Birthdays

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE (1899-1973)

Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

Born to a well-off family in Ireland, Bowen and her mother moved to Britain in 1907, after her father went mad. When her mother died in 1912, she was raised by aunts. Falling in with the Bloomsbury set, she was championed by the author Rose Macaulay, who helped her get her first collection of short stories published in 1923.

Bowen became known early on for the finely-wrought character of her tales, and she enjoyed success in both short story and novel form. Her book, Heat of the Day, is reckoned the best portrayal of London during the Blitz. She was awarded the CBE in 1948. In 1952 she and her husband retired to her family manse in Ireland, where she spent the rest of her life cranking out books and going on lecture tours to generate the funds needed to keep the place up. All told, she produced ten novels, thirteen collections of short stories, and sixteen nonfiction books; in the forty years since she died nearly sixty critical appraisals of her work have been published in book and  monograph form.

Bowen once said what interested her was “life with the lid on, and what happens when the lid comes off.”  The last 32 years of her life she carried on a passionate, mostly epistolary, relationship with a Canadian diplomat; her collected letters to him are considered by many some of her finest writing.

Related sites:

1956 BBC radio broadcast by Bowen, on creating characters in fiction.

“I am in your keeping,” (review of EB letters to Charles Ritchie, The Guardian, February 6, 2009)

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (1917-2000)

Poet, university professor

• 1946, Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry
• 1946, American Academy of Arts & Letters Award
• 1950, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
• 1968-2000, appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois
• 1976, the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America
• 1985-86, Poet Laureate of the United States
• 1988, inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame
• 1989, awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Society of America
• 1994, National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecturer
• 1994, Recipient of the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
• 1995, presented with the National Medal of Arts
• Recipient of over 75 honorary degrees from colleges and universities around the world.