Happy birthday, Isaac Bashevis Singer

It is the birthday of writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and was a leading figure in Yiddish literature. He wrote the short story Yentl, which was adapted as a 1983 film starring Barbra Streisand. His first work to gain wide attention was the short story Gimpel the Fool, which Saul Bellow translated in to English in 1953. Singer wrote 18 novels, including Enemies, a Love Story (1972), which was adapted for film in 1989.

Maxwell: The New Yorker fiction editor

It is the birthday of editor and writer William Maxwell (1908), who was fiction editor for The New Yorker magazine from 1936 to 1975, and in that position served as mentor to such literary luminaries as John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, J.D. Salinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Updike, and Eudora Welty, who said of him, "For fiction writers, he was the headquarters." Maxwell also wrote six novels and numerous short stories. His novels include Bright Center of Heaven (1934), They Came Like Swallows (1937), The Folded Leaf (1945), Time Will Darken (1948), The Chateau (1961), and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980). Maxwell was still contributing to The New Yorker at 91. He died within a year.