Flannery O'Connor wrote many short stories of very odd characters in the Deep South

It is the birthday of Southern writer Flannery O'Connor (1925), whose odd characters and themes of theology have won her a passionate following in literary circles. O'Connor was a devout Catholic surrounded by Southern Protestantism in Georgia. She wrote numerous short stories but only two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). Her short story collections include A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), and The Complete Stories (1971), which won the National Book Award. She died from lupus in 1964 at the age of 39.

Happy birthday, Peter Matthiessen

It is the birthday of writer Peter Matthiessen (1927), whose hefty Shadow Country (2008), a semi-fictional account of the murder of a Southwest Florida sugar cane plantation owner in 1910, won the National Book Award for fiction in 2008 and the William Dean Howells Medal in 2010. The book was a reworking of his trilogy on Edgar Watson, an alleged fugitive who settled in the Chokoloskee area in the early  part of the 20th century, which included Killing Mr. Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997), and Bone By Bone (1999). With Shadow Country, Matthiessen finally achieved his original vision for the story. His first manuscript was 1,500 pages but was eventually trimmed and edited into the three original books. Matthiessen also wrote At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), Far Tortuga (1975), The Snow Leopard (1978), and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983).

Howard Nemerov won Pulitzer for poetry

Howard Nemerov

It is the birthday of poet Howard Nemerov, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1978 for his Collected Poems. He also received the National Book Award and was twice appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He grew up in New York City, was educated at Harvard, was a pilot during World War II and taught at several universities, including Brandeis and Washington University in St. Louis. His father was art historian Alexander Nemerov, who taught at Yale. His sister was photographer Diane Arbus. Among his most anthologized poems are the playful "A Primer of the Daily Round"  and the reflective "The War in the Air"