Carter Brown wrote pulp fiction mysteries

It is the birthday of England-born, Australia-raised writer Alan Geoffrey Yeats (1923), whose 1950s pulp fiction novels under the pseudonym Carter Brown became international bestsellers. He wrote 322 in the series. His books were translated in to 14 languages. Most of the books were set in California and featured a variety of heroes, including a Hollywood screenwriter, a scatterbrained private detective, a San Francisco lawyer, and a policeman in a tiny east California ex-mining town. Yeats wrote many of the early novels having never visited the United States. The formula plots always included an attractive, dangerous woman, sex, violence, and humor.

Thomas Hardy stirred up Victorian readers

It is the birthday of English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840), whose most well known books, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), examined the decline of rural Victorian English society. Hardy was heavily influenced by the work of Charles Dickens and his criticism English urban life. Tess and Jude received a lot of criticism, Tess for its apparent sympathetic portrait of a woman of ill repute, and Jude for its criticism of marriage and its open discussion of sexual themes. He wrote no more novels after that.