Conrad Richter won a Pulitzer for The Town, part of his trilogy on the American frontier

It is the birthday of writer Conrad Richter (1890) whose book The Town (1950) won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1951. The book was part of his The Awakening Land trilogy, a series that included The Sea of Grass (1936) and The Light in the Forest (1953). The series tells the stories of pioneers settling in the Ohio Valley and Pennsylvania after the American Revolution. His portraits of frontier America are regarded as among the most accurate ever published. All were adapted for film. Richter also founded a youth magazine and wrote for pulp magazines in the 1930s.

"Your prose makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy," Elmore Leonard was once told

It is the birthday of writer Elmore Leonard (1925), whose career has spanned more than half a century. One of the most popular and prolific modern day writers, he is best known today for his thrillers and crime fiction, among them bestsellers such as Mr. Majestyk (1974), Get Shorty (1990), Rum Punch (1992), and Out of Sight (1996). Leonard is acclaimed for his ear for dialogue and his gritty realism. Leonard counts Ernest Hemingway among his influences, though he said Hemingway didn't have a sense of humor. British novelist Martin Amis once told Leonard, "Your prose makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy."

Harold Pinter won Nobel Prize for Literature for his plays, including The Birthday Party

Photo by Martin Rosenbaum

It is the birthday of English playwright Harold Pinter (1930), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008 for his work, including The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978). Pinter also wrote screenplays for The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1983), and Sleuth (2007).

He wrote 29 plays and 21 screenplays, and directed  27 theater productions, and received more than 50 awards throughout his professional career, including the French Legion d'Honneur and Moliere D'Honneur, The Laurence Olivier Award, the Shakespeare Prize, the European Prize for Literature, and a Tony Award for The Homecoming in 1967.

Jill Ker Conway, first woman president of Smith College, tended sheep in Australia

It is the birthday of historian and author Jill Ker Conway (1934), who lived with her family on a farm in the Australian outback and eventually became the first woman president of Smith College in Massachusetts. Her memoir, The Road from Coorain (1989), tells her story of tending sheep in the wilds of New South Wales in the 1940s. Jill Ker Conway now serves as a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has written 21 books, among them The Female Experience in 18th and 19th Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women (1982); The First Generation of American Women Graduates (1987), her doctoral thesis in American History at Harvard; True North (1994), a memoir of her life from Harvard to Smith College; and Written By Herself (1995), an anthology of the changing status of women throughout history.