Author Birthdays: Dostoyevsky, Pound, Kimmel

Sat, 10/30/2010 - 12:05pm by marshd

October 30th marks the birthday of authors Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ezra Pound, and Eric A. Kimmel.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, and is probably now best know for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

Among Dostoyevsky's other works are Notes from Underground, often considered the first existentialist novel, and The Idiot, which tells the story of a socially-outcast epileptic.

Ezra Pound was an early 20th-century American poet. As an expatriate, he lived in London, and later in Italy. During WWII he was imprisoned there for treason because of statements he made about FDR. During that time, he wrote The Pisan Cantos, which were later published as part of a larger work of 120 cantos.

Pound also wrote a long poem called Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. It is made up of 18 shorter poems, the first section of which is a sort of autobiographical epitaph. For more on this man's troubled life, you can read one of the many biographies we have on him.

Eric A. Kimmel is a Jewish-American children's book author. He won the Caldecott Honor and Newbury Honor for his picture book Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins, as well as the Sydney Taylor Book Award for The Chanukkah Guest and Gershon's Monster.

Kimmel does not only write picture books, nor does he do exclusively Jewish tales. He has many other folklore stories in his grasp, like the Russian Baba Yaga, the Norwegian Boots and His Brothers, and the Mexican The Witch's Face. Also, his story of The Gingerbread Man has been described as having a "strong narrative, good dialogue, and a fine chorus" by School Library Journal Review.