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Author Birthdays: Turgenev, Sexton, Kertész

by marshd

November 9th marks the birthday of authors Ivan Turgenev, Anne Sexton, and Imre Kertész.

Ivan Turgenev was a Russian writer best known for his works Fathers and Sons and A Sportsman's Sketches (also known as Sketches from a Hunter's Album or Notes of a Hunter). Though he was more a contemporary of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, he was perhaps closer to the French writer Gustave Flaubert.

In Russia, Turgenev's most read work was probably Home of the Gentry, which was about the desire of Russians to turn away from European ideals. Among his other works are First Love and The Diary of a Superfluous Man. We also have some of his novels in their native Russian.

Anne Sexton was an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her collection called Live or Die. Her work is mostly categorized as "confessional"; major themes include guilt, motherhood, sexuality, and mental illness.

Sexton was more widely read due to her later works like Transformations, which is a sort of retelling of Grimm fairy tales. Another later work is The Book of Folly, a dark collection of poems centered around alienation and death.

Imre Kertész is a Jewish-Hungarian author, survivor of Auschwitz, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known for his somewhat autobiographical work Fatelessness, the story of a young man who is sent to Auschwitz, which he later wrote a Hungarian film script for.

Among Kertész's other works are Liquidation, the story of a man who commits suicide after surviving both Auschwitz and Communist Hungary, and The Pathseeker, which Publishers Weekly called "a taut, grim allegory of man in the face of oppression".

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