The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of writer Alan Hollinghurst, (books by this author) born in Gloucestershire, England (1954), who won the 2004 Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty.

He studied at Oxford, wrote a master's thesis on three gay writers, including E.M. Forster, got a job teaching there at Oxford, and then became editor of the Times Literary Supplement. In the meantime, he wrote novels, like The Swimming Pool Library (1988), The Folding Star (1994) and The Spell (1999), all of which featured gay narrators; he said he wanted "to write about gay life from a gay perspective … as naturally as most novels are written from a heterosexual position." It was his fourth major novel, The Line of Beauty (2004)— about a young Londoner named Nick Guest — that won the Booker Prize. The story is set during the 1980s, with Margaret Thatcher's politics and the growing prominence of AIDS forming the backdrop of the novel.

Hollinghurst has a tremendously deep voice (some of his friends nicknamed him "Basso Profundo"), is obsessed with the music of Wagner, idolizes writer Henry James, and is known for living an ascetic lifestyle. He said, "The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo."

It's the birthday of Caitlin Kiernan, (books by this author) who was born in Dublin, Ireland (1964), and raised in a small town in Alabama. Her first book, Silk, about a dreadlocked, tattooed woman named Spyder and her goth friends in Alabama, received a number of major first-book awards. Before that, her writings had been published in places like the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology; she'd spent most of her career looking at fossils.

Her novels include The Five of Cups, (2003), Murder of Angels (2004), and Daughter of Hounds (2007). Her most recent novel, The Red Tree, came out last year.

She said: "Since I was a child, I've had a powerful fascination for the macabre, and most of the writers that I read when I was a kid fueled that fascination —Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, and a little later, Harlan Ellison and Shirley Jackson. So I think a good portion of what I'm doing now ... goes right back to those stories, those authors, and all the time I spent sleeping with the lights on because of them."

In 1897, on this day, Dracula, by Bram Stoker, (books by this author) was published. Stoker added several chilling details to the vampire tale: that the undead show no reflection in a mirror, that they shun garlic, and that they can be killed only by a stake through the heart.

It's the birthday of photographer and author Dorothea Lange, (books by this author) born in Hoboken, New Jersey (1895). She took some of the most famous photographs of the Great Depression, including "White Angel Breadline," which depicted a crowd of well-dressed, newly unemployed men waiting for food on a breadline, and "Migrant Mother," which showed a prematurely aged woman in a tattered tent with her children.

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Maxwell Bodenheim, (books by this author) born in Hermanville, Mississippi (1892). His family was among the only Jews in rural Mississippi, and after his father's store went bankrupt, his family moved to Chicago. He became friends with the poet Carl Sandburg and published his first poems in Poetry magazine. He published many books of poetry in the 1920s, including Against This Age (1923), and he wrote several best-selling erotic novels, including Replenishing Jessica (1925) and Naked on Roller Skates (1930).

It's the birthday of Robert W. Chambers (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1865). He was one of the most popular writers of the early 20th century. He's best known as the author of supernatural tales like those in his book of short stories The King in Yellow (1895).