June Literary Birthdays

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
June 13, 1865 - January 28, 1939

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures in 20th century literature. He studied painting in his youth, and from an early age was interested in Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature heavily in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. From 1900, Yeats's poetry grew more physical and realistic. He renounced the transcendentalism of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with the contrast between the physical and the spiritual, as well as with cyclical theories of life. Over time, Yeats became a respected public figure, and a pillar of the Irish literary establishment. He was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, and served as an Irish Senator in his later years. In 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Some of his works:
The Land of Heart's Desire
The Hour-Glass
The Celtic Twilight
The Tower
The Winding Stair and Other Poems
A Vision

Search for his books


Other Literary Birthdays

Australian novelist Colleen McCullough (1937)
English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840)
Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926)
Texas novelist Larry McMurtry (1936)
Andalusian poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca (1898)
British author Ken Follett (1939)
Novelist Margaret Drabble (1939)
Russian writer Aleksander Pushkin (1799)
German novelist and 1929 Nobelist Thomas Mann (1875)
Belgian-born Marguerite Yourcenar (1903)
American-Jewish author Saul Bellow (1915)
Japanese novelist, first Japanese to win Nobel prize for literature, in 1968, Yasunari Kawabata (1899)
Virginia writer William Styron (1925)
American poet, author, and illustrator Djuna Barnes (1892)
Diarist and Holocaust victim Anne Frank (1929)
Novelist Jerzy Kosinski (1933)
Novelist Joyce Carol Oates (1938)
Russian novelist and travel writer Ivan Goncharov (1812)
French philosopher and writer of the Pensees, Blaise Pascal (1623)
Exiled Indian (born Bombay) writer Salman Rushdie (1947)
Brazilian novelist and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839)
Existentialist philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre (1905)
French novelist Francoise Sagan (1935)
British novelist and Booker Prize Winner Ian McEwan (1948)
German novelist Erich Maria Remarque (1898)
Russian (Ukrainian) poet Anna Akhmatova (1888)
French dramatist Jean Anouilh (1910)
Bengali-German novelist Anita Desai (1937)
British futurist George Orwell (1903)
Swiss "Father of the Romanticism" and author of the Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712)
French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900)
Polish-American poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911)