Bookish birthdays for the week of June 30, 2024

Here are the literary birthdays to celebrate over the week of June 30, 2024.

George Sand (July 1, 1804): Sand’s novel Indiana — about a woman who abandons a conventional but unhappy marriage for love — brought her immediate fame, while her so-called “rustic” novels like The Devil’s Pool, set in the countryside where she grew up, cemented her legacy.

Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877): Hesse, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, is best known in English for the poetic novel Siddhartha.

Tom Stoppard (July 2, 1937): Stoppard has won the Tony Award for several plays, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Travesties, and the trilogy The Coast of Utopia.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804): Hawthorne’s emotions about his ancestor William Hathorne, a key player in the Salem witchcraft trials, can be clearly seen in the novels for which he earned the most acclaim, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables (and in the fact that the author changed the spelling of his last name).

Hilary Mantel (July 6, 1952): Mantel won the Man Booker Prize twice, for the first two books in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy: Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.