We’re ready to celebrate some of the authors who were born in the month of January! View the list below along with some of their most popular works, and learn more about each author by visiting their page on our website. Let us know who we should feature for February’s author blog!
3rd — J.R.R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), beloved throughout the world as the creator of “The Hobbit”, “The Lord of the Rings”, & “The Silmarillion”, was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University.
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8th — Stephen Hawking
Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford, England. Most famous for his research on black holes, Hawking is also the author of numerous articles for scientific papers, has 12 honorary degrees and is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
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17th — Michelle Obama
Michelle Robinson was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 17, 1964. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988, she joined the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she met her husband Barack Obama. In February 2010, she launched Let’s Move!, a nationwide initiative to address the epidemic of childhood obesity by bringing healthier food into schools and communities, and encouraging children to be more active.
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17th — Betty White
Betty White Ludden (born January 17, 1922), better known as Betty White, was an American actress, comedian, author, and former game show host. She was best known for her television roles as Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls. White won seven Emmy awards and received 20 Emmy nominations.
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18th — A. A. Milne
A prolific writer, A. A. Milne published 35 plays, 6 novels, 3 books of verse, 3 collections of short stories, and several works of nonfiction, including sketches for Punch magazine, of which he was the assistant editor. All are considered classics and have been included among the Children’s Literature Association’s Touchstone books as the best in children’s literature, on the Lewis Carroll Shelf list, and on the Choice magazine list of books for the academic library.
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19th — Edgar Allen Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809. In 1827, he enlisted in the United States Army and his first collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published. In 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor.
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25th — Robert Burns
Robert Burns, a Scottish poet, was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland, on January 25, 1759. The frustration of watching his father’s struggles on the farm is said to have inspired his satirical poetry. In 1786 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published, which described the existence of the Scottish peasant. Burns’s popularity was immediate, if short-lived. In addition to his poetry, Burns is well known for his songwriting. He worked with James Johnson on a project to revise old Scottish tunes and created some new songs of his own.
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29th — Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey was born in 1954 in Kosciusko, Mississippi. In 1997, she was named Newsweek’s most important person in books and media, and a year later named TV Guide’s Television Performer of the Year, as well as one of the 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century by Time Magazine. She went on to receive the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 as well. In 2000 she was presented with the National Book Foundation’s 50th anniversary gold medal for all that Oprah’s Book Club has done for books and authors.
