Day: December 1, 2025

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Her parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, were Southern Presbyterian missionaries, stationed in China. Pearl was the fourth of seven children (and one of only three who would survive to adulthood). She was born when her parents were near the end of a furlough in the United States; when she was three months old, she was taken back to China, where she spent most of the first forty years of her life. The Sydenstrickers lived in Chinkiang (Zhenjiang), in…

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill (1888 – 1953) was an American playwright. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier associated with Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg. The tragedy Long Day’s Journey into Night is often included on lists of the finest American plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. He was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill is also the only playwright to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. O’Neill’s plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular…

Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first author from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.” Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can’t Happen Here (1935). Several of his notable works were critical of American capitalism and materialism during the interwar period. Lewis is respected…

George Bernard Shaw was a prominent Irish playwright, critic, and social reformer, born in Dublin in 1856 to an English Protestant family. He grew up in a challenging household, marked by his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s artistic aspirations. Shaw moved to London at the age of 15, where he pursued literature and became involved in the Fabian Society, advocating for social change through gradual reform. He initially struggled as a novelist but found his voice in theater, becoming a significant figure in modern drama by the 1890s. Shaw’s works…

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually by the Swedish Academy to authors for outstanding contributions in the field of literature. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, which are awarded for outstanding contributions in chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine. As dictated by Nobel’s will, the award is administered by the Nobel Foundation and awarded by the Swedish Academy.Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma and a monetary award prize that has varied throughout the years. In 1901, the first laureate Sully Prudhomme received 150,782 SEK, which is equivalent to 8,823,637.78 SEK in January 2018. The award…