Sinclair Lewis & Laura Ingalls Wilder

It's the birthday of writer Sinclair Lewis, born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota (1885), the son of a country doctor. He made his name with Main Street (1920), a novel portraying a small town in Minnesota called Gopher Prairie. His next novel, Babbit (1922), was about a banal businessman, and "babbitry" became a synonym for middle-class conventionality. Sixteen of his twenty-two novels have Midwestern protagonists or settings.

It's the birthday of writer Laura Ingalls Wilder, born in Pepin, Wisconsin (1867). The Ingalls family moved repeatedly—to Missouri, Kansas, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Iowa and finally to De Smet, South Dakota. Laura married a farmer named Almanzo Wilder, and they settled in the Ozarks on a chicken farm. She wrote columns for local newspapers about farm life and raising poultry, and, at her daughter Rose's urging, she wrote her first book, Little House in the Big Woods, in 1931. This was followed by Little House on the Prairie and other books.