Born March 4: David Plante

Since his fiction debut 44 years ago, Ghost of Henry James, David Plante has written a new book every couple years. His best known works form the gay-vague Francoeur trilogy -- The Family, The Country, The Woods -- about a French-Canadian American family with Native American ancestry and seven sons, just like his own.

In 2009 Plante published his wonderful 19th book, The Pure Lover [Kindle], a remarkably concise memoir of his nearly forty years with his Greek partner Nikos Stangos, four years his senior. Richard Labonté chose it as a favorite of 2009 and Pulitzer- winning critic Michael Dirda said, "out of the fragments, Proustian moments and sharply felt memories of a happy and painful past, David Plante has made a lovely book, joyful, plangent and true."

Last September he published his diaries, which Caleb Crain named his favorite queer book of 2013: "Halfway through Becoming a Londoner [Kindle], a diary of the years 1966 to 1986 illustrated with photos and art, the novelist David Plante records that two friends 'tell me I drop names.' Indeed, Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode, Francis Bacon, Harold Acton, David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Philip Roth, and Sonia Orwell are major figures, and Forster, Auden, Isherwood, and Ashbery make cameos. Plante is amusing and illuminating about all. Even better, the diary is a moving portrait of the love that Plante shared with his boyfriend Nikos Stangos, a celebrated editor."