Rebecca West

Dame Cicily Isabel Fairfield, known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph and The New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason (1964), a study of the trial of the British fascist William Joyce and others; The Return of the Soldier (1918), a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows (1956), This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund (1985). Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959; in each case, the citation reads: "writer and literary critic". She took the pseudonym "Rebecca West" from the rebellious young heroine in Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. She was a recipient of the Benson Medal.

21 December 1892

Born on the same birth date (21 December 1892): Walter Hagen

Born on the same birth day (21 December): Benjamin Disraeli • Clara Tauson • Corey Collymore • Hermann Raupach • Khris Davis • Kurt Waldheim • Leon MacDonald • Lorenzo Bandini • Luis Arturo González López • Luke Brooks • Paul Winchell • Phil Donahue • Tamara Bykova • U. R. Ananthamurthy • William H. Osborn

Born in the same month (December 1892): Alfred Edwin McKay • André Randall • Arnold Majewski • Don Barclay (actor) • Francisco Franco • Herman Potočnik • J. Paul Getty • Liu Bocheng • Marcus Lee Hansen • Osbert Sitwell • Ruth Chatterton • Sam Barry • Stuart Davis (painter) • Walter Hagen