On November 10, 1960, Neil Gaiman was born. Gaiman is an author of comics and fantasy novels whose work draws on a wide range of historical styles, literary eras, and mythologies.
Gaiman was reading by the age of four and loved books. He says that one of the reasons he was a good student is that he read through all of his textbooks in the first few days of the school year so that he was rarely surprised by what came up in his lessons.
Gaiman remembers C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as childhood favorites. He has said that Roger Zelazny has been the greatest influence on his writing; Michael Moorcock, Ursula Le Guin, and Angela Carter are among the other authors who “furnished the inside of my mind and set me to writing.”
For much of the 1980s, Gaiman worked in journalism. He published his first book, a biography of Duran Duran, in 1984. That was also the year that he discovered comics when he found an issue of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing while waiting for a train. Gaiman and Moore eventually became friends, and Gaiman began writing stories for comics in the late 1980s.
DC Comics asked Gaiman if he’d be interested in writing for them, and Gaiman proposed a revival of the 1970s character The Sandman. The Sandman had only lasted for a few issues in his 1970s version and appeared infrequently in other DC comics ever since. Gaiman offered a major re-interpretation of the character. Gaiman’s Sandman, known as Dream, is the personification of dreams. As Gaiman’s series opens, Dream has been held prisoner for 70 years and has just escaped into the modern world, where he attempts to rebuild his kingdom, which has fallen into disarray during his captivity.
Gaiman’s The Sandman ran for 75 issues from 1989 to 1996, and has been collected in book form as a series of 10 volumes. Several attempts to film the series have fallen through, but Netflix is reportedly working on a TV series adaptation.
Gaiman has returned to comics throughout his career. Among his most important works are the limited series Marvel 1602, which offers Elizabethan versions of popular Marvel superheroes; and The Eternals, another revival of relatively obscure characters created in the 1970s.
Gaiman has also had great success as a novelist. His first novel was Good Omens, written with Terry Pratchett; it’s a comic fantasy in which an angel and a demon attempt to prevent the Apocalypse because they’ve come to enjoy their lives on Earth.
The 1996 novel Neverwhere began life as a BBC television miniseries, also written by Gaiman; his novel expanded on scenes that had been cut for television and restored some of his original ideas that the TV version had changed. It’s the story of a young man whose attempts to help a woman in distress lead him into a dark alternate universe. In 2017, Gaiman announced that he had begun work on a sequel, to be titled The Seven Sisters.
Stardust, about residents of a village that borders the land of Faerie, began life as a “storybook with pictures,” and its first publication was as a comic mini-series. It has also been published in text-only editions, without the illustrations by Charles Vess.
In 2001, Gaiman published American Gods, a sprawling fantasy in which the “old gods”—deities drawn from a variety of world mythologies —find themselves in danger of dying out as their numbers of believers dwindle; they assemble in preparation for a battle with the new American gods, manifestations of such things of media and technology. The novel was an enormous success, winning both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the two major science fiction awards in the United States, as well as the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers of America. The follow-up, Anansi Boys, isn’t a sequel, but a separate story about the character Mr. Nancy, an incarnation of the African trickster god Anansi.
Gaiman repeated the Hugo-Nebula-Stoker sweep (though in different award categories) with 2002’s Coraline, a novella for children in which a nine-year-old girl is tempted to remain in an alternate world where her Other Mother seems to love her more than her real mother. Coraline has been adapted into several other formats—an animated film, an opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage, and an off-Broadway musical by Stephen Merritt.
In 2008, Gaiman received another Hugo Award for The Graveyard Book, a young adult novel about a boy who is raised by the ghostly residents of a graveyard after the rest of his family is murdered. The novel also received the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal, the American and British awards for the year’s best children’s book, the only book ever to be awarded both of those awards.
Gaiman returned to fiction for adults with 2013’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, in which a man is haunted by his past while attending a funeral in his hometown.
For samples of Gaiman’s work at shorter length, The Neil Gaiman Reader collects his best short stories, and The View from the Cheap Seats is a selection of his nonfiction. Art Matters gathers four long essays on the importance of art, creativity, and libraries; and Norse Mythology is a collection of retellings of stories of Odin, Thor, Freya, and the other Norse gods.
Also This Week
November 9, 1924
Robert Frank was born. Frank was a Swiss-born photographer and documentarian. In the mid-1950s, he spent two years traveling across the United States. His photographs of that journey were collected in the 1958 book The Americans. The photos were controversial in their lack of technical polish and their emphasis on race and class differences in American society, but had enormous influence on a generation of photographers. Frank’s life and career are the subject of the documentaries Leaving Home, Coming Home and Don’t Blink, and of R. J. Smith’s biography American Witness.
November 10, 1945
Terence Davies was born. Davies is a director whose movies are thoughtful, understated, occasionally cryptic explorations of tension within families. Three of his films are available for streaming at Kanopy—the Emily Dickinson biography A Quiet Passion; the infidelity drama The Deep Blue Sea; and Of Time and the City, which combines documentary, memoir, and a portrait of Davies’ home city, Liverpool.
November 11, 1960
Stanley Tucci was born. Tucci made his first film in 1985 and has become one of Hollywood’s busiest actors, appearing in almost 100 movies. His career has included everything from small independent films to big-budget multi-film franchises. In addition to acting, he has occasionally directed movies. Tucci stars in two of his own movies; Big Night is the story of two brothers who own an Italian restaurant, and Blind Date focuses on a couple struggling to deal with tragedy.
November 9, 1989
The East German government announced that its citizens would be allowed to travel freely between East and West Germany; within hours, Germans on both sides began to attack the wall with various tools, chipping off pieces to keep as souvenirs. The “Iron Curtain” of barriers between eastern and western Europe had begun to fall in other countries several months earlier, but the fall of the Berlin Wall was the most powerful symbol of the change. The political change sweeping through eastern Europe culminated with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Mary Elise Sarotte describes the events leading to the opening of the Wall in The Collapse.