Happy birthday, Nevada Barr; William Dean Howells.

Agatha and Anthony Award winner Nevada Barr, the creator of park ranger sleuth Anna Pigeon, turns 56 today. Her latest novel, which will be out April 1st, is Winter Study.

And Atlantic Monthly editor and critic William Dean Howells was born today in Ohio in 1837. Author of The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and other novels, he also edited one of the earliest round-robin novels, The Whole Family (1908), with contributors such as Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Henry James, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. He promoted the work of Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and Emile Zola, among other writers, and was a member of Boston's Dante Club. He died in 1920.