It's the birthday of the novelist Doris Lessing, born in Kermanshah, Persia, which is now Iran (1919). Her father was a captain in the British army. Her mother was a nurse.

She grew up in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and then moved to South Africa. She supported herself working in a dress shop writing advertising, where she started to read Virginia Woolf, Proust, and D.H. Lawrence, and she began to write. She emigrated to England after World War II.

Doris Lessing said, "I was a communist for some years from which I learned a great deal, chiefly about the nature of political power, how groups of people operate, I think, according to specific but little-understood laws and the force of self-delusion. I am still leftwing in politics, though pessimistic about the human condition and more interested in philosophy and religion than I expected to be. Yeats said that a writer must work a way inwards, into self-knowledge. I am always surprised at what I find in myself and this to me is the most rewarding part of being a writer."

Doris Lessing is best known for her novel The Golden Notebook (1962) and her most recent book The Sweetest Dream.

(from Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" on NPR--National Public Radio--in the U.S.)