Today is the birthday of two authors whose birth names you don’t know. Well, you probably don’t. The first, born December 3, 1857, is Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. You may recognize him as Joseph Conrad. The second, born December 3, 1937, is Sally Snyder, who is celebrating her 87th birthday today. You can imagine her in her library in her home in Dublin, Ireland, surrounded by the many award-winning books she’s written. The books all carry the pen name she now uses in daily life: Morgan Llywelyn. Both writers tell fascinating stories, and both have lived their own fascinating stories.
Conrad was born in Ukraine, which at the time was in the Russian Empire, but his family was Polish, from the time that their home was part of the Kingdom of Poland. His father was Apollo Korzeniowski, a writer, translator, and activist whose cause was trying to restore Poland to what it had been before being occupied by Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg monarchy. Poland didn’t exist as an independent nation for over a century due to the occupations.
Mostly because of his father’s activism, the family had to move around a great deal when Conrad was a boy. He was mostly educated by his father at home, and developed an affinity for Polish Romantic poetry. Those works influenced his later writing, and decades later he said:
“The Polishness in my works comes from Mickiewicz and Słowacki. My father read [Mickiewicz’s] Pan Tadeusz aloud to me and made me read it aloud…. I used to prefer [Mickiewicz’s] Konrad Wallenrod [and] Grażyna. Later I preferred Słowacki. You know why Słowacki?… [He is the soul of all Poland].”
Both of Conrad’s parents died by the time he was just 11, and he was raised by his uncle. At that point he began attending school regularly, but was a poor student and didn’t like to study. His uncle decided that the best path for Conrad was to learn a trade, and both he and Conrad thought becoming a sailor would be in the boy’s future. When Conrad was 16, he was sent to Marseilles, France, hopefully to get a job on a French merchant ship. Conrad could speak French fluently by then, and did start his maritime career.
It wasn’t until 1889, when he was 32, that Conrad began writing his first novel, Almayer’s Folly. He wrote in English, which he hadn’t learned until in his 20s. When it was published he used the pen name Joseph Conrad, and kept that name throughout his writing career — which began in earnest in 1894 when he abandoned his sailing career. His first two books were set in exotic lands and foreign ports, and created a reputation (which he detested) as a writer of romantic adventure stories.
Conrad’s books were well respected by critics and intellectuals, but weren’t particularly popular until 1913, when Chance was published and was a best seller for that era. Ironically, Chance is now regarded as near the bottom of the list of his novels, and came after his best works, Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907). He did his best work around the first twenty years of the 20th Century, and is now regarded as one of the greatest writers of English.
Sally Snyder was born in New York City, and her family moved to Dallas, Texas in her early teens. That’s where she learned to love riding horses — and she was quite good at it. She competed in professional horse shows by the time she was 16, and came within a whisker of qualifying for the 1976 US Olympic dressage team. She missed the cut by just five one-hundredths of one percent.
After that she was evidently casting about for a new pursuit after spending 15 years as a horse trainer and riding teacher. She had published a single article about horse training, and focused on writing, as well as becoming fascinated by her family history. She traced her genealogy, on her mother’s side, back to Welsh roots, including the Welsh ruler Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, and Llywelyn the Great. Then in 1978 she published her first book, The Wind from Hastings, which (just like in Conrad’s case) also marked her first use of her pen name, Morgan Llywelyn.
She kept at it, publishing historical novels focusing on Celtic roots and themes. Her third book, The Horse Goddess, won the Novel of the Year award from the League American Penwomen. She received the award from the Mayor of New York, where she lived at the time.
In 1985 Llywelyn permanently relocated to Ireland and became an Irish citizen. A few years later, she began writing for a younger audience, and won an Irish Children’s Book Trust award for Brian Boru: Emperor of the Irish in 1991. She’s still writing, and by now has an extensive bibliography, thanks to publishing at least one new book per year (and in some years, like 2006, she’s published several). She’s also the recipient of the 1999 Exceptional Celtic Woman of the Year award from Celtic Women International.
Both stories just go to show that you can achieve great success in a field even if you don’t start until you’re nearly 40 years old. At least if your birthday is December third.
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