How do I find authors the same age as me?

December 29, 2007 5:33 PM

Is there any resource online that lists fiction (and possibly non-fiction) authors by age?

I'm looking to find and read books by authors of a similar age to me (I'm 29). Similar to the idea that Douglas Coupland, being of Generation X, had a age-based cultural type of writing, I'm curious to read any of "my" generation (whatever that may be).

Really what I'd like is some way to search a list of authors by age or birthdate. Nothing turns up on google. Nothing I want, anyway. My searches have only turned up listings of authors by historical "age" (e.g. Elizabethan, etc).

Short of looking up individual biographies of authors, is there any way to do this?

posted by aclevername to media & arts (5 comments total)

Wikipedia lists births by year, with nationalities and occupations. You might browse those lists. Here's 1978.
posted by judith at 6:22 PM on December 29, 2007

What judith said is probably going to be best, amazing that I can't find a better source! Here's something like you are asking for, but it's only American writers of the 20th Century, and then only the more famous ones. Surely there's something better, but short of going through the table of contents of various anthologies I can't think of anything.
posted by dawson at 6:37 PM on December 29, 2007

Actually the first link I gave above goes back to the 16th century. But only American.
posted by dawson at 7:11 PM on December 29, 2007

If you have an Ottawa Public Library card, you can use the Literature Resource Center database. It's on this alphabetical list - choose "search authors by type" and then you can pick "born after" from the drop down and enter a year. This will search authors profiled in most of the literary reference books that Gale produces.

The links in your list of names will take you to an author page with at minimum a biographical sketch and bibliography. I found 1600+ listings for authors my age or younger, so you may want to narrow your search by adding a genre, theme or literary movement.
posted by zepheria at 11:07 AM on December 30, 2007

Thanks everyone. zepheria, your suggestion worked perfectly. Thank you.
posted by aclevername at 2:25 PM on December 31, 2007