Birthday profile
Jonathan Raban, English author and academic (died 2023)
Jonathan Mark Hamilton Priaulx Raban was a British award-winning travel writer, playwright, critic and novelist. He was educated at King's School, Worcester, where like his father he was unhappy but discovered the comforting value of literature. From 1974 he wrote regular pieces of literary criticism for the newly-founded New Review.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.
Jonathan Raban was born in 1942. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.
These figures put everyday life in Jonathan Raban's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.
| Measure | 1942 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Gas | $0.20 | $3.45/gal |
| Average home | $5,600 | $435,000 |
| Average income | $3,800 | $67,500 |
| Minimum wage | $0.30 | $7.25/hr (federal) |
| Movie ticket | $0.27 | $11.95 |
| Postage stamp | $0.03 | $0.73 |
| Population | 134.9M | 341 million |
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Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.