Portrait of Stephen Spender

Birthday profile

Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender, English author and poet (died 1995)

Born
February 28, 1909
Died
July 16, 1995
Zodiac sign
Pisces
Birth year
1909

About Stephen Spender

Sir Stephen Harold Spender was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1965. For many of my friends and for myself, Germany seemed a paradise where there was no censorship and young Germans enjoyed extraordinary freedom in their lives Spender was discovered by T. With Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson, Spender co-founded Horizon magazine and served as its editor from 1939 to 1941. At the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, which published the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, historic figures made rare appearances to read their work: Paul Valéry, André Gide and Eliot.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

The world when Stephen Spender was born

Stephen Spender was born in 1909. 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.

Culture in 1909

  • Best-selling book"The Inner Shrine" – Basil King

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentHonus Wagner leads Pittsburgh Pirates to World Series victory
  • Top headlineRobert Peary claims to reach the North Pole
  • Technology milestoneBakelite (first fully synthetic plastic) invented
  • Notable inventionBakelite plastic
  • World population~1.69B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderWilliam Howard Taft
  • U.S. population88.8M

1909 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Stephen Spender's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19092026
Population88.8M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.