It’s the birthday of novelist Douglas Coupland, born on a Canadian military base in Baden-Solingen, Germany (1961). He is best known for his controversial novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). He invented the term “Generation X,” which was later attached to a whole generation of people, and he continues to write about pop culture.
Coupland started off as a sculptor, working with wood and fiberglass, earning his degree in studio sculpture in 1984. He did all kinds of jobs to make money, working as a gas station attendant, making copies of blue prints, and even designing baby cribs. Coupland’s writing career began mostly from luck, when an editor at Vancouver magazine read a postcard he had written to a friend. He liked Coupland’s style and hired him to write for the magazine. And that was the beginning of his career as a writer.
[Writer's Almanac]
