May 15 is a banner day for literature, with three well-known authors born today: novelist and short story writer Katherine Ann Porter, children's author L. Frank Baum, and children's and teen author Paul Zindel.

They're certainly a diverse group of writers....

Porter won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for her 1965 book, The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. She wrote several volumes of short stories and essays including Flowering Judas and Other Stories and The Leaning Tower and Other Stories. She is also the author of a novel, Ship of Fools.

Zindel was a hot teen author from the late 1960s through 1980s with books such as The Pigman and Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball; in later years he published a series of books for older children, the P.C. Hawke Mysteries.

Baum, of course, is the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.... as well as many other stories. If you loved The Wizard of Oz but never tried his other books, there are more than a dozen in the Oz series. Here are the first few (after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) to get you started again:

The Marvelous Land of Oz
Ozma of Oz
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
The Road to Oz
Emerald City of Oz
Patchwork Girl of Oz

Baum is also the author of The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and other stories about magical lands and people.