Authors That Inspire Movies
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Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in December 1928, along with a twin sister, Jane. Jane died less than eight weeks later, allegedly from an allergy to mother's milk. Dick's parents split up during his childhood, and he moved with his mother to Berkeley, California, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. Dick became a published author in 1952. His first sale was the short story "Roog." His first novel, "Solar Lottery," appeared in 1955. Dick produced an astonishing amount of material during the 1950s and 1960s, writing and selling nearly a hundred short stories and some two dozen or so novels during this period, including "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," "Time Out Of Joint," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," and the Hugo-award winning "The Man In The High Castle." A supremely chaotic personal life (Dick was married five times) along with drug experimentation, sidetracked Dick's career in the early 1970s. Dick would later maintain that reports of his drug use had been greatly exaggerated by sensationalistic colleagues. In any event, after a layoff of several years, Dick returned to action in 1974 with the Campbell award-winning novel "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said." Perhaps more importantly, though, this same year Dick would have a profound religious experience that would forever alter his life. Dick's final years were haunted by what he alleged to be a 1974 visitation from God, or at least a God-like being. Dick spent the rest of his life writing copious journals regarding the visitation and his interpretations of the event. At times, Dick seemed to regard it as a divine revelation and, at other times, he believed it to be a sign of extreme schizophrenic behaviour. His final novels all deal in some way with the entity he saw in 1974, especially "Valis," in which the title-character is an extraterrestrial God-like machine that chooses to make contact with a hopelessly schizophrenic, possibly drug-addled and decidedly mixed-up science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick. Despite his award-winning novels and almost universal acclaim from within the science-fiction community, Dick was never especially financially successful as a writer. He worked mainly for low-paying science-fiction publishers and never seemed to see any royalties from his novels after the advance had been paid, no matter how many copies they sold. In fact, one of the reasons for his extreme productivity was that he always seemed to need the advance money from his next story or novel in order to make ends meet. But towards the very end of his life, he achieved a measure of financial stability, partly due to the money he received from the producers of Blade Runner (1982) for the rights to his novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" upon which the film was based. Shortly before the film premiered, however, he died of a heart attack at the age of 53. Since his death, several other films have been adapted from his works (incuding Total Recall (1990)) and several unpublished novels have been published posthumously.- Writer
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Charles Dickens' father was a clerk at the Naval Pay Office, and because of this the family had to move from place to place: Plymouth, London, Chatham. It was a large family and despite hard work, his father couldn't earn enough money. In 1823 he was arrested for debt and Charles had to start working in a factory, labeling bottles for six shillings a week. The economy eventually improved and Charles was able to go back to school. After leaving school, he started to work in a solicitor's office. He learned shorthand and started as a reporter working for the Morning Chronicle in courts of law and the House of Commons. In 1836 his first novel was published, "The Pickwick Papers". It was a success and was followed by more novels: "Oliver Twist" (1837), "Nicholas Nickleby" (1838-39) and "Barnaby Rudge" (1841). He traveled to America later that year and aroused the hostility of the American press by supporting the abolitionist (anti-slavery) movement. In 1858 he divorced his wife Catherine, who had borne him ten children. During the 1840s his social criticism became more radical and his comedy more savage: novels like "David Copperfield" (1849-50), "A Tale of Two Cities" (1959) and "Great Expectations" (1860-61) only increased his fame and respect. His last novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood", was never completed and was later published posthumously.- Writer
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William Shakespeare's birthdate is assumed from his baptism on April 25. His father John was the son of a farmer who became a successful tradesman; his mother Mary Arden was gentry. He studied Latin works at Stratford Grammar School, leaving at about age 15. About this time his father suffered an unknown financial setback, though the family home remained in his possession. An affair with Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and a nearby farmer's daughter, led to pregnancy and a hasty marriage late in 1582. Susanna was born in May of 1583, twins Hamnet and Judith in January of 1585. By 1592 he was an established actor and playwright in London though his "career path" afterward (fugitive? butcher? soldier? actor?) is highly debated. When plague closed the London theatres for two years he apparently toured; he also wrote two long poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". He may have spent this time at the estate of the Earl of Southampton. By December 1594 he was back in London as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company he stayed with the rest of his life. In 1596 he seems to have purchased a coat of arms for his father; the same year Hamnet died at age 11. The following year he purchased the grand Stratford mansion New Place. A 1598 edition of "Love's Labors" was the first to bear his name, though he was already regarded as England's greatest playwright. He is believed to have written his "Sonnets" during the 1590s. In 1599 he became a partner in the new Globe Theatre, the company of which joined the royal household on the accession of James in 1603. That is the last year in which he appeared in a cast list. He seems to have retired to Stratford in 1612, where he continued to be active in real estate investment. The cause of his death is unknown.- Writer
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Tennessee Williams met long-term partner Frank Merlo in the summer of 1948 (Merlo died of lung cancer in the fall of 1963). Though separated briefly in 1961 and again in 1962, the two were partners for 15 years. Merlo acted as his personal manager/secretary.
Williams spent much of his most prolific years in Rome, Italy, and his enduring friendship with Italian stage and screen legend Anna Magnani lasted 24 years and inspired both "The Rose Tattoo" and "Orpheus Descending". Magnani realized the lead parts of these two plays, which were written for her, in their film versions. The turbulent and inspirational friendship shared between Williams and Magnani is the subject of the internationally acclaimed play "Roman Nights" by Franco D'Alessandro.
Aside from his published "Memoirs", the only authorized biographical book on Williams is by Bruce Smith, entitled "Costly Performances - Tennessee Williams; The Last Stage." This book deals with the last four years of Williams' life (1979-1983).- Writer
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John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 without a degree. He was variously employed as a sales clerk, farm laborer, ranch hand and factory worker. In 1925, he traveled by freight from Los Angeles to New York, where he was a construction worker. From 1926-1928, he was a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, CA. His first novel, "Cup of Gold," was published in 1929. During the 1930s, he produced most of his famous novels ("To a God Unknown," "Tortilla Flat," "In Dubious Battle," "Of Mice and Men," and his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Grapes of Wrath"). In 1941, he moved with the singer who would become his second wife to New York City. They had two sons, Thom (b. 1944) and John IV (b. 1946). In 1948, his close friend Ed Ricketts died, he went through a divorce, he took a a tour of Russia, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His wrote the screenplay for Viva Zapata! (1952), and 17 of his works have been made into movies. He received three Academy Award nominations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. US President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964, and he was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on what would have been his 75th birthday. His ashes lie in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.- Mario Puzo was born October 15, 1920, in "Hell's Kitchen" on Manhattan's (NY) West Side and, following military service in World War II, attended New York's New School for Social Research and Columbia University. His best-known novel, "The Godfather," was preceded by two critically acclaimed novels, "The Dark Arena" and "The Fortunate Pilgrim." In 1978, he published "Fools Die," followed by "The Sicilian" (1984) and "The Fourth K" (1991). Mario Puzo has also written several screenplays, including Earthquake (1974), Superman (1978), and all three "Godfather" movies, for which he received two Academy Awards. Mario's latest novel, 1996's "The Last Don," was made into a CBS television miniseries in May 1997, starring Danny Aiello, Kirstie Alley and Joe Mantegna. In 1997, Part II was aired. Also in 1997, Mario's "The Fortunate Pilgrim" was re-released by Random House. Mario passed away July 2, 1999, at his home in Bay Shore, Long Island. His last novel, "Omerta," will be published July, 2000. He is survived by his companion of 20 years, Carol Gino, and five children.
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Anthony Burgess was born on 25 February 1917 in Manchester, England, UK. He was a writer, known for A Clockwork Orange (1971), Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and Vinyl (1965). He was married to Liana Burgess and Llewela Isherwood Jones. He died on 22 November 1993 in London, England, UK.- Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Heraklion, Crete (Greece). He studied Law in Athens and in Paris, but soon he studied philosophy and literature. He travelled almost everywhere; he learnt many foreign languages and left his scientific research for Nitsche. At philosophy: "Ascetics" (Salvatores Dei, 1927), script that expresses the writer's belief for metaphysics. At poetry: "The Odyssey" (1938) "Tertsines" and also some poetic works for theatre: "Protomastoras" (=foreman) "Melissa" (=Bee) "Julian" "Prometheus" etc. His novels are: "Alexis Zorbas" (1946) "O Xristos xanastavronetai" (=Christ is recrucified) (1948) "O ftoxoulis tou Theou" (=The God's poor man) (1952-3) "Anafora ston Greco (=Reference to Greco) (1961) He died in 1957.
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Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, in his ancestral estate Yasnaya Polyana, South of Moscow, Russia. He was the fourth of five children in a wealthy family of Russian landed Gentry. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his elder brothers and relatives.
Leo Tolstoy studied languages and law at Kazan University for three years. He was dissatisfied with the school and left Kazan without a degree, returned to his estate and educated himself independently. In 1848 he moved to the capital, St. Petersburg, and there passed two tests for a law degree. He was abruptly called to return to his estate near Moscow, where he inherited 4000 acres of land and 350 serfs. There Tolstoy built a school for his serfs, and acted as a teacher. He briefly went to a Medical School in Moscow, but lost a fortune in gambling, and was pulled out by his brother. He took military training, became an Army officer, and moved to the Caucasus, where he lived a simple life for three years with Cossacs. There he wrote his first novel - "Childhood" (1852), it became a success. With writing "Boyhood" (1854) and "Youth" (1857) he concluded the autobiographical trilogy. In the Crimean War (1854-55) Tolstoy served as artillery commander in the Battle of Sevastopol, and was decorated for his courage. Between the battles he wrote three stories titled "Sevastopol Sketches", that won him wide attention, and a complement from the Czar Aleksandr II.
After the war, Tolstoy returned to St. Petersburg, where he enjoyed the friendship of Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai A. Nekrasov, Ivan Goncharov, and other writers. On his trips to Europe, he had discussions with Gertsen in London, and attended Darwin's lectures. In Brussels he had meetings with philosophers Prudhon and Lelewel. Tolstoy undertook a research of schools in Europe, and later he built and organized over 20 schools for poor people in Russia. At that time the secret police began surveillance, and searched his home. In 1862 he married Sofia Andreevna Bers, and fathered 13 children with his wife. Four of their babies died, and the couple raised the remaining nine children. His wife was also his literary secretary, and also contributed to his best works, "War and Peace" (1863-69) and "Anna Karenina" (1873-77). In his "Confession" (1879) Tolstoy revealed his own version of Christianity, blended with socialism, that won him many followers. Tolstoyan communities sprang up in America and Europe, and he assisted the Russian non-Orthodox Christians (Dukhobors) in migrating to USA and Canada. He split from aristocratic class and developed an ascetic lifestyle, becoming a vegetarian, and a farmer. He sponsored and organized free meals for the poor. He transfered his copyright on all of his writings after 1880 to public domain. In his later age Tolstoy was pursuing the path of a wandering ascetic. He corresponded with Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was directly influenced by Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1894), which was praised by many nonviolent movements.
In 1900 Tolstoy criticized the Tsar's government in a series of publications, calling for separation of Chuch and State. Tsar Nicholas II retaliated through the Church, by expulsion of Tolstoy from Orthodox Cristianity as a "heretic". He fell ill, and suffered from a severe depression; he was suicidal and even had to eliminate all hunting guns from his home, because of his suicidal mode. He was treated by the famous doctor Dahl, and was visited by composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and basso Feodor Chaliapin Sr., who performed for Tolstoy on many occasions. Later he went to convalesce in Yalta, in Crimea, where he spent time with Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. Tolstoy was an obvious candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but was initially omitted by the Nobel Committee for his views. The omission caused a strong response from a group of Swedish writers and artists. They sent an address to Tolstoy, but the writer answered by declining any future prize nomination.
In 1902 Tolstoy wrote a letter to the Tsar, calling for social justice, to prevent a civil war, and in 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War, Tolstoy wrote a condemnation of war. The Tsar replied by increasing police surveillance on Tolstoy. In November of 1910 he left his estate, probably taking the path of a wandering ascetic, which he had been pursuing for decades. He left home without explanations and took a train, in which he caught pneumonia, and died at a remote station of Astapovo. He was laid to rest in his estate of Yasnaya Polyana, which was made a Tolstoy National Museum.
His youngest daughter, named Alexandra Tolstoy, was the director of the Tolstoy Museum, and was arrested by the Communists five times. She emigrated from Russia to the United States, where she founded the Tolstoy Foundation. She helped many prominent Russian intellectuals, such as Vladimir Nabokov and Sergei Rachmaninoff among many others.- Writer
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Arthur Conan Doyle was a British writer of Irish descent, considered a major figure in crime fiction. His most famous series of works consisted of the "Sherlock Holmes" stories (1887-1927), consisting of four novels and 56 short stories. His other notable series were the "Professor Challenger" stories (1912-1929) about a scientist and explorer, and the "Brigadier Gerard" stories (1894-1910) about a French soldier in the Napoleonic Wars. Doyle's literary works have frequently been adapted into film and television.
In 1859, Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland to an Irish Catholic family. His father was Charles Altamont Doyle (1832 - 1893), a professional illustrator and water-colorist who is primarily remembered for fantasy-style paintings. Doyle's mother was Mary Foley (1837-1920). Through his father, Doyle was a nephew of the antiquarian James William Edmund Doyle (1822 - 1892), the illustrator Richard Doyle (1824-1883), and the gallery director Henry Edward Doyle (1827 -1893). Doyle's paternal grandfather was the political cartoonist and caricaturist John Doyle (1797-1868).
During his early years, Doyle's family had financial problems due to his father's struggles with depression and alcoholism. They received financial support from affluent uncles, who also financed Doyle's education. From 1868 to 1870, Doyle was educated at Hodder Place, a Jesuit preparatory school located at Stonyhurst, Lancashire. From 1870 to 1875, Doyle attended Stonyhurst College, a Roman Catholic boarding school. He disliked the school due to its rather limited curriculum, and the constant threats of corporal punishment and ritual humiliation used to discipline students.
From 1875 to 1876, Doyle received further education at Stella Matutina, a Jesuit school located at Feldkirch, Austria. His family wanted him to perfect his use of the German language, but this school offered a wider range of study subjects. Stella Matutina attracted student from many countries, and was more cosmopolitan in nature than Doyle's previous schools.
Doyle decided to follow a medical career. From 1876 to 1881, Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School. He also took botany lessons at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. During his university years, Doyle started writing short stories. He had trouble finding a publisher, and "Blackwood's Magazine" (1817-1980) rejected his submitted work. Doyle's first published short story was "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley" (1879), featuring a demon in South Africa. That same year, Doyle published his first academic article in a science journal. The article examined the uses of the flowering plant Gelsemium as a poison. As an experiment, Doyle self-administrated doses of the poison and recorded the symptoms.
In 1880, Doyle worked for a while as a doctor in the whaling ship "Hope". In 1881, following his graduation from medical school, Doyle served as a ship's surgeon on the SS Mayumba. In 1882, Doyle and a former classmate established a medical practice in Plymouth, Devon. Their partnership failed, and Doyle soon started his own practice in Southsea, Hampshire. He did not have many patients, so he decided to resume writing fiction to supplement his income.
In 1886, Doyle created the character of Sherlock Holmes. He loosely based his creation on his former college teacher Joseph Bell (1837 - 1911), inspired by Bell's emphasis on the importance of "deduction and inference and observation". Doyle completed the first Holmes novel, "A Study in Scarlet" (1887), and sold the rights to the publishing house "Ward, Lock & Co." (1854-1964). The novel's publication was delayed until November, 1887, but it was well-received by professional critics.
Doyle next completed the sequel novel "The Sign of the Four" (1890), commissioned from the American literary magazine Lippincott's Monthly Magazine (1868-1915). He started writing short stories about Holmes for the British literary magazine "The Strand Magazine" (1891-1950).
Besides Holmes stories, Doyle wrote seven historical novels between 1888 and 1906. He wrote "Micah Clarke" (1889), as a fictionalized account of the Monmouth Rebellion (1685) and its consequences. The novel also voices Doyle's arguments against religious extremism. He wrote "The White Company" (1891) to examine the role of mercenaries in 14th-century warfare, depicting the campaigns of Edward the Black Prince (1330-1376) in the Kingdom of Castile. He wrote "The Great Shadow" (1892) to feature the experiences of soldiers in the Battle of Waterloo (1815). He wrote "The Refugees" (1893) to examine the fates of Huguenot refugees who were fleeing 17th-century France to escape religious persecution by Louis XIV (1638-1715, reigned 1643-1715). He wrote "Sir Nigel" (1906) to examine the early phases of the Hundred Years' War (1337 - 1453). He regarded these novels to be his best literary work, though they were never as popular as his crime novels.
In 1900, Doyle served as a volunteer doctor in the Second Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902), though he had no previous military experience. He was stationed at a field hospital at Bloemfontein. At about this time, Doyle wrote the non-fiction book "The Great Boer War" (1900), which covered in detail the early phases of the war. He also wrote the companion work "The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct" in order to defend the British Empire from accusations of misconduct in its military efforts. These works were translated in multiple languages, and were appreciated by the British government. For his services to the British Empire, Doyle was knighted in 1902. In 1903, Doyle became a knight of the Order of Saint John, a British royal order of chivalry that was based on the original Knights Hospitaller.
In 1906, Doyle was involved in efforts to exonerate the lawyer George Edalji, a mild-mannered man who had been convicted of animal mutilations on insufficient evidence. Doyle helped publicize other instances of miscarriages of justice, and convinced the public that there was need of reforms in the legal system. In 1907, British authorities reacted to this campaign by establishing the Court of Criminal Appeal.
In 1909, Doyle wrote the non-fiction work "The Crime of the Congo" (1909). In the book, Doyle denounced the human rights abuses in the Congo Free State, and claimed that the Belgian colonial forces had enslaved the local population. He quoted testimonies from many witnesses and tried to convince the public of a need to intervene in the area.
World War I (1914-1918) was a difficult time for Doyle , as several of his relatives and friends died due to the war. Doyle's son Kingsley was seriously wounded in the Battle of the Somme (1916), and never fully recovered. Kingsley died of pneumonia in 1918, while still hospitalized. Doyle's brother, Brigadier-general Innes Doyle, died of pneumonia in 1919. Doyle's brother-in-law, the famous author E. W. Hornung, died of pneumonia in 1921. The series of deaths led Doyle to further embrace Spiritualism, and that faith's claims about existence beyond the grave. He spend much of the 1920s as a missionary of Spiritualism, and investigated supposed supernatural phenomena. He also wrote many non-fiction spiritualist works. In 1926, Doyle financed the construction of a Spiritualist Temple in Camden, London.
In July 1930, Doyle suffered a heart attack while staying in his then-residence, Windlesham Manor, in Crowborough, Sussex. He spend his last moments in reassuring his wife Jean Leckie that she was wonderful. He was 71-years-old at the time of his death. He was survived by two sons and two daughters. His daughter Jean Conan Doyle (1912 - 1997) was the copyright holder of much of her father's works until her own death.
Since Doyle was no longer a Christian at the time of his death, his family declined giving him a Christian burial place. Doyle was buried in Windlesham Manor's rose garden. His remains were later re-interred in Minstead churchyard, New Forest, Hampshire. His wife's remains were buried beside him. His gravestone epitaph described him as "Steel true/Blade straight/Arthur Conan Doyle/Knight/Patriot, Physician and man of letters".
Doyle is long gone, but his works have remained popular into the 21st century. Doyle has been cited as an influence on later crime writers, and Agatha Christie's earliest novels were strongly influenced by Sherlock Holmes' stories. His life's events have inspired several biographies, and a number of fictionalized accounts.- Writer
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Writer, born in Bromley, Kent. He was apprenticed to a draper, tried teaching, studied biology in London, then made his mark in journalism and literature. He played a vital part in disseminating the progressive ideas which characterized the first part of the 20th-c. He achieved fame with scientific fantasies such as The Time Machine (1895) and War of the Worlds (1898), and wrote a range of comic social novels which proved highly popular, notably Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). Both kinds of novel made successful (sometimes classic) early films. A member of the Fabian Society, he was often engaged in public controversy, and wrote several socio-political works dealing with the role of science and the need for world peace, such as The Outline of History (1920) and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind- Producer
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Stan Lee was an American comic-book writer, editor, and publisher, who was executive vice president and publisher of Marvel Comics.
Stan was born in New York City, to Celia (Solomon) and Jack Lieber, a dress cutter. His parents were Romanian Jewish immigrants. Lee co-created Spider-Man, the Hulk, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Daredevil, Thor, the X-Men, and many other fictional characters, introducing a thoroughly shared universe into superhero comic books. In addition, he challenged the comics' industry's censorship organization, the Comics Code Authority, indirectly leading to it updating its policies. Lee subsequently led the expansion of Marvel Comics from a small division of a publishing house to a large multimedia corporation.
He had cameo appearances in many Marvel film and television projects, with many yet to come, posthumously. A few of these appearances are self-aware and sometimes reference Lee's involvement in the creation of certain characters.
On 16 July 2017, Lee was named a Disney Legend, a hall of fame program that recognizes individuals who have made an extraordinary and integral contribution to The Walt Disney Company.
Stan was married to Joan Lee for almost 70 years, until her death. The couple had two children. Joan died on July 6, 2017. Stan died on November 12, 2018, in LA.- Writer
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Frank Miller was born in Olney, Maryland, to a nurse mother and a carpenter and electrician father, and was raised in Montpelier, Vermont. He is of Irish descent. Miller was a big comics writer/artist in the '70s and '80s. He wrote and penciled the Marvel series "Daredevil" for a long time. His friend, Klaus Janson, inked. He also wrote two spinoffs about the character "Electra" and did a miniseries about the "X-Men" character "Wolverine". His hit miniseries "Ronin" was published by DC in the mid-eighties. His greatest success came with DC's character "Batman". In 1980, he wrote the acclaimed "Batman" story "Wanted - Santa Claus - Dead or Alive!" for DC Comics. In 1986, his most notable comic-book work, the groundbreaking "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns", an alternate history story about Batman in a grim future, was published by DC. Miller wrote and penciled. In 1988, he wrote the acclaimed "Batman: Year One", about Batman's first year on the job, for DC. In 1996, he wrote "Spawn versus Batman", a one-shot issue published by DC and Image Comics. He wrote the major motion pictures RoboCop 2 (1990) and RoboCop 3 (1993) and did the "Robocop" comic series for a little while.
Miller directed The Spirit (2008) and co-directed Sin City (2005) and Frank Miller's Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014)_.- Writer
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Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 into the lower nobility of Florence, to Alighiero di Bellincione d'Alighiero, a moneylender. A precocious student, Dante's education focused on rhetoric and grammar. He also became enamored with a young girl, Beatrice Portinari, whose death in 1290 threw a grieving Dante into intense religious studies. Though the Alighieri family had managed to avoid entanglement in the power struggles between the Ghibelline and Guelf families for control of Florence, Dante allied himself with the democratic Guelfs and married a member of that clan, Gemma di Manetto Donati, in 1285.
After serving in the Guelf forces as a cavalryman in the Battle of Campaldino, Dante enrolled in the Guild of Doctors and Pharmacists and became politically active. He became an ambassador and a prior, but after finding himself on the opposite side of the political party in power he was forced to flee Florence in 1301, never able to return to the city of his birth. He narrowly escaped being executed for treason.
Dante left for Verona and Ravenna, where he was joined by his children. He then wrote his most famous work, "Commedia", not in scholarly Latin but in the vernacular Italian of the time, giving his countrymen a literature of their own. In it he would resurrect the love of his youth, Beatrice, giving her a place among the angels. This work would also take the author, escorted by the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, on a grand tour to Hell and Purgatory, and later by his beloved Beatrice to Paradise. History would later judge Dante's creation to be divine. Dante Alighieri died in 1321 and was buried in Ravenna. Three sons--Pietro, Jacopo and Giovanni--and a daughter, Antonia, survived him.- Writer
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Joanne Rowling was born in Yate, near Bristol, a few miles south of a town called Dursley ("Harry Potter"'s Muggle-family). Her father Peter Rowling was an engineer for Rolls Royce in Bristol at this time. Her mother, Anne, was half-French and half-Scottish. They met on a train as it left King's Cross Station in London. Her sister Diana is about 2 years younger than Joanne. In 1971, Peter Rowling moved his family to the nearby village of Winterbourne (still in the Bristol vicinity). During the family's residence in Winterbourne, Jo and Di Rowling were friends with neighborhood children, Ian and Vikki Potter. In 1974, the Rowling family moved yet again, this time to Tutshill, near the Welsh border-town of Chepstow in the Forest of Dean and across the Severn River from the greater Bristol area. Rowling admits to having been a bit of a daydreamer as a child and began writing stories at the age of six. After leaving Exeter University, where she read French and Classics, she started work as a teacher but daydreamed about becoming a writer. One day, stuck on a delayed train for four hours between Manchester and London, she dreamed up a boy called "Harry Potter". That was in 1990. It took her six years to write the book. In the meantime, she went to teach in Portugal, married a Portuguese television journalist, had her daughter, Jessica, divorced her husband and returned to Britain when Jessica was just three months old. She went to live in Edinburgh to be near her sister, Di. Her sudden penury made her realize that it was "back-against-the-wall time" and she decided to finish her "Harry Potter" book. She sent the manuscript to two agents and one publisher, looking up likely prospects in the library. One of these agents that she picked at random based on the fact that she liked his name, Christopher Little, was immediately captivated by the manuscript and signed her on as his client within three days. During the 1995-1996 time-frame, while hoping to get the manuscript for "Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone" published, Rowling worked as a French teacher in Edinburgh. Several publishers turned down the manuscript before Bloomsbury agreed to purchase it in 1996.- Writer
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English writer, scholar and philologist, Tolkien's father was a bank manager in South Africa. Shortly before his father died (1896) his mother took him and his younger brother to his father's native village of Sarehole, near Birmingham, England. The landscapes and Nordic mythology of the Midlands may have been the source for Tolkien's fertile imagination to write about 'the Shire' and 'hobbits' in his later book the Hobbit (1937). After his mother's death in 1904 he was looked after by Father Francis Xavier Morgan a RC priest of the Congregation of the Oratory. Tolkien was educated at King Edward VI school in Birmingham. He studied linguistics at Exeter College, Oxford, and took his B.A. in 1915. In 1916 he fought in World War I with the Lancashire Fusiliers. It is believed that his experiences during the Battle of the Somne may have been fueled the darker side of his subsequent novels. Upon his return he worked as an assistant on the Oxford English Dictionary (1918-20) and took his M.A. in 1919. In 1920 he became a teacher in English at the University of Leeds. He then went on to Merton College in Oxford, where he became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon (1925-45) and Merton professor of English Language and Literature (1945-59). His first scholarly publication was an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925). He also wrote books on Chaucer (1934) and Beowulf (1937). In 1939 Tolkien gave the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland titled: "On Fairy-Stories". Tolkien will however be remembered most for his books the Hobbit (1937) and the Lord of the Rings (1954-55). The Hobbit began as a bedtime story for his children". He wrote Lord of the Rings over a period of about 14 years.
Tolkien also discussed parts of his novels with fellow Oxfordian and fantasy writer CS Lewis during their 'meetings'. He was trying to create a fantasy world so that he could explain how he had invented certain languages, and in doing so created 'Middle-earth'. However among his peers at Oxford his works were not well received as they were not considered 'scholarly'. It was after LOTR was published in paperback in the United States in 1965 that he developed his legendary cult following and also imitators. Tolkien was W. P. Ker lecturer at Glasgow University in 1953. In 1954 both the University of Liege and University College, Dublin, awarded him honorary doctorates. He received the CBE in 1972. He served as vice-president of the Philological Society and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made an honorary fellow of Exeter College. Despite the immense popularity of his books today Tolkien did not greatly benefit from their sales. His son Christopher Tolkien was able to publish some of his works posthumously after his manuscripts were found.- Writer
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Hunter S. Thompson was born on 18 July 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), The Rum Diary (2011) and Gonzo (2008). He was married to Anita Thompson and Sondi Wright. He died on 20 February 2005 in Aspen, Colorado, USA.- Writer
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Welsh's books have made him a cult figure within the writing world since the 1990s. Several of his books have become best sellers and all have a mixture of comedy, drama and hard-hitting issues...the best-known being Trainspotting (1996) which was made into a box-office smash worldwide at the movies in 1996. Of his other works, one other has been brought to screen, The Acid House (1998)..a trilogy of stories and though not as successful as Trainspotting commercially, became a cult success in his homeland of Scotland and the UK. At time of writing, Welsh is currently on a project writing the sequel to Trainspotting called 'Porn', which given the success of the first film, should make him even more famous when released as a film within the next year or so.- Writer
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Born the son of a shoe-maker two months before the birth of another famous playwright, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe achieved fame as an Elizabethan dramatist as well as an atheist. He was killed in a tavern brawl by a former friend, allegedly over a bill. There is now some evidence that suggests his death was in fact an assassination.- Writer
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Neil Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. He is best known for the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.
As a child and a teenager, Gaiman read the works of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mary Shelley, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alan Moore.
Gaiman also wrote episodes of the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who, during Matt Smith's as the Doctor.- Writer
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Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital in Portland. His parents were Nellie Ruth (Pillsbury), who worked as a caregiver at a mental institute, and Donald Edwin King, a merchant seaman. His father was born under the surname "Pollock," but used the last name "King," under which Stephen was born. He has an older brother, David. The Kings were a typical family until one night, when Donald said he was stepping out for cigarettes and was never heard from again. Ruth took over raising the family with help from relatives. They traveled throughout many states over several years, finally moving back to Durham, Maine, in 1958.
Stephen began his actual writing career in January of 1959, when David and Stephen decided to publish their own local newspaper named "Dave's Rag". David bought a mimeograph machine, and they put together a paper they sold for five cents an issue. Stephen attended Lisbon High School, in Lisbon, in 1962. Collaborating with his best friend Chris Chesley in 1963, they published a collection of 18 short stories called "People, Places, and Things--Volume I". King's stories included "Hotel at the End of the Road", "I've Got to Get Away!", "The Dimension Warp", "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well", "The Stranger", "I'm Falling", "The Cursed Expedition", and "The Other Side of the Fog." A year later, King's amateur press, Triad and Gaslight Books, published a two-part book titled "The Star Invaders".
King made his first actual published appearance in 1965 in the magazine Comics Review with his story "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber." The story ran about 6,000 words in length. In 1966 he graduated from high school and took a scholarship to attend the University of Maine. Looking back on his high school days, King recalled that "my high school career was totally undistinguished. I was not at the top of my class, nor at the bottom." Later that summer King began working on a novel called "Getting It On", about some kids who take over a classroom and try unsuccessfully to ward off the National Guard. During his first year at college, King completed his first full-length novel, "The Long Walk." He submitted the novel to Bennett Cerf/Random House only to have it rejected. King took the rejection badly and filed the book away.
He made his first small sale--$35--with the story "The Glass Floor". In June 1970 King graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Science degree in English and a certificate to teach high school. King's next idea came from the poem by Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." He found bright colored green paper in the library and began work on "The Dark Tower" saga, but his chronic shortage of money meant that he was unable to further pursue the novel, and it, too, was filed away. King took a job at a filling station pumping gas for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour. Soon he began to earn money for his writings by submitting his short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier.
On January 2, 1971, he married Tabitha King (born Tabitha Jane Spruce). In the fall of 1971 King took a teaching job at Hampden Academy, earning $6,400 a year. The Kings then moved to Hermon, a town west of Bangor. Stephen then began work on a short story about a teenage girl named Carietta White. After completing a few pages, he decided it was not a worthy story and crumpled the pages up and tossed them into the trash. Fortunately, Tabitha took the pages out and read them. She encouraged her husband to continue the story, which he did. In January 1973 he submitted "Carrie" to Doubleday. In March Doubleday bought the book. On May 12 the publisher sold the paperback rights for the novel to New American Library for $400,000. His contract called for his getting half of that sum, and he quit his teaching job to pursue writing full time. The rest, as they say, is history.
Since then King has had numerous short stories and novels published and movies made from his work. He has been called the "Master of Horror". His books have been translated into 33 different languages, published in over 35 different countries. There are over 300 million copies of his novels in publication. He continues to live in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, and writes out of his home.
In June 1999 King was severely injured in an accident, he was walking alongside a highway and was hit by a van, that left him in critical condition with injuries to his lung, broken ribs, a broken leg and a severely fractured hip. After three weeks of operations, he was released from the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.- Writer
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Attended Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Illinois, graduating in 1994.
Graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 1999. Majored in English.
Shortly after graduating from Georgetown University, Jonathan Nolan served as a production assistant on Memento (2000).
Wrote the short story, "Memento Mori", on which the film Memento (2000) is based.
Was co-writer, with his brother Christopher Nolan, on The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012). Also co-wrote the Terminator Salvation (2009).- Writer
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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced general medicine for about ten years.
While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favor of writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and compassion. It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided stereotyping and instructive political messages in favor of cool comic irony. Praised by writers Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1888.
In 1890, Chekhov made a lengthy journey to Siberia and to the remote prison-island of Sakhalin. There, he surveyed thousands of convicts and conducted research for a dissertation about the life of prisoners. His research grew bigger than a dissertation, and in 1894, he published a detailed social-analytical essay on the Russian penitentiary system in Siberia and the Far East, titled "Island of Sakhalin." Chekhov's valuable research was later used and quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago." In 1897-1899, Chekhov returned to his medical practice in order to stop the epidemic of cholera.
Chekhov developed special relationship with Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theater. He emerged as a mature playwright who influenced the modern theater. In the plays "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "Seagull," and "Cherry Orchard," he mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax, and implied emotion. The leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, became his wife. In 1898, Chekhov moved to his Mediterranean-style home at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. There he was visited by writers Lev Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, and artists Konstantin Korovin and Isaac Levitan.- Guy de Maupassant was born on 5 August 1850 in Château de Miromesnil, France. He was a writer, known for La criada de la granja (1953), Pierre & Jeanne and Black Sabbath (1963). He died on 6 July 1893 in Paris, France.
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Jack Kerouac was born into a French-Canadian family and spoke French before he learned English. His father was a printer and a local businessman. His first story was inspired by the radio show "The Shadow". As a young writer he styled himself after Thomas Wolfe, and attended Columbia University. Although his most famous novel is "On the Road", some of his other better known novels are "The Town and the City" and "The Dharma Bums", about a group of writers and Zen. Kerouac, who was married thrice, was a very heavy drinker, which was a major factor in his deteriorating health. He died in 1969, during emergency surgery.- Jack London was the best-selling, highest paid and most popular American author of his time.
He was born John Griffith Chaney, on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco. He was raised by his mother Flora Wellman and his stepfather John London (he didn't know who his father was until his adulthood). After graduation from a grammar school he worked 12 to 18 hours a day at a cannery. Jack had a special relationship with his black foster mother, Virginia (Jenny) Prentiss. She loaned him some money and in 1891 he bought a sloop and became an oyster pirate. A few months later he joined the California Fish Patrol. In 1893 he joined the crew of a sealing schooner, bound for Japan. His first story, "Typhoon off the Coast of Japan", based on his sailing experiences, was published in November of 1893. Still unemployed, he became a tramp and hoboed around the country. In 1894 he was arrested for vagrancy and spent a month in jail, where he was a witness to "awful abysses of human degradation." His entire life, after these events, became a race to erase the traumatizing memories of his childhood and youth.
He continued his self-education at the Oakland Public Library. Among his readings were works by Gustave Flaubert and Lev Tolstoy. In 1896 he was admitted to the University of California, but after a year was forced to leave due to financial reasons. In 1897 he went to the Canadian Yukon and joined the Klondike Gold Rush. There he experienced all the hardships of uncivilized life and suffered from--among other things--severe frostbite, scurvy, malaria and dysentery. This left his health seriously impaired. London's struggles for survival inspired "To Build a Fire" (1902), which is considered his best short story. Writing became his ticket out of poverty; a way, in his words, to "sell his brains". His first marriage to Bess Maddern began as a friendship, not love, and ended 3 years later, leaving her with two daughters. His second marriage to Charmian Kittrdge, an editor, lasted until his death.
"The Call of the Wild" (1903) was his biggest success. "The Sea-Wolf" (1904) was turned into the first full-length American movie. Later came "The Iron Heel" (1908), a premonition of the Orwellian world, and the autobiographical "Martin Eden" (1909). The highest-paid writer of his time, he earned over $2 million yet he was always broke. In 1905 he bought a ranch in California, where he designed the first concrete silo in the state. His books provided operating income. He once said, "I would write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate." His ecological approach and effort to adapt the ideas of Asian sustainable agriculture was ahead of his time. In 1913 his Big House was ruined by a devastating fire and Jack was financially and mentally hurt. He built a small cottage and made big plans, but he lived only 3 more years. His 1400-acre ranch is now a National Historic Landmark, named Jack London State Historic Park. The writer's cottage was preserved by his wife Charmian, who lived there until her death in 1955.
His changing views and philosophy were often misunderstood as he grew out of his own mistakes. At one time he wrote, "I have been more stimulated by [Friedrich Nietzsche] than by any other writer in the world." Later London disregarded the "superman" theory of Nietzsche, calling himself Nietschze's "intellectual enemy." His readings of Carl Jung contributed to his complex philosophy. His other influences ranged from Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Darwin, Aldous Huxley and Karl Marx. While sympathizing with the Mexican revolution in "The Mexican", he wrote differently about it when he was sent to Mexico as a reporter in 1914. By age 40, somewhat disillusioned, he resigned from the Socialist party and from various clubs. During his last years London was in extreme pain, caused by complications from kidney failure (uremia is recorded on his death certificate). He was laid to rest at his ranch according to his will: "And roll over me a red boulder from the ruins of the Big House." - "There are no second acts in American lives," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, who himself went from being the high priest of the Jazz Age to a down-and-out alcoholic within the space of 20 years, but not before giving the world several literary masterpieces, the most famous of which is "The Great Gatsby" (1924).
He was born in 1896 to a mother who spoiled him shamelessly, leading him to grow up an especially self-possessed young man. While he was obsessed by the image of Princeton University, he flunked out, less interested in Latin and trigonometry than bathtub gin and "bright young things". The brightest was an unconventional young lady from Montgomery, Alabama named Zelda Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald invoked the jealousy of numerous local boys, some of whom had even begun a fraternity in Zelda's honor, by snagging her shortly before the publication of his first novel, "This Side of Paradise". The novel was a huge success, and Fitzgerald suddenly found himself the most highly-paid writer in America.
During the mid-to-late '20s the Fitzgeralds lived in Europe among many American expatriates including Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway and Thornton Wilder. He wrote what is considered his greatest masterpiece, "The Great Gatsby", while living in Paris. It was at the end of this period (1924-30) that his marriage to the highly strung, demanding and mentally unstable Zelda began to unravel. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent much of the rest of her life in a variety of mental institutions. Fitzgerald turned more and more to alcohol. In 1930 a major crisis came when Zelda had a series of psychotic attacks, beginning a descent into madness and schizophrenia from which she would never recover. Much of Fitzgerald's income would now be dedicated to keeping his wife in mental hospitals. Emotionally and creatively wrung out, he wrote "Tender is The Night" (1934), the story of Dick Diver and his schizophrenic wife Nicole, that shows the pain that he felt himself. In the mid-30s Fitzgerald had a breakdown of his own. He had become a clinical alcoholic, something he would detail in his famous "The Crack-Up" series of essays.
With Zelda institutionalized on the East Coast, it was Hollywood that proved to be Fitzgerald's salvation. Although he had little success in writing for films, which he had attempted several times previously, he was paid well and gained a new professional standing. His experiences there inspired "The Last Tycoon", his last--and unfinished--novel which some believe might have been his greatest of all. Fitzgerald died at the home of his mistress, writer Sheilah Graham, of a heart attack in 1940, believing himself to be a failed and broken man. He never knew that he would one day be considered one of the finest writers of the 20th century. - Writer
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Anton Donchev was born on 14 September 1930 in Burgas, Bulgaria. He was a writer, known for The Heretics, Kaloyan (1963) and Glutnitzata (1972). He was married to Raina Vasileva and Evelina Troyanska. He died on 20 October 2022 in Bulgaria.- Miguel de Cervantes' baptism occurred on October 9, 1547, at Alcala de Henares, Spain, so it is reasonable to assume he was born around that time, and Alcala de Henares has long claimed itself as his birthplace. The son of Rodrigo de Cervantes, an itinerant and not-too-successful surgeon, Miguel was educated by monks as he and his family wandered from city to city. In 1570 he obtained a position as a kind of secretary to Cardinal Aquaviva in Rome. In 1571 he became a soldier and fought in the famous Battle of Lepanto that pitted Spain against Turkish forces. Being ill with fever at the time, and wishing to prove his bravery, he asked to be put in the most dangerous fighting position on his ship. He was, and received two wounds in the chest and one in his left hand, which rendered him disabled for life. Returning home with his brother Rodrigo in 1575, they were captured by the Barbary pirates and sold into slavery. He and his fellow captives made three attempts to escape, all unsuccessful - one because they were betrayed by a fellow captive. In each attempt Cervantes deliberately shouldered the blame on himself, in an attempt to shield his fellow captives from torture. The Turkish Bey was so impressed with his perhaps foolhardy audacity that he spared him each time. The Cervantes family was able to ransom Rodrigo but not Miguel, and he remained in captivity until 1580, when he was finally ransomed by two Trinitarian friars.
He then began a writing career, which was at first completely unsuccessful due to the fact that Cervantes deliberately tried to write the kind of plays and poetry popular at the time, and to imitate their style, something he was woefully inadequate at doing. He fathered a daughter out of wedlock, and entered into an unhappy marriage in 1584. He took on a series of odd jobs to make ends meet. His financial difficulties netted him three or more prison terms and an excommunication by the Spanish Inquisition, although it was clear he never committed any crimes. Finally, in 1605, he published the first part of the novel which gave him immortality, the brilliant and unforgettable "Don Quixote de La Mancha", which was supposed to be a satire on the chivalric novels of the time, but was actually a work unlike anything anyone else had ever written (the second part followed ten years later, after the success of the first had produced a plagiarized sequel that not only coarsened the satire but contained openly insulting remarks about Cervantes). "Don Quixote"'s surface seems comic, but Cervantes, finally writing in his own personal style and no one else's, created two characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, to whom he gives more multi-layered depth than anyone else up to that time had given characters, except possibly the depth that William Shakespeare had given to Hamlet. The novel "Don Quixote" itself becomes an ironic mixture of comedy, humiliation, disillusionment and tragedy. All of its characters, except those in the interpolated romance novels, are believable and each reacts to Don Quixote's madness in an illuminating way. "Don Quixote" was immensely successful in its time, but it did not make Cervantes a wealthy man.
His other highly regarded works are his collection of "Exemplary Stories", published in 1613, and his "Eight Interludes", published in 1615. He died of dropsy on April 23, 1616, but in an especially ironic twist, his gravesite is lost. His contemporary, William Shakespeare, died ten days later, which according to the Julian calendar then used in England was, coincidentally, also April 23, 1616. Strangely enough, to the end of his life, Cervantes valued his poetic work more highly than his prose (perhaps just a case of wishful thinking) and never considered "Don Quixote" his masterpiece. He died without knowing that it would be one day regarded as the world's greatest novel by many critics. - Ivan Vazov was born on 27 June 1850 in Sopot, Vazovgrad, Bulgaria, Ottoman Empire [now Bulgaria]. He was a writer, known for Gramada (1936), Pod igoto (1952) and Pod igoto (1990). He was married to Athena Boliarska. He died on 22 September 1921 in Sofia, Bulgaria.
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Maksim Gorky is a pseudonym of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, who was born into a poor Russian family in Nizhnii Novgorod on Volga river. Gorky lost his father at an early age, he was beaten by his stepfather and became an orphan at age 9, when his mother died. He was brought up by his grandmother, who helped his development as a storyteller.
He was blessed with a brilliant memory, but failed to enter a University of Kazan. At age 19 he survived a suicide attempt, because the bullet missed his heart. After that Gorky traveled on foot for 5 years all over Central Russia, worked as a sailor on a Volga steamboat, then a salesperson, a railway worker, a salt miller, and a lawyer's clerk. At that time he was arrested for his public criticism of the Tsar and social injustices in Russia. He started writing for newspapers and published his first 'Sketches and Stories' in 1890s. Later he wrote an autobiographic book "My Universities" based on impressions from his travels and jobs. Gorky wrote with sympathy about the simple folks, the outcasts, the gypsies, the hobos and dreamers in the context of social decay in the Russian Empire. He became friends with Anton Chekhov and Lev Tolstoy. His play 'The Lower Depths' (1892) was praised by Chekhov and was successfully played in Europe and the United States. His political activism resulted in cancellation of his membership in the Russian Academy. Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Korolenko left the Academy in protest and solidarity with Gorky. He went to live in Europe and America in 1906-13. In America he started his classic novel, 'The Mother', about a Russian Christian woman and her imprisoned son, who both joined revolutionaries under the illusion that revolution follows Christ's messages.
After the Russian revolution in 1917, Gorky criticized Lenin and communists for their "bloody experiments on the Russian people". He wrote, 'Lenin and Trotsky are corrupted with the dirty poison of power. They are disrespectful of human rights, freedom of speech and all other civil liberties". Soon Gorky received a handwritten warning letter from Lenin. Later his friend Nikolai Gumilev, ex-husband of Anna Akhmatova was executed by communists. In 1921 Gorky emigrated to Europe and settled in Capri. He became careful in his critique of communism. In 1932 after a series of brief visits, he returned to Soviet Russia. He was placed in a rich Moscow mansion of the former railroad tycoon Ryabushinsky. His return from the fascist Italy was a victory for Soviet propaganda. He was made the Chairman of the Soviet Writer's Union, and a figurehead of "socialist realism" . After the murder of Kirov in 1934 Gorky was under a house arrest. His son died in 1935. The following year Gorki Gorky died suddenly at the Lenin's dacha in Moscow.- Writer
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Kesey burst into the literary scene with the "Cuckoo's Nest" in 1962 which he wrote from his experiences working at a veterans hospital. During this period, he volunteered for the testing on the drug LSD. After writing his second novel, "Sometimes A Great Notion," he bought an old school bus dubbed "Further." With Neal Cassidy at the wheel and pitchers of LSD-laced-Kool-Laid in the cooler, Kesey and a band of friends who called themselves The Merry Pranksters took a trip across America to New York's World Fair. It would be 28 years until Kesey published his third major novel, "Sailor Song," in 1992, and he later said he lost interest in the novel as an art form after he discovered the magic of the bus. The bus ride was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 account, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." The movie version of the "Cuckoo's Nest" swept the 1974 Academy Awards for best actor, best actress, best director, and best picture. But Kesey, who has never seen the film, sued the producers because it took the viewpoint away from the character of the schizophrenic American Indian, Cheif Bromden. Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992 and set down root in Pleasant Hill, in the mid 1960s, after serving four months in jail for a marijuana bust in California. His rambling red barn-house has become a landmark of the psychedelic era, attracting visits from myriad strangers in tie-dyed clothing seeking enlightenment.- Writer
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Versatile Greek poet and tragic dramatist. He was the son of Sophilus, a wealthy arms manufacturer. Sophocles studied tragedy under Aeschylus, whom he subsequently defeated in the dramatic festival of 468 BC, thus gaining his first victory at these competitions. He became a general under Nicias and after the failure of the Athenian expedition to Syracuse (413) was appointed one of the special commissioners to deal with the emergency. He was a priest of Amynos, a god of healing, and offered his own house as a place of worship for the healing deity Asclepius until his temple was ready. In addition, he founded a literary and musical society. His descendants were also tragedians - his son Iophon and grandson Sophocles the younger. Unlike his rival Euripides, he had very early acquired a favorable public. About 130 plays were attributed to him, (7 of which were subsequently reckoned spurious). In the dramatic competitions he probably won 24 victories--that is to say, 24 of his tetralogies (each comprising 3 tragedies and a satyr play) were successful. Seven of his tragedies have survived viz. Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Electra, the Trachinian Women, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus (his last play performed in 401 after his death). Sophocles died just before the catastrophic end of the Peloponnesian War.- Writer
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Born on Salamis island around 484 BC, Euripides is considered the first professional writer in Athens. His dramas evolve around human passions and his interest lies in strong feelings of love, hate and revenge. Often also the gods themselves share the same low moral standards as the humans do. In several of his plays women take leading parts, "Medea" is probably the most famous. He also stressed the importance of the dialogue and lessened the the influence of the choir. Of his around 90 plays, 18 plays remain, the rest are lost or only known in fragments.- Aeschylus is considered by some as the greatest writer ever to walk the face of earth. He was born to a noble family in Elefsinia, a few miles from Athens. The greatest festival in his hometown was the Elefsinia Mysteria, a dramatic imitation of nature's awakening in spring. Aeschylus is the founder of the classic Ancient Greek drama and was the first to clad his actors in impressive costumes on stage. His heroes were greater than life, always decent, even in their most dramatic moments. In his plays he was questioning everything, including the gods. People would walk for days to see his new play. He was leading an unhappy life, however, constantly seeking answers to the mysteries of life and death. He spent his last few years in the western Greek colonies of Sicily.
- Ernest Hemingway was an American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954) for his novel The Old Man and the Sea, which was made into a 1958 film The Old Man and the Sea (1958).
He was born into the hands of his physician father. He was the second of six children of Dr. Clarence Hemingway and Grace Hemingway (the daughter of English immigrants). His father's interests in history and literature, as well as his outdoorsy hobbies (fishing and hunting), became a lifestyle for Ernest. His mother was a domineering type who wanted a daughter, not a son, and dressed Ernest as a girl and called him Ernestine. She also had a habit of abusing his quiet father, who suffered from diabetes, and Dr. Hemingway eventually committed suicide. Ernest later described the community in his hometown as one having "wide lawns and narrow minds".
In 1916 Hemingway graduated from high school and began his writing career as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. There he adopted his minimalist style by following the Star's style guide: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." Six months later he joined the Ambulance Corps in WWI and worked as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, picking up human remains. In July 1918 he was seriously wounded by a mortar shell, which left shrapnel in both of his legs causing him much pain and requiring several surgeries. He was awarded the Silver Medal. Back in America, he continued his writing career working for Toronto Star . At that time he met Hadley Richardson and the two married in 1921.
In 1921, he became a Toronto Star reporter in Paris. There he published his first books, called "Three Stories and Ten Poems" (1923), and "In Our Time" (1924). In Paris he met Gertrude Stein, who introduced him to the circle that she called the "Lost Generation". F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson and Ezra Pound were stimulating Hemingway's talent. At that time he wrote "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), "A Farewell to Arms" (1929), and a dazzling collection of Forty-Nine stories. Hemingway also regarded the Russian writers Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov as important influences, and met Pablo Picasso and other artists through Gertrude Stein. "A Moveable Feast" (1964) is his classic memoir of Paris after WWI.
Hemingway participated in the Spanish Civil War and took part in the D-Day landings during the invasion of France during World War II, in which he not only reported the action but took part in it. In one instance he threw three hand grenades into a bunker, killing several SS officers. He was decorated with the Bronze Star for his action. His military experiences were emulated in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940) and in several other stories. He settled near Havana, Cuba, where he wrote his best known work, "The Old Man and the Sea" (1953), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. This was adapted as the film The Old Man and the Sea (1958), for which Spencer Tracy was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor, and Dimitri Tiomkin received an Oscar for Best Musical Score.
War wounds, two plane crashes, four marriages and several affairs took their toll on Hemingway's hereditary predispositions and contributed to his declining health. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and insomnia in his later years. His mental condition was exacerbated by chronic alcoholism, diabetes and liver failure. After an unsuccessful treatment with electro-convulsive therapy, he suffered severe amnesia and his physical condition worsened. The memory loss obstructed his writing and everyday life. He committed suicide in 1961. Posthumous publications revealed a considerable body of his hidden writings, that was edited by his fourth wife, Mary, and also by his son Patrick Hemingway. - Writer
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Born into a wealthy and influential English family, Ian Fleming spent his early years attending top British schools such as Eton and Sandhurst military academy. He took to writing while schooling in Kitzbuhel, Austria, and upon failing the entrance requirements for Foreign Service joined the news agency Reuters as a journalist -- winning the respect of his peers for his coverage of a "show trial" in Russia of several Royal Engineers on espionage charges. Fleming briefly worked in the financial sector for the family bank, but just prior to the Second World War, was recruited into British Naval Intelligence where he excelled, shortly achieving the rank of Commander. When the war ended, Fleming retired to Jamaica where he built a house called "Goldeneye," took up writing full-time and created the character that would make him famous -- British Secret Service agent James Bond, in a novel called "Casino Royale." Fleming spent the rest of his life writing and traveling the world, but as his Bond character reached new heights of popularity on movie screens, Fleming was in ailing health. He died of a heart attack (his second) in England in August 1964 at the age of 56.- Writer
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Dahl was born in Wales in 1916. He served as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force during World War II. He made a forced landing in the Libyan Desert and was severely injured. As a result, he spent five months in a Royal Navy hospital in Alexandria. Dahl is noted for how he relates suspenseful and sometimes horrific events in a simple tone.- Writer
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Acclaimed writer, Dr. Seuss was born Theodor Geisel in Springfield, Massachusetts, on Wednesday, March 2nd, 1904. After attending Dartmouth College and Oxford University, he began a career in advertising. His advertising cartoons, featuring Quick, Henry, the Flit!, appeared in several leading American magazines. Dr. Seuss's first children's book, titled "And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street", hit the market in 1937, changing the face of children's literature forever. It was rejected 27 times before it was finally published by Vanguard Press in 1937.
Following World War 2, Geisel and his first wife Helen moved to La Jolla, California, where he wrote and published several children's books in the coming years, including If I Ran the Zoo and Horton Hears a Who! A major turning point in Geisel's career came when, in response to a 1954 Life magazine article that criticized children's reading levels, Houghton Mifflin and Random House asked him to write a children's primer using 220 vocabulary words. The resulting book, The Cat in the Hat, was published in 1957 and was described by one critic as a "tour de force." The success of The Cat in the Hat cemented Geisel's place in children's literature.
In the following years, Geisel wrote many more books, both in his new simplified-vocabulary style and using his older, more elaborate technique, and including such favorites as Green Eggs and Ham and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966). In 1966, with the help of eminent & longtime cartoonist, Chuck Jones, The Grinch was immediately adapted into an animated film & Boris Karloff was the narrator, (& as the evil Grinch, that turned away from its bitterness, as the special begins) of the half-hour Christmas animation special.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and three Academy Awards, Seuss overall was the author and illustrator of 44 children's books, some of which have been made into audio-cassettes, animated television specials, and videos for people of all ages. Even after his death in Autumn of 1991, Dr. Seuss continues to be the best-selling author of children's books in the world. Following the death of his first wife Helen Geisel in 1967, Geisel wed Audrey Geisel, who remained his wife until his death on Tuesday, September 24th, 1991, at the age of 87 years 6 months and 22 days. His full life-time was 31,982 days, equaling 4,568 weeks & 6 days.- Jane Austen was born on December 16th, 1775, to the local rector, Rev. George Austen (1731-1805), and Cassandra Leigh (1739-1827). She was the seventh of eight children. She had one older sister, Cassandra. In 1783 she went to Southampton to be taught by a relative, Mrs. Cawley, but was brought home due to a local outbreak of disease. Two years later she attended the Abbey Boarding School in Reading, reportedly wanting to follow her sister Cassandra, until 1786.
Jane was mostly educated at home, where she learned how to play the piano, draw and write creatively. She read frequently and later came to enjoy social events such as parties, dances and balls. She disliked the busy life of towns and preferred the country life, where she took to taking long walks.
In 1801 Jane, her parents and sister moved to Bath, a year after her father's retirement, and the family frequented the coast. While on one of those coastal holidays she met a young man, but the resulting romantic involvement ended tragically when he died. It is believed by many astute Austen fans that her novel, "Persuasion", was inspired by this incident.
Following her father's passing in January of 1805--which left his widow and daughters with financial problems--the family moved several times until finally settling into a small house, in Chawton, Hampshire, owned by her brother Edward, which is reminiscent of "Sense and Sensibility". It was in this house that she wrote most of her works.
In March of 1817 her health began to decline and she was forced to abandon her work on "Sanditon", which she never completed. It turned out that she had Addisons disease. In April she wrote out her will and then on May 24th moved with Cassandra to Winchester, to be near her physician. It was in Winchester she died, in the arms of her sister, on Friday, 18 July 1817, at the age of only 41. She was buried the 24th of July at Winchester Cathedral. Jane never married.
During her formative years, Jane wrote plays and poems. At 14 she wrote her first novel, "Love and Freindship [sic]" and other juvenilia. Her first (unsuccessful) submission to a publisher, however, was in 1797 titled "First Impressions" (later "Pride and Prejudice"). In 1803 "Susan" (later "Northanger Abbey") was actually sold to a publisher for a mere £10 but was not published until 14 years later, posthumously. Her first accepted work was in 1811 titled "Sense and Sensibility", which was published anonymously as were all books published during her lifetime. She revised "First Impressions" and published it entitled "Pride and Prejudice" in 1813. "Mansfield Park" was published in 1814, followed by "Emma" in 1816, the same year she completed "Persuasion" and began "Sanditon", which was ultimately left unfinished. Both "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey" were published in 1818, after her death. - Louisa May Alcott was born on 29 November 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, USA. She was a writer, known for Little Women (2019), Little Women (1994) and An Old-Fashioned Girl (1949). She died on 6 March 1888 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
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Frank Herbert was born on 8 October 1920 in Tacoma, Washington, USA. He was a writer, known for Dune (2021), Dune (1984) and Dune: Part Two (2024). He was married to Theresa Shackleford, Beverley Ann Stuart and Flora Parkinson. He died on 11 February 1986 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.- Cinematographer
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Mitch Cullin was born on 23 March 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. He is a cinematographer and writer, known for Mr. Holmes (2015), Tideland (2005) and Tokyo Is Dreaming (2008).- Writer
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E.L. Doctorow was born on 6 January 1931 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Daniel (1983), Ragtime (1981) and Wakefield (2016). He was married to Helen Setzer. He died on 21 July 2015 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.- Writer
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Oscar winner and Pulitzer Prize recipient William Saroyan, who gained world fame with his classic book "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" (1934), was born in California to Armenak and Takoohi Saroyan.
With his unmistakably American literary works, deeply rooted in his Armenian heritage, William Saroyan soon established himself as one of the preeminent short story writers, playwrights and novelists in the United States.
In 1939 and 1940 William Saroyan's "My Heart's in the Highlands" and "The Time of Your Life" were staged for theater and "Love's Old Sweet Song" opened on Broadway, winning the New York Critics Circle Award.
In 1943 his MGM screenplay "The Human Comedy" was novelized and published and received great reviews, and he won the Academy Award for Best Writing Original Story for "The Human Comedy".
He wrote the lyrics of Ross Bagdasarian's famous # 1 hit song "Come On-a My House", performed by Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, and Rosemary Clooney, which was featured in Madonna's "Swept Away" (2002) and Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952).
William Saroyan is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century -- along with such masters as John Updike, John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, who admired him. Saroyan is perhaps the only major and influential writer to receive both the Pulitzer Prize and the Academy Award, and his work continues to appear on the theater stage and the silver screen worldwide.- William Faulkner, one of the 20th century's most gifted novelists, wrote for the movies in part because he could not make enough money from his novels and short stories to support his growing number of dependants. The author of such acclaimed novels as "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom!", Faulkner received official screen credits for just six theatrical releases, five of which were with director Howard Hawks. Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1949 and he received two Pulitzer Prizes, for "A Fable" in '1955 and "The Reivers", which was published shortly before he died in 1962.
- Franz Kafka was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Austrian Empire, in 1883. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a business owner and a domestic tyrant, frequently abusing his son. Kafka later admitted to his father, "My writing was all about you...". He believed that his father broke his will and caused insecurity and guilt, that affected his whole life. Their tensions come out in "The Trial" and in "The Castle" in form of a hopeless conflict with an overwhelming force. His mother, Julie Lowy, came from an intellectual, spiritual family of the Jewish merchant and brewer Jakob Lowy. Although her influence was diminished by his dominating father, she shared her son's delicate nature. Kafka had a few relationships with women and was engaged, but never made a family.
He finished the German National Gymnasium in 1901, and graduated from the German University in Prague as Doctor of Law in 1906. He worked for insurance companies for the rest of his life. His profession shaped the formal, cold language of his writings which avoided any sentimental interpretations, leaving it to the reader. In 1908 Kafka published eight short stories compiled under the title "Meditation". In 1911 he became interested in Yiddish theater, that absorbed him more than abstract Judaism. In 1912 he began writing "The Judgment", which was more than an autobiography, providing a therapeutical outlet for his wrecked soul. The same year he started "Metamorphosis" about a traveling salesman, who transformed into a giant bug. In 1914 he wrote "In the Penal Colony" and "The Trial", which is regarded to be his best work. His style remains unique, though literary connections may be traced to Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Nikolay Gogol, as well as to Chinese parables, to the Bible and Talmud.
As a Jew Kafka experienced social tensions and isolation from the German community, so very few of his writings could find readers during his life. His three sisters later died in the Nazi concentration camps. He suffered from clinical depression, social anxiety, insomnia, and tuberculosis, complicated by laryngitis, that caused him the loss of his voice before his death in 1924. He was comforted by his girlfriend Dora Diamant, who had broken away from her Hasidic shtetl in Poland. She was 19 when they met in 1923 and Kafka wrote to her parents, asking for their permission to marry her. Their answer was negative, because Kafka presented himself as a non-religious Jew. He asked Dora to destroy his manuscripts after his death, but she kept about 20 notebooks of his writings and 35 private letters, that were reportedly confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933 and are not yet recovered. His university friend Max Brod became his editor, biographer and literary agent, who preserved and published most of Kafka's works posthumously, including the unfinished novels "The Trial", "The Castle", and "America". - Writer
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Margaret Mitchell was an American historical novelist and a journalist. She published only one completed novel in her lifetime, "Gone with the Wind" (1936), which covered a woman's struggle for survival through the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, and it was the top American fiction bestseller in 1936 and 1937. Mitchell had completed the romance novella "Lost Laysen" in her adolescence, but it was only published posthumously in 1996. A collection of Mitchell's newspaper articles was published under the title ""Margaret Mitchell: Reporter" (2000). Several of her writings from her early life have been published under the title "Before Scarlett: Girlhood Writings of Margaret Mitchell." (2000).
In 1900, Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Her father was Eugene Mitchell (1866-1944), a prominent lawyer, politician, and historian. He served a term as the President of the Atlanta Board of Education (1911-1912), and co-founded the Atlanta Historical Society. Mitchell's mother was Maybelle Stephens Mitchell (1872-1919), a prominent suffragist leader, and a co-founder of both the League of Women Voters in Georgia and the Catholic Layman's Association of Georgia. Mitchell's paternal ancestors were Scottish-Americans, and her maternal ancestors were Irish-Americans.
During her early childhood, Mitchell lived with her family at a Jackson Street mansion, east of downtown Atlanta. The mansion was owned by Miitchell's maternal grandmother, Annie Stephens (d. 1934) , who lived with them. Stephens was reportedly a tyrant to her family, and had a somewhat adversarial relationship with her granddaughter. But Mitchell went on to interview her for "eye-witness information" about the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Atlanta. Stephen's memories were one of the primary sources for "Gone with the Wind" .
Mitchell's mother had the habit of dressing her daughter in boys' pants, because she thought that they were safer than dresses. Mitchell continued dressing as a boy until she was 14, and her family nicknamed her "Jimmy" (after the comic strip character "Little Jimmy"). Mitchell was a tomboy in her childhood, and her favorite pastime was to ride her Texas plains pony. Aging Confederate soldiers tried to entertain the young girl by narrating to her gritty details of specific battles from the Civil War.
In 1912, the Mitchell family moved to a new residence at the east side of Peachtree Street. The house was located at a short distance from the Chattahoochee River. The family reportedly had concerns about the safety of their Jackson Hill home, due to its proximity to areas affected by the Atlanta Race Riot (1906). The Jackson Hill home was eventually destroyed in the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917.
By the early 1910s , Mitchell was an avid reader. Among her favorite writers were Edith Nesbit and Thomas Dixon. Mitchell started writing fairy tales and adventure stories as a hobby. Among her early works was "The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden" (1913), about a mixed-race "Indian" who has to endure pain to win over his love interest. Mitchell's mother kept her daughter's stories in white enamel bread boxes.
In 1914, Mitchell started attending Atlanta's Washington Seminary, a then-fashionable private girls' school. The school had over 300 students. Mitchell joined the school's drama club. She was still a tomboy, and she habitually played the male characters in performances of William Shakespeare's plays. She also joined the school's literary club, and had her stories published in the school's yearbook. Among her first published stories was the revenge-themed "Little Sister", where a little girl shoots her sister's rapist.
In 1918, Mitchell graduated and started preparing for a college education, at the insistence of her mother. Her mother chose which school Mitchell would attend, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. At the time, it was reputedly "the best women's college in the United States". Before her college classes started, Mitchell was engaged to her first serious love interest, the army lieutenant Clifford West Henry. He was send to fight in France in July 1918, and was mortally wounded in October of the same year. Mitchell would continue mourning him for years.
In 1919, Mitchell' mother died from the flu. She was one of the many victims of a flu pandemic that had started in 1918. Mitchell arrived home from college, a day after her mother had died. She found that her mother left a short letter of advise for her, telling her to take care of herself before taking care of other causes.
Later in 1919, Mitchell dropped out of college. She did not excel in any area of academics, and her father expected her to take over the family's household. Mitchell had health problems of her own, and had an appendectomy in the autumn of 1919. Mitchell was feeling increasingly disappointed with her life's direction, as she wrote to a friend. In 1920, Mitchell made her Atlanta society debut. Shortly after, she started dressing as a flapper. In 1921, she shocked the Atlanta high society by performing an Apache dance in a charity ball, and kissing her male partner during the performance. She was consequently blacklisted from the Junior League.
In 1922, Mitchell started dating the bootlegger Berrien ("Red") Kinnard Upshaw (1901-1949). In September 1922. the couple were married against her family's wishes. They both moved in with Mitchell's father. Red was an alcoholic with a violent temper, and Mitchell suffered physical abuse at his hands. They agreed to a period of separation in December 1922, and their divorce was finalized in October 1924. In 1925, Mitchell married her second husband John Robert Marsh (1895-1952). He was Red's former roommate, and another love interest for Mitchell since 1922. Marsh had reportedly secured Mitchell's uncontested divorce, by giving Red a loan. Mitchell and her new husband set their residence at the Crescent Apartments in Atlanta, nicknaming their new home "The Dump". It would later become known as Margaret Mitchell House and Museum.
Between her two marriages, Mitchell had decided that she needed her own source of income. In 1922, she started working as a journalist for "The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine". Among her early successes was securing a 1923 interview with the then-popular actor Rudolph Valentino. She continued her journalistic career until May 1926. At the time of her resignation, Mitchell had suffered an ankle injury that would not heal properly. Her mobility problems prevented her from working on assignments.In her four years as a journalist, Mitchell wrote 129 feature articles, 85 news stories, and several book reviews.
Following her resignation from "The Atlanta Journal", Mitchell worked for a few months as a gossip columnist for the "Sunday Magazine". In 1926, Marsh asked his increasingly bored wife why she did not write a book of her own instead of reading thousands of them. By 1928, Mitchell started work on a historical novel of her own. In 1935, her novel was still unfinished. But the book editor Harold Latham of Macmillan read her manuscript and was convinced that it was a potential best-seller. Having secured a publisher, Mitchell spend 6 months in making revisions and checking the novel's historical references. "Gone with the Wind" was published in June 1936.
Her novel turned Mitchell into a literary celebrity, but she had no intention of writing further works. In September 1941, Mitchell christened the light cruiser USS Atlanta (CL-51). During World War II, Mitchell served as a volunteer for the American Red Cross. She raised money for the war effort by selling war bonds. In 1944, she christened the light cruiser USS Atlanta (CL-104).
On August 11, 1949, Mitchell crossed Peachtree Street with her husband. They were on their way to a movie theatre, when Mitchell was struck by a drunk driver. She was hospitalized at Grady Hospital. She died on August 16, without ever regaining consciousness. She was buried at Oakland Cemetery, Georgia. Her husband was buried by her side in 1952. Though Mitchell is long gone, her novel never went out of print. It remains popular into the 21st century. Mitchell was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2000.- Writer
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Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles L. Dodgson, author of the children's classics "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass."
Born on January 27, 1832 in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, Charles Dodgson wrote and created games as a child. At age 20 he received a studentship at Christ Church and was appointed a lecturer in mathematics. Dodgson was shy but enjoyed creating stories for children. His books including "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" were published under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Dodgson died in 1898.
Early Life, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, best known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, was born in the village of Daresbury, England, on January 27, 1832. The eldest boy in a family of 11 children, Carroll was rather adept at entertaining himself and his siblings. His father, a clergyman, raised them in the rectory. As a boy, Carroll excelled in mathematics and won many academic prizes. At age 20, he was awarded a studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges) to Christ College. Apart from serving as a lecturer in mathematics, he was an avid photographer and wrote essays, political pamphlets and poetry. "The Hunting of the Snark" displays his wonderful ability in the genre of literary nonsense.
Alice and Literary Success, Carroll suffered from a bad stammer, but he found himself vocally fluent when speaking with children. The relationships he had with young people in his adult years are of great interest, as they undoubtedly inspired his best-known writings and have been a point of disturbed speculation over the years. Carroll loved to entertain children, and it was Alice, the daughter of Henry George Liddell, who can be credited with his pinnacle inspiration. Alice Liddell remembers spending many hours with Carroll, sitting on his couch while he told fantastic tales of dream worlds. During an afternoon picnic with Alice and her two sisters, Carroll told the first iteration of what would later become Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. When Alice arrived home, she exclaimed that he must write the story down for her.
He fulfilled the small girl's request, and through a series of coincidences, the story fell into the hands of the novelist Henry Kingsley, who urged Carroll to publish it. The book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was released in 1865. It gained steady popularity, and as a result, Carroll wrote the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). By the time of his death, Alice had become the most popular children's book in England, and by 1932 it was one of the most popular in the world.
Photography and Legacy, besides writing, Carroll created a number of fine photographs. His notable portraits include those of the actress Ellen Terry and the poet Alfred Tennyson. He also photographed children in every possible costume and situation, eventually making nude studies of them. Despite conjecture, little real evidence of child abuse can be brought against him. Shortly before his 66th birthday, Lewis Carroll caught a severe case of influenza, which led to pneumonia. He died on January 14, 1898, leaving an enigma behind him.- Writer
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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born into a family of old provincial nobility. Failing his final exams at a preparatory school, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. In 1921, he began military service in the 2nd Regiment of Chasseurs, and sent to Strasbourg for pilot training. The next year, he obtained his license, and was offered a transfer to the air force. But his fiancée's family objected, so he settled in Paris and took an office job. His engagement ultimately broke off, and he worked at several jobs over the next few years without success.
By 1926, he was flying again. He became one of the pioneers of international postal flight in the days when aircrafts had few instruments and pilots flew by the seat of their pants. He worked on the Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar. His first tale, L'Aviateur (The Aviator), was published in the magazine Le Navire d'Argent. In 1928, he published his first book, Courrier-Sud (Southern Mail), and flew the Casablanca/Dakar route. He became the director of Cap Juby airfield in Rio de Oro, Sahara. In 1929, he moved to South America where he was appointed director of the Aeroposta Argentina Company. In 1931, Vol de Nuit (Night Flight), which won the Prix Femina, was published. He married Salvadoran artist and writer Consuelo Suncin Sandoval de Gómez, who became the model for the temperamental Rose in Le Petit Prince. Theirs was a stormy union as Saint-Exupéry traveled frequently and indulged in numerous affairs.
During World War II, he was in New York City, but returned to France to join a squadron based in the Mediterranean. Now 44, he agreed to collect data on German troop movements in the Rhone River Valley. He took off the night of July 31, 1944, and was never seen again. A lady reported having seen a plane crash around noon on August 1st near the Bay of Carqueiranne. A body wearing a French uniform was found several days later, and buried. In 1998, a fisherman found a silver chain bracelet south of Marseille which was identified as being Saint-Exupéry's. On April 7, 2004, officials confirmed that the wreckage of a Lockheed Lightning P-38 found on the seabed off the coast of Marseille in 2000 was Saint-Exupéry's.
Further research in 2006 by the dive team which recovered the wreckage located a German pilot who was flying a mission at the Bay of Carqueiranne at the time Saint-Exupéry's plane went down. Horst Rippert acknowledged that he shot at the plane, but did not report it, possibly because he was not sure he actually downed it. When the Germans heard American radio broadcasts that Saint-Exupéry was missing, Rippert said he knew that the plane he downed was his. Rippert idolized Saint-Exupéry, read all his books, and had been bothered by the incident his whole life. He told the dive team he would not have shot at the plane had he known it was Saint-Exupéry's.- Thomas Harris was born in 1940 in Jackson, Mississippi, USA. He was raised in the town of Rich where his father worked as a farmer. He earned his bachelor's degree in English from Baylor University in Texas in 1964. While attending school, he also worked for the local newspaper.
After graduating, Harris traveled Europe for a time. Back in the USA, he worked for the Associated Press out of New York. Not coincidentally, his duties for the press included covering murders and other crimes. This helped fuel his imagination in the fictional world, and he began to write macabre stories for magazines that began to show his attention for detail that would make his subsequent novels so popular.
In 1975, he wrote his first novel, Black Sunday, about a diabolical plot to kill thousands with a blimp during the Superbowl. Perhaps ahead of his time, the terrorism of 11 September, 2001, led to many stadiums being turned into no-fly zones due to fears of a similar attack. The book was turned into a film -- Black Sunday (1977) -- a very short two years after being published. Following its success, he devoted his career entirely to fictional novelization.
In 1981, Harris wrote his first book in the Hannibal Lecter trilogy, Red Dragon. Though the character of Lecter did not become famous (or infamous, as the case may be) for another decade, the book did spark a loosely-based movie, Manhunter (1986), which was quickly dismissed at first, grossing back only about half its cost. Then, in 1988, Harris wrote another novel about the character Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs. This time, he gave the character more of a presence, although he still did not dominate the book. When this was turned into a film three years later as The Silence of the Lambs (1991), it became an instant hit and swept the "Big 5" at the Academy Awards, becoming only the third movie to do so.
After the success of The Silence of the Lambs in both movie and book form, there became a growing demand among fans - and film producer Dino De Laurentiis -- for there to be another chapter in the Hannibal Lector series. It took 11 years between novels, but Harris finally delivered again in 1999 with the best-selling novel Hannibal. It was made into a film two years later in Hannibal (2001) and, although dismissed by some critics and fans for straying from the book in parts (as well as Jodie Foster's non-appearance as Agent Clarisse Starling), it set opening records in box office sales for an R-rated film.
Because of the large box office take and the fact that Anthony Hopkins, who won an Oscar for his role in the second Lecter film, did not play Lecter in Manhunter (1986), De Laurentis and Harris came to terms to make a second version of the first book, this time properly titled Red Dragon (2002). This film version was more in keeping with the book than the first film was.
Unable to escape from being known as the man who created Lecter, Harris again agreed to make not only another novel on the character, but to write the material for the film adaption as well. The current working title is Behind the Mask. As of 2005, Harris resides in Miami, Florida, and Sag Harbor, New York, USA. - Writer
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Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in Upper Bockhampton, Dorset, England, UK. He was a writer, known for Far from the Madding Crowd (2015), Tess (1979) and Maiden No More. He was married to Florence Emily Dugdale and Emma Lavinia Gifford. He died on 11 January 1928 in Dorchester, Dorset, England, UK.- Writer
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L. Frank Baum became a success with his 1883 production of "The Maid of Arran" in 1882. He was a dreamer, had a printing press and an amateur newspaper, "The Rose Lawn Home Journal" and published a coin and stamp collecting guide. He failed at almost everything through poor business sense. He had been an actor, though only successfully in "The Maid of Arran," a newspaper editor ("The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer"), a store owner (Baum's Bazaar, from which he filed for bankruptcy on New Year's Day of 1899), and motion picture producer and director. He met everything with enthusiasm and talent, but things did not work just right and only became successful again as a writer. Diverse in audience and subject matter, he is best remembered for his fourteen Oz books and their subsidiary fantasies. He is said to have singlehandedly created the fantasy genre out of the Andersen-style literary fairy tale. He used a variety of pseudonyms for juvenile series made at the publishers request, the best known and most successful being as Edith Van Dyne, who was once played by an actress at a luncheon with another publisher who wanted to meet her. The name was later used by Emma Speed Sampson, who continued some of his series.
Baum was a kind and gentle family man, who never swore or told dirty jokes, nor was he able to punish his four sons, whom Maud had to handle for him. He was born with a bad heart and suffered several minor attacks, including one induced by The Peekskill Military Academy at age 14. He loved to make fun of the military after that incident, as one can see in his Oz books. He created and headed The Oz Film Manufacturing Company in 1914 and directed one film the year later, after which his son Frank Joslyn Baum took it over, changing the name to Dramatic Feature Films, after the Oz name had been cursed as box-office poison, despite excellent critical reception of J. Farrell MacDonald's The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914).
He continued writing, sitting up in bed long after his health had failed him, and his final Oz book was published posthumously in 1920. It was only his second attempt at science fiction. Baum's writing attracted legions of fans of all ages, both during and after his lifetime. His work has influenced such writers as Gore Vidal, Ray Bradbury, and Terry Brooks. The Oz series has been continued both officially and unofficially after his death. Frank Joslyn Baum sold the film rights of the first Oz book to MGM in 1934, and Walt Disney soon picked up the rest, unable to secure the original from them, for he, too, had desired to make a film version, as had been done before by Baum himself, Otis Turner, Ray C. Smallwood, Larry Semon, Ethel Meglin, Ted Eshbaugh, and many subsequent to 1939. Ironically, Baum moved to Hollywood at Ozcot to have a quiet place to write, which, of course, resulted in the OFMC. One other notable work by Baum is Tamawaca Folks, a spoof of his vacation town of Macatawa Michigan, taking the name of Michigan author John Esten Cooke and changing it to John Estes Cooke. Baum himself has a supporting role (under a different name) in the novel, which was based on all the vacationers. Baum's health problems limited his life to 63 years, but his literary output was remarkable, though mostly forgotten. An episode of the television series Death Valley Days (1952) features him and Maud as characters.- Stanev is one of Bulgaria's best known writers of short stories, especially animal stories. He studied financial sciences and economy and was a passionate hunter. Among his most popular stories is Valtchi Nochti (Wolves Nights). But he became also well-known for _Kradetsat na praskovi (1964)_ (The Peach Thief), the love story between the young wife of a Bulgarian officer and a Serbian prisoner of war during World War I.
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Born in Liverpool, England, UK, Clive Barker is an English writer, director, and visual artist, best known for his works in the genres of horror and dark fantasy. His mother Joan Ruby (née Revill) was a painter and school welfare officer and his father Leonard Barker was a personnel director for an industrial relations firm. He studied English and philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His first artistic endeavors took place while at school, where he was a part of students' theatre. In the early days of his artistic career, he supported himself by working as a male prostitute. In 1978 he co-founded a theatre group called The Dog Company, among whose members was Doug Bradley who later went on to star in Barker's Hellraiser movie series. In 1985 he published his debut novel, The Damnation Game, and the same year he wrote his first feature movie scripts: Underworld (1985) and Rawhead Rex (1986). The end effect of these two movies disappointed Barker so much that he decided to adapt his prose into a movie he would direct himself, leading to the creation of Hellraiser (1987). The movie achieved cult status and turned into a multimedia franchise, although Barker lost control over it at one point, only to regain it in 2020. In addition to his work in literature and movies, he is also a visual artist, often illustrating his own books and was involved in a number of television, comic book, and visual arts projects.- Writer
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A gifted poet, playwright and wit, Oscar Wilde was a phenomenon in 19th-century England. He was illustrious for preaching the importance of style in life and art, and of attacking Victorian narrow-mindedness.
Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin before leaving the country to study at Oxford University in England when he was in his early 20s. His prodigious literary talent was recognized when he received the Newdegate Prize for his outstanding poem "Ravenna". After leaving college his first volume of poetry, "Patience", was published in 1881, followed by a play, "The Duchess of Padua", two years later. It was around this time that Wilde sparked a sensation.
On his arrival to America he stirred the nation with his flamboyant personality: wearing long silk stockings--an unusual mode of dress--long, flowing hair that gave the impression to many of an effeminate and a general air of wittiness, sophistication and eccentricity. He was an instant celebrity, but his works did not find recognition until the publication of "The Happy Prince and Other Tales" in 1888. His other noted work was his only novel, was "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1890), which caused controversy as the book evidently attacked the hypocrisy of England. It was later used as incriminating evidence at Wilde's trial, on the basis of its obvious homosexual content.
Wilde was a married man with children, but his private life was as a homosexual. He had an affair with a young snobbish aristocrat named Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas' father, the Marquess of Queensberry, did not approve of his son's relationship with the distinguished writer, and when he accused Wilde of sodomy, Wilde sued the Marquess in court. However, his case was dismissed when his homosexuality--which at the time was outlawed in England--was exposed. He was sentenced to two years hard labor in prison. On his release he was a penniless, dejected man and soon died in Paris. He was 46.
Wilde is immortalized through his works, and the stories he wrote for children, such as "The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant", are still vibrant in the imagination of the public, especially "The Picture of Dorian Gray", the story of a young handsome man who sells his soul to a picture to have eternal youth and beauty, only to face the hideousness of his own portrait as it ages, which entails his evil nature and degradation. The book has been interpreted on stage, films and television.- Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 - 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, "Dean Swift".
Swift is remembered for works such as A Tale of a Tub (1704), An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1712), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729). He is regarded by the Encyclopædia Britannica as the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. He originally published all of his works under pseudonyms-such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M. B. Drapier-or anonymously. He was a master of two styles of satire, the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.
His deadpan, ironic writing style, particularly in A Modest Proposal, has led to such satire being subsequently termed "Swiftian". - Writer
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Lord Byron seemed destined from birth to tragedy. His father was the handsome but feckless Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron and his mother the Scottish heiress Catherine Gordon, the only child of the Laird of Gight.
Captain Byron abandoned his wife and child leaving Catherine to bring up young Byron on her own. A harsh and dependent parent, Catherine was just the wrong sort of person to raise a sensitive child, clinging to him one moment, and the next denouncing Byron as a "lame brat." Born with a club foot, Byron (no-one ever called him George) was kept separated from peers and his elder half-sister, Augusta, by his over-protective mother. At fourteen he fell in love with a neighbor, Mary Chaworth, and wrote love poetry to her. Byron was heartbroken, however, when he overheard Mary callously call him "that little lame boy" while talking to a friend.
Always deeply sensitive about his deformity, he finally received adequate medical care in his teens which corrected the problem. A hedonist in school, Byron was popular and outgoing, though by his own admission he did very little schoolwork. The publication of his poem, "Childe Harold", prompted Byron to remark famously, "I awoke one day to find myself famous." When a distant cousin died, Byron unexpectedly found himself heir to the baronetcy, at which point he became the 6th Baron Byron. The most popular person in Regency London, he wrote more poetry and carried on illicit affairs, most notably with Lady Caroline Lamb, who inspired one of his best and shortest poems: "Caro Lamb, Goddamn."
After the spectacular flaming disintegration of his relationship with Caroline, a woman stepped into his life who would become his greatest love and the cause of his eventual downfall -- his half-sister, Augusta. Augusta occupied the central place in his heart, and he wrote many passionate poems in her honor.
On April 15th, 1814, Augusta gave birth to Elizabeth Medora Leigh. Byron was ecstatic over the birth of the girl, who was nicknamed "Libby". The child bore the name Leigh, and Augusta's husband, her cousin Colonel George Leigh, apparently had no suspicions regarding her paternity. Libby herself claimed in her autobiography she was always a favorite of the Colonel's.
Augusta herself pressured her brother Byron to wed, in order to avert a scandal. He reluctantly chose the intelligent and confident Annabella Milbanke, a cousin of his old flame Caroline Lamb. Enamoured with her handsome husband, Annabella even became friendly with Augusta, but it was not long before her marriage began to fall apart. Byron treated her coldly, and was very disappointed when their only child, Ada Byron, was not a boy.
Byron went into self-imposed exile in Italy, though he remained in contact with Augusta. Byron befriended fellow rogue poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had shocked the world by running away and living in sin with Mary Wollenstonecraft Godwin (better known as Mary Shelley, author of "Frankenstein"). Percy and Mary joined Byron for the summer at Geneva, accompanied by Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Byron and Claire had a brief romance, which resulted in daughter Allegra, who Byron raised himself. Allegra saw little of her mother, and referred to Byron's Italian mistress as "mamma". When Allegra died at the age of six in 1822, Claire was enraged and refused to have anything to do with Byron ever again. Depressed by both his daughter's death and the drowning of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron took up a new cause - that of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Summoning support, he arrived in Greece with weapons and supplies, but before he could join the fight, went down with a deadly fever. He died in 1824, and his last words were, "My daughter! My sister!"- Writer
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Arthur C. Clarke was born in the seaside town of Minehead, Somerset, England in December 16, 1917. In 1936 he moved to London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society. There he started to experiment with astronautic material in the BIS, write the BIS Bulletin and science fiction. During World War II, as a RAF officer, he was in charge of the first radar talk-down equipment, the Ground Controlled Approach, during its experimental trials. His only non-science-fiction novel, Glide Path, is based on this work. After the war, he returned to London and to the BIS, which he presided in 46-47 and 50-53. In 1945 he published the technical paper "Extra-terrestrial Relays" laying down the principles of the satellite com- communication with satellites in geostationary orbits - a speculation realized 25 years later. His invention has brought him numerous honors, such as the 1982 Marconi International Fellowship, a gold medal of the Franklin Institute, the Vikram Sarabhai Professorship of the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, the Lindbergh Award and a Fellowship of King's College, London. Today, the geostationary orbit at 36,000 kilometers is named The Clarke Orbit by the International Astronomical Union. The first story Clarke sold professionally was "Rescue Party", written in March 1945 and appearing in Astounding Science in May 1946. He obtained first class honors in Physics and Mathematics at the King's College, London, in 1948.
In 1953 he met an American named Marilyn Torgenson, and married her less than three weeks later. They split in December 1953. As Clarke says, "The marriage was incompatible from the beginning. It was sufficient proof that I wasn't the marrying type, although I think everybody should marry once". Clarke first visited Colombo, Sri Lanka (at the time called Ceylon) in December 1954. In 1954 Clarke wrote to Dr Harry Wexler, then chief of the Scientific Services Division, U.S. Weather Bureau, about satellite applications for weather forecasting. Of these communications, a new branch of meteorology was born, and Dr. Wexler became the driving force in using rockets and satellites for meteorological research and operations. In 1954 Clarke started to give up space for the sea. About the reasons, he said: "I now realise that it was my interest in astronautics that led me to the ocean. Both involve exploration, of course - but that's not the only reason. When the first skin-diving equipment started to appear in the late 1940s, I suddenly realized that here was a cheap and simple way of imitating one of the most magical aspects of spaceflight - weightessness." In the book Profiles of the Future (1962) he looks at the probable shape of tomorrow's world. In this book he states his three Laws: 1."When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." 2."The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." 3."Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In 1964, he started to work with Stanley Kubrick in a SF (Science Fiction) movie script. After 4 years, he shared an Oscar Academy Award nomination with him for the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He co-broadcasted the Apollo 11 , 12 and 15 missions with Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra for CBS. In 1985, He published a sequel to 2001 : 2010: Odyssey Two. He worked with Peter Hyams in the movie version of 2010. They work was done using a Kaypro computer and a modem, for Arthur was in Sri Lanka and Peter Hyams in Los Angeles. Their communications turned into the book The Odyssey File - The Making of 2010. His thirteen-part TV series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World in 1981 and Arthur C. Clarke's World of strange Powers in 1984 has now been screened in many countries. He made part of other TV series about the space, as Walter Cronkite's Universe series in 1981. He has lived in Colombo, Sri Lanka since 1956 and has been doing underwater exploration along that coast and the Great Barrier Reef. So far it has been to over 70 books, almost as many non-fiction, as science fiction. In March 1998, his latest, and probably last, novel: 3001: The Final Odyssey was released.- Writer
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, the eldest of five children in a wealthy aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia. His grandfather was a Justice Minister to the Czar Alexander II. His father, named Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal political leader, the editor of a liberal newspaper, and was a friend of Sergei Diaghilev. His mother, named Elena Ivanovna (née Rukavishnikov), was the daughter of the wealthiest Russian goldmine owner.
Nabokov's family was trilingual. As a child he was already reading foreign writers Edgar Allan Poe, Gustave Flaubert, and the Russians Lev Tolstoy, Nikolay Gogol, and Anton Chekhov. He excelled in languages and literature, as well, as in soccer, tennis and chess. He was inspired by his father's studies in lepidoptery from the age of 7, and spent summers collecting butterflies in the family estate of Vyra, near St. Petersburg. He graduated from the most advanced and prestigious Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Nabokov's father was the Secretary of the Russian Provisional Government, when he was arrested during the Russian revolution of October, 1917, and the family estate was confiscated by the communists. The Nabokov family emigrated to London and then to Berlin. There Nabokov's father was murdered at a political meeting while shielding his opponent from assassins. The painful memory of his father's violent death would echo in many of Nabokov's writings. In 1923 Nabokov graduated with honors from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied zoology and literature. He worked as a translator and tutor in Europe for 18 years. In 1925 he married Vera Evseevna Slonim, from a Russian-Jewish family, and their son Dimitri was born in 1934.
Traumatized by the death of his father and the loss of his home country, Nabokov expressed himself in writing. His novel 'The Luzhin Defence' (1930) is alluding to his own story of emigration and the sense of loss. In 1937 his father's killer was released by Adolf Hitler, and Nabokov had to move to Paris. Three years later he fled from the advancing German Armies to the United States, with his wife and son. In 1940 he crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Champlain, where he had a first class cabin, paid with the money from the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. In 1945 Nabokov became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught literature at Cornell University and worked as entomologist at Harvard University, becoming a distinguished lepidopterist.
He published short stories in the Atlantic and the New Yorker magazines in English, while still writing his memoirs in Russian, and agonizing to switch from Russian to English. It took him 6 years to complete "Lolita" (1955), a controversial story of a pedophile's desire for a 12-year-old girl, who reminds him of the little girl he loved as a boy. The novel was banned in America and the UK until 1958. He later wrote a screenplay for the film Lolita (1962), directed by Stanley Kubrick. Lolita and "Pale Fire" (1962) are his best known novels. In 1964 Nabokov published his four-volume translation of 'Eugene Onegin' by Alexander Pushkin, on which he worked for 10 years. He later made English translations of poems by Mikhail Lermontov and Fyodor Tyutchev. His own later works: the artfully constructed 'Ada' (1969), 'Transparent Things' (1972), and the autobiographic 'Look at the Harlequins' (1975), were translated into Russian by his son Dimitri. Nabokov also published scholarly works on Nikolay Gogol, James Joyce and Franz Kafka.
In 1960 Nabokov moved to Switzerland and made his home at the Montreux Palace Hotel. From there he frequently traveled to Milan, Italy, where his son Dimitri Nabokov was an opera singer at the La Scala. Nabokov's main hobby was his immense collection of rare butterflies which grew to a museum-quality with his many entomological expeditions. He never learned to drive a car, and he depended on his wife Vera to drive him around. Nabokov's individualism manifested in his ironic rejection of any mass-psychology, especially Marxism, Freudism, etc. He never used telephones, thus preventing any outside influence over his way of life. He had a rare gift of synaesthesia, cognate with that of composer Alexander Scriabin and artist Wassily Kandinsky. Nabokov also made his name in chess by composing chess problems.
Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, in Montreux Palace Hotel, and was laid to rest in the Clarens Cemetery, Montreux, Switzerland. His wife and muse, Vera Slonim, died in 1993, and was laid to rest with Nabokov. The family mansion of Nabokov's in St. Petersburg, Russia is now a Nabokov's Museum. His first collection of butterflies is now part of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. His last and most valuable butterfly collection was bequeathed to the Zoology Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.- Writer
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James Matthew "J. M." Barrie was a Scottish novelist and playwright. He had a distinguished career, but is primarily remembered for creating Peter Pan and his supporting characters. He used the character of Pan in the novel "The Little White Bird" (1902), the stage play "Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up" (1904). the novel "Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens" (1906), the play "When Wendy Grew Up - An Afterthought" (1908), and the novel "Peter and Wendy" (1911).
In 1860,. Barrie was born in the burgh of Kirriemuir, in the county of Forfarshire. The county has since been renamed to "Angus". In the 19th century, Kirriemuir was center for the weaving industry, Barrie's father was David Barrie, a moderately prosperous weaver. Barrie's primary caregiver was his mother Margaret Ogilvy, who introduced him to English-language literature at an early age. Barrie was the 9th child born to the couple, out of ten children.
In 1866, Barrie's older brother David Barrie was killed in an ice-skating accident. David was Margaret's favorite son, and she was devastated by his death. Barrie started imitating his dead brother, in an effort to serve as a replacement for him. Barrie's mother reportedly found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her.
In 1868, Barrie started attending the Glasgow Academy, an independent day school located in Glasgow. At the time, two of his older siblings were among the school's teachers. In 1870, Barrie was transferred to the Forfar Academy. It was a comprehensive school located in Forfar, and it was closer to his parents' house. In 1874, Barrie was enrolled at the Dumfries Academy, a grammar school located in Dumfries.
As a teenager, Barrie was a bibliophile. He enjoyed reading penny dreadfuls, serial literature sold at a cheap price. He also enjoyed reading the juvenile fiction of Robert Michael Ballantyne ( 1825 - 1894), and the historical novels of James Fenimore Cooper (1789 - 1851). Barrie was part of a group which liked to re-enact the adventures of pirates. He was also part of a drama club at Dumfries. While a teenager, he wrote and produced his first play: "Bandelero the Bandit". The play was denounced by a local clergyman for its supposed immorality.
Barrie aspired to become a professional writer, but his family insisted that he must attend university first. Barrie enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. While a college student, he started working at the newspaper "Edinburgh Evening Courant" as their drama reviewer. He graduated from university in 1882.
Following graduation, Barrie worked as a staff journalist for the newspaper "Nottingham Journal". Meanwhile he started working on short stories based on the life story of his grandfather. He eventually reworked this story into a trilogy of novels: "Auld Licht Idylls" (1888), "A Window in Thrums" (1890), and "The Little Minister "(1891). The stories depicted life within the "Auld Lichts", a religious sect which his grandfather had joined. These novels were popular at the time, though largely based on the industrialized Scotland's nostalgia for a bygone era.
In the 1890s, Barrie started working on theatrical works. An early success for him was "Ibsen's Ghost, or Toole Up-to-Date" (1891), a parody of the plays of Henrik Ibsen (1828 -1906). The play was largely based on two of Ibsen's plays, "Ghosts" (1881) and "Hedda Gabler" (1891) .
While working as a playwright, Barrie met and courted the actress Mary Ansell (1861 -1950). The two of them were married in 1894, though they reputedly never consummated their marriage. The marriage lasted until 1909, ending in a divorce. Barrie resented Ansell's extramarital affair with a younger man, the novelist Gilbert Cannan (1884 -1955). Following a second failed marriage of Ansell, Barrie voluntarily started financially supporting her. Until his death in 1937, Barrie gave her an annual allowance.
In 1901, Barrie published one of his most successful plays, "Quality Street". The protagonist Phoebe Throssel was a respectable school mistress, who started pretending to be a younger woman in older to reclaim the heart of her former suitor. The initial run of the play in London lasted for 459 performances. The play was frequently revived until the 1940s.
In 1902, Barrie had another hit with the survival-themed play "The Admirable Crichton". The play depicts an aristocratic family and their servants as shipwreck survivors. While living in a desert island, the butler Crichton turns out to be a far more effective leader than his employer. This satire on class relationships had an initial run of 828 performances.
In 1902, Barrie introduced the character of Peter Pan, which became his most popular creation. He liked contrasting the typical middle class life of the Edwardian era, with the adventurous life and ambivalent morality of the fictional Neverland. While most of the Pan stories were written for a child audience, their social commentary also attracted adults. Barrie was praised by fellow writer George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) for these stories.
In 1909, Barrie was part of a campaign by several playwrights to challenge the United Kingdom's strict censorship laws. In 1911, Barrie was part of the anti-censorship's campaign second wave. In 1910, he commented on marital relations with the play "The Twelve Pound Look". In the play, a married woman seeks a divorce. She has gained financial independence and no longer needs her husband. The play was considered controversial at the time.
In 1917, Barrie explored the concept of the alternate reality in the play "Dear Brutus". In the play, a group of adult characters feel that they have taken wrong turns in their lives. A magic users offers them glimpses into the lives of their alternate reality counterparts, which took different life decisions. Some of them are enlightened by the experience, others learn nothing of value. The play was a hit, running for 363 performances in its initial run. It was revived in 1922.
In 1920, Barrie wrote the mystery play "Mary Rose". It was the last notable hit in his career. The play's protagonist mysteriously vanishes twice. She first disappears as a child. She re-appears 21 days later, but she has no recollection of where she was. As an adult, Mary Rose vanishes again. She leaves a husband and a son behind. She re-appears decades later, with no recollection of where she was again. But she has not aged a single day, and she is now physically younger than her own son. The play offers no definite answers to its mystery. It has experienced several revivals.
In 1929, Barrie gave the copyright right to Peter Pan (and any royalties gained from it) to the children's hospital Great Ormond Street Hospital. The royalties have continued to financially support the hospital ever since. The copyright was extended indefinitely by a special provision in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Barrie continued producing new works into the 1930s, though none were particularly groundbreaking. His last play was the Bible-themed story "The Boy David" (1936). It concerned the relationship between the aging Saul, King of Israel and his youthful son-in-law and prospective heir David. The play was based on the "Books of Samuel". A play which Barrie wrote but never produced was "The Reconstruction of the Crime", published posthumously in 2017.
By 1937, had moved into a nursing home in London. In June 1937, he died there due to pneumonia. He was 77-years-old at the time of his death. He was buried in his native Kirriemuir, in the family grave previously used by his parents and some of his siblings. His will left provision for his ex-wife Mary Ansell and a number of Barrie's surrogate children from the Llewelyn Davies family. Barrie left the majority of his estate to his longtime secretary Lady Cynthia Asquith ( 1887 -1960). Barrie had no known descendants.
Several of Barrie's works have remained popular into the 21st century. Peter Pan has frequently been adapted into various media, and has inspired a number of unofficial sequels. Tourists continue visiting locations in Kirriemuir which are associated with him. Barrie's long-lasting fame has not faded.- Writer
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Born in the Hyogo Prefecture capital city of Kobe, he studied oil painting at Osaka University of Arts. While in college, he developed an interest in manga, which led him to create his own complete work, Black Magic, which was published in the manga dojinshi Atlas. His work caught the eye of Seishinsha President Harumichi Aoki, who offered to publish him.
The result was best-selling manga Appleseed, a full volume of densely plotted drama taking place in an ambiguous future. The story was a sensation, and won the 1986 Seiun Award for Best Manga. After a professional reprint of Black Magic and a second volume of Appleseed, he released Dominion in 1986. Two more volumes of Appleseed followed before he began work on Ghost in the Shell.
In 2007, he collaborated again with Production I.G to co-create the original concept for the anime television series Ghost Hound, Production I.G's 20th anniversary project. A further original collaboration with Production I.G began airing in April 2008, titled Real Drive.- Writer
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Bob Kane was an American comic book writer and artist of Jewish descent, most famous for co-creating Batman and several members of Batman's supporting cast. Kane was inducted into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1994 and into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1996.
Kane was born under the name "Robert Kahn" in New York City. His father was the engraver Herman Kahn, and his mother was the housewife Augusta. Both of his parents were originally from Eastern Europe.
Kane attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he was friends with future comic book writer Will Eisner. Following his graduation, he legally changed his name to "Robert Kane" and enrolled at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art to study art. The school was a private college, located at Cooper Square on the border of the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan.
Kane originally wanted to become an animator, and in 1934 he was hired as a trainee animator by the animation studio Fleischer Studios (1921-1942), headed by the brothers Max Fleischer (1883-1972) and Dave Fleischer (1894-1979). He worked for up to two years in the production of animated short films, but had left the studio by 1936.
Kane entered the comics field in 1936, as a freelance penciler and inker. His early work was published in the magazine "Wow, What A Magazine!," which was edited by cartoonist Jerry Iger (1903-1990). Kane's most notable contribution was the comic serial "Hiram Hick", which he both drew and inked.
In 1936, Jerry Iger and .Will Eisner partnered to create their own company, "Eisner & Iger" (1936-1939). It was a comic book packager, producing complete comic stories that could be sold to publishers that did not have their own creative staff. In 1937, Kane was hired by this upstart company.
Kane's early work included the anthropomorphic animal series "Peter Pupp" (published by the magazine "Wags" in the United Kingdom and by Fiction House's "Jumbo Comics" in the United States), the comedy series "Ginger Snap" (published in "More Fun Comics"), the comedy series "Oscar the Gumshoe" (published in "Detective Comics"), the comedy series "Professor Doolittle" (published in "Adventure Comics"), and the adventure series "Rusty and his Pals" (published in "Adventure Comics). Among them, Peter Pupp stood out for its "overtones of mystery and menace".
By 1939, Superman had become a major hit for an early incarnation of DC Comics and there was a new market for comic book superheroes. Interested in creating his own superhero Kane started working on a new character, "Bat-Man". Kane said his influences for the character included actor Douglas Fairbanks' film portrayal of the swashbuckler Zorro; Leonardo da Vinci's diagram of the ornithopter, a flying machine with huge bat-like wings; and the 1930 film "The Bat Whispers", based on Mary Rinehart's mystery novel "The Circular Staircase" (1908).
Kane had already used Bill Finger as a ghost writer for his early comic strips. He asked Finger to provide additional ideas for Batman, and to write the initial Batman stories. Following a number of Finger's suggested redesigns, "Batman" debuted in "Detective Comics" #27 (May, 1939). It became a major hit for an early incarnation of DC Comics.
Early Batman stories were written and penciled by Bob Kane's own art studio (located in The New York Times building) and then sold for publication. Kane received the sole credit for whatever he and his staff created. Finger remained the main writer of the series, while Jerry Robinson (1922-2011) and George Roussos (1915-2000) were hired as Kane's art assistants. The four of them are jointly credited for introducing most of Batman's early supporting characters and memorable villains.
By the early 1940s, DC Comics demanded more Batman stories than the Bob Kane studio could produce. In response, DC hired its own writers and artists to work on additional stories, though Bob Kane continued to receive the sole credit for the stories. The most notable of these "ghost artists" was Dick Sprang (1915-2000) who remained attached to the Batman series for at least a decade, and co-created a popular new villain, the Riddler. Among the ghost writers of Batman, the most notable was Gardner Fox (1911-1986), who introduced some of Batman's notable equipment.
From 1943 to 1946, Bob Kane focused entirely on the Batman newspaper comic strip, and no longer produced new Batman stories for comic books. In his absence, Jerry Robinson became the main penciler for the Batman stories. Additional ghost artists of the period included Jack Burnley (1911-2006) and Win Mortimer (1919-1998). Several Batman-related covers were designed by Fred Ray (1920-2001), who was also the primary Superman cover-artist of the 1940s,
In 1946, the Batman newspaper comic strip ended, and Bob Kane started producing comic book stories for Batman again. He eventually hired his own ghost writers and ghost artists, The most notable among them were Lew Sayre Schwartz (1926-2011), the main artist of the Batman series between 1946 and 1953, and Sheldon Moldoff (1920-1967), the main artist of the series between 1953 and 1967. Schwartz is mainly remembered for co-creating a popular villain, called Deadshot. Moldoff is remembered for co-creating the villains Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze, the second version of the villainous Clayface, Batman's allies Bat-Mite, Bat-Girl/Betty Kane, and Batwoman/Kathy Kane, and Batman's pet dog Ace the Bat-Hound.
In the 1960s, Kane found work in television animation., He created the television series "Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse" (1960-1962), featuring two anthropomorphic animal superheroes. Courageous Cat was a parody of Batman, while sidekick Minute Mouse was a parody of Robin. Kane subsequently created the television series "Cool McCool" (1966-1967), depicting the adventures of an inept secret agent.
In 1966 or 1967, Kane chose to retire from his work in comic books and animation. He was 52-years-old and had been working on the field for three decades. He started producing "fine art" works for exhibitions in galleries. His work as a painter was prolific, though comic book historians have noted that he again hired ghost artists to help him produce the paintings.
In 1989, Kane was hired as a consultant for the live-action "Batman" (1989) film directed by Tim Burton. He served in the same consulting role for its three sequels, released between 1992 and 1997. In 1998, Kane was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he eventually died. He was 83-years-old and had lived in retirement for two decades.
Kane was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. Several of the characters Kane created remain popular, and he continues to receive posthumous credit in works based on his creations.- Writer
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Bill Finger was a comic book writer. His father Louis Finger was born in Austria and emigrated to the United States in 1907, while still a teenager. Louis worked as a tailor. Tessie, Bill's mother, was born and raised in New York City. Both parents were in their early 20s at the time of Finger's birth. Bill Finger had two sisters.
Finger was born in Denver, Colorado, but the Finger family eventually moved to New York City. Finger was mostly raised in The Bronx, and attended DeWitt Clinton High School. He graduated high school in 1933, and started his working career in the Great Depression. In 1938, Finger entered the comic strip business, as a ghost writer for a few comic strips created by Bob Kane's studio. Kane was a fellow graduate of DeWitt Clinton High School and the two of them were acquaintances.
In 1938-1939, National Comics (predecessor of DC Comics) had its first major success with a character called "Superman". This created a market for superheroes and several creators started working on creating other hero/vigilante characters. Bob Kane came up with a hero called "Bat-Man" or "Batman", and asked for Finger's assistance on the project. Finger rejected several of Kane's initial ideas about the character and suggested several changes in design and characterization. He came up with a civilian identity for the character as "Bruce Wayne", which Finger named after Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland and general Anthony "Mad Anthony" Wayne.
Kane marketed the "Batman" character to National Comics, and Batman's first story was published in "Detective Comics" #27 (May 1939). The script was written by an uncredited Finger, making him the first of many ghost writers to work on comics officially credited to Bob Kane. When Kane negotiated a contract about selling the rights to the "Batman" character, he claimed he was the sole creator of the character and demanded a sole mandatory byline on all Batman comics and adaptations thereof, acknowledging him as the creator. Finger's work on the character was not acknowledged.
Finger kept on working in "Batman"-related stories for much of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s either as a writer or a ghost writer. He is generally credited by comic book historians with creating or co-creating a number of Batman's foes and supporting characters. Among them: the Joker, Catwoman, Robin, Ace the Bat-Hound. Bat-Mite, Clayface, Bat-Girl/Betty Kane, the Penguin, the Scarecrow, Two-Face, the Riddler, and the Calendar Man. He also came up with the name "Gotham City" for the previously nameless metropolis where Batman operates, and co-created the Batmobile and the Batcave.
Besides "Batman", Finger's other writing credits for National Comics/DC Comics involve various stories for "Green Lantern", "Superman", and "Superboy". He is credited with co-creating Green Lantern/Alan Scott, the original character with that code-name. The Green Lantern series of the 1940s was a fantasy series, and the hero had magical powers. A reboot of the series in 1959 turned "Green Lantern" into a science fiction series featuring space cops and aliens, as the fantasy concept was considered outdated. In "Superman" stories, Finger is credited for adapting "Kryptonite" into comic books in 1949. The fictional element was created for the Superman radio series, but was adapted into the comic book series and became a permanent part in of the "Superman" saga. Finger's main contribution in the "Superboy" series was creating the character Lana Lang, as a love interest for the teenage hero.
Outside National Comics,Finger also contributed stories and characters to rival companies, such as Fawcett Comics, Quality Comics and Timely Comics (predecessor of Marvel Comics). Marvel credits him with the co-creation of the All-Winners Squad (introduced in 1946), the company's first superhero team.
Finger mostly retired from comic book writing c. 1961, starting a new career as a screenwriter for films and television series. He was even hired to write two episodes for the 1960s "Batman" live-action series. But he was in increasingly poor health, suffering a series of heart attacks in 1963, 1970 and 1973. He died due to atherosclerosis in 1974. His remains were cremated, and the ashes scattered on a beach. Finger has no known grave.
Finger was married twice, and he was survived by a son, Fred. While he never claimed rights to the Batman character, his granddaughter Athena Finger requested a creator's credit for his work. After negotiations, DC Entertainment finally credited Finger as Batman's co-creator in 2015.- Writer
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Daniel Wallace was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He studied English and Philosophy at Emory University and the University of North Carolina. He has three sisters and lives in Chapel Hill with his wife and son. His first job was veterinary assistant. He worked for his father's import/export company in Nagoya, Japan for two years, and in a bookstore and as an illustrator for thirteen years. His novel 'Big Fish: a Novel of Mythic Proportions' was the first to be accepted for publication after other previous five were rejected.- Writer
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Ransom Riggs is known for Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016), Portable Living Room (2006) and Black River.- Writer
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Elmore Leonard was born on 11 October 1925 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Out of Sight (1998), Get Shorty (1995) and Justified (2010). He was married to Christine Kent, Joan Shepard and Beverly Claire Cline. He died on 20 August 2013 in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, USA.- Writer
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Robert Ludlum was born on 25 May 1927 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Bourne Identity (2002) and The Bourne Legacy (2012). He was married to Karen Dunn and Mary Patricia Ryducha. He died on 12 March 2001 in Naples, Florida, USA.- Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Kiev Province, now the Ukraine, to Polish parents Apollo Korzeniowski and Ewa Bobrowska. His father was a political activist and he and his family were exiled after he was suspected of involvement with revolutionary activities. Conrad had no friends as a child and rarely associated with boys or girls. His mother had always been a sickly person and died of tuberculosis in 1865. Conrad's father sent him to live with his uncle and pursue his education in France. Conrad's father died in 1869, also of tuberculosis. Conrad became an officer on British ships and spent two decades on various ships. Conrad was inspired to write "Heart of Darkness" after voyaging to Congo in 1890. In 1894, Conrad published his first novel and in 1896 he married Jessie George, an on-again off-again girlfriend. Conrad had few friends in adulthood, mainly fellow authors such as Stephen Crane and Henry James. Conrad died of a heart attack in 1924.
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Grandson of famed humorist and actor Robert Benchley and the son of highly respected children's books author Nathaniel Benchley, novelist Peter Benchley's book were decidedly more dramatic in their content and style than his father's, and usually centered on the world's oceans as a backdrop to his vigorous plots.
Benchley is of course best remembered for penning the multi-million selling thriller Jaws, which was eventually filmed by director Steven Spielberg starring Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw. Jaws (1975) was a box office sensation, becoming one of the seminal films of the 1970s, spawning several inferior sequels, numerous low budget copycat films starring hammerheads, tiger and mako sharks. Plus generations of swimmers chose backyard pools over the mysterious ocean surf for cooling off in summer.
Benchley also wrote The Deep and The Island which were also both brought to the screen, but with much less fanfare and box office return than the Jaws venture. Interestingly, after the enormous hysteria created over the great white shark and their alleged man-eating habits, Benchley became a dedicated environmentalist committed to learning all he could about one of the world's most amazing apex predators. In the ensuing years, Benchley became one of the great white shark's greatest defenders and publicly admitted on numerous occasions that with what he now knew about the fragility of the species, he would have never written a book like Jaws which demonised the great white.
Benchley kept very active in his passion for studying great whites up until the time of his death from pulmonary fibrosis on February 11th, 2006.- Writer
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Robert Bloch was born on 5 April 1917 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer, known for Psycho (1960), Psycho II (1983) and Psycho (1998). He was married to Eleanor Zalisko Alexander and Marion Holcombe. He died on 23 September 1994 in Los Angeles, California, USA.- Writer
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William S. Burroughs, one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation (the other two being his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. He grew up in patrician surroundings and attended private school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, chosen due to the climate as he suffered from sinus trouble (the school was later used to house the Manhattan Project during World War II)). Burroughs took his undergraduate degree at Harvard College (Class of 1936) but rebelled inwardly against the life that the upper-class Harvard man was supposed to lead during the pre-war period (outwardly he dressed the part of a patrician, with three-piece suit, necktie, black homburg and chesterfield overcoat being his standard wardrobe. His political options generally were also of his class, i.e., right-wing).
Planning to become a physician, Burroughs moved to Germany to study medicine. The plight of the Jews under the Nazis was desperate, and in 1937 Burroughs agreed to marry Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a German Jewish woman, so she could leave Germany and eventually become a U.S. citizen. The two remained friends for many years after they moved back to the U.S., meeting often for lunch when Burroughs eventually settled in New York City in the early 1940s. They never lived together, and Burroughs formally divorced her in 1946 so he could marry his second wife, Joan.
Perhaps it was his exposure to National Socialism in Adolf Hitler's Germany that raised Burroughs' interest in his lifelong fascination: control mechanisms used by the state against its citizens. Burroughs left Germany for the United States without completing his studies, bringing along Ilse.
A homosexual in an extremely homophobic age, back in the U.S. he drifted from job to job while continuing his education as an autodidact. He lived in Chicago, where he was an exterminator, which he claimed was the best job he ever had. While in Chicago he met the young Lucien Carr (later to be the father of best-selling novelist Caleb Carr, author of "The Alienist") and David Kammerer. Kammerer was a homosexual 14 years Carr's senior who had been his private school tutor and had stalked Carr obsessively afterward, following him from city to city. While Carr was disturbed by Kammerer's behavior, he was also immature and flattered by the attention, a moth attracted to the flame. When the moth got singed, he would fly away. Carr dropped out of the University of Chicago to attend Columbia in New York in order to escape Kammerer, and when Kammerer inevitably followed, Burroughs tagged along.
Through Carr, Burroughs made the connections that would change his life: Columbia drop-out Kerouac, then in the Merchant Marine, and Columbia undergrad Ginsberg, then studying pre-law with the idea of becoming a labor lawyer. Intrigued by what he heard from Carr and Kammerer of Kerouac, he dropped in to see him at the apartment of Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Kerouac Parker, who shared the flat with Burroughs' future wife Joan.
Before the momentous meet-up, Burroughs had begun experimenting with morphine when he acquired a stash of the drug to sell, and he subsequently became hooked. Long fascinated by "low lifes" and the vitality they retained while the rest of "normal" Americans seemed wan and dessicated (this was the Great Depression, after all), Burroughs began conducting field "research" into New York's demimonde, aided and abetted by Herbert Huncke, a junkie and thief whom Burroughs befriended and let share his apartment in lower Manhattan. With Huncke playing Virgil to his Dante, Burroughs met the "low-lifes" who would become part of his fiction as he journeyed through the rings of hell that was World War II New York. "Sailor", who showed up as a character in Naked Lunch (1991), was a thief and drug dealer who once borrowed Burroughs' pistol and went out and shot a storekeeper to death (Sailor later hanged himself in jail after being arrested for an unrelated crime. He was known as an informer and had turned in a rival narcotics dealer--he was facing beatings, torture and possibly murder when he decided to take his own life). Soon Burroughs began to deal drugs in earnest in order to keep up with his own habit and fence merchandise himself, becoming part of a den of thieves that spilled over into Edie and Joan's apartment. The patrician Burroughs, with his high standards, prided himself on giving the best "cut" of heroin available, with personal home delivery to boot.
Jack Kerouac first urged Burroughs to write. Burroughs spent a lot of time at the apartment Kerouac shared with Edie and Joan. He particularly liked to psychoanalyze Kerouac and Ginsburg, and enjoyed having them act out scenarios, little dramas in which they would play roles: Burroughs an old queen/con artist, Ginsburg her pimp, and Kerouac as the gullible young American, mouth agape in a foreign land, ripe for the plucking. Their imaginations were quite fertile, and it fed Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing. Burroughs had never really had any inclination to write until he met Kerouac, but he and Jack collaborated on a mystery novel they eventually entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," after the last sentence of a BBC-Radio report on a fire at the London Zoo. Each wrote alternating chapters, and after the book was complete, the manuscript was passed around among New York publishers. There were no takers, and for the time, Burroughs lost interest in writing.
In 1945 Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death during a stroll along the bank of the Hudson River below Morningside Heights that was a notorious gay cruising area. After holding the dying man in his arms, Carr weighted down the body of his former tutor with rocks and disposed of it in the Hudson. In bloodied clothes, Carr sought out Burroughs, soliciting advice. Ignoring the elder's wise counsel to get a good lawyer and turn himself in, Carr then went to see Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses. Both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested (Burroughs as a material witness; Kerouac as an accessory after the fact), but eventually both were released without being prosecuted. Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent off to the Elmira Reformatory, where he was incarcerated for two years.
New York City became increasingly untenable as Burroughs became known to the police, so -- after he and Joan married -- they moved to Louisiana to become farmers. Their crop was marijuana, and eventually they moved on to Mexico, where living was cheaper and drugs easier to come by (and there was less hassle from police). In 1951, at a party in which they both were drunk, an exhibitionistic Burroughs shot and killed Joan in an alleged accident where he reportedly attempted to mimic the "apple on the son's head" scene from "William Tell". As the story is told, Joan put a glass of liquor on top of her head after Burroughs beseeched her to perform their William Tell trick for the guests. There had never been a William Tell trick, Burroughs later ruefully admitted, and Joan wound up with a .32 ACP slug in her head. Accounts of the death, which the Mexican police ruled a misadventure caused by a mistake in judgment, have never been entirely satisfactory. Like Lucien Carr before him, Burroughs may have consciously or subconsciously rid himself of a lover whom he no longer had any use for, or was piqued at. Burroughs at the time of the shooting was in love, involved in a heavy gay affair.
After the death of Joan, Burroughs spent time journeying through Central and South America, looking for the drug called "Yage", which like peyote was rumored to offer a key to opening the doors of perception and heightening consciousness. He found it and distributed it among friends. In 1953 Allen Ginsburg managed to get Burroughs into print under the pen name "William Lee." His autobiographical novel, "Junkie", was published by Ace Books (the son of the owner, Carl Solomon, was one of Ginsburg's friends) as a 35-cent paperback original (its formal title was "Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Adict", and it was published as "Two Books in One" back-to-back with another paperback original in the same volume). Returning to Mexico City, in the mid-'50s he began writing in earnest while keeping up with his drug habit, living off the small trust fund he received as a scion of the Burroughs family. It was in Mexico City that he began writing the sketches that would turn into his major book, "Naked Lunch". In 1956 he left Mexico City for Tangiers, Morocco, as the living was even cheaper than it was in Mexico City (as were the drugs). He eventually returned to the US in the 1960s.
"Naked Lunch" has the distinction of being the last major book to be prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The novel was written in Mexico City and Tangiers, crafted from fragments he wrote while addicted to heroin. After it was published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1959, it quickly became notorious for its graphic descriptions of sexual encounters, sadism and murder, as well as its no-holds-barred use of language. Many stalwart defenders of the First Amendment drew the line at "Naked Lunch", stating that they did not fight the good fight to get James Joyce's "Ulysses" and the works of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller before the American public so that something like "Naked Lunch" could be published. Grove Press acquired the rights to the book, but it was not published until 1962, as the publishing house awaited the outcome of other obscenity trials, including one involving Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl", which featured Burroughs as one of its hipsters searching for "an angry fix". Guided by Justice William J. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court starting in the late 1950s had relaxed censorship standards to protect literature that had redeeming social value, no matter that passages in the works were accused of being obscene. To be banned, a work had to be utterly without redeeming social value. Undaunted, the Comonwealth of Massachusetts successfully prosecuted the book as obscene.
For the initial trial, Grove Press had gathered together an impressive list of "experts" such as Norman Mailer to defend the book, but Burroughs' modern classic initially lost, was declared obscene, and was banned in Massachusetts (a banned book would be destroyed, the copies already having been confiscated by the police). However, in 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court (in Memoirs v. Massachusetts) found that "Naked Lunch" was "not without social value, and therefore, not obscene." With this ruling an era that began in the 1870s when anti-smut crusader Anthony Comstock led the charge for stricter enforcement of obscenity laws by the federal and state governments came to an end.
By the late 1970s Burroughs had lived long enough to be hailed by critics and the public as a major American writer. He was embraced by punk rockers in New York and became an iconic figure by the 1980s. He died in 1997 at the age of 83.- Charles Brandt is the author of numerous best-selling true crime novels based on the major crimes Brandt solved through interrogation during his illustrious legal career as a homicide investigator, prosecutor and eventually, Chief Deputy Attorney General of the State of Delaware.
He is the author of "I Heard You Paint Houses," a New York Times best-seller, published in over fourteen countries, and is the definitive work solving the disappearance and murder of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. It is the biography of a colorful hit man, Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran, the prime suspect in the F.B.I.'s Jimmy Hoffa case. Brandt's book is based on nearly five years of interviews he recorded on tapes that have since been subpoenaed by the F.B.I. The book forms the basis for Martin Scorsese's film, having the working title, "The Irishman," to be released by Netflix. This blockbuster Mafia movie stars a dream cast of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Anna Pacquin, Bobby Cannavale and other great actors, with a screenplay adapted from Brandt's book by Oscar-winning screenwriter Steve Zaillian.
Brandt is also the author of The Right to Remain Silent a well-reviewed detective novel praised by then President Ronald Reagan for execution of its theme "on behalf of law-abiding citizens". Brandt also wrote two more true crime Mafia books: Donnie Brasco - Unfinished Business, co-authored with undercover F.B.I. agent Joe Pistone, the real life Donnie Brasco, the wrecking ball of the American Mafia; and We're Going to Win This Thing , co-authored with Lin DeVecchio, the F.B.I. supervisory special agent in charge of the Mafia Commission case, which case destroyed the Mafia's ruling Commission and crushed the nationwide Mafia.
Charles Brandt is at work on a new book, Interrogation Interrupted: A Professional Solves "Dallas". It is an explosive true crime thriller that will unravel the intricacies of the decades long mystery of President Kennedy's assassination and its cover-up by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Brandt's work will permanently define one of the most important events in American history. The analysis of "Dallas" is finally in the hands of a professional homicide investigator who knows what he's talking about.
Brandt is a fifty-year practitioner of Tai Chi. He began his studies under the 20th Century Master Cheng Man Ching on Canal St. in N.Y.C. Brandt's talent as a writer comes from his hands-on experience of solving homicides and interrogating witnesses. Before graduating from Brooklyn Law School in 1969, Brandt, a native of New York City, had been a Junior High English teacher in Queens and a welfare investigator in East Harlem. Following law school, Brandt moved to Delaware and worked as a homicide investigator, prosecutor and eventually, Chief Deputy Attorney General of the State of Delaware. Brandt had four men on death row when he left the office.
In private legal practice since 1976, Brandt, at first, defended the major homicides of his state, including the President of the Pagan motorcycle club who was charged with the double murder of witnesses in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Brandt later restricted his practice to plaintiff's medical malpractice and the cross-examination of medical defense experts, such as neurosurgeons. These cases often involved the investigation of wrongful death, a form of homicide. Brandt was named by his trial lawyer peers as one of the "Best Lawyers in America", and one of the "Best Lawyers in Delaware." Brandt was elected president of the Delaware Trial Lawyers Association and the Delaware Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates. During his career he taught cross-examination to other trial lawyers and interrogation techniques to police officers.
Brandt is the grandson of Italian immigrants, Rosa and Luigi DiMarco, who had a small family farm in Staten Island. They couldn't read or write in any language, but their examples inspired Brandt his whole life.
Charles Brandt lives in Lewes, Delaware and Sun Valley, Idaho with his wife, Nancy, and has three grown children and four grandchildren. - Writer
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Thomas Keneally, (born October 7, 1935, Sydney, Australia), Australian writer best known for his historical novels. Keneally's characters are gripped by their historical and personal past, and decent individuals are portrayed at odds with systems of authority.
At age 17 Keneally entered a Roman Catholic seminary, but he left before ordination; the experience influenced his early fiction, including The Place at Whitton (1964) and Three Cheers for the Paraclete (1968). His reputation as a historical novelist was established with Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), about Australia's early years as an English penal colony. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972; film 1980) won Keneally international acclaim; it is based on the actual story of a half-caste Aboriginal who rebels against white racism by going on a murder spree. The Great Shame (1998), a work inspired by his own ancestry, details 80 years of Irish history from the perspective of Irish convicts sent to Australia in the 19th century.
Although Australia figures prominently in much of Keneally's work, his range is broad. His well-received Gossip from the Forest (1975) examines the World War I armistice through the eyes of a thoughtful, humane German negotiator. He is also praised for his treatment of the American Civil War in Confederates (1979). His later fiction includes A Family Madness (1985), To Asmara (1989), Flying Hero Class (1991), Woman of the Inner Sea (1992), Jacko (1993), Homebush Boy (1995), Bettany's Book (2000), The Tyrant's Novel (2003), The Widow and Her Hero (2007), and The Daughters of Mars (2012).
Keneally's best-known work, Schindler's Ark (1982; also published as Schindler's List; film 1993), tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than 1,300 Jews from the Nazis. Like many of Keneally's protagonists, Schindler is a rather ordinary man who acts in accord with his conscience despite the evil around him. The book won him the Man Booker Prize and he also worked with Steven Spielberg on the original drafts of the Schindler's List screenplay which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Adapated Screenplay. He was shortlisted on three further occasions for the Man Booker prize- Writer
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Shûsaku Endô was born on 27 March 1923 in Sugamo, Tokyo, Japan. He was a writer and actor, known for The Sea and Poison (1986), Silence (2016) and A Life of Jesus. He was married to Okada Junko. He died on 29 September 1996 in Tokyo, Japan.- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin; 30 August 1797 - 1 February 1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel "Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus" (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
After Wollstonecraft's death less than a month after her daughter Mary was born, Mary was raised by Godwin, who was able to provide his daughter with a rich, if informal, education, encouraging her to adhere to his own liberal political theories. When Mary was four, her father married a neighbor, with whom, as her stepmother, Mary came to have a troubled relationship.
In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, the then married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Together with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, Mary and Shelley left for France and traveled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.
In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel "Frankenstein". The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, probably caused by the brain tumor that was to kill her at the age of 53.
Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel "Frankenstein", which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley's achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels "Valperga" (1823) and "Perkin Warbeck" (1830), the apocalyptic novel "The Last Man" (1826), and her final two novels, "Lodore" (1835) and "Falkner" (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book "Rambles in Germany and Italy" (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia" (1829-46), support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin - Writer
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Bram Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1847, and gained fame for his novel "Dracula" about an aristocratic vampire in Transylvania. The sequel, "Dracula's Guest," was not published for 17 years after the publication of "Dracula," two years after Stoker's death. Stoker also wrote "The Mystery of the Sea" and "Famous Imposters." He was the stage manager for actor Sir Henry Irving and wrote "Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving," after Irving's death.- Writer
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Ray Bradbury was an American science fiction writer whose works were translated in more than 40 languages and sold millions of copies around the world. Although he created a world of new technical and intellectual ideas, he never obtained a driver's license and had never driven an automobile.
He was born Ray Douglas Bradbury on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. He was the third son in the family. His father, Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, was a telephone lineman and technician. His mother, Esther Marie Bradbury (nee Moberg), was a Swedish immigrant. His grandfather and great-grandfather were newspaper publishers. In 1934, his family settled in Los Angeles, California. There, young Bradbury often roller-skated through Hollywood, trying to spot celebrities. He attended Los Angeles High School, where he was involved in the drama club and planned to become an actor. He graduated from high school in 1938 and had no more formal education. Instead, he learned from reading works of such writers as Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others.
From 1938-1942, he was selling newspapers on the streets of Los Angeles, spending days in the local library and nights at the typewriter. At that time, he published his stories in fanzines. In 1941, he became a paid writer when the pulp magazine Science Stories published his short story, titled "Pendulum", and he was a full-time writer by the end of 1942. His first book - "Dark Carnival" - was a collection of stories published in 1947. That same year, he married Marguerite McClure (1922-2003), whom he met at a bookstore a year earlier. Maggie, as she was affectionately called, was the only woman Bradbury ever dated. They had four daughters and, eventually, eight grandchildren.
Ray Bradbury shot to international fame after publication of "The Martian Chronicles" (1950), a collection of short stories partially based on ideas from ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Then he followed the anti-Utopian writers Yevgeni Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley in his best-known work, "Fahrenheit 451" (1953). The film adaptation (Fahrenheit 451 (1966)) by director François Truffaut, starring Julie Christie, received several nominations. However, Bradbury was not happy with the television adaptation (The Martian Chronicles (1980), starring Rock Hudson) of his story "The Martian Chronicles". His other novels and stories also have been adapted to films and television, as well as for radio, theatre and comic books. Bradbury had written episodes for Alfred Hitchcock's television series, as well as for many other television productions. His total literary output is close to 600 short stories, more than 30 books and numerous poems and plays. He was writing daily.
In 2004, Bradbury received a National Medal of Arts. He was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6644 Hollywood Boulevard. An asteroid was named in his honor, "9766 Bradbury", and the Apollo 15 astronauts named an impact crater on the moon "Dandelion Crater", after his novel, "Dandelion Wine". He also received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Grand Master Award from Science Fiction Writers of America, an Emmy Award for his work as a writer on "The Halloween Tree", and many other awards and honors. Ray Bradbury died on June 6, 2012, at the age of 91, in Los Angeles, California.- Arthur Golden was born in 1956 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA. He is a writer, known for Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), I riassuntini (2018) and The Opportunity Crisis (2003). He has been married to Trudy Legee since 1982.
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Master of comedy novelist Pelham (Plum) Grenville Wodehouse was born on October 15, 1881, in Guilford, Surrey, England. He died in hospital in Southampton, New York, on Valentine's day (February 14) 1975, from a heart attack after a long illness at age 93. In that time he managed to write close to 200 novels, short stories, plays, song lyrics and so on.
At the time of his birth, Plum's mother was visiting her sister in England, but after only a few weeks she and young Plum returned to Hong Kong, where his father was a magistrate. At an early age he was sent to school in Britain--Dulwich College in London.
At age 14, he moved with his parents in to what they would call "the old house." After completing school, he spent two years as a banker at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, but he soon switched jobs to the old Globe newspaper as a sports reporter and columnist on "By the way..." About that time he started to write his own little stories. At first he wrote school novels about life in the famous universities in England (for example, "The White Feather") and mainly for a boys magazine called "The Captain", but soon he developed a talent for comic dialogue and started to put his talents to that instead.
Success was just around the corner, and by 1910 he had established himself in such a way that he could spend time between residences in the US and France. It was also at about this time he acquired his obsession with golf, a sport around which many of his short stories circle--even though his handicap never came down below 18. In a few years he was reaching millions of readers in dozens of countries.
Plum met Ethel, an American widow who became the woman of his life, in 1913 and they married in 1914. World War II caught Plum in his newly-purchased home in Le Touquet in France, having tea with his wife and some friends. He was captured by German forces and put in a prison camp. He was treated well and got the means to keep writing his books. Joseph Goebbels, it was revealed later, understood what a big fish they had caught and lured Plum into giving some brief, humorous appearances on German radio. Being the political fool he was, Plum fell into the trap. The broadcasts, which were supposed to be heard in the US only, were redirected to Britain, in a cunning scheme to annoy British authorities. As word of the broadcasts spread, back in Britain Plum's readers and publisher went berserk. They wanted him charged with treason. However, it was obvious he had been tricked and as the war ended, he returned to America, where he became a citizen in 1955.
Hollywood claimed Wodehouse, but it soon became apparent that all they wanted was his name on the posters and ads. Still, his popularity increased to such a degree that in 1975, a few weeks before his death, he was forgiven his wartime mistakes by the British establishment and was knighted by Her Majesty the Queen. At the time of his knighthood he was in poor health and couldn't attend the ceremony. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, a devout Wodehouse fan, offered to go to the US to personally present the knighthood.
In his final years, Plum was in and out of the hospital with pneumonia, heart problems and lung failures. Seeking comfort, as always, in his typewriter, Sir Plum kept writing until the end. His last work is the unfinished "Sunset at Blandings", of which nine chapters were written before he died in 1975.
Lady Ethel lived until 1984. They had no mutual children, only from Ethel's daughter from her previous marriage, Leonora, who Plum adopted and who died during surgery in 1942, devastating Plum to his core.- Agatha was born as "Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller" in 1890 to Frederick Alvah Miller and Clara Boehmer. Agatha was of American and British descent, her father being American and her mother British. Her father was a relatively affluent stockbroker. Agatha received home education from early childhood to when she turned 12-years-old in 1902. Her parents taught her how to read, write, perform arithmetic, and play music. Her father died in 1901. Agatha was sent to a girl's school in Torquay, Devon, where she studied from 1902 to 1905. She continued her education in Paris, France from 1905 to 1910. She then returned to her surviving family in England.
As a young adult, Agatha aspired to be a writer and produced a number of unpublished short stories and novels. She submitted them to various publishers and literary magazines, but they were all rejected. Several of these unpublished works were later revised into more successful ones. While still in this point of her life, Agatha sought advise from professional writer Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960). Meanwhile she was searching for a suitable husband and in 1913 accepted a marriage proposal from military officer and pilot-in-training Archibald "Archie" Christie. They married in late 1914. Her married name became "Agatha Christie" and she used it for most of her literary works, including ones created decades following the end of her first marriage.
During World War I, Archie Christie was send to fight in the war and Agatha joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a British voluntary unit providing field nursing services. She performed unpaid work as a volunteer nurse from 1914 to 1916. Then she was promoted to "apothecaries' assistant" (dispenser), a position which earned her a small salary until the end of the war. She ended her service in September, 1918.
Agatha wrote "The Mysterious Affair at Styles", her debut novel ,in 1916, but was unable to find a publisher for it until 1920. The novel introduced her famous character Hercule Poirot and his supporting characters Inspector Japp and Arthur Hastings. The novel is set in World War I and is one of the few of her works which are connected to a specific time period.
Following the end of World War I and their retirement from military life, Agatha and Archie Christie moved to London and settled into civilian life. Their only child Rosalind Margaret Clarissa Christie (1919-2004) was born early in the marriage. Agatha's debut novel was first published in 1920 and turned out to be a hit. It was soon followed by the successful novels "The Secret Adversary" (1922) and "Murder on the Links" (1923) and various short stories. Agatha soon became a celebrated writer.
In 1926, Archie Christie announced to Agatha that he had a mistress and that he wanted a divorce. Agatha took it hard and mysteriously disappeared for a period of 10 days. After an extensive manhunt and much publicity, she was found living under a false name in Yorkshire. She had assumed the last name of Archie's mistress and claimed to have no memory of how she ended up there. The doctors who attended to her determined that she had amnesia. Despite various theories by multiple sources, these 10 days are the most mysterious chapter in Agatha's life.
Agatha and Archie divorced in 1928, though she kept the last name Christie. She gained sole custody of her daughter Rosalind. In 1930, Agatha married her second (and last) husband Max Mallowan, a professional archaeologist. They would remain married until her death in 1976.Christie often used places that she was familiar with as settings for her novels and short stories. Her various travels with Max introduced her to locations of the Middle East, and provided inspiration for a number of novels.
In 1934, Agatha and Max settled in Winterbrook, Oxfordshire, which served as their main residence until their respective deaths. During World War II, she served in the pharmacy at the University College Hospital, where she gained additional training about substances used for poisoning cases. She incorporated such knowledge for realistic details in her stories.
She became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1956 and a Dame Commander of the same order in 1971. Her husband was knighted in 1968. They are among the relatively few couples where both members have been honored for their work. Agatha continued writing until 1974, though her health problems affected her writing style. Her memory was problematic for several years and she had trouble remembering the details of her own work, even while she was writing it. Recent researches on her medical condition suggest that she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease or other dementia. She died of natural causes in early 1976. - Born the eldest son and third child of James and Mary Defoe, Defoe received a very good education, as his father intended him to become a Presbyterian minister, but he chose to become a merchant instead. In 1684 he joined the army of the rebel Duke of Monmouth, but when the rebellion failed, Defoe was forced into semi-exile. He went bankrupt in 1692, and began writing professionally. He wrote a satirical pamphlet in 1703 called "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters", for which he was pilloried. After a stint in Newgate prison and more troubles with his bankruptcy, Defoe wrote "Robinson Crusoe" and "Moll Flanders", both of which were great successes. Labeled a social historian for his interest in colonization, economics, and exploration, Defoe died of a lethargy in Cripplegate on 24 April 1731.
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His paternal grandparents were Marie Cessete Dumas (a Haitian slave) and Marquis Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie. Antoine disapproved of their son, Thomas-Alexandre, joining the French army under the "Davy de la Pailleterie" name, so Thomas-Alexandre used his mother's surname instead. He became a valued general of Napoleon, and after he married the daughter of a local tavern owner, Thomas-Alexandre had a son of his own. This son was Alexandre Dumas, who became world-famous as the author of "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo".- Producer
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Dennis Lehane was born on 4 August 1965 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for The Drop (2014), Mystic River (2003) and Live by Night (2016). He was previously married to Dr. Angela Mililani (Lieb) Bernardo and Sheila Fort Lawn.- Writer
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An American novelist, writer of crime fiction featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe, Raymond (Thornton) Chandler was born in Chicago of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother. He moved to England when his parents divorced. He attended Dulwich College and studied languages in France and Germany before returning to England in 1907 and becoming a naturalized British subject. He took a civil service job in the Admiralty, which he left in 1912 to return to America, settling in California. After the US entered World War I he enlisted in the Canadian Army, then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. After the armistice he returned to California and got a series of bookkeeping jobs, finally becoming a vice-president with the Dabney Oil syndicate.
All along, however, he had been submitting stories, poems, sketches and essays to a number of periodicals, but when the Depression hit and the bottom fell out of the oil business, he lost his job and turned to writing full-time. He found a niche with stories of the "hard-boiled" school popularized by Dashiell Hammett, and had many of his early stories accepted by Black Mask, the same mystery magazine that had first published Hammett. His first four novels--"The Big Sleep" (1939, filmed 1946 [The Big Sleep (1946)] and 1978 [The Big Sleep (1978)]); "Farewell My Lovely" (1940, filmed 1944 [Murder, My Sweet (1944)] and 1975 [Farewell, My Lovely (1975)]); "The High Window" (1942, filmed 1947 [The Brasher Doubloon (1947)]); and "The Lady in the Lake (1943, filmed 1946 [Lady in the Lake (1946)])--which reworked plots from some of his short stories, were his most successful.
He spent some time in Hollywood as a screenwriter, contributing to Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), the film noir classic The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951). He wrote realistically, in stark contrast to the English style of drawing-room puzzle mysteries where an amateur detective always knows more than the police and clues turn up at just the right moment. Chandler dismissed these plots as "having God sit in your lap."- Writer
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John Irving was born on 2 March 1942 in Exeter, New Hampshire, USA. He is a writer and actor, known for The Cider House Rules (1999), The Door in the Floor (2004) and The World According to Garp (1982). He has been married to Janet Turnbull since 1987. They have one child. He was previously married to Shyla Leary.- Producer
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Fredrik Backman was born on 2 June 1981 in Brännkyrka, Södermanland, Sweden. He is a producer and writer, known for A Man Called Ove (2015), A Man Called Otto (2022) and Anxious People (2021). He has been married to Neda Shafti Backman since 2009. They have two children.- Writer
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Born in the ancient roman port today known as Cartagena in the province of Murcia, Spain, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, today the best-selling author in Spain and the best-selling Spanish author in the world, studied Political Sciences and Journalism. He started working as a reporter for the Madrid newspaper "Pueblo" and was twice reported missing -- first in the Sahara in 1975 and two years later in Eritrea. He also reported on the Falkland Isles war in 1982. From there he moved to RTVE as war correspondent and covered bellicose events in Cyprus, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chad, Lebanon, Sudan, Mozambique, Angola, Persian Gulf, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is on his experiences in this last mentioned that his book "Territorio Comanche" is based and which ired RTVE directors, causing Pérez-Reverte to quit. He has since then dedicated himself exclusively to writing and has to date produced about 16 novels, hundreds of articles in magazines, most notably "Semanal TV" and appeared on radio and TV interview shows. He frequently appears at seminars, congresses and book fairs and has received numerous journalist awards from radio, TV and newspapers. He lives in a village outside Madrid with his wife and daughter Carlota. Indeed, his daughter was in great part responsible for the first part of the "Alatriste" novels as she carried out quite a lot of the work of investigating historical documents relating to 17th Century Madrid. His novels have the common thread of being based on real historical times and that in each case a great deal of investigation goes into the making of his stories, as well as the fact that he has had to learn a great deal on topics ranging from chess-playing to historical first-editions, from 16th Century Dutch masters to Informatics and even swordsmanship. His extraordinary imaginative abilities have been able to produce well-written adventure stories. But for Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who has his own yacht which is his great passion, "true freedom starts ten miles out to sea."- Writer
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Alan Alexander Milne (signing with the initials A. A. ) was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, and playwright from London. He is primarily remembered for creating Winnie-the-Pooh and his supporting characters. He set their stories in the "Hundred Acre Wood", a fictionalized version of Ashdown Forest in East Sussex. Milne owned a country home near the forest, and resided there for about 3 months of the year. He depicted Winnie in the short story collections "Winnie-the-Pooh" (1926) and "The House at Pooh Corner" (1928), and the poetry collections "When We Were Very Young" (1924) and "Now We Are Six" (1927). All four books were illustrated by Ernest Howard Shepard (1879 - 1976). The Winnie stories have received several adaptations, and were the basis of a Disney media franchise introduced in 1966.
In 1882, Milne was born in Kilburn, London. It was a relatively new district of the London, with its first major building activity having started in 1819. Kilburn was named after Kilburn Priory, a small community of nuns who resided in the area from the 1130s to the 1530s. Milne's father was the educator John Vine Milne. He operated Henley House School, a small independent school in Kilburn. Milne and his family lived within the school building.
Milne was initially educated at his father's school. From 1889 to 1890, Milne's school teacher was the novelist H. G. Wells (1866- 1946). Milne received his secondary education at the Westminster School, a public school that had been operating since the 1540s. It had received royal patronage by both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
Milne received his college education at Trinity College, Cambridge. He entered the college with a mathematics scholarship, and graduated in 1903 with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics. During his college years, Milne was a writer and editor for the student magazine "Granta" (1889-). The magazine often published works by students who aspired to professional writing careers. It was relaunched as a literary magazine in 1979.
In 1903, Milne started regularly contributing texts for publication to "Punch" (1841-1992), the leading humor magazine of the United Kingdom. Most of his early published work consisted of humorous verse and whimsical essays. In 1905, Milne published his debut novel "Lovers in London". He later grew to dislike it. In 1906, he officially joined the "Punch" magazine's staff. He soon started working as an assistant editor for the magazine.
In 1913, Milne married Dorothy "Daphne" de Sélincourt (1890-1971). At the start of World War I, Milne joined the the British Army. He initially served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant (on probation) in February, 1915. His probationary status ended in late December 1915, when his commission was approved. Milne was transferred to the Royal Corps of Signals in 1916, as his health had declined during his military service. He returned from service in France to work as a signals instructor.
In 1917, Milne was transferred to Military Intelligence. He spend the rest of the war as a propaganda writer for MI7, an office of the Directorate of Military Intelligence with responsibilities for press liaison and propaganda. He was discharged from the army in February, 1919. He voluntarily relinquished his commission in February 1920, though he retained the rank of lieutenant. His son Christopher Robin Milne was born in August 1920.
During his war service, Milne had continued his writing career. In 1917, he published the fairy tale novel "Once on a Time". He tried to subvert the stereotypes of typical fairy-tales, by featuring morally grey "heroes" and "villains". He also portrayed Princess Hyacinth as a competent regent, rather than a damsel in distress.
In 1919, Milne published the comedy play "Mr. Pim Passes By". The play's female lead Olivia Marden is happily married to her second husband, following a miserable married life with her original husband Telworthy. Telworthy supposedly died abroad in Australia. Early in the play, Olivia learns from an elderly acquaintance that Telworthy may be still be alive, and that her second marriage is bigamous. How she tries to confirm whether Telworthy is alive forms the play's plot. The play had an initial run of total run of 246 performances in Manchester and London. It had several revivals during the 1920s, including a ran of 124 performances in Broadway, New York City. It firmly established Milne's reputation as a competent playwright.
In 1920, Milne was hired as a screenwriter by the film studio Minerva Films. It was co-owned at the time by the actor Leslie Howard (1893-1943) and the film director Adrian Brunel (1892-1958). Milne wrote the screenplays for the silent films "The Bump", "Twice Two", "Five Pound Reward", and "Bookworms".
In 1922, Milne published the mystery novel "The Red House Mystery", a "locked room" whodunit. In the novel, Mark Ablett is the owner of English country house. He already has several guests staying at his residence, and then he has an unexpected reunion with his long-lost brother Robert. Shortly after, Robert is murdered and Mark disappears. Amateur sleuth Tony Gillingham decides to find out what happened to the two brothers. Milne had been a long-time fan of mystery novels, and decided to write one of his own. The novel was a best seller, and remained in print for decades. However, Milne initially decided against writing another mystery novel.
Inspired by his relationship with his young son Christopher Robin, Milne started writing poems and short stories for children in 1924. Besides the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, he also published the short story collection "A Gallery of Children" (1925). He took inspiration from a series of illustrations by Henriette Willebeek le Mair (1889-1966), and wrote one short story to accompany each of the illustrations.
In 1928, Milne wrote the short story "In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There" as the finale of the Winnie series. In the story, an older Christopher Robin and Winnie bid farewell to each other, but Winnie promises never to forget his friend. Milne decided to quit writing children's stories by the end of the 1920s. He felt that his son was too old to enjoy them. He had also grown to dislike that the public expected him to write only children's stories, while he had diverse literary interests.
In December 1929, Milne introduced his theatrical play "Toad of Toad Hall". It was the first theatrical adaptation of the novel "The Wind in the Willows" (1908) by Kenneth Grahame. Milne introduced a frame story, where the 12-year-old girl Marigold listens to an animal fable by her nurse. The play enjoyed several revivals in the West End until 1935. It became popular again in the 1960s, and enjoyed annual West End revivals for two decades.
In 1933, Milne published the mystery novel "Four Days Wonder". In the novel, an obsessive young woman investigates the unexpected death of her aunt. While not one of Milne's most famous works, it was adapted into the American mystery film "Four Days' Wonder" (1936). In 1934, Milne published the non-fiction book "Peace With Honour" in order to express his pacifist political views. In 1939, he wrote his autobiography "It's Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer".
During World War II, Milne served in the Home Guard (1940-1944). It was an armed citizen militia, and most of its volunteers were too old to join the regular armed services. Milne received the rank of captain, but he insisted to be called "Mr. Milne" by members of his platoon. He wrote the non-fiction book "War with Honour" (1940) to express the view that Britain needed to achieve victory over Nazi Germany. During the War, his son Christopher Robin served as a sapper in the Royal Engineers.
In 1946, Milne published his final novel, "Chloe Marr". It featured a beautiful socialite who regularly manipulated her suitors, but had a hidden agenda. Milne then published his final short story collections, "The Birthday Party" (1948) and "A Table Near the Band" (1950). They were met with little success, as Milne's popularity had declined. In his personal life, Milne was estranged with his son Christopher Robin. In 1948, Christopher Robin had married his maternal first cousin Lesley de Sélincourt, against the wishes of both his parents. Lesley's father was the hated brother of Daphne de Sélincourt, and the two siblings had been avoiding each other for 30 years.
In 1951, Milne published his final play, "Before the Flood". It was his first new play since the early 1940s. In 1952, Milne survived a stroke. Its effects reportedly invalidated him, and he was forced to retire from his writing career. By 1953, Milne looked older than his actual age . He was also increasingly depressed. He died on January 31, 1956, two weeks following his 74th birthday. His remains were cremated and his ashes "were scattered in a crematorium's memorial garden in Brighton".
In 1964, the University of Texas at Austin acquired a collection of Milne's manuscripts. It has also acquired fragments of Milne's correspondence, his legal documents, his genealogical records, and some of his personal effects. The original manuscripts for "Winnie-the-Pooh" and "The House at Pooh Corner" have been acquired by the Trinity College Library, Cambridge. In 1979, a memorial plaque was unveiled in Ashdown Forest. It commemorates the works of Milne and Shepard which granted worldwide fame to the Forest. While Milne is long gone, Winnie and his other famous characters have remained popular for nearly a century.- Writer
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Andersen experienced an unhappy childhood marked by deep poverty. When he was 14 years old, he left his parents' home and fled alone to Copenhagen. Here the director of the Royal Theater, Jonas Collin, took care of the child and gave him shelter and work. With his help, the young Hans Christian Andersen was also able to attend school. Inspired by his theater work, he began to write his first plays, which he later wanted to expand into stage plays. The first stories, stories and poems were created at this time. In 1822, Andersen's first plots were published with great success. He became a recognized writer in 1829 with his fantastic stories, which were entirely based on the example of the German writer Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann.
Andersen's debut novel, "The Improviser", was written in 1835 and received extremely positive reviews from critics. The Danish philosopher and writer Sören Kierkegaard was critical of him in his 1837 work "Only a Violinist". From 1839 Andersen was provided with a state poet's salary. As a result, financially secure, he traveled to Europe, Asia and Africa. However, he spent most of his time in Germany. He recorded his adventures and experiences in dramas, novels and travel books. Anderson became a literary figure with worldwide recognition through his precise portrayal of individual characters, which the writer wrote in everyday language that was atypical at the time. The secret fears and longings of the characters were portrayed, and their exemplary behavior also represented an educational goal.
During his literary work, Andersen wrote some of the most popular children's stories of modern times. Andersen's collected fairy tales and poems were published between 1835 and 1848 under the Danish title "Eventyr, fortalte for børn". His most successful stories include "The Ugly Duckling", "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Snow Queen" and "The Princess and the Pea". Andersen's extensive legacy includes over 150 fairy tales, including "The Little Mermaid", which gave rise to the sculpture of the same name in memory of him in the harbor of Copenhagen. Andersen's stories have been translated into over 80 languages and served as plays, ballets, picture books and later as successful films.
Hans Christian Andersen died on August 4, 1875 in Copenhagen.- Writer
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Dashiell Hammett was born May 27, 1894, in St. Mary's County, Maryland, to Richard Hammett and Mary Bond. He joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1915. He enlisted in the US Army's Ambulance Corps in June 1918 and was posted to a camp 20 miles from Baltimore, where he caught the flu, which developed into tuberculosis. He was invalided out of the army in July 1919 and returned to Pinkerton's. Hammett entered the veterans hospital near Tacoma, Washington, with tuberculosis in 1920. Upon his release he worked at Pinkerton's Spokane branch. Hospitalized again with tuberculosis, he met and courted a nurse, Josephine Dolan. In February 1921 he was moved to an army hospital near San Diego. After he was released he married a now-pregnant Josie in San Francisco. Hammett worked for the San Francisco branch of Pinkerton's, but left the agency in 1921 or 22 due to ill health. He took a writing course and sold droll vignettes to "The Smart Set" magazine during 1922, and some short stories to other magazines. He began to sell detective stories to "The Black Mask" from 1923. After the birth of the couple's second daughter in 1926, Hammett gave up freelance writing and became an advertising copy writer for the jeweler Albert Samuels, but left after six months due to ill health. Forced by his tuberculosis to live apart from Jose and the children, the marriage eventually broke up. Hammett supported himself through writing, chiefly for "The Black Mask", now under editor Joe Shaw. Hammett's long short stories were republished in novel form by Alfred Knopf. In 1929 Hammett moved to New York. After the success of his novel "The Maltese Falcon", he was engaged as a screenwriter by Paramount Pictures and moved to Hollywood, where he met Lillian Hellman. He returned to New York in 1931, where he wrote "The Glass Key". "The Thin Man" was published as a magazine serial in 1933. Hammett was encouraged by Hearst to write the "Secret Agent X9" comic strip, which ran from 1934-35, his last original work. In 1942 he re-enlisted in the army and was posted to the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska, where he edited The Adakian. When discharged in 1945, he returned to New York and became President of the NY Civil Rights Congress. In July 1951 Hammett was subpoenaed to testify on the Civil Rights Congress' bail fund, and was jailed for refusing to answer questions. Upon his release from jail, he was presented with a bill by the Internal Revenue Service for $111,000 in back taxes. In failing health, he lived off and on with Hellman. In 1961 he was admitted to New York's Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, where he died on January 10.- Writer
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Isaac Asimov was born Isaak Judah Ozimov, on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi shtetl, near Smolensk, Russia. He was the oldest of three children. His father, named Judah Ozimov, and his mother, named Anna Rachel Ozimov (nee Berman), were Orthodox Jews. Ozimov family were millers (the name Ozimov comes from the eponymous sort of wheat in Russian). In 1923 Isaac with his parents immigrated to the USA and settled in Brooklyn, New York. There his parents temporarily changed his birthday to September 7, 1919, in order to send him to school a year earlier. Their family name was changed from Ozimov to Asimov.
Asimov was an avid reader before the age of 5. He spoke Yiddish and English at home with his parents and spoke only a few word in Russian. He began his formal education in 1925 in the New York Public School system. From 1930-1932 he was placed in the rapid advance course. In 1935 he graduated from high school, in 1939 received a B.S. and in 1941 he earned his M. Sc. in Chemistry from Columbia University. From 1942-1945 Asimov was a chemist at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard's Naval Air experimental station. After the war ended, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and was transfered to the island of Oahu and was destined to participate in the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in July 1946. He narrowly avoided that by receiving an honorable discharge in May 1946. In 1948 he completed his post-graduate studies and earned his Ph. D. in Chemistry. In 1949 he began his teaching career at the Medical School of Boston University, becoming assistant professor in 1951, and associate professor in 1955. In 1958 Asimov became a full-time writer and gave up his teaching duties because his income from his literary works was much greater than his professor's salary. He was fired, but he retained his title and later returned as a lecturer and was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1979. Asimov was considered one of the best lecturers at Boston University.
Young Isaac Asimov was raised as a non-religious person. His parents observed the Orthodox Judaism, but did not force their belief upon young Asimov. He did not have affiliation with a temple, did not have a bar mizvah and called himself an atheist, then used the term "humanist" in his later life. He did not oppose genuine religious convictions in others but opposed superstitious or unfounded beliefs. Asimov defined his intellectual position as a Humanist and rationalist. He opposed the Vietnam war in the 1960s and was a supporter of the Democratic party. He embraced environmental issues, and supported feminism, joking that he wished women to be free "because I hate it when they charge". He was also humorous about many of his memberships in various clubs and foundations. Asimov did not approve exclusionary societies, he left Mensa after he found that many of the members were arrogant. He liked individuality and stayed in groups where he enjoyed giving speeches. As a free thinker, Asimov saw sci-fi literature serving as a pool where ideas and hypotheses are expressed with unrestricted intellectual freedom.
Young Asimov was fascinated with science fiction magazines which were sold at his parent's general store. Around the age of 11 he wrote eight chapters of a fiction about adventures of young boys in a small town. His first publication was "Marooned Off Vesta" in the Amazing Stories magazine in 1939. Asimov shot to fame in 1941 with 'Nightfall', a story of a planet where night comes once every 2049 years. 'Nightfall' has been described as one of the best science fiction stories ever written. Asimov wrote over five hundred literary works. He is credited for introducing the words "positronic", "psychohistory", and "robotics" into the English language. He penned such classics as "I, Robot" and the "Foundation" series, which are considered to be the most impressive of his writings. He also founded "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine", which became a best-selling publication.
Asimov was afraid of needles and the sight of blood. Although he had the highest score on the intelligence test he had the lowest score on the physical-conditioning test. He never learned how to swim or ride a bicycle. The author who described spaceflights suffered from fear of flying. In his entire life he had to fly only twice during his military service. Acrophobia was revealed when he took his date and first love on a roller coaster in 1940, and was terrified. This phobia complicated the logistics and limited the range over which he traveled; it also found reflection in some of his literary works. He avoided traveling long distances. Instead he enjoyed cruise ships like the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2, where he occasionally entertained passengers with his science-themed talks. He impressed public with his highly entertaining speeches as well as with his sharp sense of timing; he never looked at the clock, but he spoke for precisely the time allocated. Asimov's sense of time prevented him from ever being late to a meeting. Once he discovered that his parents changed his date of birth, he insisted that the official records of his birthday be corrected to January 2, 1920, the date he personally celebrated throughout his life.
Asimov met Gertrude Blugherman on a blind date on Valentine's Day in February of 1942, they got married in July of the same year. The Asimovs had two children, son David (born in 1951), and daughter Robyn Joan (born in 1955). Asimov had known Janet Opal Jeppson since 1959. She was a psychoanalyst and also a writer of science fiction for children. Correspondence with her convinced Asimov that she was the right kind of person for him. He and Gertrude were separated in 1970, and he moved in with Janet Jappeson almost at once. His first marriage ended in divorce in 1973. That same year he and Janet Jeppson were married at Janet's home by an official of Ethical Culture Society. Asimov had no children by his second marriage.
In 1983 Asimov contracted HIV infection from a tainted blood transfusion received during a triple bypass surgery. He eventually developed AIDS and wanted to go public about his AIDS but his doctors convinced Asimov to remain silent. The specific cause of death was heart and renal failure as complications of AIDS. He died on April 6, 1992, in Boston, Massachussets, and was cremated. His ashes were scattered.
Ten years after Asimov's death, his widow, Janet Jeppson Asimov, revealed that his death was a consequence of an unfortunately contracted AIDS.- Stanislaw Lem was a visionary Polish author known for Solaris (1972).
He was born on September 12, 1921, in Lwów, Poland. His father, Samuel Lem, was a wealthy laryngologist who served in the Austrian army. His mother, Sabina Woller, was a homemaker. Although he was born into a Polish-Jewish family, Lem was raised a Catholic and later became an atheist. He graduated from the Lwów Gymnazium in 1939, then studied medicine at the Lvov Medical Institute in 1940-1941. During WWII, he survived the Nazi occupation of Lwów and worked as a mechanic and welder for a German firm until 1944.
After World War II Lem escaped from the Soviet occupation of Germany and moved to Krakow, Poland, as a repatriate. There he completed his medical studies at Jagellonian University, without taking the doctor's degree. He worked at the Konserwatorium Naukoznawcze as a research assistant for psychologist Dr. Choynowski. From 1946-1949 Lem was involved in medical research in psychology, which became a turning point in his life. He started writing poetry and science fiction in 1946, but his first serious novel, "Hospital of the Transfiguration", was suppressed by the Polish government for eight years. It was released only in 1956, when freedom of speech was earned after the "Polish October" popular uprising.
Lem quit medicine in 1949, because he did not want to be drafted into the army. He married a doctor instead of being one. In 1949 he became a professional writer and continued creating his increasingly unusual novels: "The Investigation", "Eden", "Return from the Stars". The 1960s and 1970s were the most productive for Lem. At that time he wrote 'Solaris', 'The Invincible', 'The Cyberiad', 'His Master's Voice', 'The Star Diaries', 'The Futurological Congress', and 'Tales of Pirx the Pilot'. His gift of a visionary materialized in 'Summa Technologiae' (Sum of Technologies, 1964), which tackled problems of virtual reality. Lem showed his talent for premonition in "Katar" (1975), which predicted international terrorism, and in "Observations on the Spot"' (1982), which showed absurdity of a conflict between two civilizations.
His novel 'Solaris' was adapted into eponymous films twice. First came the Russian-made film adaptation by director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972, starring Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk. Lem spent six months working with Tarkovsky in Moscow, but their collaboration ended in a bitter conflict over the changes and additions to the original story. After seeing edited parts of the 1972 film, Lem said of Tarkovsky: "Instead of focusing on deeper moral questions related to frontiers of human knowledge, he made a drama-type 'Crime and Punishment' in space, by making up unnecessary characters of parents and relatives, then adding a hut on an island." "Tarkovsky was a genius, but he was moving in the opposite direction from my book", also said Lem. Upon his doctor's advice Lem did not want to see the 2002 remake by director Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone.
"Solaris" (1961) is arguably the best known work of Lem's works. It deals with the problem of human existence in the world of the unknown. It also shows the inevitability of misunderstandings in human contacts with other worlds. Planet Solaris is inhabited by a single Plasma Ocean organism with the eerie ability to materialize human thoughts. When astronauts become more aggressive in forcing contact with Solaris, it confronts them with pushing the buttons of their most painful thoughts by recreating their dead wives and relatives, and virtually bringing the dead back to life in front of their eyes. Obsolete biological human impulses are shown in stark contrast with the magnitude of the ocean-size organism. At some point humans become an irrational liability to their machine partner, the spaceship. Lem's imagination and talent for creation of alternative reality challenges the limits of human knowledge.
"Past is more perfect than future, which makes me sad," said Lem. Although some of his predictions came true, he expressed his disappointment about the failure of many positive prognosis that were made during the 1960s and 1970s. He died on March 27, 2006, in Kraków, and was laid to rest in the Salwatorski cemetery in Kraków, Poland. His books sold over 27 million copies in 41 languages. - Writer
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Although Hugo was fascinated by poems from childhood on, he spent some time at the polytechnic university of Paris until he dedicated all his work to literature. He was one of the few authors who were allowed to reach popularity during his own lifetime and one of the leaders of French romance.
After the death of his daughter Leopoldine in 1843, he started a career in politics and became member of the Paris chamber where he fought for leftist ideas. After the re-establishing of monarchy, he had to go into exile to Guernesey (1851-1870) where his literary work became more important, e.g. "Les Miserables" was written during that period. After his return to Paris he did not join politics anymore.- Writer
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Mark Millar is the New York Times best-selling writer of Jupiter's Legacy, Kick-Ass, Kingsman, The Magic Order, Wanted, Old Man Logan, Marvel Civil War and Superman: Red Son.
He is also President of Netflix's Millarworld Division in Los Angeles and serves as an executive producer on all his Hollywood properties.
Marvel and DC In Summer 2000, Marvel brought Millar in as part of a new team to revitalise their comic-book line. He worked with the best artists in the industry and launched his X-Men revamp at number one with Ultimate X-Men, re-thinking The Avengers next and shattering his own sales numbers with The Ultimates before creating the Marvel Civil War storyline in 2006, remaining Marvel's most financially successful event of the 21st century and their best-selling graphic novel of all time.
Screen-writer Zak Penn credits The Ultimates as his template for the 2012 Avengers movie and both Civil War and his classic Wolverine: Old Man Logan provided the inspiration for two blockbuster movies of the same name.
His Superman book, Red Son, is the highest-selling Superman graphic novel in history and was adapted by Warner Bros as an animated movie in 2020.
Millarworld On the advice of Stan Lee, Mark decided to branch out from Marvel and create his own characters while still working at the company.
Wanted was his first comic-book under the Millarworld banner, a huge hit that spawned the 2008 movie starring Angelina Jolie. Wanted grossed $342 million on a $70 million budget and paved the way for the successful adaptation of his Kick-Ass comic in 2010, starring Nicolas Cage.
Quitting Marvel soon after, Millar focused all his attention on Millarworld and co-created properties which include Jupiter's Legacy, The Magic Order, American Jesus, Super Crooks, Sharkey The Bounty Hunter, Empress, Superior, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Chrononauts, Starlight, Nemesis, Space Bandits, MPH and Huck.
Kingsman was released as a movie in 2015 and, like Kick-Ass has spawned at least one sequel. The most recent Kingsman movie, The King's Man, is released on March 12th, 2021.
Netflix Netflix bought Millarworld in 2017 and now owns the full rights to all 17 properties purchased, later hiring Mark and his wife Lucy to act as President and CEO of their Millarworld line and help develop these comic-books into big-budget original movies, shows and animated series.
The first of these to be streamed is Jupiter's Legacy in 2021, Super Crooks, Huck, Sharkey The Bounty Hunter, Space Bandits, The Magic Order, Prodigy and more are all either in production now or in active development.
The only franchises excluded from this sale were Kick-Ass and Kingsman, which Mark still co-owns independently.
Awards and honours Mark has received or been nominated for numerous industry honours over the years including Eagles, Eisners, UKCAC, Speakeasy and Wizard awards.
Outside of comics, he has won the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland award for writing, the Scottish Press Awards Hall of Fame, the SFX Award for Best Comic, Time Magazine's Comic-Book of the Decade (for The Ultimates) and two GLAAD awards for excellence.
He was awarded and honorary doctorate for literature from Glasgow Caledonia University in 2012 and in 2013 received an MBE from the Queen at Buckingham Palace for services to Film and Literature.
Personal life Mark was born in Coatbridge, Scotland, on December 24th 1969. He is the youngest of six children and married to Lucy Millar, CEO of Netflix's Millarworld Division. He has three daughters.- Writer
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Dave Gibbons was born on 14 April 1949 in England, UK. He is a writer, known for Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), Watchmen (2009) and Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017).- Writer
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Arthur Laurents was born on 14 July 1917 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Rope (1948), The Way We Were (1973) and The Turning Point (1977). He died on 5 May 2011 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.