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2026 Reading Challenge

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Margo Orlando Littell

Goodreads Author

Born

in The United States

October 29

Website

http://www.margoorlandolittell.com

Twitter

margolittell

Genre

Fiction

Member Since

June 2007

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I grew up in a small southwestern Pennsylvania town where crumbling mansions are all that remain of the coal-and-coke wealth from the early twentieth century, when the town led the United States in millionaires per capita. Now, nearly half the population lives at or below the poverty level, and haunting, once-splendid buildings in the old downtown can be purchased for a song. After more than two decades of living in New York City, Barcelona, Northern California, and New Jersey, I've settled down in Pittsburgh with my husband and two teenage daughters.

I started writing obsessively as soon as I learned to write, in a Cabbage Patch diary I filled with critical minutia like “We get to have pop at Grandma’s.” Thousands of journal pages followed I grew up in a small southwestern Pennsylvania town where crumbling mansions are all that remain of the coal-and-coke wealth from the early twentieth century, when the town led the United States in millionaires per capita. Now, nearly half the population lives at or below the poverty level, and haunting, once-splendid buildings in the old downtown can be purchased for a song. After more than two decades of living in New York City, Barcelona, Northern California, and New Jersey, I've settled down in Pittsburgh with my husband and two teenage daughters.

I started writing obsessively as soon as I learned to write, in a Cabbage Patch diary I filled with critical minutia like “We get to have pop at Grandma’s.” Thousands of journal pages followed, and then, eventually, poetry. I was serious about my efforts, and in high school I attended the Pennsylvania School for the Arts. It’s funny how bits from the far past sometimes resurface: a poem I heard during my poetry classes that summer--over twenty years ago now--wound up becoming the epigraph of Each Vagabond By Name.

I began writing short stories at the University of Dayton and went on to receive an MFA from Columbia, where I taught undergraduate composition and wrote a collection of novellas. After a few years working as an editor in New York City, I sold nearly everything I owned, quit my job, and followed my boyfriend to Spain--and then to California and then back to Brooklyn. Somewhere in all that, we got married and had kids. Life took over for a while, freelance editing and professional resume writing and house buying and child rearing, but in 2011 I turned one of my novellas into a full-length novel that would become Each Vagabond By Name.

Inspired again by southwestern Pennsylvania, I published a second novel set in the area in 2020, The Distance from Four Points.

I’m driven to write about characters who are rooted to a place and who, even if they succeed at leaving, feel pulled toward home for one reason or another. I find inspiration in odd rummage-sale finds, visits to my hometown, and newspaper articles that give a glimpse of quiet struggles and preoccupations that are just to the side of the expected thing. ...more

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Margo Orlando Littell’s books

Average rating: 4.08 · 478 ratings · 105 reviews · 2 distinct works • Similar authors

	Each Vagabond By Name 4.01 avg rating — 318 ratings — published 2016 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Distance from Four Points 4.20 avg rating — 160 ratings — published 2020 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Margo Orlando Littell's Blog

An Extraordinary Fall

It’s October, my favorite month, the month that always puts me straight back into the world of Each Vagabond by Name. “It was an ordinary fall until the gypsies came,” that novel begins. Of course, fall 2020 is anything but ordinary. And amid so much global unrest and turmoil, I undertook a monumental change last month and moved back to Pennsylvania, where I haven’t lived since I was ei

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The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen

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All of Us: The Collected Poems (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Raymond Carver

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