Childhood: His father was a civil servant in Hungary, first as a county official and then in the Treasury. He rose to a high position and retired with a title.
Edith Wharton emerged as one of America’s most insightful novelists, deftly exposing the tensions between societal expectation and personal desire through her vivid portrayals of upper-class life. Dra…
William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that …
William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist, satirist, and journalist, best known for his keen social commentary and his novel Vanity Fair (1847–1848). His works often explored themes of ambit…
James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his …
Patricia Highsmith (19 January 1921 – 4 February 1995) was an American novelist who is known mainly for her psychological crime thrillers which have led to more than two dozen film adaptations over th…
Joseph Hansen (1923–2004) was an American author of mysteries. The son of a South Dakota shoemaker, he moved to a California citrus farm with his family in 1936. He began publishing poetry in the New …
English-born American Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist who portrayed Berlin in the early 1930s in his best known works, such…
Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as S…
Mary Renault was an English writer best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece. In addition to vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great, she wrote …
Bart Yates was born in Cheyenne, WY, raised in Lamoni, IA, educated in Boston, MA, and now lives in Iowa City, IA, with the world's finest and most discerning cat.
Sebastian Barry is an Irish playwright, novelist and poet. He is noted for his dense literary writing style and is considered one of Ireland's finest writers
Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class differenc…
Sarah Schulman is a longtime AIDS and queer activist, and a cofounder of the MIX Festival and the ACT UP Oral History Project. She is a playwright and the author of seventeen books, including the nove…
Ulrichs was born in Aurich, then part of the Kingdom of Hanover, in north-western Germany. He graduated in law and theology from Göttingen University in 1846. From 1846 to 1848, he studied history at …
Patrick Ness, an award-winning novelist, has written for Radio 4 and The Sunday Telegraph and is a literary critic for The Guardian. He has written many books, including the Chaos Walking Trilogy, The…
Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan, CBE was a British dramatist. He was one of England's most popular mid twentieth century dramatists. His plays are typically set in an upper-middle-class background. He is …
Many works, including Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life; he won t…
Rasheed Newson is the author of the national bestseller "My Government Means to Kill Me." The novel was a Lambda Literary finalist for Gay Fiction and was named one of the “The 100 Notable Books of 20…
