Edmond L. Taylor was born on February 13, 1908 in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, but abandoned school during his freshman year for journalism, starting as a polic…
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's…
Anthony Michael Bourdain was an American celebrity chef, author, and travel documentarian. He starred in programs focusing on the exploration of international culture, cuisine, and the human condition…
Doris Helen Kearns Goodwin is an American biographer, historian, former sports journalist, and political commentator. She has written biographies of numerous U.S. presidents. Goodwin's book No Ordinar…
Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor i…
Jon Ellis Meacham is an American writer, reviewer, historian and presidential biographer who is serving as the Canon Historian of the Washington National Cathedral since November 7, 2021. A former exe…
Novelist Harry Sinclair Lewis satirized middle-class America in his 22 works, including Babbitt (1922) and Elmer Gantry (1927) and first received a Nobel Prize for literature in 1930.
Anne Fadiman is the author, most recently, of the essay collection Frog (2026). Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Ang…
Douglas Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956, and grew up in the deadly boring suburb of Wellesley. Following a distinguished career at a private nursery school--he was almost immedia…
Charlaine Harris has been a published writer for over forty years. Her first two books were standalones, followed by a long sabbatical when she was having children. Then she began the Aurora Teagarden…
Greg Iles spent most of his life in Natchez, Mississippi. His first novel, Spandau Phoenix, was the first of seventeen New York Times bestsellers. His Natchez Burning trilogy continued the story of Penn…
Leon Marcus Uris (August 3, 1924 - June 21, 2003) was an American novelist, known for his historical fiction and the deep research that went into his novels. His two bestselling books were Exodus, pub…
Lisa Scottoline is a #1 bestselling and Edgar award-winning author of 33 novels. Her books are book-club favorites, and Lisa and her daughter Francesca Serritella have hosted an annual Big Book Club P…
John D. MacDonald was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and educated at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Syracuse and Harvard, where he took an MBA in 1939. During WW2, he rose to the rank of Colonel, an…
Ada Ferrer is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she has taught since 1995. She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, an…
Dr Andrew Roberts, who was born in 1963, took a first class honours degree in Modern History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, from where he is an honorary senior scholar and a Doctor of Philoso…
Candice Millard is a former writer and editor for National Geographic magazine. Her first book, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, was a New York Times bestseller and was named …
Martin Middlebrook was a British military historian and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Appointed Knight of the Order of the Belgian Crown in 2004.
Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he w…
Barbara Demick is an American journalist. She is the author of Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (Andrews & McMeel, 1996). Her next book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in No…
Cody Cassidy is a freelance writer and editor whose articles have appeared in Wired and Slate, among many other publications. He lives in San Francisco.
