Bill Bryson is a bestselling American-British author known for his witty and accessible nonfiction books spanning travel, science, and language. He rose to prominence with Notes from a Small Island (1…
John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". …
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfi…
Probably most famous for his gritty depiction of a gang of Scottish Heroin addicts, Trainspotting (1993), Welsh focuses on the darker side of human nature and drug use. All of his novels are set in hi…
Anne Lamott is an author of several novels and works of non-fiction. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, her non-fiction works are largely autobiographical, with strong doses of self-deprecating humo…
Garth Nix was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia, to the sound of the Salvation Army band outside playing 'Hail the Conquering Hero Comes' or possibly 'Roll Out the Barrel'. Garth left Melbourne at …
Julie Powell was born and raised in Austin, Texas, where she first fell in love with cooking — and her husband, Eric. She was the author of a cooking memoir, Julie & Julia, which was released in 2005.…
Betty Joan Perske, better known as Lauren Bacall, was a Golden Globe– and Tony Award–winning, as well as Academy Award–nominated, American film and stage actress and model. Known for her husky voice a…
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…
Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later sym…
John Barrett McInerney Jr. is an American writer. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, and The Last of the Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New…
Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels Turn of the Century, Heyday, and True Believers, and and, with Alec Baldwin of You Can't Spell America Without Me. His non-fiction books include Fantasyland, …
Flora Rheta Schreiber (April 24, 1918 - November 3, 1988), an American journalist, was the author of the 1973 bestseller Sybil, the story of a woman (identified years later as Shirley Ardell Mason) wh…
Anatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic and editor for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays and two books during his…
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an Academy Award- and Palme d'Or-winning American film director, screenwriter and actor. He rose to fame in the early 1990s as an independent filmmaker whose films used non…
Dallas William Mayr, better known by his pen name Jack Ketchum, was an American horror fiction author. He was the recipient of four Bram Stoker Awards and three further nominations. His novels include…
Lucy Ellmann was born in Evanston, Illinois, the daughter of biographer Richard Ellmann and writer Mary Ellmann (née Donahue). She moved to England at the age of 13 and was educated at Falmouth School…
Cherie Currie (born November 30, 1959) is an American singer, musician and actress. Currie was the lead vocalist of The Runaways, an all-female hard rock (of which Joan Jett and Lita Ford were also me…
Kate Clifford Larson is a bestselling author of critically acclaimed biographies including Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero and Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Da…
Courtney Peppernell is an acclaimed best-selling author from Australia, celebrated for her inspirational poetry collections, including the beloved Pillow Thoughts series, Watering the Soul, I Hope You…
Audrey Clare Farley is a scholar of twentieth-century American culture. She earned a PhD in English literature from University of Maryland, College Park, and now teaches at Mount St. Mary's University…
Antonia Hylton is the author of MADNESS: Race and Insanity in Jim Crow Asylum. She’s a Peabody and two-time Emmy award-winning Correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC and the cohost of the hit podcasts S…