Neeli Cherkovski (born Nelson Innis Cherry) grew up in Los Angeles, California and moved to San Francisco in 1974, where he was a member of the vibrant North Beach literary community. He has lived wit…
Larry Jeff McMurtry was an American novelist, essayist, and screenwriter whose work was predominantly set in either the Old West or contemporary Texas. His novels included Horseman, Pass By (1962), Th…
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company execut…
Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a r…
JOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached …
Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold milli…
Philip Kindred Dick was a prolific American science fiction author whose work has had a lasting impact on literature, cinema, and popular culture. Known for his imaginative narratives and profound phi…
Ken Kesey was American writer, who gained world fame with his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962, filmed 1975). In the 1960s, Kesey became a counterculture hero and a guru of psychedelic drug…
Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He mo…
Mark Helprin belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend. As many have observed and as Time Magazine has phrased it, “He lights his own way.” His three collections of short stories (A …
Sean O'Casey was born in 1880 and lived through a bitterly hard boyhood in a Dublin tenement house. He never went to school but received most of his education in the streets of Dublin, and taught hims…
Henry Charles Bukowski (born as Heinrich Karl Bukowski) was a German-born American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of hi…
Fante's early years were spent in relative poverty. The son of an Italian born father, Nicola Fante, and an Italian-American mother, Mary Capolungo, Fante was educated in various Catholic schools in B…
A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often co…
Heinrich Harrer was an Austrian mountaineer, sportsman, geographer, and author. He is best known for being on the four-man climbing team that made the first ascent of the North Face of the Eiger in Sw…
Alfredo James Pacino is an Academy Award-, Golden Globe-, Tony-, BAFTA-, Emmy- and SAG award-winning American film and stage actor and director, widely considered to be one of the greatest and most in…
William Seward Burroughs II, (also known by his pen name William Lee) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generatio…
JAYSON GREENE is a contributing writer and former senior editor at Pitchfork. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vulture, and GQ, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his w…
