Kenneth Fearing (July 28, 1902 – June 26, 1961) was an American poet, novelist, and founding editor of Partisan Review. Literary critic Macha Rosenthal called him "the chief poet of the American Depre…
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including hi…
Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts …
Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sh…
James Mallahan Cain (July 1, 1892–October 27, 1977) was an American journalist and novelist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labeling, he is usually associated with the hard-boiled school of …
John Ehle (1925-2018) grew up the eldest of five children in the mountains of North Carolina, which would become the setting for many of his novels and several works of nonfiction. Following service i…
Leonora Carrington was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surreali…
Charles McColl Portis was an American author best known for his novels Norwood (1966) and the classic Western True Grit (1968), both adapted as films. The latter also inspired a film sequel and a made…
Carr was born in Thirsk Junction, Carlton Miniott, Yorkshire, into a Wesleyan Methodist family. His father Joseph, the eleventh son of a farmer, went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a st…
JENNIFER NIVEN is the #1 New York Times and internationally bestselling author of All the Bright Places, Holding Up the Universe, and Breathless. Her books have been translated in over 75 languages an…
Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–1993) was a mystery author and literary critic. Born in Kansas City, she studied at Columbia University, and won an award from the Yale Series of Younger Poets for her first bo…
Horace Stanley McCoy (1897–1955) was an American novelist whose gritty, hardboiled novels documented the hardships Americans faced during the Depression and post-war periods. McCoy grew up in Tennesse…
Leonard Gardner is an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Esquire, The Southwest Review, and other publications, and he has been awar…
William Lindsay Gresham (August 20, 1909 – September 14, 1962) was an American novelist and non-fiction author particularly regarded among readers of noir. His best-known work is Nightmare Alley (1946…
Jean-Patrick Manchette was a French crime novelist credited with reinventing and reinvigorating the genre. He wrote ten short novels in the seventies and early eighties, and is widely recognized as th…
Don Carpenter was an American writer, best known as the author of Hard Rain Falling. He wrote numerous novels, novellas, short stories and screenplays over the course of a 22-year career that took him…
Lewis Elliott Chaze (November 15, 1915 – November 11, 1990) was an American war veteran, journalist, and novelist. After nearly half a century, his "long lost" 1953 noir classic Black Wings Has My Ang…
Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's …
Charles Willeford was a remarkably fine, talented and prolific writer who wrote everything from poetry to crime fiction to literary criticism throughout the course of his impressively long and diverse…
Edward Anderson (1905–1969) was born in Texas in 1905 and grew up in Oklahoma, serving his apprenticeship as a journalist on a small paper in Ardmore, Okla. Restless, he worked as a deckhand on a frei…
