American musician Louis Armstrong, known as Satchmo, a virtuoso trumpeter and popular, gravelly voiced singer, greatly influenced the development of jazz.
Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in…
John Kennedy Toole was an American novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana, whose posthumously published novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981; he also wrote The Neon…
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 …
Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movi…
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 …
Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, poet, and, of late, disc jockey who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan…
Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of American novelists. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through …
Dan Baum was born in Orange, New Jersey (or South Orange, New Jersey) to Seymour and Audrey Bernice (Goldberger) Baum. His father, Seymour, was an executive with Colgate-Palmolive. His mother, Audrey …
Jamaican-born American writer Claude McKay figured prominently in the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s; his works include collections of poetry, such as Constab Ballads (1912), and novels, includin…
Gary Krist is the author of four previous narrative nonfiction books: The White Cascade, City of Scoundrels, Empire of Sin, and The Mirage Factory. He has also written three novels and two short story…
Tove Jansson was born and died in Helsinki, Finland. As a Finnish citizen whose mother tongue was Swedish, she was part of the Swedish-speaking Finns minority. Thus, all her books were originally writ…
With warm, muted style on albums, such as Kind of Blue (1959), noted American trumpeter Miles Dewey Davis, Junior, later experimented with jazz-fusion.
James Kaplan has been writing noted biography, journalism, and fiction for more than four decades. The author of Frank: The Voice and Sinatra: The Chairman, the definitive two-volume biography of Fran…
PATTI SMITH is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has released twelve albums, including Horses, which has…
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Revie…
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. A MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellow, Coates has received the National…
Born and raised in New York, Hayden Panettiere seemed destined for superstardom from the moment she could walk. By the age of four in 1993, she had already landed her first on-screen role, and the spo…
Ronell Eugene Stallworth is an American retired police officer who infiltrated the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs in the late 1970s. He was the first African-American police officer and…
Julie Lythcott-Haims is the New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult and Real American. She holds a BA from Stanford University, a JD from Harvard Law School, and an MFA from Califor…
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atla…
Larry Mitchell (1939 – December 26, 2012) was an American author and publisher. He was the founder of Calamus Books - an early small press devoted to gay male literature - and the author of fiction de…
Julie Satow is an award-winning journalist and the author. Her new book, When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion will be published on June 4 with Doubleday. Her …
