African-American poet, novelist, and playwright, who became one of the foremost interpreters of racial relationships in the United States. Influenced by the Bible, W. E...
Musical Beginning James Hurst grew up in North Carolina on a farm near the sea. After attending North Carolina State College and serving in the United States Army during World War II, he studied singing at the famous Juilliard School of Music in New York. Hoping for an operatic career, Hurst went to Italy for additional study, but he soon abandoned his musical ambitions...
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author who wrote stories, novels, anthropological folklore and an autobiography. She died in 1960 but her works have increased in popularity and are passing the test of time with staying power. She was a unique artist and scientist who produced for us a large body of work that stands equal to any body of work in American Literature and world literature...
"A succession of explorations and discoveries--that is what my life has been," says Laura Huxley, whose life continues to be a series of investigations uncovering answers for her ceaseless questions about the nature and quality of life.
A child prodigy who made her first performance at Carnegie Hall while still in her teens, Mrs. Huxley began her career in the universe of violin...
Birthplace:
Connecticut
Current Address:
Oregon
I was born and grew up in Connecticut, where I graduated from Quinnipiac University. My interest in writing grew out of a love of books developed by parents who read to me and good teachers in a great school system. I’m the author of short stories and books for children and teens, and humorous greeting cards...
Born: 11 September 1862
Died: 5 June 1910
Birthplace: Greensboro, North Carolina
Best known as: American short story writer
Name at birth: William Sydney Porter
O. Henry was the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter, who wrote colorful short stories with surprising and ironic twists. His best-known titles included "The Last of the Troubadours," "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief...
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals...
In the constellation of original artists who regenerated Swedish poetry at the end of the last century, Verner von Heidenstam was the most brilliant star. He was the leader of the generation of poets of 1890; he was the first to set forth in theory and also to realize in his works the ideal of new Swedish generations. Even in his first poems he opened new paths for imagination and form; and his later collections are in large part pure masterpieces of the lyric art...
Seamus Heaney was born in April 1939, the eldest member of a family which would eventually contain nine children. His father owned and worked a small farm of some fifty acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland, but the father’s real commitment was to cattle-dealing. There was something very congenial to Patrick Heaney about the cattle-dealer’s way of life to which he was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after the early death of his own parents...
Born in 1956 in Scotland, moved to Dublin 18 months later. Studied mathematical sciences in Trinity College Dublin. Beau press published 25 Poems, edited by Maurice Scully, in 1983...
I was born on November 15, 1862. The place of my birth is Bad Obersalzbrunn, a spa famous for its medicinal springs. The house of my birth is the inn «Zur Preussischen Krone»...
Elizabeth Harris was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1867, to parents who had been slaves. She married Jacob Walker Harris in 1883 at the age of 15 and was the mother of nine children. She lived until 1942, surviving her husband and two of her children...
Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was born in Lom, Norway, and grew up in poverty in Hamarøy in Nordland. At the age of seventeen he became an apprentice to a ropemaker, and at about the same time he began to write. He spent some years in America, travelling and working at odd jobs, and published his impressions, chiefly unfavourable, under the title Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (1889) [The Intellectual Life of Modern America]...
Growing up on a small farm near Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the 1940s, Virginia Hamilton was lovingly embraced by the sights, sounds and smells of rural America, and by a big extended family of cousins, uncles, aunts. All these things would come into play in the children’s stories Hamilton would spin as an adult...
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright. Her drama A Raisin in the Sun (first performed in 1959) was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, and was the winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best Broadway play of the 1958-1959 season. In 2004, A Raisin in the Sun received a Broadway revival earning Tony Awards for Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald...
Anecdotes of Johnson
Hesther Lynch Piozzi
Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson
INTRODUCTION
Mrs. Piozzi, by her second marriage, was by her first marriage the Mrs. Thrale in whose house at Streatham Doctor Johnson was, after the year of his first introduction, 1765, in days of infirmity, an honoured and a cherished friend...
Mars
Percival Lowell
I. ATMOSPHERE.
AMID the seemingly countless stars that on a clear night spangle the vast dome overhead, there appeared last autumn to be a new-comer, a very large and ruddy one, that rose at sunset through the haze about the eastern horizon...
TISH: The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions
Mary Roberts Rinehart
TISH: Mind Over Motor
How Tish Broke The Law And Some Records
I
So many unkind things have been said of the affair at Morris Valley that I think it best to publish a straightforward account of everything. The ill nature of the cartoon, for instance, which showed Tish in a pair of khaki trousers on her back under a racing-car was quite uncalled for...
IMy name is William Francis Furlong. My occupation is that of a commission merchant, and my place of business is on St. Paul Street, in the City of Montreal...
Chapter 1: I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE
THIS is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous...
CHAPTER I. THE LONE PASSENGER
That evening the down train from London deposited at the little country station of Ramsdon but a single passenger, a man of middle height, shabbily dressed, with broad shoulders and long arms and a most unusual breadth and depth of chest...
FRANKENSTEIN
MARY W SHELLEY
Preface
THE event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors...
UP FROM SLAVERY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by Booker T. Washington
PREFACE
THIS volume is the outgrowth of a series of articles, dealing with incidents in my life, which were published consecutively in the Outlook. While they were appearing in that magazine I was constantly surprised at the number of requests which came to me from all parts of the country, asking that the articles be permanently preserved in book form...
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
by Charles Dickens
I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.
Their faithful Friend and Servant,
C...
As Anna and Ben struggle just to cope with their parents' divorce, a new woman enters their father's (Ed Harris) life. Isabel (Julia Roberts), a successful photographer, doesn't plan to give up her career to raise another woman's kids. Jackie (Susan Sarandon) is the dedicated mother who deems Isabel unfit to raise her children. But the chasm between them becomes meaningless when Jackie's diagnosed with cancer and they all have to pull together...
THERE were eight in our party of bronzed children who were going East with the missionaries. Among us were three young braves, two tall girls, and we three little ones, Judewin, Thowin, and I.
We had been very impatient to start on our journey to the Red Apple Country, which, we were told, lay a little beyond the great circular horizon of the Western prairie...
A Brief History of the United States
John Bach McMaster
[Illustration: GEORGE WASHINGTON. Painted by Rembrandt Peale.]
PREFACE
It is not too much to assert that most of our countrymen acquire at school all the knowledge they possess of the past history of their country...