The Columbia History of the American Novel

Biographies of American Authors

Though Abbey was born in Pennsylvania, a preoccupation with the desert landscape of the Southwest — predominantly Arizona and New Mexico — and issues of the environment inform all of his fiction, as well as his life. His experience as a Park Ranger and firefighter finds resonance in his famous work The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975). His other works include Desert Solitaire (1968) and The Fool's Progress (1988). His final novel, Hayduke Lives! (1990), is a sequel to the popular Monkey Wrench Gang.

Born in Vienna, Abish fled Austria with his family and arrived in Shanghai in 1940. In 1960 Abish came to the United States, where he worked as an urban planner. In his challenging, experimental fiction, Abish deconstructs the continuity of ordinary events. Alphabetical Africa (1974), In the Future Perfect (1977), and How German Is It (1980) have established Abish's reputation as a central voice among avant-garde novelists.

Raised in New York, Acker has lived in San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego, where she has avowedly pursued a lifestyle corresponding to the stark merge of sexuality, feminism, and "punk" aesthetics in-753- habiting her fiction. Her novels include Blood and Guts in High School (1978), Great Expectations (1982), and, most recently, Seven Cardinal Sins (1990) and In Memoriam to Identity (1990).

Alcott, daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the transcendentalist circle of Emerson and Thoreau. At sixteen she published her first book, Flower Fables, and from an early age she worked to help support her family. Her first novel was Moods (1864). Little Women (1868-69) was an immediate success, and the family was at last economically secure. Her other novels include An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), and Under the Lilacs (1878). Her last novel was Jo's Boys (1886), a sequel to Little Women. She died in Boston in 1888, only two days after her father.

He was born in Revere, Massachusetts, the son of a Unitarian minister, and was raised under a strict regimen of study and prayer in preparation for the ministry. He graduated from Harvard in 1852, entered Harvard Divinity School in 1855, but ran away to Paris before graduation exercises. He did enter the pulpit in 1864, but two years later fled again, to New York. There he became a close friend of Charles O'Connor of the Newsboys Lodging House, and began writing the boys' stories (of Ragged Dick, Tattered Tom, etc.) for which he is still remembered.

Born in Pastura, New Mexico, Anaya has remained in the state of his birth. He is concerned with the life and image of Latinos in the Southwest and these concerns find articulation in his work. Anaya's most famous fiction is a trilogy about growing up in New Mexico: Bless Me Ultima (1972), The Heart of Aztlan (1976), and Tortuga (1979). -754-

Born in southern Ohio to a poor and vagabond family, Anderson is best known for his collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and for the influence his unadorned but poetic prose style and his "grotesque" characters had on other writers of his generation, notably Ernest Hemingway, Nathanael West, and William Faulkner. In 1912, after abruptly abandoning the mental pressures of a successful business career in Ohio, he moved to Chicago, where he became acquainted with and received encouragement from Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and Floyd Dell, to pursue the creative life that he yearned for. A writer of naturalistic stories and novels (Windy McPherson's Son [1916], Marching Men [1917], Poor White [1920], Many Marriages [1923], Tar [1926], Beyond Desire [1932], Kit Brandon [1936]) set usually in the Midwest, he depicted the demoralizing effect of an increasingly industrialized and corporate-minded America upon the imagination and spirit of the common people, a theme that extended to his nonfiction writing (Perhaps Women [1931]; Puzzled America [1935]).

Born in rural New York state, Arthur trained to be a watchmaker and worked for several years as a clerk before he became editor of the Baltimore Athenaeum. A regular contributor to Godey's Lady's Book, he eventually founded several magazines of his own, the most successful of which was Arthur's Home Magazine. He was a prolific writer of cautionary tales and moral tracts, most notably the sensational and melodramatic Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, and What I Saw There (1854), dramatized in 1858 by William Pratt.

Asimov was born in Russia and was brought to New York City as a small child. He graduated at nineteen from Columbia University, received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1948, and joined the faculty of Boston University in 1955. At eighteen he sold his first science fiction story. His first novel, Pebble in the Sky, was published in 1950, and Asimov embarked on an extremely prolific and eclectic writing ca-755- reer, sometimes under the pseudonym Paul French. His best-known work is the Foundation trilogy (Foundation [1951]; Foundation and Empire [1952]; and Second Foundation [1953]), to which he continues to add (Foundation's Edge [1982]; Foundation and Earth [1986]).

Born Gertrude Franklin in California, Atherton wrote several novels depicting California history, going back to its days as a Spanish colony: Before the Gringo Came (1894; revised in 1902 as The Splendid Idle Forties); The Californians (1898; revised 1935); The Horn of Life (1942). In addition she wrote short stories, essays, and a history of California (Golden Gate Country [1945]). The Conqueror (1902) is a fictionalized biography of Alexander Hamilton; her society novels include Julia France and Her Times (1912) and Black Oxen (1923).

Atwood was born in Ottawa, grew up in Toronto, attended the University of Toronto, and took a graduate degree from Radcliffe. She has published many collections of poetry and has taught at several Canadian universities. Her second volume of poetry (The Circle Game [1966]) won a Governor General's Award, and her study Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) established her reputation as a critic. Her popular successes include The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), Life Before Man (1980), and The Handmaid's Tale (1985), for which she received a second Governor General's Award.

Mary (Hunter) Austin was born in Illinois but moved to California at eighteen, where she made a study of Native American life and was involved with the artists' colony at Carmel before moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she taught and continued her own research. Her fictional themes include the West and Native American culture, -756-

the life of Jesus, women, radical politics, and social reform. Her bestknown works are Land of Little Rain (1903) and The Ford (1917).

Born in Harlem, New York City, Baldwin spent much of his spare time in the city library enthusiastically reading such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, and Horatio Alger. Throughout his difficult growing-up years, Baldwin endured much hostility from his fanatically religious stepfather, an experience that forms the theme of many of Baldwin's works, including his collection of stories, Going to Meet the Man (1965). At age fourteen, Baldwin underwent a religious conversion, which led to an evangelical calling until he was seventeen. Disenchanted with America's treatment of its African American population, in 1948 Baldwin purchased a one-way ticket to France. Although he returned sporadically to the United States, and was active in the Civil Rights movement, he remained an expatriate until his death. In such powerful and elegant novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Giovanni's Room (1955), and in such nonfiction as Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin explores life at the margins of society and what it means to be black in America. Other works include If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), The Devil Finds Work (1976), and Just Above My Head (1979).

Born LeRoi Jones, he grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Baraka attended a predominantly white private school and then Harvard University. Dismissed from school in 1954, he joined the United States Air Force. However, in the wake of the Red scare and the prevalent fear of communist insurgency, Baraka was dishonorably discharged in 1957 because of his "suspicious" activities. Baraka moved to New York's Greenwich Village, and became acquainted with the literati there. With his then wife, Hettie Cohn, Baraka edited a Beat journal, Yugen, publishing the work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. In 1960 Baraka visited Cuba. Tremendously affected by this trip, and later by the assassination of Malcolm X, Baraka left the Village for Harlem. During this same period, Baraka changed his name, com-

— 757- bining Islamic and Bantu references. In 1979 Baraka joined the African Studies Department at SUNY/Stony Brook. His works detail his shifting and maturing political consciousness. They include Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), Dutchman and The Slave (1964), The Dead Lecturer (1964), Black Magic (1969), In Our Terribleness (1970), Jello (1970), Spirit Reach (1972), and The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (1984).

Barnes was born in New York state and joined the colony of American expatriates in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. She was associated with the avant-garde and the bohemian, in terms of both her life and her art. Barnes's fiction gives free expression to her family traumas, her bisexuality, and her feminism. Sometimes published under the pseudonym Lydia Steptoes, Barnes's ironic, frequently grotesque works include The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), Ryder (1928), and Nightwood (1936).

Born in Maryland, Barth originally studied at the Juilliard School of Music. This early affinity for music is reflected in his first novel, The Floating Opera (1956). He was associated, by his own admission, with existentialism, and later with the postmodernist movement. Barth's challenging work rejects conventional conceptions of both narrative structure and truth. His novels include The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Chimera (1972), The Friday Book (1984), and The Tidewater Tales (1987).

Born in Philadelphia, Barthelme and his family moved to Houston where his father practiced architecture, a subject later important to Barthelme's fiction. After serving two years in Korea, Barthelme relocated to New York where he soon achieved notoriety for his innovative minimalist stories that appeared in The New Yorker. A prominent postmodernist, Barthelme published his first collection of -758- metafictional stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, in 1964, followed by Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Amateurs (1976), Great Days (1979), and Sixty Stories (1981). His novels are Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1976).

The son of a Russian Jewish émigré, and a Canadian by birth, Bellow came to Chicago when he was nine and grew up in the Midwest. He attended the University of Chicago and graduated from Northwestern University. A student of anthropology, Bellow began graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, but as his thesis persisted in "turning out to be a story," Bellow considered a career in literature. He worked on the WPA Federal Writers' Project where he became acquainted with a number of New York writers, notably Delmore Schwartz, and began teaching. Today regarded as a prominent American writer, Bellow received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976, following the publication of Humbolt's Gift (1975). His works include Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), The Dean's December (1982), and Some Die of Heartbreak (1987).

Presently a recluse and reluctant to reveal biographical details, Berger has lived in London and Manhattan. Frequently associated with the contemporary Western, Berger has written wide-ranging satiric fiction that often parodies iconographic images of American city and rural life. His novels include Little Big Man (1964), Neighbors (1980), and Changing the Past (1989).

Blais was born in Quebec City, the eldest child of a working-class family. At her parents' urging she left a convent school to train for secretarial work (which she hated — she held nine clerical jobs in three years). However, her first novel, La belle bête (1959), was an imme-759- diate success, and she received a Canada Council grant that allowed her to spend a year in Paris, where she immersed herself in French cinema and literature. In the early 1960s, Blais lived and worked on artist Mary Meigs's farm at Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and in 1971 she and Meigs moved to Brittany, where they spent four years. Blais's award-winning Francophone work includes Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1966), Les manucripts de Pauline Archange (1968), and Le sourd dans la ville (1979; translated in 1980 as Deaf to the City).

Born in Argentina, Borges was educated in Geneva, Switzerland. Upon completing his schooling, Borges returned to Buenos Aires in 1921. From 1939 to 1945 Borges worked as a librarian; and from 1955 to 1973 he worked as director of Biblioteca Nacional. From 1967 to 1968 Borges was the Elliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Primarily on the reputation of one book of stories — Labyrinths (1962) — Borges established his reputation as a masterful, highly original, and important writer. Borge's influential stories are unique in their erudition — Borges was a notorious bookworm who possessed an encyclopedic range of knowledge — and their challenging metafictional themes. His works include A Fever in Buenos Aires (1923), A Universal History of Infamy (1935), The Gardens of Forking Paths (1941), Doctor Brodie's Report (1970), The Book of Sand (1970), and A Borges Reader (1981).

Bowles was born in New York City. Acutely interested in music, he studied with composers Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. While traveling in Paris, Bowles became acquainted with Gertrude Stein and her circle of expatriates, who encouraged him to write. His works include The Sheltering Sky (1949), Next to Nothing (1976), Points in Time (1984), and A Distant Episode (1988). -760-

Born in Tacoma, Washington, Brautigan moved to San Francisco, where he became involved in the burgeoning Beat movement, before living in various locations in the Western states and Japan. Textual playfulness and whimsy characterize his extensive body of fiction. Trout Fishing in America created an international sensation when it appeared in 1967. Brautigan committed suicide in 1984. His novels include The Abortion: An Historical Romance (1966) and The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980).

Born in Philadelphia of a Quaker background, Brown was one of the first American professional authors. His writing career was brief, however, as economic pressures soon forced him to look elsewhere for his livelihood. Even so, he continued as editor and chief contributor to the Literary Magazine and American Review (1803-7) and to the American Register (1807-10). Brown was heavily influenced by the political and philosophical ideas of Thomas Jefferson and William Godwin, as demonstrated in his novels and in his treatise on the rights of women, Alcuin: A Dialogue (1798). His novels — Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (1799, 1800), Edgar Huntly (1799), Clara Howard (1801), and Jane Talbot (1801) — were the first to incorporate authentically American characters, settings, and concerns. Just as important, his works transform the supernatural conventions of the Gothic novel into close studies of psychological aberration.

A pioneering historian of African American history (The Black Man [1863]; The Rising Son [1874]), Brown was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and was perhaps the son of George Higgins, a white slaveholder. Raised in St. Louis, he was hired out for a time to the printshop of the St. Louis Times. In 1834 he escaped and, taking a job on a Lake Erie steamer, helped other fugitive slaves to freedom. Lacking formal schooling, he educated himself and in 1847 published his autobiographical Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave. -761- His novel Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (London, 1835) was released in the United States in an expurgated form as Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (1864).

Brownson was born in Stockbridge, Vermont. He was six years old when his father died, and he was raised by strictly Puritan relatives. he had almost no formal education, but he became a well-known liberal editor and helped to found the Workingmen's Party. His religious affiliations shifted from Presbyterianism to Universalism; he was for a time and itinerant preacher, then a Unitarian minister. His eventual conversion to Catholicism is recounted in The Convert (1857). His two novels are Charles Elwood; or, The Infidel Converted (1840) and The Spirit-Rapper (1854).

Born in Germany, Bukowski immigrated to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and still lives in southern California. Largely influenced by the irreverent rhythms and patterns of free association used by the Beat generation, Bukowski is an extraordinarily prolific writer of prose and poetry, authoring more than forty titles. These include Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960), Fire Station (1970), Post Office (1971), factotum (1975), Ham on Rye (1982), and Barfly (1984).

Burroughs was born in Chicago, graduated from the Michigan Military Academy, and served briefly with the Seventh Cavalry in Arizona. He held a variety of jobs, and even tried dredging for gold before the publication of his first science fiction story, Under the Moons of Mars (91912). Though Burroughs is best known as the creator of Tarzan, whose adventures he chronicled in twenty-four volumes, his many sci-fi novels include such familiar titles as The Warlord of Mars (1919) and At the Earth's Core (1922). -762-

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Burroughs attended Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico and began what was to be an extensive and diverse educational experience. From 1932 to 1936, Burroughs attended Harvard and majored in English; from 1936 to 1937 he attended medical school at the University of Vienna; and in 1938 he attended graduate school in anthropology at Harvard. In 1944 Burroughs settled in New York City and began a long association with various countercultural figures, including Beats Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Highly experimental, satiric, and demanding, Burroughs's fiction often draws upon his own experiences at the fringes of society. Burroughs's subjects include heroin addiction, homosexuality, and subversive politics. In 1962 he published Naked Lunch and 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled the book not obscene, following a long and controversial trial. His works include Nova Express (1964), The Ticket That Exploded (1967), The Wild Boys (1971), Exterminator! (1973), and The Place of Dead Roads (1983).

Cable was born in New Orleans, served in the Confederate Army, and was wounded twice. With little formal schooling, Cable set about a program of disciplined self-education, rising before daylight to study French. In 1873 his story "'Sieur George" was published in Scribner's Monthly. Between 1873 and 1879 other stories appeared in Scribner's and Appleton's, and in 1879 a collection of his Frenchdialect stories, Old Creole days, was published. His first novel, The Grandissimes, appeared the next year, to be followed by several more novels of the South and of Creole life. In 1885 Cable moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he lived for the rest of his life. Remembered today as a prominent figure of the local color movement, he was also a social and religious writer. His nonfiction work includes The Silent South (1885) and the Busy Man's Bible (1891). -763-

Capote was born in New Orleans. He attended the prestigious academies of the Trinity School and St. John's, but left school at the age of seventeen. Fascinated by New York theater, Capote worked at a number of locales before being employed by The New Yorker. As he grew older, and more self-parodic, Capote became the friend of celebrities and often received more attention as a personality than as an author. Capote's prose is both sensitive and nostalgic. His works include Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), Local Color (1950), The Grass Harp (1951), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), In Cold Blood (1966), and Answered Prayers (unfinished and posthumous, 1985).

Born in Havana, Cuba, to a Russian mother and a French father, Carpentier was a Cuban political prisoner in the early 1930s. Though he lived for many years outside his native country, mostly in Paris and in Caracas, Venezuela, Carpentier returned to Cuba in 1959, where he became a member of the Cuban Communist Party and the National Assembly. His novels!Ēcue-Yamba-e! (God Be Praised, begun in 1933 during his imprisonment and published in 1979), El acoso (1958; The Chase, 1989), El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral, 1963), and El recurso del método (Reasons of State, 1976), combine "magic realism" with strong critiques of political oppression. Carpentier died in 1980 in Paris.

Born in Clatskanie, Oregon, Carver attended California State University At Humbolt and later the University of Iowa. Despite his extensive teaching experience — at the universities of Iowa, Texas, California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz), and Syracuse — he persistently returned to the Pacific Northwest. Caver died in Port Angeles, Washington. Primarily a writer of short stories, Carver was also a poet of considerable talent. A self-avowed, recovered alcoholic, Carver explored the hidden vulnerabilities of character and exposed the revelatory aspects of ordinary experience. His works include Will You Please Be Quite, Please (1977), What We Talk About When We-764- Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1984), Fires, Essays, Poems and Stories (1984), and Where I'm Calling From (1986).

Chandler, who gained fame as a writer of "hard-boiled" detective fiction, was born in Chicago, educated in England, and moved to southern California in 1912. He began writing mystery stories when in his forties, and his first novel was The Big Sleep (1939), which introduced his famous detective, Philip Marlowe. It was an enormous success both as a novel and as a motion picture, as were Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943), and The Long Goodbye (1954), Chandler himself was a cultured man, yet he (like Dashiell Hammett, for whom he had the greatest respect) depicted the underside of life in the great metropolises. His essay on the writing of crime fiction is included in The Simple Art of Murder (1950).

Chavez is a native of New Mexico. The Last of the Menu Girls (1985) reflects her familiarity with the rhythms, language, and mythologies of the border regions, as well as Chavez's concern for the women of the Southwest.

Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, Cheever was educated in New England. He attended the well-known Thayer Academy, but was expelled at the age of seventeen. This expulsion formed the basis of Cheever's first story, "Expelled," which was published by the New Republic in 1930. Committed to a literary career, Cheever moved to New York City where he wrote book synopses for MGM. During World War II, Cheever served in the United States Army and then returned to what would become a successful literary career. Living in New England suburbia, Cheever exposed the painful and sometimes humorous truths that haunt upper-middle-class existence. The biographies that have appeared since Cheever's death suggest that his life, too, had hidden aspects. Alcoholism, familial strife, and sexual guilt were aspects of Cheever's own life, as well as themes in his fiction. His works -765- include The Way Some People Live (1943), The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953), The Wapshot Scandal (1964), The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), Bullet Park (1969), and Falconer (1978).

Chesnutt was born in Cleveland to free African American parents from North Carolina. Though largely self-taught, he worked variously as an educator, reporter, accountant, and attorney before embarking on a literary career. Though best known for his collections of short stories (The onjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, both 1899), and for his use of regional dialect in the manner of Joel Chandler Harris, Chesnutt also produced a biography of Frederick Douglass (1899) and published three novels during his lifetime. The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901) confront issues of racial identification and betrayal; The Colonel's Dream (1905) and another novel left unpublished at his death also center on the theme of racial injustice.

Born in Medford, Massachusetts, she was the sister of Unitarian minister Convers Francis. From 1825 to 1828 she taught school at Watertown, Massachusetts, where she established the Juvenile Miscellany (1826). In 1828 she married attorney David Lee Child. Both she and her husband were dedicated abolitionists, and in 1833 she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans; from 1840 to 1844 she was editor of The National Anti-Slavery Standard. In addition to her abolitionist activities, she was active in the causes of sex education and female suffrage. Though best known as an essayist, Child also wrote fictional works, including three historical romances: Hobomok (1824), The Rebels (1825), and Philothea (1836).

Born Katherine O'Flaherty, Chopin grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in an affluent Catholic family. She married Oscar Chopin at the age of -766- twenty and moved with him to Louisiana. When Chopin was thirtyfour her husband died, and she raised their children alone. During this period, Chopin began to write professionally, though her efforts at composition were always combined with child care duties. Chopin's work explores the contrasts between Northern and Southern sensibilities, as well as the continuous tension between creativity and domesticity that Chopin believed must necessarily mark the work of a woman artist. Chopin's first novel, At Fault (1860), was followed by a collection of short stories entitled Bayou Folk (1894). A second collection of short pieces of fiction, A Night in Acadie (1897), established Chopin's reputation as a representative of the local color movement. Creole culture and language and the visual landscape of Louisiana found expression in Chopin's fiction. While The Awakening (1899) is largely viewed today as Chopin's literary masterpiece, the book was widely condemned at the time of its publication. The morbid sensuality of Edna Pontellier and the novel's exploration of a new and more independent kind of woman led to its critical rejection. Both the fictional Edna Pontellier and Chopin herself languished in literary obscurity until the 1960s. An increasing sensitivity to the particular problems of the female artist and a renewed interest on the part of publishers in women writers led to a reexamination and reappraisal of Chopin's work. Frequently anthologized today, Chopin now appears to hold a secure place within American literary history.

Chu was born in a village just outside Canton, China. He moved to Newark, New Jersey, at the age of nine. He received his degree in English from New York University, and later served in the United States Army. Ironically, perhaps, Chu was stationed in Kunming in southeastern China. After the conclusion of World War II, Chu lived in New York City, operating a Chinatown record shop and working as the city's only Chinese disc jockey. Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) reflects Chu's concerns about the Asian American experience.

Born in Chicago, Cisneros is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Interested in the manner in which race and gen-767- der structure her own life, Cisneros explores these themes in poetry and stories that have been described as "international graffiti." Her books include Bad Boys (1980), The House on Mango Street (1985), and My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987).

The eleventh child of William and Elizabeth (Fenimore) Cooper, James Kent Cooper (he added Fenimore after his father's death) was born in Burlington, New Jersey, and spent his youth in the still wild country around Cooperstown, on Otsego Lake in New York, where he gained firsthand acquaintance with the Native Americans and the landscape that would be featured in his Leatherstocking tales. He attended Yale for two years, but a youthful prank resulted in his dismissal in 1806. A stint in the Navy proved dull; in 1811 he resigned and married Susan De Lancey, who bore him six children. A famous anecdote recounts the beginning of Cooper's literary career: dissatisfied with a novel he was reading, he declared that he could do better himself; his wife's challenge to do so resulted in his first book, Precaution (1820). Writing fired Cooper's imagination and sense of adventure, and his second novel (The Spy [1821]) was a success. In addition to the Leatherstocking tales, the best known of which are The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Deerslayer (1841), he was a prolific writer in a variety of modes, from historical romance to social satire, producing scholarly naval histories, a utopian allegory, and even a precursor of the mystery novel. He died on the eve of his sixty-second birthday, September 14, 1851.

Born in Iowa, Coover served in the United States Navy and later studied literature at the University of Chicago. Innovative and experimental, his postmodern fiction often collapses traditional narrative structure to help explore the breakdown of social conventions and values in American society. His novels include The Origin of the Brunists (1966), The Universal Baseball Association (1968), Spanking the Maid (1981), and Gerald's Party (1986). -768-

Crane, a native of Newark, New Jersey, attended Lafayette College and Syracuse University (a year each) before moving to New York City, where he earned a meager living as a free-lance reporter. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), was published with money borrowed from his brother, and was a financial failure, but it did impress Hamlin Garland, who brought it to the attention of William Dean Howells. Crane's masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, was published in 1895. Because of its brilliant depiction of war, Crane found himself in demand as a war correspondent. Returning from an assignment in Cuba, Crane was shipwrecked, an experience that resulted in The Open Boat (1897), but his health was broken, and he died before his twenty-ninth birthday.

Maria Susanna Cummins was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and was educated mainly at home by her father, a local judge. Her early stories appeared in various periodicals, most notably the Atlantic Monthly. In 1854 she published her first (and most popular) novel, The Lamplighter, the story of an orphan girl's struggle to independence. Cummins never married, and lived a quiet, domestic life with her family in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Her other novels include Mabel Vaughan (1857), El Fureidis (1860), and Haunted Hearts (1864).

Dana was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard Law School, and was a founder of the Free Soil Party. In his junior year at Harvard, his studies were interrupted when he contracted a case of measles that affected his eyesight. In an attempt to recoup his health, he signed onto the brig Pilgrim, bound for California, as an ordinary seaman. His narrative of the voyage, describing the hardships and discipline aboard ship, was published anonymously in 1840 as Two Years Before the Mast; in 1841 he published The Seaman's Friend, a manual of admiralty law. -769-

Born in Anderson, South Carolina, Davenport was educated at Duke, Oxford, and finally Harvard universities; he received his Ph.D. from the last in 1961. Presently a professor at the University of Kentucky, Davenport continues to write essays, reviews, poems, libretti, and what have been called "assemblages" — finely crafted short stories that merge history, myth, and sociopolitical themes along with Davenport's poetic and innovative voice. His works include Tatlin! (1974), Eclogues (1981), and Apples and Peas & Other Stories (1984).

Davies was born in Thamesville, Ontario, the son of a local newspaper publisher. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, in Kingston at Queen's University, and at Balliol College, Oxford, and has been variously an editor, educator, and dramatist as well as novelist. His novels include the Salterton trilogy, Tempest-tost (1951), Leaven of Malice (1954), and A Mixture of Frailties (1958), and the Deptford trilogy, Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975).

Born Rebecca Blaine Harding in Washington, Pennsylvania, she was largely self-educated, and began writing fiction while quite young. In 1861 her stories began to appear in the Atlantic Monthly, and in 1862 her first and most popular novel, Margret Howth, was published. In 1863 she married journalist L. Clarke Davis and moved to Philadelphia; she was herself an associate editor of the New York Tribune for several years. She was an early pioneer of the naturalistic style, exemplified in her famous short novel Life in the Iron Mills (1861). She was the mother of novelist Richard Harding Davis.

Davis's mother was writer Rebecca Harding Davis. He was born in Philadelphia, and achieved fame as a journalist, war correspondent, and editor of Harper's Weekly. His travels as a reporter provided -770- material for many collections of stories; in addition he wrote twentyfive plays and several novels, the best known of which is Soldiers of Fortune (1897), a love story set against the backdrop of a South American revolution.

Born a free African American in Charles Town, West Virginia, Delany was educated first by itinerant booksellers, briefly attended Harvard Medical School, and during the Civil War became the first African American major in the United States Army. In 1843 he established a newspaper, the Mystery; in 1852 he published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, advocating the creation of a free black state. His novel, Blake; or, The Huts of America, was serialized between 1859 and 1862, but was not published in book form until 1970.

Born in Harlem, New York, and educated in the Bronx, Delany has used metaphors of the city and ethnicity to shape his postmodern science fiction. Delany attended New York City College for two years. Highly influenced by the cultural dynamism of the 1960s, he dropped out of college to pursue a career as a writer. His first novel was finished in the same year (1962). Extraordinarily prolific, Delany numbers among his works The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Captives of the Flame (1963), The Towers of Toron (1964), The Einstein Intersection (1967), Dhalgren (1975), Triton (1976), and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984).

Didion has the unusual distinction of being from a family that has resided in California for several generations. Born outside Stockton in 1934, Didion inherited a Western sensibility that marks all of her prose. Didion is a stylist who attempts to construct narratives but is always aware that she works in a literary terrain wherein narration is necessarily a deconstructive act. Her fictional works include Run River (1963), Play It As It Lays (1970), A Book of Common Prayer-771- (1977), and Democracy (1984). Didion's essays have also received critical acclaim. Her nonfiction works include Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), and Salvador (1983). Didion now lives in New York City and has merged her postmodern perspective with her concern for global politics. She remains one of the strongest voices in contemporary literature.

Dixon was born in North Carolina, and was a Baptist minister before becoming a novelist. His novel The Clansman (1905) was part of a trilogy that included The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Traitor (1907), and was adapted for the silent screen by D. W. Griffith as The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Doig grew up in Montana where he later worked as a ranch-hand. His work chronicles in detail the development of the Montana highlands and places him in the arena of serious, contemporary Western writers. Doig's works include This House of Sky (1978), Winter Brothers (1980), The Sea Runners (1982), and a trilogy composed of English Creek (1984), Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987), and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana (1990).

Dos Passos's life was politically focused from its beginning. The son of a prominent Wall Street lawyer, Dos Passos attended Choate School, explored Europe, and went on to Harvard University, where he became committed to leftist politics. In 1917 Dos Passos went to France and volunteered as an ambulance driver. Deeply affected by the brutality and violence that he witnessed during World War I, Dos Passos increased his devotion to left-wing politics and socially committed fiction. His works include Three Soldiers (1920), Manhattan Transfer (1925), The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), The Big Money (1936), District of Columbia (1952), and Midcentury (1961). -772-

Douglass is best known for his autobiographical account of his enslaved youth and his subsequent escape from slavery. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) details Douglass's early life of bondage and his liberating discovery of his authorial voice. Douglass's work shows familiarity with previous texts concerning slavery and emancipation, but his book became the classic slave narrative, archetypal of its genre. The dates regarding Douglass's life are, by his own admission, unreliable, as slaves were not routinely provided with birth records. However, Douglass was born in Maryland, the son of a black slave woman and a free white male. After witnessing the dissolution of his family, the sexual abuse of his aunt, and beatings from his owners, Douglass escaped and made his way to New York in 1838. In 1841 Douglass attended an antislavery convention in Nantucket where he was "moved to speak," and he subsequently became involved in the abolitionist movement.

The son of former slaves, Dunbar was born and grew up in Dayton, Ohio. Both his parents had taught themselves to read, and his mother especially shared and nurtured her son's early love of poetry and literature. Dunbar attended public school in Dayton and graduated in 1891. He began to receive public attention in 1892, but not until 1896, when William Dean Howells gave his poetry a substantial and favorable review in Harper's Weekly, did he get the boost needed to establish his reputation. Dunbar produced four novels, The Uncalled (1896), The Love of Landry (1900), The Fanatics (1901), and finally, in 1902, The Sport of the Gods. While the first three books featured white protagonists, The Sport of the Gods, one of the first works of African American social protest, chronicled the aspirations, disillusionment, and ultimate disintegration of family life for newly freed slaves in the North as well as in the South.

Born in Brooklyn, Eastlake worked his way west following World War II. While exploring the rugged Jemez Mountains of New Mex-773- New Mex-, Eastlake developed a strong sense of the Western landscape, which pervades such novels as Go in Beauty (1956), The Bronc People (1958), and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963). During the 1960s Eastlake served as a correspondent in Vietnam and wrote The Bamboo Bed (1969) based on his experiences.

Born in Oklahoma and named for Ralph Waldo Emerson as testimony to his parents' hope that their son would possess a literary sensibility, Ellison was reared to have both aesthetic and social concerns. At an early age Ellison accompanied his mother when she worked on civil rights projects. By the time of his adolescence Ellison was a skilled cornet player, and he studied music at the Tuskegee Institute. Ellison later moved to New York City where he was befriended by Richard Wright, and, under his tutelage, became active in the Federal Writers' Project. Invisible Man (1952), Shadow and Act (1964), and Going to the Territory (1986) all reflect Ellison's concerns with African American consciousness, aesthetics, and music.

Born in North Dakota, and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe, Erdrich witnessed at an early age both the imperiled condition of the American West and the problematic state of the reservation Native American. Erdrich served briefly as editor of The Circle, a Native American news journal. She now lives in New Hampshire, but her works reflect a continuing interest in Native American culture and the development of the West. Her works include Jacklight (1984), Love Medicine (1984), and The Beet Queen (1986).

Evans was born near Columbus, Georgia, and was educated almost entirely at home by her mother. Upon the failure of her father's business, the family moved to Texas and then, in 1949, to Mobile, Alabama. In 1868 she married Lorenzo Madison Wilson, a rich Mobile businessman. Evans's novels — pious, sentimental, and erudite — have -774- been frequently, and at times unfairly, ridiculed. She is chiefly remembered for her phenomenally popular St. Elmo (1866), which sold over a million copies. Her other novels include Inez: A Tale of the Alamo (1855), Beulah (1859), Macaria (1863), Vashti (1869), Infelice (1875), and At the Mercy of Tiberius (1887).

Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, but moved to Oxford early in his youth. He would maintain a home there for most of his adult life. After serving in the Royal British Air Force during World War I, attending the University of Mississippi, and taking a tour of Europe, Faulkner turned his attention to literature. His early novels brought him critical recognition, but it was the self-consciously provocative Sanctuary (1931) that brought Faulkner fame. In 1950 Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Plagued by alcoholism and marital discord, Faulkner continued to be a highly prolific author. He also worked briefly — and unhappily — as a Hollywood screenwriter. Returning to the South, Faulkner taught at the University of Virginia. Acclaimed as one of the greatest of twentiethcentury American writers, Faulkner explores the corrupt and sometimes sinister structure of familial and Southern life in his fiction, as well as the way race and social class operate within that structure. Much of his work details the intrigues and dramas of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County and the antics of the nearly mythical Snopes family. Faulkner's numerous works include The Marble Faun (1924), Soldier's Pay (1926), Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1933), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), Requiem for a Nun (1951), and The Reivers (1962).

Faust was born in Seattle, Washington, and died in Italy while working as a war correspondent for Harper's. His Western novels (Destry Rides Again [1930]; Singing Guns [1938]; Danger Trail [1940]) were written under the pseudonym Max Brand. As Walter C. Butler he wrote crime fiction, and under his own name he published spy novels. -775- Other works of his include a volume of poetry (The Village Street and Other Poems [1922]) and Calling Dr. Kildare (1940).

Willis, best known under her pen name of Fanny Fern, was born in Portland, Maine, but was raised in the Boston area and attended Catharine Beecher's school in Hartford, Connecticut. Her first marriage, to Charles H. Eldredge (1837), appears to have been a happy one, but his death in 1846 left her with two children to support, which she attempted to do first through teaching and needlework, and then through the satirical essays (collected in Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio [1853, 1854]) that eventually brought her fame and fortune as a newspaper columnist. In 1849 she married Samuel P. Farrington, from whom she was divorced three years later; in 1856 she married James Parton. Her first novel, Ruth Hall (1855), contains an unflattering portrait of her brother, Nathaniel Parker Willis; the second (Rose Clark [1856]) features two heroines, one an abandoned wife, the other a divorcée.

Born in Chillicothe, Ohio, and educated in South Bend, Indiana, and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Martha Finley (under the pseudonym Martha Farquharson) produced approximately one hundred children's novels, and is chiefly remembered today as the creator of Elsie Dinsmore, a heroine whose life is chronicled in twenty-eight volumes of the Elsie books, 1868–1905. Finley never married, and lived a quiet, domestic existence in Elkton, Maryland, from 1876 until her death at the age of eighty.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, into a moderately wealthy family. He entered Princeton University in 1913, but left in his senior year and entered the United States Army. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre, and his first novel, This Side of Paradise (set at Princeton), was published. It caught the restless spirit of the times, and for several years Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were the darlings of -776- the "Jazz Age" — the name that he gave to the 1920s. During the twenties, his stories appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and Scribner's, and were collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and All the Sad Young Men (1926). Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, was published in 1925, but from that point on his life and career became increasingly troubled. Tender Is the Night (1934) reflects the tragedy of Zelda's breakdown, but Fitzgerald also suffered from physical and emotional problems. His experiences as a Hollywood screenwriter were the source materials for The Last Tycoon, which, though unfinished at Fitzgerald's death, was published posthumously in 1941.

Born in Milton, New York, Foote was schooled as an artist and illustrator. In 1876 Foote married and moved west with her husband to California. As the wife of a miner and engineer, Foote traveled through much of the Western territory; she became particularly conversant with the terrain of California, Nevada, and Colorado. Her experiences are documented in her own Westerns — novels about the West but constructed from a female sensibility. Her works include The Chosen Valley (1892), The Led-Horse Claim (1895), and Coeur D'Alene (1895).

Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and currently lives in New Orleans and in western Montana. Ford's neorealistic novels and stories reflect the rural topology of these regions — as well as the terrain of other Western states. Ford's novels include A Piece of My Heart (1976) and, most recently, Wildlife (1990).

Hannah (Webster) Foster was the daughter of a successful Boston merchant. In 1785 she married the Reverend John Foster of Brighton, Massachusetts, and bore him two daughters. Her novel, The Coquette, was published in 1797. This story of seduction was immediately popular, perhaps partly because of its basis in factual events. -777- She died in Montreal, where she had lived with her daughters following her husband's death.

Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, and lived there until 1902, when she married and moved to New Jersey. She is best known for her local color stories, collected in A Humble Romance (1887), A New England Nun (1891), and Edgewater People (1918). Her novels include Jane Field (1893); a historical novel, The Heart's Highway (1900); and The Portion of Labor (1901). In addition, she wrote a play dealing with the Salem witchcraft trials, Giles Corey (1893), and a collection of supernatural tales, The Wind in the Rosebush (1903).

Mexican author Carlos Fuentes was born in Panama City, Panama, the son of a career diplomat. As a result, his youth was exceptionally cosmopolitan. He attended the Colegio de Mexico and received a law degree from the National University of Mexico before studying economics at the Institute of Higher International Studies at Geneva, Switzerland. Fuentes's first novel was the experimental La región más transparente (1958; Where the Air Is Clear, 1960). Other major works include La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964); Cambio de piel (1967; A Change of Skin, 1968); and Terra Nostra (1975; English translation, 1976). In addition to his career as a novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist, Fuentes has held a number of governmental appointments, including that of Mexican Ambassador to France (1974-77), and he continues to be active as critic, lecturer, and political essayist.

García Márquez, Colombian-born novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, studied journalism and law at the University of Bogota and worked as reporter and foreign correspondent in Colombia, Europe, Venezuela, and the United States from 1950 to 1965. During the 1960s he lived in Mexico, where he wrote Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), a masterpiece of the -778- peculiarly Latin American style known as "magic realism." In 1975 he published El otoña del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976), also highly acclaimed, and in 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. From 1967 to 1975, García Márquez made his home in Barcelona, Spain; more recently he divides his time between his native Colombia and his residence in Mexico City. A recent novel is El amor en los tiempos de cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988), and he continues to be an influential voice in the leftist press.

Gardner was a practicing California attorney who, though he wrote many novels under several pseudonyms, is most famous as the creator of defense attorney and sleuth Perry Mason, whose long life in print began with The Case of the Velvet Claws in 1933. Gardner also produced a series of crime-detection novels centered on the figure of district attorney Douglas Selby, who first appears in The D. A. Calls It Murder (1937).

Born in Batavia, New York, Gardner grew up on a small farm and enjoyed the rhythms of a bucolic existence that would later flavor some of his fiction. Gardner attended DePauw University and Washington University in St. Louis, graduating in 1955. Increasingly intrigued by medieval literature, Gardner completed his graduate work at Iowa State University, receiving his doctorate degree in 1958. Despite his traditional academic direction, Gardner submitted a novel (The Old Men) as his dissertation. While teaching, Gardner not only engaged in writing criticism but also produced fiction and poetry. In 1966 he published The Resurrection; this novel was followed by a series of works that probed the past — Gardner's personal past and the world's more mythic history. Gardner continued to teach medieval literature at a number of institutions, including Oberlin College, California State University at San Francisco, and Bennington College. He also chaired the creative writing program at SUNY/ Binghamton. Gardner died in a motorcycle accident at the age of forty-nine. His works include The Wreckage of Agathon (1970), Grendel (1971), -779- The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), Nickel Mountain (1973), Jason and Medeia (1973), The King's Indian (1974), October Light (1978), On Moral Fiction (1978), Mickelsson's Ghosts (1982), and On Becoming a Novelist (1983).

Garland was born on a Wisconsin farm and grew up under the hardships of life on the prairies; his parents moved to Iowa and then the Dakota Territory trying to earn a living. He went to Boston in 1884, worked, and educated himself in the public library. In 1892 he published Main-Travelled Roads, bitter stories of life in the Middle West. This work and the many novels, stories, and autobiographies that followed brought financial success and critical acclaim.

Born in Fargo, North Dakota, and later trained in philosophy at Cornell University, Gass writes highly idiosyncratic, stylized fiction that merges experimentalism with familiar rural images of traditional American literature. Gass has lived in St. Louis since 1929 and teaches at Washington University. His works include Omensetter's Luck (1966), In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), The World Within the Word (1978), The First Winter of My Married Life (1979), and Habitations of the Word (1985).

Gilman was raised by her mother in Hartford, Connecticut. Trained as an art teacher, Gilman married a fellow artist, Charles Stetson. Following the birth of her daughter, Gilman suffered a bout with depression that forms the basis for her story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). Gilman subsequently divorced her first husband and married George Gilman, a cousin who shared her developing feminist perspective. Gilman's essays and speeches made her a significant member in the suffrage movement; she addressed the International Suffrage Convention in 1913 and the Woman's Peace Party in 1915. Her works, once out of print, have found renewed critical attention. They include -780- Women and Economics (1898), Human Work (1904), Man-Made World (1911), and the utopian Herland (1915).

Born in Zanesville, Ohio, Grey had a successful dental practice, but by 1904 he found this vocation tedious. He began to write Westerns and in 1908 he published The Last of the Plainsmen. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) established Grey as a popular success. Authoring more than sixty books, Grey traveled back and forth across the desert. He died at his home in Altadena, California. His works include The Border Region (1916), The Man of the Forest (1920), The Call of the Canyons (1924), The Thundering Herd (1925), Arizona (1934), The Code of the West (1934), An American Angler in Australia (1937), and Black Mesa (1955).

Griggs was born in Texas, where he attended Bishop College before entering the Richmond Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1893. His career as a Baptist minister spanned three decades. Griggs's novels include Imperium in Imperio (1899), about an independent African American state within the United States; Unfettered (1902); and The Hindered Hand; or, The Reign of the Repressionist (1905). Griggs's racial and political views are detailed in Wisdom's Call (1911) and Guide to Racial Greatness (1923).

Alfred Bertram Guthrie, Jr. was born in Indiana, grew up in Montana, and graduated from Montana State University (1923) before moving to Kentucky, where he was a journalist for twenty years. His first novel was The Big Sky (1947); he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1950 for The Way West (1949). The story of westward migration is continued in These Thousand Hills (1956).

Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born in Connecticut. His experiences as a Pinkerton detective in San Francisco provided background ma-781- terial for a new kind of crime writing, the "hard-boiled" school of detective fiction, exemplified in The Maltese Falcon (1930), which featured the tough, cynical Sam Spade. In 1932 Hammett published The Thin Man, introducing the witty, urbane Nick Charles to the canon of famous fictional detectives. Other major works include Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (both 1929) and The Glass Key (1931). While working as a scriptwriter during the era of the Hollywood "blacklist," Hammett was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities; his refusal to testify resulted in a prison sentence.

Born in Stamford, Connecticut, Hawkes was reared and educated in New England, graduating from Harvard University in 1949. Hawkes has taught at a number of prestigious institutions, including Harvard, MIT, and Brown. Hawkes's fiction explores phenomena that seem at odds with his well-bred background. He is always aware of the horror that hovers beneath conventional life. His works include The Cannibal (1949), The Beetle Leg (1951), The Goose on the Grave and The Owl (1954), The Lime Twig (1961), Second Skin (1964), The Personal Voice (1964), Innocence in Extremis (1984), and Whistlejacket (1988).

Descended from Major William Hathorne, one of the original Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, where another of his ancestors, Major Hathorne's son John, had been one of the judges during the Salem witchcraft trials. At Bowdoin College, Hawthorne was a classmate of Franklin Pierce, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Horatio Bridge. In 1841 he participated briefly in an experimental utopian community, Brook Farm, which provided material for The Blithedale Romance (1852). In 1842 he married Sophia Peabody, with whom he had three children, and in 1846 he was appointed surveyor at the Salem Custom House, which figures in his introductory essay to The Scarlet Letter. He lost this position in 1849 owing to a change of administrations. However, with the publication of The Scarlet Letter-782- in 1850, his literary reputation was firmly established. Hawthorne was a reclusive man, but his work and his character drew many admirers, among them Herman Melville, who was a regular visitor while Hawthorne was working on The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and who dedicated Moby-Dick to him. His campaign biography of Pierce (1852) won him the consulship at Liverpool. He resigned in 1857, and traveled through France to Rome. The Marble Faun (1860) was the last novel completed before his death on May 19, 1864. Hawthorne's allegorical characters and symbolic mode were tools in an ongoing exploration of the human conscience; his short stories helped to establish the genre and, with his novels, are among the classics of American literature.

Hearn was born in Greece, attended school in France and England, and came to the United States in 1869. He worked as a reporter in Cincinnati, New Orleans, and New York. In 1884 he published his first book, Stray Leaves from Strange Literature, translations from Théophile Gautier. His fascination with Oriental literature and the exotic led to Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), and his travels for Harper's resulted in Two Years in the French West Indies (1890). In 1890 he sailed for Japan, never to return. There he obtained a teaching job, married, and, under the name Koizumi Yakumo, became a Japanese citizen. During the remainder of his life he wrote extensively about his adopted home.

Heller was born and educated in Brooklyn, New York. He later attended Columbia University and then worked in the theater and television. During World War II, Heller served in the United States Army Air Force and later satirized his experiences in Catch-22 (1961). A writer of plays and fiction, Heller turned to teaching. Heller has emerged as a major parodic force in American literature. His works include Something Happened (1974), Good as Gold (1979), God Knows (1984), No Laughing Matter (1986), and Picture This (1988). -783-

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of a doctor with a fondness for fishing and camping, Hemingway worked briefly as a journalist and then volunteered as an ambulance driver for the Italian front in World War I. Hemingway was severely wounded, an experience that informed much of his subsequent fiction. Befriended by Gertrude Stein in postwar Paris, Hemingway became a part of the literary group that would later be characterized as the "Lost Generation." He gave voice to this generation in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Structured around the masculine pursuits of bullfighting, hunting, fishing, boxing, and war, Hemingway's novels often project the sometimes ironic image of the warrior-writer. Hemingway's life resembled his fiction; sojourns in Paris, Spain, Africa, Cuba, and finally Idaho are reflected in his books. Suffering from depression, alcoholism, and suspected mental illness, Hemingway shot himself through the head, using the same shotgun that his father had used to commit suicide years before. Hemingway's many works include A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and the Sea (1953), and the posthumously published Garden of Eden (1985).

Hopkins was born in Portland, Maine, but grew up in Boston, where she attended public school. She was an actress, singer, and playwright as well as a novelist and short-story writer, editor, and essayist. Her first novel was Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900). Three other novels (Hagar's Daughter [1901-2]; Winona [1902]; Of One Blood [1902-3]) were serialized in The Colored American Magazine.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Horgan grew up there and in New Mexico, and much of his fiction is set in the Southwest. His devout Catholicism sets the tone for many of his works, including the trilogy composed of Things as They Are (1964), Everything to Live For (1968), and The Thin Mountain Air (1977). He won a Pulitzer Prize -784- for his history of the Rio Grande (Great River [1954]) and for his biography of a pioneer bishop, Lamy of Santa Fe (1975).

Howells was born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, and as a boy worked in his father's printing office. What Howells lacked in formal education (he had very little) he made up in diligent self-application both in and out of the printing office. His campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln (1860) won him an appointment as United States consul at Venice (1861-65). In Paris in 1862 he married Elinor Meade; they returned to the United States in 1865, where Howells associated himself first with the New York Times and The Nation, then in 1866 with the Atlantic Monthly, where he was editor in chief from 1872 until 1881. During this time and afterward, in his long association with Harper's Monthly, Howells exerted a strong and beneficent influence on American letters, promoting the work of many promising young artists, including Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Robert Herrick, as well as Samuel Clemens and Henry James. A prolific essayist, reviewer, critic, and novelist, Howells best expressed his own realistic style in such works as A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Indian Summer (1886), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). In his later years Howells received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Oxford universities, and he was the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a post he held until his death.

Born in Florida, Hurston graduated from Howard University and studied anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. In New York City in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, she began publishing stories. Her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, was published in 1934, followed by her best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937. Despite her fine early writings, Hurston fell into obscurity and poverty; she suffered a stroke in October 1959 and died in January 1960, to be buried in an unmarked grave at Fort Pierce, Florida. -785-

Irving was born in New York City, youngest of eleven children. His health was delicate and he did not attend university; he did, however, gain fame as essayist, historian, biographer, and humorist, producing such works as the satirical A History of New York (by "Diedrich Knickerbocker," 1809) and The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820), containing such classics as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." He served as secretary of the United States legation in London (1829-32), as minister to Spain (1842-45), but declined opportunities to become mayor of New York, a United States Congressman, or Secretary of the Navy.

Born Helen Maria Hunt, in Amherst, Massachussets, Jackson was a poet and a friend of Emily Dickinson, who may be the subject of her novel Mercy Philbrick's Choice (1876). Her indictment of the United States government's policy toward Native Americans is conveyed in A Century of Dishonor (1881) and in her historical romance Ramona (1884), her most popular work, and the direct result of her participation in a governmental investigation of the plight of the California Mission Indians. The "Ramona Pageant" is still acted annually outof-doors in its historical locale, near Hemet, California.

Jacobs escaped from slavery, but freedom proved illusory. Jacobs was hidden in a small, windowless shed located off her grandmother's cabin. Incredibly, she remained concealed for seven years, before finally making her way to New York. Jacobs's autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) describes her experiences. Originally published under the pseudonym Linda Brent, Jacobs's narrative was for many years attributed to her editor, Lydia Maria Child. Recent scholarship has discounted these claims, and Jacobs's account is today considered to be a major work in the canon of slave narratives. -786-

Henry James, Jr., was born in New York City, the second son of Henry James, Sr., noted American religious philosopher, and younger brother of William James, pioneering psychological researcher. The James children received a various and dauntlessly experimental education on both sides of the Atlantic. Early immersion in European culture resulted in Henry's lifelong ambivalence toward his own American origins, and many of his best-known works — The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), The Portrait of a Lady (1881) — deal with the conflicts between American and European values, customs, and character. A partial list of his novels includes such famous titles as Washington Square (1881), The Bostonians (1886), The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Awkward Age (1899), The Sacred Fount (1901), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). He was a prolific writer of short stories ("The Beast in the Jungle"; "The Figure in the Carpet"), criticism ("The Art of Fiction"), biography (Nathaniel Hawthorne; W. W. Story), and cultural essays (The American Scene [1907]) as well. James lived in England from 1876 until his death; in sympathy with the British cause during World War I, he became a British citizen in 1915. During his lifetime his reputation prospered and declined, but today he is highly respected as an early master of psychological realism, formal structure, and narrative ambiguity, as well as for his ability to convey the nuances of human emotion and human consciousness.

Raised in the village of South Berwick, Maine, Jewett wrote fiction that frequently drew upon her rural experiences. A lifelong New Englander, Jewett died in the same house in which she was born. In the 1880s Jewett began a lifelong relationship with Annie Fields and together they established a literary center in Boston. Influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe and the previous generation of women writers, Jewett's work combined a sensitivity to the rural environment with an interest in a female community and sensibility. Jewett's books include Deephaven (1877), A Country Doctor (1884), A White-787- Heron and Other Stories (1886), and the celebrated The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).

Raised in Robinson, Illinois, Jones was educated at the University of Hawaii and was then stationed in Hawaii during World War II. A boxer, Jones participated in Golden Glove tournaments. He received a National Book Award for From Here to Eternity (1951), a work that was made into a successful film. Other works include Some Came Running (1958), The Pistol (1959), The Thin Red Line (1962), and Go to the Widow-Maker (1967).

Kingston was born in New York City, the child of first-generation Chinese immigrants. She grew up in Stockton, California, where she witnessed the restricted life of the Asian American woman. In her autobiographical The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) and China Men (1980), Kingston incorporated Chinese myth, family history, and personal experience, exploring and articulating the previously repressed voices of Stockton's Chinatown. Her most recent work is Tripmaster Monkey (1989).

Caroline (Stansbury) Kirkland was born in New York City, but with her husband, Samuel Kirkland, moved in the 1830s to the frontier town of Detroit. Their experiences as early settlers of Pinckney, Michigan, supplied material for A New Home — Who'll Follow? (1839, published under the pseudonym Mrs. Mary Clavers, reissued in 1874 as Our New Home in the West), a humorous exposé of pioneer life. In 1843 the family returned to New York, where she continued to write and was active in various social reform movements. She was the mother of novelist Joseph Kirkland.

Kogawa was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. During World War II the family was moved, along with other Canadians of Japa-788- nese descent, to the interior, an experience that provided the material for her novel Obasan (1981). Her volumes of poetry include The Splintered Moon (1968), A Choice of Dreams (1974), and Jericho Road (1978).

Laurence was born Jean Margaret Wemys in Neepawa, Manitoba. She was educated at the University of Manitoba and in 1950 married Jack Laurence, whose work as an engineer took them to Africa, the setting of her novel This Side Jordan (1960). Her best-known work is a series of novels set in the fictional town of Manawaka, including A Jest of God (1966), winner of a Governor General's Award and adapted for the screen as Rachel, Rachel.

Le Guin was born in California, daughter of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and writer Theodora Kroeber (author of Ishi of Two Worlds); In the 1960s Le Guin began her professional writing career, publishing her first stories primarily in science fiction magazines. Le Guin's fiction predominantly engages feminist issues and themes, and often combines images from fantasy and science fiction in highly original ways. Her works include A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Language of the Night (1979), and The Compass Rose (1982).

Lippard was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Philadelphia. He prepared for and rejected careers in both the Methodist ministry and the law; he was more successful as a journalist, but had to give up that profession owing to poor health. His fiction falls into the disparate categories of historical romance and urban expose; the best known of his books is The Monks of Monk Hall (1844), later entitled The Quaker City, a sensational novel exposing vice in Philadelphia. His reputation was that of a radical and an eccentric; he was a friend of Edgar Allan Poe and may possibly have had some influence on Poe's writing. -789-

Born in the Ukraine to Russian parents, Lispector was only two months old when her family arrived in Brazil. She began composing stories at the age of six; she worked as an editor at the Agencia Nacional while attending the National Faculty of Law in Rio de Janeiro, from which she graduated in 1943 at the age of eighteen. That year she finished her first novel, Perto do coracão selvagem (1944; Near to the Wild Heart, 1990), and married. Her husband was a career diplomat, whose work took them abroad for a number of years, but in 1959 the couple separated and Lispector, with her two children, returned to Rio to settle permanently. Her literary reputation was established in 1961 with the publication of her second novel, A macã no escuro (The Apple in the Dark, 1986).

John Griffith (Jack) London was born in San Francisco, grew up on the Oakland waterfront, and quit school at the age of fourteen. After a youthful career as an oyster-poacher, he joined a sealing expedition, roamed throughout the United States and Canada, studied briefly at the University of California, and in 1897 joined the rush for Klondike gold. He did not strike it rich in the gold fields, but his collection of Yukon stories, Son of the Wolf, appeared in 1900, establishing his reputation as a skillful and energetic storyteller. His novels reflect his interest in both the individual's struggle against civilized society (The Call of the Wild [1903]; The Sea Wolf [1904]) and the struggle of the lower classes against oppression (The Iron Heel [1908]; The Valley of the Moon [1913]). These concerns are also echoed in his autobiographical novel, Martin Eden (1909).

Born in Chicago, Lurie was educated in the East, where she continues to live. After graduating from Radcliffe in 1947, Lurie was employed as a ghostwriter and also wrote a variety of critical pieces. A parent, Lurie combines an interest in children's literature with a keen awareness of language and critical issues. Her works include The Nowhere-790- City (1965), Imaginary Friends (1967), The Language of Clothes (1981), and Foreign Affairs (1984).

Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. At sixteen Mailer graduated from Boys High School and entered Harvard University. He majored in aeronautical engineering, but was increasingly drawn to literary discourse. Mailer graduated in 1943 and was drafted into the United States Army in 1944. He served for eighteen months in the Philippines and in Japan. Controversy and charges of blatant sexism have surrounded Mailer. His penchant for the outrageous statement, his frequent fistfights, as well as the nonfatal stabbing of his second wife, Adele Morales (he has been married six times), have all contributed to his provocateur status. In 1967 Mailer was arrested for civil disobedience during a march on the Pentagon, and in 1969 he ran (unsuccessfully) for mayor of New York City. The themes that mark Mailer's life can also be clearly discerned in his fiction. His numerous works include The Naked and the Dead (1948), Barbary Shore (1951), The Deer Park (1955), The White Negro (1958), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), The Armies of the Night (1968), The Prisoner of Sex (1971), Marilyn (1973), The Executioner's Song (1979), Ancient Evenings (1983), and Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984).

Maillet was born and grew up in the Acadian or Cajun community of Bouctouche, New Brunswick. Both her parents were teachers, and Maillet worked her way through university, alternately teaching and studying. She received an M.A. from the College Saint-Joseph de Memramcook in 1959, after which she studied at the University of Montreal, and in 1970 received a doctorate from Laval University, where she studied folklore. While her best-known work to date is the novel Pelagie-la-Charrette (1979; translated in 1982 as Pelagie: The Return to a Homeland), she has authored more than a dozen plays in addition to her fiction and scholarly works. -791-

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Malamud graduated from Erasmus High School and the City College of New York, and eventually received a Master's degree at Columbia University. During the 1940s Malamud taught evening classes at Erasmus High and Harlem Evening High School, while working at the craft of writing. Malamud's artful and comic fiction often draws upon his urban experience, particularly in its evocation of the speech and mannerisms of workingclass, recently immigrated Jews. His works include The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), A New Life (1961), and The Stories of Bernard Malamud (1983).

Originally christened Feike Feikema, Manfred was born in Rock Township, Doon, Iowa. A former roustabout, factory hand, and gas station attendant, Manfred transforms his experiences into lyrical evocations of Midwestern life. Manfred avoids the literary arenas of New York City and Los Angeles, and continues to live in the Midwest. Among his books are Lord Grizzly (1954), Wanderlust (1962), and Green Earth (1977).

Born and largely reared in Brooklyn, New York, Marshall is the child of black immigrants from Barbados, West Indies. Marshall herself traveled to Barbados at the age of nine, and this trip proved to be highly influential in the shaping of her identity and aesthetics. Shortly after this expedition, Marshall's father left home to follow Father Divine in Harlem. Alone with her mother and other West Indian women, Marshall was constantly exposed to dialect and to African legend. Marshall graduated from Brooklyn College and later worked as a journalist. Intent on creating a pan-African sensibility, Marshall based her politics and literature on a revival of black cultural history, Her works include Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1979), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), and Merle (1985). -792-

Listed on the Osage tribal roll, Mathews was reared in Oklahoma. After serving as a flight instructor during World War I, Mathews returned to Pawhusks, Oklahoma, where he watched the exploitation and corruption of Native Americans and the fading away of traditional tribal life. Mathews's works reflect the Native American experience and include Wah' Kon-tah: The Osage and the White Man's Road (1929) and Sundown (1934).

Born in Seattle, Washington, McCarthy worked as a book reviewer in New York, after attending Forest Ridge Convent in Seattle, Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma, and Vassar College. McCarthy's work as a critic and fiction writer reflects her shrewd wit, a willingness to surprise her reader, and an acute political consciousness. Her works include Venice Observed (1950), Theater Chronicles, 1937–1962 (1963), The Group (1963), and Hanoi (1968).

McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia, and was educated at Columbia University. Her original intent had been to study music at the Juilliard School of Music, but a financial accident prevented her enrollment. McCullers married, divorced, and remarried Reeves McCullers, a man who suffered from severe alcoholism and who committed suicide in 1953. McCullers herself was chronically ill from what is now believed to have been rheumatic fever. The distress and the loneliness suggested by McCullers's biography are mirrored in her works, which include The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), and Clock Without Hands (1961).

A dedicated sportsman and Westerner, McGuane writes fiction that recalls earlier male modernist writers, in particular Ernest Hemingway. McGuane, however, employs Western themes and tropes to -793- achieve an ironic and highly individual vision of the West. Having exorcised the excesses of his earlier life, McGuane presently lives in Montana and raises cutting horses. Elegant, poetic, and funny, McGuane's fiction often powerfully evokes a sense of place. His works include The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwacked Piano (1971), Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973), Panama (1978), An Outside Chance (1980), Nobody's Angel (1982), Something to Be Desired (1984), To Skin a Cat (1986), and Keep the Change (1989).

Born in Clarendon Hills, Jamaica, McKay immigrated to the United States as a college student. He was awarded, by the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, a scholarship to study agriculture at Tuskegee Institute. McKay left college for New York City where he worked for such political journals as The Liberator. Poet and novelist, McKay became closely associated with the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance. Like many of his generation, McKay wandered through Europe as an expatriate during the years between the world wars. He returned to the United States and died in Chicago. His works include Songs of Jamaica (1919), Harlem Shadows (1922), Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), Gingertown (1932), Banana Bottom (1933), and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940).

Melville was born into a well-established family in New York City, where his father was a successful merchant. However, the business had failed and the family was heavily in debt when the father died in 1832. Melville, third oldest of eight children, left school to help support the family, and in 1837 he went to sea. His first novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were based upon his sea adventures, and were popular and acclaimed. His next book, Mardi (1849), was more philosophical and less successful. Next came Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1840), works that appealed to a wider audience. Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick (1851), proved too challenging for most readers; he followed it with the highly complex Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852) and The Confidence-Man (1857), both financial failures. To earn money, he published more accessible short -794- fiction in Harper's Monthly and Putnam's Monthly Magazine, some of which (including "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno") was collected in The Piazza Tales (1856), and a serialized historical novel, Israel Potter (1855). He published no further novels after 1857, and worked for the rest of his life as an officer in the New York Custom House. He did publish poetry, most notably BattlePieces (1866) and Clarel (1876), and in his last years returned to fiction with Billy Budd, Sailor, which was left unfinished at his death in 1891 and first published in 1924.

Millhauser was born in New York City and grew up in Connecticut. After working as a copywriter in New York, Millhauser studied medieval and Renaissance literature at Brown University from 1968 to 1971. These disparate influences find their way into Millhauser's satiric, demanding, and often parodic fiction, which often focuses on the banality, strangeness, and violence of ordinary life. Millhauser's most famous novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972), has been favorably compared to Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. Other works include Portrait of a Romantic (1977).

Mitchell was a native of Georgia, the setting of her only novel, Gone with the Wind, the best-selling romantic saga of the Civil War and Reconstruction. A former feature writer, she spent a decade (much of it bedridden) writing Gone with the Wind, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1936, and which was adapted for the screen in 1939 (the screen rights were sold for $50,000 only one month after publication). Mitchell was struck by an automobile on an Atlanta street and died in that city in 1949.

Born in Lawton, Oklahoma, an heir to both Cherokee and Kiowa Indian culture, Momaday attended both reservation parochial and public schools, and eventually attended the University of New Mex-795- University of New Mex-. He later received a Ph.D. from Stanford University and commenced his teaching career. Like his life, Momaday's work seeks to bridge the Native American and non-Native American worlds. His House Made of Dawn (1968) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. His works include The Journey of Tai-Me — Retold Kiowa Indian Folktales (1968), The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), The Gourd Dancer (1976), and The Names: A Memoir (1976).

Born in San Francisco, Mori has spent his entire life in the California Bay area, except for the three years he spent in the Japanese relocation camp in Topaz Center, Utah. During this period, Mori wrote for and edited the camp magazine Trek. Mori had a brief career as a professional baseball player with the Chicago Cubs. He quit baseball in order to assist his parents, and began to write about the people in Chinatown, Oakland, and San Leandro. Yokohama, California (1949) details the experience of the Japanese Americans in California. Frequently anthologized, Mori has authored numerous short stories and has a number of manuscripts for novels that are, as yet, unpublished. His works include Woman from Hiroshima (1978) and The Chauvinist and Other Stories (1979).

Morris was born in Nebraska, and though he moved to California in 1961, the Midwest is the setting for many of his novels. These include The Inhabitants (1946), The Works of Love (1952), Love Among the Cannibals (1957), A Life (1973), and Plains Song (1980), which won an American Book Award. Morris's excellent photography appears in some of his books: The Inhabitants, The Home Place (1948), God's Country and My People (1968).

Born in the industrial town of Lorain, Ohio, Morrison claims to have grown up in an environment relatively free of discrimination. In 1953 she graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and went on to earn a Master's degree from Cornell University. She is -796- presently a New Yorker. Morrison's innovative and lyrical fiction often integrates images from her rural upbringing with the sometimes disturbing realities of the minority urban experience. Her novels include Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Tar Baby (1981).

Born in the Czarist Russian city of St. Petersburg, Nabokov immigrated with his family after the Russian Revolution to London and Berlin. During his long, cosmopolitan life, Nabokov lived variously in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, Nabokov taught at Wellesley College and Cornell University while in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Widely considered a literary genius-many consider Nabokov to be the most influential postmodern writer — he created difficult, metafictional books, characterized by a combination of erudition and humor. Incorporating aspects of the author's personal history, passions, and aesthetic prejudices — for example, Russian history, butterflies, chess, and word games — Nabokov's books include Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962), and Ada (1969). In 1960 Nabokov returned to Europe and lived in the top floor of the Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, until his death.

He was born Benjamin Franklin Norris in Chicago. In 1884 the family moved to San Francisco, and when he was seventeen his father took him to Paris to study painting. From 1890 to 1894 he attended the University of California, then Harvard for one year, after which he worked as correspondent for Collier's and the San Francisco Chronicle, covering the Boer War. Upon his return from South Africa he worked for a San Francisco magazine, The Wave, which serialized his first novel, Moran of the Lady Letty, in 1898. That same year he went to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War. When he returned the following year he took a position with Doubleday, which in 1899 published two of Norris's novels, McTeague, set in San Francisco, and Blix. I (1901) and The Pit (1903) were the first two volumes in a planned trilogy following the growing, selling, and dis-797- tribution of California wheat. The final volume, The Wolf, was incomplete at Norris's death from a ruptured appendix in 1902

Born in upstate New York, Oates studied at Syracuse University and at the University of Wisconsin. Her numerous teaching assignments include her present position as a professor at Princeton University. Oates often translates her personal experiences into fiction. Her small-town youth and suburban adolescence are explored and frequently parodied in her novels, and she provides the same selfmocking insight into the worlds of academia and art. A teacher and critic, and an exceedingly prolific and accomplished writer, Oates is on the board of the Kenyon Review. Her works include By the North Gate (1963), With Shuddering Fall (1964), A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), them (1969), Wonderland (1971), New Heaven, New Earth (1974), Childwold (1976), Unholy Loves (1979), Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmore Romance (1982), Solstice (1985), Marya: A Life (1986), and You Must Remember This (1987).

Born and educated in Minnesota, O'Brien was drafted into the United States Army following his graduation from college in 1968. Returning from Vietnam in 1970, O'Brien went to work for the Washington Post. Often surreal, O'Brien's fiction chronicles the experience of the Vietnam War. His novels include If I Die in the Combat Zone (1973), Northern Lights (1974), and Going after Cacciato (1978).

O'Hagan was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, the son of a doctor whose practice took the family to Calgary, to Vancouver, and to a series of small railroad and mining towns in the Canadian Rockies. O'Hagan's major novel, Tay John (London, 1939), received little attention in Canada until its republication there in 1974. O'Hagan and his wife (painter Margaret Peterson) lived in Sicily from 1963 to 1974, when they returned to settle in Victoria, British Columbia. -798-

Raised in Seattle, Washington, Okada was exposed at an early age to the language of the urban streets. He received two bachelor's degrees from the University of Washington, one in English and one in library science. He later received an M.A. in literature from Columbia University, where he met his wife Dorothy. Okada was a sergeant in the United States Air Force during World War II; he became embittered by the government's treatment of its Nisei population. Okada lived for some time in West Los Angeles. When Okada's No-No Boy (1957) was published, it was dismissed as "too coarse" and too Asian. After Okada's death, his widow offered his papers and manuscripts to the University of California at Los Angeles. The university rejected the papers as being unimportant and, in consequence, Dorothy Okada burned the manuscripts. It is only recently that Okada has received positive critical acclaim as a sensitive chronicler of the Japanese American experience.

Olsen's parents fled to the United States in 1905, following the failure of the 1905 Revolution in Russia. They eventually settled in Nebraska, where Olsen was reared. Very much a child of the working class, Olsen was forced by economic circumstances to leave school before graduating from high school. Before she reached the age of eighteen, Olsen had worked in the infamous meat-packing industry, as well as serving as a waitress and a domestic. Still in her adolescence, Olsen became an active member of the Young Communist League and was jailed at eighteen for her attempts to organize packing-house workers. When Olsen was nineteen she began working on a novel that she eventually published as Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974). Throughout her life, Olsen remained concerned with issues of class and gender. During the 1950s she was harassed by the FBI. In recent years Olsen has received serious critical attention. Some of her work has found publication only in the last few decades. Despite her abbreviated formal education, Olsen has received numerous honorary degrees. Her works include Tell Me a Riddle (1961), Silences (1978), Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother: A Day Book and Reader (1984), and Dream-Vision (1984). -799-

Born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where the family owned a tea plantation, Ondaatje immigrated in 1952 to England, and at the age of nineteen to Montreal. His novels include Coming Through Slaughter (1976) and In the Skin of a Lion (1987); he has also edited a number of anthologies in addition to writing poetry, fiction, criticism, and screenplays. He has taught at the University of Western Ontario and, more recently, at Glendon College. He is the holder of two Governor General's Awards for poetry.

A Southerner, Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He was educated at the University of North Carolina. Percy went North to attend medical school at Columbia University, obtaining his M.D. in 1941. While practicing at New York's Bellevue Hospital, Percy contracted tuberculosis. He retired from medicine and turned to literature. Percy's works include The Moviegoer (1961), The Last Gentleman (1966), The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (1975), and The Second Coming (1980).

Baptized as Mary Gray, Phelps was born in Boston, the daughter of Elizabeth (Stuart) Phelps, a popular religious writer. She assumed her mother's name upon her mother's death. During a long period of reclusiveness following the death of her suitor in the Civil War, Phelps produced The Gates Ajar (1868), the first of her novels concerning the afterlife. In 1888 she married Herbert Dickinson Ward, who became an occasional co-author. Several of her novels (Hedged In [1870]; The Silent Partner [1871]; The Story of Avis [1877]; Dr. Zay [1882]) are strong indictments of the social restrictions applied to women.

Poe was born in Boston to itinerant actors, both of whom died while he was very young. Unofficially adopted by John Allen, of Richmond, -800- Virginia, he entered the University of Virginia in 1826, but left after only one year, following a bitter quarrel with Allen over debts. After brief stints in the United States Army and at West Point, Poe, destitute and wholly estranged from his one-time benefactor, located an aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The remainder of his life is a chronicle of increasing desperation, as Poe tried to support his dependents on the unreliable income of his journalistic endeavors. Virginia died in 1847; Poe's depression deepened as his health and sanity deteriorated. In October 1849 he was found unconscious on a Baltimore street, and died four days later. Today, his literary legacy marks him as one of the most original creative minds of his time. His single novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), is difficult to classify, but recounts the horrific adventures of a young stowaway on his voyage into a moral, as well as an Antarctic, abyss.

Though Elizabeth Prentiss was born in Maine, she lived most of her life in New York. She wrote religious and juvenile fiction, the best known of which is Stepping Heavenward (1869), the fictional "diary" of a religious Woman.

Puig was born in General Villegas, a small town in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He attended the University of Buenos Aires before traveling in 1957 to Rome, where he studied at the Experimental Film Center. His best-known works are the novels La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968; Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, 1971) and El beso de la mujer araña (1976; Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1979). Apart from a short visit to Buenos Aires in 1967, Puig has made his home abroad, primarily in New York and Rome.

Apart from the broad outlines of Pynchon's personal history, much about his life remains mysterious as a result of his legendary obsession with privacy. Born in Glen Cove, New York, Pynchon attended -801- Cornell University from 1953 to 1955, first studying physics, then English, dropped out to join the Signal Corps, and returned to school in 1957. While working as a technical writer for Boeing in Seattle, Pynchon achieved success writing stories. In 1963 he won the Faulkner Award for his first novel, V. A strange amalgam of spy thriller, quest mythology, alternate history, physics theory, puns, and self-reflexive literary games, the book draws on Pynchon's diverse education and interests, and immediately established him as a prodigious literary talent. Equally complex and challenging, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973) further established Pynchon's reputation as one of the most important writers of the last half of the century. His most recent novel is Vineland (1989).

"Ellery Queen" was the name of a fictional detective and also the pseudonym under which two cousins, Manfred Lee (1905-71) and Frederic Dannay (1905-82), wrote numerous detective stories and novels, the first of which was The Roman Hat Mystery (1929). Their last collaboration was A Fine and Private Place (1971). In addition, they were joint editors of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, established in 1941. They also wrote under the name of Barnaby Ross.

Born in El Paso, Texas, and a graduate of Texas Western College, Rechy also attended the New School for Social Research in New York City. At home in both the Southwest and New York, Rechy produces works that examine the forbidden, dark aspects of urban existence and homosexuality. Now a relocated Californian, Rechy currently teaches at the University of Southern California. His works include City of Night (1963), This Day's Death (1969), Numbers (1976), The Sexual Outlaw (1977), Rushes (1979), Body and Souls (1983), and Marilyn's Daughter (1988).

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Reed moved with his mother to New York state at the age of four. He grew up in Buffalo and later -802- attended the university there. After graduation, Reed moved to New York City, where he worked with a number of journals and publishing firms. He cofounded the East Village Other and Advance. Relocating in California, Reed was president of Yardbird Publishing Company and director of Reed Cannon and Johnson Communications, becoming increasingly intrigued by the possibilities presented in video technology. During this period, Reed also taught at a number of universities, receiving appointments from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Washington, and Yale University. Reed's fiction seeks to break away from the narrative-inspired autobiographical style associated with such African American writers as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, seeking instead to reinstate an African mythology and to parody traditional Western aesthetic forms. His works include The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1971), Catechism of D NeoAmerican Hoodoo Church (1970), Conjure (1972), Mumbo Jumbo (1972), The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), The Terrible Twos (1982), and Reckless Eyeballing (1986).

Rhys was born in Dominica, an island in the British West Indies. As her Welsh surname suggests, Rhys's father was born in Wales and moved to the Indies in adulthood. But Rhys's mother was born in the British Indies and Rhys's life and fiction reflect the cultural diversity of her family life. Educated at convent schools and in London, Rhys later toured England as a chorus girl. Married for a time to poet Max Hamer, Rhys spent much of her life on the Continent. Her works include The Left Bank (1927), After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie (1930), the celebrated Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Tigers Are Better Looking (1968), and Smile Please: An Unfinished Biography (1979).

Rinehart was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and was the author of popular mystery novels, including The Circular Staircase (1908; dramatized as The Bat in 1920), The Man in Lower Ten (1909), The Door (1930), The Yellow Room (1945), and The Swimming Pool (1952). In addition to horror stories and detective fiction, she wrote -803- several plays and a series of humorous novels featuring "Tish," an eccentric spinster (The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry [1911]; Tish [1916]; The Best of Tish [1955]).

An alumna of Brown University, Robinson did her graduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle, and currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her first novel, Housekeeping (1981), makes reference to Robinson's own experiences in the Northwest. The problematic appearance of the past in contemporary life and the illusory nature of any attempt at permanence mark Robinson's work. Her second novel, Mother Country (1988), explores this familiar terrain.

Ole Edvart Rölvaag was born in Norway, immigrated to the United States in 1896, and graduated from St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where he was for many years a professor of Norwegian (all of his fiction was first written in Norwegian). His best-known work is the trilogy composed of Giants in the Earth (1927), Peder Victorious (1929), and Their Fathers' God (1931), about the struggles of Norwegian immigrants in the Dakotas.

Born in Minatatlan, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, Rosaldo came to the United States in 1930. He attended high school in Chicago and in 1942 he received a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Illinois. A committed advocate of Chicano concerns and a promoter of the Spanish language, Rosaldo is active in the MLA and in the American Association of Teachers. He co-authored Six Faces of Mexico (1966) and edited Chicano: The Evolution of a People (1973).

James Sinclair Ross was born in northern Saskatchewan, in a prairie setting that figures largely in his fiction, including his first novel, As For Me and My House (1941). Between 1942 and 1946 he served in the Canadian army in London, after which he returned to his prewar -804- bank job, but continued writing, publishing his second novel, The Well, in 1958. Upon his retirement in 1968, he moved to Athens, Greece, where he finished Whir of Gold (1970), and then to Spain, returning to Canada in 1980.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Roth graduated from Bucknell University in 1954 and received his M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1955. Profoundly influenced by his own Jewish upbringing, Roth explores and satirizes the American Jewish experience, as well as American culture in general. His works include Goodbye Columbus (1959), Letting Go (1962), And When She Was Good (1967), Portnoy's Complaint (1969), The Ghost Writer (1979), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Counterlife (1986), and Deception (1990).

Susanna (Haswell) Rowson was born in Portsmouth, England. Her father was a British naval lieutenant who was working as a customs collector in Massachusetts at the outbreak of the American Revolution. During the war, the family was interned and their property was confiscated; in 1778 Haswell and his family were returned to England, where Susanna worked as a governess for the Duchess of Devonshire. Her first novel, Victoria, was published there in 1786, and that same year she married William Rowson. In 1791 Charlotte; or, A Tale of Truth, a cautionary tale of seduction set in America, appeared. The following year Rowson's business failed, and the couple turned to the stage for their living. In America after 1793, Susanna wrote and acted in several social comedies and comic operas. In 1797 she gave up the theater to open a school for girls in Boston, but continued writing: dramas, novels, essays, and textbooks. Lucy Temple, a sequel to Charlotte, was published posthumously in 1828.

Roy was born in what was, at the time, the village of Saint-Boniface, outside Winnipeg, Manitoba. The youngest of eleven children, she was unable to attend university, and instead obtained a teaching di-805- ploma from the Winnipeg Normal Institute. After several years as a schoolteacher, she traveled to London, where she studied acting briefly before embarking on a literary and journalistic career. Her first novel, Bonheur d'occasion (1945; translated in 1947 as The Tin Flute), garnered a Governor General's Award (her first of three) and the prestigious Lorne Pierce Medal; Roy won the French Prix Femina (the first Canadian to do so); and in 1947 she became the first woman fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

A native of New York City, Russ received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1957 and her M.F.A. from Yale University in 1960. Her subsequent teaching career has included appointments at Cornell, SUNY/ Binghamton, and the University of Colorado. An avowed feminist, Russ writes science fiction that explores issues of gender, politics, and utopian ethics. Her works include Picnic in Paradise (1968), And Chaos Died (1970), The Female Man (1975), The Adventures of Alyx (1983), Extra(ordinary) People (1984), and How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983).

Born and bred in New York City, Salinger began writing stories at the age of fifteen. He published his first piece when he was twenty, while serving in the United States Army. During World War II, Salinger published a number of stories concerning GI life in Collier's Magazine. Little is known about Salinger's personal life; an extraordinarily private man, he lives in New England as a virtual recluse, refusing all interviews. His works include The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963).

Born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to a wealthy Berkshire family, Sedgwick received a first-rate education at Boston and Albany, and though she traveled little and never married, she was active in philanthropic concerns, in the Unitarian Church, and in literary and so-806- cial circles. Her novels — domestic stories in an intentionally moral vein — include two historical romances, Hope Leslie (1827) and The Linwoods (1835), but all of her novels — A New England Tale (1822), Redwood (1824), Clarence (1830), and Married or Single? (1857) — present realistic depictions of New England home life and social customs. Sedgwick died at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, at the age of seventy-seven.

Born in Norwich, Connecticut, educated there and at Hartford, Sigourney began writing poetry at the age of eight. She taught school in Norwich, later opening her own school in Hartford. Her first book was Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse (1815), but her marriage in 1819 to Charles Sigourney ended her literary career for a time. She resumed writing for money — anonymously — when Mr. Sigourney's business declined; eventually she resumed the use of her name, publishing nearly seventy volumes of poetry and miscellaneous writings.

Raised in New Mexico and currently residing in Tucson, Arizona, Silko writes fiction rooted in her own tribal experience and in Navajo and Hopi history. Deeply concerned with the predicament of the Native American and the bifurcation of her own cultural life, Silko uses Indian legend, communal custom, and social injustice to structure her work. The troubled identity of the Native American — particularly the Indian woman — is a consistent theme. Silko first received critical attention for the poetry in Laguna Woman (1974) and for the fictional Ceremony (1977). These works were followed by Storyteller (1981), The Delicacy and Strength of Lace (1985), and a number of frequently anthologized stories, notably "Yellow Woman" and "Lullaby."

A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Simms was the son of a shopkeeper who went bankrupt. With little formal education, he wrote poetry at an early age, read law, and was part owner and -807- editor of the City Gazette before moving to New York in pursuit of a literary career. By 1835, when he returned to South Carolina, Simms had begun writing the romances of the Revolution and of Southern frontier history that would make him famous (his early works, Guy Rivers [1834], The Yemassee [1835], and The Partisan [1835], are the best known today). In the North, he was compared to Cooper, though his work is more realistic. In the South, he became a popular political figure, serving in the state legislature (1844-46) where he was an ardent Secessionist; he lost the lieutenantgovernorship by only one vote. Simms wrote no novels after the outbreak of the Civil War, which cost him his Northern readership as well as his home and property. He died in Charleston on June 11, 1870.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair grew up in New York City and attended Columbia University. While still an adolescent, he sold "juvenile" literature to a variety of popular magazines. In 1900 Sinclair left college to devote himself to his writing. His early novels were largely dismissed as sentimental fiction, but in 1904 Sinclair joined the Socialist Party of America and began to incorporate his social outrage into his fiction. He investigated the stockyards and oil fields and probed the lifestyles of the factory worker and piece-work laborer. In 1906 Sinclair founded Helicon Hall, an effort in cooperative living, and in 1934 he ran for governor of California on the EPIC (End Poverty in California) Democratic platform. His works include The Jungle (1906), King Coal (1917), Oil (1927), Boston (1928), and The Profits of Religion (1918).

The son of a rabbi, Singer was born in Radzymn, Poland. In 1935 Singer came to America and eventually attended Tachenioni Rabbinical Seminary. Presently a New Yorker, Singer writes lyrical and visionary fiction that often explores spiritual and religious themes. His works include Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957), The Slave (1962), and Short Friday (1964). -808-

Born in North Yarmouth, Maine, Elizabeth Oakes Prince was married in 1823 to journalist and political humorist Seba Smith. After the Panic of 1837, she began contributing to periodicals in an attempt to bolster her family's income, and her poem "The Sinless Child (1843) was favorably reviewed by Edgar Allan Poe. She produced several novels, including The Western Captive (1842), Black Hollow (1864), and Bald Eagle (1867). She was also active in the cause of women's suffrage (Woman and Her Needs [1851]).

Born in New York City, Sontag remains steadfastly an Eastern urbanite. As an undergraduate Sontag attended the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. She received her M.A. from Harvard University. Trained as a photographer, and maintaining an abiding interest in musical forms, Sontag combines a literary sensibility with extreme visual acuity. Novelist, critic, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist, Sontag is commonly credited with popularizing the sometimes arcane work of Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin. Her iconoclastic interpretations have occasionally placed her outside of the Academy. Sontag's personal experiences are frequently reflected in her work. Her controversial visit to Vietnam finds expression in Trip to Hanoi (1968), and her painful encounter with cancer engendered Illness as Metaphor (1978). Other works include Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1969), Death Kit (1967), The Benefactor (1967), I, Etcetera (1978), Under the Sign of Saturn (1981), and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989).

Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte was born in Washington, D.C. In 1840 she married Frederick H. Southworth and moved to a Wisconsin farm, but soon Mrs. Southworth, pregnant and with a young son, returned to Washington. There she taught school and in 1847 published Retribution, the first in a long series of popular "potboilers" including The Curse of Clifton (1852), The Hidden Hand (1859), and -809- The Fatal Marriage (1869). During the 1860s her Georgetown home was a popular literary meeting place.

A New Englander by birth, Spofford turned to journalism as a means of financial support. After her marriage she lived briefly in Washington, D.C. Her works detail New England life, most particularly the lives of women; her tone is realistic rather than nostalgic. Her books include The Amber Gods and Other Stories (1863), A Scarlet Poppy and Other Stories (1894), Old Washington (1906), and The Elder's People (1920).

Born in Lake Mills, Iowa, Stegner graduated from the University of Utah in 1930. Engrossed with the West since his youth, and interested in the patterns of expansion and the Mormon frontier experience, Stegner produces novels that deal with the problems of exploration. Since the publication of his first novel, The Potter's House (1938), Stegner's historical fiction has received critical acclaim. Deeply influenced by earlier Western writers, Stegner often celebrates his generic predecessors in his work. The Angle of Repose (1971) creates a fictional biography of Mary Hallock Foote. Stegner's numerous works include Remembering Laughter (1937), Mormon Country (1942), Big Rock Candy Mountain (1948), The Preacher and the Slave (1950), All the Live Things (1967), The Spectator Bird (1976), and Recapitulation (1979).

Though Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, she lived in Vienna and Australia; Passy, France; Baltimore, Maryland; Oakland and San Francisco, California; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and London, England, before settling in Paris in 1903. A charismatic expatriate during the heady days surrounding World Wars I and II, Stein and lifelong companion Alice B. Toklas drove for the American Fund for French Wounded during World War I but retired to the quietude of the French countryside during the German occupation of France -810- during World War II. A prodigious author — Stein produced some 571 works during a career spanning forty-three years — Stein was extraordinarily influential as an experimental writer. Among those who frequented her Paris flat for advice and company were such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and Hilda Doolittle. In the mid-1930s, after achieving fame with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1931), Stein returned to the United States to much acclaim. Stein died in Paris, with Toklas at her side. Her works include Tender Buttons (1914), The Geographical History of America (1936), The Mother of Us All (1949), and Patriarchal Poetry (1953).

John Ernst Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, and intermittently attended Stanford University, where he majored in marine biology. His first book was a romantic depiction of the career of buccaneer Henry Morgan (Cup of Gold [1929]), but Tortilla Flat (1935), set in Monterey, California, was his first popular success. This was followed by In Dubious Battle (1936), about striking migrant workers, Of Mice and Men (1937), and a collection, The Long Valley (1938). The struggle of migrant workers for survival and dignity is again the theme of The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which won a Pulitzer Prize. Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954), set on the Monterey waterfront, are more lighthearted, but Steinbeck's serious moral and social concerns are foremost in East of Eden (1952) and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). Travels with Charley was published in 1962, the same year that Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Christened Elizabeth Barstow, Stoddard was born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, and was educated at the prestigious Wheaton Female Seminary. She married poet Richard Henry Stoddard. A fiction writer, Elizabeth Stoddard received widespread criticism for the supposed "immorality" of her work; she sought to reproduce the familiar terrain of New England but the region she perceived was marked by sexual desire and frequent violence. Praised by William Dean Howells, who reprinted some of her works, Stoddard received ac-811- claim late in her life. Her most famous novel is The Morgesons (1862).

Stone was born in New York City, where he attended a Catholic high school and was briefly enrolled at New York University. Stone worked as a reporter during the Vietnam conflict, and his war experiences provide the basis for his award-winning Dog Soldiers (1974). Other works include A Hall of Mirrors (1967) and A Flag for for Sunrise (1981).

Daughter of clergyman Lyman Beecher and sister of Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1832. her father was appointed president of Lane Theological Seminary, and Harriet accompanied him to Cincinnati, Ohio, where in 1836 she married Calvin E. Stowe, a professor of biblical literature at the seminary. On a visit to a Kentucky plantation she witnessed the conditions and effects of slavery, but it was not until 1850 (after the Stowes had returned to New England) and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act that she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), an immediate and controversial success. Her second novel, Dred (1856), again on the subject of slavery, was less successful. Next came The Minister's Wooing (1859), loosely based on her sister Catharine's life, followed by The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862) and Agnes of Sorrento (1862), a historical romance. Oldtown Folks (1869) is a romantic depiction of life in a post-Revolutionary Massachusetts village. In 1871 Stowe produced a social satire, Pink and White Tyranny, and My Wife and I, espousing the idea of careers for women. In 1875 the sequel to the latter, We and Our Neighbors, appeared, and in 1878 an autobiographical novel, Poganuc People. She lived mainly in Florida after the Civil War, but died at Hartford, Connecticut, on July 1, 1896.

A devout Brooklynite for much of his life, Sukenick received a Ph.D. in 1962 from Brandeis University and today works as the Director of -812- Creative Writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Frustrated by the restrictions of commercial publishing, Sukenick helped establish the Fiction Collective in 1970, a writers' co-op devoted to publishing experimental fiction. Sukenick's commitment to the avantgarde is reflected in his innovative novels, which include Out (1973), 98.6 (1975), and Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues (1979).

Tabitha Tenney was a daughter of the prominent Gilman family of New Hampshire, and was married to Congressman Samuel Tenney. She wrote only one novel, the satirical Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (1801), but this single work has secured her a place in the history of women's writing in America.

Tourgée was born in Williamsfield, Ohio, and attended the University of Rochester (1859-61). He served as an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War, was twice wounded, and spent four months as a Confederate prisoner. During the Reconstruction he enjoyed a profitable career as a carpetbag politician. His novels, including A Fool's Errand (1879) and Hot Plowshares (1883), deal with the turbulent politics and race relations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period. In 1897 he was appointed consul to Bordeaux, where he died.

Born in Missouri, and reared in the small town of Hannibal on the shores of the Mississippi River, Twain is often regarded as the quintessential American author. A complex figure, Twain combined social success and aspiration with a critical skepticism, and merged his humor with a sometimes bleak vision of the human condition. Twain's literature reflects his extensive and varied experience — he piloted a ship down the Mississippi, served briefly in a Confederate troop, and searched for gold in the Mother Lode district of California. Frustrated by his lack of financial remuneration in these fields, Twain turned to writing as a career. In 1870, following his marriage to the -813- wealthy and well-connected Olivia Langdon, Twain established his household in Hartford, Connecticut. He also became a frequenter of European capitals. His numerous works include The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and "The Mysterious Stranger" (published posthumously).

The son of a writer (his mother) and a mathematics teacher (his father), Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. A highly motivated and successful student, Updike won a scholarship to Harvard University, where he was elected president of the humorous Harvard Lampoon. Upon his graduation in 1954, Updike went to England to study art at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts. In 1955 Updike began to contribute to The New Yorker, and since that time he has published more than thirty books. A winner of numerous awards, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Updike has achieved a kind of celebrity status. Updike is a versatile author; he has written novels, short stories, poetry, plays, criticism, and children's books. His works include The Same Door (1959), The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Rabbit Run (1960), Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Magic Flute (1962), Telephone Poles (1963), The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968), Bech: A Book (1970), Rabbit Redux (1971), Marry Me (1976), The Coup (1978), Rabbit Is Rich (1980), Bech Is Back (1982), Hugging the Shore (1983), The Witches of Eastwick (1984), and Roger's Version (1986).

Valenzuela is a native of Buenos Aires, Argentina. There she wrote for radio and worked as a reporter for the newspapers La Nación and El Mundo. She has lived in Mexico, Paris, and New York, where she settled in 1972. Her novels include El gato eficaz (Cat-o-NineDeaths, 1972); Comoen la guerra (1977; He Who Searches, 1987), and Cola de lagartija (1983; The Lizard's Tail, 1983). She has been -814- honored as a Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities (1981), was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, and was named Distinguished Writer in Residence, New York University (1985).

Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru. He graduated from the University of San Marcos in Lima in 1957 and attended the University of Madrid from 1957 to 1959. After a lengthy residence abroad, in Paris (where he helped to found the leftist journal Libre) and Barcelona, he returned to Peru in 1974. His first novel, La ciudad y los perros (1962; The Time of the Hero, 1966), created a sensation, and was followed in 1966 by his masterpiece, La casa verde (The Green House, 1968). He has been the recipient of many literary awards, and is recognized as a leading Latin American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and critic.

Vidal was born in the military establishment at West Point, New York. Vidal's life might best be described as cosmopolitan — he has traveled and lived in Europe, North Africa, and the Aleutian Islands. In 1960, Vidal was the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from New York's 29th Congressional District. His works include Williwaw (1946), A Search for the King (1950), Washington, D.C. (1967), Myra Breckinridge (1968), Burr (1973), and Duluth (1983).

A native of Los Angeles, Villarreal moved to Santa Clara when he was six. Here he was exposed to the economic plight of migrant workers and also learned Mexican folk tales. Villarreal's father, who reputedly lived for well over a hundred years, fought with Pancho Villa and greatly influenced his son's sense of history. After the United States entered World War II, Villareal enlisted in the Navy. Following the cessation of hostilities, Villarreal attended the University of California where he majored in English. Since then Villarreal has emerged as a leading force in Chicano literature. His works in-815- clude Poncho (1959), The Fifth Horseman (1974), and Clemente Chacon (1984).

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the child of an architect, Vonnegut grew up in an atmosphere that encouraged his interest in technology and art. Vonnegut attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University). As a young man Vonnegut worked at a variety of vocations, including a stint as a teacher at MassachusettsHopefield School, work as a freelance writer, and employment as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. During World War II, Vonnegut served in the United States Army. He was captured and held as a POW, and received the Purple Heart in recognition of his valor. After his emergence as a novelist, Vonnegut received teaching appointments at a variety of prestigious institutions, including Harvard University and the University of Iowa's famed Writers' Workshop. Always interested in painting, Vonnegut exhibited his own art in 1980. Vonnegut's interests are multidisciplinary, embracing science, technology, art, and politics. His novels incorporate these themes and frequently blur the boundaries between fiction and science fiction. Vonnegut's numerous works include Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1962), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls Before Swine (1965), Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade (1969), Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973), Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More! (1975), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galapagos (1985), and Bluebeard (1987).

Lewis Wallace was the son of David Wallace, governor of Indiana. His formal education ended at sixteen; though he was an avid reader, he disliked the confinement of the classroom. He served in the Mexican War and the Civil War, rising to the rank of major general. He was admitted to the bar in 1849, was elected to the Senate in 1856, became territorial governor of New Mexico in 1878, and was appointed minister to Turkey in 1881. His novels include The Fair God-816- (1873), about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and The Prince of India (1893), as well as the best-selling Ben-Hur (1880).

Born in New York City, Warner lived most of her life in a dilapidated farmhouse on Constitution Island, in the Hudson River near West Point, where she and her sister Anna (under the pseudonyms Elizabeth Wetherell and Amy Lothrop) attempted to generate enough money from their writing to keep pace with their father's improvident investments and litigations. Warner's first novel, The Wide, Wide World (1850), which was (after several rejections) published on the recommendation of George P. Putnam's mother, quickly became one of the sentimental best-sellers of the nineteenth century, and was soon followed by Queechy (1852), launching Warner's career as a prolific novelist and author of children's stories.

There are no birth and death dates available for Webb. It is possible that he lived in England at some point before the publication of his novel, The Garies and Their Friends, in London in 1857. The Garies is among the earliest novels by an African American; it is a chronicle depicting the themes of interracial marriage, greed, and "passing" for white in the intermingled histories of three families: one white, one black, one mixed.

Welch was born in Browning, Montana, graduated from the University of Montana, and attended Northern Montana College. His novel Winter in the Blood (1974) is the story of a young man growing up on a Montana reservation, and is narrated by a character who is, like Welch, part Gros Ventre and part Blackfoot Indian. Welch's early poems are collected in Riding the Earthboy 40 (1971).

Welty was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. In her richly poetic, stylized fiction, Welty admittedly attempts to capture the -817- rhythms and spirit of her Southern heritage. Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women, then graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1929. In 1931 Welty returned to Mississippi and five years later published her first story, "The Death of a Traveling Salesman." Her works include Losing Battles (1970), The Optimist's Daughter (1972), Collected Stories (1980), and One Writer's Beginnings (1984), a memoir.

Born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein, to Jewish immigrants in New York City, West made his way to the Pacific coast where he became obsessed with Hollywood and its lonely grotesques. The Day of the Locust (1939) — shocking in its exploration of the pathetic and perverse — remains West's most distinguished work. It was preceded by The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), and A Cool Million (1934), as well as by a number of short stories and essays. West died in a car crash as he and his wife rushed northward from Mexico to attend the Hollywood funeral of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, Wharton was born into the patrician world of New York society. She spent her formative years traveling between New York, Newport, and Europe, always accompanied by governesses and tutors. In 1885, at the age of twenty-three, Edith Jones married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Bostonian who was thirteen years her senior. Although the marriage would last twentyeight years, the relationship was marked by long separations, mutual unhappiness, nervous illnesses, and finally divorce in 1913. A highly prolific writer, Wharton published fifty texts in the course of her life, and also left numerous unpublished volumes. The Decoration of Houses (1897), Wharton's first book, dealt with her ideas concerning interior design. Her first short stories appeared in Scribner's Magazine, and these short pieces were quickly followed by longer volumes, including The Greater Inclination (1899), The Touchstone (1900), Crucial Instances (1901), The Valley of Decision (1902), Sanctuary (1903), and The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904). None of -818- these works received a great deal of recognition until Wharton published The House of Mirth (1905). This was followed by Madame de Treymes (1907), Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), The Age of Innocence (1920), and Old New York (1924). Wharton's work also includes two war novels — The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923) — as well as the autobiographical The Writing of Fiction (1925) and A Backward Glance (1934). Wharton's indictment of the Gilded Age, her exploration of the conflict between tradition and social change, and her acknowledgment that the individual is essentially trapped by stronger exterior forces made hers a significant voice in the troubled canon of early modernism.

Wilson was probably born in Milford, New Hampshire, around 1827 or 1828, although there is other evidence that posits her birth in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1807 or 1808. Her only novel, Our Nig, was published in 1859. It is the story of a white orphan's marriage to an African American man, and the trials of their mulatto daughter, Frado, as she struggles for love and autonomy, against racism, poverty, and abandonment.

Wister was born in Philadelphia, attended an Eastern preparatory school, graduated from Harvard University, and later matriculated at Harvard Law School. Suffering from poor health, Wister traveled to Wyoming in 1885 and was greatly impressed by the Western landscape. At the urging of his friend and former classmate, Theodore Roosevelt, Wister began to write about his Western experience, producing several biographies and a number of short stories that were published in Harper's Magazine. Wister's most famous work, The Virginian (1902), is dedicated to Roosevelt and translates the "rugged individualism" of the era into fiction.

Born in New York City, Wouk grew up in a predominantly Jewish community. He was educated in New York City and graduated from -819- Columbia University. Interested in writing at an early age, Wouk did commercial writing and then produced radio plays. He entered the Navy in 1942 and was employed as an officer in the Pacific. This experience he would later describe in The Caine Mutiny (1951). Wouk has enjoyed great commercial success, and has also been the recipient of various awards, notably a Pulitzer Prize. His works include Aurora Dawn (1946), The City Boy (1948), Marjorie Morningstar (1955), The Winds of War (1971), and War and Remembrance (1980).

Scottish-born radical and freethinker Frances Wright was the daughter of wealthy Scottish reformer James Wright. Wright is best known as the founder of the Nashoba Community in Tennessee (a model community where slaves were allowed to earn their freedom), for her volume Views of Society and Manners in America (London, 1821), and for her association with the radical New York journal, the Free Enquirer. She also produced a play (Altorf [1819]), the fictional tale A Few Days in Athens (1822), and was a popular — or notorious — public speaker (Course of Popular Lectures [1829]).

Born near Natchez, Mississippi, Wright created fiction that reflected the problems of growing up black in a highly prejudiced community. His character Bigger Thomas is an expression of the African American experience. Wright's most famous book, Native Son (1940), was followed by numerous other works, notably the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), as well as Uncle Tom's Children (1938), The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), The Long Dream (1958), and Eight Men (1961). -820-