Jack London was born in 1876 and began life as a sailor at the tender age of fourteen. He cruised most of the world this way and eventually landed back in California in the wave of the gold prospectors. He settled into a home there and began to write about some of the things he'd experienced and learned on his journeys. Jack London wrote many short stories, which were loved by critics and usual... Read More
Jack London was born in 1876 and began life as a sailor at the tender age of fourteen. He was one of the pioneers of writing professionally for magazine fiction. Jack London wrote many short stories, which were loved by critics and usually devoured by readers. He used his experiences around the world to write about the struggles of humans against the brutalities of nature. He was also a politic... Read More
John Griffith London, born John Griffith Chaney, was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". Jack London wrote his story The Mexican after visits to Mexico, intrigued by the outbreak o... Read More
The Call of The Wild is Jack London’s masterpiece, this dramatic account of the adventures of Buck, a very large, very tough and very resourceful dog that gets kidnapped away from his lovely Californian ranch to meet his destiny in the harsh land of the Far North in the days of the Klondike gold-rush in northern Canada, was an instantaneous worldwide success the minute it was published, selling... Read More
Jack London wrote an almost incredible number of short stories and novelettes before his premature death at the age of 40, as well as novels, novellas and a considerable number of essays, plays, poems, and articles. The sheer volume of his output and the wide variety of his subjects, ranging from the Klondike, the South Seas and Hawaii, Sailing, Hobos, Political Fiction and Crime Fiction to Sci... Read More
John Champlin Gardner Jr. was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic and university professor. As a child, Gardner attended public school and worked on his father's farm, where, in April 1945, his younger brother Gilbert was killed in an accident with a cultipacker. Gardner, who was driving the tractor during the fatal accident, carried guilt for his brother's death throughout his life... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet, philosopher and writer. He is considered to be one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation during the 1950s and the counterculture that soon followed. Listen online to free English audiobook "Reading at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University” on our website to experience Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, New... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a high school teacher father who published poetry and a Russian-born mother who retained her communist roots. Both her sympathy for the labour class and her gradual mental decay deeply affected Ginsberg in his youth. Intending to study law, Ginsberg enrolled at Columbia University in 1943, but he soon turned to literature, taking classes f... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a high school teacher father who published poetry and a Russian-born mother who retained her communist roots. Ginsberg's willingness to talk about taboo subjects made him a controversial figure during the conservative 1950s and a significant figure in the 1960s. In the mid-1950s, no reputable publishing company would even consider publishi... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a high school teacher father who published poetry and a Russian-born mother who retained her communist roots. Ginsberg’s public breakthrough came in San Francisco, in 1955, when he read the first part of “Howl” before an audience as part of an event that launched the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who... Read More
Ginsberg first came to public attention in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other Poems. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992. “Howl,” a long-lined poem in the tradition of Walt Whitman, is an outcry of rage and despair against a destructive, abusive society. Ginsberg is strongly identified with the literary and cultural phenom... Read More
Howl, Ginsberg’s first published book, laments what he believed to have been the destruction by the insanity of the “best minds of the generation.” The inspiration for "Howl" was Ginsberg's friend, Carl Solomon, and "Howl" is dedicated to him. Solomon was a Dada and Surrealism enthusiast who suffered bouts of clinical depression. Solomon wanted to commit suicide, but he thought a form of suicid... Read More
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born American writer of novels, short stories, and essays in Yiddish. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He was also awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw and one in Fiction for his collection A Cr... Read More
Jonathan Littell is a writer and a dual citizen of the United States and France and is of Jewish background. His first novel written in French, Les Bienveillantes, won two major French awards. Littell is the son of author Robert Littell. Although his grandparents were Jews who emigrated from Russia to the United States at the end of the 19th century, Littell does not define himself as a Jew "at... Read More
Alfred Bester was an American science fiction author, TV and radio scriptwriter, magazine editor and scripter for comic strips and comic books. He was born in Manhattan, New York City, on December 18, 1913. His father, James J. Bester, owned a shoe store and was a first-generation American whose parents were both Austrian. Bester attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a member of... Read More
Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. She came from the Beecher family, a famous religious family, and is best known for her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which depicts the harsh conditions for enslaved African Americans. Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a leading Congregationalist minister... Read More
Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American writer and philanthropist, the author of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which contributed so much to popular feeling against slavery that it is cited among the causes of the American Civil War. Stowe wrote 30 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential for both her writings and her public stances... Read More
Ambrose Bierce, in full Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce, was an American newspaperman, wit, satirist, and author of sardonic short stories based on themes of death and horror. Bierce was born in a log cabin at Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio, on June 24, 1842, to Marcus Aurelius Bierce and Laura Sherwood Bierce. He was of entirely English ancestry: all of his forebears came to North America betw... Read More
Ambrose Bierce was an American writer of sardonic short stories based on themes of death and horror. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is about a man named Peyton Farquhar. He was a well-off southern planter from Alabama. Peyton, who was “ardently devoted to the Southern cause,” was prevented from joining the army by circumstance and was eager to serve the South in any way possible. One evening... Read More
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce’s literary reputation is based primarily on his short stories about the Civil War and the supernatural, a body of work that makes up a relatively small part of his total output. Often compared to the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, these stories share an attraction to death in its more bizarre forms, featuring depictions of mental deterioration, uncanny, otherworldly manifesta... Read More