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Tui T. Sutherland

Tui T. Sutherland was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and lived in Asuncion, Paraguay; Miami, Florida; and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, before moving to New Jersey in high school. She is author of the Menagerie trilogy with my fabulous sister Kari, the fifth book in the Spirit Animals series, and a couple of books in the Warriors and Seekers series, and #1 New York Times bestselling Wings of Fire series. Tui's bio: https://tuibooks.com/about-tui/ Top 3 Questions Tui gets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cePnfFexVNQ

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Stephen King is the author of the book IT

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mark twain wrote the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

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died, he then left school and worked as a printers apprentice. His real name is Samuel Clemens but is known by his pen name Mark Twain. When he was 18 he was writing newspapers and had a few hit articles but he wanted to find a new career. Mark first started his career with Territorial Enterprise and his work only elevated.

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Mo Williams

Read out loud!!!

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Laurel Snyder
Laurel Snyder is an American poet and writer of children's books, including novels and picture books. She has also edited a number of literary journals and is a commentator for NPR's All Things Considered.

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Orphan Island, by Laurel Snyder (Walden Pond Press/Harper Collins) Chapter 1, read by the author

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Jaqueline Woodson has written many books including Brown girl dreaming, the day you begin, each kindness,visiting day, Before the ever after etc.

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She grew up in Virginia, and wrote many chapter books.

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Willa Sibert Cather (; born Wilella Sibert Cather; December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including , The Song of the Lark, and . In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for , a novel set during World War I.

Shortly after graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Cather moved to and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33, she moved again to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. She spent the last 39 years of her life with her domestic partner, Edith Lewis.

Cather achieved recognition as a novelist of the frontier and pioneer experience. She wrote of the spirit of those settlers moving into the western states, many of them European immigrants in the nineteenth century. Common themes in her work include nostalgia and exile. A sense of place is an important element in Cather's fiction: physical landscapes and domestic spaces are for Cather dynamic presences against which her characters struggle and find community.

Cather was born in 1873 on her maternal grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. Her father was Charles Fectigue Cather. The Cather family originated in Wales, the name deriving from Cadair Idris, a mountain in Gwynedd. Her mother was Mary Virginia Boak, a former school teacher. By the time Cather turned twelve months old, the family moved to Willow Shade, a Greek Revival-style home on 130 acres given to them by her paternal grandparents.

At the urging of Charles Cather's parents, the family moved to Nebraska in 1883 when Willa was nine years old. The farmland appealed to Charles' father, and the family wished to escape the tuberculosis outbreaks that were rampant in Virginia. Willa's father tried his hand at farming for eighteen months; then he moved the family into the town of Red Cloud, where he opened a real estate and insurance business, and the children attended school for the first time. Some of the earliest work produced by Cather was first published in the Red Cloud Chief, the city's local paper. Cather's time in Nebraska, still considered a frontier state, was a formative experience for her: She was moved by the dramatic environment and weather, the vastness of the prairie, and the various cultures of the immigrant and Native American families in the area.

Mary Cather had six more children after Willa: Roscoe, Douglass, Jessica, James, John, and Elsie. Cather was closer to her brothers than to her sisters whom, according to biographer Hermione Lee, she "seems not to have liked very much." Cather read widely, having made friends with a Jewish couple, the Wieners, who offered her free access to their extensive library. She made house calls with the local physician and decided to become a surgeon. For a time in her adolescence, she signed her name as William, but quickly abandoned the name for Willa.

Cather moved to Lincoln, Nebraska in 1890 to enroll at the University of Nebraska. While there in her first year, her essay on Thomas Carlyle was published in the Nebraska State Journal without her knowledge. She thereafter published columns for $1 apiece, saying that seeing her words printed on the page had "a kind of hypnotic effect," pushing her to continue writing. Following this experience, she became a regular contributor to the Journal. In addition to her work with the local paper, Cather served as the main editor of The Hesperian, the university's student newspaper, and became a writer for the Lincoln Courier. While at the university, she learned mathematics from and was befriended by John J. Pershing, who later became General of the Armies and, like Cather, also earned a Pulitzer Prize. She changed her plans from studying science in order to become a physician, instead graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1894.

In 1896, Cather was hired to write for a women's magazine, Home Monthly, moving in the process to Pittsburgh. There, she wrote journalistic pieces, as well as short stories and poetry. A year later, after the magazine was sold, she became a telegraph editor and critic for the Pittsburgh Leader and frequently contributed poetry and short fiction to The Library, another local publication. In Pittsburgh, she taught Latin, algebra, and English composition at Central High School for one year; she then taught English and Latin at Allegheny High School, where she came to head the English department.

Shortly after moving to Pittsburgh, Cather wrote short stories, including publishing " Tommy, the Unsentimental" in the Home Monthly, about a Nebraskan girl with a boy's name, who looks like a boy and saves her father's bank business. Janis P. Stout calls this story one of several Cather works that "demonstrate the speciousness of rigid gender roles and give favorable treatment to characters who undermine conventions." Her first book, a collection of poetry called April Twilights, was published in 1903. Shortly thereafter, in 1905, Cather's first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, was published. It contained some of her most famous stories, such as " A Wagner Matinee," " The Sculptor's Funeral," and " Paul's Case."

After Cather was offered an editorial position at McClure's Magazine in 1906, she moved to New York City. During her first year at McClure's, she ghostwrote a critical biography of the religious leader Mary Baker Eddy, crediting freelance researcher Georgine Milmine instead. While Milmine had performed copious amounts of research, she did not have the resources to produce a manuscript on her own, instead employing Cather. This biography was serialized in McClure's over the next eighteen months, and then published in book form. McClure's also serialized Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912). While most reviews were favorable, such as The Atlantic calling the writing "deft and skillful", Cather herself soon saw the novel as weak and shallow.

Cather followed Alexander's Bridge with her three novels set on the prairie, which eventually became both popular and critical successes: (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), which are-taken together-sometimes referred to as her "Prairie Trilogy". It is this succession of plains-based novels for which Cather was celebrated for her use of plainspoken language in relation to ordinary people. Sinclair Lewis, for example, praised her work for making Nebraska available to the wider world for the first time. After writing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented that in comparison to My Ántonia, it was a failure.

As late as 1920, Cather became dissatisfied with the performance of her publisher Houghton Mifflin- My Ántonia received an advertising budget of only $300, they refused to pay for all of the illustrations she commissioned for the book from Władysław T. Benda, and the physical quality of the books were poor. That year, she turned to the young publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, which had a reputation for supporting its authors through advertising campaigns. She also liked the look of its books and had been impressed with its edition of Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson. In fact, she so enjoyed their style that all her Knopf books of the 1920s-save for one printing of her short story collection Youth and the Bright Medusa-matched in design on their second and subsequent printings.

By this time, Cather had been firmly established as a major American writer, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her World War One-based novel, . She followed this up with the popular Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927, selling 86,500 copies in just two years, and which has been included on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century. Two of her three other novels of the decade- and The Professor's House-elevated her literary status dramatically. She was invited to give several hundred lectures to the public, earned significant royalties, and sold off the movie rights to A Lost Lady. It was only for her other novel of the decade, the 1926 My Mortal Enemy, that she received no widespread acclaim for-and in fact, neither she nor her partner, Edith Lewis, made significant mention of it later in their lives.

Despite her success, she was the subject of much criticism, particularly surrounding One of Ours. Her close friend, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, saw the novel as a betrayal of the realities of war, not understanding how to "bridge the gap between [Cather's] idealized war vision ... and my own stark impressions of war as lived." Similarly, Ernest Hemingway took issue with her portrayal of war, writing in a 1923 letter: "Wasn't [the novel's] last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere."

By the 1930s, an increasingly large share of critics began to dismiss her as a overly romantic and nostalgic, unable to grapple with contemporary issues: Granville Hicks, for instance, charged Cather with escaping into an idealized past to avoid confronting these matters. And it was particularly in the context of the hardships of the Great Depression in which her work was seen as lacking social relevance. Similarly, critics-and Cather herself-were disappointed when her novel A Lost Lady was made into a film; the film had little resemblance to the novel.

Cather's lifelong conservative politics, appealing to critics such as Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and Carl Van Doren, soured her reputation with younger, often left-leaning critics like Hicks and Edmund Wilson. Despite this critical opposition to her work, Cather remained a popular writer whose novels and short story collections continued to sell well; in 1931 Shadows on the Rock was the most widely read novel in the United States, and Lucy Gayheart became a bestseller in 1935.

While Cather made her last trip to Red Cloud in 1931 for a family gathering following the death of her mother, she stayed in touch with her Red Cloud friends and sent money to Annie Pavelka and other families during the Depression years. In 1932, Cather published Obscure Destinies, her final collection of short fiction, which contained " Neighbour Rosicky", one of her most highly regarded stories. That same summer, she moved into a new apartment on Park Avenue with Edith Lewis, and during a visit on Grand Manan, she probably began working on her next novel, Lucy Gayheart. Cather suffered two devastating losses in 1938. In June, her favorite brother, Douglass, died of a heart attack. Cather was too grief-stricken to attend the funeral. Four months later, Isabelle McClung died. Cather and McClung had lived together when Cather first arrived in Pittsburgh, and while McClung eventually married and moved with her husband to Toronto, the two women remained devoted friends. Cather wrote friends that Isabelle was the person she wrote all of her books for.

During the summer of 1940, Cather and Lewis went to Grand Manan for the last time, and Cather finished her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a novel much darker in tone and subject matter than her previous works. Sapphira is understood by readers as lacking a moral sense and failing to evoke empathy. However, the novel was a great critical and commercial success, with an advance printing of 25,000 copies. It was then adopted by the Book of the Month Club, which bought more than 200,000 copies. Her final story, " The Best Years", intended as a gift for her brother, was retrospective. It contained images or "keepsakes" from each of her twelve published novels and the short stories in Obscure Destinies.

Although an inflamed tendon in her hand hampered her writing, Cather managed to finish a substantial part of a novel set in Avignon, France. Her remaining papers reveal that she had titled the unfinished manuscript Hard Punishments and set it in the 14th century during the papal reign of Antipope Benedict XIV. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943. That same year, she executed a will that prohibited the publication of her letters and dramatization of her works. In 1944, Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a prestigious award given for an author's total accomplishments.

On April 24, 1947, Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 73, in her home at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan. On her death, Edith Lewis destroyed the manuscript of Hard Punishments, according to Cather's instructions.

Cather is buried at the southwest corner of the Old Burying Ground in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. She is buried with Edith Lewis. She had first visited Jaffrey in 1917 when she joined Isabelle McClung and her husband, violinist Jan Hambourg, staying at the Shattuck Inn, where she came late in life for the seclusion necessary for her writing. The inscription on her tombstone reads:

WILLA CATHER
December 7, 1873- April 24, 1947
THE TRUTH AND CHARITY OF HER GREAT
SPIRIT WILL LIVE ON IN THE WORK
WHICH IS HER ENDURING GIFT TO HER
COUNTRY AND ALL ITS PEOPLE.
" ... that is happiness; to be dissolved
into something complete and great"
From My Ántonia

Scholars disagree about Cather's sexual identity. Some argue that it is impossible or anachronistic to determine whether she had same-sex attraction, while others disagree. Researcher Deborah Carlin suggests that denial of Cather being a lesbian is rooted in treating same-sex desire "as an insult to Cather and her reputation," rather than neutral in nature. Melissa Homestead has argued that Cather was attracted to Edith Lewis, asking, "What kind of evidence is needed to establish this as a lesbian relationship? Photographs of the two of them in bed together? She was an integral part of Cather's life, creatively and personally." Beyond her own relationships with women, Cather's reliance on male characters has been used to support the idea of her same-sex attraction.

In any event, throughout Cather's adult life, her closest relationships were with women. These included her college friend Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled to Europe and at whose Toronto home she stayed for prolonged visits; the opera singer Olive Fremstad; and most notably, the editor Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived the last 39 years of her life.

Cather's relationship with Lewis began in the early 1900s. They lived together in a series of apartments in New York City from 1908 until Cather's death in 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived at No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. They moved when the apartment was scheduled for demolition during the construction of the Broadway-Seventh Avenue New York City Subway line (now the , ​, and ​ trains). While Lewis was selected as the literary trustee for Cather's estate, she was not merely a secretary for Cather's documents, but an integral part of Cather's creative process.

Although she was born into a Baptist family, as a result of her increasingly conservative views, she joined the Episcopal Church in 1922.

Beginning in 1922, Cather spent summers on the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Whale Cove on the Bay of Fundy. This is where her short story, "Before Breakfast," is set. She valued the seclusion of the island, and did not mind that her cottage had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. Anyone wishing to reach her could do so by telegraph or mail. In 1940, she stopped visiting Grand Manan following Canada's entrance to World War II, as travel was considerably more difficult; she also began a long recuperation from gallbladder surgery in 1942 that restricted travel.

A resolutely private person, Cather had destroyed many old drafts, personal papers, and letters, and asked others to do the same. While many complied, some did not. Her will restricted the ability of scholars to quote from the personal papers that remain. However, in April 2013, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather-a collection of 566 letters Cather wrote to friends, family, and literary acquaintances such as Thornton Wilder and F. Scott Fitzgerald-was published, two years after the death of Cather's nephew and second literary executor, Charles Cather. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed complexity of her character and inner world. The letters do not disclose any intimate details about Cather's personal life, but they do "make clear that [her] primary emotional attachments were to women." The Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln works to digitize her complete body of writing, including private correspondence and published work. As of 2021, over 2,100 letters have been made freely available to the public, in addition to transcription of her own published writing.

Cather admired Henry James's use of language and characterization. While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women-including George Eliot, the Brontës, and Jane Austen-she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental. One contemporary exception was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor. Jewett advised Cather of several things: to use female narrators in her fiction (even though Cather preferred using male perspectives), to write about her " own country" ( O Pioneers! was dedicated in large part to Jewett), and to write fiction that explicitly represented romantic attraction between women. Cather was also influenced by the work of Katherine Mansfield, praising in an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak out onto the shadowy realm of personal relationships."

Cather's high regard for the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on the Nebraska plains shaped much of her fiction. As a child, she visited immigrant families in her area and returned home in "the most unreasonable state of excitement," feeling that she "had got inside another person's skin." Following a trip to Red Cloud in 1916, Cather decided to write a novel based on the events in the life of her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for the title character in My Ántonia. Cather was likewise fascinated by the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in the Red Cloud area while she was a girl.

During a brief stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a novel set in that French-Canadian city. Lewis recalled: "From the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on the pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed-she was overwhelmed by the flood of memories, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinary French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent." Cather finished her novel Shadows on the Rock, a historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931; it was later included in magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924-1944. The French influence is found in many other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished novel set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.

Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form. Cather's work is often marked by-and criticized for-its nostalgic tone and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains. Consequently, notions of land, the frontier, pioneering (and so, the nascent women's movement), and relationships with western landscapes are integral to her work. While Cather is said to have significantly altered her literary approach in each of her novels, this stance is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with being out of touch with her times and failing to use more experimental techniques in her writing, such as stream of consciousness, as well as defining her literary genre as nothing but romantic. However, others have pointed out that Cather could follow no other literary path but her own:

She had formed and matured her ideas on art before she wrote a novel. She had no more reason to follow Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did to follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted to stand midway between the journalists whose omniscient objectivity accumulate more fact than any character could notice and the psychological novelist whose use of subjective point of view stories distorts objective reality. She developed her theory on a middle ground, selecting facts from experience on the basis of feeling and then presenting the experience in a lucid, objective style. Cather's style is not the accumulative cataloguing of the journalists, nor the fragmentary atomism of psychological associations.

In a 1920 essay on Willa Cather, H.L. Mencken apologized for having suggested that Cather was a talented but inconsequential imitator of Edith Wharton. He praised her for abandoning New England as a locale for the "Middle West of the great immigrations." Mencken describes My Ántonia as a sudden leap forward by Cather. "Here was a novel planned with the utmost skill, and executed in truly admirable fashion," he wrote. "Here, unless I err gravely, was the best piece of fiction ever done by a woman in America."

The English novelist A. S. Byatt observes that with each work Cather reinvented the novel form "to look at a new human world." Byatt identifies some of Cather's major themes as "the rising and setting of the sun, the brevity of life, the relation between dailiness and the rupture of dailiness, the moment when 'desire shall fail'." Particularly in her frontier novels, Cather wrote of "life's terrors ... and its beauties." Like the exiled characters of Henry James, an author who had a great influence on Cather, most of Cather's major characters live as exiled immigrants, "people trying to make their way in circumstances strange to them." Joseph Urgo in Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration says Cather felt a connection between the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" and her own feelings of exile when she lived on the frontier. Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was "the first to give immigrants heroic stature in serious American literature."

1. ^ Gorman, Michael (2017). "Rural Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Imperialism in Willa Cather's One of Ours" (PDF). The Japanese Journal of American Studies. 28: 61.

2. Bennett, Mildred. The World of Willa Cather. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961

3. ^ Woodress, James (1987). Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0803247346.

4. ^ Laegreid, Renee M. (Spring 2007). "The Good, The Bad, And The Ignored Immigrants In Willa Cather's O Pioneers!". Great Plains Quarterly. 27 (2): 101-115.

5. ^ "Willa Cather's Biography." Willa Cather Foundation website. Retrieved March 11, 2015.

6. ^ Walter, Katherine. "Early Nebraska Journalist". University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

7. ^ Homestead, Melissa J. (2010). "Edith Lewis as Editor, Every Week Magazine, and the Contexts of Cather's Fiction". Cather Studies. 8.

8. ^ Lowry, Patricia (December 8, 2008). "Places: In search of Willa Cather's East End haunts". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

9. ^ And Death Comes for Willa Cather, Famous Author Archived December 10, 2015, at the Wayback Machine, Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, April 25, 1947

10. ^ Eggan, Taylor A. (May 19, 2018). "Landscape Metaphysics: Narrative Architecture and the Focalisation of the Environment". English Studies. 99 (4): 398-411. doi:10.1080/0013838X.2018.1475594. ISSN 0013-838X. S2CID 165304534.

11. ^ Kundu, Gautam (1998). "Inadvertent Echoes or 'An Instance of Apparent Plagiarism'? Cather's "My Ántonia, A Lost Lady" and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"". Études Anglaises. 51 (3): 326.

12. ^ Claridge, Laura (2016). The lady with the Borzoi : Blanche Knopf, literary tastemaker extraordinaire (First ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp. 63-65. ISBN 9780374114251. OCLC 908176194.

13. ^ Urgo, Joseph (2005). "Review of Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World". South Atlantic Review. 70 (2): 182-186. ISSN 0277-335X. JSTOR 20064654. Nonetheless, Cather's experience was not positive, not only due to cinematically diminished aesthetic qualities, but because "the rise in book sales was short-lived" while the film ran, and she was beset by "the fan letters she received from messy and illiterate people" (116).

14. ^ Decker, James M. (April 2003). "Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism". Modern Language Review. doi:10.2307/3737843. JSTOR 3737843.

15. ^ Giannone, Richard (2005). "Music, Silence, and the Spirituality of Willa Gather". Renascence. 57 (2): 123-149. doi:10.5840/renascence20055723. Cather began the novel in 1933 when personal losses made her acutely aware of life's sad limits.

16. ^ Baker, Deena Michelle (2006). "What now?": Willa Cather's successful male professionals at middle age. p. 41. Cather began writing Lucy Gayheart in the Spring of 1933,after the loss of both parents and the sale of her childhood Red Cloud home (Rosowski 223).

17. ^ Porter, David (2017). "From The Song of the Lark to Lucy Gayheart, and Die Walküre to Die Winterreise". Cather Studies. 11. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1qv5psc.12. November 1932, just as Cather was starting to write Lucy Gayheart: "after one is 45 it simply rains death, all about one, and after you've passed ﬁfty, the storm grows ﬁercer" (474).

18. ^ Porter, David (2015). "Following the Lieder: Cather, Schubert, and Lucy Gayheart". Cather Studies. 10. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1d98c6j.19. By the time she wrote Lucy Gayheart in the mid-1930s, however, Cather was, like Lucy and Harry in Books II and III, deep into her own winter journey, a time of remembering friends and family she had lost, of feeling immobilized by her own incapacities, and of pondering the ultimate and unanswerable mystery of human suffering, which she had in her 1932 essay "Escapism" described as "the seeming original injustice[,] that creatures so splendidly aspiring should be inexorably doomed to fail" (On Writing 22).

19. ^ Edel, Leon (1960). Willa Cather, the paradox of success; a lecture delivered under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund in the Coolidge Auditorium. Library of Congress. p. 13. Of all the frontier stories available to Willa Cather, why, we can ask, did she particularly cling to this one rather than that; why did a night of talk with a blue-eyed girl at some party in the 1890's, a girl whose name was Gayhardt, end in a novel almost half a century later titled Lucy Gayheart; why had it long been dreamed of as a story to be called "Blue Eyes on the Platte?"

20. ^ Cather, Willa (1926). "Louise Guerber (October 15 [1926]) | Willa Cather Archive". cather.unl.edu. I'm flirting a little with as a story that's been knocking round in my head for sometime. Title "Blue Eyes on the Platte"-PLAtte, not plate.

21. ^ Cather, Willa (August 2015). Porter, David H. (ed.). Lucy Gayheart (Willa Cather Scholarly ed.). Lincoln. p. 288. ISBN 9780803276871.

22. ^ Cather, Willa (October 12, 1938). "Ferris Greenslet (October 12 [1938]) | Willa Cather Archive". cather.unl.edu. They were the two people dearest to me.

23. ^ Cather, Willa (May 6, 1941). "Mary Willard (May 6, 1941) | Willa Cather Archive". cather.unl.edu. I have waited for some days to turn to you, because I seemed unable to utter anything but a cry of grief and bitter disappointment. Only Isabelle's death and the death of my brother Douglass have cut me so deep. The feeling I have, all the time, is that so much of my life has been cut away.

24. ^ Gatenby, Greg (1993). The Wild is Always There: Canada through the eyes of foreign writers. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. p. 215. ISBN 0-394-28023-7.

25. ^ "Author of Lost Lady Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for Writing One of Ours". The New York Times. April 25, 1947. Willa Sibert Cather, noted American novelist, died at 4:30 P.M. yesterday in her home at 570 Park Avenue. After Miss Cather's death a secretary, who was with her at the time, was too upset to talk about it. It was reported that death was due to a cerebral hemorrhage. The author was 70 years old in December.

26. ^ Ammons, Elizabeth. "Cather and the New Canon: "The Old Beauty" and the Issue of Empire". Cather Studies. 3. Despite her sympathetic portraits of northern and eastern European gentile immigrants and her own status as a closeted lesbian writer in an increasingly homophobic era, Willa Cather was in key ways reactionary and racist.

27. ^ Carlin, Deborah (January 1, 2001). "Review of Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary TraditionBy John P. Anders & Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism By Joan Acocella". Great Plains Quarterly. 21 (1).

28. ^ Butler, Judith (1993). ""Dangerous Crossing": Willa Cather's Masculine Names". Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of "sex". New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415903661.

29. ^ Gatenby, Greg (1993). The Wild is Always There: Canada through the eyes of foreign writers. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada. p. 214. ISBN 0-394-28023-7.

30. ^ Shively, Steven B. (2017). "The Compatibility of Art and Religion for Willa Cather: From the Beginning". Cather Studies. 11. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1qv5psc.6.

31. ^ Fisher-Wirth, Ann W. (1990). "Dispossession and Redemption in the Novels of Willa Cather". Cather Studies. 1.

32. ^ Carter, Christopher (1991). "Springing From The Same Root: Religion And Art In The Fiction Of Willa Cather". William and Mary: 4. doi:10.21220/s2-gntc-w662.

33. Christopher Benfey. ^ Willa Cather's Correspondence Reveals Something New: The rage of a great American novelist, The New Republic, October 12, 2013.

34. ^ Carlin, Deborah (2015). "Cather's Jewett: Relationship, Influence, and Representation". Cather Studies. 10. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1d98c6j.12.

35. ^ Homestead, Melissa J. (2015). "Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality". Cather Studies. 10. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1d98c6j.5.

36. Danker, Kathleen (Winter 2000). "The Influence of Willa Cather's French-Canadian Neighbors in Nebraska in ^ Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock." Great Plains Quarterly. p. 34.

37. ^ Carr, Thomas M. (2016). "A French Canadian Community Becomes "French Country": The 1912 Funeral at the Center of Cather's O Pioneers!" (PDF). Willa Cather Newsletter & Review. 59 (1): 21-26.

38. ^ Ozieblo, Barbara (2002). "Love and Disappointment: Gamel Woolsey's unpublished novel Patterns on the Sand". Powys Notes. 14 (1-2): 5-12. Nostalgia for the past is not offset in Woolsey's writing by even an ambivalent acceptance of a new order, as it definitely is in Willa Cather's or Edith Wharton's novels.

39. ^ SKAGGS, MERRILL MAGUIRE (1981). "Willa Cather's Experimental Southern Novel". The Mississippi Quarterly. 35 (1): 3-14. ISSN 0026-637X. JSTOR 26474933. Because Willa Cather avoided in her fiction the bravura effects that critics can admire from so many angles and at such length, contemporary readers have sometimes found themselves at a loss to explain why they like her work, critics at a loss for a critical language capable of communicating their reasons for admiring it.

40. Mencken, H. L. "Willa Cather". ^ The Borzoi 1920: Being a sort of record of five years' publishing. Alfred Knopf. 1920. pp. 28-31. Retrieved September 21, 2017.

41. Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, pp. 5-6

Primary sources

Archival sources

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Willa Sibert Cather (; born Wilella Sibert Cather; December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947) was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, including , The Song of the Lark , and . In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for , a novel set during World War I.

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Because of Mr. Terupt by Rob Buyea, pages 1-11

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Mo Willems
Pigeon Series

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Edagar Allan Poe lived Fordham, Richmond, Boston and died in Baltimore

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Edgar Allan Poe (; January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, author, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States, and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Poe was born in Boston, the second child of actors David and Elizabeth "Eliza" Poe. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and when his mother died the following year, Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. They never formally adopted him, but he was with them well into young adulthood. He attended the University of Virginia but left after a year due to lack of money. He quarreled with John Allan over the funds for his education, and his gambling debts. In 1827, having enlisted in the United States Army under an assumed name, he published his first collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, credited only to "a Bostonian". Poe and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement after the death of Allan's wife in 1829. Poe later failed as an officer cadet at West Point, declared a firm wish to be a poet and writer, and parted ways with Allan.

Poe switched his focus to prose, and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move between several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In 1836, he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, but she died of tuberculosis in 1847. In January 1845, he published his poem " The Raven" to instant success. He planned for years to produce his own journal The Penn, later renamed . But before it began publishing, Poe died in Baltimore in 1849, aged 40, under mysterious circumstances. The cause of his death remains unknown, and has been variously attributed to many causes including disease, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide.

Poe and his works influenced literature around the world, as well as specialized fields such as cosmology and cryptography. He and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.

Early life and education

Plaque marking the approximate location of Poe's birth on Carver Street in Boston

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, the second child of American actor David Poe Jr. and English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe. He had an elder brother, Henry, and a younger sister, Rosalie. Their grandfather, David Poe, had emigrated from County Cavan, Ireland, around 1750.

His father abandoned the family in 1810, and his mother died a year later from pulmonary tuberculosis. Poe was then taken into the home of John Allan, a successful merchant in Richmond, Virginia, who dealt in a variety of goods, including cloth, wheat, tombstones, tobacco, and slaves. The Allans served as a foster family and gave him the name "Edgar Allan Poe", although they never formally adopted him.

The Allan family had Poe baptized into the Episcopal Church in 1812. John Allan alternately spoiled and aggressively disciplined his foster son. The family sailed to the United Kingdom in 1815, and Poe attended the grammar school for a short period in Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland, where Allan was born, before rejoining the family in London in 1816. There he studied at a boarding school in Chelsea until summer 1817. He was subsequently entered at the Reverend John Bransby's Manor House School at Stoke Newington, then a suburb 4 miles (6 km) north of London.

Poe moved with the Allans back to Richmond in 1820. In 1824, he served as the lieutenant of the Richmond youth honor guard as the city celebrated the visit of the Marquis de Lafayette. In March 1825, Allan's uncle and business benefactor William Galt died, who was said to be one of the wealthiest men in Richmond, leaving Allan several acres of real estate. The inheritance was estimated at $750,000 (equivalent to $19,000,000 in 2022). By summer 1825, Allan celebrated his expansive wealth by purchasing a two-story brick house called Moldavia.

Poe may have become engaged to Sarah Elmira Royster before he registered at the University of Virginia in February 1826 to study ancient and modern languages. The university was in its infancy, established on the ideals of its founder Thomas Jefferson. It had strict rules against gambling, horses, guns, tobacco, and alcohol, but these rules were mostly ignored. Jefferson enacted a system of student self-government, allowing students to choose their own studies, make their own arrangements for boarding, and report all wrongdoing to the faculty. The unique system was still in chaos, and there was a high dropout rate. During his time there, Poe lost touch with Royster and also became estranged from his foster father over gambling debts. He claimed that Allan had not given him sufficient money to register for classes, purchase texts, and procure and furnish a dormitory. Allan did send additional money and clothes, but Poe's debts increased. Poe gave up on the university after a year but did not feel welcome returning to Richmond, especially when he learned that his sweetheart Royster had married another man, Alexander Shelton. He traveled to Boston in April 1827, sustaining himself with odd jobs as a clerk and newspaper writer, and started using the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet during this period.

Military career

In May 1827, Poe enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he was first stationed at Fort Independence in Boston

Poe was unable to support himself, so he enlisted in the United States Army as a private on May 27, 1827, using the name "Edgar A. Perry". He claimed that he was 22 years old even though he was 18. He first served at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor for five dollars a month. That year, he released his first book, a 40-page collection of poetry titled Tamerlane and Other Poems, attributed with the byline "by a Bostonian". Only 50 copies were printed, and the book received virtually no attention. Poe's regiment was posted to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina, and traveled by ship on the brig Waltham on November 8, 1827. Poe was promoted to "artificer", an enlisted tradesman who prepared shells for artillery, and had his monthly pay doubled. He served for two years and attained the rank of Sergeant Major for Artillery, the highest rank that a non-commissioned officer could achieve; he then sought to end his five-year enlistment early. He revealed his real name and his circumstances to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard, who would allow Poe to be discharged only if he reconciled with Allan. Poe wrote a letter to Allan, who was unsympathetic and spent several months ignoring Poe's pleas; Allan may not have written to Poe even to make him aware of his foster mother's illness. Frances Allan died on February 28, 1829, and Poe visited the day after her burial. Perhaps softened by his wife's death, Allan agreed to support Poe's attempt to be discharged in order to receive an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

Poe was finally discharged on April 15, 1829, after securing a replacement to finish his enlisted term for him. Before entering West Point, he moved to Baltimore for a time to stay with his widowed aunt Maria Clemm, her daughter Virginia Eliza Clemm (Poe's first cousin), his brother Henry, and his invalid grandmother Elizabeth Cairnes Poe. In September of that year, Poe received "the very first words of encouragement I ever remember to have heard" in a review of his poetry by influential critic John Neal, prompting Poe to dedicate one of the poems to Neal in his second book Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, published in Baltimore in 1829.

Poe traveled to West Point and matriculated as a cadet on July 1, 1830. In October 1830, Allan married his second wife Louisa Patterson. The marriage and bitter quarrels with Poe over the children born to Allan out of extramarital affairs led to the foster father finally disowning Poe. Poe decided to leave West Point by purposely getting court-martialed. On February 8, 1831, he was tried for gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders for refusing to attend formations, classes, or church. He tactically pleaded not guilty to induce dismissal, knowing that he would be found guilty.

Poe left for New York in February 1831 and released a third volume of poems, simply titled Poems. The book was financed with help from his fellow cadets at West Point, many of whom donated 75 cents to the cause, raising a total of $170. They may have been expecting verses similar to the satirical ones Poe had written about commanding officers. It was printed by Elam Bliss of New York, labeled as "Second Edition", and including a page saying, "To the U.S. Corps of Cadets this volume is respectfully dedicated". The book once again reprinted the long poems "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf" but also six previously unpublished poems, including early versions of " To Helen", " Israfel", and " The City in the Sea". Poe returned to Baltimore to his aunt, brother, and cousin in March 1831. His elder brother Henry had been in ill health, in part due to problems with alcoholism, and he died on August 1, 1831.

Publishing career

In 1835, at age 26, Poe obtained a license to marry his cousin Virginia Clemm, who was then age 13; they were married for 11 years until her death, which may have inspired some of Poe's writing.

An 1845 portrait of Poe by Samuel Stillman Osgood

The cottage in the Fordham section of Bronx, where Poe spent his last years

After his brother's death, Poe began more earnest attempts to start his career as a writer, but he chose a difficult time in American publishing to do so. He was one of the first Americans to live by writing alone and was hampered by the lack of an international copyright law. American publishers often produced unauthorized copies of British works rather than paying for new work by Americans. The industry was also particularly hurt by the Panic of 1837. There was a booming growth in American periodicals around this time, fueled in part by new technology, but many did not last beyond a few issues. Publishers often refused to pay their writers or paid them much later than they promised, and Poe repeatedly resorted to humiliating pleas for money and other assistance.

After his early attempts at poetry, Poe had turned his attention to prose, likely based on John Neal's critiques in magazine. He placed a few stories with a Philadelphia publication and began work on his only drama . The Baltimore Saturday Visiter awarded him a prize in October 1833 for his short story " MS. Found in a Bottle". The story brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a Baltimorean of considerable means who helped Poe place some of his stories and introduced him to Thomas W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond.

In 1835, Poe became assistant editor of the ' Southern Literary Messenger, but White discharged him within a few weeks for being drunk on the job. Poe returned to Baltimore, where he obtained a license to marry his cousin Virginia on September 22, 1835, though it is unknown if they were married at that time. He was 26 and she was 13.

Poe was reinstated by White after promising good behavior, and he returned to Richmond with Virginia and her mother. He remained at the Messenger until January 1837. During this period, Poe claimed that its circulation increased from 700 to 3,500. He published several poems, book reviews, critiques, and stories in the paper. On May 16, 1836, he and Virginia held a Presbyterian wedding ceremony performed by Amasa Converse at their Richmond boarding house, with a witness falsely attesting Clemm's age as 21.

Philadelphia

In 1838, Poe relocated to Philadelphia, where he lived at four different residences between 1838 and 1844, one of which at 532 N. 7th Street has been preserved as a National Historic Landmark.

That same year, Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was published and widely reviewed. In the summer of 1839, he became assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. He published numerous articles, stories, and reviews, enhancing his reputation as a trenchant critic which he had established at the Messenger. Also in 1839, the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in two volumes, though he made little money from it and it received mixed reviews.

In June 1840, Poe published a prospectus announcing his intentions to start his own journal called , although he originally intended to call it The Penn, since it would have been based in Philadelphia. He bought advertising space for his prospectus in the June 6, 1840, issue of Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post: "Prospectus of the Penn Magazine, a Monthly Literary journal to be edited and published in the city of Philadelphia by Edgar A. Poe." The journal was never produced before Poe's death.

Poe left Burton's after about a year and found a position as writer and co-editor at Graham's Magazine, a successful monthly publication. In the last number of Graham's for 1841, Poe was among the co-signatories to an editorial note of celebration of the tremendous success the magazine had achieved in the past year: "Perhaps the editors of no magazine, either in America or in Europe, ever sat down, at the close of a year, to contemplate the progress of their work with more satisfaction than we do now. Our success has been unexampled, almost incredible. We may assert without fear of contradiction that no periodical ever witnessed the same increase during so short a period."

Around this time, Poe attempted to secure a position in the administration of John Tyler, claiming that he was a member of the Whig Party. He hoped to be appointed to the United States Custom House in Philadelphia with help from President Tyler's son Robert, an acquaintance of Poe's friend Frederick Thomas. Poe failed to show up for a meeting with Thomas to discuss the appointment in mid-September 1842, claiming to have been sick, though Thomas believed that he had been drunk. Poe was promised an appointment, but all positions were filled by others.

One evening in January 1842, Virginia showed the first signs of consumption, or tuberculosis, while singing and playing the piano, which Poe described as breaking a blood vessel in her throat. She only partially recovered, and Poe began to drink more heavily under the stress of her illness. He left Graham's and attempted to find a new position, for a time angling for a government post. He returned to New York where he worked briefly at the Evening Mirror before becoming editor of the Broadway Journal, and later its owner. There Poe alienated himself from other writers by publicly accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, though Longfellow never responded. On January 29, 1845, Poe's poem " The Raven" appeared in the Evening Mirror and became a popular sensation. It made Poe a household name almost instantly, though he was paid only $9 for its publication. It was concurrently published in The American Review: A Whig Journal under the pseudonym "Quarles".

The Broadway Journal failed in 1846, and Poe moved to a cottage in Fordham, New York, in the Bronx. That home, now known as the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, was relocated in later years to a park near the southeast corner of the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road. Nearby, Poe befriended the Jesuits at St. John's College, now Fordham University. Virginia died at the cottage on January 30, 1847. Biographers and critics often suggest that Poe's frequent theme of the "death of a beautiful woman" stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his life, including his wife.

Poe was increasingly unstable after his wife's death. He attempted to court poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement failed, purportedly because of Poe's drinking and erratic behavior. There is also strong evidence that Whitman's mother intervened and did much to derail the relationship. Poe then returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster.

Poe is interred at Westminster Hall in Baltimore, Maryland (Lat: 39.29027; Long: −76.62333); the circumstances and cause of his death remain uncertain.

On October 3, 1849, Poe was found semiconscious in Baltimore, "in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance", according to Joseph W. Walker, who found him. He was taken to the Washington Medical College, where he died on Sunday, October 7, 1849, at 5:00 in the morning. Poe was not coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition and why he was wearing clothes that were not his own. He is said to have repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds" on the night before his death, though it is unclear to whom he was referring. His attending physician said that Poe's final words were, "Lord help my poor soul". All of the relevant medical records have been lost, including Poe's death certificate.

Newspapers at the time reported Poe's death as "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation", common euphemisms for death from disreputable causes such as alcoholism. The actual cause of death remains a mystery. Speculation has included delirium tremens, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningeal inflammation, cholera, carbon monoxide poisoning, and rabies. One theory dating from 1872 suggests that Poe's death resulted from cooping, a form of electoral fraud in which citizens were forced to vote for a particular candidate, sometimes leading to violence and even murder.

Griswold's memoir

Immediately after Poe's death, his literary rival Rufus Wilmot Griswold wrote a slanted high-profile obituary under a pseudonym, filled with falsehoods that cast Poe as a lunatic, and which described him as a person who "walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes upturned in passionate prayers, (never for himself, for he felt, or professed to feel, that he was already damned)".

The long obituary appeared in the New York Tribune, signed "Ludwig" on the day that Poe was buried in Baltimore. It was further published throughout the country. The obituary began, "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it." "Ludwig" was soon identified as Griswold, an editor, critic, and anthologist who had borne a grudge against Poe since 1842. Griswold somehow became Poe's literary executor and attempted to destroy his enemy's reputation after his death.

Griswold wrote a biographical article of Poe called "Memoir of the Author", which he included in an 1850 volume of the collected works. There he depicted Poe as a depraved, drunken, drug-addled madman and included Poe's letters as evidence. Many of his claims were either lies or distortions; for example, it is seriously disputed that Poe was a drug addict. Griswold's book was denounced by those who knew Poe well, including John Neal, who published an article defending Poe and attacking Griswold as a " Rhadamanthus, who is not to be bilked of his fee, a thimble-full of newspaper notoriety". Griswold's book nevertheless became a popularly accepted biographical source. This was in part because it was the only full biography available and was widely reprinted, and in part because readers thrilled at the thought of reading works by an "evil" man. Letters that Griswold presented as proof were later revealed as forgeries.

Literary style and themes

Poe's best-known fiction works are Gothic horror, adhering to the genre's conventions to appeal to the public taste. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. Many of his works are generally considered part of the dark romanticism genre, a literary reaction to transcendentalism which Poe strongly disliked. He referred to followers of the transcendental movement as "Frog-Pondians", after the pond on Boston Common, and ridiculed their writings as "metaphor-run mad," lapsing into "obscurity for obscurity's sake" or "mysticism for mysticism's sake". Poe once wrote in a letter to Thomas Holley Chivers that he did not dislike transcendentalists, "only the pretenders and sophists among them".

Beyond horror, Poe also wrote satires, humor tales, and hoaxes. For comic effect, he used irony and ludicrous extravagance, often in an attempt to liberate the reader from cultural conformity. " Metzengerstein" is the first story that Poe is known to have published and his first foray into horror, but it was originally intended as a burlesque satirizing the popular genre. Poe also reinvented science fiction, responding in his writing to emerging technologies such as hot air balloons in " The Balloon-Hoax".

Poe wrote much of his work using themes aimed specifically at mass-market tastes. To that end, his fiction often included elements of popular pseudosciences, such as phrenology and physiognomy.

Literary theory

Poe's writing reflects his literary theories, which he presented in his criticism and also in essays such as " The Poetic Principle". He disliked didacticism and allegory, though he believed that meaning in literature should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface. Works with obvious meanings, he wrote, cease to be art. He believed that work of quality should be brief and focus on a specific single effect. To that end, he believed that the writer should carefully calculate every sentiment and idea.

Poe describes his method in writing "The Raven" in the essay " The Philosophy of Composition", and he claims to have strictly followed this method. It has been questioned whether he really followed this system, however. T. S. Eliot said: "It is difficult for us to read that essay without reflecting that if Poe plotted out his poem with such calculation, he might have taken a little more pains over it: the result hardly does credit to the method." Biographer Joseph Wood Krutch described the essay as "a rather highly ingenious exercise in the art of rationalization".

An 1875 illustration of Poe by French impressionist Édouard Manet for the Stéphane Mallarmé translation of "The Raven"

Poe depicted in a modern retouched version of the daguerreotype

During his lifetime, Poe was mostly recognized as a literary critic. Fellow critic James Russell Lowell called him "the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America", suggesting-rhetorically-that he occasionally used prussic acid instead of ink. Poe's caustic reviews earned him the reputation of being a "tomahawk man". A favorite target of Poe's criticism was Boston's acclaimed poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was often defended by his literary friends in what was later called "The Longfellow War". Poe accused Longfellow of "the heresy of the didactic", writing poetry that was preachy, derivative, and thematically plagiarized. Poe correctly predicted that Longfellow's reputation and style of poetry would decline, concluding, "We grant him high qualities, but deny him the Future".

Poe was also known as a writer of fiction and became one of the first American authors of the 19th century to become more popular in Europe than in the United States. Poe is particularly respected in France, in part due to early translations by Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire's translations became definitive renditions of Poe's work in Continental Europe.

Poe's early detective fiction tales featuring C. Auguste Dupin laid the groundwork for future detectives in literature. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, "Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed.... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?" The Mystery Writers of America have named their awards for excellence in the genre the " Edgars". Poe's work also influenced science fiction, notably Jules Verne, who wrote a sequel to Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket called An Antarctic Mystery, also known as The Sphinx of the Ice Fields. Science fiction author H. G. Wells noted, " Pym tells what a very intelligent mind could imagine about the south polar region a century ago". In 2013, The Guardian cited Pym as one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language, and noted its influence on later authors such as Doyle, Henry James, B. Traven, and David Morrell.

Horror author and historian H. P. Lovecraft was heavily influenced by Poe's horror tales, dedicating an entire section of his long essay, " Supernatural Horror in Literature", to his influence on the genre. In his letters, Lovecraft described Poe as his "God of Fiction". Lovecraft's earlier stories express a significant influence from Poe. A later work, At the Mountains of Madness, quotes him and was influenced by The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Lovecraft also made extensive use of Poe's unity of effect in his fiction. Alfred Hitchcock once said, "It's because I liked Edgar Allan Poe's stories so much that I began to make suspense films". Many references to Poe's works are present in Vladimir Nabokov's novels.

Like many famous artists, Poe's works have spawned imitators. One trend among imitators of Poe has been claims by clairvoyants or psychics to be "channeling" poems from Poe's spirit. One of the most notable of these was Lizzie Doten, who published Poems from the Inner Life in 1863, in which she claimed to have "received" new compositions by Poe's spirit. The compositions were re-workings of famous Poe poems such as " The Bells", but which reflected a new, positive outlook.

Poe has also received criticism. This is partly because of the negative perception of his personal character and its influence upon his reputation. William Butler Yeats was occasionally critical of Poe and once called him "vulgar". Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson reacted to "The Raven" by saying, "I see nothing in it", and derisively referred to Poe as "the jingle man". Aldous Huxley wrote that Poe's writing "falls into vulgarity" by being "too poetical"-the equivalent of wearing a diamond ring on every finger.

It is believed that only twelve copies have survived of Poe's first book Tamerlane and Other Poems. In December 2009, one copy sold at Christie's auctioneers in New York City for $662,500, a record price paid for a work of American literature.

Physics and cosmology

Eureka: A Prose Poem, an essay written in 1848, included a cosmological theory that presaged the Big Bang theory by 80 years, as well as the first plausible solution to Olbers' paradox. Poe eschewed the scientific method in Eureka and instead wrote from pure intuition. For this reason, he considered it a work of art, not science, but insisted that it was still true and considered it to be his career masterpiece. Even so, Eureka is full of scientific errors. In particular, Poe's suggestions ignored Newtonian principles regarding the density and rotation of planets.

Cryptography

Poe had a keen interest in cryptography. He had placed a notice of his abilities in the Philadelphia paper Alexander's Weekly (Express) Messenger, inviting submissions of ciphers which he proceeded to solve. In July 1841, Poe had published an essay called "A Few Words on Secret Writing" in Graham's Magazine. Capitalizing on public interest in the topic, he wrote " The Gold-Bug" incorporating ciphers as an essential part of the story. Poe's success with cryptography relied not so much on his deep knowledge of that field (his method was limited to the simple substitution cryptogram) as on his knowledge of the magazine and newspaper culture. His keen analytical abilities, which were so evident in his detective stories, allowed him to see that the general public was largely ignorant of the methods by which a simple substitution cryptogram can be solved, and he used this to his advantage. The sensation that Poe created with his cryptography stunts played a major role in popularizing cryptograms in newspapers and magazines.

Two ciphers he published in 1841 under the name "W. B. Tyler" were not solved until 1992 and 2000 respectively. One was a quote from Joseph Addison's play Cato; the other is probably based on a poem by Hester Thrale.

Poe had an influence on cryptography beyond increasing public interest during his lifetime. William Friedman, America's foremost cryptologist, was heavily influenced by Poe. Friedman's initial interest in cryptography came from reading "The Gold-Bug" as a child, an interest that he later put to use in deciphering Japan's PURPLE code during World War II.

In popular culture

As a character

The historical Edgar Allan Poe has appeared as a fictionalized character, often in order to represent the "mad genius" or "tormented artist" and in order to exploit his personal struggles. Many such depictions also blend in with characters from his stories, suggesting that Poe and his characters share identities. Often, fictional depictions of Poe use his mystery-solving skills in such novels as The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl.

Preserved homes, landmarks, and museums

The Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, one of several preserved former residences of Poe

No childhood home of Poe is still standing, including the Allan family's Moldavia estate. The oldest standing home in Richmond, the Old Stone House, is in use as the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, though Poe never lived there. The collection includes many items that Poe used during his time with the Allan family, and also features several rare first printings of Poe works. 13 West Range is the dorm room that Poe is believed to have used while studying at the University of Virginia in 1826; it is preserved and available for visits. Its upkeep is overseen by a group of students and staff known as the Raven Society.

The earliest surviving home in which Poe lived is at 203 North Amity St. in Baltimore, which is preserved as the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum. Poe is believed to have lived in the home at the age of 23 when he first lived with Maria Clemm and Virginia and possibly his grandmother and possibly his brother William Henry Leonard Poe. It is open to the public and is also the home of the Edgar Allan Poe Society.

While in Philadelphia between 1838 and 1844, Poe lived at at least four different residences, including the Indian Queen Hotel at 15 S. 4th Street, at a residence at 16th and Locust Streets, at 2502 Fairmount Street, and then in the Spring Garden section of the city at 532 N. 7th Street, a residence that has been preserved by the National Park Service as the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site. Poe's final home in Bronx, New York City, is preserved as the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage.

In Boston, a commemorative plaque on Boylston Street is several blocks away from the actual location of Poe's birth. The house which was his birthplace at 62 Carver Street no longer exists; also, the street has since been renamed "Charles Street South". A "square" at the intersection of Broadway, Fayette, and Carver Streets had once been named in his honor, but it disappeared when the streets were rearranged. In 2009, the intersection of Charles and Boylston Streets (two blocks north of his birthplace) was designated "Edgar Allan Poe Square".

In March 2014, fundraising was completed for construction of a permanent memorial sculpture, known as Poe Returning to Boston, at this location. The winning design by Stefanie Rocknak depicts a life-sized Poe striding against the wind, accompanied by a flying raven; his suitcase lid has fallen open, leaving a "paper trail" of literary works embedded in the sidewalk behind him. The public unveiling on October 5, 2014, was attended by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

Other Poe landmarks include a building on the Upper West Side, where Poe temporarily lived when he first moved to New York City. A plaque suggests that Poe wrote " The Raven" here. On Sullivan's Island in Charleston County, South Carolina, the setting of Poe's tale " The Gold-Bug" and where Poe served in the Army in 1827 at Fort Moultrie, there is a restaurant called Poe's Tavern. In the Fell's Point section of Baltimore, a bar still stands where legend says that Poe was last seen drinking before his death. Known as "The Horse You Came in On", local lore insists that a ghost whom they call "Edgar" haunts the rooms above.

Photographs

An 1848 "Ultima Thule" daguerreotype of Poe

Early daguerreotypes of Poe continue to arouse great interest among literary historians. Notable among them are:

"Ultima Thule" ("far discovery") to honor the new photographic technique; taken in November 1848 in Providence, Rhode Island, probably by Edwin H. Manchester

"Annie", given to Poe's friend Annie L. Richmond; probably taken in June 1849 in Lowell, Massachusetts, photographer unknown

Poe Toaster

Between 1949 and 2009, a bottle of cognac and three roses were left at Poe's original grave marker every January 19 by an unknown visitor affectionately referred to as the "Poe Toaster". Sam Porpora was a historian at the Westminster Church in Baltimore, where Poe is buried; he claimed on August 15, 2007, that he had started the tradition in 1949. Porpora said that the tradition began in order to raise money and enhance the profile of the church. His story has not been confirmed, and some details which he gave to the press are factually inaccurate. The Poe Toaster's last appearance was on January 19, 2009, the day of Poe's bicentennial.

List of selected works

Short stories

Poetry

Other works

References

1. ^ Sun, Chunyan (April 23, 2015). "Horror from the Soul-Gothic Style in Allan Poe's Horror Fictions" (PDF). English Language Teaching. Canadian Center of Science and Education. 8 (5). doi:10.5539/elt.v8n5p94.

2. ^ Semtner, Christopher P. (2012). Edgar Allan Poe's Richmond: the Raven in the River City. Charleston, SC: History Press. p. 15. ISBN 978-1-60949-607-4. OCLC 779472206.

3. 1634-1699: ^ McCusker, J. J. (1997). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States: Addenda et Corrigenda (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1700-1799: McCusker, J. J. (1992). How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (PDF). American Antiquarian Society. 1800-present: Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. "Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800-".

4. University of Virginia. ^ A Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the University of Virginia. Second Session, Commencing February 1, 1826. Charlottesville, VA: Chronicle Steam Book Printing House, 1880, p. 10

5. ^ Graham, George; Embury, E.; Peterson, Charles; Stephens, A.; Poe, Edgar (December 1841). "The Closing Year". Graham's Magazine. Philadelphia, PA: George R. Graham. We began the year almost unknown; certainly far behind our contemporaries in numbers; we close it with a list of twenty-five thousand subscribers, and the assurance on every hand that our popularity has as yet seen only its dawning. (See page 308 of pdf.)

6. Schroth, Raymond A. ^ Fordham: A History and Memoir. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008: 22-25.

7. ^ Geiling, Natasha. "The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe". Smithsonian Magazine.

8. ^ Van Luling, Todd (January 19, 2017). "A Vengeful Arch-Nemesis Taught You Fake News About Edgar Allan Poe". Huffington Post.

9. ^ "(Introduction)" (Exhibition at Boston Public Library). The Raven in the Frog Pond: Edgar Allan Poe and the City of Boston. The Trustees of Boston College. March 31, 2010.

10. ^ Zimmerman, Brett (2005). Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. pp. 85-87. ISBN 978-0-7735-2899-4.

11. ^ "Longfellow's Serenity and Poe's Prediction" (Exhibition at Boston Public Library and Massachusetts Historical Society). Forgotten Chapters of Boston's Literary History. The Trustees of Boston College. July 30, 2012.

12. ^ McCrum, Robert (November 23, 2013). "The 100 best novels: No 10 - The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838)". The Guardian. Archived from the original on September 11, 2016.

13. ^ Brian Boyd on Speak, Memory Archived 2014-06-29 at the Wayback Machine, Vladimir Nabokov Centennial, Random House, Inc.

14. "Though some wondered whether Poe wrote the source text, I find that it previously appeared in the ^ Baltimore Sun of July 4, 1840; and that it was in turn based on a widely reprinted poem ("Nuptial Repartee") that first appeared in the June 21, 1813, Morning Herald of London. A manuscript in the hand of Hester Thrale (i.e., Hester Lynch Piozzi) in Harvard's library hints that she may be the true author." From Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living by Paul Collins. Boston: New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014: p. 111.

15. ^ "An Interactive Map of Literary Boston: 1794-1862" (Exhibition). Forgotten Chapters of Boston's Literary History. The Trustees of Boston College. July 30, 2012.

16. ^ Lee, M.G. (October 5, 2014). "Edgar Allan Poe immortalized in the city he loathed". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on July 2, 2015.

17. ^ "Poe Toaster tribute is 'nevermore'". The Baltimore Sun. Tribune Company. January 19, 2010. Archived from the original on January 20, 2012.

Further reading

Bittner, William (1962). . Boston: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 978-0-316-09686-7.

George Washington Eveleth (1922). Thomas Ollive Mabbott (ed.). The letters from George W. Eveleth to Edgar Allan Poe. Bulletin of the New York Public Library. Vol. 26 (reprint ed.). The New York Public Library.

Pope-Hennessy, Una (1934). Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849: A Critical Biography. New York: Haskell House.

Robinson, Marilynne, "On Edgar Allan Poe", The New York Review of Books, vol. LXII, no. 2 (February 5, 2015), pp. 4, 6.

External links

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Edgar Allan Poe (; January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, author, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States, and of American literature.

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jeff kinney

biography

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Jeff Kinney Reads Aloud from Diary of a Wimpy Kid

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Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis and lived in Barnstable and New York

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (; November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007) was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of nonfiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, bestselling novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but dropped out in January 1943 and enlisted in the United States Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden and survived the Allied bombing of the city by taking refuge in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He later adopted his sister's sons, after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident.

Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel was reviewed positively but was not commercially successful at the time. In the nearly 20 years that followed, Vonnegut published several novels that were well regarded, two of which (The Sirens of Titan [1959] and Cat's Cradle [1963]) were nominated for the Hugo Award for best novel. He published a short story collection titled Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968. Vonnegut's breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. The book's anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War and its reviews were generally positive. After its release, Slaughterhouse-Five went to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. He was invited to give speeches, lectures and commencement addresses around the country and received many awards and honors.

Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essays and short-story collections, including Fates Worse Than Death (1991), and A Man Without a Country (2005). After his death, he was hailed as a black-humor commentator on the society in which he lived and as one of the most important contemporary writers. Vonnegut's son Mark published a compilation of his father's unpublished compositions, titled Armageddon in Retrospect. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction including five previously unpublished stories. Complete Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. Numerous scholarly works have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was the youngest of three children of Kurt Vonnegut Sr. and his wife Edith (born Lieber). His older siblings were Bernard (born 1914) and Alice (born 1917). Vonnegut was descended from German immigrants who settled in the United States in the mid-19th century; his patrilineal great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut of Westphalia, Germany, settled in Indianapolis and founded the Vonnegut Hardware Company. Kurt's father, and his father before him, Bernard, were architects; the architecture firm under Kurt Sr. designed such buildings as Das Deutsche Haus (now called "The Athenæum"), the Indiana headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company, and the Fletcher Trust Building. Vonnegut's mother was born into Indianapolis high society, as her family, the Liebers, were among the wealthiest in the city, their fortune derived from ownership of a successful brewery.

Both of Vonnegut's parents were fluent German speakers, but the ill feeling toward Germany during and after World War I caused them to abandon German culture in order to show their American patriotism. Thus, they did not teach their youngest son German, or introduce him to German literature and traditions, leaving him feeling "ignorant and rootless." Vonnegut later credited Ida Young, his family's African-American cook and housekeeper for the first 10 years of his life, for raising him and giving him values: she "gave me decent moral instruction and was exceedingly nice to me. So she was as great an influence on me as anybody." Vonnegut described Young as "humane and wise", adding that "the compassionate, forgiving aspects of [his] beliefs" came from her.

The financial security and social prosperity that the Vonneguts had once enjoyed were destroyed in a matter of years. The Liebers' brewery was closed in 1921 after the advent of Prohibition in the United States. When the Great Depression hit, few people could afford to build, causing clients at Kurt Sr.'s architectural firm to become scarce. Vonnegut's brother and sister had finished their primary and secondary educations in private schools, but Vonnegut was placed in a public school, called Public School No. 43, now known as the James Whitcomb Riley School. He was bothered by the Great Depression; both his parents were affected deeply by their economic misfortune. His father withdrew from normal life and became what Vonnegut called a "dreamy artist". His mother became depressed, withdrawn, bitter, and abusive. She labored to regain the family's wealth and status, and Vonnegut said that she expressed hatred "as corrosive as hydrochloric acid" for her husband. Edith Vonnegut tried to sell short stories to , The Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines, with no success.

Vonnegut enrolled at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1936. While there, he played clarinet in the school band and became a co-editor (along with Madelyn Pugh) for the Tuesday edition of the school newspaper, The Shortridge Echo. Vonnegut said his tenure with the Echo allowed him to write for a large audience-his fellow students-rather than for a teacher, an experience he said was "fun and easy". "It just turned out that I could write better than a lot of other people", Vonnegut observed. "Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else has so much trouble doing it."

After graduating from Shortridge in 1940, Vonnegut enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He wanted to study the humanities or become an architect like his father, but his father and brother Bernard, an atmospheric scientist, urged him to study a "useful" discipline. As a result, Vonnegut majored in biochemistry, but he had little proficiency in the area and was indifferent towards his studies. As his father had been a member at MIT, Vonnegut was entitled to join the Delta Upsilon fraternity, and did. He overcame stiff competition for a place at the university's independent newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, first serving as a staff writer, then as an editor. By the end of his first year, he was writing a column titled "Innocents Abroad" which reused jokes from other publications. He later penned a piece, "Well All Right", focusing on pacifism, a cause he strongly supported, arguing against U.S. intervention in World War II.

The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into the war. Vonnegut was a member of Reserve Officers' Training Corps, but poor grades and a satirical article in Cornell's newspaper cost him his place there. He was placed on academic probation in May 1942 and dropped out the following January. No longer eligible for a deferment as a member of ROTC, he faced likely conscription into the United States Army. Instead of waiting to be drafted, he enlisted in the Army and in March 1943 reported to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for basic training. Vonnegut was trained to fire and maintain howitzers and later received instruction in mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee as part of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). In early 1944, the ASTP was canceled due to the Army's need for soldiers to support the D-Day invasion, and Vonnegut was ordered to an infantry battalion at Camp Atterbury, south of Indianapolis in Edinburgh, Indiana, where he trained as a scout. He lived so close to his home that he was "able to sleep in [his] own bedroom and use the family car on weekends". On May 14, 1944, Vonnegut returned home on leave for Mother's Day weekend to discover that his mother had committed suicide the previous night by overdosing on sleeping pills. Possible factors that contributed to Edith Vonnegut's suicide include the family's loss of wealth and status, Vonnegut's forthcoming deployment overseas, and her own lack of success as a writer. She was inebriated at the time and under the influence of prescription drugs.

Three months after his mother's suicide, Vonnegut was sent to Europe as an intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division. In December 1944, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the final German offensive of the war. During the battle, the 106th Infantry Division, which had only recently reached the front and was assigned to a "quiet" sector due to its inexperience, was overrun by advancing German armored forces. Over 500 members of the division were killed and over 6,000 were captured.

On December 22, Vonnegut was captured with about 50 other American soldiers. Vonnegut was taken by boxcar to a prison camp south of Dresden, in Saxony. During the journey, the Royal Air Force mistakenly attacked the trains carrying Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners of war, killing about 150 of them. Vonnegut was sent to Dresden, the "first fancy city [he had] ever seen". He lived in a slaughterhouse when he got to the city, and worked in a factory that made malt syrup for pregnant women. Vonnegut recalled the sirens going off whenever another city was bombed. The Germans did not expect Dresden to be bombed, Vonnegut said. "There were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories."

On February 13, 1945, Dresden became the target of Allied forces. In the hours and days that followed, the Allies engaged in a fierce firebombing of the city. The offensive subsided on February 15, with around 25,000 civilians killed in the bombing. Vonnegut marveled at the level of both the destruction in Dresden and the secrecy that attended it. He had survived by taking refuge in a meat locker three stories underground. "It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around", Vonnegut said. "When we came up the city was gone ... They burnt the whole damn town down." Vonnegut and other American prisoners were put to work immediately after the bombing, excavating bodies from the rubble. He described the activity as a "terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt".

The American POWs were evacuated on foot to the border of Saxony and Czechoslovakia after General George S. Patton captured Leipzig. With the captives abandoned by their guards, Vonnegut reached a prisoner-of-war repatriation camp in Le Havre, France, before the end of May 1945, with the aid of the Soviets. He returned to the United States and continued to serve in the Army, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, typing discharge papers for other soldiers. Soon after he was awarded a Purple Heart about which he remarked "I myself was awarded my country's second-lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frost-bite." He was discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to Indianapolis.

Marriage, University of Chicago, and early employment

After he returned to the United States, 22-year-old Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, his high school girlfriend and classmate since kindergarten, on September 1, 1945. The pair relocated to Chicago; there, Vonnegut enrolled in the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill, as an anthropology student in an unusual five-year joint undergraduate/graduate program that conferred a master's degree. He augmented his income by working as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago at night. Jane accepted a scholarship from the university to study Russian literature as a graduate student. Jane dropped out of the program after becoming pregnant with the couple's first child, Mark (born May 1947), while Kurt also left the University without any degree (despite having completed his undergraduate education) when his master's thesis on the Ghost Dance religious movement was unanimously rejected by the department.

Shortly thereafter, General Electric (GE) hired Vonnegut as a publicist for the company's Schenectady, New York, research laboratory. Although the job required a college degree, Vonnegut was hired after claiming to hold a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. His brother Bernard had worked at GE since 1945, contributing significantly to an iodine-based cloud seeding project. In 1949, Kurt and Jane had a daughter named Edith. Still working for GE, Vonnegut had his first piece, titled "Report on the Barnhouse Effect", published in the February 11, 1950 issue of Collier's, for which he received $750. Vonnegut wrote another story, after being coached by the fiction editor at Collier's, Knox Burger, and again sold it to the magazine, this time for $950. While Burger supported Vonnegut's writing, he was shocked when Vonnegut quit GE as of January 1, 1951, later stating: "I never said he should give up his job and devote himself to fiction. I don't trust the freelancer's life, it's tough." Nevertheless, in early 1951 Vonnegut moved with his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts to write full-time, leaving GE behind.

In 1952, Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, was published by Scribner's. The novel has a post-Third World War setting, in which factory workers have been replaced by machines.

Player Piano draws upon Vonnegut's experience as an employee at GE. He satirizes the drive to climb the corporate ladder, one that in Player Piano is rapidly disappearing as automation increases, putting even executives out of work. His central character, Paul Proteus, has an ambitious wife, a backstabbing assistant, and a feeling of empathy for the poor. Sent by his boss, Kroner, as a double agent among the poor (who have all the material goods they want, but little sense of purpose), he leads them in a machine-smashing, museum-burning revolution. Player Piano expresses Vonnegut's opposition to McCarthyism, something made clear when the Ghost Shirts, the revolutionary organization Paul penetrates and eventually leads, is referred to by one character as " fellow travelers".

In Player Piano, Vonnegut originates many of the techniques he would use in his later works. The comic, heavy-drinking Shah of Bratpuhr, an outsider to this dystopian corporate United States, is able to ask many questions that an insider would not think to ask, or would cause offense by doing so. For example, when taken to see the artificially intelligent supercomputer EPICAC, the Shah asks it "what are people for?" and receives no answer. Speaking for Vonnegut, he dismisses it as a "false god". This type of alien visitor would recur throughout Vonnegut's literature.

The New York Times writer and critic Granville Hicks gave Player Piano a positive review, favorably comparing it to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Hicks called Vonnegut a "sharp-eyed satirist". None of the reviewers considered the novel particularly important. Several editions were printed-one by Bantam with the title Utopia 14, and another by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club-whereby Vonnegut gained the repute of a science fiction writer, a genre held in disdain by writers at that time. He defended the genre, and deplored a perceived sentiment that "no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works."

After Player Piano, Vonnegut continued to sell short stories to various magazines. Contracted to produce a second novel (which eventually became Cat's Cradle), he struggled to complete it and the work languished for years. In 1954 the couple had a third child, Nanette. With a growing family and no financially successful novels yet, Vonnegut's short stories helped to sustain the family, though he frequently needed to find additional sources of income as well. In 1957, he and a partner opened a Saab automobile dealership in Cape Cod, but it went bankrupt by the end of the year.

In 1958, his sister, Alice, died of cancer two days after her husband, James Carmalt Adams, was killed in a train accident. The Vonneguts took in three of the Adams' young sons-James, Steven, and Kurt, aged 14, 11, and 9, respectively. A fourth Adams son, Peter (2), also stayed with the Vonneguts for about a year before being given to the care of a paternal relative in Georgia.

Grappling with family challenges, Vonnegut continued to write, publishing novels vastly dissimilar in terms of plot. The Sirens of Titan (1959) features a Martian invasion of Earth, as experienced by a bored billionaire, Malachi Constant. He meets Winston Rumfoord, an aristocratic space traveler, who is virtually omniscient but stuck in a time warp that allows him to appear on Earth every 59 days. The billionaire learns that his actions and the events of all of history are determined by a race of robotic aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who need a replacement part that can only be produced by an advanced civilization in order to repair their spaceship and return home-human history has been manipulated to produce it. Some human structures, such as the Kremlin, are coded signals from the aliens to their ship as to how long it may expect to wait for the repair to take place. Reviewers were uncertain what to think of the book, with one comparing it to Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann.

Rumfoord, who is based on Franklin D. Roosevelt, also physically resembles the former president. Rumfoord is described, "he put a cigarette in a long, bone cigarette holder, lighted it. He thrust out his jaw. The cigarette holder pointed straight up." William Rodney Allen, in his guide to Vonnegut's works, stated that Rumfoord foreshadowed the fictional political figures who would play major roles in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Jailbird.

Mother Night, published in 1961, received little attention at the time of its publication. Howard W. Campbell Jr., Vonnegut's protagonist, is an American who goes to Nazi Germany during the war as a double agent for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, and rises to the regime's highest ranks as a radio propagandist. After the war, the spy agency refuses to clear his name and he is eventually imprisoned by the Israelis in the same cell block as Adolf Eichmann, and later commits suicide. Vonnegut wrote in a foreword to a later edition, "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be". Literary critic Lawrence Berkove considered the novel, like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to illustrate the tendency for "impersonators to get carried away by their impersonations, to become what they impersonate and therefore to live in a world of illusion".

Also published in 1961 was Vonnegut's short story, " Harrison Bergeron", set in a dystopic future where all are equal, even if that means disfiguring beautiful people and forcing the strong or intelligent to wear devices that negate their advantages. Fourteen-year-old Harrison is a genius and athlete forced to wear record-level "handicaps" and imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the government. He escapes to a television studio, tears away his handicaps, and frees a ballerina from her lead weights. As they dance, they are killed by the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers. Vonnegut, in a later letter, suggested that "Harrison Bergeron" might have sprung from his envy and self-pity as a high school misfit. In his 1976 biography of Vonnegut, Stanley Schatt suggested that the short story shows "in any leveling process, what really is lost, according to Vonnegut, is beauty, grace, and wisdom". Darryl Hattenhauer, in his 1998 journal article on "Harrison Bergeron", theorized that the story was a satire on American Cold War misunderstandings of communism and socialism.

With Cat's Cradle (1963), Allen wrote, "Vonnegut hit full stride for the first time". The narrator, John, intends to write of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional fathers of the atomic bomb, seeking to cover the scientist's human side. Hoenikker, in addition to the bomb, has developed another threat to mankind, ice-nine, solid water stable at room temperature, and if a particle of it is dropped in water, all of it becomes ice-nine. Much of the second half of the book is spent on the fictional Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, where John explores a religion called Bokononism, whose holy books (excerpts from which are quoted), give the novel the moral core science does not supply. After the oceans are converted to ice-nine, wiping out most of humankind, John wanders the frozen surface, seeking to have himself and his story survive.

Vonnegut based the title character of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964), on an accountant he knew on Cape Cod, who specialized in clients in trouble and often had to comfort them. Eliot Rosewater, the wealthy son of a Republican senator, seeks to atone for his wartime killing of noncombatant firefighters by serving in a volunteer fire department, and by giving away money to those in trouble or need. Stress from a battle for control of his charitable foundation pushes him over the edge, and he is placed in a mental hospital. He recovers, and ends the financial battle by declaring the children of his county to be his heirs. Allen deemed God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater more "a cry from the heart than a novel under its author's full intellectual control", that reflected family and emotional stresses Vonnegut was going through at the time.

In the mid-1960s, Vonnegut contemplated abandoning his writing career. In 1999 he wrote in The New York Times, "I had gone broke, was out of print and had a lot of kids..." But then, on the recommendation of an admirer, he received a surprise offer of a teaching job at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, employment that he likened to the rescue of a drowning man.

After spending almost two years at the writer's workshop at the University of Iowa, teaching one course each term, Vonnegut was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Germany. By the time he won it, in March 1967, he was becoming a well-known writer. He used the funds to travel in Eastern Europe, including to Dresden, where he found many prominent buildings still in ruins. At the time of the bombing, Vonnegut had not appreciated the sheer scale of destruction in Dresden; his enlightenment came only slowly as information dribbled out, and based on early figures he came to believe that 135,000 had died there.

Vonnegut had been writing about his war experiences at Dresden ever since he returned from the war, but had never been able to write anything acceptable to himself or his publishers-Chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse-Five tells of his difficulties. Released in 1969, the novel rocketed Vonnegut to fame. It tells of the life of Billy Pilgrim, who like Vonnegut was born in 1922 and survives the bombing of Dresden. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, with many of the story's climaxes-Billy's death in 1976, his kidnapping by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore nine years earlier, and the execution of Billy's friend Edgar Derby in the ashes of Dresden for stealing a teapot-disclosed in the story's first pages. In 1970, he was also a correspondent in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War. Slaughterhouse-Five received generally positive reviews, with Michael Crichton writing in The New Republic, "he writes about the most excruciatingly painful things. His novels have attacked our deepest fears of automation and the bomb, our deepest political guilts, our fiercest hatreds and loves. No one else writes books on these subjects; they are inaccessible to normal novelists." The book went immediately to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list. Vonnegut's earlier works had appealed strongly to many college students, and the antiwar message of Slaughterhouse-Five resonated with a generation marked by the Vietnam War. He later stated that the loss of confidence in government that Vietnam caused finally allowed for an honest conversation regarding events like Dresden.

After Slaughterhouse-Five was published, Vonnegut embraced the fame and financial security that attended its release. He was hailed as a hero of the burgeoning anti-war movement in the United States, was invited to speak at numerous rallies, and gave college commencement addresses around the country. In addition to briefly teaching at Harvard University as a lecturer in creative writing in 1970, Vonnegut taught at the City College of New York as a distinguished professor during the 1973-1974 academic year. He was later elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and given honorary degrees by, among others, Indiana University and Bennington College. Vonnegut also wrote a play called Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which opened on October 7, 1970, at New York's Theatre de Lys. Receiving mixed reviews, it closed on March 14, 1971. In 1972, Universal Pictures adapted Slaughterhouse-Five into a film which the author said was "flawless".

Meanwhile, Vonnegut's personal life was disintegrating. His wife Jane had embraced Christianity, which was contrary to Vonnegut's atheistic beliefs, and with five of their six children having left home, Vonnegut said the two were forced to find "other sorts of seemingly important work to do". The couple battled over their differing beliefs until Vonnegut moved from their Cape Cod home to New York in 1971. Vonnegut called the disagreements "painful", and said the resulting split was a "terrible, unavoidable accident that we were ill-equipped to understand." The couple divorced and they remained friends until Jane's death in late 1986. Beyond his marriage, he was deeply affected when his son Mark suffered a mental breakdown in 1972, which exacerbated Vonnegut's chronic depression, and led him to take Ritalin. When he stopped taking the drug in the mid-1970s, he began to see a psychologist weekly.

Vonnegut's difficulties materialized in numerous ways; most distinctly though, was the painfully slow progress he was making on his next novel, the darkly comical Breakfast of Champions. In 1971, Vonnegut stopped writing the novel altogether. When it was finally released in 1973, it was panned critically. In Thomas S. Hischak's book American Literature on Stage and Screen, Breakfast of Champions was called "funny and outlandish", but reviewers noted that it "lacks substance and seems to be an exercise in literary playfulness." Vonnegut's 1976 novel , which meditates on the relationship between him and his sister (Alice), met a similar fate. In The New York Times's review of Slapstick, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said Vonnegut "seems to be putting less effort into [storytelling] than ever before", and that "it still seems as if he has given up storytelling after all." At times, Vonnegut was disgruntled by the personal nature of his detractors' complaints.

In 1979, Vonnegut married Jill Krementz, a photographer whom he met while she was working on a series about writers in the early 1970s. With Jill, he adopted a daughter, Lily, when the baby was three days old. In subsequent years, his popularity resurged as he published several satirical books, including (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), (1985), (1987), and Hocus Pocus (1990). Although he remained a prolific writer in the 1980s Vonnegut struggled with depression and attempted suicide in 1984. Two years later, Vonnegut was seen by a younger generation when he played himself in Rodney Dangerfield's film Back to School. The last of Vonnegut's fourteen novels, (1997), was, as University of Detroit history professor and Vonnegut biographer Gregory Sumner said, "a reflection of an aging man facing mortality and testimony to an embattled faith in the resilience of human awareness and agency." Vonnegut's final book, a collection of essays entitled A Man Without a Country (2005), became a bestseller.

In a 2006 Rolling Stone interview, Vonnegut sardonically stated that he would sue the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, the maker of the Pall Mall-branded cigarettes he had been smoking since he was twelve or fourteen years old, for false advertising. "And do you know why?" he said. "Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me." He died on the night of April 11, 2007, in Manhattan, as a result of brain injuries incurred several weeks prior from a fall at his New York brownstone home. His death was reported by his wife Jill. Vonnegut was 84 years old. At the time of his death, Vonnegut had written fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays and five non-fiction books. A book composed of Vonnegut's unpublished pieces, Armageddon in Retrospect, was compiled and posthumously published by Vonnegut's son Mark in 2008.

When asked about the impact Vonnegut had on his work, author Josip Novakovich stated that he has "much to learn from Vonnegut-how to compress things and yet not compromise them, how to digress into history, quote from various historical accounts, and not stifle the narrative. The ease with which he writes is sheerly masterly, Mozartian." Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez said that the author will "rightly be remembered as a darkly humorous social critic and the premier novelist of the counterculture", and Dinitia Smith of The New York Times dubbed Vonnegut the "counterculture's novelist".

Vonnegut has inspired numerous posthumous tributes and works. In 2008, the Kurt Vonnegut Society was established, and in November 2010, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library was opened in Vonnegut's hometown of Indianapolis. The Library of America published a compendium of Vonnegut's compositions between 1963 and 1973 the following April, and another compendium of his earlier works in 2012. Late 2011 saw the release of two Vonnegut biographies, Gregory Sumner's Unstuck in Time and Charles J. Shields's And So It Goes. Shields's biography of Vonnegut created some controversy. According to The Guardian, the book portrays Vonnegut as distant, cruel and nasty. "Cruel, nasty and scary are the adjectives commonly used to describe him by the friends, colleagues, and relatives Shields quotes", said The Daily Beast's Wendy Smith. "Towards the end he was very feeble, very depressed and almost morose", said Jerome Klinkowitz of the University of Northern Iowa, who has examined Vonnegut in depth.

-Dinitia Smith, The New York Times, 2007

Vonnegut's works have evoked ire on several occasions. His most prominent novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, has been objected to or removed at various institutions in at least 18 instances. In the case of Island Trees School District v. Pico, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a school district's ban on Slaughterhouse-Five-which the board had called "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy"-and eight other novels was unconstitutional. When a school board in Republic, Missouri decided to withdraw Vonnegut's novel from its libraries, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library offered a free copy to all the students of the district.

Tally, writing in 2013, suggests that Vonnegut has only recently become the subject of serious study rather than fan adulation, and much is yet to be written about him. "The time for scholars to say 'Here's why Vonnegut is worth reading' has definitively ended, thank goodness. We know he's worth reading. Now tell us things we don't know." Todd F. Davis notes that Vonnegut's work is kept alive by his loyal readers, who have "significant influence as they continue to purchase Vonnegut's work, passing it on to subsequent generations and keeping his entire canon in print-an impressive list of more than twenty books that [Dell Publishing] has continued to refurbish and hawk with new cover designs." Donald E. Morse notes that Vonnegut, "is now firmly, if somewhat controversially, ensconced in the American and world literary canon as well as in high school, college and graduate curricula". Tally writes of Vonnegut's work:

Vonnegut's 14 novels, while each does its own thing, together are nevertheless experiments in the same overall project. Experimenting with the form of the American novel itself, Vonnegut engages in a broadly modernist attempt to apprehend and depict the fragmented, unstable, and distressing bizarreries of postmodern American experience ... That he does not actually succeed in representing the shifting multiplicities of that social experience is beside the point. What matters is the attempt, and the recognition that ... we must try to map this unstable and perilous terrain, even if we know in advance that our efforts are doomed.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Vonnegut posthumously in 2015.

The asteroid 25399 Vonnegut is named in his honor.

In the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut recounts meeting filmmaker Harrison Starr at a party who asked him whether his forthcoming book was an anti-war novel-"I guess" replied Vonnegut. Starr responded "Why don't you write an anti-glacier novel?". This underlined Vonnegut's belief that wars were, unfortunately, inevitable, but that it was important to ensure the wars one fought were just wars.

In 2011, NPR wrote, "Kurt Vonnegut's blend of anti-war sentiment and satire made him one of the most popular writers of the 1960s." Vonnegut stated in a 1987 interview that, "my own feeling is that civilization ended in World War I, and we're still trying to recover from that", and that he wanted to write war-focused works without glamorizing war itself. Vonnegut had not intended to publish again, but his anger against the George W. Bush administration led him to write A Man Without a Country.

Slaughterhouse-Five is the Vonnegut novel best known for its antiwar themes, but the author expressed his beliefs in ways beyond the depiction of the destruction of Dresden. One character, Mary O'Hare, opines that "wars were partly encouraged by books and movies", starring " Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men". Vonnegut made a number of comparisons between Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima in Slaughterhouse-Five and wrote in Palm Sunday (1991) that "I learned how vile that religion of mine could be when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima".

Nuclear war, or at least deployed nuclear arms, is mentioned in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. In Player Piano, the computer EPICAC is given control of the nuclear arsenal, and is charged with deciding whether to use high-explosive or nuclear arms. In Cat's Cradle, John's original purpose in setting pen to paper was to write an account of what prominent Americans had been doing as Hiroshima was bombed.

-Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, 1999

Vonnegut was an atheist, a humanist and a freethinker, serving as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association. In an interview for , he stated that his forebears who came to the United States did not believe in God, and he learned his atheism from his parents. He did not however disdain those who seek the comfort of religion, hailing church associations as a type of extended family. Like his great-grandfather Clemens, Vonnegut was a freethinker. He occasionally attended a Unitarian church, but with little consistency. In his autobiographical work Palm Sunday, Vonnegut says he is a "Christ-worshipping agnostic"; in a speech to the Unitarian Universalist Association, he called himself a "Christ-loving atheist". However, he was keen to stress that he was not a Christian.

Vonnegut was an admirer of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, particularly the Beatitudes, and incorporated it into his own doctrines. He also referred to it in many of his works. In his 1991 book Fates Worse than Death, Vonnegut suggests that during the Reagan administration, "anything that sounded like the Sermon on the Mount was socialistic or communistic, and therefore anti-American". In Palm Sunday, he wrote that "the Sermon on the Mount suggests a mercifulness that can never waver or fade." However, Vonnegut had a deep dislike for certain aspects of Christianity, often reminding his readers of the bloody history of the Crusades and other religion-inspired violence. He despised the televangelists of the late 20th century, feeling that their thinking was narrow-minded.

Religion features frequently in Vonnegut's work, both in his novels and elsewhere. He laced a number of his speeches with religion-focused rhetoric, and was prone to using such expressions as "God forbid" and "thank God". He once wrote his own version of the Requiem Mass, which he then had translated into Latin and set to music. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Vonnegut goes to heaven after he is euthanized by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Once in heaven, he interviews 21 deceased celebrities, including Isaac Asimov, William Shakespeare, and Kilgore Trout-the last a fictional character from several of his novels. Vonnegut's works are filled with characters founding new faiths, and religion often serves as a major plot device, for example in Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle. In The Sirens of Titan, Rumfoord proclaims The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Slaughterhouse-Five sees Billy Pilgrim, lacking religion himself, nevertheless become a chaplain's assistant in the military and display a large crucifix on his bedroom wall. In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut invented the religion of Bokononism.

Vonnegut did not particularly sympathize with liberalism or conservatism, and mused on the specious simplicity of American politics, saying facetiously, "If you want to take my guns away from me, and you're all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other ... you're a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you're a conservative. What could be simpler?" Regarding political parties, Vonnegut said, "The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead."

Vonnegut disregarded more mainstream political ideologies in favor of socialism, which he thought could provide a valuable substitute for what he saw as social Darwinism and a spirit of " survival of the fittest" in American society, believing that "socialism would be a good for the common man". Vonnegut would often return to a quote by socialist and five-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free." Vonnegut expressed disappointment that communism and socialism seemed to be unsavory topics to the average American, and believed that they may offer beneficial substitutes to contemporary social and economic systems.

Vonnegut's writing was inspired by an eclectic mix of sources. When he was younger, Vonnegut stated that he read works of pulp fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and action-adventure. He also read the classics, such as the plays of Aristophanes-like Vonnegut's works, humorous critiques of contemporary society. Vonnegut's life and work also share similarities with that of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn writer Mark Twain. Both shared pessimistic outlooks on humanity, and a skeptical take on religion, and, as Vonnegut put it, were both "associated with the enemy in a major war", as Twain briefly enlisted in the South's cause during the American Civil War, and Vonnegut's German name and ancestry connected him with the United States' enemy in both world wars. He also cited Ambrose Bierce as an influence, calling An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge the greatest American short story and deeming any who disagreed or had not read the story 'twerps.'

Vonnegut called George Orwell his favorite writer, and admitted that he tried to emulate Orwell. "I like his concern for the poor, I like his socialism, I like his simplicity", Vonnegut said. Vonnegut also said that Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, heavily influenced his debut novel, Player Piano, in 1952. Vonnegut commented that Robert Louis Stevenson's stories were emblems of thoughtfully put together works that he tried to mimic in his own compositions. Vonnegut also hailed playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw as "a hero of [his]", and an "enormous influence". Within his own family, Vonnegut stated that his mother, Edith, had the greatest influence on him. "[My] mother thought she might make a new fortune by writing for the slick magazines. She took short-story courses at night. She studied writers the way gamblers study horses."

Early on in his career, Vonnegut decided to model his style after Henry David Thoreau, who wrote as if from the perspective of a child, allowing Thoreau's works to be more widely comprehensible. Using a youthful narrative voice allowed Vonnegut to deliver concepts in a modest and straightforward way. Other influences on Vonnegut include The War of the Worlds author H. G. Wells, and satirist Jonathan Swift. Vonnegut credited American journalist and critic H. L. Mencken for inspiring him to become a journalist.

In his book Popular Contemporary Writers, Michael D. Sharp describes Vonnegut's linguistic style as straightforward; his sentences concise, his language simple, his paragraphs brief, and his ordinary tone conversational. Vonnegut uses this style to convey normally complex subject matter in a way that is intelligible to a large audience. He credited his time as a journalist for his ability, pointing to his work with the Chicago City News Bureau, which required him to convey stories in telephone conversations. Vonnegut's compositions are also laced with distinct references to his own life, notably in Slaughterhouse-Five and Slapstick.

Vonnegut believed that ideas, and the convincing communication of those ideas to the reader, were vital to literary art. He did not always sugarcoat his points: much of Player Piano leads up to the moment when Paul, on trial and hooked up to a lie detector, is asked to tell a falsehood, and states, "every new piece of scientific knowledge is a good thing for humanity". Robert T. Tally Jr., in his volume on Vonnegut's novels, wrote, "rather than tearing down and destroying the icons of twentieth-century, middle-class American life, Vonnegut gently reveals their basic flimsiness." Vonnegut did not simply propose utopian solutions to the ills of American society, but showed how such schemes would not allow ordinary people to live lives free from want and anxiety. The large artificial families that the U.S. population is formed into in Slapstick soon serve as an excuse for tribalism, with people giving no help to those not part of their group, and with the extended family's place in the social hierarchy becoming vital.

In the introduction to their essay "Kurt Vonnegut and Humor", Tally and Peter C. Kunze suggest that Vonnegut was not a " black humorist", but a "frustrated idealist" who used "comic parables" to teach the reader absurd, bitter or hopeless truths, with his grim witticisms serving to make the reader laugh rather than cry. "Vonnegut makes sense through humor, which is, in the author's view, as valid a means of mapping this crazy world as any other strategies." Vonnegut resented being called a black humorist, feeling that, as with many literary labels, it allows readers to disregard aspects of a writer's work that do not fit the label's stereotype.

Vonnegut's works have, at various times, been labeled science fiction, satire and postmodern. He also resisted such labels, but his works do contain common tropes that are often associated with those genres. In several of his books, Vonnegut imagines alien societies and civilizations, as is common in works of science fiction. Vonnegut does this to emphasize or exaggerate absurdities and idiosyncrasies in our own world. Furthermore, Vonnegut often humorizes the problems that plague societies, as is done in satirical works. However, literary theorist Robert Scholes noted in Fabulation and Metafiction that Vonnegut "reject[s] the traditional satirist's faith in the efficacy of satire as a reforming instrument. [He has] a more subtle faith in the humanizing value of laughter." Examples of postmodernism may also be found in Vonnegut's works. Postmodernism often entails a response to the theory that the truths of the world will be discovered through science. Postmodernists contend that truth is subjective, rather than objective, as it is biased towards each individual's beliefs and outlook on the world. They often use unreliable, first-person narration, and narrative fragmentation. One critic has argued that Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, features a metafictional, Janus-headed outlook as it seeks both to represent actual historical events while problematizing the very notion of doing exactly that. This is encapsulated in the opening lines of the novel: "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true." This bombastic opening-"All this happened"-"reads like a declaration of complete mimesis" which is radically called into question in the rest of the quote and "[t]his creates an integrated perspective that seeks out extratextual themes [like war and trauma] while thematizing the novel's textuality and inherent constructedness at one and the same time." While Vonnegut does use elements as fragmentation and metafictional elements, in some of his works, he more distinctly focuses on the peril posed by individuals who find subjective truths, mistake them for objective truths, then proceed to impose these truths on others.

Vonnegut was a vocal critic of American society, and this was reflected in his writings. Several key social themes recur in Vonnegut's works, such as wealth, the lack of it, and its unequal distribution among a society. In The Sirens of Titan, the novel's protagonist, Malachi Constant, is exiled to Saturn's moon Titan as a result of his vast wealth, which has made him arrogant and wayward. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, readers may find it difficult to determine whether the rich or the poor are in worse circumstances as the lives of both groups' members are ruled by their wealth or their poverty. Further, in Hocus Pocus, the protagonist is named Eugene Debs Hartke, a homage to the famed socialist Eugene V. Debs and Vonnegut's socialist views. In Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, Thomas F. Marvin states: "Vonnegut points out that, left unchecked, capitalism will erode the democratic foundations of the United States." Marvin suggests that Vonnegut's works demonstrate what happens when a "hereditary aristocracy" develops, where wealth is inherited along familial lines: the ability of poor Americans to overcome their situations is greatly or completely diminished. Vonnegut also often laments social Darwinism, and a "survival of the fittest" view of society. He points out that social Darwinism leads to a society that condemns its poor for their own misfortune, and fails to help them out of their poverty because "they deserve their fate". Vonnegut also confronts the idea of free will in a number of his pieces. In Slaughterhouse-Five and Timequake the characters have no choice in what they do; in Breakfast of Champions, characters are very obviously stripped of their free will and even receive it as a gift; and in Cat's Cradle, Bokononism views free will as heretical.

The majority of Vonnegut's characters are estranged from their actual families and seek to build replacement or extended families. For example, the engineers in Player Piano called their manager's spouse "Mom". In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut devises two separate methods for loneliness to be combated: A "karass", which is a group of individuals appointed by God to do his will, and a " granfalloon", defined by Marvin as a "meaningless association of people, such as a fraternal group or a nation". Similarly, in Slapstick, the U.S. government codifies that all Americans are a part of large extended families.

Fear of the loss of one's purpose in life is a theme in Vonnegut's works. The Great Depression forced Vonnegut to witness the devastation many people felt when they lost their jobs, and while at General Electric, Vonnegut witnessed machines being built to take the place of human labor. He confronts these things in his works through references to the growing use of automation and its effects on human society. This is most starkly represented in his first novel, Player Piano, where many Americans are left purposeless and unable to find work as machines replace human workers. Loss of purpose is also depicted in Galápagos, where a florist rages at her spouse for creating a robot able to do her job, and in Timequake, where an architect kills himself when replaced by computer software.

Suicide by fire is another common theme in Vonnegut's works; the author often returns to the theory that "many people are not fond of life." He uses this as an explanation for why humans have so severely damaged their environments, and made devices such as nuclear weapons that can make their creators extinct. In Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut features the neutron bomb, which he claims is designed to kill people, but leave buildings and structures untouched. He also uses this theme to demonstrate the recklessness of those who put powerful, apocalypse-inducing devices at the disposal of politicians.

"What is the point of life?" is a question Vonnegut often pondered in his works. When one of Vonnegut's characters, Kilgore Trout, finds the question "What is the purpose of life?" written in a bathroom, his response is, "To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool." Marvin finds Trout's theory curious, given that Vonnegut was an atheist, and thus for him, there is no Creator to report back to, and comments that, "[as] Trout chronicles one meaningless life after another, readers are left to wonder how a compassionate creator could stand by and do nothing while such reports come in." In the epigraph to Bluebeard, Vonnegut quotes his son Mark, and gives an answer to what he believes is the meaning of life: "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

Unless otherwise cited, items in this list are taken from Thomas F. Marvin's 2002 book Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, and the date in parentheses is the date the work was first published:

1. ^ Vonnegut, Kurt (April 6, 2006). . Bookworm (Interview). Interviewed by Michael Silverblatt. Santa Monica, California: KCRW.

2. Boomhower 1999; Farrell 2009, pp. 8-9; Marvin 2002, p. 25

3. ^ "Kurt Vonnegut: American author who combined satiric social commentary with surrealist and science fictional elements" Archived 2015-09-10 at the Wayback Machine. Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. EMP Museum (empmuseum.org). Retrieved September 10, 2015.

4. ^ Haley, Guy (2014). Sci-Fi Chronicles: A Visual History of the Galaxy's Greatest Science Fiction. London: Aurum Press (Quarto Group). p. 135. ISBN 978-1781313596. The asteroid 25399 Vonnegut is named in his honor.

Allen, William R. "A Brief Biography of Kurt Vonnegut". Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. Archived from the original on January 18, 2015.

Allen, William R. (1991). Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-87249-722-1.

Barsamian, David (2004). Louder Than Bombs: Interviews from the Progressive Magazine. South End Press. ISBN 978-0-89608-725-5.

Blount, Roy Jr. (May 4, 2008). "So It Goes". Sunday Book Review. The New York Times.

Boomhower, Ray E. (1999). "Slaughterhouse-Five: Kurt Vonnegut Jr". Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History. 11 (2): 42-47. ISSN 1040-788X.

"Obituary of Kurt Vonnegut: Guru of the counterculture whose science fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five, inspired by his survival of the Dresden bombings, became an anti-war classic". The Daily Telegraph. May 13, 2007. p. 25.

Freese, Peter (2013). "'Instructions for use': the opening chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five and the reader of historiographical metafictions". In Tally, Robert T. Jr. (ed.). Kurt Vonnegut. Critical Insights. Salem Press. pp. 95-117. ISBN 978-1-4298-3848-1.

Harris, Paul (December 3, 2011). "Kurt Vonnegut's dark, sad, cruel side is laid bare". The Guardian.

Hattenhauer, Darryl (1998). "The Politics of Kurt Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron'". Studies in Short Fiction. 35 (4): 387-392. ISSN 0039-3789.

Hayman, David; Michaelis, David; et al. (1977). "Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64". The Paris Review. 69: 55-103. Archived from the original on February 5, 2015.

Jensen, Mikkel (2016). "Janus-Headed Postmodernism: The Opening Lines of Slaughterhouse-Five". The Explicator. 74 (1): 8-11. doi:10.1080/00144940.2015.1133546. ISSN 1939-926X. S2CID 162509316.

Kohn, Martin (March 28, 2001). "God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian listing". New York University School of Medicine.

Kunze, Peter C.; Tally, Robert T. Jr. (2012). "Vonnegut's sense of humor". Studies in American Humor. 3 (26): 7-11.

Morais, Betsy (August 12, 2011). "The Neverending Campaign to Ban 'Slaughterhouse Five'". The Atlantic.

Niose, David A. (July 1, 2007). "Kurt Vonnegut saw humanism as a way to build a better world". The Humanist - via HighBeam Research (subscription required) . Archived from the original on September 24, 2015.

Sharp, Michael D. (2006). Popular Contemporary Writers. 10. Marshall Cavendish Reference. ISBN 978-0-7614-7601-6.

Shields, Charles J. (2011). And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, a Life. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 978-0-8050-8693-5.

Smith, Dinitia (April 13, 2007). "Kurt Vonnegut, Counterculture's Novelist, Dies". The New York Times.

Sumner, Gregory (2014). "Vonnegut, Kurt Jr". American National Biography Online.

Thomas, Peter L. (2006). Reading, Learning, Teaching Kurt Vonnegut. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-6337-7.

"Up to 25,000 died in Dresden's WWII bombing - report". BBC. March 18, 2010.

Vitale, Tom (May 31, 2011). "Kurt Vonnegut: Still Speaking To The War Weary". NPR.

Vonnegut, Kurt (January 21, 2006). "A Man Without A Country, "Custodians of chaos"". The Guardian.

Oltean-Cîmpean, A. A. (2016). "Kurt Vonnegut's Humanism: An Author's Journey Towards Preaching for Peace." Studii De Ştiintă Şi Cultură, 12(2), 259-266.

Párraga, J. J. (2013). Kurt Vonnegut's Quest for Identity. Revista Futhark, 8185-8199

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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (; November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007) was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of nonfiction, with further collections being published after his death.

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https://www.laurentarshis.com/

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Karina Yan Glaser

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Tui T Sutherland - Wrote Wings of Fire series. two sons and husbnd and small dog

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Nicholas Butler

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Nicholas Murray Butler (April 2, 1862 - December 7, 1947) was an American philosopher, diplomat, and educator. Butler was president of Columbia University, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and William Howard Taft's running mate in the 1912 United States presidential election. He became so well known and respected that The New York Times printed his Christmas greeting to the nation every year.

Butler, great-grandson of Morgan John Rhys, was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to Mary Butler and manufacturing worker Henry Butler. He enrolled in Columbia College (later Columbia University) and joined the Peithologian Society. He earned his bachelor of arts degree in 1882, his master's degree in 1883 and his doctorate in 1884. Butler's academic and other achievements led Theodore Roosevelt to call him "Nicholas Miraculous." In 1885, Butler studied in Paris and Berlin and became a lifelong friend of future Secretary of State Elihu Root. Through Root he also met Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. In the fall of 1885, Butler joined the staff of Columbia's philosophy department.

In 1887, he co-founded with Grace Hoadley Dodge, and became president of, the New York School for the Training of Teachers, which later affiliated with Columbia University and was renamed Teachers College, Columbia University, and from which a co-educational experimental and developmental unit became Horace Mann School. From 1890 to 1891, Butler was a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Throughout the 1890s Butler served on the New Jersey Board of Education and helped form the College Entrance Examination Board.

In 1901, Butler became acting president of Columbia University, and in 1902 formally became president. Among the many dignitaries in attendance at his investiture was President Roosevelt. Butler was president of Columbia for 43 years, the longest tenure in the university's history, retiring in 1945. As president, Butler carried out a major expansion of the campus, adding many new buildings, schools, and departments. These additions included Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, the first academic medical center in the world.

In 1919, Butler amended the admissions process to Columbia in order limit the number of Jewish and Episcopal students. Butler's policy was successful[dubious ] and the number of students hailing from New York City dropped from 54% to 23% stemming what one administrator[] called "the invasion of the Jewish student." This is one of the reasons why Butler has been called an Anti-Semite.

In 1937 he was admitted as an honorary member of the New York Society of the Cincinnati.

In 1941, the Pulitzer Prize fiction jury selected Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Pulitzer Board initially agreed with that judgment, but Butler, ex officio head of the Pulitzer board, found the novel offensive and persuaded the board to reverse its determination, so that no novel received the prize that year.

During his lifetime, Columbia named its philosophy library for him; after he died, its main academic library, previously known as South Hall, was rechristened Butler Library. A faculty apartment building on 119th Street and Morningside Drive was also renamed in Butler's honour, as was a major prize in philosophy.

An in-depth look at Butler's time at Columbia University also can be found in The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education, by Upton Sinclair.

Butler was a delegate to each Republican National Convention from 1888 to 1936; in 1912, after Vice President James S. Sherman died eight days before the presidential election, Butler was designated to receive the electoral votes that Sherman would have received: the Republican ticket won only 8 electoral votes from Utah and Vermont, finishing third behind the Democrats and the Progressives.

In 1916, Butler tried to secure the Republican presidential nomination for Elihu Root. Butler also sought the nomination for himself in 1920, without success.

Butler believed that Prohibition was a mistake, with negative effects on the country. He became active in the successful effort for Repeal in 1933.

He credited John W. Burgess along with Alexander Hamilton for providing the philosophical basis of his Republican principles.

In June 1936 Butler traveled to the Carnegie Endowment Peace Conference in London where, at the meeting, the question of gold being used internationally was considered.

Butler was the chair of the Lake Mohonk Conference on International Arbitration that met periodically from 1907 to 1912. In this time he was appointed president of the American branch of International Conciliation. Butler was also instrumental in persuading Andrew Carnegie to provide the initial $10 million funding for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Butler became head of international education and communication, founded the European branch of the Endowment headquartered in Paris, and was President of the Endowment from 1925 to 1945. For his work in this field, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1931 (shared with Jane Addams) "[For his promotion] of the Briand-Kellogg pact" and for his work as the "leader of the more establishment-oriented part of the American peace movement".

In December 1916 Butler, Roosevelt and other philanthropists including Scottish-born industrialist John C. Moffat, William Astor Chanler, Joseph Choate, Clarence Mackay, George von Lengerke Meyer, and John Grier Hibben purchased the Château de Chavaniac, birthplace of the Marquis de Lafayette in Auvergne, to serve as a headquarters for the French Heroes Lafayette Memorial Fund, which was managed by Chanler's ex-wife Beatrice Ashley Chanler.

Butler was President of the Pilgrims Society, which promotes Anglo-American friendship. He served as President of the Pilgrims from 1928 to 1946. Butler was president of The American Academy of Arts and Letters from 1928 to 1941.

Butler married Susanna Edwards Schuyler (1863-1903) in 1887 and had one daughter from that marriage. Susanna was the daughter of Jacob Rutsen Schuyler (1816-1887) and Susannah Haigh Edwards (born 1830). His wife died in 1903 and he married again in 1907 to Kate La Montagne, granddaughter of New York property developer Thomas E. Davis. In 1940, Butler completed his autobiography with the publication of the second volume of Across the Busy Years. When Butler became almost blind in 1945 at the age of eighty-three, he resigned from the posts he held and died two years later. Butler is buried at Cedar Lawn Cemetery, in Paterson, New Jersey.

Despite Butler's accomplishments[clarification needed ], many people regarded him as arrogant. He autocratically dismissed faculty members who displeased him, such as the great classical scholar Harry Thurston Peck, and others who dared to question his dismissals, such as the civil rights pioneer Joel Elias Spingarn. He had little respect for Columbia's fine arts faculty, and stripped them of academic affairs voting rights in 1903, accelerating his deteriorating relationship with music professor Edward MacDowell; he went so far as to accuse MacDowell of unprofessional conduct and sloppy teaching, prompting MacDowell's abrupt resignation from Columbia in February 1904. In 1939, a former student of Butler's, Rolfe Humphries, published in the pages of an effort titled "Draft Ode for a Phi Beta Kappa Occasion" that followed a classical format of unrhymed blank verse in iambic pentameter with one classical reference per line. The first letters of each line of the resulting acrostic spelled out the message: "Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses [sic] ass." Upon discovering the "hidden" message, the irate editors ran a formal apology. Randolph Silliman Bourne lampooned him as "Alexander Macintosh Butcher" in "One of our Conquerers", a 1915 essay he published in The New Republic.

Butler wrote and spoke voluminously on all manner of subjects ranging from education to world peace. Although marked by erudition and great learning, his work tended toward the portentous and overblown. In The American Mercury, the critic Dorothy Dunbar Bromley referred to Butler's pronouncements as "those interminable miasmas of guff."

Regeneration, 1896.

Philosophy, 1908.

Why Should we Change our Form of Government?, 1912.

The Great War and Its Lessons, 1914.

The United States as a World Power, 1915.

The Building of the Nation, 1916.

Making Liberal Men and Women, 1921.

Scholarship and Service, 1921.

Building the American Nation, 1923.

The Faith of a Liberal, 1924.

Between Two Worlds, 1934.

Across the Busy Years: Recollections and Reflections. I (1 ed.). New York & London: The Charles Scribner's Sons. 1939 - via Internet Archive.

Across the Busy Years: Recollections and Reflections. II (1 ed.). New York & London: The Charles Scribner's Sons. 1940 - via Internet Archive.

1. ^ "Morgan J. Rhees papers, 1794-1968". www.columbia.edu. Abolitionist, Welsh republican radical, publisher, Baptist minister, pioneer and adventurer Morgan J. Rhees ... was the great grandfather of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University.

2. ^ "A Tribute to Grace Hoadley Dodge". Columbia.edu. Teachers College, Columbia University.

3. ^ "History of Horace Mann School". Horace Mann School. Archived from the original on July 12, 2007.

4. ^ https://www.college.columbia.edu/cct_archive/jan02/jan02_cover_architecture.html

5. ^ Butler, Nicholas Murray (1939). Across the busy years: recollections and reflections. Charles Scribner's Sons. p. 363.

6. "Americans Aid War Refugees in Paris Mrs. William Astor Chanler Tells of Work Done Through Lafayette Fund;" ^ The Philadelphia Inquirer; 8-04-1918; Vol. 179, Issue: 35; p. 11, Philadelphia, PA.

7. ^ Butler, Nicholas Murray (1940). Across the Busy Years: Recollections and Reflections. II (1 ed.). New York & London: The Charles Scribner's Sons - via Internet Archive.

8. ^ Money to Burn: Great American Foundations and Their Money

9. ^ https://www.prazskyhradarchiv.cz/file/edee/vyznamenani/cs_rbl.pdf

Comte, Edward Le (1986). "Dinner with Butler and Eisenhower," Commentary, Vol. LXXXI, No. 1.

Hewlett, Charles F. (1983). "Nicholas Murray Butler and the American Peace Movement," Teachers College Record, Vol. 85, No. 2.

Hewlett, Charles F. (1987). "John Dewey and Nicholas Murray Butler: Contrasting Conceptions of Peace Education in the Twenties," Educational Theory, Vol. 37, No. 4.

Marrin, Albert (1976). Nicholas Murray Butler, Boston: Twayne Publishers.

Rosenthal, Michael (2006). Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-29994-3

Sokal, Michael M. (2009). "James McKeen Cattell, Nicholas Murray Butler, and Academic Freedom at Columbia University, 1902-1923," History of Psychology, Vol. XII, No. 2.

Thomas, Milton Halsey (1932). Bibliography of Nicholas Murray Butler, 1872-1932: A Check List, New York: Columbia University Press.

Williams, Andrew (2012). "Waiting for Monsieur Bergson: Nicholas Murray Butler, James T. Shotwell, and the French Sage," Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 23, No. 2.

Akhund, Nadine, Tison, Stephane (2018), En guerre pour la paix. Correspondance Paul d'Estournelles de Constant et Nicholas Murray-Butler (1914-1919), Paris: Alma.

Nicholas Murray Butler on Nobelprize.org

Works by Nicholas Murray Butler at Project Gutenberg

Works by or about Nicholas Murray Butler at Internet Archive

Works by Nicholas Murray Butler, at Unz.org

Works by Nicholas Murray Butler, at Hathi Trust

Nicholas Murray Butler at IMDb

CEIP archive at Columbia University

Picture of Nicholas Murray Butler, ca. 1930

Portrait of Nicholas Murray Butler, by Augustus Vincent Tack

John D. Rockefeller, Letter to Nicholas Murray Butler

"Address by Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler to the members of the Union League of Philadelphia, 1915, Digital Library@Villanova University"

"Documented in the United States of America Congressional Record, Proceedings and Discussions of the 76th Congress, Third Session, Remarks of Hon. J. Thorkelson of Montana, in the House of Representatives, Aug. 19, 1940: Steps Toward British Union - a World State and International Strife--Part IV (Page 12)"

Newspaper clippings about Nicholas Murray Butler in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

Nicholas Murray Butler papers, 1891-1947 at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, NY

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Nicholas Murray Butler (April 2, 1862 - December 7, 1947) was an American philosopher, diplomat, and educator. Butler was president of Columbia University, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and William Howard Taft's running mate in the 1912 United States presidential election.

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Dan Gutman

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Jeff Kinney, the author of the award winning "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series, lives in Massachusetts. He published 12 books in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Jeff Kinney has a net worth of $70 million dollars.

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Lou Anders was morn in Brimingham, Alabama. He wrote Thrones and Bones a fantasy chapter book. The thrones and bones series is a three book series he also has another fantasy book once upon a unicorn. He is also a game desighner.

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Bio - Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Divergent series (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four: A Divergent Collection), the Carve the Mark duology (Carve the Mark, the Fates Divide), The End and Other Beginnings collection of short fiction, and many short stories and essays. She lives in Chicago.

Link to her website - https://veronicarothbooks.com/

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Margaret Hillert

Margaret Hillert was an author dedicated to writing children's books to help them read. She wrote over 80 books, along with some poetry. She was born in 1920 and died in 2014. Margaret's bio: https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/authors/margaret-hillert/ What's in the pond, dear dragon?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3_l390gDtE

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Magic Tree House Books! My Favorite

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Mary Pope Osborne Interview on The Magic Tree House

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Michael Buckley
Nerds

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Mark Twain

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J.R.R Tolkien is the author of the famous "The Hobbit" books. He lives in Oxford Missouri. Tolkien created several made up elf languages for his series, and wrote 36 books.

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In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats - the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill - The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it - and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours' respect, but he gained-well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

The mother of our particular hobbit... what is a hobbit? I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves. Hobbits have no beards. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. They are inclined to be at in the stomach; they dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow); wear no shoes, because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly); have long clever brown fingers, good-natured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it). Now you know enough to go on with. As I was saying, the mother of this hobbit - of Bilbo Baggins, that is - was the fabulous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of The Hill. It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbit-like about them, - and once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up; but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses, though they were undoubtedly richer. Not that Belladonna Took ever had any adventures after she became Mrs. Bungo Baggins. Bungo, that was Bilbo's father, built the most luxurious hobbit-hole for her (and partly with her money) that was to be found either under The Hill or over The Hill or across The Water, and there they remained to the end of their days. Still it is probable that Bilbo, her only son, although he looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father, got something a bit queer in his makeup from the Took side, something that only waited for a chance to come out. The chance never arrived, until Bilbo Baggins was grown up, being about fifty years old or so, and living in the beautiful hobbit-hole built by his father, which I have just described for you, until he had in fact apparently settled down immovably.

By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed) - Gandalf came by. Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, and I have only heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort I of remarkable tale. Tales and adventures sprouted up all over the place wherever he went, in the most extraordinary fashion. He had not been down that way under The Hill for ages and ages, not since his friend the Old Took died, in fact, and the hobbits had almost forgotten what he looked like. He had been away over The Hill and across The Water on business of his own since they were all small hobbit-boys and hobbit-girls.

All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was an old man with a staff. He had a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf over which a white beard hung down below his waist, and immense black boots. "Good morning!" said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat. "What do you mean?" be said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is morning to be good on?"

"All of them at once," said Bilbo. "And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain. If you have a pipe about you, sit down and have a fill of mine! There's no hurry, we have all the day before us!" Then Bilbo sat down on a seat by his door, crossed his legs, and blew out a beautiful grey ring of smoke that sailed up into the air without breaking and floated away over The Hill.

"Very pretty!" said Gandalf."But I have no time to blow smoke-rings this morning. I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone."

I should think so - in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anybody sees in them, said our Mr. Baggins, and stuck one thumb behind his braces, and blew out another even bigger smoke-ring. Then he took out his morning letters, and begin to read, pretending to take no more notice of the old man. He had decided that he was not quite his sort, and wanted him to go away. But the old man did not move. He stood leaning on his stick and gazing at the hobbit without saying anything, till Bilbo got quite uncomfortable and even a little cross.

"Good morning!" he said at last. "We don't want any adventures here, thank you! You might try over The Hill or across The Water." By this he meant that the conversation was at an end.

"What a lot of things you do use Good morning for!" said Gandalf. "Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won't be good till I move off."

"Not at all, not at all, my dear sir! Let me see, I don't think I know your name?"

"Yes, yes, my dear sir - and I do know your name, Mr. Bilbo Baggins. And you do know my name, though you don't remember that I belong to it. I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me! To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took's son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!" "Gandalf, Gandalf! Good gracious me! Not the wandering wizard that gave Old Took a pair of magic diamond studs that fastened themselves and never came undone till ordered? Not the fellow who used to tell such wonderful tales at parties, about dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widows' sons? Not the man that used to make such particularly excellent fireworks! I remember those! Old Took used to have them on Midsummer's Eve. Splendid! They used to go up like great lilies and snapdragons and laburnums of fire and hang in the twilight all evening!" You will notice already that Mr. Baggins was not quite so prosy as he liked to believe, also that he was very fond of flowers. "Dear me!" she went on. "Not the Gandalf who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures. Anything from climbing trees to visiting Elves - or sailing in ships, sailing to other shores! Bless me, life used to be quite inter - I mean, you used to upset things badly in these parts once upon a time. I beg your pardon, but I had no idea you were still in business." "Where else should I be?" said the wizard. "All the same I am pleased to find you remember something about me. You seem to remember my fireworks kindly, at any rate, land that is not without hope. Indeed for your old grand-father Took's sake, and for the sake of poor Belladonna, I will give you what you asked for."

"I beg your pardon, I haven't asked for anything!"

"Yes, you have! Twice now. My pardon. I give it you. In fact I will go so far as to send you on this adventure. Very amusing for me, very good for you and profitable too, very likely, if you ever get over it."

"Sorry! I don't want any adventures, thank you. Not today. Good morning!

But please come to tea - any time you like! Why not tomorrow? Come tomorrow!

Good-bye!"

With that the hobbit turned and scuttled inside his round green door, and shut it as quickly as he dared, not to seen rude. Wizards after all are wizards.

"What on earth did I ask him to tea for!" he said to him-self, as he went

to the pantry. He had only just had break fast, but he thought a cake or two and a drink of something would do him good after his fright. Gandalf in the meantime was still standing outside the door, and laughing long but quietly. After a while he stepped up, and with the spike of his staff scratched a queer sign on the hobbit's beautiful green front-door. Then he strode away, just about the time when Bilbo was finishing his second cake and beginning to think that he had escape adventures very well.

The next day he had almost forgotten about Gandalf. He did not remember things very well, unless he put them down on his Engagement Tablet: like this:

Gandalf 'a Wednesday. Yesterday he had been too flustered to do anything of the kind. Just before tea-time there came a tremendous ring on the front-door bell, and then he remembered! He rushed and put on the kettle, and put out another cup and saucer and an extra cake or two, and ran to the door. "I am so sorry to keep you waiting!" he was going to say, when he saw that it was not Gandalf at all. It was a dwarf with a blue beard tucked into a golden belt, and very bright eyes under his dark-green hood. As soon a the door was opened, he pushed inside, just as if he had been expected. He hung his hooded cloak on the nearest peg, and "Dwalin at your service!" he said with a low bow.

"Bilbo Baggins at yours!" said the hobbit, too surprised to ask any questions for the moment. When the silence that followed had become uncomfortable, he added: "I am just about to take tea; pray come and have some with me." A little stiff perhaps, but he meant it kindly. And what would you do, if an uninvited dwarf came and hung his things up in your hall without a word of explanation?

They had not been at table long, in fact they had hardly reached the third cake, when there came another even louder ring at the bell. "Excuse me!" said the hobbit, and off he went to the door. "So you have got here at last!" was what he was going to say to Gandalf this time. But it was not Gandalf. Instead there was a very old-looking dwarf on the step with a white beard and a scarlet hood; and he too hopped inside as soon as the door was open, just as if he had been invited. "I see they have begun to arrive already," he said when he caught sight of Dwalin's green hood hanging up. He hung his red one next to it, and "Balin at your service!" he said with his hand on his breast.

"Thank you!" said Bilbo with a gasp. It was not the correct thing to say, but they have begun to arrive had flustered him badly. He liked visitors, but he liked to know them before they arrived, and he preferred to ask them himself. He had a horrible thought that the cakes might run short, and then he-as the host: he knew his duty and stuck to it however painful-he might have to go without.

"Come along in, and have some tea!" he managed to say after taking a deep breath.

"A little beer would suit me better, if it is all the same to you, my good sir," said Balin with the white beard. "But I don't mind some cake-seed-cake, if you have any."

"Lots!" Bilbo found himself answering, to his own surprise; and he found himself scuttling off, too, to the cellar to fill a pint beer-mug, and to the pantry to fetch two beautiful round seed-cakes which he had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel.

When he got back Balin and Dwalin were talking at the table like old friends (as a matter of fact they were brothers). Bilbo plumped down the beer and the cake in front of them, when loud came a ring at the bell again, and then another ring.

"Gandalf for certain this time," he thought as he puffed along the passage. But it was not. It was two more dwarves, both with blue hoods, silver belts, and yellow beards; and each of them carried a bag of tools and a spade. In they hopped, as soon as the door began to open-Bilbo was hardly surprised at all.

"What can I do for you, my dwarves?" he said. "Kili at your service!"

said the one. "And Fili!" added the other; and they both swept off their blue hoods and bowed.

"At yours and your family's!" replied Bilbo, remembering his manners this time.

"Dwalin and Balin here already, I see," said Kili. "Let us join the throng!"

"Throng!" thought Mr. Baggins. "I don't like the sound of that. I really must sit down for a minute and collect my wits, and have a drink." He had only just had a sip-in the corner, while the four dwarves sat around the table, and talked about mines and gold and troubles with the goblins, and the depredations of dragons, and lots of other things which he did not understand, and did not want to, for they sounded much too adventurous-when, ding-dong-a-ling-' dang, his bell rang again, as if some naughty little hobbit-boy was trying to pull the handle off. "Someone at the door!" he said, blinking. "Some four, I should say by the sound," said Fili. "Be-sides, we saw them coming along behind us in the distance."

The poor little hobbit sat down in the hall and put his head in his hands, and wondered what had happened, and what was going to happen, and whether they would all stay to supper. Then the bell rang again louder than ever, and he had to run to the door. It was not four after all, it was FIVE. Another dwarf had come along while he was wondering in the hall. He had hardly turned the knob, be-x)re they were all inside, bowing and saying "at your service" one after another. Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, and Gloin were their names; and very soon two purple hoods, a grey hood, a brown hood, and a white hood were hanging on the pegs, and off they marched with their broad hands stuck in their gold and silver belts to join the others. Already it had almost become a throng. Some called for ale, and some for porter, and one for coffee, and all of them for cakes; so the hobbit was kept very busy for a while. A big jug of coffee bad just been set in the hearth, the seed-cakes were gone, and the dwarves were starting on a round of buttered scones, when there came-a loud knock. Not a ring, but a hard rat-tat on the hobbit's beautiful green door. Somebody was banging with a stick!

Bilbo rushed along the passage, very angry, and altogether bewildered and bewuthered-this was the most awkward Wednesday he ever remembered. He pulled open the door with a jerk, and they all fell in, one on top of the other. More dwarves, four more! And there was Gandalf behind, leaning on his staff and laughing. He had made quite a dent on the beautiful door; he had also, by the way, knocked out the secret mark that he had put there the morning before. "Carefully! Carefully!" he said. "It is not like you, Bilbo, to keep friends waiting on the mat, and then open the door like a pop-gun! Let me introduce Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, and especially Thorin!" "At your service!" said Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur standing in a row. Then they hung up two yellow hoods and a pale green one; and also a sky-blue one with a long silver tassel. This last belonged to Thorin, an enormously important dwarf, in fact no other than the great Thorin Oakenshield himself, who was not at all pleased at falling flat on Bilbo's mat with Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur on top of him. For one thing Bombur was immensely fat and heavy. Thorin indeed was very haughty, and said nothing about service; but poor Mr. Baggins said he was sorry so many times, that at last he grunted "pray don't mention it," and stopped frowning.

"Now we are all here!" said Gandalf, looking at the row of thirteen hoods-the best detachable party hoods-and his own hat hanging on the pegs. "Quite a merry gathering!

I hope there is something left for the late-comers to eat and drink! What's that? Tea! No thank you! A little red wine, I think, for me." "And for me," said Thorin. "And raspberry jam and apple-tart," said Bifur. "And mince-pies and cheese," said Bofur. "And pork-pie and salad," said Bombur. "And more cakes-and ale-and coffee, if you don't mind," called the other dwarves through the door.

"Put on a few eggs, there's a good fellow!" Gandalf called after him, as

the hobbit stumped off to the pantries. "And just bring out the cold chicken and pickles!"

"Seems to know as much about the inside of my larders as I do myself!" thought Mr. Baggins, who was feeling positively flummoxed, and was beginning to wonder whether a most wretched adventure had not come right into his house. By the time he had got all the bottles and dishes and knives and forks and glasses and plates and spoons and things piled up on big trays, he was getting very hot, and red in the face, and annoyed.

"Confusticate and bebother these dwarves!" he said aloud. "Why don't they come and lend a hand?" Lo and behold! there stood Balin and Dwalin at the door of the kitchen, and Fili and Kili behind them, and before he could say knife they had whisked the trays and a couple of small tables into the parlour and set out everything afresh.

Gandalf sat at the head of the party with the thirteen, dwarves all round: and Bilbo sat on a stool at the fireside, nibbling at a biscuit (his appetite was quite taken away), and trying to look as if this was all perfectly ordinary and. not in the least an adventure. The dwarves ate and ate, and talked and talked, and time got on. At last they pushed their chairs back, and Bilbo made a move to collect the plates and glasses. "I suppose you will all stay to supper?" he said in his politest unpressing tones. "Of course!" said Thorin. "And after. We shan't get through the business till late, and we must have some music first. Now to clear up!" Thereupon the twelve dwarves-not Thorin, he was too important, and stayed talking to Gandalf-jumped to their feet and made tall piles of all the things. Off they went, not waiting for trays, balancing columns of plates, each with a bottle on the top, with one hand, while the hobbit ran after them almost squeaking with fright: "please be careful!" and "please, don't trouble! I can manage." But the dwarves only started to sing:

"Chip the glasses and crack the plates!
Blunt the knives and bend the forks!
That's what Bilbo Baggins hates-
Smash the bottles and burn the corks!
Cut the cloth and tread on the fat!
Pour the milk on the pantry floor!
Leave the bones on the bedroom mat!
Splash the wine on every door!
Dump the crocks in a boiling bowl;
Pound them up with a thumping pole;
And when you've finished, if any are whole,
Send them down the hall to roll!
That's what Bilbo Baggins hates!
So, carefully! carefully with the plates!"

And of course they did none of these dreadful things, and everything was cleaned and put away safe as quick as lightning, while the hobbit was turning round and round in the middle of the kitchen trying to see what they were doing. Then they went back, and found Thorin with his feet on the fender smoking a pipe. He was blowing the most enormous smoke-rings, and wherever he told one to go, it went-up the chimney, or behind the clock on the man-telpiece, or under the table, or round and round the ceiling; but wherever it went it was not quick enough to escape Gandalf. Pop! he sent a smaller smoke-ring from his short clay-pipe straight through each one of Thorin's. The Gandalf's smoke-ring would go green and come back to hover over the wizard's head. He had quite a cloud of them about him already, and in the dim light it made him look strange and sorcerous. Bilbo stood still and watched-he loved smoke-rings-and then be blushed to think how proud he had been yesterday morning of the smoke-rings he had sent up the wind over The Hill. "Now for some music!" said Thorin. "Bring out the instruments!"

Kili and Fili rushed for their bags and brought back little fiddles;

Dori, Nori, and Ori brought out flutes from somewhere inside their coats; Bombur produced a drum from the hall; Bifur and Bofur went out too, and came back with clarinets that they had left among the walking-sticks Dwalin and Balin said: "Excuse me, I left mine in the porch!" "Just bring mine in with you," said Thorin. They came back with viols as big as themselves, and with Thorin's harp wrapped in a green cloth. It was a beautiful gold-en harp, and when Thorin struck it the music began all at once, so sudden and sweet that Bilbo forgot everything else, and was swept away into dark lands under strange moons, far over The Water and very far from his hobbit-hole under The Hill. The dark came into the room from the little window that opened in the side of The Hill; the firelight flickered-it was April-and still they played on, while the shadow of Gandalf's beard wagged against the wall. The dark filled all the room, and the fire died down, and the shadows were lost, and still they played on. And suddenly first one and then another began to sing as they played, deep-throated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of their ancient homes; and this is like a fragment of their song, if it can be like their song without their music.

As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up - probably somebody lighting a wood-fire-and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered; and very quickly he was plain Mr. Baggins of Bag-End, Under-Hill, again. He got up trembling. He had less than half a mind to fetch the lamp, and more than half a mind to pretend to, and go and hide behind the beer barrels in the cellar, and not come out again until all the dwarves had gone away. Suddenly he found that the music and the singing had stopped, and they were all looking at him with eyes shining in the dark.

"Where are you going?" said Thorin, in a tone that seemed to show that he guessed both halves of the hobbit's mind.

"What about a little light?" said Bilbo apologetically.

"We like the dark," said the dwarves. "Dark for dark business! There are many hours before dawn."

"Of course!" said Bilbo, and sat down in a hurry. He missed the stool and sat in the fender, knocking over the poker and shovel with a crash. "Hush!" said Gandalf. "Let Thorin speak!" And this is bow Thorin began. "Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins! We are not together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit-may the hair on his toes never fall out! all praise to his wine and ale!-" He paused for breath and for a polite remark from the hob-bit, but the compliments were quite lost on-poor Bilbo Baggins, who was wagging his mouth in protest at being called audacious and worst of all fellow conspirator, though no noise came out, he was so flummoxed. So Thorin went on:

"We are met to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices. We shall soon before the break of day start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us (except our friend and counsellor, the ingenious wizard Gandalf) may never return. It is a solemn moment. Our object is, I take it, well known to us all. To the estimable Mr. Baggins, and perhaps to one or two of the younger dwarves (I think I should be right in naming Kili and Fili, for instance), the exact situation at the moment may require a little brief explanation-" This was Thorin's style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling any one there 'anything that was not known already. But he was rudely interrupted. Poor Bilbo couldn't bear it any longer. At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel. All the dwarves sprang Bp knocking over the table. Gandalf struck a blue light on the end of his magic staff, and in its firework glare the poor little hobbit could be seen kneeling on the hearth-rug, shaking like a jelly that was melting. Then he fell flat on the floor, and kept on calling out "struck by lightning, struck by lightning!" over and over again; and that was all they could get out of him for a long time. So they took him and laid him out of the way on the drawing-room sofa with a drink at his elbow, and they went back to their dark business.

"Excitable little fellow," said Gandalf, as they sat down again. "Gets funny queer fits, but he is one of the best, one of the best-as fierce as a dragon in a pinch."

If you have ever seen a dragon in a pinch, you will realise that this was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hobbit, even to Old Took's great-granduncle Bullroarer, who was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse. He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Gol-firnbul's head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.

In the meanwhile, however, Bullroarer's gentler descendant was reviving in the drawing-room. After a while and a drink he crept nervously to the door of the parlour. This is what he heard, Gloin speaking: "Humph!" (or some snort more or less like that). "Will he do, do you think? It is all very well for Gandalf to talk about this hobbit being fierce, but one shriek like that in a moment of excitement would be enough to wake the dragon and all his relatives, and kill the lot of us. I think it sounded more like fright than excitement! In fact, if it bad not been for the sign on the door, I should have been sure we had come to the wrong house. As soon as I clapped eyes on the little fellow bobbing and puffing on the mat, I had my doubts. He looks more like a grocer-than a burglar!"

Then Mr. Baggins turned the handle and went in. The Took side had won. He suddenly felt he would go without bed and breakfast to be thought fierce. As for little fellow bobbing on the mat it almost made him really fierce. Many a time afterwards the Baggins part regretted what he did now, and he said to himself: "Bilbo, you were a fool; you walked right in and put your foot in it."

"Pardon me," he said, "if I have overheard words that you were saying. I don't pretend to understand what you are talking about, or your reference to burglars, but I think I am right in believing" (this is what he called being on his dignity) "that you think I am no good. I will show you. I have no signs on my door-it was painted a week ago-, and I am quite sure you have come to the wrong house. As soon as I saw your funny faces on the door-step, I had my doubts. But treat it as the right one. Tell me what you want done, and I will try it, if I have to walk from here to the East of East and fight the wild Were-worms in the Last Desert. I bad a great-great-great-granduncle once, Bullroarer Took, and -" "Yes, yes, but that was long ago," said Gloin. "I was talking about you. And I assure you there is a mark on this door-the usual one in the trade, or used to be. Burglar wants a good job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward, that's how it is usually read. You ^an say Expert Treasure-hunter instead of Burglar if you like. Some of them do. It's all the same to us. Gandalf told us that there was a man of the sort in these parts looking for a Job at once, and that he had arranged for a meeting here this Wednesday tea-time."

"Of course there is a mark," said Gandalf. "I put it there myself. For very good reasons. You asked me to find the fourteenth man for your expedition, and I chose Mr. Baggins. Just let any one say I chose the wrong man or the wrong house, and you can stop at thirteen and have all the bad luck you like, or go back to digging coal."

He scowled so angrily at Gloin that the dwarf huddled back in his chair; and when Bilbo tried to open his mouth to ask a question, he turned and frowned at him and stuck oat his bushy eyebrows, till Bilbo shut his mouth tight with a snap. "That's right," said Gandalf. "Let's have no more argument. I have chosen Mr. Baggins and that ought to !6te enough for all of you. If I say he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is, or will be when the time comes. There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself. You may (possibly) all live to thank me yet. Now Bilbo, my boy, fetch the lamp, and let's have little light on this!"

On the table in the light of a big lamp with a red shad he spread a piece of parchment rather like a map.

"This was made by Thror, your grandfather, Thorin, he said in answer to the dwarves' excited questions. "It is a plan of the Mountain." "I don't see that this will help us much," said Thorin disappointedly after a glance. "I remember the Mountain well enough and the lands about it. And I know where Mirkwood is, and the Withered Heath where the great dragons bred."

"There is a dragon marked in red on the Mountain, said Balin, "but it will be easy enough to find him without that, if ever we arrive there." "There is one point that you haven't noticed," said the wizard, "and that is the secret entrance. You see that rune on the West side, and the hand pointing to it from the other runes? That marks a hidden passage to the Lower Halls.

"It may have been secret once," said Thorin, "but how do we know that it is secret any longer? Old Smaug had lived there long enough now to find out anything there is to know about those caves."

"He may-but he can't have used it for years and years. "Why?" "Because it is too small. 'Five feet high the door and three may walk abreast' say the runes, but Smaug could not creep into a hole that size, not even when he was a young dragon, certainly not after devouring so many of the dwarves and men of Dale."

"It seems a great big hole to me," squeaked Bilbo (who had no experience of dragons and only of hobbit-holes) He was getting excited and interested again, so that he forgot to keep his mouth shut. He loved maps, and in his hall there hung a large one of the Country Round with all his favourite walks marked on it in red ink. "How could such a large door be kept secret from everybody outside, apart from the dragon?" he asked. He was only a little hobbit you must remember.

"In lots of ways," said Gandalf. "But in what way this one has been hidden we don't know without going to see. From what it says on the map I should guess there is a closed door which has been made to look exactly like the side of the Mountain. That is the usual dwarves' method - I think that is right, isn't it?" "Quite right," said Thorin.

"Also," went on Gandalf, "I forgot to mention that with the map went a key, a small and curious key. Here it is!" he said, and handed to Thorin a key with a long barrel and intricate wards, made of silver. "Keep it safe!" "Indeed I will," said Thorin, and he fastened it upon a fine chain that hung about his neck and under his jacket. "Now things begin to look more hopeful. This news alters them much for-the better. So far we have had no clear idea what to do. We thought of going East, as quiet and careful as we could, as far as the Long Lake. After that the trouble would begin." "A long time before that, if I know anything about the loads East," interrupted Gandalf.

"We might go from there up along the River Running," went on Thorin taking no notice, "and so to the ruins of Dale-the old town in the valley there, under the shadow of the Mountain. But we none of us liked the idea of the Front Gate. The river runs right out of it through the great cliff at the South of the Mountain, and out of it comes the dragon too-far too often, unless he has changed."

"That would be no good," said the wizard, "not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply lot to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary). That is why I settled on burglary-especially when I remembered the existence of a Side-door. And here is our little Bilbo Baggins, the burglar, the chosen and selected burglar. So now let's get on and make some plans."

"Very well then," said Thorin, "supposing the burglar-expert gives us some ideas or suggestions." He turned with mock-politeness to Bilbo."First I should like to know a bit more about things," said he, feeling all confused and a bit shaky inside, but so far still lookishly determined to go on with things. "I mean about the gold and the dragon, and all that, and how it got there, and who it belongs to, and so on and further." "Bless me!" said Thorin, "haven't you got a map? and didn't you hear our song? and haven't we been talking about all this for hours?"

"All the same, I should like it all plain and clear," said he

obstinately, putting on his business manner (usually reserved for people who tried to borrow money off him), and doing his best to appear wise and prudent and professional and live up to Gandalf's recommendation. "Also I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required and remuneration, and so forth"-by which he meant: "What am I going to get out of it? and am I going to come back alive?"

"O very well," said Thorin. "Long ago in my grandfather Thror's time our family was driven out of the far North, and came back with all their wealth and their tools to this Mountain on the map. It had been discovered by my far ancestor, Thrain the Old, but now they mined and they tunnelled and they made huger halls and greater workshops -and in addition I believe they found a good deal of gold and a great many jewels too. Anyway they grew immensely rich and famous, and my grandfather was King under the Mountain again and treated with great reverence by the mortal men, who lived to the South, and were gradually spreading up the Running River as far as the valley overshadowed by the Mountain. They built the merry town of Dale there in those days. Kings used to send for our smiths, and reward even the least skilful most richly. Fathers would beg us to take their sons as apprentices, and pay us handsomely, especially in food-supplies, which we never bothered to grow or find for ourselves. Altogether those were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the. fun of it, not to speak of the most marvellous and magical toys, the like of which is not to be found in the world now-a-days. So my grandfather's halls became full of armour and jewels and carvings and cups, and the toy-market of Dale was the wonder of the North.

"Undoubtedly that was what brought the dragon. Dragons steal gold and jewels, you know, from men and elves and dwarves, wherever they can find them; and they guard their plunder as long as they live (which is practically forever, unless they are killed), and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value; and they can't make a thing for themselves, not even mend a little loose scale of their armour. There were lots of dragons in the North in those days, and gold was probably getting scarce up there, with the dwarves flying south or getting killed, and all the general waste and destruction that dragons make going from bad to worse. There was a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm called Smaug. One day he flew up into the air and came south. The first we heard of it was a noise like a hurricane coming from the North, and the pine-trees on the Mountain creaking and cracking in the wind. Some of the dwarves who happened to be outside (I was one luckily -a fine adventurous lad in those days, always wandering about, and it saved my life that day)-well, from a good way off we saw the dragon settle on our mountain in a spout of flame. Then he came down the slopes and when he reached the woods they all went up in fire. By that time all the bells were ringing in Dale and the warriors were arming. The dwarves rushed out of their great gate; but there was the dragon waiting for them. None escaped that way. The river rushed up in steam and a fog fell on Dale, and in the fog the dragon came on them and destroyed most of the warriors-the usual unhappy story, it was only too common in those days. Then he went back and crept in through the Front Gate and routed out all the halls, and lanes, and tunnels, alleys, cellars, mansions and passages. After that there were no dwarves left alive inside, and he took all their wealth for himself. Probably, for that is the dragons' way, he has piled it all up in a great heap far inside, and sleeps on it for a bed. Later he used to crawl out of the great gate and come by night to Dale, and carry away people, especially maidens, to eat, until Dale was ruined, and all the people dead or gone. What goes on there now I don't know for certain, but I don't suppose anyone lives nearer to the Mountain than the far edge of the Long Lake now-a-days.

"The few of us that were well outside sat and wept in hiding, and cursed Smaug; and there we were unexpectedly joined by my father and my grandfather with singed beards. They looked very grim but they said very little. When I asked how they had got away, they told me to hold my tongue, and said that one day in the proper time I should know. After that we went away, and we have had to earn our livings as best we could up and down the lands, often enough sinking as low as blacksmith-work or even coalmining. But we have never forgotten our stolen treasure. And even now, when I will allow we have a good bit laid by and are not so badly off"-here Thorin stroked the gold chain round his neck-"we still mean to get it back, and to bring our curses home to Smaug-if we can.

"I have often wondered about my father's and my grandfather's escape. I see now they must have had a private Side-door which only they knew about. But apparently they made a map, and I should like to know how Gandalf got hold of it, and why it did not come down to me, the rightful heir." "I did not 'get hold of it,' I was given it," said the wizard. "Your grandfather Thror was killed, you remember, in the mines of Moria by Azog the Goblin -""Curse his name, yes," said Thorin.

"And Thrain your father went away on the twenty-first of April, a hundred years ago last Thursday, and has never been seen by you since-" "True, true," said Thorin.

"Well, your father gave me this to give to you; and if I have chosen my own time and way of handing it over, you can hardly blame me, considering the trouble I had to find you. Your father could not remember his own name when he gave me the paper, and he never told me yours; so on the whole I think I ought to be praised and thanked. Here it is," said he handing the map to Thorin. "I don't understand," said Thorin, and Bilbo felt he would have liked to say the same. The explanation did not seem to explain. "Your grandfather," said the wizard slowly and grimly, "gave the map to his son for safety before he went to the mines of Moria. Your father went away to try his luck with the map after your grandfather was killed; and lots of adventures of a most unpleasant sort he had, but he never got near the Mountain. How he got there I don't know, but I found him a prisoner in the dungeons of the Necromancer."

"Whatever were you doing there?" asked Thorin with a shudder, and all the dwarves shivered.

"Never you mind. I was finding things out, as usual; and a nasty dangerous business it was. Even I, Gandalf, only just escaped. I tried to save your father, but it was too late. He was witless and wandering, and had forgotten almost everything except the map and the key." "We have long ago paid the goblins of Moria," said Thorin; "we must give a thought to the Necromancer." "Don't be absurd! He is an enemy quite beyond the powers of all the dwarves put together, if they could all be collected again from the four corners of the world. The one thing your father wished was for his son to read the map and use the key. The dragon and the Mountain are more than big enough tasks for you!"

"Hear, hear!" said Bilbo, and accidentally said it aloud, "Hear what?" they all said turning suddenly towards him, and he was so flustered that he answered "Hear what I have got to say!" "What's that?" they asked. "Well, I should say that you ought to go East and have a look round.

After all there is the Side-door, and dragons must sleep sometimes, I suppose.

If you sit on the doorstep long enough, I daresay you will think of something. And well, don't you know, I think we have talked long enough for one night, if you see what I mean. What about bed, and an early start, and all that? I will give you a good breakfast before you go."

"Before we go, I suppose you mean," said Thorin. "Aren't you the burglar? And isn't sitting on the door-step your job, not to speak of getting inside the door? But I agree about bed and breakfast. I like eggs with my ham, when starting on a journey: fried not poached, and mind you don't break 'em."

After all the others had ordered their breakfasts without so much as a please (which annoyed Bilbo very much), they all got up. The hobbit had to find room for them all, and filled all his spare-rooms and made beds on chairs and sofas, before he got them all stowed and went to his own little bed very tired and not altogether happy. One thing he did make his mind up about was not to bother to get up very early and cook everybody else's wretched breakfast. The Tookishness was wearing off, and he was not now quite so sure that he was going on any journey in the morning. As he lay in bed he could hear Thorin still humming to himself in the best bedroom next to him:

"Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To find our long-forgotten gold."

Bilbo went to sleep with that in his ears, and it gave him very uncomfortable dreams. It was long after the break of day, when he woke up.

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J. R. R. Tolkien - The Hobbit (Chap. 1: An Unexpected Party)

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In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

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Lori Rader-Day wrote the book Little Pretty Things

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Christopher Paul Curtis

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Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835. He passed away in 1910. He was the 6th of 7 children. When he was 11 is father died, he then left school and worked as a printers apprentice. His real name is Samuel Clemens but is known by his pen name Mark Twain. When he was 18 he was writing newspapers and had a few hit articles but he wanted to find a new career. Mark first started his career with Territorial Enterprise and his work only elevated.

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Maya Angelou- Wrote many children's books.

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Maya Angelou: I'm a Rainbow in Somebody's Cloud

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biography

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Bill bryson

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William McGuire Bryson (; born 8 December 1951) is an American-British author of books on travel, the English language, science, and other non-fiction topics. Born in the United States, he has been a resident of Britain for most of his adult life, returning to the U.S. between 1995 and 2003, and holds dual American and British citizenship. He served as the chancellor of Durham University from 2005 to 2011.

Bryson came to prominence in the United Kingdom with the publication of Notes from a Small Island (1995), an exploration of Britain, and its accompanying television series. He received widespread recognition again with the publication of A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), a book widely acclaimed for its accessible communication of science.

Bryson was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of Bill Bryson Sr., a sports journalist who worked for fifty years at the Des Moines Register, and Agnes Mary (née McGuire), the home furnishings editor at the same newspaper. His mother was of Irish descent. He had an older brother, Michael (1942-2012), and a sister, Mary Jane Elizabeth. In 2006, Bryson published The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a humorous account of his childhood years in Des Moines.

Bryson attended Drake University for two years before dropping out in 1972, deciding instead to backpack around Europe for four months. He returned to Europe the following year with a high school friend, Matt Angerer (the pseudonymous Stephen Katz). Bryson wrote about some of his experiences from the trip in his book Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe.

Bryson first visited Britain in 1973 during his tour of Europe and decided to stay after landing a job working in a psychiatric hospital, the now-defunct Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water, Surrey. He met a nurse there, Cynthia Billen, whom he married in 1975. They moved to Bryson's hometown of Des Moines, Iowa in 1975 so Bryson could complete his degree at Drake University. In 1977 they settled in Britain.

He worked as a journalist, first for the Bournemouth Evening Echo, eventually becoming chief copy editor of the business section of and deputy national news editor of the business section of The Independent.

The Brysons have moved around the UK, living in Virginia Water (Surrey), Purewell (Dorset), Burton (Dorset), Kirkby Malham (North Yorkshire, in the 1980s and '90s), and the Old Rectory in Wramplingham, Norfolk (2003-2013). They currently live in rural Hampshire and maintain a small flat in South Kensington, London. From 1995 to 2003 they lived in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Although able to apply for British citizenship, Bryson said in 2010 that he had declined a citizenship test, declaring himself "too cowardly" to take it. However, in 2014, he said that he was preparing to take it and in the prologue to his 2015 book The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island he describes doing so, in Eastleigh. His citizenship ceremony took place in Winchester and he now holds dual citizenship.

While living in the US in the 1990s Bryson wrote a column for a British newspaper for several years, reflecting on humorous aspects of his repatriation in the United States. These columns were selected and adapted to become his book I'm a Stranger Here Myself, alternatively titled Notes from a Big Country in Britain, Canada, and Australia. During his time in the US, Bryson decided to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend Stephen Katz (a pseudonym), about which he wrote the book A Walk in the Woods. In the 2015 film adaptation of A Walk in the Woods, Bryson is portrayed by Academy Award winner Robert Redford, and Katz by Nick Nolte.

In 2003, in conjunction with World Book Day, British voters chose Bryson's book Notes from a Small Island as that which best summed up British identity and the state of the nation. the same year, he was appointed a Commissioner for English Heritage.

His popular science book, the 500-page A Short History of Nearly Everything, explores not only the histories and current statuses of the sciences, but also their humble and often humorous beginnings. Although one "top scientist" is alleged to have jokingly described the book as "annoyingly free of mistakes", Bryson himself makes no such claim, and a list of some of its reported errors is available online.

In November 2006, Bryson interviewed then British prime minister Tony Blair on the state of science and education.

Bryson has also written two popular works on the history of the English language, The Mother Tongue and Made in America-and, more recently, an update of his guide to usage, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words (first published as The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words in 1983).

In October 2020 he announced that he had "retired" from writing books.

In 2012 Bryson sued his agent, Jed Mattes Inc., in New York County Supreme Court, claiming it had "failed to perform some of the most fundamental duties of an agent". The case was settled out of court, with part of the settlement being that Bryson may not discuss it.

In 2013 Bryson claimed copyright on an interview he had given nearly 20 years previously, after the interviewer republished it as an 8000-word e-book. Amazon removed the e-book from publication.

Awards, positions and honours

In 2005, Bryson was appointed chancellor of Durham University, succeeding the late Sir Peter Ustinov, and became more active with student activities than is common for holders of that post, appearing in a Durham student film and promoting litter-collection in the city. He had praised Durham as "a perfect little city" in Notes from a Small Island. In October 2010, it was announced that Bryson would step down at the end of 2011.

In May 2007, he became the president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. His first focus in this role was the establishment of an anti-littering campaign across England. He discussed the future of the countryside with Richard Mabey, Sue Clifford, Nicholas Crane, and Richard Girling at CPRE's Volunteer Conference in November 2007.

Bryson has received numerous awards for his ability to communicate science with passion and enthusiasm. In 2004, he won the Aventis Prize for best general science book that year, with A Short History of Nearly Everything. In 2005, the book won the European Union's Descartes Prize for science communication. In 2005, he received the President's Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry for advancing the cause of the chemical sciences. In 2007, he won the Bradford Washburn Award, from the Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts, for contributions to the popularization of science. In 2012, he received the Kenneth B. Myer Award, from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience, in Melbourne, Australia.

With the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Bill Bryson prize for Science Communication was established in 2005. The competition engages students from around the world in explaining science to non-experts.

He was made an honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his contribution to literature on 13 December 2006. In 2007, he was awarded the James Joyce Award by the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin. After he received British citizenship, his OBE was made substantive.

In 2011, Bryson won the Golden Eagle Award from the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild. On 22 November 2012, Durham University officially renamed the Main Library the Bill Bryson Library for his contributions as the university's 11th chancellor (2005-2011). The library also has a cafe named after Bryson's book Notes from a Small Island.

Bryson was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2013, becoming the first non-Briton to receive this honour. His biography at the Society reads:

Bill Bryson is a popular author who is driven by a deep curiosity for the world we live in. Bill's books and lectures demonstrate an abiding love for science and an appreciation for its social importance. His international bestseller, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), is widely acclaimed for its accessible communication of science and has since been adapted for children.

In 2006 Frank Cownie, the mayor of Des Moines, awarded Bryson the key to the city and announced that 21 October 2006 would be "Bill Bryson, The Thunderbolt Kid, Day".

In January 2007, Bryson was the Schwartz Visiting Fellow at the Pomfret School in Connecticut.

Honorary doctorates

Bryson has written the following books:

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William McGuire Bryson (; born 8 December 1951) is an American-British author of books on travel, the English language, science, and other non-fiction topics. Born in the United States, he has been a resident of Britain for most of his adult life, returning to the U.S.

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Patricia Polacco's best books include Thank You Mr. Falker and Thunder Cake.

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Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains.

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Joe Hayes
Is the Author of The Gum Chewing Rattler

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Kate DiCamillo

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Norman Bridwell
Norman Ray Bridwell was an American author and cartoonist best known for the Clifford the Big Red Dog book series.

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Clifford The Big Red Dog - Read Aloud Book for Children

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Patrica Polacco

Thank you Mr. Falker

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Laura Ingalls Wilder

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The Paris Hours

In glittering 1927 Paris, Josephine Baker dances with Ernest Hemingway, Maurice Ravel plays a lonely piano, and Gertrude Stein hosts her legendary salons. Yet alongside these creative geniuses, a quartet of ordinary men and women are forging their own extraordinary stories.

Since the death of her beloved employer, housemaid Camille has lived with a secret: when Marcel Proust asked her to burn his notebooks, she saved one for herself. Now it has disappeared, and she is desperate to recover it before her betrayal is revealed. Across town, lovesick painter Guillaume is also racing against the clock, with only a few more hours to repay a debt that threatens to bury him alive. Souren, an Armenian refugee, performs puppet shows for children, seeking connection in a city that has never felt like home. While Souren relentlessly relives his tragic past, journalist Jean-Paul is unable to confront his own, searching for his missing daughter in every stranger's face.

As the hours tick toward midnight, the City of Lights pulls these four characters ever closer, until their paths collide in an unforgettable climax. Symphonic and profound, The Paris Hours shows us that even the forgotten residents of Paris are as dazzling as the glorious city they inhabit.

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In glittering 1927 Paris, Josephine Baker dances with Ernest Hemingway, Maurice Ravel plays a lonely piano, and Gertrude Stein hosts her legendary salons. Yet alongside these creative geniuses, a quartet of ordinary men and women are forging their own extraordinary stories.

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Shel Silverstein

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Alan Gratz

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Looking for a short bio? Use this! Alan Gratz is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty novels and graphic novels for young readers, including Heroes, Two Degrees, Captain America: The Ghost Army, Ground Zero, Refugee, Allies, Prisoner B-3087, and Ban This Book. A Knoxville, Tennessee native, Alan is now a full-time writer […]

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Gloria Whelan

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Michigan's long, vibrant history and varied, breathtaking terrains have inspired writers to capture its long-forgotten tales while also creating new ones. Michigan writers from all walks of life have been creating stories that capture the very essence of the mitten and what makes it such a wonderful place to live and experience. No one narrates the state better than a native Michigander, so if you're looking to kick back with some the most intimate accounts of our state and what makes it special, here are five Michigan authors that should be on your reading list.

Gloria Whelan

Born in Detroit, MI in 1923, Gloria Whelan has 31 books for children and young adults, both historical and fictional. Whelan developed a love of reading from a young age, and she grew up in Detroit before graduating from the University of Michigan. When she and her husband eventually moved to Oxbow Lake in northern Michigan, what was meant to be their quiet oasis was soon disturbed when an oil company wanted to drill on their land. Without access to the mineral rights, the family eventually had to relent the land, and the experience prompted Whelan to write the manuscript for A Clearing In The Forest. Six years after the incident, in 1978, it became her first published book.

Loosely based on her experience, A Clearing In The Forest is about an aging widow that works with a neighborhood youth to go up against a company that is threatening to destroy the woods near their northern Michigan homes. Another locally-set story, Once on This Island, takes place on Mackinac Island during the war of 1812, and it won Whelan the Great Lakes Book Award in 1996. Whelan's lyrical style of writing and her deep, thoughtful story lines make her a must-read Michigan author.

Terry McMillan

You might know Terry McMillan as the author of Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, both of which were made into award-winning movies, but she is also a Michigan native. Born and raised in Port Huron, McMillan has made a name for herself in the literary world writing multiple New York Times Best Sellers and other books turned into made-for-TV movies. However, she may be best known for her debut novel Mama in 1986. She won the Doubleday New Voices in Fiction award and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her work is poignant and down-to-earth, allowing audiences to easily relate to both the struggles and the fun-loving humor in her novels. McMillan's newest title, I Almost Forgot About You, uses her refreshingly honest writing style to delve into the journey of Dr. Georgia Young. Even though Georgia is a woman that seems to have it all, she does a complete 180 in life when she finds herself restless and bored. It is the kind of story that opens readers to the idea that there is so much more to life than the everyday routine, and it is up to us to go out there and find it. McMillan's uplifting stories and strong female characters keep readers coming back for more.

Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard was born in Louisiana in 1925, but his father's job as a General Motors site locator meant frequent moves. Not long before Elmore turned ten, his family settled in Detroit. He was fascinated with western tales and began writing in the fifth grade. Throughout school, he also wrote for his high school paper before graduating and spending three years in the Navy. Afterwards, he returned to Michigan and went to the University of Detroit, where he began to focus on his career as a writer. Leonard graduated with a dual degree in English and Philosophy, and he got his first break in 1951, when one of his short stories was published. Three years later, his first novel The Bounty Hunters was published, and Leonard's explorations of the western genre produced 3:10 to Yuma and The Captives, both of which were adapted for the big screen. While the western tropes were a favorite of Leonard's, he ventured into crime stories in the 1960s as the popularity of westerns fell off. Living in the often dangerous city of Detroit, Leonard used his hometown as a setting for many of his novels, and people loved his raw, gritty writing with its complicated characters. Newsweek would eventually run a cover story featuring Leonard, referring to him as the "Dickens of Detroit." His books Get Shorty and Jackie Brown were also turned into screenplays, and his work will long be remembered for its captivating storylines and tales of complicated men trying overcome their flawed natures.

Tom Stanton

Tom Stanton was born in Warren in 1960, and the surrounding Metro Detroit area has inspired much of his writing work. As a journalist, Stanton helped found The Voice Newspapers in Detroit, where he served as an editor for sixteen years before channeling his writing into books. He has numerous nonfiction books, including The Final Season which details the last season the Detroit Tigers played at Tigers Stadium. Stanton attended every home game that last season and provided a thoughtful look at the four generations of his own family that had spent decades watching games at the stadium and bonding over baseball. The Final Season won the CASEY Award from Spinning Magazine, and Stanton also won a Michigan Author Award in 2008. He has other books that revolve around baseball and its deep emotional ties, but he has also written about other subjects, coauthoring a book about Elton John with Claude Bernardin. Currently Stanton teaches journalism at the University of Detroit, and he released Terror in the City of Champions: Murder Baseball, and the Secret Society that Shocked Depression-era Detroit last year. His writing touches upon one of America's favorite pastimes and captures so much of Michigan's culture and history, it should be on every Michigander's must-read list.

Jerry Dennis

Jerry Dennis was born in Flint but grew up in northern Michigan, where he still lives today. Dennis became an independent writer in the late 1980s, and his collection of essays and short fiction pieces have been featured in The New York Times, Gray's Sporting Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review and more than 100 other publications. In the 90s, his writing took him all over the world, where Dennis wrote regular columns for environmental publications such as Wildlife Conservation Magazine. He has written a variety of books that revolve around the environment and how people interact with the world around them. One of Dennis' best selling books was The Living Great Lakes, which details his trip through the Great Lakes starting from Lake Michigan and ending in Bar Harbor, Maine. With a crew of five, they struggled with the everyday dangers of navigating multiple waterways as well as the difficulties of being trapped on a boat with the same people day in and day out. The book won the 2004 Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Best Book of the Year from the Outdoor Writers Association of America, the Stuart D. and Vernice Gross Award for Excellence in Literature, and the Great Lakes Culture Award. Dennis also won the 1999 Michigan Library Association Author of the Year award, and you can see him as a frequent guest speaker at universities and a variety of venues. His work for the University of Michigan's Bear River Writers Conference includes teaching workshops in creative nonfiction, and in 2014 he started the Big Maple Press with artist Glenn Wolff and creative director Gail Dennis. They publish special editions of their books and sell them in independent bookstores. Dennis has managed to create a career out of his major passions while sharing his stories and knowledge with others, and if you are an avid outdoorsmen, his books are the perfect addition to your collection and provide a detailed look at some Michigan's beautiful landscapes.
Who are your favorite Michigan authors? Let us know in the comments!

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5 Must-Read Michigan Authors - The Awesome Mitten

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Michigan's long, vibrant history and varied, breathtaking terrains have inspired writers to capture its long-forgotten tales while also creating new ones. Michigan writers from all walks of life have been creating stories that capture the very essence of the mitten and what makes it such a wonderful place to live and experience.

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Who is she -
I'm a creator, a visionary, a poet. I approach the world with the eyes of an artist, the ears of a musician, and the soul of a writer. I see rainbows where others see only rain, and possibilities when others see only problems. I love spring flowers, summer's heat on my body, and the beauty of the dying leaves in the fall. Classical music, art museums, and ballet are sources of inspiration, as well as blues music and dim cafes.

I love to write; words flow easily from my fingertips, and my heart beats rapidly with excitement as an idea becomes a reality on the paper in front of me. I smile often, laugh easily, and I weep at pain and cruelty. I'm a learner and a seeker of knowledge, and I try to take my readers along on my journey. I am passionate about what I do.

I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me.

Bio - Sharon M. Draper is a professional educator as well as an accomplished writer. She has been honored as the National Teacher of the Year, is a five-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Literary Awards, and is a New York Times bestselling author, with Out of my Mind staying on the list for almost two years. She was selected as Ohio’s Outstanding High School Language Arts Educator, Ohio Teacher of the Year, and was chosen as a NCNW Excellence in Teaching Award winner. She is a Milken Family Foundation National Educator Award winner, and was the Duncanson Artist-in-Residence for the Taft Museum. She is a YWCA Career Woman of Achievement, and is the recipient of the Dean’s Award from Howard University School of Education, the Pepperdine University Distinguished Alumnus Award, the Marva Collins Education Excellence Award, and the Governor’s Educational Leadership Award. Last year she was named Ohio Pioneer in Education by the Ohio State Department of Education, and in 2008 she received the Beacon of Light Humanitarian award. In 2009 she received the Doctor of Laws Degree from Pepperdine University. In 2011, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to the field of adolescent literature by The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English, as well as the 33rd Annual Jeremiah Luddington Award by the Educational Book and Media Association, also for lifetime achievement. In 2015 she was honored by the American Library Association as the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime literary achievement. In 2015 she was honored with the Anne V. Zarrow Award by the Tulsa Library Trust., as well as the 2016 Upstander Award by Antioch College.

Link to her website -
https://sharondraper.com/biography.asp

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She became a writer when she got in 6th grade. And wrote, The Recess Queen

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I don't think that anymore.

(Although good penmanship does help a lot if you want others to read what you've written.)

My luckiest day happened when I was born in Boston to parents with Irish (by way of County Cork) and Scottish (by way of Nova Scotia) roots who loved to sing and tell stories and jokes.

My older brother, younger sister and husband are great joke-tellers. I am not. But I'm a good laugher, no matter how many times I've heard the same joke. I discovered, though, that I was good at writing things down on paper, so that's how I ended up doing what I do now - writing books for kids.

When we moved from South Boston to Wakefield, Massachusetts, I discovered my first profession: I became a teacher at the age of seven. My dad brought home a discarded blackboard from his factory and nailed it up in our garage.

With some chalk and my mom's old portable typewriter that came in a tailored suitcase, I set up for business, roping kids from the neighborhood into being my students. It was very satisfying. I decided that's what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I did.

My second profession started when I was in 6th grade: I became a writer. Only I didn't realize this until much, much later. When my teacher, Mr. La Bossiere, read my report on Ireland (which was slightly fictionalized) out loud to the class and my classmates liked it, I knew I was on to something.

I used the "almost a report" technique in many classes to follow in junior high and high school, including history and science. Topics included The Alamo, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, The Life and Works of Sir William Thomson, Three Sides of Washington Irving,
and more.

Teachers applauded my creativity. Many read my writing out loud. Classmates complimented me. And I liked the feeling. I didn't know then that I'd grow up to be a writer after becoming a teacher. But I did. And I love my life.

So that's the short of it.

If you want to know the longer version with specifics, click here for my "official" biography.

Thanks for stopping by. I hope we might meet someday!

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I don't think that anymore. (Although good penmanship does help a lot if you want others to read what you've written.) My luckiest day happened when I was born in Boston to parents with Irish (by way of County Cork) and Scottish (by way of Nova Scotia) roots who loved to sing and tell stories and jokes.

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Sarah Bird was an ALEX Award nominee; winner of the Texas Philosophical Society Literary Award; a Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice; a Seattle Times Best Book of the Year; a Tucson Book Festival Great Books for Book Club selection; and a Marie Claire Best Summer Reads. She wrote Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen and Above the East China Sea, which was long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award. Sarah's bio: http://sarahbirdbooks.com/bio/ Sarah on becoming a writer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FqpWNtCT9s

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Louis Sachar

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Joe R. Lansdale

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Joe Richard Lansdale (born October 28, 1951) is an American writer and martial arts instructor.

Lansdale grew up in East Texas, the son of a mechanic.

He has written novels and stories in various genres, including Western, horror, science fiction, mystery, and suspense. He has also written for comics as well as Batman: The Animated Series. He has written 45 novels and published 30 short story collections along with many chapbooks and comic book adaptations. Several of his novels have been adapted to film and to television series.

Frequent features of Lansdale's writing are usually deeply ironic, strange or absurd situations or characters, such as Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy battling a soul-sucking Egyptian mummy in a nursing home (the plot of his Bram Stoker Award-nominated novella, Bubba Ho-Tep, which was made into a movie by Don Coscarelli). He is the winner of the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the Edgar Award, and ten Bram Stoker Awards.

His Hap and Leonard series of twelve novels, four novellas, and three short story collections feature two friends, Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, who live in the fictional town of Laborde, in East Texas, and find themselves solving a variety of often unpleasant crimes. The characters themselves are an unlikely pairing; Hap is a white working class laborer in his mid forties who once protested against the war in Vietnam and spent time in federal prison rather than be drafted and Leonard is a gay black Vietnam vet. Both of them are accomplished fighters, and the stories (told from Hap's narrative point of view) feature a great deal of violence, profanity and sex. Lansdale paints a picture of East Texas which is essentially "good" but blighted by racism, ignorance, urban and rural deprivation and corruption in public officials. Some of the subject matter is extremely dark, and includes scenes of brutal violence. These novels are also characterized by sharp humor and "wisecracking" dialogue. These books have been adapted into a TV series for the SundanceTV channel and a series of graphic novels will be published in early 2017. Season 2 is based on the second Hap and Leonard novel Mucho Mojo and season 3, which premiered on 3/7/18, is based on the third novel The Two-Bear Mambo. Much of Lansdale's work has been issued and re-issued as limited editions by Subterranean Press and as trade paperbacks by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Publications. His current new release publisher is Mulholland Books. Lansdale also publishes with Dark Regions Press, and Tachyon Publications.

Lansdale's novel titled Fender Lizards was published in November 2015 by Subterranean Press. In February 2016 two full-length novels Hell's Bounty was published Feb 27 also by Subterreanean Press and a new Hap and Leonard novel titled Honky Tonk Samurai was released Feb 2 by Mulholland Books. More Hap and Leonard works are on the way. On January 31, 2017 Coco Butternut: A Hap and Leonard Novella was released by Subterranean Press and Rusty Puppy was released by Mulholland Books February 21, 2017. A new mosaic novel titled Blood and Lemonade was released on March 14, 2017.

Lansdale and daughter Kasey have started a new publishing company called Pandi Press to control the re-issue and publishing of his older works.

Lansdale book of essays and memoirs, Miracles Ain't What They Used To Be, was released by PM Press's Outspoken Author Series. His newest Hap and Leonard release is a novel titled Jackrabbit Smile and released March 27, 2018. He also, along with his daughter Kasey, released a collection of Dana Roberts mysteries titled Terror is Our Business: Dana Roberts' Casebook of Horrors, published in May 2018 by Cutting Block Books. In October 2018 a short story collection titled Driving to Geronimo's Grave and Other Stories has been published by Subterranean Press as a limited edition. Since then Joe Lansdale has been very busy publishing 11 Hap and Leonard novels as well as short story collections. Refer to his bibliography. His most recent novel is titled More Better Deals and was published by Mulholland Books. It's hardcover and Kindle release were on July 21, 2020. Since then he released a novel Big Lizard co-written with his son Keith Lansdale released as a limited edition of 1500 hardcopies published by Short, Scary Tales Publications and is also available through Amazon Kindle.

Lansdale, who was born in Gladewater, Texas, lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife Karen and is the writer in residence at Stephen F. Austin State University. He also teaches at his own Shen Chuan martial arts school Lansdale's Self Defense Systems in Nacogdoches and is a member of the United States Martial Arts Hall of Fame as Sōke and the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame. He is the father of actress, musician and publisher Kasey Lansdale and reporter and screenwriter Keith Lansdale. He has described himself as an atheist, though he has also said that he is not anti-religion.

Lansdale was a contributing writer for Batman: the Animated Series, credited with three episodes, namely "Perchance to Dream" (season 1, episode 26, which aired October 29, 1992), "Read My Lips"(season 1, episode #59 that aired May 10, 1993), and "Showdown" (season 4, episode 2, aired September 12, 1995). Lansdale also wrote "Identity Crisis" on Superman: The Animated Series (season 2, episode 6, airing September 15, 1997), and " Critters" (with Steve Gerber) for The New Batman Adventures (season 2, episode 2, airing September 19, 1998).

Lansdale's first film adaptation was Bubba Ho-Tep, based on his novella of the same and released in 2002. The film featured Elvis Presley and a man who believes himself to be John F. Kennedy, confined to an old-age rest home, teaming up to fight a mummy who is stealing their friends' souls.

In 2010, Lansdale wrote the screenplay for the animated short DC Showcase: Jonah Hex. The short storyIncident On and Off a Mountain Road was adapted for the first episode of the first season of Masters of Horror. It aired on October 28, 2005. Lansdale's story "The Job" was made into an 11-minute short in 1997 by A.W. Feidler. It is available on the out-of-print DVD collection, Short 5 - Diversity, on Warner Home Video. The short story "Drive-In Date" was filmed as a short by James Cahill, from a script written by Lansdale, published in A Fist Full of Stories.

The film Christmas with the Dead, based on the Lansdale short story of the same name, was filmed in East Texas in Summer 2011. The film starring Brad Maule, Damian Maffei, and Kasey Lansdale is currently showing on the film festival circuit and at private screenings. The DVD has been released. Actor and director Bill Paxton worked for six years on a film adaptation of Lansdale's novel The Bottoms. In a 2015 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Paxton admitted having difficulty getting the project off the ground. Paxton's death left unfinished projects, including The Bottoms movie.

Backup Media and Memento Films International financed Cold in July, an adaptation of Lansdale's cult novel was directed by Jim Mickle, with acting by Michael C. Hall and Sam Shepard. Filming began in 2013. Accompanied by a movie tie-in edition of the original story released by Tachyon Publications, the film was screened at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Nick Damici and Jim Mickle developed a Hap and Leonard private investigator series for the Sundance Channel, which premiered in March 2016. On June 27, 2016, SundanceTV renewed the series for a six-episode second season, which aired in 2017[needs update ] and was based on the second novel, . Season 3 is based the third book, The Two-Bear Mambo On May 14, 2018, SundanceTV announced the cancellation of the series.

Lansdale is the executive producer of the upcoming film The Pale Door.

Joe Lansdale has won ten Bram Stoker Awards over the course of his long career. The short story Night They Missed the Horror Show won the award for "Short Fiction" in 1988. In the "Long Fiction" category (which is for novellas, though it also initially included comic book work as well), he won in 1989 for On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks, 1997 for The Big Blow, and 1999 for Mad Dog Summer (a shared award with Brian A. Hopkins' "Five Days in April"). In 1992 the story The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance shared the "Long Fiction" award with Aliens: Tribes by Steve Bissette. In 1993, Jonah Hex: Two Gun Mojo won in the newly created "Other Media" category. Lansdale's 2006 anthology Retro Pulp Tales tied for the Best Anthology category with Mondo Zombie edited by John Skipp. He just won his tenth Bram Stoker in the long fiction category for Fishing for Dinosaurs which was published in the collection Limbus 2.

He was also nominated nine other times. The Drive-In and Savage Season were nominated in the "Novels" category in 1988 and 1990, respectively. By Bizarre Hands and Writer of the Purple Rage were nominated for "Fiction Collection" in 1989 and 1994. The short story Love Doll: A Fable was nominated in "Short Fiction" in 1991. The novella Bubba Ho-Tep was nominated for "Long Fiction" in 1994. Something Lumber This Way Comes was nominated in a new "Work for Younger Readers" category, and Jonah Hex: Shadows West #1 was nominated for "Illustrated Narrative", both in 1999. Red Romance (published in DC Comics' Flinch #11) was nominated for "Illustrated Narrative" in 2000.

Other nominations include:

1986, Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back for a World Fantasy Award.

2007, Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard for a World Fantasy Award.

He's been nominated for a World Fantasy Award eleven other times over his long career.

Other awards include:

1990, On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks won the British Fantasy Award for best short story.

1994, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

2000, The Bottoms was given the Edgar Award for Best Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. It was also named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and the Herodotus Award for best historical mystery novel. It was also nominated for a Dashiell Hammett Award for "Best Novel", as well as "Best Mystery Novel" in the Mystery Readers International's Macavity Awards in 1991.

2011, SUGARPRIZE for a body of work during the Sugarpulp Festival.

2011, The Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature for a body of work.

2012, Edge of Dark Water was listed Booklist Editors' Choice for Adult Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association.

2013, His novel The Thicket was voted one of the best historical novels by the Library Journal.

2015, He received the Raymond Chandler lifetime achievement award.

2016, The Western Writers of America gave Paradise Sky a Spur Award for Best Historical Western Novel.

He is also frequently cited as winning the American Mystery Award, the Horror Critics Award, and the "Shot in the Dark" International Crime Writer's award. The specifics are difficult to track down at present, but it is likely that at least some of these were awarded to The Bottoms, which is by far his most acclaimed novel.

The Horror Writers Association gave him and the late Rick Hautala Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement for 2011, which they received at the Bram Stoker Awards Banquet in Salt Lake City, Utah on March 31, 2012

On October 19, 2012 he was inducted into The Texas Literary Hall of Fame.

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Joe Richard Lansdale (born October 28, 1951) is an American writer and martial arts instructor. Lansdale grew up in East Texas, the son of a mechanic. He has written novels and stories in various genres, including Western, horror, science fiction, mystery, and suspense. He has also written for comics as well as Batman: The Animated Series .

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Sherry Garland
Sherry Garland is the award-winning author of over thirty books for children, teens and adults. She lives in Texas with her husband and five rescued cats.

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Texas, USA - Amy Wu and the Patchwork Dragon

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Texas, USA - Amy Wu and the Patchwork Dragon

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Author: Kat Zhang

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AMY WU & THE PATCHWORK DRAGON Read by Kat Zhang

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Edward Abbey died on March 14, 1989, in Tucson Arizona. His first and best novel was The Brave Cowboy.

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Edward Paul Abbey (January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies. His best-known works include Desert Solitaire, a non-fiction autobiographical account of his time as a park ranger at Arches National Park considered to be iconic work of nature writing and a staple of early environmentalist writing, the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by environmentalists and groups defending nature by various means, also called eco-warriors, his novel Hayduke Lives, and his essay collections Down the River (with Henry Thoreau & Other Friends) (1982) and One Life at a Time, Please (1988).

Abbey was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on January 29, 1927 to Mildred Postlewait and Paul Revere Abbey. Mildred was a schoolteacher and a church organist, and gave Abbey an appreciation for classical music and literature. Paul was a socialist, anarchist, and atheist whose views strongly influenced Abbey.

Abbey graduated from high school in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in 1945. Eight months before his 18th birthday, when he would be faced with being drafted into the U.S. Military, Abbey decided to explore the American southwest. He traveled by foot, bus, hitchhiking, and freight train hopping. During this trip, he fell in love with the desert country of the Four Corners region. Abbey wrote: "[...]crags and pinnacles of naked rock, the dark cores of ancient volcanoes, a vast and silent emptiness smoldering with heat, color, and indecipherable significance, above which floated a small number of pure, clear, hard-edged clouds. For the first time, I felt I was getting close to the West of my deepest imaginings, the place where the tangible and the mythical became the same."

In the military, Abbey had applied for a clerk typist position but instead served two years as a military police officer in Italy. Abbey was promoted in the military twice but, due to his knack for opposing authority, was twice demoted and was honorably discharged as a private. His experience with the military left him with a distrust for large institutions and regulations which influenced his writing throughout his career, and strengthened his anarchist beliefs.

When he returned to the United States, Abbey took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend the University of New Mexico, where he received a B.A. in philosophy and English in 1951, and a master's degree in philosophy in 1956. During his time in college, Abbey supported himself by working at a variety of odd jobs, including being a newspaper reporter and bartending in Taos, New Mexico.

During this time, he had few male friends but had intimate relationships with a number of women. Shortly before getting his bachelor's degree, Abbey married his first wife, Jean Schmechal, also a UNM student.

While an undergraduate, Abbey was the editor of a student newspaper in which he published an article titled "Some Implications of Anarchy". A cover quotation of the article (from Denis Diderot, ironically attributed to Louisa May Alcott), stated: "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." University officials seized all of the copies of the issue and removed Abbey from the editorship of the paper.

Upon receiving his honorable discharge papers, Abbey sent them back to the department with the words "Return to Sender". The FBI took note and added a note to his file which was opened in 1947 when Edward Abbey committed an act of civil disobedience: he posted a letter while in college urging people to rid themselves of their draft cards. Abbey was on the FBI's watch-list ever since then and was watched throughout his life. In 1952, Abbey wrote a letter against the draft in times of peace, and again the FBI took notice writing, "Edward Abbey is against war and military." Throughout Abbey's life the FBI took notes building a profile on Abbey, observing his movements, and interviewing many people who knew him. Towards the later part of his life Abbey learned of the FBI's interest in him and said, "I'd be insulted if they weren't watching me."

After graduating, Schmechal and Abbey traveled together to Edinburgh, Scotland, where Abbey spent a year at Edinburgh University as a Fulbright scholar. During this time, Abbey and Schmechal separated and ended their marriage. In 1951, Abbey began an affair with Rita Deanin, who in 1952 would become his second wife after he and Schmechal divorced. Deanin and Abbey had two children, Joshua N. Abbey and Aaron Paul Abbey.

Abbey's master's thesis explored anarchism and the morality of violence, asking the two questions: "To what extent is the current association between anarchism and violence warranted?" and "In so far as the association is a valid one, what arguments have the anarchists presented, explicitly or implicitly, to justify the use of violence?" After receiving his master's degree, Abbey spent 1957 at Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship.

In 1956 and 1957, Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger for the United States National Park Service at Arches National Monument (now a national park), near the town of Moab, Utah. Abbey held the position from April to September each year, during which time he maintained trails, greeted visitors, and collected campground fees. He lived in a house trailer that had been provided to him by the Park Service, as well as in a ramada that he built himself. During his stay at Arches, Abbey accumulated a large volume of notes and sketches which later formed the basis of his first non-fiction work, Desert Solitaire. Abbey's second son Aaron was born in 1959, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In the 1960s, Abbey worked as a seasonal park ranger at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on the border of Arizona and Mexico.[citation needed ] In 1961, the movie version of his second novel, The Brave Cowboy, with screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, was being shot on location in New Mexico by Kirk Douglas who had purchased the novel's screen rights and was producing and starring in the film, released in 1962 as Lonely Are the Brave. Douglas once said that when Abbey visited the film set, he looked and talked so much like Douglas' friend Gary Cooper that Douglas was disconcerted. Nonetheless, over 25 years later when Abbey died, Douglas wrote that he had "never met" Abbey. In 1981, Abbey's third novel, Fire on the Mountain, was also adapted into a TV movie by the same title.

On October 16, 1965, Abbey married Judy Pepper, who accompanied him as a seasonal park ranger in the Florida Everglades and then as a fire lookout in Lassen Volcanic National Park. Judy was separated from Abbey for extended periods of time while she attended the University of Arizona to earn her master's degree. During this time, Abbey had relations with other women-something that Judy gradually became aware of, causing their marriage to suffer. On August 8, 1968 Judy gave birth to a daughter, Susannah "Susie" Mildred Abbey. Ed purchased the family a home in Sabino Canyon, outside of Tucson. Judy died of leukemia on July 11, 1970, an event that crushed Abbey, causing him to go into "bouts of depression and loneliness" for years. It was to Judy that he dedicated his book . However, the book was not an autobiographical novel about his relationship with Judy. Rather, it was a story about a woman with whom Abbey had an affair in 1963. Abbey finished the first draft of Black Sun in 1968, two years before Judy died, and it was "a bone of contention in their marriage."

Desert Solitaire, Abbey's fourth book and first non-fiction work, was published in 1968. In it, he describes his stay in the canyonlands of southeastern Utah from 1956 to 1957. Desert Solitaire is regarded as one of the finest nature narratives in American literature, and has been compared to Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac[citation needed ] and Thoreau's . In it, Abbey vividly describes the physical landscapes of southern Utah and delights in his isolation as a back country park ranger, recounting adventures in the nearby canyon country and mountains. He also attacks what he terms the "industrial tourism" and resulting development in the national parks ("national parking lots"), rails against the Glen Canyon Dam, and comments on various other subjects.[citation needed ]

In 1973, Abbey married his fourth wife Renee Downing. However, Abbey was always gone so they divorced after four years of marriage.

Abbey met his fifth and final wife, Clarke Cartwright, in 1978, and married her in 1982. Together they had two children, Rebecca Claire Abbey and Benjamin C. Abbey.

In 1984, Abbey went back to the University of Arizona to teach courses in creative writing and hospitality management. During this time, he continued working on his book Fool's Progress.

In July 1987, Abbey went to the Earth First! Rendezvous at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. While there, he was involved in a heated debate with an anarchist communist group known as Alien Nation, over his stated view that America should be closed to all immigration. Abbey devoted an entire chapter in his book Hayduke Lives! to the events that took place at the Rendezvous. In autumn of 1987, the Utne Reader published a letter by Murray Bookchin which claimed that Abbey, Garrett Hardin, and the members of Earth First! were racists and eco-terrorists. Regarding the accusation of "eco-terrorism", Abbey responded that the tactics he supported were trying to defend against the terrorism he felt was committed by government and industry against living beings and the environment.

Abbey died on March 14, 1989, aged 62, in his home in Tucson, Arizona. His death was due to complications from surgery; he suffered four days of bleeding into his esophagus due to varices caused by portal hypertension, a consequence of end stage liver cirrhosis. Showing his sense of humor, he left a message for anyone who asked about his final words: "No comment." Abbey also left instructions on what to do with his remains: Abbey wanted his body transported in the bed of a pickup truck and wished to be buried as soon as possible. He did not want to be embalmed or placed in a coffin. Instead, he preferred to be placed inside of an old sleeping bag and requested that his friends disregard all state laws concerning burial. "I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree," said the message. For his funeral, Abbey stated, "No formal speeches desired, though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge. But keep it all simple and brief." He requested gunfire and bagpipe music, a cheerful and raucous wake, "[a]nd a flood of beer and booze! Lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking."

A 2003 Outside article described how his friends honored his request:

The last time Ed smiled was when I told him where he was going to be buried," says Doug Peacock, an environmental crusader in Edward Abbey's inner circle. On March 14, 1989, the day Abbey died from esophageal bleeding at 62, Peacock, along with his friend Jack Loeffler, his father-in-law Tom Cartwright, and his brother-in-law Steve Prescott, wrapped Abbey's body in his blue sleeping bag, packed it with dry ice, and loaded Cactus Ed into Loeffler's Chevy pickup. After stopping at a liquor store in Tucson for five cases of beer, and some whiskey to pour on the grave, they drove off into the desert. The men searched for the right spot the entire next day and finally turned down a long rutted road, drove to the end, and began digging. That night they buried Ed and toasted the life of America's prickliest and most outspoken environmentalist.

Abbey's body was buried in the Cabeza Prieta Desert in Pima County, Arizona, where "you'll never find it." The friends carved a marker on a nearby stone, reading:

In late March, about 200 friends of Abbey's gathered near the Saguaro National Monument near Tucson and held the wake he requested. A second, much larger wake was held in May, just outside his beloved Arches National Park, with such notables as Terry Tempest Williams and Wendell Berry speaking.[citation needed ]

Abbey is survived by two daughters, Susannah and Rebecca, and three sons, Joshua, Aaron, and Benjamin. He also has a nephew, David Abbey.

Wrenched, by Jerome filmmaker ML Lincoln is a 2013 documentary film that picks up where Edward Abbey's iconic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang left off, chronicling Abbey's legacy of environmental civil disobedience. This was originally called "Lines Across The Sand".

Edward Abbey: A Voice in the Wilderness is a 1993 PBS documentary by Eric Temple.

The Cracking of Glen Canyon Damn - with Edward Abbey and Earth First!(1982) captured the legendary first action of radical desert rats when they dropped a 300-foot-long black plastic "crack" over the dam and called poetically for its demise. Produced by Toby McLeod, Glenn Switkes and Randy Hayes.

Abbey's literary influences included Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau, Gary Snyder, Peter Kropotkin, and A. B. Guthrie, Jr.. Although often compared to authors like Thoreau or Aldo Leopold, Abbey did not wish to be known as a nature writer, saying that he didn't understand "why so many want to read about the world out-of-doors, when it's more interesting simply to go for a walk into the heart of it." The theme that most interested Abbey was that of the struggle for personal liberty against the totalitarian techno-industrial state, with wilderness being the backdrop in which this struggle took place. Most of Abbey's writing criticizes the park services and American society for its reliance on motor vehicles and technology. He wanted to preserve the wilderness as a refuge for humans and believed that modernization was making us forget what was truly important in life.

Regarding his writing style, Abbey states: "I write in a deliberately provocative and outrageous manner because I like to startle people. I hope to wake up people. I have no desire to simply soothe or please. I would rather risk making people angry than putting them to sleep. And I try to write in a style that's entertaining as well as provocative. It's hard for me to stay serious for more than half a page at a time." Abbey felt that it was the duty of all authors to "speak the truth--especially unpopular truth. Especially truth that offends the powerful, the rich, the well-established, the traditional, the mythic".

Abbey's abrasiveness, opposition to anthropocentrism, and outspoken writings made him the object of much controversy. Agrarian author Wendell Berry claimed that Abbey was regularly criticized by mainstream environmental groups because Abbey often advocated controversial positions that were very different from those which environmentalists were commonly expected to hold.

Abbey has also drawn criticism for what some regard as his racist and sexist views.[citation needed ] In an essay called "Immigration and Liberal Taboos", collected in his 1988 book One Life at a Time, Please, Abbey expressed his opposition to immigration ("legal or illegal, from any source") into the United States: "(I)t occurs to some of us that perhaps ever-continuing industrial and population growth is not the true road to human happiness, that simple gross quantitative increase of this kind creates only more pain, dislocation, confusion and misery. In which case it might be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-generically impoverished people. At least until we have brought our own affairs into order. Especially when these uninvited millions bring with them an alien mode of life which-let us be honest about this-is not appealing to the majority of Americans. Why not? Because we prefer democratic government, for one thing; because we still hope for an open, spacious, uncrowded, and beautiful-yes, beautiful!-society, for another. The alternative, in the squalor, cruelty, and corruption of Latin America, is plain for all to see."

It is often stated that Abbey's works played a significant role in precipitating the creation of Earth First!. The Monkey Wrench Gang inspired environmentalists frustrated with mainstream environmentalist groups and what they saw as unacceptable compromises. Earth First! was formed as a result in 1980, advocating eco-sabotage or " monkeywrenching." Although Abbey never officially joined the group, he became associated with many of its members, and occasionally wrote for the organization

Anarchism and the Morality of Violence (1959) (Thesis for master's degree in philosophy from the University of New Mexico)

Appalachian Wilderness (1970)

Cactus Country The American Wilderness/Time-Life books (1973)

The Hidden Canyon (1977)

Desert Images (1979)

In Praise of Mountain Lions (1984)

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Notes from a Secret Journal (1989)

Slumgullion Stew: An Edward Abbey Reader (1984)

The Best of Edward Abbey (1984)

The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader (1995)

Prentiss, Sean (2015). Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey And His Hidden Desert Grave. University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 978-0-8263-5591-1.

Abbey, Edward (2010). "Earth First! and The Monkeywrench Gang". In Keller, David R. (ed.). Environmental Ethics: The Big Questions. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4051-7639-2.

Foreman, Dave (1992). Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. Crown Publishing. ISBN 0-517-88058-X.

Gessner, David (2015). All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-08999-8.

Meyer, Kurt A. (1987). Edward Abbey: freedom fighter, freedom writer. University of Wyoming Press.

Quigley, Peter, ed. (1998). Coyote in the maze: tracking Edward Abbey in a world of words. University of Utah Press. ISBN 978-0-87480-563-5.

Slovic, Scott (1992). ""Rudolf the red knows rain, dear": The Aestheticism of Edward Abbey". Seeking awareness in American nature writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez. University of Utah Press. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-87480-362-4.

Wild, Peter (1999). "Edward Abbey: Ned Ludd Arrives on the Desert". The opal desert: explorations of fantasy and reality in the American Southwest. University of Texas Press. ISBN 978-0-292-79129-9.

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Edward Paul Abbey (January 29, 1927 - March 14, 1989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies.

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Marissa Meyer is the author of The Lunar Chronicles as well as other books including Heartless.

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Mini Bio

Marissa Meyer is the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lunar Chronicles, Heartless, The Renegades Trilogy, and Instant Karma, as well as the graphic novel duology Wires and Nerve. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University and a MA in Publishing from Pace University. In addition to writing, Marissa hosts The Happy Writer podcast. She lives near Tacoma, Washington, with her husband and twin daughters.

Longer Bio

One of my first spoken words was "story" (right along with "bath" and "cookie"), my favorite toy as an infant was a soft, squishable book, and I've wanted to be a writer since I first realized such a job existed.

When I was fourteen my best friend introduced me to anime and fanfiction-over the years I would complete over forty Sailor Moon fanfics under the penname Alicia Blade. Those so inclined can still find my first stories at fanfiction.net. Writing fanfic turned out to be awesome fun and brought me in contact with an amazing group of fanfiction readers and writers. As Alicia Blade, I also had a novelette, "The Phantom of Linkshire Manor," published in the gothic romance anthology Bound in Skin (CatsCurious Press, 2007).

When I was sixteen I worked at The Old Spaghetti Factory in Tacoma, Washington, affectionately termed "The Spag." (Random factoid: This is also the restaurant where my parents met some 25 years before.) I attended Pacific Lutheran University where I sorted mail that came to the dorm, carted tables and chairs around campus, and took writing classes, eventually earning a Bachelor's degree in Creative Writing and Children's Literature. Knowing I wanted a career in books, I would also go on to receive a Master's degree in Publishing from Pace University (which you can learn more about here). After graduation, I worked as an editor in Seattle for a while before becoming a freelance typesetter and proofreader.

Then, day of days, someone thought it would be a good idea to give me a book deal, so I became a full-time writer. CINDER was my first completed novel, though I have an adorable collection of unfinished ones lying around, too.

I married my husband in 2011, two months before the release of Cinder, and we adopted our two beautiful twin daughters, Sloane and Delaney, in 2015. Reading lots and lots of bedtime stories is most definitely a new favorite pastime.

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Marissa Meyer is the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lunar Chronicles, Heartless, The Renegades Trilogy, and Instant Karma, as well as the graphic novel duology Wires and Nerve. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University and a MA in Publishing from Pace University.

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Rick Riordan is known for writing the famous "Percy Jackson" series. He has two sons named Haley and Patrick, who he likes to play video games with. He has an estimated net worth of about $35 million.

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Alan Dean Foster

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Susan Fromberg Schaffer

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Rick Riordan

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Bryan Washington is a writer from Houston. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times Style Magazine, BuzzFeed, the BBC, Vulture, The Paris Review, Boston Review, The Cut, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, MUNCHIES, American Short Fiction, GQ, FADER, The Awl, The Believer, Hazlitt, and Catapult, where he wrote a column called "Bayou Diaries". He's also a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 winner, a New York Public Library Young Lions Award recipient, an Ernest J. Gaines Award recipient, an International Dylan Thomas Prize recipient, a Lambda Literary Award recipient, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize finalist, a National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize finalist, and the recipient of an O. Henry Award.

His first novel, Memorial, dropped on October 27th. The New York Times called it a Notable Book of 2020 and TIME called it one of their books of the year. So did the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly and Vanity Fair. You can read an excerpt of it here at The New Yorker. And also another one at Entertainment Weekly. TIME, Vogue, People, Vulture, Buzzfeed, Kirkus, Goodreads, and Bookpage were looking forward to it, and the novel is currently nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award for Fiction. It was also nominated for The Aspen Literary Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and The Center for Fiction's 2020 First Novel Prize. You can pre-order it here, or from your local indie, or from mine.

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Bryan Washington is a writer from Houston. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times Style Magazine, BuzzFeed, the BBC, Vulture, The Paris Review, Boston Review, The Cut, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, MUNCHIES, American Short Fiction, GQ, FADER, The Awl, The Believer,...

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Go Big - Cory Cotton, Cory Cotton wrote Go big a book about sports. Cory is on the famous youtube channel Dude Perfect that does crazy trick-shots. Cory has a twin who is also on Dude Perfect and is named Coby Cotton.

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Bryan wasinton

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rick riordan was born there

Biography

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The Lost Hero Audiobook by Rick RiordanThe Heroes of Olympus Book 1 Part 1

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https://joyofmuseums.com/artists-index/american-artists/the-2000-yard-stare/

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SHORT BIO (great for introductions!):

Katherine Center’s new novel is WHAT YOU WISH FOR. She’s the author of eight novels, including How to Walk Away and Things You Save in a Fire—both instant New York Times bestsellers—as well as The Lost Husband (now a movie starring Josh Duhamel that just hit #1 on Netflix). She writes laugh-and-cry books about how life knocks us down—and how we get back up. Katherine has been compared to both Nora Ephron and Jane Austen, the Dallas Morning News calls her stories, “satisfying in the most soul-nourishing way,” and BookPage calls her the “reigning queen of comfort reads.” Her books have made countless Best-Of lists, including Real Simple’s Best Books of 2020, Amazon’s Top 100 Books of 2019, Goodreads’ Best Books of the Year, the Indie Next Great Reads List, BookList’s Top Ten Women’s Fiction, and many, many more. Katherine lives in her hometown of Houston, Texas, with her husband, two kids, and their fluffy-but-fierce dog.

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SHORT BIO (great for introductions!):

Katherine Center’s new novel is WHAT YOU WISH FOR. She’s the author of eight novels, including How to Walk Away and Things You Save in a Fire—both instant New York Times bestsellers—as well as The Lost Husband (now a movie starring Josh Duhamel that just hit #1 on Netflix). She writes laugh-and-cry books about how life knocks us down—and how we get back up. Katherine has been compared to both Nora Ephron and Jane Austen, the Dallas Morning News calls her stories, “satisfying in the most soul-nourishing way,” and BookPage calls her the “reigning queen of comfort reads.” Her books have made countless Best-Of lists, including Real Simple’s Best Books of 2020, Amazon’s Top 100 Books of 2019, Goodreads’ Best Books of the Year, the Indie Next Great Reads List, BookList’s Top Ten Women’s Fiction, and many, many more. Katherine lives in her hometown of Houston, Texas, with her husband, two kids, and their fluffy-but-fierce dog.

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Katherine Center is the New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author of What You Wish For, How to Walk Away and Things You Save in a Fire. She’s also written five other bittersweet comic novels about love and family, including The Bright Side of Disaster and Happiness for Beginners.  Her fourth novel, The Lost Husband just became a feature film starring Josh Duhamel and Leslie Bibb. Katherine’s work has appeared in Redbook, O Magazine, InStyle, People, USA Today, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Real Simple, Southern Living, and many others. USA Today says, “Katherine Center writes amazing heartwarming novels.” The Dallas Morning News says, “Reading a book by Katherine Center is like having a long lunch conversation with an old friend you haven’t seen for a while — familiar, cozy and satisfying in the most soul-nourishing way.” And #1 NYT bestselling author Jodi Picoult says of Things You Save in a Fire, “Just read it, and thank me later.” BookPage calls The Bright Side of Disaster, “beautifully penned and truly memorable.” People calls The Lost Husband, “A sweet tale about creating the family you need.” And InStyle says of Happiness for Beginners, “If you’re anything like us, you’ll read this book in one sitting.” Katherine’s novels have been published in translation all around the world. Her books have made countless Best-Of lists, including Amazon’s Top 100 Books of 2019, Goodreads’ Best Books of the Year 2019, BookBub’s Best-Loved Books of 2019, the Indie Next Great Reads List, SheReads’ Best Women’s Fiction 2019, BookList’s Top Ten Women’s Fiction, and many, many more.  Katherine is also a speaker on writing, and reading, and how the stories we tell impact our lives—and she recently gave a TEDx talk on how stories teach us empathy.  She lives in her hometown of Houston, Texas, with her awesome husband, two sweet children, and their fluffy-but-fierce dog.

Link to her website -   https://katherinecenter.com/about/

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Joanna Gaines has written many children's book like The World need who you were made to be .

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Estela Portillo-Trambley (January 16, 1926 - December 1, 1998) was a Chicana poet and playwright. She gained recognition through the publishing of her many plays, prose, and poetry depicting the lives and plight of Chicana women in male-dominated societies.

Portillo-Trambley was born to Mexican immigrant parents on January 16, 1926 in El Paso, Texas. At a young age, she went to live with her grandparents in El Segundo Barrio of El Paso where her passion for literature was fostered. Growing up Estela had one younger sister named Alicia Portillo-Armendariz and two brothers, Frank Portillo and Robert Portillo. In 1947, she was married to Robert Trambley, and together they had six children - five daughters and one son. She earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Texas at El Paso and had a career as a high school teacher from 1957 to 1964, at the El Paso Technical Institute, before dedicating herself to writing. She is the first Chicana to publish a short story collection and the first to write a musical comedy. She was the resident dramatist at El Paso Community College from 1970-75. While there she produced and directed the college's dramatic productions and served as a drama instructor. She died on December 1, 1999.

While many works of other authors were centered on the experience of Latin men, Portillo-Trambley focused her work on women, claiming their own voice. Her experiences living in Mexico and along the Texas-Mexico border inspired the evident themes in her works. Portillo-Trambley's work tends to focus on her feminist stance, contesting stoicism and submissiveness of women. The historical play Sor Juana reconsiders the double standards that the 17th century nun faced and reimagines her life from a feminist perspective. Additionally, her play The Day of the Swallows can be considered ahead of its time for featuring a lesbian relationship.

Impressions (haiku poetry), El Espejo Quinto Sol, 1971.

(Editor) Chicanas en literatura y Arte (title means Chicana Women in Literature and Art), Quinto Sol, 1974.

Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (short stories), Tonatiuh International, 1976 ISBN 978-0892290017

Trini, Bilingual Press, 1986 ISBN 978-1558615021

The Day of the Swallows (also see below), El Espejo Quinto Sol, 1971.

Morality Play (three-act musical), first produced in El Paso, Tex., at Chamizal National Theatre, 1974.

(Contributor) We Are Chicano, Washington Square Press, 1974.

Black Light (three-act), first produced in El Paso at Chamizal National Theatre, 1975.

El Hombre Cosmico (title means The Cosmic Man), first produced at Chamizal National Theatre, 1975.

Sun Images (musical), first produced at Chamizal National Theatre, 1976.

(Contributor) Roberto Garza, editor, Chicano Theatre (includes The Day of the Swallows), Notre Dame University Press, 1976.

Isabel and the Dancing Bear (three-act), first produced at Chamizal National Theatre, 1977.

Sor Juana and Other Plays, Bilingual Press, 1983 ISBN 978-0916950330

Autumn Gold (three-act comedy)

Broken Moon (three-act play)

Los amores de Don Estafa (three-act comedy in English).

Portillo-Trambley won the 1975 Quinto Sol Award, a literary award presented by Quinto Sol Publications for her short story collection Rain of Scorpions. Such an award was given to Chicano and Chicana authors, promoting their genre of work.

In 1968, Portillo-Trambley became one of the founders of the first Hispanic theater group, Los Pobres, in El Paso, TX. Later in her career, she attained second place in the 1985 New York Shakespeare Festival's Hispanic American playwright's competition for her play Black Light. The playwright was named Author of the Pass by the El Paso Herald Post in 1990, and was inducted into the El Paso Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. In 1995, she held the position of Presidential Chair in Creative Writing at the University of California, Davis.

Portillo-Trambley's works and biographical materials are currently archived in the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas. The dates of the papers archived range from 1969 to 1978. Included in the archive are samples of plays, prose, poetry, and other reviews, critical essays, and notes about Portillo-Trambley's work, and an interview by Juan Bruce-Novoa.

Plays

Prose

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Estela Portillo-Trambley (January 16, 1926 - December 1, 1998) was a Chicana poet and playwright. She gained recognition through the publishing of her many plays, prose, and poetry depicting the lives and plight of Chicana women in male-dominated societies. Portillo-Trambley was born to Mexican immigrant parents on January 16, 1926 in El Paso, Texas.

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Katherine Applegate

Katherine Applegate is a #1 New York Times bestselling author who wrote The One And Only Ivan, Crenshaw, and Wishtree. Katherine's Bio: https://katherineapplegate.com/about The One and Only Bob trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8UKRHQ66Mw

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Raina Telgemeier
An amazing cartoonist the currently lives in San Francisco. Some of her books are sisters, ghosts, and drama.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCxMqb8GOa4

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Mac Barnett

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Mac Barnett: Why a good book is a secret door

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Stuart gibbs

biography

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Evil Spy School

HEAVY ARTILLERY
Battle Zone

September 3

1100 hours

I ran as fast as my legs could carry me, seven enemy agents in hot pursuit.

I had spent a great deal of time preparing for this moment. I had practiced self-defense. I had studied how to remain calm under pressure. I had read everything I could find on mortal combat. And so I had hoped that when the time came and I found myself in the thick of battle, I would be able to handle myself with cool, spy-like aplomb.

Instead, I was screaming.

Thankfully, it wasn't a girly shriek. It was more of a sustained "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" Which could be roughly translated as: "I'm in serious trouble. Someone please help me."

It's one thing to study action sequences. It's a whole other thing to find yourself in the middle of one.

I dodged through piles of dirt and debris, aware the agents were gaining on me. They were all screaming too, although this was more of a war cry. Translation: "Once we catch you, you're dead meat." I was dressed for combat, clad from head to toe in camouflage gear, but it obviously wasn't working, because the enemy could see me perfectly well. Sniper fire whistled past me. Something screeched through the air high above and exploded in the distance.

Not far ahead, a foxhole came into view. To most people, it would have looked like just a big, grubby hole in the dirt, but to me, it was beautiful.

I shouted into my radio headset, "Erica! I'm coming in hot!"

"Okay," Erica replied calmly. "I'm ready." She didn't sound like she was in the heat of battle at all. Instead, she sounded bizarrely relaxed, as though she were lounging in a hammock at a beach resort.

I leapt into the foxhole. It was four feet deep. Erica Hale sat inside, leaning against the dirt wall, casually leafing through a Guns & Ammo magazine despite all the chaos around her. Like me, she was wearing camouflage gear, but somehow she looked stylish in hers. Then again, Erica would have looked stylish in a potato sack. She was the most beautiful girl I'd ever met, as well as the smartest, the most athletic, and the deadliest.

"There's a horde of enemy agents right behind me," I panted. "Heavily armed. They ambushed me as I was nearing the objective . . . ."

"Ben, take it easy." Erica calmly tucked the magazine into her knapsack. "What are you so worked up about?"

"They're going to be here any second!" I exclaimed. "And they're ruthless!"

"They're twelve years old," Erica said flatly.

She had a good point. They were only twelve. And the war around us was merely a combat simulation. We were in the midst of our traditional Survival and Combat Skills Assessment exam at the CIA's Academy of Espionage. Our weapons were only paintball guns, and the battlefield was a mock-up on the academy firing range. But it felt real enough.

"Some of them are pretty big twelve-year-olds," I said defensively.

Their war cry was growing louder. They were almost upon us.

"How many of them are there?" Erica asked.

"Seven."

In one fluid movement, Erica sprang to her feet and fired her paintball gun over the lip of the foxhole. Five shots, each punctuated by the yelp of someone being hit squarely by a paint-filled projectile.

Erica took cover again, grinning. "Now there's only two," she informed me.

If there was anyone you wanted in your foxhole, it was Erica Hale. Although she was only fifteen, she was easily the most talented spy-in-training at school. She'd practically been preparing for it since birth: Spying was her family business. Most of her ancestors had been spies, going all the way back to Nathan Hale in the Revolutionary War. Her grandfather Cyrus Hale was one of the best there'd ever been, and he'd taught Erica almost everything he knew.

On the other hand, I came from a long line of grocers. I was only thirteen, and until seven months earlier, my entire espionage experience had consisted of watching James Bond movies. Since then, however, I'd twice been involved in thwarting the plots of SPYDER, a secretive subversive organization dedicated to causing chaos and mayhem. Thus, I'd seen far more action than most of my fellow students. But that didn't mean I was comfortable in the heat of battle, be it real or pretend.

Today was a good example. It was our first day back at school for the fall semester, time for the annual Survival and Combat Skills Assessment. When I was inducted, it was the middle of the school year, so my SACSA had been a solo exam. But now the school administration had to assess the entire first-year class-and reassess all the returning students-at the same time. There were six grades (seventh through twelfth) with fifty kids in each. Three hundred people. Thus, the full-scale fake battle. The school had been divided into two teams: red (them) and blue (us). Each was assigned to steal a heavily guarded objective from the other side while protecting their own. It was basically an enormous, potentially painful version of capture the flag. Since it was only a game-and the kids who'd been chasing me were all newbies-I probably should have been as calm as Erica, but I wasn't. I was still on edge, terrified of screwing up in front of the professors, who were watching closely from the sidelines and grading our performance.

"Did you only have five paintballs in your ammo clip?" I asked Erica.

"No," she replied. "I have plenty."

"Then why didn't you take out all seven enemy agents?"

Erica shrugged. "What fun would that be?"

With a primal scream, the two remaining newbies leapt into our foxhole, guns primed, ready to paint us cherry red. One of them was staggeringly large for a boy his age. He was built like a sequoia tree. The other was a surprisingly small girl. She looked like a heavily armed elf.

Thankfully, Erica took the guy. Before he could get a shot off, she'd launched herself into action, sweeping his legs out from under him and wrenching his gun away. Then she dispatched him with a shot to the chest, coating his torso in blue paint.

I attacked the girl. It felt a bit mean to attack an elf, but this one was aiming a gun at me. I wasn't as adept as Erica, but my fighting skills had improved at school. Before I'd arrived, I wouldn't have been able to beat a small girl in a fight. Now I could. It wasn't very chivalrous, but my grade was on the line. I shoved the elf's gun aside as she fired. The paintball whizzed past me, leaving a red splotch on the side of the foxhole. Then I barreled into her, knocking her flat as I snapped the gun from her grasp. I swung it around, preparing to blast her.

Only, the elf started crying. "Stop!" she wailed. "I quit!"

"You quit?" I asked, thrown. "Er . . . I don't think you can do that."

"I thought I could hack it here, but I was wrong," the elf sobbed. "It's too hard! I want to go home! I want my mommy!"

I lowered the gun, feeling bad for how hard I'd knocked her down. "Sorry. Spy school's not for everyone . . . ."

"Like you?" The elf's crying suddenly stopped. The whole "I want my mommy" thing had been an act. I tried to shoot her, but she lashed out a leg, catching me behind the knee. I crashed to the ground, the gun tumbling from my grasp. The elf pounced on it and swung the barrel toward me . . . .

Erica blew her away. She fired six times, coating the elf in blue, then pointed to the sidelines. "Nice try, newbie. But you're out."

The elf now looked like a Smurf. A really angry one. "You got lucky this time," she sneered at me. "Next time, your girlfriend might not be around to save you." Then she stormed off toward the "morgue" on the sidelines, where her fellow paint-splattered corpses watched the battle play out.

"I'm not his girlfriend!" Erica yelled after her.

I staggered back to my feet, brushing myself off. "Man, that girl was devious."

"She was," Erica agreed. "She'll do well here."

I watched the elf trudge past the reviewing stands. Professor Kuklinski, who taught advanced biochemical weaponry, appeared disappointed in her performance, while Professor Greenwald-Smith, who taught counterespionage, seemed to be giving her some words of encouragement. Next to them, Professor Crandall, who taught self-preservation, had dozed off in his chair.

"You know," I said to Erica, "when normal kids go back to school, their first day is all about getting oriented and meeting their teachers. There's no paint guns or fighting or pretending to kill one another."

"Really?" Erica asked. "It must suck to be normal."

I pried a clod of dirt from my ear, then scoped out the battlefield around us. "I'd probably better get back in the game before I get dinged for slacking off."

"Hold on," Erica said. "How'd you end up with all those newbies after you in the first place?"

"Chip and Jawa set up an ambush for me. I thought I had a chance at the objective, but it was a trap."

"You're sure it was their doing?"

"Definitely. I saw them sic the newbies on me." Although they were on the opposing team, Chip Schacter and Jawaharlal O'Shea were two of my closest friends at spy school. Jawa was extremely smart. Chip was extremely sneaky and underhanded. Together, they made a formidable combination.

"They didn't come after you themselves?" Erica asked.

"They probably knew you and I would be working together," I said.

"So let's work together to take them out." Erica started sketching a plan in the dirt with the barrel of her paintball gun.

She'd drawn only two lines when an emergency call came over my headset: "Smokescreen, you out there? We need your help."

It was Zoe Zibbell, another of my close friends, only she was on our team today. Zoe had christened me "Smokescreen" shortly after my recruitment because she had mistakenly believed that my initial incompetence was an act designed to catch my enemies off guard. ("No one could be that inept," she'd once explained. "I've seen turtles that could fight better.") Since then, I had gained a considerable amount of skill and savvy, but the nickname had stuck.

I radioed back. "What's the situation?"

"Chameleon doesn't know how to work the mortar," Zoe reported.

"Yes, I do!" shouted Warren Reeves-aka Chameleon-in the background. Warren was gifted at camouflage but mediocre at just about everything else.

The mortar was a new addition to the SACSA exams. The administration at spy school had decided it was time for us to learn how to use heavy artillery.

I chanced a look out of the foxhole toward our mortar base, a makeshift bunker atop a slope at one end of the firing range. From what I knew, the mortar was an actual working cannon; only the ammunition had been altered. Instead of shells, it fired paint bombs big enough to take out a dozen people at once.

There were several red enemy agents between us and the base.

Erica got on the radio with us. "No dice. Smokescreen is assigned to target acquisition, not heavy artillery. You'll have to work this out yourselves."

"No can do, Ice Queen," Zoe replied. "The situation is dire."

"How dire?" I asked.

"Hold on," Zoe said. "You're about to see."

A second later, I heard Warren yell, "Fire in the hole!" followed by a loud explosion. A paint bomb blasted out of the bunker. Only, I could immediately tell something was wrong. Instead of arcing toward the enemy base at the opposite end of the battlefield, the bomb soared almost straight up, then began screaming downward-right toward us.

"Take cover!" Erica yelled.

For once, I was already ahead of her. We threw ourselves into the protected side of the foxhole just as the bomb detonated on the ground above us. A wave of blue paint sailed over our heads and splattered the rest of the hole.

I peered back out of the foxhole. The ground for thirty feet in every direction was a ring of blue. A third-year red team member on her way to the morgue had caught the worst of it. She was now coated with paint.

"That's not cool!" she howled. "I was already dead!"

Several of our own team members had been hit as well. Most had been caught only in the arm or the leg, but that was enough to remove them from the game. They were all shouting things at our mortar base that would have gotten them detention at a normal school.

I got back on the radio. "You guys nearly killed us just now!"

"Sorry," Warren said. "My bad."

Erica took in the carnage and sighed. "All right," she radioed. "I'm bringing Smokescreen in."

"Even though it's not our assignment?" I asked. Erica usually wasn't one to defy orders. Not when her perfect grade point average was on the line.

"It's a calculated risk. If we leave those two cheeseheads in charge of the mortar, we may not have a team much longer. Stay close to me." With that, Erica grabbed her knapsack, sprang out of the foxhole, and raced toward base.

I did exactly as she'd ordered. En route to the base, several opposing team members made the mistake of attacking us. Erica thwarted them so easily, she almost looked bored. I actually caught her yawning while she knocked one enemy agent unconscious.

A few opponents who were older students-and thus familiar with Erica's reputation-didn't even bother to attack. Instead, they simply dropped their weapons and surrendered. This wasn't going to earn them a lot of points on their exam, but it was far less painful than having Erica take them out.

Even though I should have been covering our backs, I couldn't help but watch Erica. In the first place, she could probably cover our backs better than I could, even while being attacked from the front. And second, Erica in action was a thing of beauty. It was like watching a prima ballerina perform Swan Lake, only with a lot more screaming. I already had a tremendous crush on Erica, and somehow, watching her wipe out a field full of enemies made her even more alluring.

I was sure Erica knew about my crush. After all, she was our finest spy-in-training; keeping a secret from her was like trying to hide meat from a dog. Erica had never let on the slightest bit, but then, human interaction wasn't her strong suit. She barely deigned to speak to anyone else at school-including our professors-so I knew not to expect too much. Frankly, I was thrilled that she had been willing to team up with me.

Erica calmly took out the last two opponents as we arrived at our mortar base, leaving them whimpering in pain. We clambered over the bunker wall only to have Zoe nearly blast us away.

"It's us, you nitwit!" Erica yelled.

"Sorry!" Zoe apologized, holstering her gun.

It didn't take long to scope out the bunker, as it was only a few feet across. The mortar sat in the center next to a pile of artillery. It was smaller than I'd expected, like a sawed-off cannon. Warren stood beside it, frantically flipping through the instruction manual.

Zoe hugged me with relief. "Thank goodness you're here."

Warren glowered jealously, as he always did whenever Zoe showed me any affection.

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We're trying to take out the enemy mortar base, but we can't get the targeting right," Zoe reported.

"We'll handle it," Erica said, then pointed to Zoe and ordered, "Stay on guard." Then she pointed to me and ordered, "Work out the trajectory." Then she pointed to Warren and ordered, "Move. You're in my space."

Warren scurried out of Erica's path, meekly holding out the instruction manual. "Do you need this?"

Erica rolled her eyes. "Please. I've known how to operate a mortar since I was in preschool."

With most people, this would have been an exaggeration. With Erica, it probably wasn't. Her father had once showed me a baby picture of her playing with nunchucks. Erica instantly began making adjustments to the cannon.

I turned to Warren and grinned confidently. It was now my time to shine. I might not have been as great a warrior as Erica, but when it came to math, no one else at spy school could hold a candle to me. I had level 16 skills, which meant I could do extremely complex computations in my head and never forgot a phone number. At normal school, this was the kind of thing that not only failed to impress my fellow students but often got me shaken down for my lunch money. At the Academy of Espionage, however, there were sometimes occasions-such as aiming a mortar-where being good at calculus made you kind of cool.

"How far is the enemy base?" I asked.

"One hundred sixty-five meters," Warren replied.

"Charge?"

"Two hundred pounds of thrust."

"Weight of the shell?"

Warren frowned. "Is that important?"

"Only if you actually want to take out the enemy rather than our own team," Erica muttered. Then she told me, "Standard shell weighs sixteen pounds."

"Wind speed?" I asked.

"Fifteen miles an hour," Zoe reported. "Coming directly from the southwest."

I took a second to make my mental calculations, then another second to double-check my work. "We need a launch angle of seventy-three degrees, aiming six degrees right of the target."

"Roger." Erica started orienting the mortar.

"Nice work!" Zoe told me. "Thanks for bailing us out, Smokescreen."

"We don't know if he's right yet," Warren muttered sullenly.

"Of course he is," Zoe shot back. "I'd trust Smokescreen before my own calculator."

I started for the pile of ammunition, but Warren leapt into my path. "I'll handle that!" he snapped. "Firing this is my job!"

I stepped back, knowing Warren was desperate to prove his worth. While he grabbed a paint bomb, I jammed in some earplugs and borrowed Zoe's binoculars to scan our surroundings. Below us, the battlefield was laid out in an oddly perfect rectangle. At the edges, the dirt and debris stopped abruptly and the green lawns of campus began. It was like a little slice of Beirut had been dropped in the middle of Washington, DC. Behind me, the Gothic buildings of the academy ringed the north end of the battlefield, dominated by the five-story Nathan Hale Administration Building. For a mile on each side around us was untouched forest, providing plenty of land for our normal war games-as well as a barrier between us and the outside world, which swallowed up the sounds of battle. (The academy's official reason for existence was a highly guarded secret, so the campus had its own secret identity: St. Smithen's Science Academy for Boys and Girls.) The reviewing stands sat on the western side of the field. Beside them, the students who'd been "killed" were gathered, rooting on their respective teams. Since most of the "corpses" were now colored blue or red, they had the look of game pieces gathered along the edge of a Risk board.

There were a lot more blue-spattered corpses than red ones, which meant our team was winning. This was mostly due to Erica, who had more kills than everyone else on our team put together. However, Chip and Jawa were currently leading the remaining reds in an assault on our flag, aided by their own mortar, which their team was doing a decent job of operating. As I watched, a red paint bomb detonated only a few feet from our flag, taking out half of our defenders.

Erica observed this too. "Are you sure you're right, Ben?" she asked. "If we don't take out their mortar with this shot, they'll win with their next blast."

I was sure, but I rechecked my math one last time, not wanting to make a fool of myself in front of Erica. "It'll work," I assured her.

"All right." Erica stepped away from the mortar and joined Zoe and me at the edge of the base. Rather than watch Warren set off the mortar, she lifted her paintball gun to her shoulder and began picking off the red team members swarming toward our flag.

"Stand back!" Warren warned us, clutching the remote trigger. "Detonation in five seconds. Four . . ."

Erica suddenly stopped shooting, concerned. She spun back toward the mortar, sniffing the air.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"That idiot put a live round in there!" Erica cried, springing at Warren.

I leapt into action as well. There was no time to ask Erica how she'd determined Warren had screwed up; knowing her, she could smell the difference between a live munition and a fake one. The fact was, I'd calculated the right trajectory, meaning the mortar was about to reduce several of my fellow students to tiny pieces.

Thankfully, before Warren could fire, Erica slammed into him, knocking him flat. Unfortunately, Warren interpreted this attack as some sort of spy school trick.

"Help!" he squawked, struggling for control of the trigger. "She's a double agent for the red team!"

In Warren's defense, this was exactly the sort of ruse the faculty at spy school played all the time. If it had been anyone but Erica, I might have doubted her intentions as well.

I left Erica to handle Warren and turned my attention to the mortar itself. The cannon sat on a rotating platform. I pulled the pin that locked it into place, then threw my shoulder into the barrel. It spun more easily than I'd expected, swiveling quickly away from me . . .

Just as Warren wrenched the trigger away from Erica and depressed it. "Fire!" he screamed triumphantly-and only then bothered to check to see where the cannon was aimed.

The mortar roared. It was so loud that even with my earplugs in, I felt as though my brains might vibrate out of my head. The shell exploded out of the barrel, arcing into the air away from the battlefield.

And right toward the Nathan Hale Building.

The entire war zone immediately fell silent. Every student and faculty member stopped what they were doing to watch the disaster unfold.

The bomb peaked several hundred feet in the air and then whistled downward, slamming into the Hale Building's roof directly above the principal's office.

Erica had been right. It wasn't a paint bomb. It was a live round.

The explosion blasted a huge chunk out of the building. Brick and tile flew through the air. A gargoyle rocketed across Hammond Quadrangle and embedded in the wall of the armory.

When the smoke cleared, there was a divot thirty feet across right where the principal's office had been.

I cringed and looked to Erica. "What's the chance that the principal was up there?"

"Well, he's supposed to be down here in the reviewing stands," Erica said. "But the chances of the principal being in the right place at the right time aren't usually very good."

A howl of rage suddenly echoed from the blast site.

I raised the binoculars and saw the principal stagger out of the remains of his office bathroom. His clothes were charred black and the toilet seat was around his neck, but he appeared to be all right. Enraged, but all right.

"Who is responsible for this?" he bellowed. "Find them and bring them to me!"

Zoe and Erica looked to me with genuine concern in their eyes. Warren, however, couldn't hide his glee. "Oooh," he taunted. "Ben, you're in trouble!"

And for once, I knew Warren was actually right.

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Evil Spy School HEAVY ARTILLERY Battle Zone September 3 1100 hours I ran as fast as my legs could carry me, seven enemy agents in hot pursuit. I had spent a great deal of time preparing for this moment. I had practiced self-defense. I had studied how to remain calm under pressure.

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Mac Barnett

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Read Out Loud at Home with Mac Barnett PAOLO, EMPEROR OF ROME

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Stuart Gibbs is the author of the popular "Spy School" series.

·He is 51 years old, born on June 11, 1969.

·He has two children

·The first book he ever wrote was "Belly Up".

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N.H. Senzai-Escape From Aleppo

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Pam Munoz Ryan- Esperanza Rising

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Pam Muñoz Ryan Reads Esperanza Rising | Scholastic

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Pam Muñoz Ryan reads aloud an excerpt from Esperanza Rising in which El Rancho de las Rosas is set ablaze.

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Photo: Getty Images

Quick Facts "This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other 364.""Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.""New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.""The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.""I'd rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I've got so much more of it.""Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.""Do not put off 'til tomorrow what can be put off 'til day-after-tomorrow just as well.""In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.""'Classic'-a book which people praise and don't read.""When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.""Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.""We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life, but would assassinate you.""Be good and you will be lonesome."

Who Was Mark Twain?

Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, was the celebrated author of several novels, including two major classics of American literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and inventor.

Early Life

Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to nearby Hannibal, a bustling river town of 1,000 people.

John Clemens worked as a storekeeper, lawyer, judge and land speculator, dreaming of wealth but never achieving it, sometimes finding it hard to feed his family. He was an unsmiling fellow; according to one legend, young Sam never saw his father laugh.

His mother, by contrast, was a fun-loving, tenderhearted homemaker who whiled away many a winter's night for her family by telling stories. She became head of the household in 1847 when John died unexpectedly.

The Clemens family "now became almost destitute," wrote biographer Everett Emerson, and was forced into years of economic struggle - a fact that would shape the career of Twain.

Twain in Hannibal

Twain stayed in Hannibal until age 17. The town, situated on the Mississippi River, was in many ways a splendid place to grow up.

Steamboats arrived there three times a day, tooting their whistles; circuses, minstrel shows and revivalists paid visits; a decent library was available; and tradesmen such as blacksmiths and tanners practiced their entertaining crafts for all to see.

However, violence was commonplace, and young Twain witnessed much death: When he was nine years old, he saw a local man murder a cattle rancher, and at 10 he watched an enslaved person die after a white overseer struck him with a piece of iron.

Hannibal inspired several of Twain's fictional locales, including "St. Petersburg" in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. These imaginary river towns are complex places: sunlit and exuberant on the one hand, but also vipers' nests of cruelty, poverty, drunkenness, loneliness and soul-crushing boredom - all parts of Twain's boyhood experience.

Sam kept up his schooling until he was about 12 years old, when - with his father dead and the family needing a source of income - he found employment as an apprentice printer at the Hannibal Courier, which paid him with a meager ration of food. In 1851, at 15, he got a job as a printer and occasional writer and editor at the Hannibal Western Union, a little newspaper owned by his brother, Orion.

Steamboat Pilot

Then, in 1857, 21-year-old Twain fulfilled a dream: He began learning the art of piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi. A licensed steamboat pilot by 1859, he soon found regular employment plying the shoals and channels of the great river.

Twain loved his career - it was exciting, well-paying and high-status, roughly akin to flying a jetliner today. However, his service was cut short in 1861 by the outbreak of the Civil War, which halted most civilian traffic on the river.

As the Civil War began, the people of Missouri angrily split between support for the Union and the Confederate States. Twain opted for the latter, joining the Confederate Army in June 1861 but serving for only a couple of weeks until his volunteer unit disbanded.

Where, he wondered then, would he find his future? What venue would bring him both excitement and cash? His answer: the great American West.

Heading Out West

In July 1861, Twain climbed on board a stagecoach and headed for Nevada and California, where he would live for the next five years.

At first, he prospected for silver and gold, convinced that he would become the savior of his struggling family and the sharpest-dressed man in Virginia City and San Francisco. But nothing panned out, and by the middle of 1862, he was flat broke and in need of a regular job.

Twain knew his way around a newspaper office, so that September, he went to work as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He churned out news stories, editorials and sketches, and along the way adopted the pen name Mark Twain - steamboat slang for 12 feet of water.

Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in the West. He honed a distinctive narrative style - friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious.

He got a big break in 1865, when one of his tales about life in a mining camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country (the story later appeared under various titles).

'Innocents Abroad'

His next step up the ladder of success came in 1867, when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of the trip.

In 1869, The Innocents Abroad was published, and it became a nationwide bestseller.

At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America.

Marriage to Olivia Langdon

However, Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those years, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern establishment centered in New York City and Boston - a straight-laced, Victorian, moneyed group that cowed Twain.

"An indisputable and almost overwhelming sense of inferiority bounced around his psyche," wrote scholar Hamlin Hill, noting that these feelings were competing with his aggressiveness and vanity. Twain's fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization."

In February 1870, he improved his social status by marrying 24-year-old Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have ... the only sweetheart I have ever loved ... she is the best girl, and the sweetest, and gentlest, and the daintiest, and she is the most perfect gem of womankind."

Livy, like many people during that time, took pride in her pious, high-minded, genteel approach to life. Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S MARK TWAIN FACT CARD

Mark Twain's Books

Thankfully, Twain's glorious "low-minded" Western voice broke through on occasion.

'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, and soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of the culture he had chosen to embrace."

'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Twain called Huckleberry Finn," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935, giving short shrift to Herman Melville and others but making an interesting point.

Hemingway's comment refers specifically to the colloquial language of Twain's masterpiece, as for perhaps the first time in America, the vivid, raw, not-so-respectable voice of the common folk was used to create great literature.

Huck Finn required years to conceptualize and write, and Twain often put it aside. In the meantime, he pursued respectability with the 1881 publication of The Prince and the Pauper, a charming novel endorsed with enthusiasm by his genteel family and friends.

'Life on the Mississippi'

In 1883 he put out Life on the Mississippi, an interesting but safe travel book. When Huck Finn finally was published in 1884, Livy gave it a chilly reception.

After that, business and writing were of equal value to Twain as he set about his cardinal task of earning a lot of money. In 1885, he triumphed as a book publisher by issuing the bestselling memoirs of former President Ulysses S. Grant, who had just died.

He lavished many hours on this and other business ventures, and was certain that his efforts would be rewarded with enormous wealth, but he never achieved the success he expected. His publishing house eventually went bankrupt.

'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'

Twain's financial failings, reminiscent in some ways of his father's, had serious consequences for his state of mind. They contributed powerfully to a growing pessimism in him, a deep-down feeling that human existence is a cosmic joke perpetrated by a chuckling God.

Another cause of his angst, perhaps, was his unconscious anger at himself for not giving undivided attention to his deepest creative instincts, which centered on his Missouri boyhood.

In 1889, Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a science-fiction/historical novel about ancient England. His next major work, in 1894, was The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, a somber novel that some observers described as "bitter."

He also wrote short stories, essays and several other books, including a study of Joan of Arc. Some of these later works have enduring merit, and his unfinished work The Chronicle of Young Satan has fervent admirers today.

Twain's last 15 years were filled with public honors, including degrees from Oxford and Yale. Probably the most famous American of the late 19th century, he was much photographed and applauded wherever he went.

Indeed, he was one of the most prominent celebrities in the world, traveling widely overseas, including a successful 'round-the-world lecture tour in 1895-96, undertaken to pay off his debts.

Family Struggles

But while those years were gilded with awards, they also brought him much anguish. Early in their marriage, he and Livy had lost their toddler son, Langdon, to diphtheria; in 1896, his favorite daughter, Susy, died at the age of 24 of spinal meningitis. The loss broke his heart, and adding to his grief, he was out of the country when it happened.

His youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with severe epilepsy. In 1909, when she was 29 years old, Jean died of a heart attack. For many years, Twain's relationship with middle daughter Clara was distant and full of quarrels.

In June 1904, while Twain traveled, Livy died after a long illness. "The full nature of his feelings toward her is puzzling," wrote scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. "If he treasured Livy's comradeship as much as he often said, why did he spend so much time away from her?"

But absent or not, throughout 34 years of marriage, Twain had indeed loved his wife. "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden," he wrote in tribute to her.

Twain became somewhat bitter in his later years, even while projecting an amiable persona to his public. In private he demonstrated a stunning insensitivity to friends and loved ones.

"Much of the last decade of his life, he lived in hell," wrote Hamlin Hill. He wrote a fair amount but was unable to finish most of his projects. His memory faltered.

Twain suffered volcanic rages and nasty bouts of paranoia, and he experienced many periods of depressed indolence, which he tried to assuage by smoking cigars, reading in bed and playing endless hours of billiards and cards.

Death

Twain died on April 21, 1910, at the age of 74. He was buried in Elmira, New York.

The Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, is now a popular attraction and is designated a National Historic Landmark.

Twain is remembered as a great chronicler of American life in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Writing grand tales about Sawyer, Finn and the mighty Mississippi River, Twain explored the American soul with wit, buoyancy and a sharp eye for truth.

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Quick Facts "This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other 364." "Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries." "New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions."

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Derek cressman

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Derek cressman

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Isabel Allende is a

Chilean writer. She is know for her book the house of Spirits

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Stuart Gibbs

Interesting Facts

Stuart Gibbs is an American author who has written five series: the FunJungle series, the Moon Base Alpha series, the Spy School series, the Charlie Thorne series, and the Last Musketeer series.

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Raina Telgemeier, has wrote many books, most of them being graphic novels. And most of her book are based on her childhood/growing up. And she also has wrote a lot of award winning books.

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Raina Telgemeier is the author and illustrator of the graphic novels Smile, Drama, Sisters, Ghosts, and Guts, all #1 New York Times bestsellers. She also adapted and illustrated four graphic novel versions of Ann M. Martin's Baby-Sitters Club series, and has contributed short stories to many anthologies. Raina's accolades include three Eisner Awards, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor, a Stonewall Honor, and many Best-of and Notables lists. Raina lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Raina is represented by Judith Hansen of Hansen Literary Agency

For more info and answers to Frequently Asked Questions, visit Raina's FAQ page!

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Raina Telgemeier is the author and illustrator of the graphic novels Smile, Drama, Sisters, Ghosts, and Guts, all #1 New York Times bestsellers. She also adapted and illustrated four graphic novel versions of Ann M. Martin's Baby-Sitters Club series, and has contributed short stories to many anthologies.

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Ellie Terry is the auther of froget me not! Click here to watch a book trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_FgucYL3gI click here to watch a book talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47OeVKJ3gNs
- interesting Facts

I am (almost) five feet tall.

I enjoy sewing dresses for little girls.

I’ve had 27 stitches.

I am an award winning baton twirler.

I am a horrible singer.

I am learning to play the guitar.

I love brownies, flowers, and the color purple.

I survived being hit by a pickup truck while crossing the street.

I am deaf in my right ear.

I do most of my reading in the bathtub.

I was born with multiple heart defects.

I have Tourette syndrome, OCD, and SPD.

I have three children (ages 18, 14, and 10).

I have 3 sisters and 4 brothers.

biography
Short -Ellie Terry writes heartfelt contemporary fiction for middle-grade readers. Her middle-grade debut, a verse novel titled FORGET ME NOT, was published in 2017 by Feiwel & Friends, an imprint of Macmillan. She lives in southern Utah with her husband, three kids, dog, hamster, and Russian tortoise.

Long-Ellie Terry has been writing poems and stories since she was ten years old. Whether in a notebook while sitting high up in an aspen tree, on her father’s typewriter at the kitchen table, or in one of her many journals while taking bubble baths, she has always loved working with words. Her poetry has won several state awards and has appeared in various magazines for children. In 2014 she was a recipient of the Nikki Grimes Poetic Techniques Merit Scholarship. Her middle-grade debut novel FORGET ME NOT–a story in which a girl attempts to hide her Tourette syndrome while trying to convince her mother not to move them yet again, especially after making friends with the boy next door–was published in 2017 by Feiwel & Friends, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group. Ellie grew up in small towns in South Dakota, Arizona, and Nevada and currently lives in southern Utah in a house the color of vanilla bean ice cream with her husband, three children (18, 14, 10), one dog (Mya), one hamster (Pumpkin), and one Russian tortoise (Mr. Rhino).

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Shannon Messenger
Author of Keeper of the Lost Cities Series

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New York Times And USA Today Bestselling Author

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Annie Barrows
Annie Barrows (born 1962 in San Diego, California) is an American editor and author. She is best known for the Ivy and Bean series of children's books, but she has written several other books for adult readers as well.

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Ivy and Bean, One Big Happy Family by Annie Barrows and Sophie Blackall, chapter 1

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Austin Kennedy - The Wendals
Austin Kennedy lives in Orange County in CA. He has a wife and 4 children, The Wendals was his 1st book and is coming out with more.

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Shannon Messenger is the author of the Keeper of the Lost Cities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MeGFnANV7g this is the fist chapter of the first book. https://shannonmessenger.com/about-me.html this is Shannon Messenger biography.

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Katherine Applegate- Click that link to find more background information.  Click this link to listen to one of her most popular books!

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Maureen Johnson
Has written many books including the current book that I'm reading, which is Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson. It's a spooky Murder Mystery!!

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Alice Walker

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Alice Walker, A Reading from the Color Purple