In 1928 two cousins, Frederick Dannay (“Danny) and Manfred B. Lee (“Manny”), created Ellery Queen for a contest sponsored by McClure’s magazine and Stokes publishing house.  The prize for creating the best new detective novel was $7500.  The cousins won the contest, but McClure’s went bankrupt shortly afterwards, so they never collected their prize.  Between

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, best known for writing The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, “On Fairie Stories,” and other seminal works of fiction, was an Oxford professor and linguist who contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary, the translation of the Jerusalem Bible, and other historical literature. After Tolkien’s death his son Christopher

BOOM. 1984. Sandra Cisneros’ poetic novella House on Mango Street is published, and for the first time the literature by a U. S. Latina reaches a mass audience, ushering in the extraordinary explosion of Latina poets, playwrights, and novelists who have followed. Sandra was born in Chicago, the third child (of seven) and only daughter

In 1928 two cousins, Frederick Dannay (“Danny”) and Manfred B. Lee, created Ellery Queen for a contest sponsored by McClure’s magazine and Stokes publishing house.  The prize for creating the best new detective novel was $7500.  The cousins won the contest, but McClure’s went bankrupt shortly afterwards, so they never collected their prize.  Between 1929

Walter Lord is best known as author of A Night to Remember (1955), a narrative non-fiction book on the sinking of the Titanic. Lord interviewed more survivors than any other Titanic historian and inspired a generation of Titanic scholars. When the film A Night to Remember was released in 1958, it reminded the world of

Sherman Alexie has been called a new, inventive voice in Native American literatures. But don’t call him a Native American, a term that he says is a product of “liberal white guilt.” Alexie is Spokane and Coeur d’Alene Indian, although he is careful to warn against reading his work as representative of other Indians’ experiences.

Ray Bradbury was a beloved and innovative writer known for writing literally hundreds of science fiction and fantasy short stories. He is best known for books  Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He loved life and everyone he ever met. Among his many honors are

Probably the most famous American novelist of the 20th Century, Hemingway was born in affluent Oak Park, Illinois, but before he was more than a few month old already was in northern Michigan, where his parents were arranging the construction of a family cottage near Petoskey. His “Nick Adams” stories of childhood and young adulthood

Best known for her Lord Peter Wimsey novels, Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford and also completed her Master’s degree there.  Although remembered for her fiction she was most proud of her academic work and her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy is still the most-used translation. Sayers was

Prolific writer Louise Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota. When she was a child, her father gave her a nickel for every story she wrote, and he recently gave her a roll of antique nickels, saying “I owe you,” as she told The Paris Review in an interview in 2010.