Author Profiles
Profiles Index - page 3
Richard Russo
Richard Russo lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters. He has written five novles: Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man and Empire Falls, and a collection of short stories, The Whore's Child. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Empire Falls.
Jon Krakauer
Jon Krakauer was born in Brookline Massachusetts in 1954. He worked simultaneously as a carpenter and a freelance journalist until 1983, when he quit carpentry. His first book was EIGER DREAMS, a collection of articles written for Outside and Smithsonian. The second book was INTO THE WILD, the non-fictional chronicles of Chris McCandless, who ventured into the Alaskan wilderness to seek liberation and never returned. UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN explores the dark side of extreme religious belief.
Anne Rice
Anne Rice was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She holds a Master of Arts Degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University and is the author of twenty-one novels. Her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, was published in 1976 and has gone on to become one of the bestselling novels of all time. It was in Interview with the Vampire that Rice first introduced her vampire, the Vampire Lestat, to the world.
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, New York, in 1937. He is also the author of The Crying of Lot 49, V., Vineland, Slow Learner, and Mason & Dixon.
Mario Puzo
The publication of The Godfather in March 1969 catapulted Mario Puzo into the front ranks of American authors. Reviewers hailed the book as "a staggering triumph" (Saturday Review), "big, turbulent, highly entertaining" (Newsweek), "remarkable" (Look), and "a voyeur's dream, a skillful fantasy of violent personal power" (New York Times). Winning readers by the millions, it stayed at or near the top of the New York Times bestseller lists for sixty-nine weeks.
Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman is the acclaimed author of the His Dark Materials trilogy: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. His other books for children and young adults include Count Karlstein and a trilogy of Victorian thrillers featuring Sally Lockhart. The Golden Compass, the first of Pullman's His Dark Materials triology, won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Fiction Prize.
Annie Proulx
Annie Proulx is the author of the short-story collection Heart Songs and Other Stories and four novels: Postcards, The Shipping News, Accordion Crimes, and That Old Ace in the Hole. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner Award, she lives and writes in Wyoming.
Walker Percy
Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 - May 10, 1990) was trained as a medical doctor but became an author after contracting tuberculosis in 1942. His works include: Lancelot, The Last Gentleman, The Moviegoer, Lost in the Cosmos, Love in the Ruins, The Thanatos Syndrome, The Message in the Bottle, Signposts in a Strange Land.
Suzan-Lori Parks
SUZAN-LORI PARKS is a playwright and screenwriter whose plays include TOPDOG/UNDERDOG, FUCKING A, THE DEATH OF THE LAST BLACK MAN IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD, THE SINNERS PLACE, DEVOTEES IN THE GARDEN OF LOVE, BETTING ON THE DUST COMMANDER, IMPERCEPTIBLE MUTABILITIES IN THE THIRD KINGDOM (1990 Obie Award for Best New American Play), THE AMERICA PLAY, VENUS (1996 Obie Award), and IN THE BLOOD.
Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk’s novels are the bestselling Lullaby and Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke, and Diary. He lives in Portland, Oregon. Chuck's last name is pronounced "Paula-nick."
Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje is the author of three previous novels, a memoir and eleven books of poetry. His novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize. Born in Sri Lanka, he moved to Canada in 1962 and now lives in Toronto.
Ben Okri
Ben Okri is a Nigerian writer resident in London. He has been the recipient of many awards, including the Booker Prize, and the Paris Review Aga Khan prize for fiction. He is visiting writer-in-residence at Trinity College, Cambridge. His books include Flowers and Shadows, The Landscapes Within, Stars of the New Curfew, An African Elegy, The Famished Road, and Songs of Enchantment.
Garth Nix
Garth Nix was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Ragwitch, Sabriel, Shade's Children, Lirael, Abhorsen, The Seventh Tower Series, the Very Clever Baby series, Bill the Inventor, Black Bread the Pirate, and Serena and The Sea Serpent.
V.S. Naipaul
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including Half a Life, A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature."
Bharati Mukherjee
Mukherjee's earlier works, such as the The Tiger's Daughter and parts of Days and Nights in Calcutta, are her attempts to find her identity in her Indian heritage. The second phase of her writing, works such as Wife, the short stories in Darkness, an essay entitled "An Invisible Woman," and The Sorrow and the Terror, a joint effort with her husband. Her latest works include The Holder of the World, published in 1993, and Leave It to Me, published in 1997.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison made her debut as a novelist in 1970, soon gaining the attention of both critics and a wider audience for her epic power, unerring ear for dialogue, and her poetically-charged and richly-expressive depictions of Black America. A member since 1981 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has been awarded a number of literary distinctions, among them the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
Harper Lee
Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, where she attended local schools and the University of Alabama. She has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, three honarary degrees, and many other literary awards for her one novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird."
Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver's nine published books include novels, collections of short stories, poetry, essays, and an oral history. Her novel, The Poisonwood Bible, remained on bestseller lists for more than a year and won literary awards at home and abroad. Her latest book is a novel: Prodigal Summer. Her work has also appeared in numerous literary anthologies and periodicals.
Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey was born in 1935 and grew up in Oregon. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, his first novel, was published in 1962. His second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, followed in 1964. His other books include Kesey's Garage Sale, Demon Box, Caverns (with O. U. Levon), The Further Inquiry, Sailor Song, and Last Go Round (with Ken Babbs). Ken Kesey died on November 10, 2001.
Erica Jong
Erica Jong is the author of eight novels including Fear of Flying; Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones; Shylock's Daughter (formerly titled Serenissima); Inventing Memory, a story of mothers and daughters, and the new novel Sappho's Leap.
J.A. Jance
New York Times bestselling author J.A. Jance was born in South Dakota, brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, and now lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.
Yu Hua
Yu Hua was born in 1960 in Hangzhou, the son of medical doctors destined to enter a career in dentistry. Constrained by that profession’s rigidity and unable to quell a need to create, Yu Hua started writing in 1983. Since that time he has published three novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays.
Carl Hiaasen
Carl Hiaasen turned his hand to fiction in the early eighties. His first novel, Tourist Season,was published in 1986 and named "one of the ten best destination reads of all time" by GQ Magazine. He is the author of five other best-selling novels, Double Whammy, Skin Tight, Native Tongue, Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, Hoot and Basket Case.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was in 1993. It has been translated into fifteen languages and made into a feature film. Middlesex, his second novel, met with similar acclaim when published in 2002. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, The Gettysburg Review and Granta's "Best of Young American Novelists."
Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller began his writing career as the author of short stories but won immediate acclaim with Catch-22. A protest novel underscored with dark humor, Catch-22 satirizes the horrors of war and the power of modern society, especially bureaucratic institutions, to destroy the human spirit.