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Curated category

American male essayists

  • Stephen KingStephen Edwin King was born on the 21st of September 1947 in Portland, Maine. His father Donald Edwin King worked as a traveling vacuum salesman after…
  • Edgar Allan PoeOn the 27th of May 1827, a young man named Edgar A. Perry enlisted in the United States Army under an assumed name. He was actually eighteen years old and…
  • Ernest HemingwayErnest Miller Hemingway was born on the 21st of July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. He grew up as the second of six children to Clarence Edmonds Hemingway and…
  • Herman MelvilleHerman Melville was born on the 1st of August 1819, in New York City. He entered the world as the third child of Allan Melvill and Maria Gansevoort.
  • T. S. EliotThomas Stearns Eliot was born on the 26th of September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. He lived at a house on Locust Street for his first sixteen years before…
  • Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis on the 11th of November 1922. He descended from a long line of German Americans whose family fortune rested on the…
  • Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was born on the 30th of October 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey, Idaho Territory.
  • Hunter S. ThompsonHunter Stockton Thompson entered the world on the 18th of July 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky. He grew up as the first of three sons born to Virginia Davison…
  • John CageJohn Milton Cage Jr. was born on the 5th of September 1912 at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr., worked as an…
  • Salman RushdieSir Ahmed Salman Rushdie entered the world on the 19th of June 1947 in Bombay. This city was then part of British India and is now known as Mumbai within…
  • Philip K. DickPhilip Kindred Dick was born on the 16th of December 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. He arrived six weeks prematurely alongside his twin sister Jane Charlotte…
  • Arthur MillerArthur Asher Miller was born on the 17th of October 1915 in Harlem, Manhattan. He grew up as the second child of Augusta and Isidore Miller.
  • W. H. AudenWystan Hugh Auden was born at 54 Bootham in York, England, on the 21st of February 1907. His father George Augustus Auden worked as a physician while his…
  • Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky was born on the 7th of December 1928 in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents were Ashkenazi Jewish…
  • Ralph EllisonRalph Waldo Ellison was born on the 1st of March 1913 in Oklahoma City. His father Lewis Alfred worked as a construction foreman and small-business owner…
  • Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Wuppertal, Germany. His father rose from being a poor ribbon-weaver to own a ribbon-making factory.
  • Jonathan FranzenJonathan Earl Franzen was born on the 17th of August 1959 in Western Springs, Illinois. He grew up in an affluent neighborhood in the St.
  • Paul KrugmanPaul Robin Krugman was born on the 28th of February 1953 in Albany, New York. He spent his early years moving between upstate cities before settling into…
  • Claude ShannonClaude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916 in a hospital near Petoskey, Michigan. His family lived in the small town of Gaylord where he spent…
  • Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov arrived in the United States on the 3rd of February 1923, aboard the RMS Baltic at age three. His family traveled from Petrovichi, Russian SFSR…
  • Jerry FodorJerry Alan Fodor was born in New York City on the 22nd of April 1935. He grew up in a Jewish household and pursued his undergraduate studies at Columbia…
  • Dave WolvertonJohn David Wolverton arrived in Springfield, Oregon on the 28th of May 1957. His family moved to a farm in Monroe when he was six years old.
  • Hilary PutnamHilary Whitehall Putnam arrived in the world on the 31st of July 1926, within a hospital in Chicago, Illinois. His father Samuel worked as a scholar of…
  • Stephen GreenblattStephen Jay Greenblatt arrived in the world on the 7th of November 1943. He grew up in Newton, Massachusetts after his family moved from Boston.
  • Victor Davis HansonVictor Davis Hanson was born on the 5th of September 1953 in Selma, California. He grew up working the family orchard and vineyard that had been in his…
  • Cornel WestCornel Ronald West was born on the 2nd of June 1953, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He grew up in Sacramento, California, where his mother Irene Rayshell Bias worked as…
  • James GleickIn 1987, Viking Penguin published Chaos: Making a New Science. This book introduced the concept of the butterfly effect to millions of readers who had never…
  • George SteinerFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use…