Curated category
American male short story writers
- Stephen KingStephen King was walking on the shoulder of Maine State Route 5 on the 19th of June 1999 when a minivan struck him and sent him into a depression in the…
- Mark TwainMark Twain was born on the 30th of November 1835, shortly after Halley's Comet swept past the Earth, and he came to believe the two of them were bound…
- F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald sold fewer than 23,000 copies of The Great Gatsby in its first year, and the novel posted tepid sales for the rest of his life.
- Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe was found semiconscious on the streets of Baltimore on the 3rd of October, 1849, wearing clothes that were not his own.
- Woody AllenWoody Allen has made 50 feature films. That single fact sits at the center of a career so long and so productive it resists easy summary.
- Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway was born on the 21st of July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, into a family where his mother kept his hair long and dressed him in frilly…
- Herman MelvilleHerman Melville died on the morning of the 28th of September 1891, and the death notice in The New York Times misspelled his great novel as "Mobie Dick."…
- Tennessee WilliamsTennessee Williams wrote in his will that he wanted to be sewn into a canvas sack and dropped into the sea at the exact spot where his idol, the poet Hart…
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient…
- William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner spent most of his writing life within a few square miles of Lafayette County, Mississippi, yet the fictional world he built from that patch…
- John SteinbeckJohn Steinbeck once stole bacon from a local produce market to survive. During the Great Depression, he and his first wife lived on fish and crabs he…
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers.
- Raymond ChandlerRaymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago in 1888 and died in 1959, having spent much of the intervening years doing almost everything except what he…
- Vernor VingeVernor Steffen Vinge spent decades asking one question that made both scientists and storytellers uncomfortable: what happens when machines become smarter…
- Saul BellowSaul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on the 10th of June, 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, to parents who had fled Saint Petersburg two years earlier, carrying with…
- Tom HanksTom Hanks lost 35 pounds for a single role. He thinned his hair, learned to walk differently, and prepared to play a dying man on screen.
- Jack LondonJack London was born on the 12th of January, 1876, in a San Francisco neighborhood that would later burn to the ground in the earthquake of 1906.
- Salman RushdieSalman Rushdie was born on the 19th of June 1947 in Bombay, in British India, into a world on the verge of shattering and remaking itself.
- Philip K. DickPhilip K. Dick died on the 2nd of March 1982, in a Santa Ana hospital, having never seen the film that would make his name famous.
- Arthur MillerArthur Miller died on the evening of the 10th of February 2005 - the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman.
- Nathaniel HawthorneNathaniel Hawthorne was born on the 4th of July, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, a town that had marked his family with a particular darkness long before he…
- Ralph EllisonRalph Waldo Ellison was born on the 1st of March 1913 in Oklahoma City, named after the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson by a father who hoped his son would grow up…
- Stephen CraneStephen Crane died on the 5th of June, 1900, in a health spa on the edge of Germany's Black Forest. He was 28 years old.
- Vladimir NabokovVladimir Nabokov arrived in the United States in May 1940 aboard the SS Champlain, a Russian exile who spoke three languages and had already written nine…
- Joseph HellerJoseph Heller was born on the 1st of May, 1923, in Coney Island, Brooklyn, to poor Jewish immigrant parents from Russia.
- John JakesJohn William Jakes sold his first short story in 1950, and by the time he died in Sarasota on the 11th of March 2023, he had put tens of millions of books…
- George R. R. MartinGeorge Raymond Richard Martin was born on the 20th of September, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of a longshoreman.
- Junot DíazJunot Díaz was born on the last day of 1968, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to Rafael and Virtudes Díaz. He was the third of seven children.
- L. Sprague de Camp"My own true name sounds more like a pseudonym than most pseudonyms do," L. Sprague de Camp said, explaining why he rarely used pen names.
- Lin CarterLin Carter published his first letter in a pulp magazine in 1943, when he was thirteen years old. By the time he died in February 1988, he had written an…
- Isaac AsimovIsaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books, and on top of that he sent an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. He once said the only thing about…
- 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.
- Timothy ZahnTimothy Zahn was born in 1951, and for much of the late 1980s, Star Wars was a franchise running on fumes. The films had wrapped, the toys were fading from…
- Robert E. HowardRobert E. Howard died on the morning of the 11th of June 1936 at age thirty, having first asked a nurse whether his mother would ever wake from her coma.
- David BrinGlen David Brin was born on the 6th of October 1950 in Glendale, California. His parents were Selma and Herb Brin, who raised him as a Jewish child.
- Raymond BensonRaymond Benson was born in Midland, Texas, in 1955, a place known for its oil fields and wide-open skies, far removed from the smoky London clubs and exotic…
- A. MerrittA. Merritt earned $100,000 a year by the end of his life, but the work he is remembered for was never his day job. Abraham Grace Merritt, born on the 20th of…
- Fritz LeiberFritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was born on the 24th of December 1910, in Chicago, Illinois, into a household where Shakespeare was practically a family business.
- 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…