Curated playlist
Novelists from New York (state)
- 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. He could not explain himself. Four days later, at five in the morning on a Sunday, he was dead. He was…
- Kirk DouglasKirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch on the 9th of December 1916, the only son among seven children in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Amsterdam, New York. His father had been a horse trader in Russia and became a ragman in…
- Langston HughesLangston Hughes died on the 22nd of May 1967, and beneath the floor of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, his ashes rest under an African cosmogram titled Rivers. At the center of that design is a single line…
- 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 them the memory of a life that had already collapsed. His mother could not stop…
- Carl SaganCarl Sagan grew up in a modest Bensonhurst apartment with parents who, by his own account, "knew almost nothing about science." Yet it was precisely those parents who set him on a path that would eventually lead hundreds of millions of…
- 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 novels that almost nobody in America had read. He was forty years old, nearly broke,…
- Joseph HellerJoseph Heller was born on the 1st of May, 1923, in Coney Island, Brooklyn, to poor Jewish immigrant parents from Russia. By the time he died in December 1999, the title of his first novel had entered the English language itself. Not as a…
- Upton SinclairUpton Sinclair once wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." He penned that line to explain why California newspaper editors refused to take his ideas seriously.…
- 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. Over a career spanning 60 years, he wrote more than 100 books. By the 1930s and 1940s he had become…
- 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 himself severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment was his compulsion to…
- Fletcher PrattIn February 1916, an Associated Press dispatch reported the arrest of Murray Fletcher Pratt in Geneva, New York. Pratt was a college student at the time. He had broken into cash drawers across town on a series of midnight runs, netting…
- Audre LordeAudre Lorde was born on the 18th of February 1934, in Harlem, New York, nearly blind, the youngest daughter of Caribbean immigrants, and already, somehow, thinking in poetry. By the time she was four years old, she had learned to read and…
- James Wyatt (game designer)James Wyatt was writing adventures for Dungeon magazine while serving as the minister of two small United Methodist churches in southeastern Ohio. That is not the biography most people expect from the designer of the fourth-edition Dungeon…
- Donald A. WollheimOn the 22nd of October 1936, a group from New York met with a group from Philadelphia in Philadelphia. This gathering became known as the first American science fiction convention. Donald A. Wollheim organized this event when he was just…
- Alan Dean FosterAlan Dean Foster, born on the 18th of November 1946, is the kind of writer whose name you might not immediately recognize, but whose words you have almost certainly encountered. He ghostwrote the original novelization of Star Wars,…
- 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 it as an able-bodied person would. She believed self-pity was nauseating and…