Literary Biography

Ernest Hemingway wasn't just a novelist. He was a hunter and a fisherman; he became an ambulance officer in Paris, France, during World War I; and he worked as a reporter during the civil war in Spain in the 1930s. All of these experiences had such an important impact on Ernest's life that he used them as inspiration for some of his most notable works of fiction, including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Before James Baldwin was a celebrated novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and activist, he was a boy who fell in love with stories. Words opened up new worlds for young Jimmy, who read and wrote at every opportunity. He ultimately realized his dreams of becoming an author and giving voice to his community, and in doing so he showed the world the fullness of Black American life. This book biography of an American icon is a poetic introduction to James Baldwin and celebration of the power of language.

Melvil Dewey loved order (Organize mother’s jelly jars), efficiency (Why spell his name Melville when Melvil has fewer letters and sounds the same?), and keeping records (Height! Weight! Earnings!). Melvil also loved books and numbers and decimals. When he realized every library organized their books differently (Size! Title! Color!), he wondered if he could invent a system all libraries could use to ORGANIZE them EFFICIENTLY.

As soon as artist Robert McCloskey saw the ducks in Boston Public Garden, he knew he had to write about them. But how? Studying stuffed birds didn’t help. Would inviting some into his apartment work? What? Was he quack-ers? For months ducklings slept on his sofa and swam in his bathtub, making incredible messes. Quack! Quack! His roommate was not amused and his neighbors complained, but Robert did not give up. As the ducklings grew, he got down on his hands and knees and followed them with pad and pencil.

Gary Paulsen takes listeners along on his maiden voyage, proving that ignorance can be bliss. Also really stupid and incredibly dangerous. He tells of boats that owned him, good, bad, and beloved, and how they got him through terrifying storms that he survived by sheer luck. His spare prose conjures up shark surprises and killer waves as well as moonlight on the sea, and makes listeners feel what it’s like to sail under the stars or to lie at anchor in a tropical lagoon where dolphins leap, bathed in silver.

Theodor Fontane begann seine Karriere als Apotheker. Doch das Schreiben lag ihm im Blut und so wurde er Journalist und später Schriftsteller. Er war gezwungen, für den preußischen König zu arbeiten, gegen den er sich einst aufgelehnt hatte. Doch in seinen Werken kritisierte er die Gesellschaft, in der er lebte und die Kriege, die er hautnah erlebte...

Gary Soto writes that when he was five "what I knew best was at ground level." In this lively collection of short essays, Soto takes his listener to a ground-level perspective, recreating in vivid detail the sights, sounds, smells, and textures he knew growing up in his Fresno, California, neighborhood. The "things" of his boyhood tie it all together: his Buddha "splotched with gold", the taps of his shoes, and the "engines of sparks that lived beneath my soles", his worn tennies smelling of "summer grass, asphalt, the moist sock breathing the defeat of baseball". The child’s world is made up of small things - small, very important things.

"Si je vous parle aujourd'hui, c'est qu'il y a une nouveauté. [...] Je ne veux plus voler, je ne veux plus mentir. Je veux mener une vie de morte, ouvertement, sans honte. C'est ce qu'on me demande, je suppose. Je suis une personne 'en plus', mais je suis là. Si j'étais véritablement indésirable, on me l'aurait signifié, je me serais liquéfiée, dissoute. Si je suis encore là, c'est qu'il y a un sens à ce non-être. À moi de le trouver. Voilà mon travail nouveau, voilà ma tâche." (Macha Méril)

Author L. M. Montgomery first brought Anne Shirley onto the page in 1908, and this independent and inspiring character has been capturing readers' hearts ever since. The story of an orphaned girl who is sent to Avonlea on Prince Edward Island to live with the Cuthbert family includes adventure, romance, and an ensemble of iconic characters like Diana Barry and Gilbert Blythe.

While Halley’s Comet lit up Earth’s sky in 1835, America’s biggest literature star was born. Though Samuel Langhorne Clemens toiled in obscurity as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi and to this day remains a name oft forgotten, that young man became famous around the globe under his unforgettable pseudonym, Mark Twain. Although Twain spent the first 30 years of his life working odd jobs, his printing background, sharp wit, and humor helped establish him first as a journalist and later an author.

Born as Theodor Geisel in 1904, Dr. Seuss was attracted to writing humorous stories from a young age, even as a contributor to Dartmouth's humor magazine. During the first 30 years of his life, he wrote humorous short stories, articles, and even comic strips for a variety of publications. Occasionally, he used his middle name, Seuss, to publish. But it was not until the late 1930s and early 1940s that "Dr. Seuss" truly found his niche in children's publications.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, based on her own childhood and later life, are still beloved classics almost a century after she began writing them. Now young listeners will see just how similar Laura's true-life story was to her books. Born in 1867 in the "Big Woods" in Wisconsin, Laura experienced both the hardship and the adventure of living on the frontier.

With the groundbreaking Caldecott winner The Snowy Day, the first mainstream picture book to feature an African American child, Ezra Jack Keats became part of children's literature history. Keats's best-loved books are the ones that portray the neighborhood where he grew up. He was an inspiration to many artists of color, who, for the first time, saw themselves reflected in his books.

Born in Connecticut in 1811, Harriet Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist, author, and playwright. Slavery was a major industry in the American South, and Stowe worked with the Underground Railroad to help escaped slaves head north towards freedom. The publication of her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a scathing anti-slavery novel, fanned the flames that started the Civil War. The book’s emotional portrayal of the impact of slavery captured the nation’s attention.

This inspiring biography tells the story of New York City's first Puerto Rican librarian, a woman who championed bilingual literature. When she came to America in 1921, Pura Belpré carried the cuentos folklóricos of her Puerto Rican homeland. Finding a new home at the New York Public Library as a bilingual assistant, she turned her popular retellings into libros and spread story seeds across the land. Today, these seeds have grown into a lush landscape as generations of children and storytellers continue to share her tales and celebrate Pura’s legacy.

Cuando llegó a Estados Unidos, en 1921, Pura traía los cuentos folclóricos de su querido Puerto Rico. Al encontrar un nuevo hogar en la Biblioteca Pública de Nueva York como asistente bilingüe, convirtió sus historias populares en libros y esparció semillas de historias por todo el país.

A humorist, narrator, and social observer, Mark Twain is unsurpassed in American literature. Best known as the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, not unlike his protagonist, Huck, has a restless spirit. He found adventure prospecting for silver in Nevada, navigating steamboats down the Mississippi, and making people laugh around the world. But Twain also had a serious streak and decried racism and injustice. His fascinating life is captured candidly in this enjoyable biography.

The inspiring stories of six people who changed history, including Voltaire, the French writer who believed in equality for all; Charlotte Brontë, the British novelist who wrote Jane Eyre; Mark Twain, the American who wrote Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer; Jacques Prévert, the writer known in France as 'the People's Poet'; Ayn Rand, whose writing expressed her own philosophical ideas; and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote about life in a Soviet Labour Camp.

The inspiring stories of six people who changed history, including Geoffrey Chaucer, writer of the first great works of English literature; William Shakespeare, writer of the greatest plays in history; Charles Dickens, who wanted to make England a better place; Victor Hugo, the French writer who cared about the poor; Leo Tolstoy, the man who wrote War and Peace; and Rudyard Kipling, who wrote The Jungle Book and won a Nobel Prize.

Books are one of humankind's greatest forms of expression, and now Book, in a witty, idiosyncratic voice, tells us the inside story. A wonderfully eccentric character with strong opinions and a poetic turn of phrase, Book tells of a journey from papyrus scrolls to medieval manuscripts to printed paper and beyond - pondering, along the way, many bookish things, including the evolution of the alphabet, the library (known to Egyptians as "the healing place of the soul"), and even book burning.