After pilfering a book from my schools library (shh) that was deemed by its back cover to hit the reader like “the Hallelujah Chorus being played by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch” I realized that what I was hiding underneath my jacket wasn’t just your usual mediocre Highschool library book but something special. Usually we hear of the “author that dies before his prime story” and half the time that is written about a middling writer who would have never reached his prime even …

Ayn Rand, author of the classic novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and founder of the Objectivist movement, was born Alice Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 1905. Her genius and love of literature manifested itself early in her childhood – at age six she taught herself to read, and at age nine decided that she wanted to dedicate her career to writing. She was drawn to authors such as Walter Scott and Victor Hugo.

During her adolescence another influence became clear in her …

Born January 17 (old style) 1860, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was raised in Tanganrog, near the Sea of Arzov. He was from a humbler background than any other great Russian author, the son of a grocer and the grandson of a serf.

Chekhov studied medicine at the University of Moscow, and would become a practicing doctor (like a later American writer of subtle skills, William Carlos Williams). He also managed to spend a lot of time writing, and a short story called ‘The …

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman (the chairmen of Transcendentalism) wrote from personal insights gained through direct experience. Nathaniel Hawthorne painted portraits of America’s colonial past. Dissatisfied with the stagnating, etiquette-ridden culture of his time, he wrote of the plight of the Native American, the state of the environment, and the need for human individuality amidst the stifling demands of society.

Born in Salem, Mass. on the 4th of July, 1804, Hawthorne was a gifted storyteller, though he didn’t learn …

Born Edward J. Hughes near Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire on August 16, 1930, Ted Hughes is perhaps most widely known for having married the tragic and iconic poet Sylvia Plath. However, Hughes is an important poet in his own right. His dynamic realism and almost childlike honesty reveres innocence, individual expression and above all else, nature.

His childhood years in Yorkshire were certainly an important influence on his literary sensibility. He studied English literature and ancient civilizations at Cambridge University, and in 1956 …

In terms of years, William Blake was the first bohemian. However, without Edgar Allan Poe the bohemian movement quite simply would not have flourished.

The original decadent was born January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. The family was anything but happy, and in Edgar’s second year his father deserted the family and his mother died. Edgar was adopted by a sea merchant of modest upbringing, John Allen, from whom Poe adopted his new middle name.

Poe attended the University of Virginia …

Born in Bombay, India to John and Alice Kipling on the 30th of December, 1865, Rudyard Kipling had a luminescent early childhood and benefited greatly from his parents’ love of foreign cultures and arts. However, the young boy became unhappy when forced to leave the fascinating land of India and live in England from the age of five.

After attending the strangely-named ‘United Services College at Westward Ho!’ in England, he wrote a short novel, ‘Stalky and Co.’, about life as a schoolboy. He …

“It was a time for sitting on porches beside the road … Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins … the sun and the bossman were gone, so the sins felt powerful and human.” This was the first generation of blacks born free, free from the bonds of slavery but not yet secure in their own civil rights. This was a time of segregated towns, schools, and public facilities. Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ could not have occurred in our world …