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It is 86 years today since Joyce Carol Oates was born.
American author, born into a Protestant working-class family in the little town of Lockport in the western part of the state of New York. The family had a difficult economic situation and she spent most of her childhood and adolescence with her paternal grandparents on a farm in Erie. As a child, she liked to read and write; she got her first book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, from her g...
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It is 67 years today since Alexandra Marinina was born.
Alexandra Marinina is the pseudonym of Marina Anatolyevna Alekseyeva, a Russian author born in Lviv, western Ukraine. Her father, who died in 1973, was a police officer and her mother a lawyer. When she was still young, the family moved to Leningrad (now St.Petersburg) and then to Moscow. She attended an English-language school in Leningrad, and the Rimsky-Korsakov conservatory in Moscow. She...
Sample of Authors
![Portrait image of W. Somerset Maugham](images/writer/1148/6213c7f2aba9b793c474f4175628697c0477111e04ab9.jpg)
Maugham, W. Somerset
1874 - 1965
William Somerset Maugham was a British author born in Paris. His father was a lawyer at the British Embassy there. When...
Further reading![Portrait of Martha Grimes](images/writer/3425/605076284f112bf4935ef9e8ba81aed174edbb0af3498.jpg)
Grimes, Martha
1931 -
Martha Grimes is an American author of detective stories born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her father, a lawyer, died when...
Further reading
Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel
1939 - 2003
Spanish author, journalist, essayist and poet. Vázquez Montalbán was born in Barcelona the same year as General Franco came o...
Further reading![Portrait of Jean-Patrick Manchette](images/writer/3469/60991ec0d6163b0d3438897a577ea3972886d0c6acb68.jpg)
Manchette, Jean-Patrick
1942 - 1995
Jean-Patrick Manchette was a French author credited for having revolutionised noir fiction in France. He was born in...
Further reading