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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 Rex Stout](images/writer/1640/619ae56c6655bb901e6f78e0fb448eec8bd806420c6f9.jpg)
Stout, Rex
1886 - 1975
The American author Rex Todhunter Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, as the sixth of nine children to John and Lucetta...
Further reading![Portrait of Bill Pronzini](images/writer/4980/609950d9e9a0fe55a6a34b246b89a79694e7226c77a3c.jpg)
Pronzini, Bill
1943 -
The extremely prolific American author William John "Bill" Pronzini is the prize-winning author of over a hundred works of...
Further reading![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
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