Meny
  • 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...

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Sample of Authors

Portrait of Fred Vargas

Vargas, Fred
1957 -

Fred Vargas is a pseudonym used by the French historian, archaeologist and crime writer Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau. "Vargas" w...

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Portrait image of Jim Thompson

Thompson, Jim
1906 - 1977

James Myers "Jim" Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. His father was of Scottish origin while his mother had Cherokee...

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Portrait of Donald E. Westlake

Westlake, Donald E.
1933 - 2008

Donald Edwin Westlake was an American author of Irish descent born in Brooklyn, New York. As a small boy, he moved with his...

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Portrait of James McClure

McClure, James
1939 - 2006

The journalist and author James "Jim" McClure’s Scottish parents left for South Africa in 1930, and he was subsequently b...

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