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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 of James McClure](images/writer/1157/60992bf12d8dba3682822b154dfc20adb8e65100bbe52.jpg)
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...
Further reading![Portrait image of Mark Billingham](images/writer/3180/3180.jpg)
Billingham, Mark
1961 -
The British author Mark Philip David Billingham was born in Solihull, Warwickshire, and grew up near Birmingham where he...
Further reading![Portrait of Jeffrey Archer](images/writer/85/6621b4583fca9b2e9a32302013707b333a3a3d935a47c.jpg)
Archer, Jeffrey
1940 -
Jeffrey Howard Archer is a British author, former politician and peer of the realm surrounded by scandal. His thrillers and...
Further reading![Portrait of Robert B. Parker](images/writer/1344/609aa9d2037ed665d803f109c45ccb064d20c2926c27d.jpg)
Parker, Robert B.
1932 - 2010
Robert Brown Parker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, where his father was head of a telephone company. Parker...
Further reading