You've Got to Read This (109 page)

She was the author of eleven novels, eight children's books,
The Company
of Wolves
and other film and radio scripts, and the story collections
Fireworks
and
The Bloody Chamber,
as well as the critical study
The Sadeian
Woman and the Ideology of Pornography.
She died of cancer in 1992.

Raymond Carver
was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1939 and educated at Chico State College, where he studied writing under John Gardner; Hum-boldt State College; the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop; and Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. He was the author of five books of poetry and five collections of short stories, including his selection
Where I'm Calling From.
In 1983 he was given the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award and resigned his professorship at Syracuse University. In 1988 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, but on August 2 of that year he died of lung cancer at his home in Port Angeles, Washington.

John Cheever
was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912 and went to school at South Braintree's Thayer Academy, from which he was expelled in his senior year for intractability. A frequent contributor to
The New
Yorker,
he was the author of five novels, including
The Wapshot Chronicle
and
Oh, What a Paradise It Seems,
and seven volumes of short stories, which were collected in 1978 in
The Stories of John Cheever
and for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Mr.

Cheever was also a recipient of the National Book Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Howells Medal for Fiction. In June 1982

he died of cancer in his home in Ossining, New York. He is survived by his wife and three children.

Anton Chekhov
was born in I860 and wrote his first stories while a medical student at Moscow University, to help his family pay off debts. His grand-618 • ABOUT THE AUTHORS

father had been a serf, his father an unsuccessful grocer. In 1886 his comic stories were collected in book form, and by 1887 his first play,
Ivanov,
had been produced. In 1890 he published
Sakhalin Island,
an investiga-tion of convict life in Siberia that helped catalyze widespread prison reforms instituted two years later. In his working life he wrote over fifty short stories; between 1895 and 1904, his plays included
The Seagull,
Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters,
and
The Cherry Orchard.
Consumption forced him to divide his later years between the south coast of the Crimea and French and German health resorts. He died in 1904 in Badenweiler.

Robert Coover
was born in Charles City, Iowa, in 1932. After receiving a B.A.

from Indiana University, he served in the U.S. Navy for four years, attaining the rank of lieutenant. He then earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago and began teaching literature and creative writing at such universities as Princeton, Iowa, and Brown.
The Origins of the Brunists
won a William Faulkner Award for the best first novel of 1966 and was followed by
The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., The
Public Burning, Spanking the Maid, Gerald's Party,
and
Pinocchio in
Venice,
as well as the story collections
Pricksongs and Descants
and
A
Night at the Movies.
Among his honors are the Brandeis Citation for Fiction, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. He is married and the father of three children.

Charles Dickens
was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1812 but spent his happiest childhood years in Chatham. His father's financial embarrass-ments forced Charles to perform hard labor at a blacking factory as a boy while his father served time in a debtor's prison, and those experiences would influence much of his later' fiction. His formal schooling ended at age fifteen. He thereafter worked as a clerk in a solicitor's office, as a shorthand reporter in the London courts, and as a parliamentary journalist before finding literary success in 1836 with his
Sketches by "Boz"
and the hugely popular comic narrative
The Pickwick Papers.
His fourteen novels include
Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copper-field, Bleak House,
and
Great Expectations;
he was also an indefatigable editor of newspapers and magazines and the author of histories, plays, essays, and Christmas books—a form he invented. The father of nine children, he died suddenly on June 9, 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Annie Dillard
was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1945. Educated at Hollins College, she has been a contributing editor to
Harper's
and a columnist for
Living Wilderness.
Her books include the poetry collection
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel,
the memoir
An American Childhood,
a historical novel
The Living,
and
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Living by Fiction, Holy
the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk,
and
The Writing Life.
She lives in Connecticut.

Deborah Eisenberg
was born in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1945. She attended Marlboro College and The New School for Social Research, and in 1982

had her play
Pastorale
produced by Second Stage in New York. Her first
ABOUT THE AUTHORS - 619

collection of stories,
Transactions in a Foreign Currency,
was published in 1986, and her second,
Under the 82nd Airborne,
in 1992.

Louise Erdrich
was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954. Her father, a teacher, and her mother, a Chippewa Indian, were both affiliated with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Educated at Dartmouth College and Johns Hop-kins University, she worked as a beet weeder, waitress, psychiatric aide, poetry teacher in prisons, lifeguard, and construction flag signaler.
Love
Medicine,
a novel, and
Jacklight,
a book of poems, were published in 1984, and were followed by the poetry collection
Baptism of Desire
and the novels
The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Crown of Columbus,
and, most recently,
The Bingo Palace.
She lives with her husband and seven children in Minnesota.

Molly Giles
was born in California in 1940. She was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State University, where she now teaches in the creative writing department. Her stories have appeared in
Shenandoah, Redbook, North American Review, Ascent,
and
McCall's
and were collected in
Rough Translations,
winner of the 1985 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is the mother of three daughters.

Mary Gordon
was born on Long Island, New York, in 1949- She studied writing with Elizabeth Hardwick at Barnard College and received her M.A.

from Syracuse University. Her first novel,
Final Payments,
was published in 1978. Her other works include
The Company of Women,
another novel, and
Temporary Shelter,
a collection of stories. She lives in New York City.

Allan Gurganus
was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1947. He studied painting at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College to study writing with Grace Paley.

He attended the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop on a Danforth fellowship, studying with Stanley Elkin and John Cheever, and Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship, staying on to teach there as a Jones Lecturer. Mr. Gurganus has subsequently taught at Duke, Iowa, and Sarah Lawrence. His first novel,
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,
was named winner of the Sue Kaufman prize, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for the best first work of fiction published in 1989.
White People
collected stories and novellas previously published in
Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review,
and elsewhere. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Lars Gustafsson
was born in 1936 in Vasteras, Sweden, and studied philosophy at Uppsala University, receiving a Ph.D. in 1978. He edited the influential
Bonniers Litterara Magasin
from 1961 to 1972. His early reputation was mainly that of a lyric poet, but he has since received acclaim in nearly all genres: short fiction, novels, nonfiction, drama. Perhaps his greatest achievement is considered to be five novels given the overall title
The
Cracks in the Wall: Mr. Gustafsson Himself, Wool, The Family Party, Sigis-mund,
and
The Death of a Beekeeper.
Other works include his collection
620 • ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Sonnets, Stories of Happy People,
and the novel
Bernard Foy's Third
Castling.
He continues to be one of the most productive and versatile of writers.

Ron Hansen
was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in December 1947. Educated in English literature at Creighton University, he served as a lieutenant in the U.S.

Army, then studied under John Irving and John Cheever at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, where his classmates included T. Coraghessan Boyle and Allan Gurganus, and under John L'Heureux at Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. His first novel,
Desperadoes,
was published in 1979 and was followed by
The Assassination
of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,
a children's book,
The Shadow-maker,
a book of stories,
Nebraska,
and the novel
Mariette in Ecstasy.
He lives in California.

John Hawkes
was born in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1925 and served in World War II. He graduated from Harvard in 1947 and has produced a book of short plays, two collections of short fiction, and thirteen novels, including
The Blood Oranges, The Lime Twig, Death, Sleep, and the Traveler,
and
Whistlejacket.
He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife, Sophie.

Amy Hempel
was born in Chicago in 1951 but spent much of her life in California. Educated in a nonlinear way at five different universities, she has been widely published in both fiction and nonfiction, appearing in
Esquire, Harper's, Vanity Fair, Vogue,
and other magazines. Author of the story collections
Reasons to Live
and
At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom,
she lives with her husband in New York City.

Oscar Hijuelos
was born in New York City in 1951. He received his B.A. and M.A. from City College and in 1983 published his first novel,
Our House in
the Last World.
Since then he has published two more novels,
The Mambo
Kings Play Songs of Love
and
Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien.
He lives in New York City.

John Irving
was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. He attended the University of Pittsburgh on a wrestling scholarship, studied comparative-literature at the University of Vienna and the University of New Hampshire, and received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, where he studied with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The author of eight novels including
Setting Free the Bears, The Water-Method Man, The World
According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany,
and, most recently,
A Son of
the Circus,
Mr. Irving is married and the father of three sons. He lives in Vermont.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Cologne, Germany, in 1927. In 1939 her parents fled to England, where she became a British citizen and earned a degree in literature in 1951. She married a Parsee architect and lived in India from 1951 to 1975. Her work includes her first novel,
To Whom She Will, A Backward Place,
and
Heat and Dust.

She lives in New York City, collaborating on screenplays and television scripts as well as continuing to write fiction.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS - 621

Edward P. Jones
was bom and raised in Washington, D.C. He was educated at Holy Cross College and the University of Virginia.
Lost in the City,
his first collection of stories, appeared in 1992. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

James Joyce
was born in 1882 in a suburb of Dublin and was educated at both the best Jesuit schools and at home, depending upon the state of his parents' financial decline. After taking his bachelor's degree from University College, Dublin, he moved to Paris in 1904 and never again lived in Ireland, settling in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris again. His collection of stories,
Dubliners,
was finished in 1905 but only published in 1916 after a bitter struggle with Irish publishers. His first novel,
A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man,
was published the same year. He produced two more novels,
Ulysses
and
Finnegan's Wake.
He died in 1941.

Franz Kafka
was born in 1883 in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence and began work as a civil service lawyer. He never married and lived most of his life with his parents. His collections of stories included
Meditation, The Stoker: A Fragment, The Metamorphosis, The
Judgement, In the Penal Colony,
and
A Country Doctor.
He died of tuberculosis in 1924. Three novels—
Amerika, The Trial,
and
The Castle
—were published posthumously, against his expressed wishes.

Janet Kauffman
was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1945. She attended Juniata College and received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

She published her first book of poems,
The Weather Book,
in 1981, and her first book of fiction,
Places in the World a Woman Could Walk,
in 1984. She has since published a novel,
Collaborators,
and another collection of stories,
Obscene Gestures for Women.
She lives in Hudson, Michigan.