You've Got to Read This (110 page)

Jamaica Kincaid
was born in St. Johns, Antigua, in the West Indies in 1949.

After high school she left Antigua to study in the United States but considered college "a dismal failure" and so educated herself. She published stories in various places, including
The New Yorker,
where she became a staff writer in 1978. She published her first collection of stories,
At the Bottom
of the River,
six years later, and her second,
Annie John,
a year after that.

She lives in Vermont and New York City.

David Leavitt
was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1961 and graduated from Yale University in 1983. He moved to New York and began publishing stories and articles. His first collection of stories,
Family Dancing,
appeared a year later. He has since published a second collection,
A Place I've Never
Been,
and three novels,
The Lost Language of Cranes, Equal Affections,
and
While England Sleeps.
He lives in East Hampton, Long Island, and spends much of his time in Florence, Italy.

John L'Heureux
was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1934. Educated at the National Academy of Theater Arts, the College of the Holy Cross, Boston College, and Harvard University, he has been a staff editor and contributing editor to
The Atlantic
and for many years was Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. He has published four books of poetry, a memoir
Picnic in Babylon,
the story collections
Family
Affairs, Desires,
and
Comedians,
and six novels, including
A Woman Run
622 • ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Mad, An Honorable Profession,
and
The Shrine at Altamira.
He lives with his wife in California.

Clarice Lispector
was born in the Ukraine in 1925 and was raised in Brazil.

As a young woman she studied European literature and became one of Brazil's first women journalists. In 1944 she published her first novel,
Close
to the Savage Heart.
For the next thirty-three years she published many novels and collections of short fiction, including
Family Ties, An Apprenticeship, or the Book of Delights,
and
The Hour of the Star.
She died in 1977

from cancer.

Katherine Mansfield
was born in New Zealand in 1888 to wealthy parents.

She studied, and settled, in London, and in 1911 produced her first book of stories,
In a German Pension.
She married the critic John Middleton Murry in 1918. She published two other collections,
Bliss and Other Stories
and
The Garden Party
—and a total of more than seventy stories—before her death from tuberculosis in 1923-Bobbie Ann Mason was born in Mayfield, Kentucky, in 1942. After attending the University of Kentucky she worked in New York City, writing articles for movie magazines, and then received her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut with a dissertation on Nabokov's
Ada.
She published
The Girl
Sleuth: A Feminist Guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters
in 1975, and her first collection,
Shiloh and Other Stories,
in 1981. She has since published two novels,
In Country
and
Feather Crowns,
and another collection of stories,
Love Life.
She lives in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky.

Kenneth A. McClane, Jr.,
was born in New York City in 1951, the son of a family physician in Harlem, and received his B.A., M.A., and M.F.A. degrees from Cornell University, where he is now a professor of English. He is the author of seven poetry collections, including
Take Five,
and of autobiographical essays collected in
Walls.

Sue Miller
was born in 1943 and attended Radcliffe College. She published her first novel,
The Good Mother,
in 1986, and followed that with a collection of stories,
Inventing the Abbotts and Other Stories,
and two more nov-, els,
Family Pictures
and
For Love.
She lives in Boston with her husband, the writer Douglas Bauer, and one son.

Lorrie Moore
was born in Glens Falls, New York, in 1957. She attended St.

Lawrence University and Cornell University and published her first collection of stories,
Self-Help,
in 1985. She has since produced a novel,
Anagrams,
another collection,
Like Life,
and a book for children,
The
Forgotten Helper.
She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Alice Munro
was born near Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada, in 1931. After attending the University of Western Ontario for two years, she married and moved to British Columbia. She published her first collection of stories,
Dance of the Happy Shades,
in 1968 to great acclaim. Other collections have included
Lives of Girls and Women, Something I've Been Meaning to
Tell You, The Moons ofJupiter,
and
The Progress of Love.
She lives in southern Ontario.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS - 623

Vladimir Nabokov
was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1899 and fled with his family to Germany during the Russian revolution. He was educated at Cambridge University and spent his subsequent years in Berlin and Paris, leaving France with his family in 1940 in the midst of the German invasion. He settled in America, where he wrote
Lolita,
the success of which allowed him to devote his full time to writing. He produced over forty volumes of fiction, criticism, and poetry, including
Invitation to a Beheading,
Speak, Memory, Pnin, Nabokov's Dozen,
and
Pale Fire.
He died in Mon-treux, Switzerland, in 1977.

Joyce Carol Oates
was born in Lockport, New York, in 1938. She remembers creating stories in pictures even before she could write. She received her B.A. from Syracuse University and her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin. Since her first collection of stories
By the North Gate
appeared in 1963, she has been one of America's most widely anthologized and prolific authors, publishing over a hundred short stories and over forty books, including the novels
them, Expensive People,
and
Black Water.
She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Tim O'Brien
was born in 1946 in Austin, Minnesota. After graduating
summa
cum laude
from Macalester College, he served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, where he was awarded a Purple Heart and achieved the rank of sergeant. O'Brien studied for a doctorate in political science at Harvard before becoming a national affairs reporter for
The Washington Post.
His first book was
If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home,
and was followed by the novels
Northern Lights, Going After Cacciato,
for which he won the National Book Award, and
The Nuclear Age.
His most recent book is
The Things They Carried.
He lives in Massachusetts.

Flannery O'Connor
was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925 and was raised in Milledgeville. She graduated from Women's College of Georgia and got an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. Her first novel,
Wise Blood,
was published in 1952 and was followed by
The Violent Bear It Away
as well as the story collections
A Good Man Is Hard to
Find
and
Everything That Rises Must Converge.
She received three O.

Henry First Prizes for her short fiction, and
The Complete Stories
was given a National Book Award posthumously in 1971. She died of lupus on August 3, 1964.

Tillie Olsen
was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1913, the second of six children of Jewish immigrants. She joined the Young Communist League in the early 1930s, then moved to California, where she married and worked as a union organizer, waitress, laundress, and secretary before enrolling in creative writing classes at San Francisco State University. She was awarded a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University based on stories that finally would be published in
Tell Me a Riddle.
She's also written
Yonnondio,
a novel from the thirties, and
Silences,
a collection of essays. She is the mother of three daughters.

Louis Owens
was born in Lompoc, California, in 1948. Of Choctaw, Chero-kee, and Irish descent, he is the author of the critical studies
Other Des-624 • ABOUT THE AUTHORS

tinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel
and
American Indian
Novelists: An Annotated Critical Bibliography.
Educated in English literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, he is also author of the novels
The
Sharpest Sight, Wolfsong,
and, most recently,
Bone Game.
Mr. Owens lives outside Albuquerque with his wife and two daughters and is Director of Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico.

Grace Paley
was born in New York City in 1922. She studied at Hunter College and New York University and published her first book of stories,
The
Little Disturbances of Man,
in 1959- During the next two decades she was prominent as an activist against the Vietnam War. She has since published two more collections,
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
and
Later the
Same Day.
She lives in New York and Vermont.

Francine Prose
was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1947 to parents who were both physicians. She attended Radcliffe College and Harvard University and published her first novel,
Judah the Pious,
in 1973- She has since continued to publish novels and collections of short fiction, including
Household Saints
and
Women and Children First.
She lives in Krumville, New York.

Delmore Schwartz
was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents in 1913. He studied philosophy at several universities and received his degree in 1935. In 1937 his short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" appeared in the inaugural issue of
The Partisan Review
and was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. A first collection of poetry and prose appeared with the same title a year later. The critical reception for his next two major works,
Shenandoah; or, The Naming of the Child,
a surrealistic verse play, and
Genesis: Book One,
an epic poem, bitterly disappointed him. He went on to publish three more collections of poetry and fiction, including
The World Is a Wedding,
and was active as a critic and essayist until his death in 1966.

Jim Shepard
was born in Stratford, Connecticut, in 1956 and graduated from Trinity College and from Brown University, where he studied fiction writing with John Hawkes. His short stories have appeared in
The Atlantic,
Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker,
and
Triquarterly.
His first novel,
Flights,
published in 1983, was followed by
Paper Doll, Lights Out in the
Reptile House,
and
Kiss of the Wolf.
He teaches fiction writing and film at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Leslie Marmon Silko
was born in 1948 to Laguna Pueblo Indian parents in New Mexico, and was educated at the University of New Mexico. She has produced two novels,
Ceremony
and
The Almanac of the Dead,
and a personal anthology of the Laguna Pueblo culture,
Storyteller.
She lives in Tuc-son.

Jane Smiley
was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1949 to a father who was an army officer and a mother who was a writer. She received her B.A.

from Vassar College and her M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. She published her first novel,
Barn Blind,
in 1980; since then she has published seven more books, including two collections of novellas,
ABOUT THE AUTHORS - 625

The Age of Grief
and
Ordinary Love & Good Will,
and the novel
A Thousand Acres,
for which she won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pultizer Prize. She lives in Ames, Iowa.

Robert Stone
was born in Brooklyn in 1937 to a father he never knew and a mother who was institutionalized for schizophrenia. Educated in Catholic schools on the West Side of Manhattan, he joined the U.S. Navy at seventeen and served as a journalist, attaining the rank of petty officer third class. After that he worked for the New York
Daily News
and attended New York University and then Stanford on a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. His first novel,
A Hall of Mirrors,
won a William Faulkner Foundation Award; his second,
Dog Soldiers,
received a National Book Award; and his third,
A Flag for Sunrise,
the PEN/Faulkner Award.

His most recent novels are
Children of Light
and
Outerbridge Reach.
The father of two children, Mr. Stone lives with his wife in Connecticut.

Amy Tan
was born in Oakland, California, in 1952. Her parents emigrated from Beijing, China, in 1949. After her father's death, she attended high school in Switzerland and college in Oregon; she visited China with her mother for the first time in 1984. Her first novel,
The Joy Luck Club,
was published in 1989; her second,
The Kitchen God's Wife,
a few years later.

She lives in San Francisco.

Leo Tolstoy
was born in 1828 in Yasnaya Polyana, about one hundred miles south of Moscow. Orphaned at nine, he was brought up by an elderly aunt, educated at Kazan University, and served as a junior officer in the Russian army before retiring from his commission in 1856. His first books,
Childhood, Boyhood,
and
Youth,
were fictions based on his diaries, and the sketches in
Sevastopol
on his firsthand experience of the Crimean War.