Art Pepper

American jazz musician noted for the beauty of his sound and his improvisations on alto saxophone, and a major figure in the 1950s in West Coast jazz.

Pepper in his teens played in Los Angeles bands led by Lee Young and Benny Carter, then joined the Stan Kenton band briefly before serving in the U.S. Army (1944–46). He returned to Kenton in 1947 and remained until 1952, the year he began leading recording groups. Narcotics addiction and drug-related prison terms interrupted his freelance career in the 1950s; after a remarkably productive period of recording, 1956–60, he spent most of 1961–67 in prison. Physical ailments and a three-year period of rehabilitation in Synanon resulted in only intermittent performing until the late 1970s, when he

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Dan Nadel

Dan Nadel is the author of Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life (Scribner, April 2025). His previous books include, It’s Life as a I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940–1980; Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence, 1945–1976; and Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries, 1900–1969. Nadel has curated exhibitions for galleries and museums internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is the founder of PictureBox, a publishing and packaging company that produced over one hundred books, objects, and zines from 2000 to 2014, including the Grammy Award–winning design for Wilco’s 2004 album A Ghost Is Born. Dan is the curator-at-large f
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Val Wilmer

Valerie Sybil Wilmer (born 7 December 1941) is a British photographer and writer specialising in jazz, gospel, blues, and British African-Caribbean music and culture.
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James Kaplan

James Kaplan has been writing noted biography, journalism, and fiction for more than four decades. The author of Frank: The Voice and Sinatra: The Chairman, the definitive two-volume biography of Frank Sinatra, he has written more than one hundred major profiles of figures ranging from Miles Davis to Meryl Streep, from Arthur Miller to Larry David.
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Penelope Mortimer

Early life

She was born in Rhyl, Flintshire, Wales, the younger child of an Anglican clergyman, who had lost his faith and used the parish magazine to celebrate the Soviet persecution of the Russian church. He also sexually abused her. Her father frequently changed his parish, so, consequently, she attended numerous schools. She left University College, London, after only one year.

Adulthood

She married Charles Dimont, a journalist, in 1937, and they had two daughters, including the actress Caroline Mortimer, and two daughters through extra-marital relationships with Kenneth Harrison and Randall Swingler.
She met barrister and writer John Mortimer while pregnant with the last child and married him in 1949. Together they had a daughter and a son
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Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart is the author of The Crisis of Zionism and The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris and The Good Fight. A former editor of The New Republic, he is an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and the senior political writer for The Daily Beast. He lives with his family in New York City.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/peterb...
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Ashley Kahn

Ashley Kahn is an American music historian, journalist, and producer.
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Miles Davis

With warm, muted style on albums, such as Kind of Blue (1959), noted American trumpeter Miles Dewey Davis, Junior, later experimented with jazz-fusion.

Recordings of Armando Anthony Corea with group of Davis from 1968 to 1970 contributed to the development of jazz-fusion.

Miles Dewey Davis III led a band and composed.

From World War II, people widely considered Davis at the forefront of almost every major development as the most influential musicians of the 20th century, to the 1990s. He played various early bebop and one of the first cool records. He partially responsibly developed modal, and his work with other musicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s arose.

Davis belongs to the great tradition that started with Buddy Bolden and ra
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Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday was an American jazz singer and songwriter.

Nicknamed Lady Day by her sometime collaborator Lester Young, Holiday was a seminal influence on jazz, and pop singers' critic John Bush wrote that she "changed the art of American pop vocals forever." Her vocal style — strongly inspired by instrumentalists — pioneered a new way of manipulating wording and tempo, and also popularized a more personal and intimate approach to singing.

She co-wrote only a few songs, but several of them have become jazz standards, notably "God Bless the Child," "Don't Explain," and "Lady Sings the Blues."
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Robin D.G. Kelley

Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.
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Don Winslow

Don Winslow is the author of twenty-one acclaimed, award-winning international bestsellers, including the New York Times bestsellers The Force and The Border, the #1 international bestseller The Cartel, The Power of the Dog, Savages, and The Winter of Frankie Machine. Savages was made into a feature film by three-time Oscar-winning writer-director Oliver Stone. The Power of the Dog, The Cartel and The Border sold to FX in a major multimillion-dollar deal to air as a weekly television series beginning in 2020.

A former investigator, antiterrorist trainer and trial consultant, Winslow lives in California and Rhode Island.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more informatio
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Donald E. Westlake

Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008) was one of the most prolific and talented authors of American crime fiction. He began his career in the late 1950's, churning out novels for pulp houses—often writing as many as four novels a year under various pseudonyms such as Richard Stark—but soon began publishing under his own name. His most well-known characters were John Dortmunder, an unlucky thief, and Parker, a ruthless criminal. His writing earned him three Edgar Awards: the 1968 Best Novel award for God Save the Mark; the 1990 Best Short Story award for "Too Many Crooks"; and the 1991 Best Motion Picture Screenplay award for The Grifters. In addition, Westlake also earned a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1993.

Westlake's
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Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth, journalist and novelist, was born and grew up in Brody, a small town near Lemberg in East Galicia, part of the easternmost reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire and is now Ukraine. Roth was born into a Jewish family. He died in Paris after living there in exile.

http://www.josephroth.de/
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John Fante

Fante's early years were spent in relative poverty. The son of an Italian born father, Nicola Fante, and an Italian-American mother, Mary Capolungo, Fante was educated in various Catholic schools in Boulder and Denver, Colorado, and briefly attended the University of Colorado.

In 1929, he dropped out of college and moved to Southern California to concentrate on his writing. He lived and worked in Wilmington, Long Beach, and in the Bunker Hill district of downtown Los Angeles, California.

He is known to be one of the first writers to portray the tough times faced by many writers in L.A. His work and style has influenced such similar authors as "Poet Laureate of Skid Row" Charles Bukowski and influential beat generation writer Jack Kerouac. He
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Flann O'Brien

Pseudonym of Brian Ó Nualláin , also known as Brian O'Nolan.

His English novels appeared under the name of Flann O’Brien, while his great Irish novel and his newspaper column (which appeared from 1940 to 1966) were signed Myles na gCopaleen or Myles na Gopaleen – the second being a phonetic rendering of the first. One of twelve brothers and sisters, he was born in 1911 in Strabane, County Tyrone, into an Irish-speaking family. His father had learned Irish while a young man during the Gaelic revival the son was later to mock. O’Brien’s childhood has been described as happy, though somewhat insular, as the language spoken at home was not that spoken by their neighbours. The Irish language had long been in decline, and Strabane was n
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Pamela Des Barres

Pamela Des Barres aka Miss Pamela (born Pamela Ann Miller on September 9, 1948) is a former rock and roll groupie, author, and magazine writer.

Des Barres was born in Reseda, California. Her mother was a housewife and her father worked for Anheuser-Busch and occasionally worked as a gold miner. She idolized the Beatles and Elvis Presley as a child, and fantasized about meeting and dating her favorite Beatle, Paul McCartney.

A high school acquaintaince introduced Pamela to Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, a musician and friend of Frank Zappa. Vliet in turn introduced her to Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, which drew her to the rock music scene on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. She started to spend her tim
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Carl Hiaasen

Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida. After graduating from the University of Florida, he joined the Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter and went on to work for the newspaper’s weekly magazine and prize-winning investigations team. As a journalist and author, Carl has spent most of his life advocating for the protection of the Florida Everglades. He and his family live in southern Florida.
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Denis Johnson

Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993), a Whiting Writer's Award (1986), the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams, and most recently, the National Book Award for Fiction (2007).
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Daniel Clowes

Daniel Gillespie Clowes is an Academy Award-nominated American author, screenwriter and cartoonist of alternative comic books. Most of Clowes' work appears first in his anthology Eightball (1989-2004), a collection of self-contained narratives and serialized graphic novels. Several of these narratives have been collected published separately as graphic novels, most notably Ghost World. With filmmaker Terry Zwigoff, Clowes adapted Ghost World into the 2000 film of the same name, and also adapted another Eightball story into the 2006 film Art School Confidential. Before Eightball, Clowes worked on comic book series Lloyd Llewellyn, which in the later issues stronger foreshadowed some of the social criticism of his work with Eightball.
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Mark Bowden

Mark Bowden is an American journalist and writer. He is a former national correspondent and longtime contributor to The Atlantic. Bowden is best known for his book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999) about the 1993 U.S. military raid in Mogadishu, which was later adapted into a motion picture of the same name that received two Academy Awards.
Bowden is also known for the books Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (2001), about the efforts to take down Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and Hue 1968, an account of the Battle of Huế.

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James Ellroy

Lee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia (1987) and L.A. Confidential (1990).

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Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on
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Raymond Chandler

Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America.
Chandler had
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Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as
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