M.F.K. Fisher
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was a prolific and well-respected writer, writing more than 20 books during her lifetime and also publishing two volumes of journals and correspondence shortly before her death in 1992. Her first book, Serve it Forth, was published in 1937. Her books deal primarily with food, considering it from many aspects: preparation, natural history, culture, and philosophy. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the "arts of life" and explored the art of living as a secondary theme in her writing. Her style and pacing are noted elements of her short stories and essays.
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Kathryn Harrison
Kathryn Harrison is the author of the novels Envy, The Seal Wife, The Binding Chair, Poison, Exposure, and Thicker Than Water.
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She has also written memoirs, The Kiss and The Mother Knot, a travel memoir, The Road to Santiago, a biography, Saint Therese of Lisieux, and a collection of personal essays, Seeking Rapture.
Ms. Harrison is a frequent reviewer for The New York Times Book Review; her essays, which have been included in many anthologies, have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, Salon, and other publications.
She lives in New York with her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison, and their children. -
Mark Kurlansky
Mark Kurlansky is an American journalist and author who has written a number of books of fiction and nonfiction. His 1997 book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (1997), was an international bestseller and was translated into more than fifteen languages. His book Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea (2006) was the nonfiction winner of the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
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Luke Barr
Luke Barr is the author of THE SECRET HISTORY OF FRENCH COOKING (March 2026), RITZ & ESCOFFIER, and the New York Times bestseller PROVENCE, 1970. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, architect Yumi Moriwaki, and their two daughters.
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Walker Percy
Walker Percy was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
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Trained as a physician at Columbia University, Percy decided to become a writer after a bout of tuberculosis. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age." His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith. He had a lifelong friendship with author and historian Shelby Foote and spent much of his life in Covington, Louisiana, where he died of prostate cancer in 1990. -
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
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Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, W -
Ethan Hawke
Ethan Green Hawke is an American actor, author, and film director. He made his film debut in Explorers (1985), before making a breakthrough performance in Dead Poets Society (1989). Hawke starred alongside Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater's Before trilogy from 1995 to 2013. Hawke received two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Training Day (2001) and Boyhood (2014) and two for Best Adapted Screenplay for co-writing Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013). Other notable roles include in Reality Bites (1994), Gattaca (1997), Great Expectations (1998), Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), Maggie's Plan (2015), First Reformed (2017), The Black Phone (2021), and The Northman (2022).
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Hawke directed the -
Julia Child
Julia Carolyn Child was an American chef, author, and television personality. She is recognized for having brought French cuisine to the American public with her debut cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her subsequent television programs, the most notable of which was The French Chef, which premiered in 1963.
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Chris Bohjalian
Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 25 books. His 25th book, THE JACKAL’S MISTRESS, is now on sale. He writes literary fiction, historical fiction, thrillers, and (on occasion) ghost stories. His goal is never to write the same book twice. He has published somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.5 million words.
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His work has been translated into 35 languages and become three movies (MIDWIVES, SECRETS OF EDEN, and PAST THE BLEACHERS) and an Emmy-winning TV series (THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT). He has two other novels in development for TV series as well.
He is also a playwright, including THE CLUB in 2024; MIDWIVES in 2020; and GROUNDED (now WINGSPAN) in 2018.
His books have been chosen as Best Books of the Year by the Washing -
Amy Tan
Amy Tan (Chinese: 譚恩美; pinyin: Tán Ēnměi; born February 19, 1952) is an American writer whose novels include The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Saving Fish From Drowing, and The Valley of Amazement. She is the author of two memoirs, The Opposite of Fate and Where the Past Begins. Her two children’s books are The Chinese Siamese Cat and The Moon Lady. She is also the co-screenwriter of the film adaptation of The Joy Luck, the librettist of the opera The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and the creative consultant to the PBS animated series Sagwa the Chinese Chinese Cat.
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Tan is an instructor with MasterClass on writing, memory and imagination. She is featured in the American Masters document -
Ruth Reichl
Ruth Reichl is the New York Times bestselling author of five memoirs, the novels Delicious! and The Paris Novel, and the cookbook My Kitchen Year. She was editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, and previously served as restaurant critic for The New York Times, as well as food editor and restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times. She has been honored with six James Beard Awards.
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Erik Larson
Erik Larson is the author of nine books and one audio-only novella. His latest book, The Demon of Unrest, is a non-fiction thriller about the five months between Lincoln’s election and the start of the Civil War. Six of his books became New York Times bestsellers. Two of these, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz and Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, both hit no. 1 on the list soon after launch. His chronicle of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, The Devil in the White City, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won an Edgar Award for fact-crime writing. It lingered on various Times bestseller lists for the better part of a decade and is currently in development at Disn
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Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
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Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation. -
Edward Albee
Noted American playwright Edward Franklin Albee explored the darker aspects of human relationships in plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and Three Tall Women (1991), which won his third Pulitzer Prize.
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People know Edward Franklin Albee III for works, including The Zoo Story , The Sandbox and The American Dream .
He well crafted his works, considered often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflected a mastery and Americanization of the theater of the absurd, which found its peak in European playwrights, such as Jean Genet, Samuel Barclay Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco. Younger Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel credits daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue of Albee with -
Muriel Spark
Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
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Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN f -
May Sarton
May Sarton was born on May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. An accomplished memoirist, Sarton boldly came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her later memoir, Journal of a Solitude, was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton died in York, Maine, on July 16, 1995.
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Octavia E. Butler
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant.
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After her father died, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction.
She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become -
Eve Babitz
Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Mae, an artist, and Sol, a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox.Her father was of Russian Jewish descent and her mother had Cajun (French) ancestry.Babitz's parents were friends with the composer Igor Stravinsky, who was her godfather.
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In 1963, her first brush with notoriety came through Julian Wasser's iconic photograph of a nude, twenty-year-old Babitz playing chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp, on the occasion of his landmark retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The show was curated by Walter Hopps, with whom Babitz was having an affair at the time. The photograph is described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as being “among the key documentary im -
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer (also credited as Robin W. Kimmerer) (born 1953) is Associate Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF). She is the author of numerous scientific articles, and the book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She is Potawatomi and combines her heritage with her scientific and environmental passions.
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Harold McGee
Harold James McGee is an American author who writes about the chemistry and history of food science and cooking. He is best known for his seminal book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen initially published in 1984 and revised in 2004.
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McGee is a visiting scholar at Harvard University. His book On Food and Cooking has won numerous awards and is used widely in food science courses at many universities. McGee's scientific approach to cooking has been embraced and popularized by chefs and authors such as Heston Blumenthal, David Chang, Alton Brown, Shirley Corriher, Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Russ Parsons. -
Dorothy B. Hughes
Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–1993) was a mystery author and literary critic. Born in Kansas City, she studied at Columbia University, and won an award from the Yale Series of Younger Poets for her first book, the poetry collection Dark Certainty (1931). After writing several unsuccessful manuscripts, she published The So Blue Marble in 1940. A New York–based mystery, it won praise for its hardboiled prose, which was due, in part, to Hughes’s editor, who demanded she cut 25,000 words from the book.
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Hughes published thirteen more novels, the best known of which are In a Lonely Place (1947) and Ride the Pink Horse (1946). Both were made into successful films. In the early fifties, Hughes largely stopped writing fiction, preferring to focus on critic -
Anya von Bremzen
Anya von Bremzen is one of the most accomplished food writers of her generation: the winner of three James Beard awards; a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure magazine; and the author of five acclaimed cookbooks. She also contributes regularly to Food & Wine and Saveur and has written for The New Yorker, Departures, and the Los Angeles Times. She divides her time between New York City and Istanbul.
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Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
People note French politician and gourmet Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, for his Physiologie du Goût (1825), a witty dissertation on the art of dining.
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This lawyer gained fame as an epicure and gastronome. The Rhone River then separated France from Savoy at his hometown in a family of lawyers. He studied law, chemistry and medicine in Dijon in his early years and thereafter practiced in his hometown. In 1789, at the opening of the revolution, people sent him as a deputy to the Estates-General, quickly the national constituent assembly, and he acquired some limited fame, particularly for a public speech in defense of capital punishment. He adopted his second surname upon the death of an aunt, who, named Savarin, left him her entire fortu -
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.
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Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out, -
José Andrés
José Ramón Andrés Puerta, más conocido como José Andrés, es un cocinero español-estadounidense. Desde 2013 tiene también la nacionalidad estadounidense.
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Chef/Owner of ThinkFoodGroup, star of the "Made In Spain" television series, and culinary creator and advocate. -
Claire Swinarski
Claire Swinarski is the author of multiple books for both kids and adults. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, Seventeen, Milwaukee Magazine, and many other publications. She lives in small town Wisconsin with her husband and three kids, where she writes books, wears babies, and wrangles bread dough. You can follow her on Instagram @claireswinarski.
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Adam D. Roberts
Adam Roberts is the creator of the food blog The Amateur Gourmet (launched in 2004). Since then, he's written several books -- including The Amateur Gourmet and Secrets of the Best Chefs -- as well for film and television. His latest book is a novel, FOOD PERSON, which is being published by Knopf in May 2025. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York with his husband Craig and their dog, Winston.
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Reay Tannahill
Reay Tannahill was born on December 9, 1929 in Glasgow, Scotland, where she brought up. Her forename was the maiden name of her mother, Olive Reay. She was educated at Shawlands Academy, and obtained an MA in History and a postgraduate certificate in Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. In 1958, she married Michael Edwardes but the marriage ended in divorce in 1983, he died in 1990. Until her death on November 2, 2007, she lived in a smart terrace house in London near Tate Britain.
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Before started to write, she worked as a probation officer, advertising copywriter, newspaper reporter, historical researcher and graphic designer. She published her first non-fiction book in 1964. The international success came with the novel Food in His -
Ruth Reichl
Ruth Reichl is the New York Times bestselling author of five memoirs, the novels Delicious! and The Paris Novel, and the cookbook My Kitchen Year. She was editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, and previously served as restaurant critic for The New York Times, as well as food editor and restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times. She has been honored with six James Beard Awards.
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Kate Lebo
Kate Lebo's first collection of nonfiction, The Book of Difficult Fruit, was published by FSG and Picador in April 2021. She is the author of the cookbook Pie School (Sasquatch Books), the poetry chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books), and co-editor with Samuel Ligon of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze (Sasquatch Books). Her essay about listening through hearing loss, “The Loudproof Room,” originally published in New England Review, was anthologized in Best American Essays 2015.
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Her poems and essays have appeared in This is the Place: Women Writing About Home, Ghosts of Seattle Past, Best New Poets, Gettysburg Review, Willow Springs, Moss, Catapult, and Poetry Northwest, among other -
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
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Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation. -
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
People note French politician and gourmet Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, for his Physiologie du Goût (1825), a witty dissertation on the art of dining.
Buy books on Amazon
This lawyer gained fame as an epicure and gastronome. The Rhone River then separated France from Savoy at his hometown in a family of lawyers. He studied law, chemistry and medicine in Dijon in his early years and thereafter practiced in his hometown. In 1789, at the opening of the revolution, people sent him as a deputy to the Estates-General, quickly the national constituent assembly, and he acquired some limited fame, particularly for a public speech in defense of capital punishment. He adopted his second surname upon the death of an aunt, who, named Savarin, left him her entire fortu -
Judith Jones
Judith B. Jones retired as senior editor and vice president at Knopf in 2011. In 1950 she rescued The Diary of Anne Frank from the reject pile. In 1960, she championed a cookbook no other publisher would touch, named it Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and became Julia Child's editor from then on. She ushered all of John Updike's books into print, including the posthumous titles, and edited many other important works both culinary and literary.
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Jones has written a number of cookbooks herself, as well as a cookbook/memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food. Raised in New England, she lives in New York City and summers in Northern Vermont, where she also raises grass-fed cattle on the Bryn Teg farm.
Her husband and collaborator Evan Jones die