Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley (1753 – December 5, 1784?) was the first professional African American poet and the first African-American woman whose writings were published. Born in Gambia, Senegal, she was enslaved at age eight. She was purchased by the Wheatley family of Boston, who taught her to read and write, and helped encourage her poetry.
Born about 1753 in West Africa, she was kidnapped in 1763 and taken to America on a slave ship called The Phillis (this is where she got her name). She was purchased in Boston by John Wheatley. Wheatley and his wife Mary instructed the young girl and encouraged her education including study of Latin and history. Mrs.Wheatley arranged for Phillis to work around the house and allowed Mary Wheatley to tutor Philli
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Livy
Titus Livius (Patavinus) (64 or 59 BC – AD 17)—known as Livy in English, and Tite-Live in French—was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people – Ab Urbe Condita Libri (Books from the Foundation of the City) – covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome before the traditional foundation in 753 BC through the reign of Augustus in Livy's own time. He was on familiar terms with the Julio-Claudian dynasty, advising Augustus's grandnephew, the future emperor Claudius, as a young man not long before 14 AD in a letter to take up the writing of history. Livy and Augustus's wife, Livia, were from the same clan in different locations, although not related by blood.
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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was born in 1967 and grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Her work examines culture, religion, race, and family. Her first book, The Gospel of Barbecue (2000), won the Stan and Tom Wick poetry prize and was a 2001 Paterson Poetry prize finalist.
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Jeffers’s poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Callaloo, the Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has been anthologized in numerous volumes, including Roll Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (2002) and These Hands I Know: Writing About the African American Family (2002). Jeffers has also published fiction in the Indiana Review, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and Sto -
Black Hawk
born 1767
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Black Hawk, originally Makataimeshekiakiak, a noted leader of Sauk, fought with the British against the Americans in the war of 1812 and opposed policies of Keokuk of accommodation with the government of the United States; its troops in a brief known conflict of 1832 defeated him.
Zachary Taylor served as an officer of Army in the war of 1832 against Black Hawk.
Keokuk, leader of Sauk, aided the United States in the war of 1832 against Black Hawk and negotiated peace between his people and the Lakota in 1837.
chief
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George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
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Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as t -
Virgil
born 15 October 70 BC
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died 21 September 19 BC
Roman poet Virgil, also Vergil, originally Publius Vergilius Maro, composed the Aeneid , an epic telling after the sack of Troy of the wanderings of Aeneas.
Work of Virgil greatly influenced on western literature; in most notably Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. -
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 -
Mark Twain
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. -
Walt Whitman
Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
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Whitman was born in Huntington on Long Island, and lived in Brooklyn as a child and through much of his career. At the age of 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman's major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was financed with hi -
Herman Melville
There is more than one author with this name
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Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a mer -
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
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Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University wher -
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and often is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
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Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. During World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, but did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925). He went back to Oxford -
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass (né Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey) was born a slave in the state of Maryland in 1818. After his escape from slavery, Douglass became a renowned abolitionist, editor and feminist. Having escaped from slavery at age 20, he took the name Frederick Douglass for himself and became an advocate of abolition. Douglass traveled widely, and often perilously, to lecture against slavery.
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His first of three autobiographies, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, was published in 1845. In 1847 he moved to Rochester, New York, and started working with fellow abolitionist Martin R. Delany to publish a weekly anti-slavery newspaper, North Star. Douglass was the only man to speak in favor of Elizabeth C -
Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American novelist, poet and journalist, best known for the novel, The Red Badge of Courage. That work introduced the reading world to Crane's striking prose, a mix of impressionism, naturalism and symbolism. He died at age 28 in Badenweiler, Baden, Germany.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. -
Flannery O'Connor
Critics note novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and short stories, collected in such works as A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), of American writer Mary Flannery O'Connor for their explorations of religious faith and a spare literary style.
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The Georgia state college for women educated O’Connor, who then studied writing at the Iowa writers' workshop and wrote much of Wise Blood at the colony of artists at Yaddo in upstate New York. She lived most of her adult life on Andalusia, ancestral farm of her family outside Milledgeville, Georgia.
O’Connor wrote Everything That Rises Must Converge (1964). When she died at the age of 39 years, America lost one of its most gifted writers at the height of her pow -
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Great political influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin , novel against slavery of 1852 of Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, American writer, advanced the cause of abolition.
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Lyman Beecher fathered Catharine Esther Beecher, Edward Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, another child.
Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, an author, attacked the cruelty, and reached millions of persons as a play even in Britain. She made the tangible issues of the 1850s to millions and energized forces in the north. She angered and embittered the south. A commonly quoted statement, apocryphally attributed to Abraham Lincoln, sums up the effect. He met Stowe and then said, "So you're the little woman that started this great war!" or so people say.
AKA:
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Adrienne Rich
Works, notably Diving into the Wreck (1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.
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A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up polit -
Charles Brockden Brown
Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel," or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was by no means the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decad
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Margery Kempe
The following biography information provides basic facts and information about the life and history of Margery Kempe, a famous Medieval character:
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Nationality: English
Lifespan: c1373 - c1438
Time Reference: Lived during the reign of the English kings Edward III, Richard II and Henry IV
Date of Birth: She was born Margery Brunham at King's Lynn, Norfolk (then called Bishop's Lynn) in approximately 1373
Family connections : She was the daughter of John Brunham, a wealthy merchant in King's Lynn who was involved in local politics and achieved the position of mayor and Member of Parliament
Education: Margery Kempe was unable to read or write but had people read to her. She dictated her memoirs which were transcribed as 'The Book of Margery Kempe'
Ma -
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most respected poets of the Victorian era.
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Born in County Durham, the eldest of 12 children, Browning was educated at home. She wrote poetry from around the age of six and this was compiled by her mother, comprising what is now one of the largest collections extant of juvenilia by any English writer. At 15 Browning became ill, suffering from intense head and spinal pain for the rest of her life, rendering her frail. She took laudanum for the pain, which may have led to a lifelong addiction and contributed to her weak health.
In the 1830s Barrett's cousin John Kenyon introduced her to prominent literary figures of the day such as William Wordsworth, Mary Russell Mitford, Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Alfred -
Lore Segal
Lore Vailer Segal was an Austrian-American novelist, translator, teacher, short story writer, and author of children's books. Her novel Shakespeare's Kitchen was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.
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Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, was one of the most prominent Africans involved in the British movement of the abolition for the slave trade. Although enslaved as a young man, he purchased his freedom and worked as an author, merchant, and explorer in South America, the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies, and the United Kingdom.
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Mary Rowlandson
1635 -1711
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Mrs. Mary White Rowlandson was a Puritan resident of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who was captured by Native Americans and held for 11 weeks before being ransomed in 1676. Her later memoir of these events became the first American best-seller, going through four editions in one year. -
Christina Rossetti
Christina Georgina Rossetti, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote lyrical religious works and ballads, such as "Up-hill" (1861).
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Frances Polidori Rossetti bore this most important women poet writing in nineteenth-century England to Gabriele Rossetti. Despite her fundamentally religious temperament, closer to that of her mother, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.
Dante made seemingly quite attractive if not beautiful but somewhat idealized sketches of Christina as a teenager. In 1848, James Collinson, one of the minor pre-Raphaelite brethren, engaged her but reverted to Roman Catholicism and afterward ended the engagement.
When failing healt -
Anne Bradstreet
English poet Anne Dudley Bradstreet, wife of Simon Bradstreet, wrote several collections of verse, including The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650).
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People first published this first notable colonial woman. Her work much influenced Puritans in her time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Br... -
Black Hawk
born 1767
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Black Hawk, originally Makataimeshekiakiak, a noted leader of Sauk, fought with the British against the Americans in the war of 1812 and opposed policies of Keokuk of accommodation with the government of the United States; its troops in a brief known conflict of 1832 defeated him.
Zachary Taylor served as an officer of Army in the war of 1832 against Black Hawk.
Keokuk, leader of Sauk, aided the United States in the war of 1832 against Black Hawk and negotiated peace between his people and the Lakota in 1837.
chief
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_H... -
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was born in 1967 and grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Her work examines culture, religion, race, and family. Her first book, The Gospel of Barbecue (2000), won the Stan and Tom Wick poetry prize and was a 2001 Paterson Poetry prize finalist.
Buy books on Amazon
Jeffers’s poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Callaloo, the Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has been anthologized in numerous volumes, including Roll Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (2002) and These Hands I Know: Writing About the African American Family (2002). Jeffers has also published fiction in the Indiana Review, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and Sto -
Aimee Phan
Aimee Phan is the author of The Reeducaion of Cherry Truong (2012) and We Should Never Meet (2004.) She is chair of the undergrad Writing and Literature program at California College of the Arts. She is married to the poet Matt Shears (10,000 Wallpapers, Where a Road Had Been.)
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John Winthrop
Puritan (Calvinist) Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and co-founder of the settlement that became Boston.
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Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth century British writer, philosopher, and feminist. Among the general public and specifically among feminists, Wollstonecraft's life has received much more attention than her writing because of her unconventional, and often tumultuous, personal relationships. After two ill-fated affairs, with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement; they had one daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft died at the age of thirty-eight due to complications from childbirth, leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts.
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During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of -
Harriet Ann Jacobs
Harriet Ann Jacobs, usually wrote under the name Harriet Jacobs but also used the pseudonym Linda Brent.
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Harriet was born in Edenton, North Carolina to Daniel Jacobs and Delilah. Her father was a mulatto carpenter and slave owned by Dr. Andrew Knox. Her mother was a mulatto slave owned by John Horniblow, a tavern owner. Harriet inherited the status of both her parents as a slave by birth. She was raised by Delilah until the latter died around 1819. She then was raised by her mother's mistress, Margaret Horniblow, who taught her how to sew, read, and write.
In 1823, Margaret Horniblow died, and Harriet was willed to Horniblow's niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, whose father, Dr. James Norcom, became her new master. She and her brother John went to -
Livy
Titus Livius (Patavinus) (64 or 59 BC – AD 17)—known as Livy in English, and Tite-Live in French—was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people – Ab Urbe Condita Libri (Books from the Foundation of the City) – covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome before the traditional foundation in 753 BC through the reign of Augustus in Livy's own time. He was on familiar terms with the Julio-Claudian dynasty, advising Augustus's grandnephew, the future emperor Claudius, as a young man not long before 14 AD in a letter to take up the writing of history. Livy and Augustus's wife, Livia, were from the same clan in different locations, although not related by blood.
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