William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer. His novel Clotel (1853) is considered the first novel written by an African American; it was published in London, where he was living at the time. Brown was a pioneer in several different literary genres, including travel writing, fiction, and drama. He has a school named after him in Lexington, Kentucky and was among the first writers inducted to the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
Lecturing in England when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the US, which required people in
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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 -
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 -
Harriet E. Wilson
Traditionally considered the first female African-American novelist as well as the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig was published in 1859 and rediscovered in 1982.
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The daughter of Joshua Green, an African-American "hooper of barrels", and Margaret Ann (or Adams) Smith, a washerwoman of Irish ancestry. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother abandoned her at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr., a well-to-do Milford farmer. As an orphan, Adams was made an indentured servant to the Hayward family, a customary way for society to arrange support at the time. In exchange for her labor, the child would receive room, board and training in life skills, or that was -
David Fiske
David Fiske is a librarian, genealogist, and researcher. He resides in Ballston Spa, New York. He has written numerous local history articles which were published in a weeky newspaper, Ballston Spa Life. A list of those articles can be found at:
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David Fiske's history articles.
Mr. Fiske recently authored a book about Solomon Northup, a free black man who was a slave in Lousiana for nearly 12 years. After being rescued, Northup wrote a book about his experienes titled Twelve Years a Slave. For more information on Northup (and Fiske's book, Solomon Northup: His Life Before and After Slavery, see the Solomon Northup Page, which is maintained by Fiske. -
Fanny Fern
Fanny Fern, born Sara Willis (July 9, 1811 – October 10, 1872), was an American newspaper columnist, humorist, novelist, and author of children's stories in the 1850s-1870s. Fern's great popularity has been attributed to her conversational style and sense of what mattered to her mostly middle-class female readers. By 1855, Fern was the highest-paid columnist in the United States, commanding $100 per week for her New York Ledger column.
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A collection of her columns published in 1853 sold 70,000 copies in its first year. Her best-known work, the fictional autobiography Ruth Hall (1854), has become a popular subject among feminist literary scholars. -
Quincy Troupe
Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr. is an American poet, editor, journalist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, California. He is best known as the biographer of Miles Davis, the jazz musician.
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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 -
Toni Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
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Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction a -
August Strindberg
Johan August Strindberg, a Swede, wrote psychological realism of noted novels and plays, including Miss Julie (1888) and The Dance of Death (1901).
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Johan August Strindberg painted. He alongside Henrik Ibsen, Søren Kierkegaard, Selma Lagerlöf, Hans Christian Andersen, and Snorri Sturluson arguably most influenced of all famous Scandinavian authors. People know this father of modern theatre. His work falls into major literary movements of naturalism and expressionism. People widely read him internationally to this day.
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Arthur Miller
Works of American playwright Arthur Asher Miller include Death of a Salesman (1949), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Crucible (1953).
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This essayist, a prominent figure in literature and cinema for over 61 years, composed a wide variety, such as celebrated A View from the Bridge and All My Sons , still studied and performed worldwide. Miller often in the public eye most famously refused to give evidence to the un-American activities committee of the House of Representatives, received award for drama, and married Marilyn Monroe. People at the time considered the greatest Miller.
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Zora Neale Hurston
Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
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In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern t -
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 -
Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. Of mixed race and majority European ancestry, Toomer struggled to identify as "an American" and resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer.
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He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
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Bertolt Brecht
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. A seminal theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble—the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife and long-time collaborator, the actress Helene Weigel—with its internationally acclaimed productions.
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From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political -
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore. He was also one of the first African-American professors at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.
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Langston Hughes
Through poetry, prose, and drama, American writer James Langston Hughes made important contributions to the Harlem renaissance; his best-known works include Weary Blues (1926) and The Ways of White Folks (1934).
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People best know this social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry, for his famous written work about the period, when "Harlem was in vogue."
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Charles W. Chesnutt
Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an author, essayist and political activist, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity.
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Catherine Clinton
Professor of history at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Specializes in American history, African-American history, the Civil War, and women's history. Previously taught at Brandeis and Harvard universities. Born in 1952, grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. Studied sociology and history at Harvard, earned a master's degree from Sussex and a doctorate from Princeton.
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Georg Büchner
Karl Georg Büchner was a German dramatist and writer of prose. He was the brother of physician and philosopher Ludwig Büchner. Georg Büchner's talent is generally held in great esteem in Germany. It is widely believed that, but for his early death, he might have attained the significance of such central German literary figures as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller.
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Harriet E. Wilson
Traditionally considered the first female African-American novelist as well as the first African American of any gender to publish a novel on the North American continent. Her novel Our Nig was published in 1859 and rediscovered in 1982.
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The daughter of Joshua Green, an African-American "hooper of barrels", and Margaret Ann (or Adams) Smith, a washerwoman of Irish ancestry. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother abandoned her at the farm of Nehemiah Hayward Jr., a well-to-do Milford farmer. As an orphan, Adams was made an indentured servant to the Hayward family, a customary way for society to arrange support at the time. In exchange for her labor, the child would receive room, board and training in life skills, or that was -
Wallace Thurman
Wallace Henry Thurman (1902–1934) was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
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Fanny Fern
Fanny Fern, born Sara Willis (July 9, 1811 – October 10, 1872), was an American newspaper columnist, humorist, novelist, and author of children's stories in the 1850s-1870s. Fern's great popularity has been attributed to her conversational style and sense of what mattered to her mostly middle-class female readers. By 1855, Fern was the highest-paid columnist in the United States, commanding $100 per week for her New York Ledger column.
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A collection of her columns published in 1853 sold 70,000 copies in its first year. Her best-known work, the fictional autobiography Ruth Hall (1854), has become a popular subject among feminist literary scholars. -
Ezra Greenspan
Ezra Greenspan holds the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and is professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He is the editor of William Wells Brown: A Reader and the author of William Wells Brown: An African American Life. He is a founding editor of the journal Book History.
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Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth (1797–November 26, 1883) was the self-given name, from 1843, of Isabella Baumfree, an American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York. Her best-known speech, "Ain't I a Woman?," was delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
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Benjamin Arthur Quarles
Quarles was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a subway porter. He married twice, first to Vera Bullock Quarles, who died in 1951, and second to Ruth Brett Quarles. He had two daughters, Pamela and Roberta.
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In his Twenties, Quarles enrolled at Shaw University and received his B.A. degree in 1931, M.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1933, and Ph.D. in 1940. He worked as an instructor of history at Shaw University, Raleigh, North Carolina (1935–39), a professor and dean at Dillard University, New Orleans, Louisiana (1939–1953), and a professor of history and chair of department at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland (1953–1974). At Morgan, Quarles reached near legendary status as the long-time head of th -
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 -
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859 – August 13, 1930) was a prominent African-American novelist, journalist, playwright, historian, and editor. She is considered a pioneer in her use of the romantic novel to explore social and racial themes. Her work reflects the influence of W. E. B. Du Bois.
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She also wrote under the pseudonym Sarah A. Allen. -
Anton Chekhov
Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of humans to communicate.
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Born ( Антон Павлович Чехов ) in the small southern seaport of Taganrog, the son of a grocer. His grandfather, a serf, bought his own freedom and that of his three sons in 1841. He also taught to read. A cloth merchant fathered Yevgenia Morozova, his mother.
"When I think back on my childhood," Chekhov recalled, "it all seems quite gloomy to me." Tyranny of his father, religious fanaticism, and long nights in the store, open from five in the morning till midnight, shadowed his early years. He attended a school for Greek boys in Taganrog from 1867 -
Yaa Gyasi
YAA GYASI was born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she held a Dean's Graduate Research Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn.
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YAA GYASI is available for select speaking engagements. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at speakers@penguinrandomhouse.com or visit prhspeakers.com. -
Andrew K. Diemer
ANDREW DIEMER is an associate professor at Towson University. He earned his PhD from Temple University and is author of The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2016. He lives in Philadelphia.
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Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. Of mixed race and majority European ancestry, Toomer struggled to identify as "an American" and resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer.
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He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
(from Wikipedia) -
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859 – August 13, 1930) was a prominent African-American novelist, journalist, playwright, historian, and editor. She is considered a pioneer in her use of the romantic novel to explore social and racial themes. Her work reflects the influence of W. E. B. Du Bois.
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She also wrote under the pseudonym Sarah A. Allen. -
Wallace Thurman
Wallace Henry Thurman (1902–1934) was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
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Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Born to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland. After her mother died when she was three years old in 1828, Watkins was orphaned. She was raised by her aunt and uncle. She was educated at the Academy for Negro Youth, a school run by her uncle Rev. William Watkins, who was a civil rights activist. He was a major influence on her life and work. At fourteen, she found work as a seamstress.
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Frances Watkins had her first volume of verse, Forest Leaves, published in 1845 (it has been lost). Her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, published in 1854, was extremely popular. Over the next few years, it was reprinted in 20 editions. Many African American women's service clubs named themselves in her honor, and across the nation, in cities such a -
Marie Clements
Marie Clements (born January 10, 1962) is a Métis playwright, performer, director, producer and screenwriter. Marie was founding artistic director of urban ink productions, and is currently co-artistic director of red diva projects, and director of her new film company Working Pajama Lab Entertainment. Clements lives on Galiano Island, British Columbia. As a writer Marie has worked in a variety of mediums including theatre, performance, film, multi-media, radio, and television.
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Andrew K. Diemer
ANDREW DIEMER is an associate professor at Towson University. He earned his PhD from Temple University and is author of The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2016. He lives in Philadelphia.
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Harry M. Benshoff
Dr. Harry Benshoff's research interests include topics in film genres, film history, film theory, and multiculturalism. He has published essays on Dark Shadows fan cultures, blaxploitation horror films, Hollywood LSD films, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and Brokeback Mountain. He is the author of Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester University Press, 1997). With Sean Griffin he co-authored America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies (Blackwell Publishers, 2004), and Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). He was also the co-editor of Queer Cinema: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2004). His most recent books include Dark Shadows
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Hannah Crafts
Hannah Bond, pen name Hannah Crafts (b.ca.1830s), was an African-American writer who escaped from slavery in North Carolina about 1857 and went to the North. Bond settled in New Jersey, likely married Thomas Vincent, and became a teacher. She wrote The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts after gaining freedom, which may be the first novel by an African-American woman. It is the only known one by a fugitive slave woman.
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Apparently written in the late 1850s, the novel was published in 2002 for the first time after Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard University professor of African-American literature and history, purchased the manuscript and had it authenticated. [I]t rapidly became a bestseller.
Bond's identity was documented in 2013 by Gregg -
Ezra Greenspan
Ezra Greenspan holds the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and is professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He is the editor of William Wells Brown: A Reader and the author of William Wells Brown: An African American Life. He is a founding editor of the journal Book History.
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Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan
Also known as Dr. Ben, Yosef Alfredo Antonio Ben-Jochannan claimed to have been born on December 21, 1918 to a Beta Israel lawyer named Kriston Ben-Jochannan and a Puerto Rican Jewish midwife mother of Yemenite ancestry named Julia Matta-Cruz in Gondor, Ethiopia.
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His formal education is elusive, and he was likely an autodidact, but he claimed it to have begun in Puerto Rico and continued in the Virgin Islands and in Brazil. Ben-Jochannan claimed to have earned a BS degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, but the registrar has no record of his attendance. He claimed to have received doctoral degrees in Cultural Anthropology and Moorish History from the University of Havana and the University of Barcelona in Spain, but Ba -
Annie L. Burton
Annie L. Burton (born c. 1858) was an African American memoirist. She was born into slavery on a plantation near Clayton, Alabama. Her date of death is uncertain. Her life's story is captured in her 1909 autobiography Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days. In her autobiography Burton relates that the end of slavery not only signaled a time for African Americans to start a new life, but also a time to redefine their lives. "Burton's Memories details not only one woman's quest from slavery to physical freedom but also her journey from a proscribed role to the creation of own free identity."
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George Lillo
George Lillo (3 February 1691 – 4 September 1739)[1] was an English playwright and tragedian. He was a jeweller in London as well as a dramatist. He produced his first stage work, Silvia, or The Country Burial, in 1730. A year later, he produced his most famous play, The London Merchant. He wrote at least six more plays before his death in 1739, including The Christian Hero (1735), Fatal Curiosity (1737) and Marina (1738).[2]
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Contents
Life
George Lillo was born in Moorfields, or Moorgate, in the City of London.[3] He became a partner in his father’s goldsmith-jewellery business.[2]
Early stage works
Lillo wrote at least eight plays between 1730 and his death in 1739. His first work in the theatre was the ballad opera Silvia, or The Country Buria