AUTHORS

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)

Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, but grew up in Massachusetts. The Alcott home in Concord, known as Orchard House, is now a museum. Alcott was a tom-boy as a young girl, much like her character, Jo March. As a young adult, Alcott worked as a seamstress, a teacher and a maid. But she always loved to write. Some of her poems and short stories appeared in magazines when she was barely 20 and her first book was published when she was 22. Alcott wrote the mostly autobiographical Little Women at Orchard House when she was just 35 at the request of her publisher who asked her to write a story for girls. It is the tale of three sisters growing up in New England during the Civil War era.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Amherst Academy and, for a short time, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She began writing poetry at the age of twenty. But by the age of 23, she had become a virtual recluse and only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime. Most of Dickinson's work surfaced in the five to ten years following her death, thanks in large part to the efforts of her sister, Lavinia. Dickinson's work began to gain popularity in the 1920's and 1930's. However, it was not until 1955, almost 70 years after her death, that a complete volume of her works became available.

Janet Egleson Dunleavy (1928-2000)
Gareth W. Dunleavy (1923-2004)

Janet and Gareth Dunleavy were husband and wife. Prior to their retirement, they were both professors of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Each was an author and scholar but they collaborated on several books, most notably Douglas Hyde, A Make of Modern Ireland (a biography of the first president of modern Ireland) and The O’Conor Papers (a descriptive catalogue and surname register of the materials at Clonalis House). During their marriage, they collected numerous rare editions and early manuscripts including the Gareth and Janet Dunleavy Chaucer Collection and the Janet E. Dunleavy Collection of Great Women Writers, both now housed in Special Collections at the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Although Frost was born in San Francisco, when he was eleven, he moved to Massachusetts with his mother and lived in New England for most of his life. He attended Dartmouth College in Vermont and then attended Harvard for two years. He published his first collection of poems in 1912. He taught at Plymouth State College (now Plymouth State University), Amherst College and Michigan University. He personally recited two of his poems at the inauguration of President Kennedy in 1961 and traveled to the Soviet Union in 1962 on a mission of goodwill. During his lifetime, Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times.

John Grisham (1955- )

Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas. He dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player, but realized at an early age that he should seek an alternate career. He attended college at Mississippi State University, majoring in accounting. He continued his education at Ole Miss, graduating from law school in 1981 and began practicing in the small town of Southaven, Mississippi. His first novel, A Time to Kill was actually based, in part, on a case he observed one day while in court waiting for his own client’s case to be heard. His second novel, The Firm, was a best seller and he has continued to write novels (all bestsellers) and one original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man, ever since.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 -1864)

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804, the son of a sea captain and a descendent of John Hawthorne, reputed to have been one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft trials of the late 1600's. His early works (1825-1836) included numerous short stories. He then tried his hand at children's stories including the well-known collection entitled Twice Told Tales. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850. It tells of an illicit affair between a young married woman and her minister and is set in a 17th century Puritan village in New England.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. He attended Harvard and following graduation, started a career as a land surveyor. He quickly abandoned that business and worked for a number of years as a school teacher. But in his heart he was a writer and ended up doing odd jobs for his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, so he could concentrate on his essays. Walden, was published in 1854 and is arguably his best known work. It details his two years of solitude on the shores of Walden Pond in a small house he built by himself.

Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

Arthur Miller was born in New York and grew up in Brooklyn in a house that was the inspiration for his best known play, Death of a Salesman. Miller attended college at the University of Michigan, but returned to New York after graduation, writing scripts for radio programs. Another of Miller’s well known works, The Crucible, was recently made into a movie. Ironically, Miller was not permitted to attend the premiere of his play in Brussels in 1953 because, at the time, he was under scrutiny by a committee of the United States Congress investigating Communist influence in the arts and he could not get a passport. In additional to his long and successful career, Miller is also well-known as the husband of Marilyn Monroe. They divorced only a year before she died.

Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949)

Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta and as a child was fascinated with stories of the Civil War. She entered Smith College in 1918, shortly after the United States had entered World War I. But within a year, her fiancé was killed in action in France and her mother died from influenza, so returned to Atlanta to care for her father and brother. She made her formal society debut in 1920, but became better known as a flapper – seeking excitement at every turn. Within a two year span, she married and divorced and married again. Her sweeping novel, Gone With The Wind, was published in 1936. A year later, the work earned her the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and in 1939, the famous motion picture premiered at the Loew’s Grand Theater in Atlanta. Just ten years later, Mitchell was struck by a car and killed in Atlanta, only a few blocks from her home.