African-American poet, novelist, and playwright, who became one of the foremost interpreters of racial relationships in the United States. Influenced by the Bible, W. E...

Musical Beginning James Hurst grew up in North Carolina on a farm near the sea. After attending North Carolina State College and serving in the United States Army during World War II, he studied singing at the famous Juilliard School of Music in New York. Hoping for an operatic career, Hurst went to Italy for additional study, but he soon abandoned his musical ambitions...

Zora Neale Hurston was an American author who wrote stories, novels, anthropological folklore and an autobiography. She died in 1960 but her works have increased in popularity and are passing the test of time with staying power. She was a unique artist and scientist who produced for us a large body of work that stands equal to any body of work in American Literature and world literature...

"A succession of explorations and discoveries--that is what my life has been," says Laura Huxley, whose life continues to be a series of investigations uncovering answers for her ceaseless questions about the nature and quality of life. A child prodigy who made her first performance at Carnegie Hall while still in her teens, Mrs. Huxley began her career in the universe of violin...

Birthplace: Connecticut Current Address: Oregon I was born and grew up in Connecticut, where I graduated from Quinnipiac University. My interest in writing grew out of a love of books developed by parents who read to me and good teachers in a great school system. I’m the author of short stories and books for children and teens, and humorous greeting cards...

Born: 11 September 1862 Died: 5 June 1910 Birthplace: Greensboro, North Carolina Best known as: American short story writer Name at birth: William Sydney Porter O. Henry was the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter, who wrote colorful short stories with surprising and ironic twists. His best-known titles included "The Last of the Troubadours," "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief...

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals...

In the constellation of original artists who regenerated Swedish poetry at the end of the last century, Verner von Heidenstam was the most brilliant star. He was the leader of the generation of poets of 1890; he was the first to set forth in theory and also to realize in his works the ideal of new Swedish generations. Even in his first poems he opened new paths for imagination and form; and his later collections are in large part pure masterpieces of the lyric art...

Seamus Heaney was born in April 1939, the eldest member of a family which would eventually contain nine children. His father owned and worked a small farm of some fifty acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland, but the father’s real commitment was to cattle-dealing. There was something very congenial to Patrick Heaney about the cattle-dealer’s way of life to which he was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after the early death of his own parents...

Born in 1956 in Scotland, moved to Dublin 18 months later. Studied mathematical sciences in Trinity College Dublin. Beau press published 25 Poems, edited by Maurice Scully, in 1983...

I was born on November 15, 1862. The place of my birth is Bad Obersalzbrunn, a spa famous for its medicinal springs. The house of my birth is the inn «Zur Preussischen Krone»...

Elizabeth Harris was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1867, to parents who had been slaves. She married Jacob Walker Harris in 1883 at the age of 15 and was the mother of nine children. She lived until 1942, surviving her husband and two of her children...

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was born in Lom, Norway, and grew up in poverty in Hamarøy in Nordland. At the age of seventeen he became an apprentice to a ropemaker, and at about the same time he began to write. He spent some years in America, travelling and working at odd jobs, and published his impressions, chiefly unfavourable, under the title Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (1889) [The Intellectual Life of Modern America]...

Growing up on a small farm near Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the 1940s, Virginia Hamilton was lovingly embraced by the sights, sounds and smells of rural America, and by a big extended family of cousins, uncles, aunts. All these things would come into play in the children’s stories Hamilton would spin as an adult...

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright. Her drama A Raisin in the Sun (first performed in 1959) was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, and was the winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best Broadway play of the 1958-1959 season. In 2004, A Raisin in the Sun received a Broadway revival earning Tony Awards for Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald...