 |
 Lyman Frank Baum
loved to tell stories to children in his
neighborhood. In 1900, he put one of those
stories into book form under the title The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He subsequently went
on to produce seventeen sequels. He was also the
author of Father Goose, His Book, which
was published in 1899 and became the best selling
children's book of the year. |
 Gwendolyn Brooks
became the first African-American to receive the
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950, for Annie
Allen, a loosely-connected series of poems
related to a black girl's growing up in Chicago. |
 James Branch Cabell
attracted his greatest fame following the 1919
publication of Jurgen, thanks to an
obscenity trial which not only brought him
notoriety but also boosted sales of the book. |
 Raymond Thornton
Chandler was one of the leading
writers of detective fiction. His most famous
character, Philip Marlowe, was first introduced
in 1939, in The Big Sleep. |
 Zane
Grey wrote almost 90 books. Although
best known for westerns, he also wrote books with
fishing themes, many stories, a biography of
George Washington as a young man, and several
stories for children. |
 James Langston Hughes
was one of the leading writers of the Harlem
Renaissance Movement of the twenties. His desire
was to tell the stories of his own people in ways
that reflected their actual culture, including
both their suffering and their love of music,
laughter, and language itself. |
 Edgar Lee Masters
published over 25 books of poetry but only
enjoyed success with Spoon
River Anthology (1915), a collection of over
200 monologues from the dead in an Illinois
graveyard |
 Henry Louis Mencken
was the first American to be widely read as a
critic. His columns addressed many of the social
issues of his day, from civil rights and social
darwinism to Prohibition and the Great
Depression. |
 James Albert Michener
spent a lifetime visiting many of the countries
of the world, and writing novels based on his
travels. His first book, Tales of the South
Pacific, earned him the 1948 Pulitzer Prize
for Literature; it was adapted into the
long-running Broadway play "South
Pacific," which in turn was made into a
major motion picture. |
 Eugene Gladstone
O'Neill became the only American
dramatist to date to be awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature. Many of his works drew their
inspiration from his own less-than-ideal life,
including Long Day's Journey Into Night
and The Iceman Cometh. |
 Ezra Loomis Pound
is probably best remembered for his monumental
work Cantos, published between 1925 and
1969. In this work he traced the rise and fall of
Eastern and Western empires, with special
emphasis on what he saw as the destructive role
of materialism and greed. |
 Carl Sandburg
received the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History for
his monumental history of Abraham Lincoln. He was
also the recipient of the 1951 Pultizer Prize for
Poetry. |
 Laura Ingalls Wilder
spent most of her childhood traveling the Great
Plains from one homestead to another. She turned
the story of her life into a series of eight
books known as the "Little House"
series, which in turn inspired a television
series. |
