BOBBIE ANN MASON

Bobbie Ann Mason was born in 1942 and grew up on her father's dairy farm outside of Mayfield, Kentucky. As a child she loved to read, so her parents always made sure she had books. These books were mostly popular fiction about the Bobbsey Twins and the Nancy Drew mysteries. She would later write a book about these books that she loved to read as an adolescent titled "The Girl Sleuth: A feminist guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters."
After high school, Bobbie Ann Mason went on to major in journalism at the University of Kentucky. After graduating in 1962, she took several jobs in New York City with various movie magazines, writing articles about various stars that were in the spotlight. She wrote about Annette Funicello, Troy Donahue, Fabian, and other teen stars. Next, she went to graduate school at the University of Connecticut, where she subsequently received her Ph.D. in literature with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov's Ada in 1972. Her dissertation was later published in paperback form titled "Nabokov's Garden" in 1974.
By the time she was in her later thirties, Bobbie Ann started to write short stories. In 1980 The New Yorker published her first story. "It took me a long time to discover my material," she says. "It wasn't a matter of developing writing skills, it was a matter of knowing how to see things. And it took me a very long time to grow up. I'd been writing for a long time, but was never able to see what there was to write about. I always aspired to things away from home, so it took me a long time to look back at home and realize that that's where the center of my thought was." Mason writes about the working-class people of western Kentucky, and her short stories have contributed to a renaissance of regional fiction in America creating a literary style that critics have labeled "shopping mall realism."
Mason then went on to write a collection of short stories entitled "Shiloh and Other Stories. She won the 1982 Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for this work. In 1985 she wrote her first novel, "In-Country." She followed "In Country" with another novel titled "Spence and Lila" in 1988. She just recently published a new collection of stories called "Midnight Magic."
Bobbie Ann Mason is one of the country's leading fiction writers. She reportedly now resides in rural Kentucky.

A List of Her Work
The American Claimant. In Country. Spence and Lila. Feather Crowns. Midnight Magic: Selected Stories of Bobbie Ann Mason. Shiloh and Other Stories. The Girl Sleuth. Clear Springs: A Memoir. Landscapes. Love Life: Stories. Nabokov's Garden: A Guide to Ada.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in SALEM, Massachusetts. His father was a sea captain and named Nathaniel Hawthorne, and was descendent of John Hawthorne, one judge in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. His mother was Elizabeth Clark Manning Hawthorne. She withdrew to a life of seclusion which she maintained till her death; and his father died when he was only four years.

Nathaniel Hawthorne moved to Maine with his family, where he was educated at the Bowdoin Collage (1821-1824). He was friend of Longfellow and Franklin Pierce who became the 14th president of the U.S. In 1842 he got married with Sofia Peabody who was an intellectual participant in the transcendental movement.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was novelist and short story writer. His first short story, “seven tales of my native land”, was burned by himself because publishers rejected it. His first novel “fanshawe” (1828) was based on his college life and it did not receive much attention and the author burned the unsold copies. He wrote a series of book for children such as: “grandfather’s chair” (1841); “famous old people” (1841); “liberty tree” (1841); and “biographical history for children” (1842). Others relevant works were “young Goodman brown” (1835); “the birthmark” (1843); “Rappacini’s daughter” (1844); “the scarlet letter”; “the artist of the beautiful”; “the custom house” (1850); “the minister of the black veil; “the blithe dale romance” (1852); “the marble faun” (1860).
In 1853, when Franklin Pierce became president, Hawthorne who was written a camping biography, was appointed as consul in Liverpool, England; and he lived there for four years and then spent a year and half in Italy. He died on May 19th, 1864 in Plymouth, N.H. on a trip to the mountains with his friend. After his death Sofia Hawthorne edited and published his notebooks.

D.H. Lawrence

http://www.online-literature.com/dh_lawrence/


D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. "Snake" and "How Beastly the Bourgeoisie is" are probably his most anthologized poems. David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, central England. He was the fourth child of a struggling coal miner who was a heavy drinker. His mother was a former schoolteacher, greatly superior in education to her husband. Lawrence's childhood was dominated by poverty and friction between his parents. He was educated at Nottingham High School, to which he had won a scholarship. He worked as a clerk in a surgical appliance factory and then for four years as a pupil-teacher. After studies at Nottingham University, Lawrence matriculated at 22 and briefly pursued a teaching career. Lawrence's mother died in 1910; he helped her die by giving her an overdose of sleeping medicine.
In 1909, a number of Lawrence's poems were published by Ford Max Ford in the English Review. The appearance of his first novel, The White Peacock(1911), launched Lawrence into a writing career. In 1912 he met Frieda von Richthofen, the professor Ernest Weekly's wife and fell in love with her. Frieda left her husband and three children, and they eloped to Bavaria. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers appeared in 1913 and was based on his childhood . In 1914 Lawrence married Frieda von Richthofen, and traveled with her in several countries. Lawrence's fourth novel, The Rainbow (1915), was about two sisters growing up in the north of England. Lawrence started to write The Lost Girl in Italy. He dropped the novel for some years and rewrote the story in an old Sicilian farmhouse near Taormina in 1920.
During the First World War Lawrence and his wife were unable to obtain passports and were targets of constant harassment from the authorities. They were accused of spying for the Germans and officially expelled from Cornwall in 1917. The Lawrences were not permitted to emigrate until 1919, when their years of wandering began.
Lawrence's best known work is Lady Chatterly's Lover, first published privately in Florence in 1928. It tells of the love affair between a wealthy, married woman, and a man who works on her husband's estate. The book was banned for a time in both UK and the US as pornographic. Lawrence's other novels from the 1920s include Women In Love (1920), a sequel to The Rainbow.
Aaron's Rod (1922) shows the influence of Nietzsche, and in Kangaroo (1923) Lawrence expressed his own idea of a 'superman'. The Plumed Serpent (1926) was a vivid evocation of Mexico and its ancient Aztec religion. The Man Who Died (1929), is a bold story of Christ's Resurrection. Lawrence's non-fiction works include Movements In European History(1921), Psychoanalysis And The Unconscious (1922) and Studies In Classic American Literature (1923).
D.H. Lawrence died in Vence, France on March 2, 1930. He also gained posthumous renown for his expressionistic paintings completed in the 1920s.

Jane Austen
http://www.jasa.net.au/jabiog.htm

Jane Austen was a major English novelist, whose brilliantly witty, elegantly structured satirical fiction marks the transition in English literature from 18th century neo-classicism to 19th century romanticism.
Jane Austen was born on 16 December, 1775, at the rectory in the village of Steventon, near Basingstoke, in Hampshire. The seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and his wife, Cassandra, she was educated mainly at home and never lived apart from her family. She had a happy childhood amongst all her brothers and the other boys who lodged with the family and whom Mr Austen tutored. From her older sister, Cassandra, she was inseparable. To amuse themselves, the children wrote and performed plays and charades, and even as a little girl Jane was encouraged to write. The reading that she did of the books in her father's extensive library provided material for the short satirical sketches she wrote as a girl.
At the age of 14 she wrote her first novel, Love and Freindship (sic) and then A History of England by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian, together with other very amusing juvenilia. In her early twenties Jane Austen wrote the novels that were later to be re-worked and published as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. She also began a novel called The Watsons which was never completed.
As a young woman Jane enjoyed dancing (an activity which features frequently in her novels) and she attended balls in many of the great houses of the neighbourhood. She loved the country, enjoyed long country walks, and had many Hampshire friends.

Then, in July, 1809, on her brother Edward offering his mother and sisters a permanent home on his Chawton estate, the Austen ladies moved back to their beloved Hampshire countryside. It was a small but comfortable house, with a pretty garden, and most importantly it provided the settled home which Jane Austen needed in order to write. In the seven and a half years that she lived in this house, she revised Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and published them ( in 1811 and 1813) and then embarked on a period of intense productivity. Mansfield Park came out in 1814, followed by Emma in 1816 and she completed Persuasion (which was published together with Northanger Abbey in 1818, the year after her death). None of the books published in her life-time had her name on them — they were described as being written "By a Lady". In the winter of 1816 she started Sanditon, but illness prevented its completion. Jane Austen had contracted Addisons Disease, a tubercular disease of the kidneys (see Jane Austen's Illness by Sir Zachary Cope, British Medical Journal, 18 July 1964 and Australian Addisons Disease Assoc.). No longer able to walk far, she used to drive out in a little donkey carriage which can still be seen at the Jane Austen Museum at Chawton. By May 1817 she was so ill that she and Cassandra, to be near Jane's physician, rented rooms in Winchester. Tragically, there was then no cure and Jane Austen died in her sister's arms in the early hours of 18 July, 1817. She was 41 years old. She is buried in Winchester Cathedral.