Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

* Born: 22 July 1898

* Birthplace: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

* Died: 13 March 1943

* Best Known As: He wrote "The Devil And Daniel Webster"

Stephen Vincent Benét was an American poet, novelist and short story writer, the author of the famous story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1937). He won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for "John's Brown Body," the epic Civil War poem that recounts John Brown's 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry, and his novels include The Beginning of Wisdom (1921), Young People's Pride (1922) and James Shore's Daughters (1934). Beginning in the 1930s Benét worked occasionally in Hollywood, but he was primarily a poet and short story writer; his last collection of poems, Western Star won him a second (and posthumous) Pulitzer in 1944.

His short story "The Sobbin Women" was the basis for the musical Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954)... His brother, William Rose Benét, was also a Pulitzer-winning poet.


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Oskar Maria Graf (1894-1967)

Oskar Maria Graf (born July 22 1894 in Berg, Bavaria ; died June 28 1967 in New York) was a German author.

He wrote several socialist-anarchist novels and narratives about life in Bavaria, mostly autobiographical.

In the beginning Graf wrote under his real name Oskar Graf. Since 1918, he edited his works for newspapers under the pseudonym, Oskar Graf-Berg; for himself as "worth being read", regarded his works, he selected the name Oskar Maria Graf.

An apprentice baker, Graf went to Munich in 1911, where he supported himself with a variety of menial jobs. Drafted into military service, he was a soldier at the Russian front during World War I. He joined a revolutionary socialist group and participated in a strike by munitions workers and in the November Revolution that resulted in the short-lived Socialist Republic of Bavaria. After its demise in 1919, Graf worked as a director for the Munich Workers’ Theatre before turning to writing. In 1933 Graf fled Germany for Vienna and later for Czechoslovakia, and in 1938 he left Europe and eventually settled in New York.

His early work centres on themes of social revolution and protest, ideas that were never totally absent from his work, but he found his genre in stories of Bavarian folk life. He was concerned about the effects of modernity on traditional lives. Those fears are voiced in several novels about the future, in particular his utopian novel, Die Eroberung der Welt (1949; “The Conquest of the World”), reissued as Die Erben des Untergangs (1959; “The Heirs of the Ruins”).


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Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)

* Born: 22 July 1849
* Birthplace: New York, New York
* Died: 19 November 1887 (Hodgkin's disease)
* Best Known As: Author of the poem on the Statue of Liberty

Emma Lazarus was an American writer of Portugese-Jewish ancestry whose 1883 poem, "The New Colossus," is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in New York and began writing poems as a teenager. In 1886 her first collection, Poems and Translations, was published by her father. She attracted the attention and support of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and soon found herself a member in the elite literary circles of New York City. In the 1880s Lazarus was moved by the news of the Russian and Eastern European persecution of Jews to become more active as an advocate for Jewish immigrants. She published many well-received poems and essays, including "The New Colossus," now one of the most often quoted poems in U.S. history, especially the lines "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to be free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Upon returning to the U.S. from a trip to Europe, Lazarus, who was suffering from Hodgkin's disease, died at the age of 38. Her poem was placed on the Statue of Liberty in 1903. Her other works include Admetus and Other Poems (1871), The Spagnoletto: A Drama in Verse (1876), Songs of a Semite (1882) and the novel Alide: An Episode in Goethe's Life (1874).


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Hart Crane (1899-1932)

* Born: 21 July 1899

* Birthplace: Garrettsville, Ohio

* Died: 27 April 1932 (suicide)

* Best Known As: Suicidal poet of The Bridge

Name at birth: Harold Hart Crane

Bright, volatile, short-lived and hard-drinking, Crane was in some ways an archetype of the Roaring Twenties author. Crane is best known for The Bridge (1930), an epic vision of American life with the Brooklyn Bridge as a central image. Crane is often compared to Walt Whitman, both for his modern American sensibilities and for the homoerotic imagery some find in his work. In sheer style Crane also resembled T.S. Eliot, whom he admired. Crane committed suicide by leaping from the S.S. Orizaba in 1932.

Crane was no relation to Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage.

Crane's personal life was anguished and turbulent. After an unhappy childhood during which he was torn between estranged parents, he held a variety of uninteresting jobs, always, however, returning to New York City and his writing. An alcoholic and a homosexual, he was constantly plagued by money problems and was often a severe trial to friends who tried to help him. In 1931 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Mexico to work on a long poem about Latin America; a year later, returning by ship to the United States, the poem not even started, he jumped overboard and drowned. His collected poems were published in 1933.


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Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

* Born: 21 July 1899

* Birthplace: Oak Park, Illinois

* Died: 2 July 1961 (suicide)

* Best Known As: Famously manly author of For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most famous American writers of the 20th century. He wrote novels and short stories about outdoorsmen, expatriates, soldiers and other men of action, and his plainspoken no-frills writing style became so famous that it was (and still is) frequently parodied. His dashing machismo was almost as famous as his writing: he lived in Paris, Cuba and Key West, fancied bullfighting and big game hunting, and served as a war correspondent in WWII and the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway sealed his own notoriety when he killed himself with a shotgun in 1961. His books include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). His short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and Hemingway was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His memoir of his early life in Paris, A Moveable Feast, was published posthumously in 1964.

Hemingway is also called by his familiar nickname "Papa"... His birthdate is sometimes listed in error as 1898. According to a 1954 article in the New York Times, "In most reference books and in his own conversation he is one year older because he gave 1898 as his birth date when he tried to enlist [in the army] early in 1917, and stuck to that date ever since"... Hemingway's father also committed suicide, shooting himself with a Civil War pistol in 1928... He wrote several short stories about the character Nick Adams, his youthful alter ego; they were collected in The Nick Adams Stories in 1972


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Jessamyn West (1907-1984)

American novelist, born in . Indiana, USA . A Quaker herself, her most famous novel is The Friendly Persuasion (1945), about the conflicts felt by a Quaker farm family during the Civil War. Other works include the novels Cress Delahanty (1954) and Except for Me and Thee (1969), a sequel to The Friendly Persuasion; collections of stories including Love, Death, and the Ladies Drill Team (1955), and Collected Stories (1987); and the autobiographical Hide and Seek (1973) and The Woman Said Yes (1976).


Works: Works by Jessamyn West

1945 The Friendly Persuasion. The Indiana-born author's debut is a series of affectionate and humorous sketches recalling her ancestors, a Quaker farming family during the second half of the nineteenth century. The story would be adapted as a film, starring Gary Cooper, in 1956.

1953 Cress Delahanty. One of West's most popular and best works is this series of episodes in the title character's development from ages twelve to sixteen.


Quotes By: Jessamyn West

"A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself."

"To meet at all, one must open ones eyes to another; and there is no true conversation no matter how many words are spoken, unless the eye, unveiled and listening, opens itself to the other."

"It's very easy to forgive others their mistakes, it takes more gut and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own."

"If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one."

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."

"I have done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt."


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Clifford Odets (1906-1963)

American dramatist, born in Philadelphia. After graduating from high school he became an actor and in 1931 joined the Group Theatre. Turning his attention from acting to playwriting, Odets soon came to be regarded as the most gifted of the American naturalistic social-protest dramatists of the 1930s.

His first work for the Group, Waiting for Lefty (1935), a vernacular, Marxian drama of the awakening and insurgency of the impoverished working classes, aroused immediate international attention. Awake and Sing (1935), his first full-length play and widely considered his best work, compassionately portrays the struggles and rebellion of a financially destitute Jewish-American family. Other plays include Till the Day I Die (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), Night Music (1939), and Clash by Night (1942). Odets spent many years in Hollywood writing film scripts, e.g., Sweet Smell of Success (1957). In his later plays he turned from social drama to self-conscious dramas of the individual, such as The Big Knife (1949), The Country Girl (1950), and The Flowering Peach (1954).


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