American poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts. After studying at Harvard and teaching for a brief time, Emerson entered the ministry. He was appointed to the Old Second Church in his native city, but soon became an unwilling preacher. Unable in conscience to administer the sacrament of the Lord's Supper after the death of his nineteen-year-old wife of tuberculosis, Emerson resigned his pastorate in 1831. The following year, he sailed for Europe, visiting Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Carlyle, the Scottish-born English writer, was famous for his explosive attacks on hypocrisy and materialism, his distrust of democracy, and his highly romantic belief in the power of the individual. Emerson's friendship with Carlyle was both lasting and significant; the insights of the British thinker helped Emerson formulate his own philosophy.
        On his return to New England, Emerson became known for challenging traditional thought. In 1835, he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson, and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. Known in the local literary circle as "The Sage of Concord," Emerson became the chief spokesman for Transcendentalism, the American philosophic and literary movement. Centered in New England during the 19th century, Transcendentalism was a reaction against scientific rationalism. Emerson's first book, Nature (1836), is perhaps the best expression of his Transcendentalism, the belief that everything in our world—even a drop of dew—is a microcosm of the universe. His concept of the Over-Soul—a Supreme Mind that every man and woman share—allowed Transcendentalists to disregard external authority and to rely instead on direct experience. "Trust thyself," Emerson's motto, became the code of Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and W. E. Channing. From 1842 to 1844, Emerson edited the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial.
        Emerson wrote a poetic prose, ordering his essays by recurring themes and images. His poetry, on the other hand, is often called harsh and didactic. Among Emerson's most well known works are Essays, First and Second Series (1841, 1844). The First Series includes Emerson's famous essay, "Self-Reliance," in which the writer instructs his listener to examine his relationship with Nature and God, and to trust his own judgment above all others. Emerson's other volumes include Poems (1847), Representative Men, The Conduct of Life (1860), and English Traits (1865). His best-known addresses are The American Scholar (1837) and The Divinity School Address, which he delivered before the graduates of the Harvard Divinity School, shocking Boston's conservative clergymen with his descriptions of the divinity of man and the humanity of Jesus.
        Emerson's philosophy is characterized by its reliance on intuition as the only way to comprehend reality, and his concepts owe much to the works of Plotinus, Swedenborg, and Böhme. A believer in the "divine sufficiency of the individual," Emerson was a steady optimist. His refusal to grant the existence of evil caused Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James, Sr., among others, to doubt his judgment. In spite of their skepticism, Emerson's beliefs are of central importance in the history of American culture. Ralph Waldo Emerson died of pneumonia in 1882.
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/201

        Writer. Born William Sydney Porter, on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina. The American short-story writer, who wrote under the pseudonym O. Henry, pioneered in picturing the lives of lower-class and middle-class New Yorkers. Porter attended school for a short time, then clerked in an uncle's drugstore. At the age of 20 William Sydney Porter went to Texas, working first on a ranch and later as a bank teller. In 1887 he married and began to write freelance sketches. A few years later he founded a humorous weekly, the Rolling Stone. When this failed, he became a reporter and columnist on the Houston Post. Indicted in 1896 for embezzling bank funds (actually a result of technical mismanagement), Porter fled to a reporting job in New Orleans, then to Honduras. When news of his wife's serious illness reached him, he returned to Texas. After her death William Sydney Porter was imprisoned in Columbus, Ohio. During his three-year incarceration, he wrote adventure stories set in Texas and Central America that quickly became popular and were collected inCabbages and Kings (1904).
        Released from prison in 1902, Porter went to New York City, his home and the setting of most of his fiction for the remainder of his life. Writing prodigiously under the pen name O. Henry, he completed one story a week for a newspaper, in addition to other stories for magazines. Popular collections of his stories included The Four Million (1906); Heart of the West and The Trimmed Lamp(both 1907); The Gentle Grafter and The Voice of the City (both 1908); Options (1909); and Whirligigs and Strictly Business (both 1910). O. Henry's most representative collection was probably The Four Million. The title and the stories answered the snobbish claim of socialite Ward McAllister that only 400 people in New York "were really worth noticing" by detailing events in the lives of everyday Manhattanites. In his most famous story, "The Gift of the Magi," a poverty-stricken New York couple secretly sell valued possessions to buy one another Christmas gifts. Ironically, the wife sells her hair so that she can buy her husband a watch chain, while he sells his watch so that he can buy her a pair of combs.
         Incapable of integrating a book-length narrative, O. Henry was skilled in plotting short ones. He wrote in a dry, humorous style and, as in "The Gift of the Magi," frequently used coincidences and surprise endings to underline ironies. Even after O. Henry's death on June 5, 1910, stories continued to be collected: Sixes and Sevens(1911); Rolling Stones (1912); Waifs and Strays (1917); O. Henryana (1920); Letters to Lithopolis (1922); Postscripts (1923); and O. Henry Encore (1939).
http://www.biography.com/people/william-sydney-porter-9542046

        A British novelist, short story writer, fighter pilot and screenwriter.  His parents were from Norway, but he was born in Wales, 1916. The family used to spend the summer holidays on a little Norwegian island, swimming, fishing and going by boat. When Roald was four years old, his father died, so his mother had to organise the trip alone for herself and her six children. 
        At school, he was always homesick. At St. Peter's Prep School, all the letters home were controlled by the headmaster, and afterwards at Repton Public School, he had to wear a horrible school uniform [with braces, waist coat, hat and lots of buttons, all black]. The younger boys were often punished by the headmaster and the older boys called prefects. Roald lays much emphasis on describing the school-beatups in his book. You could get beaten for small mistakes like leaving a football sock on the floor, for burning the prefect's toast at teatime or for forgetting to change into house-shoes at six o'clock. The most terrible beatings, however, were given by the headmaster himself, who was also a clergyman. He was so cruel, that he made a pause after each beat to smoke his pipe and talk about sins and wrongdoing, while the boy had to remain kneeling. After ten beats, the victim was told to wash away the blood first, before putting on the trousers. By the way, this headmaster became later the Archbishop of Canterbury. Roald Dahl kept telling himself, that if this was one of God's chosen men, there was something going very wrong about the whole business. 
        After school, Roald Dahl didn't go to university, but applied for a job at the Shell company, because he was sure they would send him abroad. He was sent to East Africa, where he got the adventure he wanted: great heat, crocodiles, snakes and safaries. He lived in the jungle, learned to speak Swahili and suffered from malaria. When the second World War broke out, he went to Nairobi to join the Royal Air Force. He was a fighter pilot and shot down German planes and got shot down himself. After 6 months in hospital he flew again. 
        In 1942, he went to Washington as Assistant Air Attaché. There, he started writing short stories. In 1943, he published his first children's book "The Gremlins " with Walt Disney and in 1945 his first book of short stories appeared in the US. His marriage with the actress Patricia Neal was unhappy. None of their kids survived, his wife suffered a stroke. When she regained consciousness, she could hardly read, count and talk. But Roald managed to nurse her back to health, so that she could act again. Nevertheless, he got divorced in 1983 and married Felicity Crosland. He recieved several awards, such as the Edgar Allan Poe Award. 
        His collections of short stories have been translated into many languages and have been best-sellers all over the world. Among them are "Someone Like You ", "Sweet Mystery Of Life ", "Kiss Kiss " and "Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories ". He wrote TV series like "Tales of the Unexpected " and the novel "My Uncle Oswald ". 
        His books are mostly fantasy, and full of imagination. They are always a little cruel, but never without humour - a thrilling mixture of the grotesque and comic. A frequent motif is, that people are not, what they appear to be. Mary Maloney in "Lamb to the Slaughter ", for example, is not a friendly widow, but a clever murderess. In his stories, the background is perfectly worked out: details are very close to reality. 
        Roald Dahl didn't only write books for grown-ups, but also for children, such as "James and the Giant Peach ", "Fantastic Mr. Fox " and "The Gremlins ". About his children's stories he said once: "I make my points by exaggerating wildly. That's the only way to get through to children." Roald Dahl is perhaps the most popular and best-selling children's book author. However, these stories are so sarcastic and humorous, that also adults appreciate reading them.  Roald Dahl died in November 1990. The Times called him "one of the most widely read and influential writers of our generation"
http://www.poemhunter.com/roald-dahl/biography/

        Writer. Born February 19, 1952 in Oakland, California. Tan grew up in Northern California, but when her father and older brother both died from brain tumors in 1966, she moved with her mother and younger brother to Europe, where she attended high school in Montreux, Switzerland. She returned to the United States for college, attending Linfield College in Oregon, San Jose City College, San Jose State University, the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of California at Berkeley.
        After college, Tan worked as a language development consultant and as a corporate freelance writer. In 1985, she wrote the story "Rules of the Game" for a writing workshop, which formed the early foundation for her first novel The Joy Luck Club. Published in 1989, the book explored the relationship between Chinese women and their Chinese-American daughters, and became the longest-running New York Times bestseller for that year. The Joy Luck Club received numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award. It has been translated into 25 languages, including Chinese, and was made into a major motion picture for which Tan co-wrote the screenplay.
        Her other two books, The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) and The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), have also appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Her latest novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, was published in 2001. Tan has also written two children's books:The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), the latter of which was adapted to television for PBS.
        Amy Tan has been married to her husband, Lou DeMattei, for over twenty years. They live in San Francisco and New York.
http://www.biography.com/people/amy-tan-9542574

        Poe’s stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the “art for art’s sake” movement in nineteenth-century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work’s effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe’s poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late nineteenth century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature. It is this philosophical and artistic transaction that accounts for much of Poe’s importance in literary history.
        Poe’s father and mother were professional actors who at the time of his birth were members of a repertory company in Boston. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died, and he was raised in the home of John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia, who never legally adopted his foster son. As a boy, Poe attended the best schools available, and was admitted to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825. While there he distinguished himself academically but was forced to leave after less than a year because of bad debts and inadequate financial support from Allan. Poe’s relationship with Allan disintegrated upon his return to Richmond in 1827, and soon after Poe left for Boston, where he enlisted in the army and also published his first poetry collection, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. The volume went unnoticed by readers and reviewers, and a second collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, received only slightly more attention when it appeared in 1829. That same year Poe was honorably discharged from the army, having attained the rank of regimental sergeant major, and was then admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point. However, because Allan would neither provide his foster son with sufficient funds to maintain himself as a cadet nor give the consent necessary to resign from the Academy, Poe gained a dismissal by ignoring his duties and violating regulations. He subsequently went to New York City, where Poems, his third collection of verse, was published in 1831, and then to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm.
        Over the next few years Poe’s first short stories appeared in the PhiladelphiaSaturday Courier and his “MS. Found in a Bottle” won a cash prize for best story in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. Nevertheless, Poe was still not earning enough to live independently, nor did Allan’s death in 1834 provide him with a legacy. The following year, however, his financial problems were temporarily alleviated when he accepted an editorship at The Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his twelve-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The Southern Literary Messenger was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next ten years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature. While Poe’s writings gained attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the profits from his work remained meager, and he supported himself by editing Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. After his wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in a number of romantic affairs. It was while he prepared for his second marriage that Poe, for reasons unknown, arrived in Baltimore in late September of 1849. On October 3, he was discovered in a state of semi-consciousness; he died four days later without regaining the necessary lucidity to explain what had happened during the last days of his life.
        Poe’s most conspicuous contribution to world literature derives from the analytical method he practiced both as a creative author and as a critic of the works of his contemporaries. His self-declared intention was to formulate strictly artistic ideals in a milieu that he thought overly concerned with the utilitarian value of literature, a tendency he termed the “heresy of the Didactic.” While Poe’s position includes the chief requisites of pure aestheticism, his emphasis on literary formalism was directly linked to his philosophical ideals: through the calculated use of language one may express, though always imperfectly, a vision of truth and the essential condition of human existence. Poe’s theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader’s sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in “tales of ratiocination” or works evoking “terror, or passion, or horror.”
        Aside from a common theoretical basis, there is a psychological intensity that is characteristic of Poe’s writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories—which include “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character’s psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the school of psychological realism. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as “The Fall of the House of Usher,”“The Masque of the Red Death,” and “Ligeia” an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and also links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The influence of Poe’s tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. In addition to his achievement as creator of the modern horror tale, Poe is also credited with parenting two other popular genres: science fiction and the detective story. In such works as “The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall” and “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” Poe took advantage of the fascination for science and technology that emerged in the early nineteenth century to produce speculative and fantastic narratives which anticipate a type of literature that did not become widely practiced until the twentieth century. Similarly, Poe’s three tales of ratiocination--”The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget”—are recognized as the models which established the major characters and literary conventions of detective fiction, specifically the amateur sleuth who solves a crime that has confounded the authorities and whose feats of deductive reasoning are documented by an admiring associate. Just as Poe influenced many succeeding authors and is regarded as an ancestor of such major literary movements as Symbolism and Surrealism, he was also influenced by earlier literary figures and movements. In his use of the demonic and the grotesque, Poe evidenced the impact of the stories of E.T.A. Hoffman and the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, while the despair and melancholy in much of his writing reflects an affinity with the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. It was Poe’s particular genius that in his work he gave consummate artistic form both to his personal obsessions and those of previous literary generations, at the same time creating new forms which provided a means of expression for future artists.
        While Poe is most often remembered for his short fiction, his first love as a writer was poetry, which he began writing during his adolescence. His early verse reflects the influence of such English romantics as Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, yet foreshadows his later poetry which demonstrates a subjective outlook and surreal, mystic vision. “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf” exemplify Poe’s evolution from the portrayal of Byronic heroes to the depiction of journeys within his own imagination and subconscious. The former piece, reminiscent of Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” recounts the life and adventures of a fourteenth-century Mongol conqueror; the latter poem portrays a dreamworld where neither good nor evil permanently reside and where absolute beauty can be directly discerned. In other poems--”To Helen,” “Lenore,” and “The Raven” in particular—Poe investigates the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in regaining it. These pieces are usually narrated by a young man who laments the untimely death of his beloved. “To Helen” is a three stanza lyric that has been called one of the most beautiful love poems in the English language. The subject of the work is a woman who becomes, in the eyes of the narrator, a personification of the classical beauty of ancient Greece and Rome. “Lenore”presents ways in which the dead are best remembered, either by mourning or celebrating life beyond earthly boundaries. In “The Raven,” Poe successfully unites his philosophical and aesthetic ideals. In this psychological piece, a young scholar is emotionally tormented by a raven’s ominous repetition of “Nevermore” in answer to his question about the probability of an afterlife with his deceased lover. Charles Baudelaire noted in his introduction to the French edition of “The Raven”: “It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor drivelling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible.” Poe also wrote poems that were intended to be read aloud. Experimenting with combinations of sound and rhythm, he employed such technical devices as repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to produce works that are unique in American poetry for their haunting, musical quality. In “The Bells,” for example, the repetition of the word “bells” in various structures accentuates the unique tonality of the different types of bells described in the poem.
        While his works were not conspicuously acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe did earn due respect as a gifted fiction writer, poet, and man of letters, and occasionally he achieved a measure of popular success, especially following the appearance of “The Raven.”After his death, however, the history of his critical reception becomes one of dramatically uneven judgments and interpretations. This state of affairs was initiated by Poe’s one-time friend and literary executor R.W. Griswold, who, in a libelous obituary notice in the New York Tribune bearing the byline “Ludwig,” attributed the depravity and psychological aberrations of many of the characters in Poe’s fiction to Poe himself. In retrospect, Griswold’s vilifications seem ultimately to have elicited as much sympathy as censure with respect to Poe and his work, leading subsequent biographers of the late nineteenth century to defend, sometimes too devotedly, Poe’s name. It was not until the 1941 biography by A.H. Quinn that a balanced view was provided of Poe, his work, and the relationship between the author’s life and his imagination. Nevertheless, the identification of Poe with the murderers and madmen of his works survived and flourished in the twentieth century, most prominently in the form of psychoanalytical studies such as those of Marie Bonaparte and Joseph Wood Krutch. Added to the controversy over the sanity, or at best the maturity of Poe (Paul Elmer More called him “the poet of unripe boys and unsound men”), was the question of the value of Poe’s works as serious literature. At the forefront of Poe’s detractors were such eminent figures as Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and T. S. Eliot, who dismissed Poe’s works as juvenile, vulgar, and artistically debased; in contrast, these same works have been judged to be of the highest literary merit by such writers as Bernard Shaw and William Carlos Williams. Complementing Poe’s erratic reputation among English and American critics is the more stable, and generally more elevated opinion of critics elsewhere in the world, particularly in France. Following the extensive translations and commentaries of Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s, Poe’s works were received with a peculiar esteem by French writers, most profoundly those associated with the late nineteenth-century movement of Symbolism, who admired Poe’s transcendent aspirations as a poet; the twentieth-century movement of Surrealism, which valued Poe’s bizarre and apparently unruled imagination; and such figures as Paul Valery, who found in Poe’s theories and thought an ideal of supreme rationalism. In other countries, Poe’s works have enjoyed a similar regard, and numerous studies have been written tracing the influence of the American author on the international literary scene, especially in Russia, Japan, Scandinavia, and Latin America.
        Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, both in its popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious forms, which represent the essential artistic manner of the twentieth century. In contrast to earlier critics who viewed the man and his works as one, criticism of the past twenty-five years has developed a view of Poe as a detached artist who was more concerned with displaying his virtuosity than with expressing his “soul,” and who maintained an ironic rather than an autobiographical relationship to his writings. While at one time critics such as Yvor Winters wished to remove Poe from literary history, his works remain integral to any conception of modernism in world literature. Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote in an essay entitled “Edgar Poe’s Tradition”: “While the New England dons primly turned the pages of Plato and Buddha beside a tea-cozy, and while Browning and Tennyson were creating a parochial fog for the English mind to relax in, Poe never lost contact with the terrible pathos of his time. Coevally with Baudelaire, and long before Conrad and Eliot, he explored the heart of darkness.”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/edgar-allan-poe?gclid=CIDP1oG2nL0CFclDMgodiEEAkg#poet

        James Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry. After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University in New York City. During this time, he held odd jobs such as assistant cook, launderer, and busboy. He also travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes's first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, (Knopf, 1930) won the Harmon gold medal for literature.
        Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period—Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen—Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.
        The critic Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1973) that Hughes "differed from most of his predecessors among black poets...in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read...Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet."
        Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer in May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed "Langston Hughes Place."
        In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind, (Simon & Schuster, 1950); Simple Stakes a Claim, (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife, (Simon & Schuster, 1953); and Simple's Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965). He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940), and cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/83

        Katherine Mansfield stares out of her photographs with a direct gaze that challenges the observer. Courageous, contradictory, self-willed, single-minded, argumentative, elusive, in both her life and her work, she has always defied the attempts of posterity to pin down the qualities that fascinated her contemporaries. Bertrand Russell admired her brain and would have liked to seduce her; Virginia Woolf said she ‘stank like a civet cat that has taken to street walking’ but admitted that she loved her ‘I suppose in my own way’, and that Katherine was the only writer whose writing she was jealous of. Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley were among a number of writers who borrowed not only her words, but also her character for their novels. D.H. Lawrence used her as the model for Gudrun in ‘Women in Love’. He and his wife lived in a ‘menage a quatre’ with Katherine and her husband which ended in such animosity that he afterwards sent her a postcard saying ‘You are a loathsome reptile; I hope you will die’. His wife Frieda also disliked Katherine but acknowledged that she ‘knew more of the truth than anyone else’.
        Katherine, often unsure of her own identity, liked to present a sharply defined focus. She had her hair cut like a Japanese doll and when other women were still struggling with Edwardian frills and flounces, had her plain, elegantly designed clothes specially made. Katherine’s writing was similarly uncluttered. ‘Life and work are one thing indivisible,’ she wrote, and for her it was true. Katherine was a passionate woman who dared to live outside the strict code decreed for young women at the beginning of the century and who did not deserve the cruelty of what she sometimes regarded as her punishment. She lived as a free spirit, loving both men and women, risking everything and paying a tragic price for freedoms which women now take for granted. Out of a short life of great daring and considerable suffering she created stories that readers always remember and that critics throughout the twentieth century have compulsively re-visited. Above all she is a writers’ writer, haunting the post modernist consciousness with a strong presence that will not go away. Elizabeth Bowen described her as ‘our missing contemporary’.
         Her influence on other writers throughout the twentieth century has been immeasurable. If it had not been for her conversations with Katherine, Virginia Woolf would probably not have written Mrs Dalloway. Carson McCullers read Katherine’s work so often as a student that the library copies of her books fell apart and had to be re-ordered. Katherine wrote constantly about the process of writing, and her letters and notebooks are among her best work. She searched for the universal through what she called the ‘Defeat of the Personal’. She was looking for a new language to express her ideas, having glimpsed the possibilities while looking at paintings by Van Gogh in the Post-Impressionist Exhibition of 1910; ‘They taught me something about writing, which was queer, a kind of freedom - or rather, a shaking free.’ Katherine’s way of looking became noticeably more painterly and she had important relationships with some of the colourists, particularly Anne Estelle Rice and J.D. Fergusson, as well as some of the younger Bloomsbury painters.
         Born in New Zealand in 1888 - the daughter of a self-made colonial merchant and financier, Katherine came to England at the age of nineteen, fell in love with a young musician - Garnet Trowell - became pregnant, rashly married her singing teacher George Bowden and then abandoned him - all within seven months of her arrival. She was taken to Germany by her mother to have the baby and there met and fell in love with a Polish writer, Floryan Sobienowski, who later blackmailed her into buying back her letters. She destroyed all her diaries and letters from this period. It is possible that Katherine became pregnant again, though peritonitis (possibly from an ectopic pregnancy) resulted in her losing one of her fallopian tubes. Shaped by these early experiences and driven to lead a double life by the necessity of concealing them, Katherine became a much more complex person ‘sexually reckless and socially excitable, temperamentally damaged by illness and as malicious and chilling as she could be appealing and vulnerable’. Subsequently she lived on her own and had numerous love affairs, eventually meeting John Middleton Murry - slightly younger and considerably less experienced.
John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield were only 22 and 23 respectively when they met in London, after she had submitted some stories to Rhythm - a review he was editing while studying at Oxford. She floats across the pages of his heavy-footed autobiographical novels, ‘superior, condescending, lovely, untouchable, tired of asking first-rate questions from second-rate people’. Within a few weeks he had moved into her flat as a lodger and shortly afterwards they became lovers at Katherine’s instigation. A few months later she had pledged the allowance she received from her father to pay the debts left by the failure of Rhythm. At the time Katherine thought her relationship with Murry would be ideal. She believed she had found someone she could share her mind with - a soul mate. Murry also wanted to be a writer. Similarly unconventional, he didn’t mind the fact that Katherine was already married. Perhaps remembering the baby she had lost and two further possible miscarriages or abortions, she desperately wanted to have Murry’s child, but her gynaecological history prevented this and Katherine continually grieved over it. She and Murry consoled themselves with fantasy children - a little Katherine and a little John - children John Murry would later father on his second wife Violet le Maistre.
Not surprisingly, since their circumstances and temperaments were so very different, the Murrys’ relationship quickly became turbulent. Whereas Katherine had had a relatively happy, financially secure upbringing in New Zealand, Murry’s childhood had been unbelievably bleak. A child prodigy who could read the Times when he was three, he was beaten and abused by his father, who nevertheless worked overtime every evening at the Penny Bank to pay for his son’s education. When Murry wrote about his childhood later - in the third person - he could recall nothing but misery. ‘There was no sunlight in his memory at all. There was only gloom and grit and sordidness, amid which he had run like a drop of water in grey dust, complete and separate and hidden. . . Why had there been no relief from it all, not one lovely, calm, sunlit thing to look back upon? Why had he worked with terror in his soul at his grammar school when he had taken his scholarship? Why had he never a moment’s enjoyment of his own cleverness, even? Terror and darkness, terror and darkness . . .’ John Murry saw gaining a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital and then to Oxford as his only way out, though the slog of study involved ‘the complete obliteration of [my] childhood’. He emerged a nervous, insecure, guilt-ridden young man with ‘a devouring desire to love and be loved’. Unfortunately the spirit of his father - the penny pinching, joyless bank-clerk was firmly lodged in Murry’s soul.
         Throughout his life, women were attracted to Murry’s vulnerability and the sadness they could perceive at the core of his personality. Katherine was no exception. She was drawn to him by the secret tragedies in her own life - some of which (like the story of her baby) were never told to him. But within two years of their first meeting, an utterly disillusioned Katherine had left Murry twice, though she always went back. He appears in her stories again and again, weak, ineffectual but well meaning - the ‘Man without a Temperament’ and ‘Je ne Parle pas Francais’.
         Part of the problem was that, while she lived with Murry, Katherine found writing extremely difficult. After the early success with In a German Pension, ill-health and personal troubles as well as her unsatisfactory relationship and the need to earn her own living, restricted her ability to write anything but a few short sketches, reviews and literary journalism. She was relatively unknown outside a small circle where she was regarded as promising, but her potential as yet unrealised. This aggravated Katherine. After one dinner party with Virginia Woolf and her literary friends Katherine said she had felt all evening as if she wanted to jump up and shout ‘I, too, write a little!’ It was John Murry who was seen as the important ‘man of letters’; a career writer, editing weighty periodicals, churning out critical essays and biographies as well as a series of turgid novels, and expecting Katherine to support him - emotionally and sometimes financially. ‘Art is absolutely self-development’ Katherine observed, but for women it was ‘the hopelessly insipid doctrine that love is the only thing in the world, taught, hammered into women, from generation to generation, which hampers us so cruelly.’ Yet she was unable to prevent herself from falling into the trap, walking about ‘with a mind full of ghosts and saucepans and primus stoves’ and Middleton Murry calling from the back room ‘Tig, isn't there going to be tea?’ Katherine coped with the help of a devoted female friend, Ida Baker, the woman Katherine referred to as her ‘wife’ and nicknamed L.M. It was Ida who cared for Katherine after she was diagnosed with TB shortly before her marriage in 1918. Ida accompanied her to France and Switzerland where Katherine spent long periods as her health deteriorated.
         For the last five years of Katherine’s life - even after their marriage - the Murrys often lived apart and communicated by letter. They got on better that way. Theirs was a relationship constructed from words on paper across vast absences necessitated by Katherine’s ill-health and their mutually incompatible temperaments. When they lived together, their attempts at intimacy always foundered because the reality of their relationship could never bear comparison with the fictional entity they had created in their letters. There was also the invidious presence of the essential Ida. They were both unfaithful, but clung together like survivors of a shipwreck. For ten years, until Katherine’s death, they wrote to each other almost every day and both kept detailed journals.
        In January 1923, Katherine was living at the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainebleau, trying to achieve spiritual peace in the hope that by healing the mind she could also heal the body. Aware that she was in the final stages of tuberculosis, she still hoped that she could be cured. Although she had already said a final goodbye to John Murry when she left England in the previous September, she invited him to visit her at the Institute - perhaps aware that she had very little time left. Ida Baker was working on a farm nearby so that she could be close to Katherine and her diary entries record her emotional confusion. Having devoted her whole life to loving Katherine, she couldn’t understand why her affection was not reciprocated at the same level and why Katherine always preferred the inadequate Murry to herself. On the evening of Murry’s arrival, Katherine tried to run up the stairs to go to bed, began to haemorrhage and died in the arms of the family doctor - James Young. Murry was stunned, and the burden of organising the funeral and dealing with Katherine’s belongings fell to Ida who tried diligently to carry out Katherine’s instructions.
         After her death Murry had what he described as a mystical experience, believing that ‘Katherine’s love survived her own physical death’ and that her presence would accompany him always. He vowed that he ‘would not let her die’ and proceeded to idealise their relationship, while having an affair with her friend Dorothy Brett - begun while Katherine was still alive - and another with Frieda Lawrence. But in the emotional chaos of bereavement he forgot to pay for Katherine’s funeral so that her body had to be moved into a pauper’s grave.
         Dorothy Brett believed he was going to marry her and Frieda Lawrence also had hopes of a lasting relationship with him. They were very bitter when he became abruptly engaged to Violet le Maistre within a few months of Katherine’s death. His second marriage was a strange repeat of the first. Murry could have collected an Oscar for emotional inadequacy. ‘I couldn’t love anyone but a girl,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘I don’t know what Woman is: and never shall. Not that I have avoided Woman. It is simply that I can’t see, can’t make contact with Woman. She doesn’t exist for me.’
http://www.katherinemansfield.net/life/briefbio4.html

        Kate Chopin was born Kate O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri in 1850 to Eliza and Thomas O'Flaherty. She was the third of five children, but her sisters died in infancy and her brothers (from her father's first marriage) in their early twenties. She was the only child to live past the age of twenty-five.
        In 1855, at five and a half, she was sent to The Sacred Heart Academy, a Catholic boarding school in St. Louis. Her father was killed two months later when a train on which he was riding crossed a bridge that collapsed. For the next two years she lived at home with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, all of them widows. Her great-grandmother, Victoria Verdon Charleville oversaw her education and taught her French, music, and the gossip on St. Louis women of the past. Kate O'Flaherty grew up surrounded by smart, independent, single women. They were also savvy and came from a long line of ground breaking women Victoria's own mother had been the first woman in St. Louis to obtain legal separation from her husband, after which she raised her five children and ran a shipping business on the Mississippi. Until Kate was sixteen, no married couples lived in her home, although it was full of brothers, uncles, cousins, and borders.
        She returned to the Sacred Heart Academy, where the nuns were known for their intelligence, and was top of her class. She won medals, was elected into the elite Children of Mary Society, and delivered the commencement address. After graduation she was a popular, if cynical, debutante. She wrote in her diary advice on flirting, "just keep asking 'What do you think?'" (Toth, 62).
        She grew up during the Civil War and this caused her to be separated from the one friend she had made at the Sacred Heart Academy, Kitty Garesche. Her family were slave holders and supported the South. St. Louis was a pro-North city, and the Gareshe's were forced to move. After the war, Kitty returned and she and Chopin were friends until Kitty entered Sacred Heart as a nun. There is no other evidence that Chopin had any other close female friendships.
        Kate's grandmother died three days before Christmas in 1863, the same year Kitty was banished. Kate's half-brother, George, died in the war of typhoid fever on Mardi Gras Day. Her father had died on All Saints day, eight years previously, and these unhappy incidents combined to create a strong skepticism of religion in Chopin.
        In 1870, at the age of twenty, she married Oscar Chopin, twenty-five, and the son of a wealthy cotton-growing family in Louisiana. He was French catholic in background, as was Kate. By all accounts he adored his wife, admired her independence and intelligence, and "allowed" her unheard of freedom. After their marriage they lived in New Orleans where she had five boys and two girls, all before she was twenty-eight. Oscar was not an able business man, and they were forced to move to his old home in a small Louisiana parish. Oscar died of swamp fever there in 1882 and Kate took over the running of his general store and plantation for over a year.
        In 1884 she sold up and moved back to St. Louis to live with her mother. Sadly, Eliza died the next year, leaving Kate alone with her children again. To support herself and her young family, she began to write. She was immediately successful and wrote short stories about people she had known in Louisiana. The Awakening was inspired by a true story of a New Orleans woman who was infamous in the French Quarter.
         Her first novel, At Fault, was published in 1890, followed by two collections of her short stories, Bayou Folk in 1894 and A Night in Acadia in 1897. The Awakening was published in 1899, and by then she was well known as both a local colorist and a woman writer, and had published over one hundred stories, essays, and sketches in literary magazines.
        As a writer, Kate Chopin wrote very rapidly and without much revision. She usually worked in her home surrounded by her children. The content and message of The Awakening caused an uproar and Chopin was denied admission into the St. Louis Fine Art Club based on its publication. She was terribly hurt by the reaction to the book and in the remaining five years of her life she wrote only a few short stories, and only a small number of those were published. Like Edna, she paid the price for defying societal rules, and as Lazar Ziff explains, she "learned that her society would not tolerate her questionings. Her tortured silence as the new century arrived was a loss to American letters of the order of the untimely deaths of Crane and Norris. She was alive when the twentieth century began, but she had been struck mute by a society fearful in the face of an uncertain dawn" (Ziff, 305).
        While reading The Awakening remember that it is a kunstleroman, "a tale of a young woman who struggles to realize herself - and her artistic ability" (Huf, 69) and remember that Chopin, as well as Edna, was on a quest for artistic acceptance. That quest ended in an abrupt and frustrated manner when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 22 1904.
        (Much of the above information was gathered from Kate Chopin by Emily Toth, Verging on the Abyss by Mary Papke, and Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography by Per Seyersted. Below is a chronology of her life and work taken from Dyer's The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, xii-xv)

Chronology
        1850 Born on February 8 to Eliza Faris O'Flaherty, a well connected St. Louisiana with French roots, and Captain Thomas O'Flaherty, a businessman from Ireland.
1855 Enters St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart. Father is killed in train accident.
1861 Confirmed in the Catholic Church by Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick.
1863 Grandmother dies in January; half-brother George dies of typhoid fever.
1867 Begins keeping a commonplace book of poems, essays,sketches, criticism, etc.
1868 Graduates from Sacred Heart Academy.
1869-1870 Attends debutante parties, learns to smoke, and writes her first story, "Emancipation: A Life Fable," a short story about freedom and restriction.
1870 Marries Oscar Chopin; keeps journal of European honeymoon; moves to New Orleans; Oscar's father dies in November.
1871-1878 Has five sons, Jean, Oscar Charles, George, Frederick, and Felix. Oscar Charles becomes a professional cartoonist for the San Francisco Examiner and his daughter Kate, becomes a talented artist.
1879 Oscar closes his business in New Orleans and they move to Cloutierville where he runs several small plantations and a general store.
1882 Oscar dies of malaria, leaving Kate with a heavy debt and six young boys.
1883-1884 Kate tries to run Oscar's businesses and finally decides to move home to her mother's.
1885 Her mother dies. The attending doctor, Dr. Kolbenheyer, who is the model for Dr. Mandelet in The Awakening, continues to visit Chopin and encourage her writing.
1888 Begins reading Maupassant and writes "Euphrase."
1889 Publishes her first poem, "If It Might Be," in America. Writes four stories and publishes each of them.
1890-1892 Joins the Wednesday Club, founded by Charlotte Stearns Eliot, T.S Eliot's mother, but resigns two years later. Satire of club women appears in several of her stories, and in The Awakening in the depiction of Mrs. Highcamp's daughter.
1891 Writes "Mrs. Mobry's Reason" and "A Shameful Affair," which are published in the New Orleans Times-Democrat in 1893. Publishes more stories in Youth's Companion and Harper's Young People.
1894 Writes "A Respectable Woman" (Vogue) in January, introducing the character of Gouvernail, who reappears in The Awakening. Houghton Mifflin publishes Bayou Folk in March, and Chopin becomes nationaly known as a short story writer.
1897 A Night in Acadia, a second volume of short stories is published by Way and Williams of Chicago.
1897-1898 Writes The Awakening.
1899 The Awakening published by Herbert S. Stone and Company on April 22.
         1900 Herbert S. Stone and Company reverses its decision to publish a third collection of short stories (it would not be published until Emily Toth's edition came out in 1991). Chopin writes four stories, only one of which is published.
1901 Writes and publishes only one story, "The Wood-Choppers."
1902 Publishes her last story, "Polly."
1904 Dies from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 22, after collapsing at the World's Fair, two days before.
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/hour/katebio.html

Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. She grew up in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. She is an author, poet, historian, songwriter, playwright, dancer, stage and screen producer, director, performer, singer, and civil rights activist. She is best known for her autobiographical books: All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), The Heart of a Woman (1981), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), Gather Together in My Name (1974), and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which was nominated for the National Book Award. Among her volumes of poetry are A Brave and Startling Truth (Random House, 1995), The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994), Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993), Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? (1983), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975), and Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971), which was nominated for the Pulitzer prize.
In 1959, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From 1961 to 1962 she was associate editor of The Arab Observer in Cairo, Egypt, the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East, and from 1964 to 1966 she was feature editor of the African Review in Accra, Ghana. She returned to the U.S. in 1974 and was appointed by Gerald Ford to the Bicentennial Commission and later by Jimmy Carter to the Commission for International Woman of the Year. She accepted a lifetime appointment in 1981 as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1993, Angelou wrote and delivered a poem, "On The Pulse of the Morning," at the inauguration for President Bill Clinton at his request.
The first black woman director in Hollywood, Angelou has written, produced, directed, and starred in productions for stage, film, and television. In 1971, she wrote the original screenplay and musical score for the film Georgia, Georgia, and was both author and executive producer of a five-part television miniseries "Three Way Choice." She has also written and produced several prize-winning documentaries, including "Afro-Americans in the Arts," a PBS special for which she received the Golden Eagle Award. Maya Angelou was twice nominated for a Tony award for acting: once for her Broadway debut in Look Away (1973), and again for her performance in Roots (1977). 
 http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/maya_angelou/biography