By Elodie Barnes | On September 24, 2019 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Kay Boyle (February 19, 1902 – December 27, 1992) was an American author of novels and short stories, and later in life, a political activist.
During her long and tumultuous life and prolific career, she produced almost forty volumes of work, including novels, short stories, essays, poems, plays, and children’s books. (photo above right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Much of her writing was autobiographical, drawing on a rich and colorful personal life — she married three times, had six children and two stepchildren, lived in Paris, Austria and Germany, and, in later years, was imprisoned twice for her political activism and opposition to the Vietnam War.
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By Skyler Gomez | On September 16, 2019 | Updated September 25, 2023 | Comments (0)
Rosario Castellanos (born Rosario Castellanos Figueroa; May 25, 1925 – August 7, 1974), author, poet, and diplomat, was one of Mexico’s most influential literary voices of the twentieth century.
This brief biography will examine her life and work, which dealt with issues of culture and gender in her home country, and which went on to influence contemporary Mexican feminist theory and cultural studies.
Castellanos was born in Mexico City and raised near her family’s ranch in Comitán in the southern state of Chiapas near the Guatemalan border. She was quite shy as a child and never completely felt part of her family. A soothsayer once told her mother that one of her two children would die, and she screamed, “Not the boy!”
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By Nava Atlas | On August 30, 2019 | Updated August 22, 2025 | Comments (0)
Radclyffe Hall (August 12, 1880 – October 7, 1943), British novelist and poet, is remembered as the author of groundbreaking lesbian literature; her most enduring work is the controversial 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness.
Hall’s struggles with love and gender identity worked their way into her fiction and contributed to a complicated, often unhappy life. (photo at right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Born in Bournemouth, Hampshire, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall’s father was a wealthy Englishman with the unusual moniker Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall, and her mother, Mary Jane Diehl, was American. Read More→
By Marcie McCauley | On August 9, 2019 | Updated February 7, 2026 | Comments (1)
Natalie Babbitt (July 28, 1932 – October 31, 2016) was an American author and illustrator of children’s books, best known for Tuck Everlasting (1975).
Born in Dayton, Ohio, her first ambition was to be a pirate. By second grade, she decided that she wanted to grow up to be a librarian.
She discussed her aspirations in Anita Silvey’s The Essential Guide to Children’s Books and Their Creators: “I might have made a pretty good librarian, but with my distaste for heavy exercise, I would probably have made a poor pirate.”
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