By Nava Atlas | On June 1, 2018 | Updated August 24, 2022 | Comments (0)
May Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) born Eleanore Marie Sarton, was an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Born in Belgium, her family moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1915 after briefly living in England.
Her mother was the English artist Mable Elwes Sarton, and her father, George Sarton, was a science historian.
Sarton began writing poetry when she was in her teens. After graduating from high school, she moved to New York City with notions of becoming an actress. She joined the New York’s Civic Repertory Theater and even tried her hand at starting and running such a venture, launching Associated Actor’s Theater in 1933. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On May 31, 2018 | Updated March 17, 2026 | Comments (1)
Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 –February 19, 2016) was an American author best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).
Born in Monroeville, Alabama, she was originally named Nelle Harper Lee.
Few novels have had the cultural impact of To Kill a Mockingbird, which has sold tens of millions of copies and has been translated into more than forty languages. Lee drew from her upbringing in a small southern town to tell an indelible American story. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On May 28, 2018 | Updated January 26, 2026 | Comments (3)
Betty Smith (December 15, 1896 – January 17, 1972), an American novelist and playwright, is best remembered for her evocative coming-of-age story, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Born Elizabeth Wehner, she shared a birthdate — December 15 — with the heroine of that beloved novel, Francie Nolan (though the author’s birth year was five years earlier than Francie’s).
Betty herself had a rough childhood, growing up in the tenements of Brooklyn at the dawn of the 1900s. The family moved several times before settling in a top-floor tenement on Grand Street that served as the model for the Nolan family’s flat in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On May 25, 2018 | Updated January 23, 2023 | Comments (2)
E. Nesbit (August 15, 1858 – May 4, 1924), full name Edith Nesbit, was an English novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for her imaginative books for children.
Born in Kennington, Surrey, a sister’s poor health compelled the family to move almost continually until she was in her late teens. An imaginative yet nervous child, the family’s peripatetic ways would have an impact on the stories she eventually became famous for.
At eighteen, Edith married Hubert Bland. Though the couple had five children, the marriage was an unstable one, marked by Bland’s philandering and inability to make a living. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On May 22, 2018 | Updated July 27, 2026 | Comments (0)
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941), born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, epitomized rare literary genius. Despite debilitating battles with mental illness, Woolf produced a body of work considered among the most groundbreaking in twentieth-century literature.
Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was a literary critic, and her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen, was a renowned beauty and artists’ model. Her mother’s sudden death when she was thirteen may have been the catalyst for the first of her recurrent breakdowns.
As a young woman, Woolf developed her writer’s voice with a number of literary pursuits. She reviewed books for the Times Literary Supplement, wrote scores of articles and essays, and for a short time, taught English and history at Morley College in London (she herself had never earned a degree). Read More→
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