By Nava Atlas | On March 13, 2018 | Updated August 25, 2022 | Comments (0)
Dorothy West (June 2, 1907 – August 16, 1998) was an American author and editor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Boston, she started writing as a child and began receiving accolades and awards while still in her teens.
Her writing is admired for its nuanced views of middle and upper middle-class African-American communities and how it comments on gender, class, and social structure through storytelling. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 11, 2018 | Updated August 30, 2025 | Comments (0)
Jane Austen (December 16, 1775 – July 18, 1817), the renowned British author, led a writing life of the inimitable artist. Despite the popular portrayal of her as all charm and modesty, she was a writer and observer with full mastery of her gifts. She cared deeply about getting published and being read, despite myths to the contrary.
Six exquisite novels crafted with compassion, humor, and insight into the travails of the sexes and social classes assured her lofty position in literary history.
These were Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion (there were also unfinished novels — The Watsons and Sanditon).
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By Nava Atlas | On March 10, 2018 | Updated January 31, 2023 | Comments (2)
Isak Dinesen (April 17, 1885 – September 7, 1962) was a Danish author best known for Out of Africa (1937), a now-controversial memoir of her life as the owner of a coffee plantation in colonial Kenya of the 1920s.
She’s also considered a master of short-form fiction. One of her best known collections is Seven Gothic Tales, and a standout short story (turned film) is “Babette’s Feast” (1958).
Though admired as a master storyteller, contemporary reconsiderations of her work shed light on the inherent racism in her portrayals of the Africans she lived amongst during the colonial period. This issue will be discussed later in this brief biography. A complex personality, Dinesen’s place in modern literature continues to be debated. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 9, 2018 | Updated August 17, 2022 | Comments (6)
Edna Ferber (August 15, 1885 – April 16, 1968) was an American novelist and playwright whose name perhaps less known today than other classic women authors of her time.
In her heyday, Ferber was considered one of the most successful writers of the time—primarily the 1920s through the early 50s, with earning power to prove it.
Due to the many film and stage adaptations of her sprawling sagas, including Giant, Showboat, Saratoga Trunk, and Cimarron, are better remembered than she is. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 8, 2018 | Updated April 9, 2026 | Comments (2)
Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and author. Hansberry grew up in an environment that set the stage, so to speak, for her best-known work —A Raisin in the Sun, the first play by a Black woman to be staged on Broadway.
At the age of twenty-nine, she became the youngest American and the first Black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play.
Hansberry was also known for the plays The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and Les Blancs. The posthumous play and published collection To Be Young, Gifted and Black encapsulated a brief and brilliant career. She was only 34 years old when she died of pancreatic cancer. Read More→
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