By Nava Atlas | On August 18, 2017 | Updated March 18, 2025 | Comments (0)
Martha Gellhorn (November 8, 1908 – February 15, 1998) was best known as an American war correspondent, though she was a prolific writer of fiction and memoir as well. She was the third wife of iconic American author Ernest Hemingway.
Gellhorn is ranked among the top war journalists of the twentieth century — and didn’t wish to be remembered as one of the four wives of “Papa” Hemingway. Famously, she lamented, “Why should I be a footnote to somebody else’s life?”
Indeed, she was more than accomplished in her own right. having covered nearly every global conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her sixty-year career. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On August 8, 2017 | Updated March 5, 2026 | Comments (1)
Octavia E. Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an American author of science fiction as well as dystopian and speculative novels. This visionary Black woman writer blazed a trail in the white male-dominated genre of science fiction.
In her New York Times obituary, she was described as “an internationally acclaimed science fiction writer whose evocative, often troubling novels explore far-reaching issues of race, sex, power, and ultimately, what it meant to be human.” (photo above right courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Born in Pasadena, CA, Octavia Estelle Butler’s father died when she was an infant. Raised by her single mother, Butler was a painfully shy child, and always exceedingly tall for her age. She also struggled with dyslexia, which made schoolwork a torture. She began to believe that she was, as she put it, “ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless.” Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On July 12, 2017 | Updated November 11, 2025 | Comments (0)
Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was a prolific American poet. Though she wrote some 1,800 poems, only a few were published during her lifetime. She is still something of a mystery, which fuels the continued fascination with her work and life.
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant —” is one of her famous lines, and the truths revealed in her poetic works are as individual as the person who reads them.
Dickinson grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. She was born, lived, and died in the same house. While popular mythology has it that she rarely formed relationships with anyone outside her immediate family, this is not quite accurate. Read More→
By Regina Arbeia | On July 4, 2017 | Updated July 30, 2024 | Comments (4)
Grace Metalious (September 8, 1924 – February 25, 1964) was an American author best remembered for her sensational novel Peyton Place. It caused an incredible scandal when first published in 1956, but quickly one of the bestselling books of the twentieth century.
Of French-Canadian ancestry, she was born Marie Grace De Repentigny in Manchester, New Hampshire. Her parents separated when she was ten years old.
At the age of eighteen she married George Metalious (1925-2015) who came from a Greek family. The couple had three children. After World War II army service, George became a teacher, but Grace was far from the ideal 1950s wife, with her rebellious nature and burning ambition to write.
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