By Nava Atlas | On October 21, 2017 | Updated January 26, 2025 | Comments (0)
Margery Sharp (January 25, 1905 – March 25, 1991), born Clara Margery Melita Sharp in Salisbury, England, was a prolific British author of witty novels featuring offbeat characters. Several were adapted for stage and screen.
Though she wrote numerous books (many in the comic novel genre), her most enduring work is The Rescuers series for children, two of which were adapted into animated Disney films.
After completing a varied education in arts and languages, Margery started her career by getting her stories published in Punch magazine, at age 21. She continued to write for this and other major magazines in Britain and the U.S. Read More→
By Regina Arbeia | On September 4, 2017 | Updated August 22, 2022 | Comments (0)
Baroness Orczy (September 23, 1865 – November 12, 1947) was born Emma (or “Emmuska”) Magdolna Rozália Mária Jozefa Borbála Orczy de Orci in Tarnaörs, Heves County, Hungary. She’s best known for The Scarlet Pimpernel and its numerous sequels, some of which were adapted to stage and film.
Both of her parents were of aristocratic ancestry. Her father Felix was a Baron and a composer and her mother, also named Emma, was a Countess and daughter of a member of the Hungarian parliament.
When revolution threatened Hungary in 1868, her parents were forced to flee their homeland and lived at various times in Budapest, Paris, and Brussels until 1880 when the family settled in London. There, Emma studied both art and music. Some of her art works were exhibited at the Royal Academy. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On August 18, 2017 | Updated September 13, 2026 | 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 September 17, 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→
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