By Nava Atlas | On June 24, 2017 | Updated September 22, 2025 | Comments (3)
Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 – November 13, 1952) was a prolific American author and editor of children’s books, best known for Goodnight Moon (1947) and The Runaway Bunny (1942).
Margaret grew up in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, the middle of three children whose well-to-do parents made no secret of their unhappy marriage. Margaret was an imaginative child who loved adventure and the outdoors.
She had more than one hundred books published during her lifetime and left behind a trove of unpublished works found after her death. The word “prolific” seems almost inadequate to describe Margaret Wise Brown’s output. Read More→
By Regina Arbeia | On June 11, 2017 | Updated August 20, 2022 | Comments (0)
Betty MacDonald (March 26, 1907 – February 7, 1958) was an American author of humorous memoirs and children’s books, born Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard in Boulder, Colorado.
Her father was a mining engineer who moved the family around frequently before finally settling in Seattle, Washington in 1916.
At age twenty, Betty married Robert Eugene Heskett. It was 1927, and the couple made their home on a chicken farm in Chimacum Valley, part of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. The marriage ended just three years later when Betty left her husband and returned to Seattle in 1931. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On June 3, 2017 | Updated February 21, 2025 | Comments (0)
Djuna Barnes (June 12, 1892 – June 18, 1982) was an American writer who became well-known in the Parisian avant-garde literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s.
Born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, Barnes attended Pratt Institute and the Art Students League of New York. Starting in 1913, she wrote and illustrated for newspapers and magazines, both literary and popular (including Smart Set and Vanity Fair).
[photo at right by Berenice Abbott, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]
Barnes’ first book-length work was The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings in 1915. It was brief, hardly more than a chapbook. Over the next few years, she wrote plays, a few of which were staged by the Provincetown Players in Cape Cod.
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By Nava Atlas | On April 24, 2016 | Updated August 22, 2022 | Comments (0)
Mary O’Hara (July 10, 1885 – October 14, 1980; born Mary O’Hara Alsop) was an American author, screenwriter, and composer, best known for the horse story for all ages, My Friend Flicka.
Born in Cape May, New Jersey, she was raised in the Brooklyn Heights, New York, mainly by her father. Her mother died when she was a child.
Against her father’s wishes, in 1905 she married a distant cousin, Kent Kane Parrot. Sadly, their daughter died of skin cancer when in her early teens. The couple, who also had a son, divorced around 1920, after which, Mary began working as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Read More→
By Diane Denton | On March 7, 2016 | Updated September 12, 2025 | Comments (2)
Jean Rhys (August 24, 1890 – May 14, 1979) was born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Roseau, Dominica. She is best known for her last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, considered a prequel and post-colonial response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Published when Rhys was 76 and shaped by her Dominican heritage and reoccurring themes of exile, loss, alienation, sexual inequality, and enslavement, it imagines the descent into madness of Rochester’s white-Creole wife Antoinette (Bertha, “the madwoman in the attic”). It won the W.H. Smith Literary Award in 1967.
Rhys described her childhood as one spent “alone except for books” and with voices “that had nothing to do” with her. Read More→
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