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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By Nava Atlas | On June 24, 2017 | Updated September 3, 2026 | 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She had more than one hundred books published during her lifetime and left behind a trove of unpublished works found after her death.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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