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→
By Taylor Jasmine | On November 8, 2015 | Updated May 9, 2024 | Comments (0)
Eleanor Estes (May 9, 1906 – July 15, 1988), born Eleanor Ruth Rosenfield in West Haven, Connecticut was best known for her award-winning children’s books, notably Ginger Pye, The Hundred Dresses, and The Moffats series.
The town of “Cranbury” in which the Moffat books were set was based on her real life hometown of West Haven.
Upon graduating from high school, she joined the staff of the New Haven Free Public Library. Within a few years, she was promoted to Head of Children’s Services there. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On September 10, 2015 | Updated August 19, 2022 | Comments (2)
Laura Z. Hobson (June 19, 1900 – February 28, 1986) was an American fiction writer best known for Gentleman’s Agreement and the subsequent award-winning film of the same name.
Born Laura Kean Zametkin in New York City, she and her twin sister Alice grew up on Long Island. Their parents were highly educated refugees from czarist Russia. Her father was the first editor of the Jewish Daily Forward; her mother did social work.
Before she became a full-time novelist with the 1947 publication of Gentleman’s Agreement, she had been a successful writer of advertising and promotional copy on the staff of Luce publications, where she wrote for Time, Life, and Fortune. Read More→
By Diane Denton | On August 30, 2015 | Updated December 9, 2024 | Comments (2)
Christina Georgina Rossetti (December 5, 1830 – December 29, 1894) is one of the most enduring and beloved of Victorian poets. Born in London, she was the youngest of four artistic and literary siblings.
She is known for her long poem “Goblin Market,” her love poem “Remember,” and the lyrics to the popular Christmas carol “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
Algernon Charles Swinburne and Lord Tennyson praised her work and she was hailed as the natural successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Christina’s poetry and prose reflected her pensive, passionate, devotional, and, at times, playful personality. Read More→
Categories: 
Comments: