Author Bios

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born on March 1, 1913, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father — who died when Ralph was three — after the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an act of aspiration that the son would spend his life both fulfilling and interrogating. He grew up in a culturally vibrant Black…

Haruki Murakami was born on January 12, 1949, in Kyoto, Japan, the son of two teachers of Japanese literature. He grew up in Kobe, and his childhood reading was predominantly Western: American crime fiction, European literature, and above all the Anglo-American pop music that was flooding Japanese youth culture in the 1960s. He studied theater…

Henry James was born on April 15, 1843, in New York City, into a wealthy and intellectually exceptional family. His father, Henry James Sr., was a Swedenborgian theologian and friend of Emerson and Thoreau; his brother William became the preeminent American philosopher and psychologist of his generation. The family moved frequently between America and Europe…

Elizabeth Strout was born on January 6, 1956, in Portland, Maine, and grew up in small coastal towns of Maine and New Hampshire. Her childhood in the tightly knit, emotionally restrained communities of rural New England gave her the material and the setting for virtually all of her fiction. She studied English at Bates College…

Italo Calvino was born on October 15, 1923, in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, where his Italian father was a tropical agronomist working on a government research project. The family returned to Italy when he was two, settling in San Remo on the Ligurian coast, where his father ran a botanical garden and his mother,…

Celeste Ng was born in 1980 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up both there and in Shaker Heights, Ohio — one of America’s most deliberately planned and self-consciously progressive suburbs, which would become the setting for her second novel. Her family is Chinese-American, her parents both scientists who emigrated from Hong Kong, and her fiction…

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi (now Dréan), in French Algeria, into a working-class family of French and Spanish descent. His father, Lucien, was an agricultural laborer who was killed at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, leaving his family destitute. Camus grew up in the Belcourt district of Algiers…

Alan Hollinghurst was born on May 26, 1954, in Stroud, Gloucestershire, England, and was educated at Canford School in Dorset before going on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read English and remained to complete a graduate thesis on the homosexual tradition in English poetry. His academic work on writers including A. E. Housman and…

Andrew Sean Greer was born on November 22, 1970, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the suburbs of Maryland. He studied writing at Brown University, where he earned his undergraduate degree, and completed a master of fine arts degree at the University of Montana. He has lived in various cities over his career —…

Edith Newbold Jones was born on January 24, 1862, into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in New York City — a family so socially prominent that the expression “keeping up with the Joneses” may have originated as a reference to her relatives. She was educated by governesses and tutors, traveled extensively in Europe,…