Author Bios

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,…

Carlos Ruiz Zafón was born on September 25, 1964, in Barcelona, Spain. He grew up in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, the labyrinthine medieval neighborhood that would become the atmospheric heart of his most celebrated fiction. He studied journalism and began his career in advertising, working as a creative director for advertising agencies in Barcelona…

Katherine O’Flaherty, who wrote as Kate Chopin, was born on February 8, 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prosperous Irish-American father and a Creole mother of French descent. Her father died in a train accident when she was five, and she was raised largely by women — her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother — who…

Hilary Mary Mantel was born on July 6, 1952, in Glossop, Derbyshire, England, and grew up in a working-class Catholic family in the village of Hadfield. Her childhood was marked by early precocity — she learned to read at age three — and by the upheaval of her parents’ separation, her mother’s new relationship with…

Larry Jeff McMurtry was born on June 3, 1936, on a ranch in Archer County, in north Texas, into a cattle-ranching family that had lived in that stretch of the great plains for three generations. He grew up in the small town of Archer City, an experience of the Texas frontier and its passing that…

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…

Umberto Eco was born on January 5, 1932, in Alessandria, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, the son of a bookkeeper and the grandson of a foundling — a fact he would later investigate in his novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. He was educated by the Salesian order and studied medieval philosophy…

Octavia Estelle Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, to a shoeshine man who died when she was very young and a domestic worker who raised her alone. She was dyslexic, shy, and extraordinarily tall, and spent much of her childhood in the library, reading voraciously. She encountered science fiction through the…

Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955, in Annapolis, Maryland, and grew up in rural Kentucky, an experience of rural poverty and agricultural life that has informed her fiction throughout her career. She studied biology at DePauw University in Indiana, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1977, then completed a master’s degree in ecology and…

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, and grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, which would become the model for the fictional Jefferson, county seat of his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. He came from a family with deep roots in Southern history — his great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner (the family…