Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the eldest son of a self-made Jewish merchant, Hermann Kafka, whose forceful, domineering personality would cast a long shadow over his son’s life and imagination. Franz grew up in German-speaking Jewish Prague, a world defined by multiple overlapping identities…
Emily Jane Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, the fifth of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Anglican clergyman, and Maria Branwell. She grew up from the age of two in Haworth, a village perched on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, and the moors became for her not merely…
Edward Morgan Forster was born on January 1, 1879, in London, the only child of an architect father who died when Forster was less than two years old. He was raised by his mother and a great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, who left him a legacy of eight thousand pounds on her death — money that gave…
Donna Tartt was born on December 23, 1963, in Greenwood, Mississippi, and grew up in Grenada, a small town in the Mississippi Delta. Her Southern upbringing, steeped in the Gothic literary tradition of the region, gave her fiction its characteristic atmosphere of beauty undercut by darkness and its sensitivity to the ways the past haunts…
Don DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936, in the Bronx, New York, to Italian immigrant parents who had settled in the Fordham section of the borough. He grew up in a close-knit Italian American community before attending Fordham University, where he studied communication arts. After graduating in 1958, he worked for several years as…
David Foster Wallace was born on February 21, 1962, in Ithaca, New York, and grew up in Champaign, Illinois, where both of his parents were academics. His father was a philosophy professor and his mother an English teacher, and Wallace grew up in an intellectually stimulating household that nonetheless failed to insulate him from the…
Cormac McCarthy was born on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father was a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. He attended the University of Tennessee, leaving twice without a degree, and served in the United States Air Force before returning to writing. His early life was…
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on September 15, 1977, in Enugu, Nigeria, and grew up in the university town of Nsukka, where her father was a professor and her mother the first female registrar at the University of Nigeria. Her childhood in a middle-class academic household gave her access to books and learning, but it…
Charlotte Brontë was born on April 21, 1816, in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, the third of six children of an Anglican clergyman. When Charlotte was four, the family moved to Haworth, a village on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, whose wild landscape left an indelible mark on all three Brontë sisters who survived to adulthood….
Arundhati Roy was born on November 24, 1961, in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, to a Bengali Hindu father and a Syrian Christian mother from Kerala. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she was raised primarily by her mother, Mary Roy, a prominent activist who later won a landmark legal case establishing Syrian Christian women’s…