Author Bios

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was born in Röcken, a small village in Saxony, the son of a Lutheran pastor who died when Friedrich was four years old. Raised in a household of women — his mother, sister, grandmother, and aunts — Nietzsche was a solitary, intense child with an exceptional memory and a precocious gift for…

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) lived almost his entire life within a few miles of his birthplace in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), yet his philosophical influence spread farther than that of almost any thinker in history. Born into a working-class family of Scottish descent, Kant received a rigorous education at the Collegium Fridericianum and later at…

Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE) was born in Rome into an equestrian family with Spanish roots and rose, through adoption and imperial patronage, to become one of the most powerful men who ever lived — and one of the few who seemed genuinely uninterested in power for its own sake. Adopted by the Emperor Antoninus Pius…

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was born in Stagira, a small Greek colony in northern Macedonia — an outsider in Athens by birth who would become Athens’s greatest intellectual export. His father, Nicomachus, served as court physician to King Amyntas III of Macedonia, and that medical background shaped Aristotle’s lifelong commitment to empirical observation. At seventeen he…

Plato (c. 428–348 BCE) was born into an aristocratic Athenian family during one of the most turbulent and intellectually fertile periods in Western history. His given name was Aristocles; the name Plato — meaning broad — was a nickname, allegedly referring to his physique from wrestling. He received a thorough Athenian education and came under…

Mildred Delois Taylor was born on September 13, 1943, in Jackson, Mississippi, and grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where her family had relocated as part of the Great Migration. Her father, Wilbert Taylor, was a gifted storyteller who shared with his children the oral history of their family’s experiences in the Deep South, the indignities…

John Anthony Bellairs was born on January 17, 1938, in Marshall, Michigan, a small town whose Victorian architecture, Gothic churches, and atmosphere of genteel decay would provide the imaginative backdrop for much of his most celebrated fiction. He was a voracious reader from childhood, drawn particularly to the atmospheric Gothic and horror fiction of the…

Katherine Womeldorf Paterson was born on October 31, 1932, in Qing Jiang, Jiangsu Province, China, the daughter of American Presbyterian missionaries. She spent her early childhood in China and moved to the United States in 1940. Her itinerant upbringing across multiple states, always the new child who did not quite fit in, gave her an…

Neil Richard Gaiman was born on November 10, 1960, in Portchester, Hampshire, England. He was an intensely bookish child and after school worked as a freelance journalist, interviewing authors and writing criticism in the early 1980s. He first achieved major recognition in comics, writing The Sandman (1989-1996), a seventy-five issue series widely considered one of…

Raquel Jaramillo was born in 1963 in New York City and grew up in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of Manhattan, the daughter of Colombian immigrants. She studied fine arts at the Parsons School of Design and had a long career as a graphic designer and art director in book publishing. She published Wonder under the…