Author Bios

Roald Dahl was born on September 13, 1916, in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales, to Norwegian parents. His father and elder sister both died in 1920, tragedies that marked his childhood deeply. He was educated at Repton School in Derbyshire, where he witnessed brutal corporal punishment that would inform his lifelong sympathy for children against adult cruelty….

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, the third of eleven children in a Church of England clergyman’s family. He displayed extraordinary aptitude for mathematics and won a studentship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he became a lecturer in mathematics for twenty-six years. As a logician and mathematician he…

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, the son of a uniform salesman who cultivated in his eldest child a love of puzzles, pattern-recognition, and the habit of asking why rather than simply accepting what things are called. Feynman’s father, Melville, told him: “See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush. But…

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was born in Shrewsbury, England, into a family of intellectual and social distinction: his father Robert was a prosperous physician, and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had written poetry speculating about biological evolution decades before Charles was born. His early education was conventional and undistinguished — he was a mediocre student at Edinburgh…

Douglas Hofstadter was born in 1945 in New York City, the son of Robert Hofstadter, who would win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1961 for his work on the structure of nucleons. Growing up in a household where physics, mathematics, and intellectual ambition were constant presences, Hofstadter developed an early and intense interest in…

James Watson was born in 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of a businessman who instilled in him a fascination with birds and natural history. A child prodigy, Watson entered the University of Chicago at fifteen under the university’s early admissions program and graduated at nineteen with a degree in zoology. A reading of Erwin…

Richard Dawkins was born in 1941 in Nairobi, Kenya, where his father was stationed with the British forces during World War II. He grew up partly in Africa and partly in England, developed an early fascination with natural history, and read zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was taught by the Nobel laureate Nikolaas…

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a garment worker who had emigrated from Ukraine and a homemaker who encouraged his early fascination with the cosmos. As a child he was captivated by science fiction and by the view of the stars from the Brooklyn streets — a passion that…

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) was born in Oxford, England, on the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death — a coincidence he enjoyed citing. The eldest child of a research biologist and a medical research secretary, he grew up in a household where intellectual ambition was expected and eccentricity was tolerated. He studied physics at University College, Oxford,…

Carmen Maria Machado was born in 1986 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a household shaped by stories — her family’s, the ones she read obsessively, and the ones she invented. She attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught at the…