Author Bios

Annelies Marie Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, into a Jewish family with deep roots in German culture. Her father, Otto Frank, was a businessman who had served in the German Army in World War I; her mother, Edith, came from a prosperous Jewish family. The rise of National Socialism forced…

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Bailey Johnson, a naval dietitian, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, a nurse and later a business owner. After her parents’ divorce when she was three, she and her brother Bailey were sent to live with their paternal grandmother in Stamps,…

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, into a prosperous German-American family. His father was an architect, and his mother came from a family of brewers; the Depression largely destroyed the family’s fortunes, an experience that gave Vonnegut an early education in the precariousness of middle-class security. He studied biochemistry…

William Ford Gibson was born on March 17, 1948, in Conway, South Carolina, and grew up in Wytheville, Virginia. His father died when he was six, and his mother when he was eighteen, leaving him largely on his own as a young man. He evaded the Vietnam War draft by moving to Canada in 1967,…

Orson Scott Card was born on August 24, 1951, in Richland, Washington, the third of six children in a Mormon family. He grew up in several Western states before settling in Utah, and his faith has been a constant presence in both his life and his fiction. He studied theater at Brigham Young University and…

Isaac Asimov was born on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi, Russia (now part of the Smolensk region), and immigrated with his family to Brooklyn, New York, in 1923. He grew up in his family’s candy store, teaching himself to read before school age and consuming science fiction pulp magazines from the store’s shelves. He entered…

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Her father was a forest entomologist, and she spent much of her early childhood in the remote wilderness of northern Quebec and Ontario, where her family lived during her father’s research seasons. This unusual upbringing — half in the bush, half in…

Frank Patrick Herbert Jr. was born on October 8, 1920, in Tacoma, Washington. He grew up in a working-class household in the Pacific Northwest and showed an early appetite for reading and ideas that outpaced his formal schooling. He began his career as a journalist, working for newspapers in the Pacific Northwest, and studied at…

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, in Godalming, Surrey, England, into one of the most distinguished intellectual families in Victorian Britain. His grandfather was the biologist T. H. Huxley, champion of Darwinian evolution; his great-uncle was the poet Matthew Arnold. Aldous was educated at Eton until a severe eye infection left him…

Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote under the pen name George Orwell, was born on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal, then part of British India. His father was a minor official in the Indian Civil Service, and the family returned to England when Orwell was young. He was educated on scholarship at Eton College, where…