Author Bios

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, at Yasnaya Polyana, his family’s estate in the Tula region of Russia, the fourth of five children of an aristocratic family. Both of his parents died before he was nine, and he was raised by relatives. He studied oriental languages and law at Kazan University…

Khaled Hosseini was born on March 4, 1965, in Kabul, Afghanistan, the son of a diplomat father and a teacher mother. He spent his early childhood in Kabul before his father was posted to Tehran and then Paris. In 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the family sought political asylum in the United States…

Junot Díaz was born on December 31, 1968, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and immigrated to New Jersey with his family at the age of six, settling in Parlin, a working-class town in Middlesex County. His experience of growing up between two cultures — the Dominican world of his family and the American world of…

Jonathan Franzen was born on August 17, 1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, and grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a middle-class suburb of St. Louis. He studied German language and literature at Swarthmore College and spent time in Germany before returning to the United States to pursue his literary ambitions. His debut novel, The Twenty-Seventh…

John Edward Williams was born on August 29, 1922, in Clarksville, Texas, the son of a sharecropper. He grew up in modest circumstances in rural Texas and worked his way through education by sheer determination, attending the University of Denver and later completing a PhD in English at the University of Missouri. He served in…

John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, the son of a county treasurer and a schoolteacher. He grew up in the fertile agricultural valleys of central California, and the landscape of the Salinas Valley, with its ranches, migrant worker camps, and hardscrabble communities, became the essential setting of his…

Jeffrey Eugenides was born on March 8, 1960, in Detroit, Michigan, the son of a Greek American father and an Irish American mother. He grew up in Grosse Pointe, the affluent Detroit suburb that would provide the setting for The Virgin Suicides, and attended Brown University before completing an MFA in creative writing at Stanford…

James Arthur Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York City, the oldest of nine children. He was raised primarily by his mother, Emma Berdis Jones, and his stepfather, David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher from New Orleans whose stern religiosity profoundly shaped the rhythms of his stepson’s prose and the arc of…

Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1, 1919, in New York City, the second child of a Jewish father who imported Polish hams and a Scottish-Irish mother. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, attending a series of schools before his father enrolled him in the Valley Forge Military Academy in…

Ian McEwan was born on June 21, 1948, in Aldershot, Hampshire, England, the son of a Scottish army officer. His early childhood was spent in various postings including Singapore and Germany before he settled in England to attend schools in Suffolk and later Woolwich. He studied English at the University of Sussex before completing his…