Author Bios

Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877, in Calw, a small town in the Black Forest region of Germany, the son of a missionary father and a mother who had herself been born in India. His upbringing was deeply religious — both of his parents were Pietist missionaries and his maternal grandfather a distinguished…

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee, a lawyer and state legislator, and Frances Cunningham Finch. She grew up in a small Southern town during the Depression era, a childhood that would provide the essential landscape and moral atmosphere of her…

Hanya Yanagihara was born on September 20, 1974, in Los Angeles, California, and grew up partly in Hawaii and Texas, the daughter of a Korean American physician. She attended Smith College, where she studied anthropology, and built a career in magazine journalism, eventually becoming editor-in-chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. This background…

George Saunders was born on December 2, 1958, in Amarillo, Texas, and grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn, Illinois. He attended the Colorado School of Mines on a geophysics scholarship, graduating in 1981, and spent several years working as a geophysicist in Sumatra for an oil company — an experience of ecological…

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, a small town in the Caribbean coastal region of Colombia, the eldest of eleven children. He was raised for the first eight years of his life primarily by his maternal grandparents in a large house that was itself a kind…

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, born on November 22, 1819, in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, the daughter of an estate agent. She adopted a male pseudonym to ensure that her fiction would be taken seriously on its literary merits rather than dismissed as mere feminine entertainment, a necessary calculation in the…

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Russia, the second of seven children of a staff doctor at a Moscow hospital for the poor. His father, a strict and devout man who was later murdered by his own serfs, was a formative presence whose authoritarian religiosity both shaped and antagonized his…

Fredrik Backman was born on June 2, 1981, in Stockholm, Sweden, and grew up in Helsingborg. He pursued studies in journalism and worked as a blogger and newspaper columnist before turning to fiction, a background that gave his writing its distinctive popular accessibility and its talent for capturing the texture of ordinary life with warmth…

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…

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of an unsuccessful businessman and a doting mother whose family money supplemented the household income. Named after a distant relative, the author of the National Anthem, Fitzgerald grew up with a keen awareness of the class distinctions that shaped…