|
Harold Norling Swanson
Harold Norling Swanson (August 28, 1899 – May 31, 1991) was a literary agent who represented Frank Buck, F. Scott Fitzgerald and many other well-known American writers. He was a member of the Cliff Dwellers Club and was one of the founding members of the Tavern Club in Chicago. Career Swanson graduated from Grinnell College, class of 1922. He began his career as a writerCorn; moods from Mid-America, by Harold Norling Swanson.but achieved more success as the editor, for eight years during the 1920s, of '' College Humor'', a Chicago-based monthly magazine. In 1931, he moved to Hollywood, where he received a few minor story credits and then spent a period as an associate producer at RKO, with eight films to his credit, including two Wheeler and Woolsey comedies, ''Hips, Hips, Hooray!'' and ''Kentucky Kernels''. In 1934, Swanson opened his eponymous agency on Sunset Boulevard. He began representing adventurer-writer Frank Buck in 1935, soon after Buck's appearance in ''Fang and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Centerville, Iowa
Centerville is a city in and the county seat of Appanoose County, Iowa, Appanoose County, Iowa, United States. The population was 5,412 in the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census, a decline from 5,924 in 2000 United States Census, 2000. After the turn of the 20th century Centerville's coal mining industry attracted European immigrants from Sweden, Italy, Croatia, and Albania. Centerville is also home of the largest town square in the state of Iowa. History Founded in 1846 by Jonathon Stratton under the name of "Chaldea," the city was planned around a unique two-block long city square. The name was later changed to Senterville, named after William Tandy Senter, a prominent Tennessee politician. When municipal corporation, incorporation papers were filed in 1855, someone mistook the name for a misspelling and corrected it to Centerville. A mining town The first coal mine in Centerville was opened in 1868, with its shaft mining, mine shaft about one-half mile from the Chica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Gruber (writer)
Frank Gruber (born February 2, 1904, Elmer, Minnesota, died December 9, 1969, Santa Monica, California) was an American writer. He was a writer of stories for pulp fiction magazines. He also wrote dozens of novels, mostly Westerns and detective stories. Gruber wrote many scripts for Hollywood movies and television shows and was the creator of three TV series. He sometimes wrote under the pen names Stephen Acre, Charles K. Boston and John K. Vedder. Career Gruber said that as a nine-year-old newsboy, he read his first book, ''Luke Walton, the Chicago Newsboy'' by Horatio Alger. During the next seven years he read a hundred more Alger books and said they influenced him professionally more than anything else in his life. They told how poor boys became rich, but what they instilled in Gruber was an ambition, at age nine or ten, to be an author. He had written his first book before age 11, using a pencil on wrapping paper. Age 13 or 14, his ambition died for a while but several ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Wambaugh
Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh, Jr. (born January 22, 1937), is a best-selling American writer known for his fictional and nonfictional accounts of police work in the United States. Several of his early novels were set in Los Angeles and its surroundings and featured Los Angeles police officers as protagonists. He has been nominated for four Edgar Awards (winning three), and was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. Early life The son of a police officer, Wambaugh was born in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He joined the U.S. Marine Corps at age 17 and married at 18. Wambaugh is of Irish and German descent. Police career Wambaugh received an associate of arts degree from Chaffey College and joined the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 1960. He served for 14 years, rising from patrolman to detective sergeant. He also attended Cal State Los Angeles, where he earned BA and MA degrees. Writing career Themes Wambaugh's perspective on police work led to his fi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Theroux
Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American novelist and travel writer who has written numerous books, including the travelogue, '' The Great Railway Bazaar'' (1975). Some of his works of fiction have been adapted as feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel '' The Mosquito Coast,'' which was adapted for the 1986 movie of the same name and the 2021 television series of the same name. He is the father of British-American authors and documentary filmmakers Marcel and Louis Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle of the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux. Early life Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts, the third of seven children, and son of Catholic parents; his mother, Anne (née Dittami), was Italian American, and his father, Albert Eugene Theroux, was of French-Canadian descent. His mother was a former grammar school teacher and painter, and his father was a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels '' Black Water'' (1992), ''What I Lived For'' (1994), and ''Blonde'' (2000), and her short story collections ''The Wheel of Love'' (1970) and ''Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories'' (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel ''them'' (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019). Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. Since 2016, she has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches short fiction in the spring semesters. Oates was elected to the A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luke Short (writer)
Luke Short (born Frederick Dilley Glidden November 19, 1908 – August 18, 1975) was a popular Western writer. At least nine of his novels were made into films. Biography Born in Kewanee, Illinois, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for two and a half years and then transferred to the University of Missouri at Columbia to study journalism. Following graduation in 1930, he worked for a number of newspapers before becoming a trapper in Canada. He later moved to New Mexico to be an archeologist's assistant. After reading Western pulp magazines and trying to escape unemployment, he began to write Western fiction. He sold his first short story and novel in 1935 under the pen name of Luke Short (which was also the name of a famous gunslinger in the Old West, although it's unclear if he was aware of that when he assumed the pen name.) His apprenticeship in the pulps was comparatively brief. In 1938, he sold a short story, "The Warning", to '' Collier's'', and in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John O'Hara
John Henry O'Hara (January 31, 1905 – April 11, 1970) was one of America's most prolific writers of short stories, credited with helping to invent ''The New Yorker'' magazine short story style.John O'Hara: Stories, Charles McGrath, ed., The Library of America, 2016. He became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with ''Appointment in Samarra'' and ''BUtterfield 8''. While O'Hara's legacy as a writer is debated, his champions rank him highly among the under-appreciated and unjustly neglected major American writers of the 20th century. Few college students educated after O'Hara's death in 1970 have discovered him, chiefly because he refused to allow his work to be reprinted in anthologies used to teach literature at the college level. "O’Hara may not have been the best story writer of the twentieth century, but he is the most addictive," wrote Lorin Stein, editor-in-chief of the ''Paris Review'', in a 2013 appreciation of O'Hara's work. Stein added, "You can binge on h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elmore Leonard
Elmore John Leonard Jr. (October 11, 1925August 20, 2013) was an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. His earliest novels, published in the 1950s, were Westerns, but he went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures. Among his best-known works are ''Get Shorty'', ''Out of Sight'', '' Swag'', '' Hombre'', ''Mr. Majestyk'', and ''Rum Punch'' (adapted as the film ''Jackie Brown''). Leonard's writings include short stories that became the films '' 3:10 to Yuma'' and ''The Tall T'', as well as the FX television series '' Justified''. Early life and education Leonard was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Flora Amelia (née Rive) and Elmore John Leonard. Because his father worked as a site locator for General Motors, the family moved frequently for several years. In 1934, the family settled in Detroit. He graduated from the University of Detroit Jesuit High School in 1943 and, after bei ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steve Fisher (writer)
Stephen Gould Fisher (August 29, 1912 – March 27, 1980) was an American author best known for his pulp stories, novels and screenplays. He is one of the few pulp authors to go on to enjoy success as both an author in "slick" magazines, such as the '' Saturday Evening Post'', and as an in-demand writer in Hollywood. Early life Steve Fisher was born August 29, 1912, in Marine City, Michigan. He was raised in Los Angeles, California, where he attended Oneonta Military Academy until running away to join the Navy at the age of sixteen.Restaino, p. 143. Fisher spent four years in the Navy submarine service, during which time he wrote prolifically, selling stories to ''U.S. Navy'' and ''Our Navy''. After Fisher's discharge from the Navy, he settled in Greenwich Village, New York, where he decided to pursue writing as a career. The first few months proved difficult. Fisher could not sell a story and suffered eviction from two apartments, and once had his electricity shut off. I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first short story, " Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in 1933 in '' Black Mask,'' a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, ''The Big Sleep'', was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published seven novels during his lifetime (an eighth, in progress at the time of his death, was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but '' Playback'' have been made into motion pictures, some more than once. In the year before his death, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature. He is a founder of the hardboiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other ''Black Mask ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pearl Buck
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (June 26, 1892 – March 6, 1973) was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for ''The Good Earth'' a bestselling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents. She was the first American woman to win that prize. Buck was born in West Virginia, but in October 1892, her parents took their 4-month-old baby to China. As the daughter of missionaries and later as a missionary herself, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, with her parents, and in Nanjing, with her first husband. She and her parents spent their summers in a villa in Kuling, Mountain Lu, Jiujiang, and it was during this annual pilgrimage that the young girl decided to become a writer. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ross Macdonald
Ross Macdonald was the main pseudonym used by the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar (; December 13, 1915 – July 11, 1983). He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in Southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer. Since the 1970s, Macdonald's works (particularly the Archer novels) have received attention in academic circles for their psychological depth, sense of place, use of language, sophisticated imagery and integration of philosophy into genre fiction. Brought up in the province of Ontario, Canada, Macdonald eventually settled in the state of California, where he died in 1983. Life Millar was born in Los Gatos, California, and raised in his Canadian parents' native Kitchener, Ontario. ''Millar'' was a Scots spelling of the surname Miller, and the author pronounced his name ''Miller'' rather than ''Millar''. When his father abandoned the family unexpectedly when Millar was four years old, he and his mother live ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
