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Virginia State Library
The Library of Virginia in Richmond, Virginia, is the library agency of the Commonwealth of Virginia. It serves as the archival agency and the reference library for Virginia's seat of government. The Library moved into a new building in 1997 and is located at 800 East Broad Street, two blocks from the Virginia State Capitol building. It was formerly known as the Virginia State Library and as the Virginia State Library and Archives. Formally founded by the Virginia General Assembly in 1823, the Library of Virginia organizes, cares for, and manages the state's collection of books and official records, many of which date back to the early colonial period. It houses what is believed to be the most comprehensive collection of materials on Virginia government, history, and culture available anywhere. Its research collections contain more than 808,500 bound volumes; 678,790 public documents; 410,330 microforms, including 45,684 reels of microfilmed newspapers; 308,900 photographs and othe ...
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United States Of America
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is also in free association with three Pacific Island sovereign states: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. With a population of over 333 million, it is the most populous country in the Americas and the third most populous in the world. The national capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. and its most populous city and principal financial center is New York City. Paleo ...
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Anne Spencer
Anne Bethel Spencer (born Bannister; February 6, 1882 – July 27, 1975) was an American poet, teacher, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener. Though she lived outside New York City, the recognized center of the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, she was an important member of this group of intellectuals. She met Edward Spencer while attending Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia. Following their marriage in 1901, the couple moved into house he builtat 1313 Pierce Street, where they raised a family and lived for the remainder of their lives. Spencer holds an important place as a widely anthologized poet, and was the first Virginian and one of three African American women included in the highly influential ''Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry'' (1973). As a civil rights activist for equality and educational opportunities, she and her husband Edward, with close friend Mary Rice Hayes Allen and others, revived the chapter of the NAACP in Lynchbu ...
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Charles Wright (poet)
Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for ''Country Music: Selected Early Poems'' and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for ''Black Zodiac''. From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. Early life and education Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee. Wright attended Christ School (North Carolina) in Asheville for his junior and senior years where he helped coach football, served as vice president of his class, and became a member of the honors program. While at Christ School, he enveloped himself in the literature that would inspire him to write. By the time he graduated in 1953 he had read everything William Faulkner had written. He then matriculated at Davidson College and graduated with a BA in history in 1957. He received a master's degree from the University of Iowa in 1963, and attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Sapienza Univer ...
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Tom Robbins (author)
Thomas Eugene Robbins (born July 22, 1932) is a best-selling and prolific American novelist. His most notable works are "seriocomedies" (also known as "comedy drama"), such as ''Even Cowgirls Get the Blues''. Tom Robbins has lived in La Conner, Washington since 1970, where he has written nine best-selling books. His latest work, published in 2014, is '' Tibetan Peach Pie'', which is a self-declared "un-memoir". ''Even Cowgirls Get The Blues'' has been adapted into a movie that shares the same name by Gus Van Sant in 1993. Early life Robbins was born on July 22, 1932, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, to George Thomas Robbins and Katherine Belle Robinson. Both of his grandfathers were Baptist preachers. The Robbins family resided in Blowing Rock before moving to Warsaw, Virginia, when the author was still a young boy. In adulthood, Robbins has described his young self as a "hillbilly". Robbins attended Warsaw High School (class of 1949) and Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, V ...
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Earl Hamner, Jr
Earl () is a rank of the nobility in the United Kingdom. The title originates in the Old English word ''eorl'', meaning "a man of noble birth or rank". The word is cognate with the Scandinavian form ''jarl'', and meant "chieftain", particularly a chieftain set to rule a territory in a king's stead. After the Norman Conquest, it became the equivalent of the continental count (in England in the earlier period, it was more akin to a duke; in Scotland, it assimilated the concept of mormaer). Alternative names for the rank equivalent to "earl" or "count" in the nobility structure are used in other countries, such as the ''hakushaku'' (伯爵) of the post-restoration Japanese Imperial era. In modern Britain, an earl is a member of the peerage, ranking below a marquess and above a viscount. A feminine form of ''earl'' never developed; instead, ''countess'' is used. Etymology The term ''earl'' has been compared to the name of the Heruli, and to runic ''erilaz''. Proto-Norse ''eri ...
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Lee Smith (fiction Author)
Lee Smith (born November 1, 1944) is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her background from the Southeastern United States in her works. She has received writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and, in April 2013, was the first recipient of Mercer University's Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature. Her novel ''The Last Girls'' was listed on the ''New York Times'' bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. ''Mrs Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger'', a collection of new and selected stories, was published in 2010. Early life and education Smith was born in 1944 in Grundy, Virginia, a small coal-mining town in the Appalachian Mountains, less than 10 miles from the Kentucky border. The Smith home sat on Main Street, and the Levisa Fork River ran just behind it. Her mother, Gig, was a college graduate who had come to Grund ...
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John Grisham
John Ray Grisham Jr. (; born February 8, 1955 in Jonesboro, Arkansas) is an American novelist, lawyer and former member of the 7th district of the Mississippi House of Representatives, known for his popular legal thrillers. According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 28 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three authors to have sold two million copies on a first printing. Grisham graduated from Mississippi State University and earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1981. He practised criminal law for about a decade and served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990. Grisham's first novel, '' A Time to Kill,'' was published in June 1989, four years after he began writing it. Grisham's first bestseller, '' The Firm'', sold more than seven million copies. The book was adap ...
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Rita Dove
Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020 she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing. Early life Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, to Ray Dove, one of the first African-American chemists to work ...
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Tom Wolfe
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (March 2, 1930 – May 14, 2018)Some sources say 1931; ''The New York Times'' and Reuters both initially reported 1931 in their obituaries before changing to 1930. See and was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques. Wolfe began his career as a regional newspaper reporter in the 1950s, achieving national prominence in the 1960s following the publication of such best-selling books as ''The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'' (a highly experimental account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters) and two collections of articles and essays, '' Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers'' and ''The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby''. In 1979, he published the influential book '' The Right Stuff'' about the Mercury Seven astronauts, which was made into a 1983 film of the same name directed by Ph ...
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William Styron
William Clark Styron Jr. (June 11, 1925 – November 1, 2006) was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work. Styron was best known for his novels, including: * '' Lie Down in Darkness'' (1951), his acclaimed first work, published when he was 26; * ''The Confessions of Nat Turner'' (1967), narrated by Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginia slave revolt; * ''Sophie's Choice'' (1979), a story "told through the eyes of a young aspiring writer from the South, about a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz and her brilliant but psychotic Jewish lover in postwar Brooklyn". In 1985, he had his first serious bout with depression. Once he recovered from his illness, Styron was able to write the memoir '' Darkness Visible'' (1990), the work for which he became best known during the last two decades of his life. Early years Styron was born in the Hilton Village historic district of Newport News, Virginia, the son of Pauline Margaret (Abraham) and ...
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Merrill D
Merrill may refer to: Places in the United States *Merrill Field, Anchorage, Alaska *Merrill, Iowa * Merrill, Maine *Merrill, Michigan * Merrill, Mississippi, an unincorporated community near Lucedale in George County *Merrill, Oregon *Merrill, Wisconsin * Merrill (town), Wisconsin *Merrill Township, Michigan * Merrill Township, North Dakota *Merrill College at the University of California, Santa Cruz People * Merrill Moses (born 1977), Olympic water polo player *Merrill (surname) *Merrill Cook, Utah politician *Merrill Garbus, musician behind the experimental indie project Tune-yards *Merrill Ashley (born 1950), American ballet dancer and ''répétiteur'' Other uses *Merrill (company), a division of Bank of America *Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, architectural firm * USS ''Merrill'' (DD-976) *Nine men's morris, a strategy board game also called ''Merrills'' * Merrill (crater) Merrill is a lunar impact crater. It is located in the high northern latitudes, on the far side. Less th ...
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George Garrett (poet)
George Palmer Garrett (June 11, 1929 – May 25, 2008) was an American poet and novelist. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2004. His novels include ''The Finished Man'','' Double Vision'', and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of '' Death of the Fox'', ''The Succession'', and ''Entered from the Sun''. He worked as a book reviewer and screenwriter, and taught at Cambridge University and, for many years, at the University of Virginia. He is the subject of critical books by R. H. W. Dillard, Casey Clabough, and Irving Malin. Biography George Palmer Garrett was born in Orlando, Florida on June 11, 1929. He attended The Hill School. He graduated from the Sewanee Military Academy in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1945. He earned his BA from Princeton University in 1952, having matriculated in 1947 and having attended Columbia University in 1948–49. He also received his MA (1956) and PhD (1985) from Princeton. Garrett served in the US Army (1946–47), and was stat ...
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