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Wharton, Edith






Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones, during the Civil War on January 24, 1862 and died on August 11, 1937. Her parents were George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander, and she had two elder brothers, Frederic Rhinelander and Henry Edward. Wharton's paternal family, the Joneses, were very wealthy and socially prominent, having made their money in real estate. She was also related to the Rensselaers, the most prestigious of the old patroon families, who had received land grants from the former Dutch government of New York and New Jersey. Her father's first cousin was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor (a prominent socialite. Fort Stevens in New York was named for Wharton's maternal great-grandfather, Ebenezer Stevens, a Revolutionary War hero and general.

From 1866 to 1872, her family visited France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. During her travels, the young Edith became fluent in French, German, and Italian. At the age of nine, she suffered from typhoid fever, which nearly killed her, while the family was at a spa in the Black Forest.

On April 29, 1885, at the age of 23, Wharton married Edward Robbins, who shared her love of travel. 


Throughout the war, she worked in charitable efforts for refugees, the injured, the unemployed, and the displaced. 

Wharton was friend and confidante to many prominent intellectuals of her time: Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide were all her guests at one time or another. Theodore Roosevelt, Bernard Berenson, and Kenneth Clark were valued friends as well. Particularly notable was her meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald, described by the editors of her letters as "one of the better known failed encounters in the American literary annals". She spoke fluent French, Italian, and German, and many of her books were published in both French and English.

She died of a stroke on August 11, 1937, at Le Pavillon Colombe, her 18th-century house on Rue de Montmorency in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt. 

Writing

She was educated by tutors and governesses. She read from her father's library and the libraries of her father's friends; however, her mother forbade her to read novels until she was married, and Edith obeyed this command.

Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She entered the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.

Wharton wrote and told stories from an early age. When her family moved to Europe, and she was just four or five, she started inventing stories for her family. Wharton began writing poetry and fiction as a young girl, and attempted to write her first novel at the age of 11. Her mother's criticism quashed her ambition and she turned to poetry.

She was 15 years old when her first published work appeared, a translation of a German poem "Was die Steine Erzählen" ("What the Stones Tell") by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, for which she was paid $50. Her family did not want her name to appear in print since writing was not considered a proper occupation for a society woman of her time. Consequently, the poem was published under the name of a friend's father, E. A. Washburn, a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson who supported women's education. She secretly wrote a novella, Fast and Loose. In 1878, her father arranged for a collection of two dozen original poems and five translations, Verses, to be privately published. Wharton published a poem under a pseudonym in the New York World in 1879. In 1880, she had five poems published anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly, an important literary magazine. Despite these early successes, she was not encouraged by her family or her social circle, and though she continued to write, she did not publish anything more until her poem "The Last Giustiniani" was published in Scribner's Magazine in October 1889.

Between 1880 and 1890, Wharton put her writing aside to participate in the social life of the New York upper classes. She keenly observed the social changes happening around her, which she used later in her writing.

She wrote many books about her travels, including Italian Backgrounds and A Motor-Flight through France. She kept a travel journal during this trip that was thought to be lost but was later published as The Cruise of the Vanadis, now considered her earliest known travel writing. They divorced after 28 years of marriage. Around the same time, she was beset with harsh literary criticism from the naturalist school of writers.

In addition to novels, Wharton wrote at least 85 short stories. She was also a garden designer, an interior designer, and a taste-maker of her time. She wrote several design books, including her first major published work, The Decoration of Houses (1897), co-authored by Ogden Codman. Another of her "home and garden" books is the generously illustrated Italian Villas and Their Gardens of 1904, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.

In the post-war years, she divided her time between Hyères and Provence, where she finished The Age of Innocence in 1920. She returned to the United States only once after the war to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1923.

The Age of Innocence (1920) won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the award. The three fiction judges – literary critic Stuart Pratt Sherman, literature professor Robert Morss Lovett, and novelist Hamlin Garland – voted to give the prize to Sinclair Lewis for his satire Main Street, but Columbia University's advisory board, led by conservative university president Nicholas Murray Butler, overturned their decision and awarded the prize to The Age of Innocence She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928, and 1930.

In 1934, Wharton's autobiography A Backward Glance was published. What is most notable about A Backward Glance, however, is what it does not tell: her criticism of Lucretia Jones [her mother], her difficulties with Teddy, and her affair with Morton Fullerton, which did not come to light until her papers, deposited in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, were opened in 1968.

Despite not publishing her first novel until she was forty, Wharton became an extraordinarily productive writer. In addition to her 15 novels, seven novellas, and eighty-five short stories, she published poetry, books on design, travel, literary and cultural criticism, and a memoir.

Writing

In 1873, Wharton wrote a short story and gave it to her mother to read. Stinging from her mother's critique, Wharton decided to write only poetry. While she constantly sought her mother's approval and love, she rarely received either, and their relationship was a troubled one

Before she was 15, Wharton wrote Fast and Loose (1877). In her youth, she wrote about society. Her central themes came from her experiences with her parents. She was very critical of her work and wrote public reviews criticizing it. She also wrote about her own experiences with life. "Intense Love's Utterance" is a poem written about Henry Stevens.

In 1889, she sent out three poems for publication, to Scribner's, Harper's and Century. Edward L. Burlingame published "The Last Giustiniani" for Scribner's. It was not until Wharton was 29 that her first short story was published: "Mrs. Manstey's View" had very little success, and it took her more than a year to publish another story. She completed "The Fullness of Life" following her annual European trip with Teddy. Burlingame was critical of this story but Wharton did not want to make edits to it. This story, along with many others, speaks about her marriage. She sent Bunner Sisters to Scribner's in 1892. Burlingame wrote back that it was too long for Scribner's to publish. This story is believed to be based on an experience she had as a child. It did not see publication until 1916 and is included in the collection called Xingu. After a visit with her friend, Paul Bourget, she wrote "The Good May Come" and "The Lamp of Psyche". "The Lamp of Psyche" was a comical story with verbal wit and sorrow. After "Something Exquisite" was rejected by Burlingame, she lost confidence in herself. She started travel writing in 1894.

In 1901, Wharton wrote a two-act play called Man of Genius. This play was about an English man who was having an affair with his secretary. The play was rehearsed but was never produced. Another 1901 play, The Shadow of a Doubt, which also came close to being staged but fell through, was thought to be lost, until it was discovered in 2017. It had a radio adaptation broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2018. It wouldn't be until 2023, over a century later, that the world stage premiere took place in Canada at the Shaw Festival directed by Peter Hinton-Davis.

She collaborated with Marie Tempest to write another play, but the two only completed four acts before Marie decided she was no longer interested in costume plays. One of her earliest literary endeavors (1902) was the translation of the play Es Lebe das Leben ("The Joy of Living"), by Hermann Sudermann. The Joy of Living was criticized for its title because the heroine swallows poison at the end, and was a short-lived Broadway production. It was, however, a successful book.

Many of Wharton's novels are characterized by subtle use of dramatic irony. Having grown up in upper-class, late-19th-century society, Wharton became one of its most astute critics, in such works as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

Themes

Versions of her mother, Lucretia Jones, often appeared in Wharton's fiction. Biographer Hermione Lee described it as "one of the most lethal acts of revenge ever taken by a writing daughter." In her memoir, A Backward Glance, Wharton describes her mother as indolent, spendthrift, censorious, disapproving, superficial, icy, dry and ironic.

Wharton's writings often dealt with themes such as "social and individual fulfillment, repressed sexuality, and the manners of old families and the new elite." Maureen Howard, editor of Edith Wharton: Collected Stories, notes several recurring themes in Wharton's short stories, including confinement and attempts at freedom, the morality of the author, critiques of intellectual pretension, and the "unmasking" of the truth. Wharton's writing also explored themes of "social mores and social reform" as they relate to the "extremes and anxieties of the Gilded Age".

A key recurring theme in Wharton's writing is the relationship between the house as a physical space and its relationship to its inhabitant's characteristics and emotions. Maureen Howard argues "Edith Wharton conceived of houses, dwelling places, in extended imagery of shelter and dispossession. Houses – their confinement and their theatrical possibilities ... they are never mere settings."

Influences

American children's stories containing slang were forbidden in Wharton's childhood home. This included such popular authors as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Joel Chandler Harris. She was allowed to read Louisa May Alcott but Wharton preferred Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby. Wharton's mother forbade her from reading many novels and Wharton said she "read everything else but novels until the day of my marriage." Instead Wharton read the classics, philosophy, history, and poetry in her father's library including Daniel Defoe, John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Jean Racine, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, John Ruskin, and Washington Irving. Biographer Hermione Lee describes Wharton as having read herself "out of Old New York" and her influences included Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. H. Huxley, George Romanes, James Frazer, and Thorstein Veblen. These influenced her ethnographic style of novelization. Wharton developed a passion for Walt Whitman.

Works

Source: Campbell, Donna M. "Works by Edith Wharton". Washington State University. Retrieved January 22, 2018.

Novels

The Valley of Decision, 1902

The House of Mirth, 1905

The Fruit of the Tree, 1907

The Reef, 1912

The Custom of the Country, 1913

Summer, 1917

The Marne, 1918

The Age of Innocence, 1920 (Pulitzer Prize winner)

The Spinster, 1921

The Glimpses of the Moon, 1922

A Son at the Front, 1923

The Old Maid, 1924

The Mother's Recompense, 1925

Twilight Sleep, 1927

The Children, 1928

Hudson River Bracketed, 1929

The Gods Arrive, 1932

The Buccaneers, 1938 (unfinished)

Novellas and novelette

The Touchstone, 1900

Sanctuary, 1903

Madame de Treymes, 1907

Ethan Frome, 1911

Bunner Sisters, 1916

Old New York, 1924

1. False Dawn; 2. The Old Maid; 3. The Spark; 4. New Year's Day

Fast and Loose: A Novelette, 1938 (written in 1876–1877)

Poetry

Verses, 1878

Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse, 1909

Twelve Poems, 1926

Short story collections

The Greater Inclination, 1899, includes Souls Belated.

Crucial Instances, 1901

The Descent of Man and Other Stories, 1904

The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories, 1908

Tales of Men and Ghosts, 1910

Xingu and Other Stories, 1916

"Xingu"; "Coming Home"; "Autres Temps ..."; "Kerfol"; "The Long Run"; "The Triumph of Night"; "The Choice"; "The Bunner Sisters"

Here and Beyond, 1926

Certain People, 1930

Human Nature, 1933

The World Over, 1936

Ghosts, 1937

Roman Fever and Other Stories, 1964

Madame de Treymes and Others: Four Novelettes, 1970

The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, 1973

"The Lady's Maid's Bell"; "The Eyes"; "Afterward"; "Kerfol"; "The Triumph of Night"; "Miss Mary Pask"; "Bewitched"; "Mr Jones"; "Pomegranate Seed"; "The Looking Glass"; "All Souls"

The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton, 1998 (Carroll & Graf Publishers; paperback, 640 pages)

"The Pelican"; "The Other Two"; "The Mission of Jane"; "The Reckoning"; "The Last Asset"; "The Letters"; "Autres Temps ..."; "The Long Run"; "After Holbein"; "Atrophy"; "Pomegranate Seed"; "Her Son"; "Charm Incorporated"; "All Souls"; "The Lamp of Psyche"; "A Journey"; "The Line of Least Resistance"; "The Moving Finger"; "Expiation"; "Les Metteurs en Scene"; "Full Circle"; "The Daunt Diana"; "Afterward"; "The Bolted Door"; "The Temperate Zone"; "Diagnosis"; "The Day of the Funeral"; "Confession"

The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, 2007 paperback 452 pages, NYREV publishers

1. Mrs. Manstey's view; 2. That good may come; 3. The portrait; 4. A cup of cold water; 5. A journey; 6. The Rembrandt; 7. The other two; 8. The quicksand; 9. The dilettante; 10. The reckoning; 11. Expiation; 12. The pot-boiler; 13. His father's son; 14. Full circle; 15. Autres temps; 16. The long run; 17. After Holbein; 18. Diagnosis; 19. Pomegranate seed; 20. Roman fever

Non-fiction

The Decoration of Houses, 1897

Italian Villas and Their Gardens, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish, 1904

Italian Backgrounds, 1905

A Motor-Flight Through France, 1908

The Cruise of the Vanadis, 1910

Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort, 1915

French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919

In Morocco, 1920 (travel)

The Writing of Fiction, 1925

A Backward Glance, 1934 (autobiography)

Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings, Edited by Frederick Wegener, 1996

Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888–1920, 1995, Edited by Sarah Bird Wright

As editor

The Book of the Homeless, 1916

Theater

Shadow of a Doubt, 1901

Adaptations

The House of Mirth, a 1918 silent film adaptation (6 reels) (of the 1905 novel) directed by French film director Albert Capellani, starring Katherine Harris Barrymore as Lily Bart. It is considered to be a lost film.

The Glimpses Of The Moon, a 1923 silent film adaptation (7 reels) (of the 1922 novel) directed for Paramount Studios by Allan Dwan, starring Bebe Daniels, David Powell, Nita Naldi and Maurice Costello. It is considered to be a lost film.

The Age of Innocence, a 1924 silent film adaptation (7 reels) (of the 1920 novel) directed for Warner Brothers by Wesley Ruggles, starring Beverly Bayne and Elliott Dexter. It is considered to be a lost film.

The Marriage Playground, a 1929 talking film adaptation (70 minutes) (of the 1928 novel The Children) directed for Paramount Studios by Lothar Mendes, starring rising star Fredric March in leading role (as Martin Boyne), Mary Brian (as Judith Wheater), and Kay Francis (as Lady Wrench).

The Age of Innocence, a 1934 film adaptation (9 reels / circa 80–90 minutes) (of the 1920 novel) directed for RKO Studios by Philip Moeller, starring Irene Dunne and John Boles.

Strange Wives, a 1934 film adaptation (8 reels / 75 minutes) (of the 1934 short story Bread Upon the Waters) directed for Universal by Richard Thorpe, starring Roger Pryor (as Jimmy King), June Clayworth (as Nadja), and Esther Ralston (as Olga). It is considered to be a lost film.

The Old Maid, a 1939 film adaptation (95 minutes) (of the 1924 short novella) directed by Edmund Goulding starring Bette Davis.

A 1944 film version of the 1911 novel Ethan Frome starring Joan Crawford was proposed, but never came to fruition.

The Children (115 minutes) directed by Tony Palmer and released in 1990, starring Ben Kingsley and Kim Novak.

Ethan Frome (99 minutes) directed by John Madden and released in 1993, starring Liam Neeson and Patricia Arquette.

The Age of Innocence (138 minutes) directed by Martin Scorsese and released in 1993, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer.

The Reef (88 minutes) directed by Robert Allan Ackerman and released in 1999.

The House of Mirth (140 minutes) directed by Terence Davies and released in 2000, starring Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart.

The Touchstone, a live broadcast on CBS April 1951. First Wharton adaptation on television.

Ethan Frome, a 1960 (CBS) TV US adaptation, directed by Alex Segal, starring Sterling Hayden as Ethan Frome, Julie Harris as Mattie Silver and Clarice Blackburn as Zenobia Frome.

Looking Back, a 1981 TV US loose adaptation of two biographies of Edith Wharton: A Backward Glance, Wharton's own 1934 autobiography & Edith Wharton, a 1975 biography by R.W.B. Lewis (1976 Bancroft Prize-winner).

The House of Mirth, a 1981 TV US adaptation, directed by Adrian Hall, starring William Atherton, Geraldine Chaplin and Barbara Blossom

The Buccaneers, a 1995 BBC mini-series, starring Carla Gugino and Greg Wise

The Buccaneers, a 2023 Apple TV+ streaming series. Starring Kristine Frøseth.

The House of Mirth was adapted as a play in 1906 by Edith Wharton and Clyde Fitch

The Age of Innocence was adapted as a play in 1928. Katharine Cornell played the role of Ellen Olenska.

The Old Maid was adapted for the stage by Zoë Akins in 1934. It was staged by Guthrie McClintic and starred Judith Anderson and Helen Menken. The play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in May 1935. When published, the play had both Akins and Wharton's names on the copyright.

Shadow of a Doubt made its world stage premiere in 2023 directed by Peter Hinton-Davis produced by the Shaw Festival. The show was designed by Gillian Gallow (Set & Costume) Bonnie Beecher (Lighting) and HAUI (Live Video) and starred Katherine Gautier as Kate Derwent.

Ethan Frome was adapted by Cathy Marston as a one-act ballet titled Snowblind for the San Francisco Ballet. The ballet premiered in 2018, with Ulrik Birkkjaer as Ethan, Sarah Van Patten as Zeena and Mathilde Froustey as Mattie.

In popular culture

Edith Wharton was honored on a U.S. postage stamp issued on September 5, 1980.

In The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Edith Wharton (Clare Higgins) travels across North Africa with Indiana Jones in Chapter 16, Tales of Innocence.

Edith Wharton is mentioned in the HBO television series Entourage in the 2007 third season's 13th episode: Vince is handed a screenplay for Wharton's The Glimpses of the Moon by Amanda, his new agent, for a film to be directed by Sam Mendes. In the same episode, period films of Wharton's work are lampooned by agent Ari Gold, who says that all her stories are "about a guy who likes a girl, but he can't have sex with her for five years, because those were the times!" Carla Gugino, who plays Amanda, was the protagonist of the BBC-PBS adaptation of The Buccaneers (1995), one of her early jobs.

Gilmore Girls makes various witty references to Wharton throughout the series. In season 1, episode 6 called "Rory's Birthday Parties", Lorelei jokingly says, "Edith Wharton would be proud." Referring to Emily's extravagant birthday party for Rory. In Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life the tradition continues as Lorelei quips Emily with a Wharton mention in the first episode.

In a 2009 episode of Gossip Girl called "The Age of Dissonance", characters put on a production of a play version of The Age of Innocence and find their personal lives mirroring the play.

"Edith Wharton's Journey" is a radio adaptation, for the NPR series Radio Tales, of the short story "A Journey" from Edith Wharton's collection The Greater Inclination.

The American singer and songwriter Suzanne Vega paid homage to Edith Wharton in her song "Edith Wharton's Figurines" on her 2007 studio album Beauty & Crime.

In Dawson's Creek, Pacey reads and takes a verbal quiz on Ethan Frome.

The Magnetic Fields have a song that summarises the plot of Ethan Frome.

www.edithwharton.org/discover/edith-wharton/




Willis, Connie






Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis (born December 31, 1945), is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards for particular works—more major SF awards than any other writer—most recently the "Best Novel" Hugo and Nebula Awards for Blackout/All Clear (2010). She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and the Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 28th SFWA Grand Master in 2011.

Several of her works feature time travel by history students at the future University of Oxford—sometimes called the Time Travel series. They are the short story "Fire Watch" (1982, also in several anthologies and the 1985 collection of the same name), the novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog (1992 and 1997), and the two-part novel Blackout/All Clear (2010). All four won the annual Hugo Award, and Doomsday Book and Blackout/All Clear won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making her the first author to win Hugo awards for all books in a series.

Willis is a 1967 graduate of Colorado State College, now the University of Northern Colorado, where she completed degrees in English and Elementary Education. She lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her husband Courtney Willis, a former professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado. They have one daughter, Cordelia.

In a 1996 interview, Willis said, "I sing soprano in a Congregationalist church choir. It is my belief that everything you need to know about the world can be learned in a church choir."

Willis's first published story was "The Secret of Santa Titicaca" in Worlds of Fantasy, Winter 1970 (December). At least seven stories followed (1978–81) before her debut novel, Water Witch by Willis and Cynthia Felice, published by Ace Books in 1982. After receiving a National Endowment for the Arts grant that year, she left her teaching job and became a full-time writer.

Scholar Gary K. Wolfe has written, "Willis, the erstwhile stand-up superstar of SF conventions—having her as your MC is like getting Billy Crystal back as host of the Oscars—and the author of some of the field's funniest stories is a woman of considerably greater complexity and gravity than her personal popularity reflects, and for all her facility at screwball comedy knock-offs and snappy parody, she wants us to know that she's a writer of some gravity as well."

Willis is known for writing "romantic 'screwball' comedy in the manner of 1940s Hollywood movies."

Much of Willis's writing explores the social sciences. She often weaves technology into her stories in order to prompt readers to question what impact it has on the world. For instance, Lincoln's Dreams plumbs not just the psychology of dreams, but also their role as indicators of disease. The story portrays a young man's unrequited love for a young woman who might or might not be experiencing reincarnation or precognition, and whose outlook verges on suicidal. Similarly, Bellwether is almost exclusively concerned with human psychology.

Other Willis stories explore the so-called "hard" sciences, following in the classic science fiction tradition. "The Sidon in the Mirror" harks back to the interplanetary and interstellar romanticism of the 1930s and 1940s. "Samaritan" is another take on the theme of Robert A. Heinlein's "Jerry Was a Man", while "Blued Moon" is similarly reminiscent of Heinlein's "The Year of the Jackpot".

Works

Novels and novellas
Water Witch (1982) – with Cynthia Felice
Lincoln's Dreams (1987) – John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner, Locus Fantasy Award nominee, 1988
Light Raid (1989) – with Cynthia Felice
Doomsday Book (Oxford time travel series, 1992) – Nebula Award winner, BSFA Award nominee, 1992; Hugo and Locus SF Awards winner,
Clarke Award nominee, 1993
Remake (1995) – Hugo Award nominee, 1996
Uncharted Territory (1994)
Bellwether (1996) – Nebula Award nominee, 1997
Promised Land (1997) – with Cynthia Felice
To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford time travel series, 1998) – Hugo and Locus SF Awards winner, 1999; Nebula Award nominee, 1998
Passage (2001) – Locus SF Award winner, Hugo and Clarke Awards nominee, 2002; Nebula Award nominee, 2001
Inside Job (2005)
D.A. (2007)
All Seated on the Ground (2007)
Blackout (Oxford time travel series, 2010) – Hugo, Nebula, and Locus SF Awards, 2011 winner
All Clear (Oxford time travel series, 2010) – Hugo, Nebula, and Locus SF Awards, 2011 winner
All About Emily (2011)
Crosstalk (2016)
I Met a Traveler in an Antique Land (2018)
Take a Look at the Five and Ten (2020)

Short story collections
Fire Watch (Oxford time travel series, 1984), whose title story won the 1982 Hugo and Nebula Awards
Impossible Things (1993) – contains three Nebula Award winners, two of which also won Hugo Awards
Futures Imperfect (1996) – omnibus edition of Uncharted Territory, Remake and Bellwether.
Even the Queen: And Other Short Stories (1998) – sound recording of five stories read by Connie Willis including "Even the Queen", "Death on the Nile", and "At the Rialto"
Willis, Connie (1999). Miracle and Other Christmas Stories. Bantam Spectra.
The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium (2007)
Time is the Fire: The Best of Connie Willis The Hugo and Nebula award-winning short fiction (2013). ISBN 978-0-575-13114-9
A Lot Like Christmas: Stories (2017) – Omnibus edition combining Miracle and Other Christmas Stories, several additional short stories, and the novellas All About Emily and All Seated On The Ground.
Terra Incognita (2018) - Collected edition of Uncharted Territory, Remake, and D.A..

Short stories
"Samaritan" (1978) – Collected in Fire Watch and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"Capra Corn" (1978) – Collected in the "Limited/Lettered Editions" of The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"Daisy, in the Sun" (1979) – Collected in Fire Watch
"And Come from Miles Around" (1979) – Collected in Fire Watch
"The Child Who Cries for the Moon" (1981) – Collected in A Spadeful of Spacetime
"Distress Call" (1981) – Published separately by Roadkill Press and collected in two anthologies
"A Letter from the Clearys" (1982) – Collected in Fire Watch and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories
"Fire Watch" (1982) – Collected in Fire Watch and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories
"Service For the Burial of the Dead" (1982) – Collected in Fire Watch and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"Lost and Found" (1982) – Collected in Fire Watch
"The Father of the Bride" (1982) – Collected in Fire Watch
"Mail Order Clone" (1982) – Collected in Fire Watch
"And Also Much Cattle" (1982)
"The Sidon in the Mirror" (1983) – Collected in Fire Watch
"A Little Moonshine" (1983)
"Blued Moon" (1984) – Collected in Fire Watch and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"Cash Crop" (1984) – Collected in The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"Substitution Trick" (1985) – Collected in the "Limited/Lettered Editions" of The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"The Curse of Kings" (1985) – Collected in The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"All My Darling Daughters" (1985) – Collected in Fire Watch and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"And Who Would Pity a Swan?" (1985)
"With Friends Like These" (1985)
"Chance" (1986) – Collected in Impossible Things, The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium, and Gardner Dozois' Modern Classics of Science Fiction
"Spice Pogrom" (1986) – Collected in Impossible Things
"The Pony" (1986) – Collected in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories
"Winter's Tale" (1987) – Collected in Impossible Things
"Schwarzschild Radius" (1987) – Collected in Impossible Things
"Circus Story" (1987)
"Lord of Hosts" (1987)
"Ado" (1988) – Collected in Impossible Things and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"The Last of the Winnebagos" (1988) – Collected in Impossible Things and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories
"Dilemma" (1989)
"Time Out" (1989) – Collected in Impossible Things
"At the Rialto" (1989) – Collected in Impossible Things, The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium and "Even the Queen: And Other Short Stories" (1998) recording and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories
"Cibola" (1990)
"Miracle" (1991) – Collected in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories
"Jack" (1991) – Collected in Impossible Things and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"In the Late Cretaceous" (1991) – Collected in Impossible Things and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"Even the Queen" (1992) – Collected in Impossible Things, The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium and "Even the Queen: And Other Short Stories" (1998) recording and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories
"Inn" (1993) – Collected in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"Close Encounter" (1993)
"Death on the Nile" (1993) – Collected in "Even the Queen: And Other Short Stories" (1998) recording and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories
"A New Theory Explaining the Unpredictability of Forecasting the Weather" (1993)
"Why the World Didn't End Last Tuesday" (1994)
"Adaptation" (1994) – Collected in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories
"The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson's Poems: A Wellsian Perspective" (1996) – Collected in The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories
"In Coppelius's Toyshop" (1996) – Collected in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories
"Nonstop to Portales" (1996) – Collected in The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"Newsletter" (1997) – Collected in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"Cat's paw" (1999) – Collected in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories
"Epiphany" (1999) – Collected in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories and The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
"The Winds of Marble Arch" (1999) – Collected in The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories
"deck.halls@boughs/holly" (2001)
"Just Like the Ones We Used to Know" (2003) – Collected in The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis
Compendium
"New Hat" (2008)
"Now Showing" (2014) – Collected in Rogues (anthology)
"I Met a Traveller in an Antique Land" (2017)

Other
Roswell, Vegas, and Area 51: Travels with Courtney (2002)

Essays
On Ghost Stories (1991)
Foreword (1998)
Introduction (1999)
The Nebula Award for Best Novel (1999)
The 1997 Author Emeritus: Nelson Bond (1999)
The Grand Master Award: Poul Anderson (1999)
A Few Last Words to Put It All in Perspective (1999)

Bibliography, including a list of all of her SF short stories and "confessions" stories, collected in the "Limited/Lettered Editions" of The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium
A Final Word; Twelve Terrific Things to Read... (Christmas stories); And Twelve to Watch (Christmas movies); all collected in Miracle and Other Christmas Stories.

https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/willis_connie



Yolen, Jane







Jane Hyatt Yolen is a writer of fantasy, science fiction, and children's books. She is the author or editor of more than 400 books. She has collaborated on works with all three of her children, most extensively with Adam Stemple.

Jane Hyatt Yolen was born on February 11, 1939, at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. She is the first child of Isabell Berlin Yolen, a psychiatric social worker who became a full-time mother and homemaker upon Yolen's birth, and Will Hyatt Yolen, a journalist who wrote columns at the time for New York newspapers, and whose family emigrated from Ukraine to the United States. Isabell also did volunteer work and wrote short stories in her spare time. However, she was not able to sell them. Because the Hyatts, the family of Yolen's grandmother, Mina Hyatt Yolen, only had girls, a number of the children of Yolen's generation were given their last name as a middle name in order to perpetuate it. In 1962, Yolen married David W. Stemple. They had three children and six grandchildren. David Stemple died in March 2006. Yolen lives in Western Massachusetts. She also owns a house in Scotland, where she lives for a few months each year.

Yolen gave the lecture for the 1989 Alice G. Smith Lecture, the inaugural year for the series. This lecture series is held at the University of South Florida School of Information "to honor the memory of its first director, Alice Gullen Smith, known for her work with youth and bibliotherapy." In 2012 she became the first woman to give the Andrew Lang lecture. Yolen published her 400th book in early 2021, Bear Outside.

When Yolen was barely one year old, the family moved to California to accommodate Will's new job working for Hollywood film studios, doing publicity on films such as American Tragedy and Knut Rockne. The family moved back to New York City prior to the birth of Yolen's brother, Steve. When Will joined the Army as a Second Lieutenant to fight in England during World War II, Yolen, her mother and her brother lived with her grandparents, Danny and Dan, in Newport News, Virginia. After the war, the family moved back to Manhattan, living on Central Park West and 97th Street until Yolen turned 13. She attended PS 93, where she enjoyed writing and singing, and became friends with future radio presenter Susan Stamberg. She also engaged in writing by creating a newspaper for her apartment with her brother that she sold for five cents a copy. She was accepted to Music and Art High School. During the summer prior to that semester, she attended a Vermont summer camp, which was her first involvement with the Society of Friends (Quakers). Her family also moved to a ranch house in Westport, Connecticut, where she attended Bedford Junior high for ninth grade, and then Staples High School. She received a BA from Smith College in 1960 and a master's degree in Education from the University of Massachusetts in 1978. After graduating she moved back to New York City.

During the 1960s, Yolen held editorial positions at various magazines and publishers in New York City, including Gold Medal Books, Routledge Books, and Alfred A. Knopf Juvenile Books. From 1990 to 1996 she ran her own young adult fiction imprint, Jane Yolen Books, at Harcourt Brace.

Although Yolen considered herself a poet, journalist, and nonfiction writer, she became a children's book writer. Her first published book was Pirates in Petticoats, which was published on her 22nd birthday.

Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens, Favorite Folktales From Around the World, Xanadu and Xanadu 2 are among the works that she has edited.

Her book Naming Liberty tells the story of a Russian girl and Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the designer of the Statue of Liberty.

She has co-written two books with her son, the writer and musician Adam Stemple, Pay the Piper and Troll Bridge, both part of the Rock 'n' Roll Fairy Tale series. She also wrote lyrics for the song "Robin's Complaint," recorded on the 1994 album Antler Dance by Stemple's band Boiled in Lead.

Regarding the similarities between her novel Wizard's Hall and the Harry Potter series, Yolen has commented on J.K. Rowling, the author of that series:

I'm pretty sure she never read my book. We were both using fantasy tropes—the wizard school, the pictures on the wall that move. I happen to have a hero whose name was Henry, not Harry. He also had a red-headed best friend and a girl who was also his best friend—though my girl was black, not white. And there was a wicked wizard who was trying to destroy the school, who was once a teacher at the school. But those are all fantasy tropes ...There's even a book that came out way before hers where children go off to a witch school or a wizard school by going on a mysterious train that no one else can see except the kids, at a major British train station—I don’t know if it was Victoria Station or King's Cross. These things are out there ...This is not new."

She writes novels, short fiction, children's books and picture books, Fiction picture books, songbooks, literary cookbooks, nonfiction picture books, poetry, graphic novels, screenplays, and nonfiction.

Awards
1987 Special World Fantasy Award (for Favorite Folktales From Around the World)
1989 Sydney Taylor Book Award for Older Readers (for The Devil's Arithmetic)
1992 The Catholic Library Association's Regina Medal (for her body of children's literature)
1999 Nebula Award for Novelette (for "Lost Girls")
2009 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement at the 2010 World Fantasy Convention. A panel of judges selects about two people annually.
2017 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. 
www.janeyolen.com/








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This page presents short biographies of pioneer American female authors of speculative literature born up to the first half of the 20th cent...