Norton, Andre
Andre Alice Norton (born Alice Mary Norton, February 17, 1912 – March 17, 2005) was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy, who also wrote works of historical fiction and contemporary fiction. She wrote primarily under the pen name Andre Norton, but also under Andrew North and Allen Weston. She was the first woman to be Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy, to be SFWA Grand Master, and to be inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
She was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1912. Her parents were Adalbert Freely Norton, who owned a rug company, and Bertha Stemm Norton. Alice began writing at Collinwood High School in Cleveland, under the tutelage of Sylvia Cochrane. She was the editor of a literary page in the school's paper, The Collinwood Spotlight, for which she wrote short stories. During this time, she wrote her first book, Ralestone Luck, which was eventually published as her second novel in 1938.
After graduating from high school in 1930, Norton planned to become a teacher, and began studying at Flora Stone Mather College of Western Reserve University. However, in 1932 she had to leave because of the Depression and began working for the Cleveland Library System, where she remained for 18 years, latterly in the children's section of the Nottingham Branch Library in Cleveland. In 1934, she legally changed her name to Andre Alice Norton, a pen name she had adopted for her first book, published later that year, to increase her marketability, since boys were the main audience for fantasy.
During 1940–1941, she worked as a special librarian in the cataloging department of the Library of Congress. She was involved in a project related to alien citizenship which was abruptly terminated upon the American entry into World War II. In 1941 she bought a bookstore called Mystery House in Mount Rainier, Maryland, the eastern neighbor of Washington, D.C. The business failed, and she returned to the Cleveland Public Library until 1950, when she retired due to ill health. She then began working as a reader for publisher-editor Martin Greenberg[a] at Gnome Press, a small press in New York City that focused on science fiction. She remained until 1958, when, with 21 novels published, she became a full-time professional writer.
As Norton's health became uncertain, she moved to Winter Park, Florida in November 1966, where she remained until 1997. She moved to Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1997 and was under hospice care from February 21, 2005. She died at home on March 17, 2005, of congestive heart failure.
Norton's novelette "The People of the Crater", published under her "Andrew North" pseudonym, was the cover story in the debut issue of Fantasy Book in 1947.
"The Gifts of Asti", also published under the "North" byline, took the cover of the third issue of Fantasy Book in 1948.
In 1934, her first book, The Prince Commands, being sundry adventures of Michael Karl, sometime crown prince & pretender to the throne of Morvania, with illustrations by Kate Seredy, was published by D. Appleton–Century Company (cataloged by the U.S. Library of Congress as by "André Norton"). She went on to write several historical novels for the juvenile (now called "young adult") market.
Norton's first published science fiction was a short story, "The People of the Crater", which appeared under the name "Andrew North" as pages 4–18 of the inaugural 1947 number of Fantasy Book, a magazine from Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc. Her first fantasy novel, Huon of the Horn, published by Harcourt Brace under her own name in 1951, adapted the 13th-century story of Huon, Duke of Bordeaux. Her first science fiction novel, Star Man's Son, 2250 A.D., appeared from Harcourt in 1952. She became a prolific novelist in the 1950s, with many of her books published for the juvenile market, at least in their original hardcover editions.
As of 1958, when she became a full-time professional writer, Kirkus had reviewed 16 of her novels,[b] and awarded four of them starred reviews. Her four starred reviews to 1957 had been awarded for three historical adventure novels—Follow the Drum (1942), Scarface (1948), Yankee Privateer (1955)—and one cold war adventure, At Swords' Points (1954). She received four starred reviews subsequently, latest in 1966, including three for science fiction.
Norton was twice nominated for the Hugo Award, in 1964 for the novel Witch World and in 1967 for the novelette "Wizard's World". She was nominated three times for the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, winning the award in 1998. Norton won a number of other genre awards and regularly had works appear in the Locus annual "best of year" polls.
She was a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, led by Lin Carter, with entry by fantasy credentials alone. Norton was the only woman among the original eight members. Some works by SAGA members were published in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies.
In 1976, Gary Gygax invited Norton to play Dungeons & Dragons in his Greyhawk world. Norton subsequently wrote Quag Keep, which involved a group of characters who travel from the real world to Greyhawk. It was the first novel to be set, at least partially, in the Greyhawk setting and, according to Alternative Worlds, the first to be based on D&D. Quag Keep was excerpted in Issue 12 of The Dragon (February 1978) just prior to the book's release.[20] She and Jean Rabe were collaborating on the sequel to her 1979 Greyhawk novel Quag Keep when she died. Return to Quag Keep was completed by Rabe and published by Tor Books in January 2006.
Her final complete novel, Three Hands for Scorpio, was published on April 1, 2005. Besides Return to Quag Keep, Tor has published two more novels with Norton and Rabe credited as co-authors, Dragon Mage (November 2006) and Taste of Magic (January 2008).
Norton wrote more than a dozen speculative fiction series, but her longest, and longest-running project was "Witch World", which began with the novel Witch World in 1963. The first six novels were Ace Books paperback originals published from 1963 to 1968. From the 1970s most of the books in the series were first published in hardcover editions. From the 1980s some were written by Norton and a co-author, and others were anthologies of short fiction for which she was editor. (Witch World became a shared universe.)There were dozens of books in all.
The five novels of The Cycle of Oak, Yew, Ash, and Rowan, To the King a Daughter, Knight or Knave, A Crown Disowned, Dragon Blade, and The Knight of the Red Beard, were written with Sasha Miller. The fifth and last novel was dedicated "To my late collaborator, Andre Norton, whose vision inspired the NordornLand cycle." ("NordornLand cycle" is another name for this cycle.)
On February 20, 2005, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which had honored Norton with its Grand Master Award in 1984, announced the creation of the Andre Norton Award, to be given each year for an outstanding work of fantasy or science fiction for the young adult literature market, beginning with 2005 publications. While the Norton Award is not a Nebula Award, it is voted on by SFWA members on the Nebula ballot and shares some procedures with the Nebula Awards. Nominally for a young adult book, actually the eligible class is middle grade and young adult novels. This added a category for genre fiction to be recognized and supported for young readers. Unlike Nebulas, there is a jury whose function is to expand the ballot beyond the six books with most nominations by members.
Often called the Grande Dame of Science Fiction and Fantasy by biographers such as J. M. Cornwell, and organizations such as Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America,[29] Publishers Weekly,[30] and Time, Andre Norton wrote novels for over 70 years. She had a profound influence on the entire genre, having over 300 published titles read by at least four generations of science fiction and fantasy readers and writers. Notable authors who cite her influence include Greg Bear, Lois McMaster Bujold, C. J. Cherryh, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Tanya Huff, Mercedes Lackey, Charles de Lint, Joan D. Vinge, David Weber, K. D. Wentworth, and Catherine Asaro.
The High Hallack Library was a facility that Norton was instrumental in organizing and opening. Designed as a research facility for genre writers, and scholars of "popular" literature (the genres of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, western, romance, gothic, and horror), it was located near Norton's home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
The facility, named after one of the continents in Norton's Witch World series, was home to over 10,000 texts, videos and various other media. Attached to the facility were three guest rooms, allowing authors and scholars the chance to stay on-site to facilitate their research goals.
The facility was opened on February 28, 1999, and operated until March 2004. Most of the collection was sold during the closing days of the facility. The declining health of Andre Norton was one of the leading causes of its closing.
Her works
Between 1939 and 2005, Norton wrote almost 90 short stories that appear in many anthologies. Some can be read complete text via Project Gutenberg.
"Short story collections by Andre Norton"
Garan the Eternal, High Sorcery, Lore of the Witch World, The Many Worlds of Andre Norton, Moon Mirror, Perilous Dreams, Spell of the Witch World, Wizards' Worlds.
“Anthologies edited by Norton”
Gates to Tomorrow: An Introduction to Science Fiction is an anthology of science fiction short works edited by Andre Norton and Ernestine Donaldy. It was first published in hardcover by Atheneum Books in April 1973. The book collects twelve novelettes and short stories by various authors, together with an introduction by the editors.
Grand Masters' Choice, is an anthology of science fiction short stories edited by Andre Norton and Ingrid Zierhut. It was first published as the convention book for Noreascon Three in a limited edition hardcover by NESFA Press in August 1989. The first paperback edition was published by Tor Books in October 1991. The paperback edition credited Norton alone as editor. The book collects eight novellas, novelettes and short stories by the eight science fiction authors then recognized as Grand Master of the field by the Science Fiction Writers of America. The works included were selected by their authors as the best short works written during their careers. The stories were previously published in the magazines The American Legion Magazine, Astounding, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Galaxy, Fantastic, Playboy, and Science Fiction Quarterly, and the anthology Flashing Swords! #2. The book includes an introduction by Robert Bloch.
Magic in Ithkar. Magic in Ithkar is a shared world anthology of fantasy stories edited by Andre Norton and Robert Adams. It was first published as a trade paperback by Tor Books in May 1985. It was reprinted as a standard paperback in April 1988 under the alternate title Magic in Ithkar 1. The book collects thirteen original short stories by various fantasy authors which share the setting of an annual fair in the city of Ithkar, together with an introduction by Adams and notes on the authors by Norton.
Magic in Ithkar 2 is a shared world anthology of fantasy stories edited by Andre Norton and Robert Adams. It was first published as a trade paperback by Tor Books in December 1985. It was reprinted as a standard paperback in October 1988. The book collects fourteen original short stories by various fantasy authors which share the setting of an annual fair in the city of Ithkar, together with an introduction by Adams and notes on the authors by Norton.
Magic in Ithkar 3 is a shared world anthology of fantasy stories edited by Andre Norton and Robert Adams. It was first published as a trade paperback by Tor Books in October 1986. It was reprinted as a standard paperback in September 1989. The book collects fourteen fifteen short stories by various fantasy authors which share the setting of an annual fair in the city of Ithkar, together with an introduction by Adams and notes on the authors by Norton.
Magic in Ithkar 4 is a shared world anthology of fantasy stories edited by Andre Norton and Robert Adams. It was first published as a paperback by Tor Books in July 1987. The book collects fourteen original short stories by various fantasy authors which share the setting of an annual fair in the city of Ithkar, together with an introduction by Adams and notes on the authors by Norton.
"Novels by Andre Norton"
The Beast Master, Catseye, The Crossroads of Time, The Defiant Agents, Galactic Derelict, The Halfblood Chronicles, Key Out of Time, Plague Ship, Postmarked the Stars, Quest Crosstime, Return to Quag Keep, Sargasso of Space, Star Born, Star Gate, Star Guard, Star Rangers, The Stars Are Ours!, Storm Over Warlock, The Time Traders, Voodoo Planet, Witch World.
She also organized Witch World, a speculative fiction project inaugurated by her 1963 novel Witch World and continuing more than four decades. Beginning in the mid-1980s, when she was about 75 years old, Norton recruited other writers to the project, and some books were published only after her death in 2005. The Witch World is a planet in a parallel universe where magic long ago superseded science; early in fictional history, it is performed exclusively by women. The series began as a hybrid of science fiction and sword and sorcery, but for the most part, it combines the latter with high fantasy.
https://andre-norton.com/
Oates, Joyce Carol
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) 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. She is a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches short fiction.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Oates was born in Lockport, New York, the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer. She grew up on her parents' farm outside the town.
Oates became interested in reading at an early age and remembers Blanche's gift of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as "the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life. This was love at first sight!" In her early teens, she read the work of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau, writers whose "influences remain very deep". Oates began writing at the age of 14, and worked for her high school newspaper. As a teen, Oates also received early recognition for her writing by winning a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. She was the first in her family to complete high school.
Oates earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University. At the age of 19, she won the "college short story" contest sponsored by Mademoiselle. Oates was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated valedictorian from Syracuse University with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960, and received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961. She was a Ph.D. student at Rice University but left to become a full-time writer.
Oates met Raymond J. Smith, a fellow graduate student, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and they married in 1961. Smith became a professor of 18th-century literature and, later, an editor and publisher. Oates described the partnership as "a marriage of like minds..." and "a very collaborative and imaginative marriage".
Oates taught in Beaumont, Texas, for a year, then moved to Detroit in 1962, where she began teaching at the University of Detroit.
The Vanguard Press published Oates' first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), when she was 26 years old.
In 1966, she published "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", a short story dedicated to Bob Dylan and written after listening to his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". The story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson". It has been anthologized many times and adapted as a film, Smooth Talk starring Laura Dern (1985). In 2008, Oates said that of all her published work, she is most noted for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?".
Influenced by the Vietnam war, the 1967 Detroit race riots, and a job offer, Oates moved across the river into Canada in 1968 with her husband, to a teaching position at the University of Windsor in Ontario.
As a diarist, Oates began keeping a detailed journal in 1973, documenting her personal and literary life; it eventually grew to "more than 4,000 single-spaced typewritten pages". In 2008, Oates said she had "moved away from keeping a formal journal" and instead preserved copies of her e-mails.
In 1978, she moved to Princeton, New Jersey, and began teaching at Princeton University. She retired from teaching at Princeton in 2014 and was honored at a retirement party in November of that year.
Oates has taught creative short fiction at UC Berkeley since 2016 and offers her course in spring semesters.
She was raised Catholic but as of 2007 is an atheist. She self-identifies as a liberal, and supports gun control. She was a vocal critic of former US President Donald Trump and his policies.
Oates writes in longhand, working from "8 till 1 every day, then again for two or three hours in the evening." Her prolificacy has become one of her best-known attributes, although often discussed disparagingly. The New York Times wrote in 1989 that Oates's "name is synonymous with productivity", and in 2004, The Guardian noted that "Nearly every review of an Oates book, it seems, begins with a list of books she has published".
Early short stories and novels: A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Them (1969), Wonderland (1971), Black Water (1992), and Blonde (2000). In 2006, The Times listed them, On Boxing (in collaboration with photographer John Ranard) (1987), Black Water, and High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006 (2006) as "The Pick of Joyce Carol Oates". In 2007, Entertainment Weekly listed its Oates favorites as Wonderland, Black Water, Blonde, I'll Take You There (2002), and The Falls (2004).
In 2003, Oates herself said that she thinks she will be remembered for, and would most want a first-time Oates reader to read, Them and Blonde, although she "could as easily have chosen a number of titles."
Oates was a member of the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 1997 to 2016. She is an honorary member of the Simpson Literary Project, which annual awards the $50,000 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize to a mid-career writer. She has served as the Project's artist-in-residence several times.
Her husband died of complications from pneumonia on February 18, 2008, and the death affected Oates profoundly.[32] In April 2008, Oates wrote to an interviewer, "Since my husband's unexpected death, I really have very little energy [...] My marriage – my love for my husband – seems to have come first in my life, rather than my writing. Set beside his death, the future of my writing scarcely interests me at the moment."
After six months of near suicidal grieving for Smith, Oates met Charles Gross, a professor in the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton, at a dinner party at her home. In early 2009, Oates and Gross were married. On April 13, 2019, Oates announced via Twitter that Gross had died at the age of 83.
As of 1999, Oates remained devoted to running, of which she has written, "Ideally, the runner who's a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting". While running, Oates mentally envisions scenes in her novels and works out structural problems in already-written drafts; she formulated the germ of her novel You Must Remember This (1987) while running, when she "glanced up and saw the ruins of a railroad bridge", which reminded her of "a mythical upstate New York city in the right place".
Oates's extensive bibliography contains poetry, plays, criticism, short stories, eleven novellas, and sixty novels, including Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart; Black Water; Mudwoman; Carthage; The Man Without a Shadow; and A Book of American Martyrs. She has published several novels under the pseudonyms "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly".
Awards and honors - Winner
1955-1956: Scholastic Art & Writing Award
1967: O. Henry Award – "In the Region of Ice"
1968: M. L. Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters – A Garden of Earthly Delights
1970: National Book Award for Fiction – them
1973: O. Henry Award – "The Dead"
1988: St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates
1990: Rea Award for the Short Story
1996: Bram Stoker Award for Novel – Zombie
1996: PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story
1997: Golden Plate Award, American Academy of Achievement
2002: Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
2003: Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement (The Kenyon Review)
2005: Prix Femina Etranger – The Falls
2006: Chicago Tribune Literary Prize (Chicago Tribune)
2006: Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Mount Holyoke College
2007: Humanist of the Year, American Humanist Association
2009: Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement, NBCC
2010: National Humanities Medal
2010: Fernanda Pivano Award
2011: Honorary Doctor of Arts, University of Pennsylvania
2011: World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction – Fossil-Figures
2011: Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection – The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares
2012: Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Oregon State University
2012: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement
2012: Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection – Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories
2019: Jerusalem Prize, Lifetime Achievement
2020: Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, work as a message of modern humanism
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. She is a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches short fiction.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Oates was born in Lockport, New York, the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer. She grew up on her parents' farm outside the town.
Oates became interested in reading at an early age and remembers Blanche's gift of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as "the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life. This was love at first sight!" In her early teens, she read the work of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau, writers whose "influences remain very deep". Oates began writing at the age of 14, and worked for her high school newspaper. As a teen, Oates also received early recognition for her writing by winning a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. She was the first in her family to complete high school.
Oates earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University. At the age of 19, she won the "college short story" contest sponsored by Mademoiselle. Oates was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated valedictorian from Syracuse University with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960, and received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961. She was a Ph.D. student at Rice University but left to become a full-time writer.
Oates met Raymond J. Smith, a fellow graduate student, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and they married in 1961. Smith became a professor of 18th-century literature and, later, an editor and publisher. Oates described the partnership as "a marriage of like minds..." and "a very collaborative and imaginative marriage".
Oates taught in Beaumont, Texas, for a year, then moved to Detroit in 1962, where she began teaching at the University of Detroit.
The Vanguard Press published Oates' first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), when she was 26 years old.
In 1966, she published "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", a short story dedicated to Bob Dylan and written after listening to his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". The story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson". It has been anthologized many times and adapted as a film, Smooth Talk starring Laura Dern (1985). In 2008, Oates said that of all her published work, she is most noted for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?".
Influenced by the Vietnam war, the 1967 Detroit race riots, and a job offer, Oates moved across the river into Canada in 1968 with her husband, to a teaching position at the University of Windsor in Ontario.
As a diarist, Oates began keeping a detailed journal in 1973, documenting her personal and literary life; it eventually grew to "more than 4,000 single-spaced typewritten pages". In 2008, Oates said she had "moved away from keeping a formal journal" and instead preserved copies of her e-mails.
In 1978, she moved to Princeton, New Jersey, and began teaching at Princeton University. She retired from teaching at Princeton in 2014 and was honored at a retirement party in November of that year.
Oates has taught creative short fiction at UC Berkeley since 2016 and offers her course in spring semesters.
She was raised Catholic but as of 2007 is an atheist. She self-identifies as a liberal, and supports gun control. She was a vocal critic of former US President Donald Trump and his policies.
Oates writes in longhand, working from "8 till 1 every day, then again for two or three hours in the evening." Her prolificacy has become one of her best-known attributes, although often discussed disparagingly. The New York Times wrote in 1989 that Oates's "name is synonymous with productivity", and in 2004, The Guardian noted that "Nearly every review of an Oates book, it seems, begins with a list of books she has published".
Early short stories and novels: A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Them (1969), Wonderland (1971), Black Water (1992), and Blonde (2000). In 2006, The Times listed them, On Boxing (in collaboration with photographer John Ranard) (1987), Black Water, and High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006 (2006) as "The Pick of Joyce Carol Oates". In 2007, Entertainment Weekly listed its Oates favorites as Wonderland, Black Water, Blonde, I'll Take You There (2002), and The Falls (2004).
In 2003, Oates herself said that she thinks she will be remembered for, and would most want a first-time Oates reader to read, Them and Blonde, although she "could as easily have chosen a number of titles."
Oates was a member of the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from 1997 to 2016. She is an honorary member of the Simpson Literary Project, which annual awards the $50,000 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize to a mid-career writer. She has served as the Project's artist-in-residence several times.
Her husband died of complications from pneumonia on February 18, 2008, and the death affected Oates profoundly.[32] In April 2008, Oates wrote to an interviewer, "Since my husband's unexpected death, I really have very little energy [...] My marriage – my love for my husband – seems to have come first in my life, rather than my writing. Set beside his death, the future of my writing scarcely interests me at the moment."
After six months of near suicidal grieving for Smith, Oates met Charles Gross, a professor in the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton, at a dinner party at her home. In early 2009, Oates and Gross were married. On April 13, 2019, Oates announced via Twitter that Gross had died at the age of 83.
As of 1999, Oates remained devoted to running, of which she has written, "Ideally, the runner who's a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting". While running, Oates mentally envisions scenes in her novels and works out structural problems in already-written drafts; she formulated the germ of her novel You Must Remember This (1987) while running, when she "glanced up and saw the ruins of a railroad bridge", which reminded her of "a mythical upstate New York city in the right place".
Oates's extensive bibliography contains poetry, plays, criticism, short stories, eleven novellas, and sixty novels, including Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart; Black Water; Mudwoman; Carthage; The Man Without a Shadow; and A Book of American Martyrs. She has published several novels under the pseudonyms "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly".
Awards and honors - Winner
1955-1956: Scholastic Art & Writing Award
1967: O. Henry Award – "In the Region of Ice"
1968: M. L. Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters – A Garden of Earthly Delights
1970: National Book Award for Fiction – them
1973: O. Henry Award – "The Dead"
1988: St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates
1990: Rea Award for the Short Story
1996: Bram Stoker Award for Novel – Zombie
1996: PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story
1997: Golden Plate Award, American Academy of Achievement
2002: Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
2003: Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement (The Kenyon Review)
2005: Prix Femina Etranger – The Falls
2006: Chicago Tribune Literary Prize (Chicago Tribune)
2006: Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Mount Holyoke College
2007: Humanist of the Year, American Humanist Association
2009: Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement, NBCC
2010: National Humanities Medal
2010: Fernanda Pivano Award
2011: Honorary Doctor of Arts, University of Pennsylvania
2011: World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction – Fossil-Figures
2011: Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection – The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares
2012: Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Oregon State University
2012: Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement
2012: Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection – Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories
2019: Jerusalem Prize, Lifetime Achievement
2020: Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, work as a message of modern humanism
https://achievement.org/achiever/joyce-carol-oates/
O'Connor, Flannery
Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia on March 25, 1925, and died on August 3, 1964. She was a novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfections or differences of these characters (whether attributed to disability, race, crime, religion or sanity) typically underpins the drama.
Her writing reflected her Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.
O'Connor was the only child of Edward Francis O'Connor, a real estate agent, and Regina Cline, who were both of Irish descent.
In 1940, O'Connor and her family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, where they initially lived with her mother's family at the so-called 'Cline mansion', in town. In 1937, her father had been diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus; it led to his eventual death on February 1, 1941, and O'Connor and her mother continued to live in Milledgeville. In 1951, they moved to Andalusia Farm, which is now a museum dedicated to O'Connor's work. The Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home museum is located at 207 E. Charlton Street on Lafayette Square.
O'Connor attended Peabody High School, where she worked as the school newspaper's art editor and from which she graduated in 1942. She entered Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in an accelerated three-year program and graduated in June 1945 with a B.A. in sociology and English literature. While at Georgia College, she produced a significant amount of cartoon work for the student newspaper. Many critics have claimed that the idiosyncratic style and approach of these early cartoons shaped her later fiction in important ways.
In 1946, she was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she first went to study journalism. While there, she got to know several important writers and critics who lectured or taught in the program, among them Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Robie Macauley, Austin Warren and Andrew Lytle. Lytle, for many years editor of the Sewanee Review, was one of the earliest admirers of her fiction. He later published several of her stories in the Sewanee Review, as well as critical essays on her work. Workshop director Paul Engle was the first to read and comment on the initial drafts of what would become Wise Blood. She received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1947. During the summer of 1948, O'Connor continued to work on Wise Blood at Yaddo, an artists' community in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she also completed several short stories.
In 1949 O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with Robert Fitzgerald (a well-known translator of the classics) and his wife, Sally, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
O'Connor is primarily known for her short stories. She published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965). Many of O'Connor's short stories have been re-published in major anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories.
O'Connor's two novels are Wise Blood (1952) (made into a film by John Huston) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). She also has had several books of her other writings published, and her enduring influence is attested by a growing body of scholarly studies of her work.
Fragments exist of an unfinished novel tentatively titled Why Do the Heathen Rage? that draws from several of her short stories, including "Why Do the Heathen Rage?," "The Enduring Chill," and "The Partridge Festival".
Her writing career can be divided into four five-year periods of increasing skill and ambition, 1945 to 1964:
Postgraduate Student: Iowa Writers' Workshop, first published stories, drafts of Wise Blood. Literary influences include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James.
Early: Wise Blood completed and published. In this period, satirical elements dominate. Influences include Jacques Maritain.
Middle: A Good Man Is Hard to Find published, The Violent Bear It Away written and published. Influences include Friedrich von Hügel. In this period, the mystical undercurrents begin to have primacy.
Mature: Everything That Rises Must Converge written. Influences include Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Mary Anne Long. In this period, the notion of grotesque is expanded to include the good as grotesque, and the grotesque as good.
Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said: "Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."
Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, frequently interacting with people with disabilities or disabled themselves (as O'Connor was), while the issue of race often appears. Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic," she wrote. "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism... When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."
She felt deeply informed by the sacramental and by the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. Yet she did not write apologetic fiction of the kind prevalent in the Catholic literature of the time, explaining that a writer's meaning must be evident in his or her fiction without didacticism. She wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that, to her thinking, brought them closer to the Catholic mind. The transformation is often accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of the holy. However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as open to the touch of divine grace. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories' violence, as of her own illness. She wrote: "Grace changes us and the change is painful."
She also had a deeply sardonic sense of humor, often based in the disparity between her characters' limited perceptions and the awesome fate awaiting them. Another source of humor is frequently found in the attempt of well-meaning liberals to cope with the rural South on their own terms. O'Connor used such characters' inability to come to terms with disability, race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, as an example of the failure of the secular world in the twentieth century.
However, in several stories O'Connor explored some of the most sensitive contemporary issues that her liberal and fundamentalist characters might encounter. She addressed the Holocaust in her story "The Displaced Person", racial integration in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" and intersexuality in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost". Her fiction often included references to the problem of race in the South; occasionally, racial issues come to the forefront, as in "The Artificial Nigger," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," and "Judgement Day," her last short story and a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, "The Geranium".
Despite her secluded life, her writing reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. O'Connor gave many lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far despite her frail health. Politically, she maintained a broadly progressive outlook in connection with her faith, voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and supporting the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.
By the summer of 1952, O'Connor was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus), as her father had been before her. She remained for the rest of her life on Andalusia. O'Connor lived for twelve years after her diagnosis, seven years longer than expected.
Her daily routine was to attend Mass, write in the morning, then spend the rest of the day recuperating and reading. Despite the debilitating effects of the steroid drugs used to treat O'Connor's lupus, she nonetheless made over sixty appearances at lectures to read her works.
In the PBS documentary, Flannery, the writer Alice McDermott explains the impact lupus had on O'Connor's work, saying, "It was the illness, I think, which made her the writer she is."
O'Connor completed more than two dozen short stories and two novels while living with lupus. She died on August 3, 1964, at the age of 39 in Baldwin County Hospital. Her death was caused by complications from a new attack of lupus following surgery for a uterine fibroid. She was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia, at Memory Hill Cemetery.
Throughout her life, O'Connor maintained a wide correspondence, including with writers Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, English professor Samuel Ashley Brown, and playwright Maryat Lee. After her death, a selection of her letters, edited by her friend Sally Fitzgerald, was published as The Habit of Being. Much of O'Connor's best-known writing on religion, writing, and the South is contained in these and other letters.
In 1955, Betty Hester, an Atlanta file clerk, wrote O'Connor a letter expressing admiration for her work. Hester's letter drew O'Connor's attention, and they corresponded frequently. For The Habit of Being, Hester provided Fitzgerald with all the letters she received from O'Connor but requested that her identity be kept private; she was identified only as "A." The complete collection of the unedited letters between O'Connor and Hester was unveiled by Emory University in May 2007; the letters had been given to the university in 1987 with the stipulation that they not be released to the public for 20 years.
Emory University also contains the more than 600 letters O'Connor wrote to her mother, Regina, nearly every day while she was pursuing her literary career in Iowa City, New York, and Massachusetts. Some of these describe "travel itineraries and plumbing mishaps, ripped stockings and roommates with loud radios," as well as her request for the homemade mayonnaise of her childhood. O'Connor lived with her mother for 34 of her 39 years of life.
O'Connor was a devout Catholic. From 1956 through 1964, she wrote more than one hundred book reviews for two Catholic diocesan newspapers in Georgia: The Bulletin and The Southern Cross.
A prayer journal O'Connor had kept during her time at the University of Iowa was published in 2013. It included prayers and ruminations on faith, writing, and O'Connor's relationship with God.
When she was six, O'Connor experienced her first brush with celebrity status. Pathé News filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained chicken and showed the film around the country. She said: "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax."
In high school, when the girls were required to sew Sunday dresses for themselves, O'Connor sewed a full outfit of underwear and clothes to fit her pet duck and brought the duck to school to model it.
As an adult at Andalusia, she raised and nurtured some 100 peafowl. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, ostriches, emus, toucans, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain, while incorporating images of peacocks into her books. She described her peacocks in an essay entitled "The King of the Birds".
O'Connor's Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and, in a 2009 online poll, was named the best book ever to have won the National Book Awards.
In June 2015, the United States Postal Service honored O'Connor with a new postage stamp, the 30th issuance in the Literary Arts series. Some criticized the stamp as failing to reflect O'Connor's character and legacy. She was inducted into the Savannah Women of Vision investiture in 2016.
The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, named in honor of O'Connor by the University of Georgia Press, is a prize given annually since 1983 to an outstanding collection of short stories.
The Flannery O'Connor Book Trail is a series of Little Free Libraries stretching between O'Connor's homes in Savannah and Milledgeville.
The Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home is a historic house museum in Savannah, Georgia, where O'Connor lived during her childhood.[50] In addition to serving as a museum, the house hosts regular events and programs.
Loyola University Maryland had a student dormitory named for O'Connor. In 2020, Flannery O'Connor Hall was renamed in honor of activist Sister Thea Bowman. The announcement also mentions, "This renaming comes after recent recognition of Flannery O’Connor, a 20th century Catholic American writer, and the racism present in some of her work."
Novels
Wise Blood (1952)
The Violent Bear It Away (1960)
Short story collections
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955)
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)
The Complete Stories (1971)
Other works
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor (1979)
The Presence of Grace: and Other Book Reviews (1983)
Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works (1988)
Flannery O'Connor: The Cartoons (2012)
A Prayer Journal (2013)
georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/flannery-oconnor/
Osborne, Mary Pope
Mary Pope Osborne (born May 20, 1949) is an American author of children's books. She is best known as the author of the Magic Tree House series, which as of 2017 sold more than 134 million copies worldwide. Both the series and Osborne have won awards, sometimes for Osborne's charitable efforts at promoting children's literacy. One of four children, Osborne moved around in her childhood before attending the University of North Carolina. Following college, Osborne traveled before moving to New York City. She somewhat spontaneously began to write, with her first book being published in 1982. She would go on to write a variety of other kinds of children's and young adult books before starting the Magic Tree House series in 1992. Osborne's sister Natalie Pope Boyce has written several compendium books to the Magic Tree House series, sometimes with Osborne's husband Will.
Mary Pope Osborne grew up in a military family, alongside her sister, Natalie Pope Boyce, her twin brother, Bill, and younger brother, Michael. Her father's career required the family to travel rather extensively and regularly move. As a child, Osborne lived in Salzburg, Austria, as well as Oklahoma and Virginia. Osborne herself says of the experience: "Moving was never traumatic for me, but staying in one place was.” After her father retired, her family settled in a small town in North Carolina. Osborne grew invested in the local community theater spending all her free time there.
Mary Pope Osborne initially studied drama at the University of North Carolina; in her junior year, however, she switched to a major in religion with a focus on comparative religions. After graduating from UNC in 1971, Osborne and a friend went traveling. For six weeks, she camped out in a cave on the island of Crete. Following this, Osborne joined a small group of Europeans heading to the East. Their journey took Osborne through 11 different countries throughout Asia, including Iraq, Iran, India, Nepal, Afghanistan, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and Pakistan. The trip came to an end when Osborne experienced blood poisoning requiring her to stay in a hospital for a couple of weeks where she read The Lord of the Rings. Remarking on her travels Osborne said, ""That journey irrevocably changed me. The experience was gathered that serves as a reference point every day of my life. I encountered worlds of light and worlds of darkness--and planted seeds of the imagination that led directly to my being an author of Adult's books."
After her travels, Osborne lived in California, Washington D.C., where she met her husband Will at a theater performance, and New York, where the couple moved after getting married in 1976. During this time, she held jobs including medical assistant, travel agent, drama teacher, bartender, and as an assistant editor for a children's magazine.
Mary Pope Osborne has written over 60 children's stories, with a variety of genres and for a range of children to young adult audiences. Her books have been named to a number of the Best Books of the Year Lists, including, School Library Journal, Parents’ Magazine, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, and Bank Street College. She has received honors from such organizations as the National Council of Teachers of English, The Children's Book Council, and the International Reading Association. She received the 1992 Diamond State Reading Association Award, 2005 Ludington Memorial Award from the Educational Paperback Association and the 2010 Heidelberger Leander Award. She has also received awards from the Carolina Alumni Association, the Virginia Library Association and in spring 2013 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ms. Osborne served two separate terms as president of the Authors Guild and also chaired its Children's Book Committee. She has since traveled extensively in the states and throughout the world, visiting schools and speaking on issues related to reading and books. In 2011, she attended the International Tokyo Film Festival for the premier of the Magic Tree House anime film and visited schools in the tsunami-hit area of Japan. The film grossed 5.7 million dollars; Osborne donated all her proceeds into her educational works.
She was profiled on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams for her continued efforts to get books into the hands of underserved children on a Magic Tree House-themed tour bus.[10] She spoke of the pressure she feels as an author that children look up to, "for a child to value someone who writes books is so extraordinary.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Magic Tree House series in 2012, Ms. Osborne created a Magic Tree House Classroom Adventures Program. Ms. Osborne's mission with Classroom Adventures is to inspire children to read and to love reading while simultaneously helping kids to read at grade level by the end of 3rd grade. Free of charge, the program provides a set of online educational resources for teachers and allows for Title 1 schools to apply for free Magic Tree House books. Under Classroom Adventures, Ms. Osborne, in partnership with the First Book organization in Washington, D.C., has donated hundreds of thousands of Magic Tree House books to underserved schools.
Osborne's travels and experiences have factored largely into her own writing, while her writing has allowed her to experience some of the thrills of traveling, as she said, "Without even leaving my home, I’ve traveled around the globe, learning about the religions of the world."
Osborne's writing career began "one day, out of the blue" when she wrote Run, Run As Fast As You Can in 1982. The book itself is semi-autobiographical in nature, according to Osborne: "The girl was a lot like me and many of the incidents in the story were similar to happenings in my childhood." The book served as the starting point for Osborne's writing career. Her early work received mixed reviews. Her work includes young adult novels, picture books, retellings of mythology and fairy tales, biographies, mysteries, a six-part series of the Odyssey, a book of American Tall Tales, and a book for young readers about the major world religions.
Osborne says that she can work on Magic Tree House up to 12 hours a day and seven days a week and has used space at shared office space, The Writer's Room. She has modeled her writing after Hemingway by trying to be simple and direct and is "noted for writing clear, lively, well-paced prose in both her stories and her informational books."
Osborne was married to Will Osborne in 1976, meeting him after seeing him appear in a play. Mary has cited the key role Will plays in her writing saying, "Will has given me the support and encouragement I've needed to be a professional daydreamer-in other word, an author of children's books." Will and Mary also work with Mary's sister Natalie, on the non-fiction fact trackers. Mary notes that the three of them enjoy doing book tours together. She does not have any children, which she has explained as "I got too busy."
Mary Pope Osborne's most prolific work has been the Magic Tree House series. The series has sold more than 134 million books worldwide since its debut in 1992 and as of 2007 the series had spent a total 132 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list.Owing to the successful sales of the books, Osborne for many years resisted efforts to commercialize the characters and books wanting them to live in the imaginations of children.
The first of the Magic Tree House books, Dinosaurs Before Dark, was published in 1992. She was initially inspired to write the books while working in a teen homeless shelter and realizing that for the teens writing themselves into stories taking place in the Himalayas or Serengeti had a major effect on the teens. Osborne says she tried writing the book seven different ways before finding a way that worked." It introduces the main characters of Jack and Annie, a brother and sister duo of adventurers who are transported to different areas of time thanks to the titular magic treehouse. The first book established the format for feature books and introduced recurring characters Morgan le Fay and Merlin, as part of the Arthurian motifs. Osborne says she is more like Jack but wishes she was more like Annie.
Osborne tends to place small cliffhangers at the end of each chapter, which has been highlighted as one of the major reasons for the appeal of the books within their target age group. Another important factor in their success is the educational nature of the series. The books are cited for their ability to interest students in history and Osborne’s usage of vocabulary encourages young readers to learn new words and for their promoting gratitude and cross-cultural understanding in its readers.
The Magic Tree House brand has taken on other forms. A full-scale musical adaptation was created by Will Osborne and Randy Court; Magic Tree House: The Musical, premiered in September 2007. Osborne hoped that it would have the same kind of kid and adult appeal as The Lion King or Mary Poppins. Based on the Magic Tree House book Christmas in Camelot, the Musical has toured nationally and had a cast album.
A planetarium show; Magic Tree House: Space Mission, also created by Will Osborne, is produced and presented exclusively at the Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
In 2011, Will Osborne collaborated with New Orleans composer Allen Toussaint and Ain't Misbehavin' co-creator Murray Horwitz to write A Night in New Orleans, a musical adaptation of Magic Tree House #42: A Good Night for Ghosts about the life of Louis Armstrong. The show features an ensemble cast and live jazz band. It premiered in 2012 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and was shown free to every Newark 4th grade student.
Magic Tree House Kids Shows are theatrical adaptations of selected titles in the Magic Tree House series designed specifically for performance by kids. To date, children's shows have been created by husband and wife playwright and composer team Randy Courts and Jenny Laird in collaboration with Will Osborne based on the following Magic Tree House books: Dinosaurs Before Dark, The Knight at Dawn, Pirates Past Noon, A Ghost Tale for Christmas Time, A Night in New Orleans, and Stage Fright on a Summer Night, a new children's show based on the life of William Shakespeare premiered at the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre in October 2017.
In 2016, Lionsgate acquired the film rights with a script by Will Osborne and Jenny Laird. The film would primarily contain plot elements from Book #29, Christmas in Camelot. As of 2021 no further news about this movie has been reported.
Other books
Run, Run As Fast As You Can (Random House Children's Books, 1982)
The Deadly Power of Medusa (Scholastic, 1988), Will and Mary Pope Osborne, illustrated by Steve Sullivan
Jason and the Argonauts (Scholastic, 1988), Will and Mary Pope Osborne, illustrated by Steve Sullivan
Favorite Greek Myths (Scholastic, 1989), retold by Osborne, illustrated by Troy Howell
American Tall Tales (Knopf, 1991), retold by Osborne, illustrated by Michael McCurdy
Spider Kane and the Mystery under the May-apple (Knopf, 1992), illustrated by Victoria Chess — middle-grade chapter book, first of the Spider Kane series
Mermaid Tales from Around the World (Scholastic, 1993), retold by Osborne, illustrated by Troy Howell
Haunted Waters (Candlewick, 1994), young-adult fantasy novel
Favorite Norse Myths (Scholastic, 1996), retold by Osborne, illustrated by Troy Howell
Rocking Horse Christmas (Scholastic, 1997), illustrated by Ned Bittinger
Favorite Medieval Tales (Scholastic, 1998), retold by Osborne, illustrated by Troy Howell
Standing in the Light: The Captive Diary of Catharine Carey Logan, Delaware Valley, Pennsylvania, 1763 (Dear America series, Scholastic, 1998)
My Secret War: The World War II Diary of Madeline Beck (Dear America, Scholastic, 2000)
My Brother's Keeper (My America series, Scholastic, 2000), first of three Virginia's Civil War Diary
Kate and the Beanstalk (Atheneum Books, 2000), picture book illustrated by Giselle Potter — adaptation of the traditional fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk
Tales from the Odyssey (Hyperion Books, 2002 to 2005), illustrated by Troy Howell — six children's novels adapted from Odyssey
Tales from the Odyssey (Hyperion, 2010), a two-volume edition
Moonhorse (Dragonfly Books, 2010), chapter book
Johnny Appleseed
The Life of Jesus in Masterpieces of Art (Viking: Penguin Putnam, 1998)
https://www.magictreehouse.com/about/
Paterson, Katherine
Katherine Womeldorf Paterson (born October 31, 1932) is a Chinese-born American writer best known for children's novels, including Bridge to Terabithia. For four different books published 1975-1980, she won two Newbery Medals and two National Book Awards. She is one of four people to win the two major international awards; for "lasting contribution to children's literature" she won the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing in 1998 and for her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" she won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2006, the biggest monetary prize in children's literature. Also for her body of work she was awarded the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in 2007 and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the American Library Association in 2013. She was the second U.S. National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, serving 2010 and 2011.
Katherine Womeldorf was born in Qing Jiang, China, to Presbyterian Missionaries Rev. G. (George) Raymond and Mary Womeldorf. Her father supported her family by preaching and heading Sutton 690, a boys’ school. The Womeldorf family lived in a Chinese neighborhood and immersed themselves in Chinese culture. When Katherine was five years old, the family fled China during the Japanese invasion of 1937. Her family returned to the United States at the onset of World War II.
Paterson said during World War II, her parents and four siblings lived in Virginia and North Carolina, and when her family’s return to China was indefinitely postponed, they moved to various towns in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, before her parents settled in Winchester, Virginia. The Womeldorf family moved 15 times over 13 years.
Paterson's first language was Chinese, and she initially experienced difficulty reading and writing English. She overcame these challenges and, in 1954, graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English from King College in Bristol, Tennessee. She then spent a year teaching at a rural elementary school in Virginia before going to graduate school. She received a master's degree from the Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, Virginia, where she studied Bible and Christian education. Paterson had hoped to become a missionary in China, but its borders were closed to western citizens. A Japanese friend pushed her to go to Japan instead, where she worked as a missionary and Christian education assistant. While in Japan, Paterson studied both Japanese and Chinese culture, which influenced much of her subsequent writing.
Paterson began her professional career in the Presbyterian Church in 1964 by writing curriculum materials for fifth and sixth graders. In 1966, she wrote the religious education book Who Am I?. While continuing to write, she was unable to get any of her novels published. After being persuaded, Paterson took an adult education course in creative writing during which her first novel was published. Her first children's novel, The Sign of the Chrysanthemum, was published in 1973. It is a work of historical fiction, set in the Japanese medieval period; it is based on Paterson's studies in Japan. Bridge to Terabithia, her most widely read work, was published in 1977. Terabithia was highly controversial due to some of the difficult themes. Bridge to Terabithia is the most popular book she has written.
Some of her other books also feature difficult themes such as the death of a loved one. In her 2007 NSK Prize Lecture at the University of Oklahoma, Paterson said she has spent the last "more than forty years" of her life as a writer, and her books seem "to be filled with heroes of the most unlikely sort."
Katherine Paterson is currently vice-president of the National Children's Book and Literacy Alliance, a non-profit organization that advocates for literacy, literature, and libraries. Paterson lives in Barre, Vermont. Her husband John Barstow Paterson, a retired Presbyterian pastor, died in 2013. She has four children and seven grandchildren.
On April 28, 2005, Paterson dedicated a tree in memory of Lisa Hill (her son David's childhood friend who became the inspiration for Bridge to Terabithia) to Takoma Park Elementary School. In 2006, she released Bread and Roses, Too. She was inspired to write this book after seeing a photograph of 35 children taken on the steps of the Old Socialist Labor Hall in Barre captioned, "Children of Lawrence Massachusetts, Bread and Roses Strike come to Barre".
She has written a play version of the story by Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck. It was performed at a conference of the Beatrix Potter Society in Fresno, California in April 2009.
In January 2010, Paterson replaced Jon Scieszka as the Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, a two-year position created to raise national awareness of the importance of lifelong literacy and education.
In 2011, Paterson gave the Annual Buechner Lecture at The Buechner Institute at her alma mater, King University.
In January 2013, Paterson received the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the American Library Association, which recognizes a living author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made "a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children". Citing Bridge to Terabithia in particular, the committee noted that "Paterson's unflinching yet redemptive treatment of tragedy and loss helped pave the way for ever more realistic writing for young people."
In Paterson's novels, her youthful protagonists face crises by which they learn to triumph through self-sacrifice. Paterson, unlike many other authors of young adult novels, tackles themes often considered to be adult, such as death and jealousy. Although her characters face dire situations, Paterson writes with compassion and empathy. Amidst her writing of misery and strife, Paterson interlaces her writing with wry wit and understated humor. After facing tumultuous events, her characters prevail in triumph and redeem themselves and their ambitions. Paterson's protagonists are usually orphaned or estranged children with only a few friends who must face difficult situations largely on their own. Paterson's plots may reflect her own childhood in which she felt estranged and lonely
The Hans Christian Andersen and Astrid Lindgren Awards are the two major international awards recognizing career contributions to children's literature. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award is the highest honor from U.S. professional librarians for contributions to American children's literature.
Paterson has also won many annual awards for new books, including the National Book Award (The Master Puppeteer, 1977; The Great Gilly Hopkins, 1979); the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award (Master Puppeteer, 1977); the Newbery Medal (Bridge to Terabithia, 1977; Jacob Have I Loved, 1981); the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction (Jip, His Story, 1996). Twenty years after its publication, Of Nightingales That Weep won the 1994 Phoenix Award as the best LOL children's book that did not win a major contemporary award.
Novels
The Sign of the Chrysanthemum, 1973.
Of Nightingales That Weep, 1974.
The Master Puppeteer, 1975.
Bridge to Terabithia, 1977.
The Great Gilly Hopkins, 1978.
Jacob Have I Loved, 1980.
Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom, 1983.
Come Sing, Jimmy Jo, 1985.
Park's Quest, 1988.
Lyddie, 1991.
Flip-Flop Girl, 1994.
Jip, His Story, 1996.
Parzival: The Quest of the Grail Knight, 1998.
Preacher’s Boy, 1999.
The Same Stuff as Stars, 2002.
Bread and Roses, Too, 2006.
The Day of the Pelican, 2009.
My Brigadista Year, 2017.
Picture books
The Angel and the Donkey, 1996.
The King's Equal, 1996.
Celia and the Sweet, Sweet Water, 1998.
The Tale of the Mandarin Ducks (Illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon), 1990.
The Wide-Awake Princess, 2000.
Blueberries for the Queen, 2004.
Brother Sun, Sister Moon: Saint Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Creatures, 2011.
I-can-read books
The Field of the Dogs, 2001.
Marvin One Too Many, 2001.
Marvin’s Best Christmas Present Ever, 1997.
The Smallest Cow in the World, 1991.
Translations Japanese
The Crane Wife by Sumiko Yagawa, 1981.
The Tongue-Cut Sparrow by Momoko Ishii, 1987.
Russian
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Lur'e, 1982.
Jacob have I Loved by Natalia Trauberg, 2001.
Bridge to Terabithia by Natalia Trauberg, 2003.
Non-fiction
Gates of Excellence: On Reading and Writing Books for Children, 1981.
Consider the Lilies: Plants of the Bible, 1986.
The Spying Heart: More Thoughts on Reading and Writing Books for Children, 1989.
Who Am I?, 1992.
A Sense of Wonder: On Reading and Writing Books for Children, 1995 (combined text of Gates of Excellence, and The Spying Heart)
The Invisible Child: On Reading and Writing Books for Children, 2001.
Christmas short story collections
Angels & Other Strangers: Family Christmas Stories, 1979.
A Midnight Clear: Twelve Family Stories for the Christmas Season, 1995.
Star of Night: Stories for Christmas, 1980.
Television productions
Bridge to Terabithia, PBS, 1985.
Miss Lettie and Me, TNT, 2002 (based on her short story "Poor Little Innocent Lamb").
Film adaptations
Bridge to Terabithia, Walt Disney Pictures, 2007.
The Great Gilly Hopkins, Lionsgate Films, 2016.
https://katherinepaterson.com/
Piercy, Marge
Marge Piercy (born March 31, 1936) is an American progressive activist and writer. Piercy's work is rooted in her Jewish heritage, communist social and political activism, and feminist ideals. For almost 50 years Marge has lived in Wellfleet, a small fishing village on Outer Cape Cod, a year-round home of many artists and writers, a summer retreat for some of the most famous names in American literature.
Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan to Bert (Bunnin) Piercy and Robert Piercy. While her father was non-religious from a Presbyterian background, she was raised Jewish by her mother and her Orthodox Jewish maternal grandmother, who gave Piercy the Hebrew name of Marah.
On her childhood and Jewish identity, Piercy said: "Jews and blacks were always lumped together when I grew up. I didn’t grow up 'white.' Jews weren't white. My first boyfriend was black. I didn't find out I was white until we spent time in Baltimore and I went to a segregated high school. I can't express how weird it was. Then I just figured they didn't know I was Jewish."
An indifferent student in her early childhood, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with the German measles and rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see".Upon graduation from Mackenzie High School, Piercy became the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan, where she received a B.A. degree in 1957. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France. She earned an M.A. from Northwestern University in 1958.
After graduating from college, Piercy and her first husband went to France, then returned to the United States. They divorced when Piercy was 23. Living in Chicago, she supported herself working various part-time jobs while unsuccessfully trying to get her novels published. It was during this time that Piercy realized she wanted to write fiction that focused on politics, feminism, and working-class people. After her second marriage, Piercy became involved in the organization Students for a Democratic Society. In 1968, Piercy's first book of poetry, Breaking Camp, was published, and her first novel was accepted for publication that same year.
At a young age, Marge Piercy was married to her first husband, a French Jewish physicist. However, the marriage failed when she was 23; Piercy attributes this to his expectations of gender roles in marriage. In 1962, she married her second husband, Robert Shapiro, a computer scientist. They divorced, and Piercy married her current husband, Ira Wood. She and her husband live in Wellfleet, MA. Piercy designed their home, where the couple have been living since the 1970s.
Piercy was involved in the civil rights movement, New Left, and Students for a Democratic Society. She is a feminist, environmentalist, marxist, social, and anti-war activist.
In 1977, Piercy became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP), an American nonprofit publishing organization that works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.
Piercy is the author of more than seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon Is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999). She has published fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her current—and third—husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir. She contributed the pieces "The Grand Coolie Damn" and "Song of the Fucked Duck" to the celebrated anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from The Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan.
Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the United States as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during modern times. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction, as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk, as Piercy mentions in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It, 1991) itself postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling megacities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.
Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone to Soldiers (1987) follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The first-person account of Gone to Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in the third person after her capture by the Nazis.
Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often centered on feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to social change—what she might call [original research?], in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world. It is rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.
Piercy contributed poems to the journal Kalliope: A Journal of Women's Art and Literature. Piercy also contributed to the collection of essays by women leaders in the climate movement, All We Can Save.
She has given readings, workshops and speeches at more than 550 venues here and abroad. Her work has been translated into over 25 languages.
She created an intensive poetry workshop of her own design to be held on the Cape. Since 2010 she has selected the best 12 poets out of many submissions and two alternates. Participants have traveled to Wellfleet from California, Oregon, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Sweden, England, Switzerland, Brazil, Australia, and Israel.
Novels
Going Down Fast, 1969; Dance The Eagle To Sleep, 1970; Small Changes, 1973; Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976; The High Cost of Living, 1978; Vida, 1979; Braided Lives, 1982; Fly Away Home, 1985; Gone To Soldiers, 1987; Summer People, 1989; He, She And It (aka Body of Glass), 1991; The Longings of Women, 1994; City of Darkness, City of Light, 1996; Storm Tide, 1998 (with Ira Wood); Three Women, 1999; The Third Child, 2003; Sex Wars, 2005
Short stories
The Cost of Lunch, Etc., 2014; Poetry collections; Breaking Camp, 1968; Hard Loving, 1969; "Barbie Doll", 1973; 4-Telling (with Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie, Robert Hershon), 1971; To Be of Use, 1973; Living in the Open, 1976; The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing, 1978; The Moon is Always Female, 1980; Circles on the Water, Selected Poems, 1982; Stone, Paper, Knife, 1983; My Mother's Body, 1985; Available Light, 1988; Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now (ed.), 1988; 1993; Mars and her Children, 1992; What are Big Girls Made Of, 1997; Early Grrrl, 1999; The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems With a Jewish Theme, 1999; Colours Passing Through Us, 2003; The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010, 2012; Made in Detroit, 2015; On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light, 2020.
Collected other
The Grand Coolie Damn" and "Song of the fucked duck" in Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, 1970, edited by Robin Morgan; The Last White Class, (play co-authored with Ira Wood), 1979; Parti-Colored Blocks For a Quilt, (essays), 1982; The Earth Shines Secretly: A book of Days, (daybook calendar), 1990; So You Want to Write, (non-fiction), 2001; Sleeping with Cats, (memoir), 2002; My Life, My Body (Outspoken Authors), (essays, poems & memoir), 2015.
Awards and honors
Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, 1992; Bradley Award, New England Poetry Club, 1992; Brit ha-Dorot Award, Shalom Center, 1992; May Sarton Award, New England Poetry Club, 1991; Golden Rose Poetry Prize, New England Poetry Club, 1990; Carolyn Kizer Poetry Prize, 1986, 1990; National Endowment for the Arts award, 1978; Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2004.
Pollack, Rachel
Rachel Grace Pollack (August 17, 1945 – April 7, 2023) was a science fiction author, comic book writer, and expert on divination tarot.
Pollack was Jewish and often wrote about the Kabbalah, most notably in The Kabbalah Tree. She was also a trans woman and wrote frequently on transgender issues. In Doom Patrol she introduced Coagula, a transsexual character. She also wrote several essays on transsexualism, attacking the notion that it is a "sickness", instead saying that it is a passion. She emphasized the revelatory aspects of transsexualism, saying that "the trance-sexual woman sacrifices her social identity as a male, her personal history, and finally the very shape of her body to a knowledge, a desire, which overpowers all rational understanding and proof."
A Secret Woman features a police detective who is transgender and Jewish. The detective utters the prayer, "Blessed art thou oh G-d who made me not a woman. Double blessed is Doctor Green who has." Pollack created the characters known as 'the bandage people' for her Doom Patrol run. The bandage people are 'sexually remaindered spirits' who died in sexual accidents. The initials SRS came from the medical term 'sex reassignment surgery'. Pollack wrote the essay "The Transsexual Book of The Dead" for the anthology Phallus Palace. This article is concerning trans men.
Fairy tales such as the Brothers Grimm influenced many of Pollack's writings. Her book Tarot of Perfection is a book of fairy tales based on the tarot.
Her magical realism novels explore worlds imbued with elements pulled from a number of traditions, faiths, and religions. Several of her novels are set in an alternative reality that resembles modern America, but an America of Bright Beings, where magic and ritual, religion and thaumaturgy are the norms.
In July 2022, Pollack revealed via Facebook that, after seemingly overcoming Hodgkin lymphoma several years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a different variant of lymphoma and would be undergoing chemotherapy. In August, Pollack's wife Zoe Matoff and Patricia Nolan announced that Pollack was in an intensive care unit and started a GoFundMe fundraiser for her medical expenses. Those who shared the fundraiser on Twitter included Neil Gaiman, Shelly Bond, Gail Simone, and DC Comics editors Chris Conroy and Andrea Shay, while prominent donors included Rachel Gold, Al Ewing, Kieron Gillen, Kim Newman, Brett Booth, and Cliff Chiang, ultimately raising over $28,000 against a $15,000 goal by September.
On March 12, 2023, Gaiman announced via Mastodon, at the behest of Pollack's wife, that Pollack was in hospice care and nearing the end of her life. This led some outlets to mistakenly report that Pollack had already died. She passed on April 7, 2023, at the age of 77.
Her work
Pollack wrote Salvador Dali's Tarot, a book-length exposition of Salvador Dalí's Tarot deck, comprising a full-page color plate for each card, with her commentary on the facing page. Her work 78 Degrees of Wisdom on Tarot reading is commonly referenced by Tarot readers. She created her own Tarot deck, Shining Woman Tarot (later Shining Tribe Tarot). She also aided in the creation of the Vertigo Tarot Deck with illustrator Dave McKean and author Neil Gaiman, and she wrote a book to accompany it. Author Neil Gaiman sometimes consulted Pollack on the tarot for his stories.
For 32 years, Pollack taught seminars with Tarot author Mary K. Greer at the Omega Institute, in Rhinebeck, New York. She also did seminars for several years in California in conjunction with Greer, and she co-presented a breakthrough seminar with Tarot author Johanna Gargiulo-Sherman on Tarot and psychic ability, using her own Shining Tribe Tarot and Gargiulo-Sherman's Sacred Rose Tarot. Pollack was also a popular lecturer at Tarot seminars and symposiums such as LATS (Los Angeles Tarot Symposium), BATS (Bay Area Tarot Symposium), and the Readers Studio. She taught creative writing at Goddard College. Her most recent work was included in the anthology called Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, edited by Theodora Goss. She taught English at State University of New York.
Pollack was known for her run of issues 64–87 (1993–1995) of the comic book Doom Patrol, on DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, a continuation of a 1960s comic that had recently become a cult favorite under Grant Morrison. She took over the series in 1993 after meeting editor Tom Peyer at a party, telling him it was the only monthly comic book she would want to write at the time, and sending him a sample script. Towards the end of Morrison's run Pollack began writing monthly "letters to the editor" in what she describes as a "gee-whiz fangirl" voice asking to take over the book when Morrison was finished. In the final letter, she claims that she had already told her mother that she had been given the job. Peyer then used that response to that letter to officially announce that Pollack was, in fact, taking over the book. As a result of these letters being printed in the letter column of Doom Patrol issues, some people seem to believe that the letters are the way she actually got the job. During her tenure, Pollack dealt with such rarely addressed comic-book topics as menstruation, sexual identity, and transsexuality. Her run ended two years later, with the book's cancellation.
In addition to Doom Patrol, Pollack wrote issues of the Vertigo Visions anthology featuring Brother Power the Geek (1993) and Tomahawk (1998), the first 11 issues of the fourth volume of New Gods (1995), and the five-issue limited series Time Breakers (1996) for the short lived Helix imprint.
In 2019, it was announced that Pollack was reuniting with Doom Patrol artist Richard Case and letterer John Workman to create a short story—titled "Snake Song"—for the Kickstarter funded "music-themed horror anthology" Dead Beats.
Degrees, awards, and memberships
1997 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel winner for Godmother Night
1994 Nebula Award for Best Novel nominee for Temporary Agency
1989 Arthur C. Clarke Award winner for Unquenchable Fire
Certified Tarot Grand Master with the Tarot Certification Board of America
Tarot Sage with the American Board For Tarot Certification
Member of the American Tarot Association
Member of the International Tarot Society
Member of the Tarot Guild of Australia
Member of the Tarot Association of the British Isles
Honours degree in English from New York University
Masters in English from Claremont Graduate University
Faculty, MFA in Creative Writing Program, Goddard College
Non-fiction books
1989 - New Thoughts on Tarot (with Hilary Anderson)
1997 - Marriages: Spring 60, a Journal of Archetype and Culture (with James Hillman)
2001 - Bento (with Dave Mckean)
1985 - Salvador Dali's Tarot
1986 - Tarot
1986 - Teach Yourself Fortune Telling
1990 - The Haindl Tarot
https://www.rachelpollack.com/bio/
Rand, Ayn
Alice O'Connor, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum (1905–1982), better known by her pen name Ayn Rand was a Russian-born American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful and two Broadway plays, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, until her death in 1982, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays.
Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge; she rejected faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism and rejected altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism, statism, and anarchism. Instead, she supported laissez-faire capitalism, which she defined as the system based on recognizing individual rights, including private property rights. Although Rand opposed libertarianism, which she viewed as anarchism, she is often associated with the modern libertarian movement in the United States. In art, Rand promoted romantic realism. She was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her, except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and classical liberals.
Rand's fiction received mixed reviews from literary critics. Although academic interest in her ideas has grown since her death, academic philosophers have generally ignored or rejected her philosophy because of her polemical approach and lack of methodological rigor. Her writings have politically influenced some libertarians and conservatives. The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings.
Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, to a Russian-Jewish bourgeois family living in Saint Petersburg. She was the eldest of three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum, a pharmacist, and Anna Borisovna (née Kaplan). She was twelve when the October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted the life the family had enjoyed previously. Her father's business was confiscated, and the family fled to the city of Yevpatoria in Crimea, which was initially under the control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War. After graduating high school there in June 1921, she returned with her family to Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was then named), where they faced desperate conditions, occasionally nearly starving.
Rand's first published work was a monograph in Russian about actress Pola Negri.
When Russian universities were opened to women after the revolution, she was in the first group of women to enroll at Petrograd State University. At 16, she began her studies in the department of social pedagogy, majoring in history. Along with many other bourgeois students, she was purged from the university shortly before graduating. After complaints from a group of visiting foreign scientists, many of the purged students were allowed to complete their work and graduate, which she did in October 1924. She then studied for a year at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. For an assignment, Rand wrote an essay about the Polish actress Pola Negri, which became her first published work. By this time, she had decided her professional surname for writing would be Rand, and she adopted the first name Ayn.
In late 1925, Rand was granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago. She departed on January 17, 1926, and arrived in New York City on February 19, 1926. Intent on staying in the United States to become a screenwriter, she lived for a few months with her relatives before leaving for Hollywood, California.
In Hollywood, a chance meeting with famed director Cecil B. DeMille led to work as an extra in his film The King of Kings and a subsequent job as a junior screenwriter. While working on The King of Kings, she met an aspiring young actor, Frank O'Connor; the two married on April 15, 1929. She became a permanent American resident in July 1929 and an American citizen on March 3, 1931. She made several attempts to bring her parents and sisters to the United States, but they were unable to obtain permission to emigrate.
Rand's first literary success came with the sale of her screenplay Red Pawn to Universal Studios in 1932, although it was never produced. Her courtroom drama Night of January 16th, first staged in Hollywood in 1934, reopened successfully on Broadway in 1935. Each night, a jury was selected from members of the audience; based on its vote, one of two different endings would be performed.
Her first published novel, the semi-autobiographical We the Living, was published in 1936. Set in Soviet Russia, it focused on the struggle between the individual and the state. Initial sales were slow, and the American publisher let it go out of print, although European editions continued to sell. She adapted the story as a stage play, but the Broadway production was a failure and closed in less than a week. After the success of her later novels, Rand was able to release a revised version in 1959 that has since sold over three million copies.
Rand started her next major novel, The Fountainhead, in December 1935, but took a break from it in 1937 to write her novella Anthem. The novella presents a vision of a dystopian future world in which totalitarian collectivism has triumphed to such an extent that even the word I has been forgotten and replaced with we. It was published in England in 1938, but Rand could not find an American publisher at that time. As with We the Living, Rand's later success allowed her to get a revised version published in 1946, which has sold over 3.5 million copies.
During the 1940s, Rand became politically active. She and her husband were full-time volunteers for Republican Wendell Willkie's 1940 presidential campaign. This work brought her into contact with other intellectuals sympathetic to free-market capitalism. She became friends with journalist Henry Hazlitt, who introduced her to the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises. Despite philosophical differences with them, Rand strongly endorsed the writings of both men throughout her career, and they expressed admiration for her. Mises once referred to her as "the most courageous man in America", a compliment that particularly pleased her because he said "man" instead of "woman". Rand became friends with libertarian writer Isabel Paterson. Rand questioned her about American history and politics long into the night during their many meetings, and gave Paterson ideas for her only non-fiction book, The God of the Machine.
The Fountainhead was Rand's first bestseller.
Rand's first major success as a writer came in 1943 with The Fountainhead, a novel about an uncompromising young architect named Howard Roark and his struggle against what Rand described as "second-handers"—those who attempt to live through others, placing others above themselves. Twelve publishers rejected it before Bobbs-Merrill Company accepted it at the insistence of editor Archibald Ogden, who threatened to quit if his employer did not publish it. While completing the novel, Rand was prescribed the amphetamine Benzedrine to fight fatigue. The drug helped her to work long hours to meet her deadline for delivering the novel, but afterwards she was so exhausted that her doctor ordered two weeks' rest. Her use of the drug for approximately three decades may have contributed to what some of her later associates described as volatile mood swings.
The success of The Fountainhead brought Rand fame and financial security. In 1943, she sold the film rights to Warner Bros. and returned to Hollywood to write the screenplay. Producer Hal B. Wallis hired her afterwards as a screenwriter and script-doctor. Her work for him included the screenplays for Love Letters and You Came Along. Her contract with Wallis also allowed time for other projects, including a never-completed nonfiction treatment of her philosophy to be called The Moral Basis of Individualism.
While working in Hollywood, Rand became involved with the anti-Communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and wrote articles on the group's behalf. She also joined the anti-Communist American Writers Association. In 1947, during the Second Red Scare, Rand testified as a "friendly witness" before the United States House Un-American Activities Committee that the 1944 film Song of Russia grossly misrepresented conditions in the Soviet Union, portraying life there as much better and happier than it was. She also wanted to criticize the lauded 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives for what she interpreted as its negative presentation of the business world, but was not allowed to do so. When asked after the hearings about her feelings on the investigations' effectiveness, Rand described the process as "futile".
After several delays, the film version of The Fountainhead was released in 1949. Although it used Rand's screenplay with minimal alterations, she "disliked the movie from beginning to end" and complained about its editing, the acting and other elements.
Magazine cover with a man holding lightning bolts
Rand's novella Anthem was reprinted in the June 1953 issue of the pulp magazine Famous Fantastic Mysteries.
Following the publication of The Fountainhead, Rand received many letters from readers, some of whom the book had influenced profoundly. In 1951, Rand moved from Los Angeles to New York City, where she gathered a group of these admirers that included future chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, a young psychology student named Nathan Blumenthal (later Nathaniel Branden) and his wife Barbara, and Barbara's cousin Leonard Peikoff. Initially, the group was an informal gathering of friends who met with Rand at her apartment on weekends to discuss philosophy. Later, Rand began allowing them to read the manuscript drafts of her new novel, Atlas Shrugged. In 1954, her close relationship with Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair, with the knowledge of their spouses.
Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was considered Rand's magnum opus. She described the novel's theme as "the role of the mind in man's existence—and, as a corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest". It advocates the core tenets of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and expresses her concept of human achievement. The plot involves a dystopian United States in which the most creative industrialists, scientists, and artists respond to a welfare state government by going on strike and retreating to a hidden valley where they build an independent free economy. The novel's hero and leader of the strike, John Galt, describes it as stopping "the motor of the world" by withdrawing the minds of the individuals contributing most to the nation's wealth and achievements. The novel contains an exposition of Objectivism in a lengthy monologue delivered by Galt.
Despite many negative reviews, Atlas Shrugged became an international bestseller; however, the reaction of intellectuals to the novel discouraged and depressed Rand. Atlas Shrugged was her last completed work of fiction, marking the end of her career as a novelist and the beginning of her role as a popular philosopher.
In 1958, Nathaniel Branden established the Nathaniel Branden Lectures, later incorporated as the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI), to promote Rand's philosophy through public lectures. He and Rand co-founded The Objectivist Newsletter (later renamed The Objectivist) in 1962 to circulate articles about her ideas;[88] she later republished some of these articles in book form. Rand was unimpressed by many of the NBI students and held them to strict standards, sometimes reacting coldly or angrily to those who disagreed with her. Critics, including some former NBI students and Branden himself, later described the culture of the NBI as one of intellectual conformity and excessive reverence for Rand. Some described the NBI or the Objectivist movement as a cult or religion. Rand expressed opinions on a wide range of topics, from literature and music to sexuality and facial hair. Some of her followers mimicked her preferences, wearing clothes to match characters from her novels and buying furniture like hers. However, some former NBI students believed the extent of these behaviors was exaggerated, and the problem was concentrated among Rand's closest followers in New York.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through her nonfiction works and by giving talks to students at colleges and universities. She began delivering annual lectures at the Ford Hall Forum, responding to questions from the audience.During these appearances, she often took controversial stances on the political and social issues of the day. These included: supporting abortion rights, opposing the Vietnam War and the military draft (but condemning many draft dodgers as "bums"), supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 against a coalition of Arab nations as "civilized men fighting savages", saying European colonists had the right to invade and take land inhabited by American Indians, and calling homosexuality "immoral" and "disgusting", while also advocating the repeal of all laws concerning it. She endorsed several Republican candidates for president of the United States, most strongly Barry Goldwater in 1964, whose candidacy she promoted in several articles for The Objectivist Newsletter.
In 1964, Nathaniel Branden began an affair with the young actress Patrecia Scott, whom he later married. Nathaniel and Barbara Branden kept the affair hidden from Rand. When she learned of it in 1968, though her romantic relationship with Branden had already ended, Rand ended her relationship with both Brandens, and the NBI was closed. She published an article in The Objectivist repudiating Nathaniel Branden for dishonesty and other "irrational behavior in his private life". In subsequent years, Rand and several more of her closest associates parted company.
Rand underwent surgery for lung cancer in 1974 after decades of heavy smoking. In 1976, she retired from writing her newsletter and, after her initial objections, allowed a social worker employed by her attorney to enroll her in Social Security and Medicare. During the late 1970s, her activities within the Objectivist movement declined, especially after the death of her husband on November 9, 1979. One of her final projects was work on a never-completed television adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.
On March 6, 1982, Rand died of heart failure at her home in New York City. At her funeral, a 6-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign was placed near her casket. In her will, Rand named Peikoff as her heir.
Rand described her approach to literature as "romantic realism". She wanted her fiction to present the world "as it could be and should be", rather than as it was. This approach led her to create highly stylized situations and characters. Her fiction typically has protagonists who are heroic individualists, depicted as fit and attractive. Her villains support duty and collectivist moral ideals. Rand often describes them as unattractive, and some have names that suggest negative traits, such as Wesley Mouch in Atlas Shrugged.
Rand considered plot a critical element of literature, and her stories typically have what biographer Anne Heller described as "tight, elaborate, fast-paced plotting". Romantic triangles are a common plot element in Rand's fiction; in most of her novels and plays, the main female character is romantically involved with at least two different men.
In school Rand read works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Victor Hugo, Edmond Rostand, and Friedrich Schiller, who became her favorites. She considered them to be among the "top rank" of Romantic writers because of their focus on moral themes and their skill at constructing plots. Hugo was an important influence on her writing, especially her approach to plotting. In the introduction she wrote for an English-language edition of his novel Ninety-Three, Rand called him "the greatest novelist in world literature".
Although Rand disliked most Russian literature, her depictions of her heroes show the influence of the Russian Symbolists and other nineteenth-century Russian writing, most notably the 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? by Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Rand's experience of the Russian Revolution and early Communist Russia influenced the portrayal of her villains. Beyond We the Living, which is set in Russia, this influence can be seen in the ideas and rhetoric of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead, and in the destruction of the economy in Atlas Shrugged.
Rand's descriptive style echoes her early career writing scenarios and scripts for movies; her novels have many narrative descriptions that resemble early Hollywood movie scenarios. They often follow common film editing conventions, such as having a broad establishing shot description of a scene followed by close-up details, and her descriptions of women characters often take a "male gaze" perspective.
Rand called her philosophy "Objectivism", describing its essence as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute". She considered Objectivism a systematic philosophy and laid out positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics.
In metaphysics, Rand supported philosophical realism and opposed anything she regarded as mysticism or supernaturalism, including all forms of religion. Rand believed in free will as a form of agent causation and rejected determinism.
In epistemology, Rand considered all knowledge to be based on sense perception, the validity of which she considered axiomatic, and reason, which she described as "the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses". Rand rejected all claims of non-perceptual knowledge, including "'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing'". In her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Rand presented a theory of concept formation and rejected the analytic–synthetic dichotomy. She believed epistemology was a foundational branch of philosophy and considered the advocacy of reason to be the single most significant aspect of her philosophy.
In ethics, Rand argued for rational and ethical egoism (rational self-interest), as the guiding moral principle. She said the individual should "exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself". Rand referred to egoism as "the virtue of selfishness" in her book of that title. In it, she presented her solution to the is-ought problem by describing a meta-ethical theory that based morality in the needs of "man's survival qua man". She condemned ethical altruism as incompatible with the requirements of human life and happiness, and held the initiation of force was evil and irrational, writing in Atlas Shrugged that, "Force and mind are opposites".
Rand's political philosophy emphasized individual rights, including property rights. She considered laissez-faire capitalism the only moral social system because in her view it was the only system based on protecting those rights. Rand opposed collectivism and statism, which she understood to include many specific forms of government, such as communism, fascism, socialism, theocracy, and the welfare state. Her preferred form of government was a constitutional republic that is limited to the protection of individual rights. Although her political views are often classified as conservative or libertarian, Rand preferred the term "radical for capitalism". She worked with conservatives on political projects, but disagreed with them over issues such as religion and ethics. Rand denounced libertarianism, which she associated with anarchism. She rejected anarchism as a naive theory based in subjectivism that would lead to collectivism in practice.
In aesthetics, Rand defined art as a "selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments". According to her, art allows philosophical concepts to be presented in a concrete form that can be grasped easily, thereby fulfilling a need of human consciousness. As a writer, the art form Rand focused on most closely was literature. She considered romanticism to be the approach that most accurately reflected the existence of human free will.
Rand's ethics and politics are the most criticized areas of her philosophy. Numerous authors, including Robert Nozick and William F. O'Neill, in some of the earliest academic critiques of her ideas, said she failed in her attempt to solve the is–ought problem. Critics have called her definitions of egoism and altruism biased and inconsistent with normal usage. Critics from religious traditions oppose her atheism and her rejection of altruism.
Multiple critics, including Nozick, have said her attempt to justify individual rights based on egoism fails. Others, like libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer, have gone further, saying that her support of egoism and her support of individual rights are inconsistent positions. Some critics, like Roy Childs, have said that her opposition to the initiation of force should lead to support of anarchism, rather than limited government.
Commentators, including Hazel Barnes, Albert Ellis, and Nathaniel Branden, have criticized Rand's focus on the importance of reason. Branden said this emphasis led her to denigrate emotions and create unrealistic expectations of how consistently rational human beings should be.
Except for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and classical liberals, Rand was sharply critical of most philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her. Acknowledging Aristotle as her greatest influence, Rand remarked that in the history of philosophy she could only recommend "three A's"—Aristotle, Aquinas, and Ayn Rand. In a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace, when asked where her philosophy came from, she responded: "Out of my own mind, with the sole acknowledgement of a debt to Aristotle, the only philosopher who ever influenced me."
In an article for the Claremont Review of Books, political scientist Charles Murray criticized her claim that her only "philosophical debt" was to Aristotle. He asserted her ideas were derivative of previous thinkers such as John Locke and Friedrich Nietzsche. Rand found early inspiration from Nietzsche, and scholars have found indications of this in Rand's private journals. In 1928, she alluded to his idea of the "superman" in notes for an unwritten novel whose protagonist was inspired by the murderer William Edward Hickman. There are other indications of Nietzsche's influence in passages from the first edition of We the Living (which Rand later revised), and in her overall writing style. By the time she wrote The Fountainhead, Rand had turned against Nietzsche's ideas, and the extent of his influence on her even during her early years is disputed.
Rand considered her philosophical opposite to be Immanuel Kant, whom she referred to as "the most evil man in mankind's history"; she believed his epistemology undermined reason and his ethics opposed self-interest. Philosophers George Walsh and Fred Seddon have argued she misinterpreted Kant and exaggerated their differences. She was also critical of Plato, and viewed his differences with Aristotle on questions of metaphysics and epistemology as the primary conflict in the history of philosophy.
Rand's relationship with contemporary philosophers was mostly antagonistic. She was not an academic and did not participate in academic discourse. She was dismissive toward critics and wrote about ideas she disagreed with in a polemical manner without in-depth analysis. She was in turn viewed very negatively by many academic philosophers, who dismissed her as an unimportant figure who need not be given serious consideration.
The first reviews Rand received were for Night of January 16th. Reviews of the Broadway production were largely positive, but Rand considered even positive reviews to be embarrassing because of significant changes made to her script by the producer. Although Rand believed that her novel We the Living was not widely reviewed, over 200 publications published approximately 125 different reviews. Overall, they were more positive than those she received for her later work. Her novella Anthem received little review attention, both for its first publication in England and for subsequent re-issues.
Rand's first bestseller, The Fountainhead, received far fewer reviews than We the Living, and reviewers' opinions were mixed. Lorine Pruette's positive review in The New York Times, which called the author "a writer of great power" who wrote "brilliantly, beautifully and bitterly", was one that Rand greatly appreciated. There were other positive reviews, but Rand dismissed most of them for either misunderstanding her message or for being in unimportant publications. Some negative reviews said the novel was too long; others called the characters unsympathetic and Rand's style "offensively pedestrian".[200]
Atlas Shrugged was widely reviewed, and many of the reviews were strongly negative. Atlas Shrugged received positive reviews from a few publications, but Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein later wrote that "reviewers seemed to vie with each other in a contest to devise the cleverest put-downs", with reviews including comments that it was "written out of hate" and showed "remorseless hectoring and prolixity". Whittaker Chambers wrote what was later called the novel's most "notorious" review for the conservative magazine National Review. He accused Rand of supporting a godless system (which he related to that of the Soviets), claiming, "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard ... commanding: 'To a gas chamber—go!'"
Rand's nonfiction received far fewer reviews than her novels. The tenor of the criticism for her first nonfiction book, For the New Intellectual, was similar to that for Atlas Shrugged. Philosopher Sidney Hook likened her certainty to "the way philosophy is written in the Soviet Union", and author Gore Vidal called her viewpoint "nearly perfect in its immorality". These reviews set the pattern for reaction to her ideas among liberal critics. Her subsequent books got progressively less review attention.
Atlas Shrugged has sold more than nine million copies.
With over 30 million copies sold as of 2015, Rand's books continue to be read widely. A survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1991 asked club members to name the most influential book in their lives. Rand's Atlas Shrugged was the second most popular choice, after the Bible.Although Rand's influence has been greatest in the United States, there has been international interest in her work.
Rand's contemporary admirers included fellow novelists, like Ira Levin, Kay Nolte Smith and L. Neil Smith; she has influenced later writers like Erika Holzer, Terry Goodkind,[219] and comic book artist Steve Ditko.[220] Rand provided a positive view of business and subsequently many business executives and entrepreneurs have admired and promoted her work. Businessmen such as John Allison of BB&T and Ed Snider of Comcast Spectacor have funded the promotion of Rand's ideas.
Television shows, movies, and video games have referred to Rand and her works. Throughout her life she was the subject of many articles in popular magazines, as well as book-length critiques by authors such as the psychologist Albert Ellis and Trinity Foundation president John W. Robbins. Rand or characters based on her figure prominently in novels by American authors, including Mary Gaitskill, Matt Ruff, Kay Nolte Smith, and Tobias Wolff. Nick Gillespie, former editor-in-chief of Reason, remarked that, "Rand's is a tortured immortality, one in which she's as likely to be a punch line as a protagonist. Jibes at Rand as cold and inhuman run through the popular culture." Two movies have been made about Rand's life. A 1997 documentary film, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The Passion of Ayn Rand, a 1999 television adaptation of the book of the same name, won several awards. Rand's image also appears on a 1999 U.S. postage stamp illustrated by artist Nick Gaetano.
Rand's works, most commonly Anthem or The Fountainhead, are sometimes assigned as secondary school reading. Since 2002, the Ayn Rand Institute has provided free copies of Rand's novels to teachers who promise to include the books in their curriculum. The Institute had distributed 4.5 million copies in the U.S. and Canada by the end of 2020. In 2017, Rand was added to the required reading list for the A Level Politics exam in the United Kingdom.
Although she rejected the labels "conservative" and "libertarian", Rand has had a continuing influence on right-wing politics and libertarianism. Rand is often considered one of the three most important women (along with Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson) in the early development of modern American libertarianism.David Nolan, one founder of the Libertarian Party, said that "without Ayn Rand, the libertarian movement would not exist". In his history of that movement, journalist Brian Doherty described her as "the most influential libertarian of the twentieth century to the public at large". Historian Jennifer Burns referred to her as "the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right".
The political figures who cite Rand as an influence are usually conservatives (often members of the Republican Party), despite Rand taking some atypical positions for a conservative, like being pro-choice and an atheist. She faced intense opposition from William F. Buckley Jr. and other contributors to the conservative National Review magazine, which published numerous criticisms of her writings and ideas. Nevertheless, a 1987 article in The New York Times referred to her as the Reagan administration's "novelist laureate". Republican congressmen and conservative pundits have acknowledged her influence on their lives and have recommended her novels. She has influenced some conservative politicians outside the U.S., such as Sajid Javid in the United Kingdom, Siv Jensen in Norway, and Ayelet Shaked in Israel.
The financial crisis of 2007–2008 spurred renewed interest in her works, especially Atlas Shrugged, which some saw as foreshadowing the crisis. Opinion articles compared real-world events with the novel's plot. Signs mentioning Rand and her fictional hero John Galt appeared at Tea Party. There was increased criticism of her ideas, especially from the political left. Critics blamed the economic crisis on her support of selfishness and free markets, particularly through her influence on Alan Greenspan. In 2015, Adam Weiner said that through Greenspan, "Rand had effectively chucked a ticking time bomb into the boiler room of the US economy". Lisa Duggan said that Rand's novels had "incalculable impact" in encouraging the spread of neoliberal political ideas. In 2021, Cass Sunstein said Rand's ideas could be seen in the tax and regulatory policies of the Trump administration, which he attributed to the "enduring influence" of Rand's fiction.
During Rand's lifetime, her work received little attention from academic scholars. Since her death, interest in her work has increased gradually. In 2009, historian Jennifer Burns identified "three overlapping waves" of scholarly interest in Rand, including "an explosion of scholarship" since the year 2000. However, as of that same year, few universities included Rand or Objectivism as a philosophical specialty or research area, with many literature and philosophy departments dismissing her as a pop culture phenomenon rather than a subject for serious study. From 2002 to 2012, over 60 colleges and universities accepted grants from the charitable foundation of BB&T Corporation that required teaching Rand's ideas or works; in some cases, the grants were controversial or even rejected because of the requirement to teach about Rand. In 2020, media critic Eric Burns said that, "Rand is surely the most engaging philosopher of my lifetime", but "nobody in the academe pays any attention to her, neither as an author nor a philosopher". That same year, the editor of a collection of critical essays about Rand said academics who disapproved of her ideas had long held "a stubborn resolve to ignore or ridicule" her work, but he believed more academic critics were engaging with her work in recent years.
In 1967, John Hospers discussed Rand's ethical ideas in the second edition of his textbook, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis. That same year, Hazel Barnes included a chapter critiquing Objectivism in her book An Existentialist Ethics. When the first full-length academic book about Rand's philosophy appeared in 1971, its author declared writing about Rand "a treacherous undertaking" that could lead to "guilt by association" for taking her seriously. A few articles about Rand's ideas appeared in academic journals before her death in 1982, many of them in The Personalist. One of these was "On the Randian Argument" by libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, who criticized her meta-ethical arguments. Other philosophers, writing in the same publication, argued that Nozick misstated Rand's case. In an article responding to Nozick, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen defended her positions, but described her style as "literary, hyperbolic and emotional".
The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, a 1984 collection of essays about Objectivism edited by Den Uyl and Rasmussen, was the first academic book about Rand's ideas published after her death. In one essay, political writer Jack Wheeler wrote that despite "the incessant bombast and continuous venting of Randian rage", Rand's ethics are "a most immense achievement, the study of which is vastly more fruitful than any other in contemporary thought". In 1987, the Ayn Rand Society was founded as an affiliate of the American Philosophical Association.
In a 1995 entry about Rand in Contemporary Women Philosophers, Jenny A. Heyl described a divergence in how different academic specialties viewed Rand. She said that Rand's philosophy "is regularly omitted from academic philosophy. Yet, throughout literary academia, Ayn Rand is considered a philosopher." Writing in the 1998 edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, political theorist Chandran Kukathas summarized the mainstream philosophical reception of her work in two parts. He said most commentators view her ethical argument as an unconvincing variant of Aristotle's ethics, and her political theory "is of little interest" because it is marred by an "ill-thought out and unsystematic" effort to reconcile her hostility to the state with her rejection of anarchism. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the study of Rand and her ideas, was established in 1999.
In a 2010 essay for the Cato Institute, Huemer argued very few people find Rand's ideas convincing, especially her ethics. He attributed the attention she receives to her being a "compelling writer", especially as a novelist, noting that Atlas Shrugged outsells Rand's non-fiction works and the works of other philosophers of classical liberalism. In 2012, the Pennsylvania State University Press agreed to take over publication of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and the University of Pittsburgh Press launched an "Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies" series based on the Society's proceedings. The Fall 2012 update to the entry about Rand in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy said that "only a few professional philosophers have taken her work seriously". That same year, political scientist Alan Wolfe dismissed Rand as a "nonperson" among academics, an attitude that writer Ben Murnane later described as "the traditional academic view" of Rand.
Academic consideration of Rand as a literary figure during her life was even more limited than the discussion of her philosophy. Mimi Reisel Gladstein could not find any scholarly articles about Rand's novels when she began researching her in 1973, and only three such articles appeared during the rest of the 1970s. Since her death, scholars of English and American literature have continued largely to ignore her work, although attention to her literary work has increased since the 1990s. Several academic book series about important authors cover Rand and her works, as well as in popular study guides like CliffsNotes and SparkNotes. In The Literary Encyclopedia entry for Rand written in 2001, John David Lewis declared that "Rand wrote the most intellectually challenging fiction of her generation." In 2019, Duggan described Rand's fiction as popular and influential on many readers, despite being easy to criticize for "her cartoonish characters and melodramatic plots, her rigid moralizing, her middle- to lowbrow aesthetic preferences ... and philosophical strivings".
After the closure of the Nathaniel Branden Institute, the Objectivist movement continued in other forms. In the 1970s, Peikoff began delivering courses on Objectivism. In 1979, Peter Schwartz started a newsletter called The Intellectual Activist, which Rand endorsed. She also endorsed The Objectivist Forum, a bimonthly magazine founded by Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger, which ran from 1980 to 1987.
In 1985, Peikoff worked with businessman Ed Snider to establish the Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting Rand's ideas and works. In 1990, after an ideological disagreement with Peikoff, David Kelley founded the Institute for Objectivist Studies, now known as The Atlas Society. In 2001, historian John McCaskey organized the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship, which provides grants for scholarly work on Objectivism in academia.
Fiction and drama:
Night of January 16th (performed 1934, published 1968)
We the Living (1936, revised 1959)
Anthem (1938, revised 1946)
The Unconquered (performed 1940, published 2014)
The Fountainhead (1943)
Atlas Shrugged (1957)
The Early Ayn Rand (1984)
Ideal (2015)
Non-fiction:
For the New Intellectual (1961)
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966, expanded 1967)
The Romantic Manifesto (1969, expanded 1975)
The New Left (1971, expanded 1975)
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1979, expanded 1990)
Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982)
Letters of Ayn Rand (1995)
Journals of Ayn Rand (1997)
https://aynrand.org/
Rice, Anne
Anne Rice was born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien; October 4, 1941, and died on December 11, 2021. She was an author of gothic fiction, erotic literature, and Christian literature.
Born in New Orleans, Rice spent much of her early life in the city before moving to Texas, and later to San Francisco. She was raised in an observant Catholic family but became an agnostic as a young adult. She began her professional writing career with the publication of Interview with the Vampire (1976), while living in California, and began writing sequels to the novel in the 1980s. In the mid-2000s, following a publicized return to Catholicism, Rice published the novels Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, fictionalized accounts of certain incidents in the life of Jesus. Several years later she distanced herself from organized Christianity, citing disagreement with the Catholic Church's stances on social issues but pledging that faith in God remained "central to [her] life." However, she later considered herself a secular humanist.
Rice's books have sold over 100 million copies, making her one of the best-selling authors of modern times. While reaction to her early works was initially mixed, she gained a better reception with critics in the 1980s. Her writing style and the literary content of her works have been analyzed by literary commentators. She was married to poet and painter Stan Rice for 41 years, from 1961 until his death from brain cancer in 2002 at age 60. She and Stan had two children, Michele, who died of leukemia at age five, and Christopher, who is also an author.
Born in New Orleans on October 4, 1941, Rice was the second of four daughters of parents of Irish Catholic descent, Howard O'Brien and Katherine "Kay" Allen O'Brien. Her father, a Naval veteran of World War II and lifelong resident of New Orleans, worked as a personnel executive for the U.S. Postal Service and authored one novel, The Impulsive Imp, which was published posthumously. Her older sister, Alice Borchardt, later became an author of fantasy and historical romance novels.
Rice spent most of her youth in New Orleans, which forms the backdrop against which many of her works are set. She and her family lived in the rented home of her maternal grandmother, Alice Allen, known as "Mamma Allen," at 2301 St. Charles Avenue in the Irish Channel, which Rice said was widely considered a "Catholic Ghetto". Allen, who began working as a domestic shortly after separating from her alcoholic husband, was an important early influence in Rice's life, keeping the family and household together as Rice's mother sank deeper into alcoholism. Allen died in 1949, but the O'Briens remained in her home until 1956, when they moved to 2524 St. Charles Avenue, a former rectory, convent, and school owned by the parish, to be closer to both the church and support for Katherine's addiction. As a young child, Rice studied at St. Alphonsus School, a Catholic institution previously attended by her father.
About her male given names, Rice said: Well, my birth name is Howard Allen because apparently my mother thought it was a good idea to name me Howard. My father's name was Howard, she wanted to name me after Howard, and she thought it was a very interesting thing to do. She was a bit of a Bohemian, a bit of mad woman, a bit of a genius, and a great deal of a great teacher. And she had the idea that naming a woman Howard was going to give that woman an unusual advantage in the world.
However, according to the authorized biography Prism of the Night, by Katherine Ramsland, Rice's father was the source of his daughter's birth name: "Thinking back to the days when his own name had been associated with girls, and perhaps in an effort to give it away, Howard named the little girl Howard Allen Frances O'Brien." Rice became "Anne" on her first day of school, when a nun asked her what her name was. She told the nun "Anne," which she considered a pretty name. Her mother, who was with her, let it go without correcting her, knowing how self-conscious her daughter was of her real name. From that day on, everyone she knew addressed her as "Anne", and her name was legally changed in 1947. Rice was confirmed in the Catholic Church when she was twelve years old and took the full name Howard Allen Frances Alphonsus Liguori O'Brien, adding the names of a saint and of an aunt, who was a nun. "I was honored to have my aunt's name," she said, "but it was my burden and joy as a child to have strange names."
When Rice was fifteen years old, her mother died as a result of alcoholism. Soon afterward, she and her sisters were placed by their father in St. Joseph Academy. Rice described St. Joseph's as "something out of Jane Eyre ... a dilapidated, awful, medieval type of place. I really hated it and wanted to leave. I felt betrayed by my father."
In November 1957, Rice's father married Dorothy Van Bever. On the subject of the couple's first meeting, Rice recalled, "My father wrote her a formal letter inviting her to lunch which I hand-delivered to her house ... I was so nervous. In the note he enclosed a pin which she was to wear if she accepted the invitation. The next day she had the pin on." In 1958, when Rice was sixteen, her father moved the family to north Texas, purchasing their first home in Richardson. Rice first met her future husband, Stan Rice, in a journalism class while they were both students at Richardson High School.
Graduating from Richardson High in 1959, Rice completed her freshman year at Texas Woman's University in Denton and transferred to North Texas State College for her sophomore year. She dropped out when she ran out of money and was unable to find employment. Soon after, she moved to San Francisco and stayed with the family of a friend until she found work as an insurance claims processor. She persuaded her former roommate from Texas Woman's University, Ginny Mathis, to join her, and they found an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district. Mathis acquired a job at the same insurance company as Rice. Soon after, they began taking night courses at University of San Francisco, an all-male Jesuit school that allowed women to take night courses. For Easter vacation Anne returned home to Texas, rekindling her relationship with Stan Rice. After her return to San Francisco, Stan Rice came for a week-long visit during summer break. He returned to Texas, Rice moved back in with the Percys, and Mathis left San Francisco in August to enroll in a nursing program in Oklahoma. Some time later, Anne received a special delivery letter from Stan Rice asking her to marry him. They married on October 14, 1961, in Denton, Texas, soon after she turned twenty years old, and when he was just weeks from his nineteenth birthday.
The Rices moved back to San Francisco in 1962, experiencing the birth of the hippie movement firsthand as they lived in the Haight-Ashbury district, Berkeley, and later the Castro District. "I'm a totally conservative person," she later told The New York Times, "In the middle of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, I was typing away while everybody was dropping acid and smoking grass. I was known as my own square." Rice attended San Francisco State University and obtained a B.A. in political science in 1964. Their daughter Michele, later nicknamed "Mouse", was born to the couple on September 21, 1966, and Rice later interrupted her graduate studies at SFSU to become a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. She soon became disenchanted with the emphasis on literary criticism and the language requirements. In Rice's words, "I wanted to be a writer, not a literature student."
Rice returned to San Francisco State in 1970 to finish her studies in creative writing and graduated with an M.A. in 1972. Stan Rice became an instructor at San Francisco State shortly after receiving his own M.A. in creative writing from the institution, and later chaired the creative writing department before retiring in 1988. Her daughter was diagnosed with acute granulocytic leukemia in 1970, while Rice was still in the graduate program. Rice later described having a prophetic dream—months before Michele became ill—that her daughter was dying from "something wrong with her blood." Michele died in 1972, shortly before she would have turned six.
Rice's son Christopher was born in Berkeley, California, in 1978; he became a best-selling author in his own right, publishing his first novel at the age of 22. Rice, an admitted alcoholic, and her husband, Stan Rice, quit drinking in mid-1979 so their son would not have the life that she had as a child.
Literary career
Rice cited Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, John Milton, Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, and Stephen King as influences on her work. She repeatedly returned to King's Firestarter for inspiration, saying "I study the novel Firestarter whenever I'm blocked. Reading the first few pages of Firestarter helps to get me going."
In 1973, while still grieving the loss of her daughter (1966–1972), Rice took a previously written short story and turned it into her first novel, the bestselling Interview with the Vampire. She based her vampires on Gloria Holden's character in Dracula's Daughter: "It established to me what vampires were—these elegant, tragic, sensitive people. I was really just going with that feeling when writing Interview With the Vampire. I didn't do a lot of research." After completing the novel and following many rejections from publishers, Rice developed obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). She became obsessed with germs, thinking that she contaminated everything she touched, engaged in frequent and obsessive hand washing and obsessively checked locks on windows and doors. Of this period, Rice says, "What you see when you're in that state is every single flaw in our hygiene and you can't control it and you go crazy."
In August 1974, after a year of therapy for her OCD, Rice attended the Squaw Valley Writer's Conference at Squaw Valley, conducted by writer Ray Nelson. While at the conference, Rice met her future literary agent, Phyllis Seidel. In October 1974, Seidel sold the publishing rights to Interview with the Vampire to Alfred A. Knopf for a $12,000 advance of the hardcover rights, at a time when most new authors were receiving $2,000 advances. Interview with the Vampire was published in May 1976. In 1977, the Rices traveled to both Europe and Egypt for the first time.
Following the publication of Interview with the Vampire, while living in California, Rice wrote two historical novels, The Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven, along with three erotic novels (The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment, and Beauty's Release) under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure, and two more under the pseudonym Anne Rampling (Exit to Eden and Belinda). Rice then returned to the vampire genre with The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, her bestselling sequels to Interview with the Vampire.
Shortly after her June 1988 return to New Orleans, Rice penned The Witching Hour as an expression of her joy at coming home. Rice also continued her Vampire Chronicles series, which later grew to encompass ten novels, and followed up on The Witching Hour with Lasher and Taltos, completing the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy. She also published Violin, a tale of a ghostly haunting, in 1997. Rice appeared on an episode of The Real World: New Orleans that aired in 2000.
Rice called Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, published in 2005, the beginning of a series chronicling the life of Jesus. After moving to Rancho Mirage, California in 2006, Rice wrote a second volume Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, published in March 2008, and was working on a third Christ the Lord: Kingdom of Heaven in November 2008. She also wrote the first two books in her Songs of the Seraphim series, Angel Time and Of Love and Evil, and her memoir Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.
On March 9, 2014, Rice announced on her son Christopher's radio show, The Dinner Party with Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn, that she had completed another book in the Vampire Chronicles, titled, Prince Lestat, a "true sequel" to Queen of the Damned. The book was released on October 28, 2014. In 2015, a sequel to the Sleeping Beauty trilogy, Beauty's Kingdom, was released.
Following its debut in 1976, Interview with the Vampire received many negative reviews from critics, causing Rice to retreat temporarily from the supernatural genre. When The Vampire Lestat debuted in 1985, reaction—both from critics and from readers—was more positive, and the first hardcover edition of the book sold 75,000 copies. Upon its publication in 1988, The Queen of the Damned was given an initial hardcover printing of 405,000 copies. The novel was a main selection of the Literary Guild of America for 1988, and reached the #1 spot on The New York Times Best Seller list, staying on the list for more than four months.
Rice's novels are well received by many members of the LGBT+ community, some of whom have perceived her vampire characters as allegorical symbols of isolation and social alienation. Similarly, a reviewer writing for The Boston Globe observed that the vampires of her novels represent "the walking alienated, those of us who, by choice or not, dwell on the fringe." On the subject, Rice herself commented, "From the beginning, I've had gay fans, and gay readers who felt that my works involved a sustained gay allegory ... I didn't set out to do that, but that was what they perceived. So even when Christopher was a little baby, I had gay readers and gay friends and knew gay people, and lived in the Castro district of San Francisco, which was a gay neighborhood."
Rice's writings have also been identified as having had a major impact on later developments within the genre of vampire fiction. "Rice turns vampire conventions inside out," wrote Susan Ferraro of The New York Times. "Because Rice identifies with the vampire instead of the victim (reversing the usual focus), the horror for the reader springs from the realization of the monster within the self. Moreover, Rice's vampires are loquacious philosophers who spend much of eternity debating the nature of good and evil."
In addition, Rice's writing style has been heavily analyzed. Ferraro, in a statement typical of many reviewers, described Rice's prose as "florid, both lurid and lyrical, and full of sensuous detail". However, others have criticized her writing style as both verbose and overly philosophical. Author William Patrick Day comments that her writing is often "long, convoluted, and imprecise". The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that "Anne Rice has what might best be described as a Gothic imagination crossed with a campy taste for the decadent and the bizarre."
In June 1988, following the success of The Vampire Lestat and with The Queen of the Damned about to be published, the Rices purchased a second home in New Orleans, the Brevard–Rice House, built in 1857 for Albert Hamilton Brevard. Stan took a leave of absence from his teaching, and together they moved to New Orleans. Within months, they decided to make it their permanent home.
Rice returned to the Catholic Church in 1998 after decades of atheism. She fell into a coma, later determined to be caused by diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), on December 14, 1998, and nearly died. She was later diagnosed with diabetes mellitus type 1, and was insulin-dependent. Following the advice of her husband, Rice underwent gastric bypass surgery shortly after his death and shed 103 pounds in 2003.
Rice nearly died again from an intestinal blockage or bowel obstruction, a common complication of gastric bypass surgery, in 2004. In 2005, Newsweek reported, "[Rice] came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18." Her return did not come with a full embrace of the Church's stances on social issues; Rice remained a vocal supporter of equality for gay men and lesbians (including marriage rights), as well as abortion rights and birth control, writing extensively on such issues.
While promoting her book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt in October 2005, Rice announced in Newsweek that she would now use her life and talent of writing to glorify her belief in God, but she did not renounce her earlier works, citing a connection in her earlier work with the state of her spiritual life.
In the Author's Note from Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Rice states:
I had experienced an old-fashioned, strict Roman Catholic childhood in the 1940s and 1950s ... we attended daily Mass and Communion in an enormous and magnificently decorated church.... Stained-glass windows, the Latin Mass, the detailed answers to complex questions on good and evil—these things were imprinted on my soul forever.... I left this church at age 18.... I wanted to know what was happening, why so many seemingly good people didn't believe in any organized religion yet cared passionately about their behavior and value of their lives.... I broke with the church.... I wrote many novels that without my being aware that they reflected my quest for meaning in a world without God.
In her memoir Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, Rice stated:
In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from [God] for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I'd been, all of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul. He wasn't going to let anything happen by accident! Nobody was going to go to Hell by mistake.
Rice announced that she had made plans to leave New Orleans on her website on January 18, 2004. She cited living alone since the death of her husband and her son moving to California as the reasons for her move. Rice put the largest of her three homes up for sale on January 30, 2004, and moved to a gated community in Kenner, Louisiana. "Simplifying my life, not owning so much, that's the chief goal", said Rice. "I'll no longer be a citizen of New Orleans in the true sense." She sold two New York City condominiums in March and April 2005. After completing Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Rice left New Orleans in 2005 shortly before the events of Hurricane Katrina in August. None of her former New Orleans properties were flooded, and Rice remained a vocal advocate for the city and related relief projects.
After leaving New Orleans, Rice first settled in La Jolla, California, describing the weather there as "like heaven" in November 2005. She left La Jolla less than a year after moving there, stating in January 2006 that the weather was too cold. She purchased a six-bedroom home in Rancho Mirage, California in late 2005 and moved there in 2006, allowing her to be closer to her son in Los Angeles.
Rice auctioned off her large collection of antique dolls at Thierault's in Chicago on July 18, 2010. Rice also auctioned off her wardrobe, jewelry, household possessions and collectibles featured in her many books on eBay starting in mid-2010 through early 2011. She sold a large portion of her library collection to Powell's Books.
Rice publicly announced her disdain for the current state of Christianity on her Facebook page on July 28, 2010: "Today I quit being a Christian.... I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else."
Shortly thereafter, she clarified her statement: "My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become."
Following her announcement, Rice's critique of Christianity was commented upon by numerous journalists and pundits. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Rice elaborated on her view regarding being a member of a Christian church: "I feel much more morally comfortable walking away from organized religion. I respect that there are all kinds of denominations and all kinds of churches, but it's the entire controversy, the entire conversation that I need to walk away from right now." In response to the question, "How do you follow Christ without a church?" Rice replied: "I think the basic ritual is simply prayer. It's talking to God, putting things in the hands of God, trusting that you're living in God's world and praying for God's guidance. And being absolutely faithful to the core principles of Jesus' teachings." Rice participated in the "I Am Second" project in 2011 with a short documentary about her spiritual journey. Rice stated that she was a secular humanist in a Facebook post on April 14, 2013. She said that Christ is still central to her life, but not in the way He is presented by organized religion, in a July 28, 2014 Facebook post,
Rice died from complications of a stroke at a hospital in Rancho Mirage, California on December 11, 2021, at the age of 80. According to a statement from Rice's son Christopher Rice, the family planned to inter her at the family mausoleum at Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.
In 1994, Neil Jordan directed a motion picture adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, based on Rice's own screenplay. The movie starred Tom Cruise as Lestat, Brad Pitt as the guilt-ridden Louis, and a young Kirsten Dunst in her breakout role as the deceitful child vampire Claudia.
A second film adaptation, Queen of the Damned, was released in February 2002, starring Stuart Townsend as the vampire Lestat and singer Aaliyah as Akasha. The movie combined plot points from both the novel The Queen of the Damned, as well as from The Vampire Lestat. Produced on a budget of $35 million, the film recouped only $30 million at the U.S. box office. On her Facebook page, Rice distanced herself from the film, and stated that she feels the filmmakers "mutilated" her work in adapting the novel.
The 1994 film Exit to Eden, based loosely on the book Rice published as Anne Rampling, stars Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd. The work was transformed from a BDSM-themed love story into a police comedy, and was widely considered a box-office failure, receiving near-universal negative reviews.
A film adaptation of Christ the Lord was reported to be in the early stages of development in February 2012. It was reported that Chris Columbus had signed on to produce, and that Cyrus Nowrasteh had already completed the script. On November 8, 2014, during an interview with her long-time editor, Victoria Wilson, at the Chicago Humanities Festival, Rice revealed that filming had finished on the movie and was going into post-production. The film, titled The Young Messiah, was released in 2016.
In August 2014, Universal Pictures had acquired the rights to Rice's Vampire Chronicles. However, in November 2016, when Universal Pictures did not renew the contract, the film and television rights reverted to Rice, who began developing The Vampire Chronicles into a television series with her son, Christopher.
In 1997, Rice wrote the story for a television pilot entitled Rag and Bone, featuring elements of both horror and crime fiction. Screenwriter James D. Parriott penned the screenplay, and the pilot ultimately aired on CBS, starring Dean Cain and Robert Patrick.
The Feast of All Saints was made into a Showtime original miniseries in 2001, directed by Peter Medak and starring James Earl Jones and Gloria Reuben. As of 2002, NBC had plans to adapt Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy into a miniseries, but the project never entered production.
Earth Angels was a presentation pilot written by Rice, produced by Imagine Television and 20th Century Fox Television, and picked up by NBC. Set in New York City, it followed angels in human form battling against evil. Four parts of Anne Rice's story treatment for the series were published in 1999 as a bonus in the comic book series called Anne Rice's Tale of the Body Thief.
In November 2016, Rice announced on Facebook that the rights to her novels were reverted to her despite earlier plans for other adaptations. Rice said that she and her son, author Christopher Rice, would be developing and executive producing a potential television series based on the novels. In April 2017, they teamed up with Paramount Television and Anonymous Content to develop a series. As of early 2018, Bryan Fuller was involved with the creation of a potential TV series based on the novels. On July 17, 2018, it was announced that the series was in development at streaming service Hulu and that Fuller had departed the production. As of December 2019, Hulu's rights had expired and Rice was shopping a package including all film and TV rights to the series. In May 2020, it was announced that AMC had acquired the rights to The Vampire Chronicles and Lives of the Mayfair Witches for developing film and television projects. Anne and Christopher Rice were to serve as executive producers on any projects developed.
On April 25, 2006, the musical Lestat, based on Rice's Vampire Chronicles books, opened at the Palace Theatre on Broadway after having its world premiere and preview run at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco, California, in December 2005. With music by Elton John and lyrics by Bernie Taupin, it was the inaugural production of the newly established Warner Brothers Theatre Ventures. Despite Rice's own overwhelming approval and praise, the show received disappointing attendance and largely negative reviews from critics. Lestat closed a month later on May 28, 2006, after just 33 previews and 39 regular performances. The release of the cast recording of the show is reportedly on hold indefinitely.
Several of Anne Rice's novels have been adapted into comic books and manga. There are also fan fiction based on her works. She initially expressed an adamant stance against fan fiction, and particularly in opposition to such fiction based on The Vampire Chronicles, releasing a statement on April 7, 2000, that disallowed all such efforts, citing copyright issues. She subsequently requested that FanFiction.Net remove stories featuring her characters. In 2012, Metro reported that Rice developed a milder stance on the issue. "I got upset about 20 years ago because I thought it would block me," she said. "However, it's been very easy to avoid reading any, so live and let live. If I were a young writer, I'd want to own my own ideas. But maybe fan fiction is a transitional phase: whatever gets you there, gets you there."
Bibliography
Non-fiction: Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (2008).
Short fiction: "October 4, 1948", Transfer 19, 1965. Reprinted in The Anne Rice Reader, Katherine Ramsland, ed., 1997; Nicholas and Jean", Transfer 21, June 1966. Reprinted in The Anne Rice Reader, Katherine Ramsland, ed., 1997; "The Art of the Vampire at Its Peak in the Year 1876, or, Armand's Lesson" (Playboy, January 1979); "The Master of Rampling Gate", Redbook, February 1984.
Series
The Vampire Chronicles: Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned (1988), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), The Vampire Armand (1998), Merrick (2000), Blood and Gold (2001),
Blackwood Farm (2002), Blood Canticle (2003), Prince Lestat (2014), Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (2016), Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat (2018).
New Tales of the Vampires: Pandora (1998), Vittorio the Vampire (1999).
Lives of the Mayfair Witches: The Witching Hour (1990), Lasher (1993), Taltos (1994).
Ramses the Damned: The Mummy (1989), The Passion of Cleopatra (2017), The Reign of Osiris (2022).
Christ the Lord: Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2005), Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (2008).
Songs of the Seraphim: Angel Time (2009), Of Love and Evil (2010).
The Wolf Gift Chronicles: The Wolf Gift (2012), The Wolves of Midwinter (2013).
Stand-alone novels: The Feast of All Saints (1979), Cry to Heaven (1982), Servant of the Bones (1996), Violin (1997).
Under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure: Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983), Beauty's Punishment (1984), Beauty's Release (1985), Beauty's Kingdom (2015).
Under the pseudonym Anne Rampling: Exit to Eden (1985), Belinda (1986).
http://annerice.com/
Russ, Joanna
Joanna Russ (February 22, 1937 – April 29, 2011) was a writer, academic and radical feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire, and the story "When It Changed".
Joanna Russ was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Evarett I. and Bertha (née Zinner) Russ, both teachers. Her family was Jewish. She began creating works of fiction at a very early age. Over the following years she filled countless notebooks with stories, poems, comics and illustrations, often hand-binding the material with thread.
As a senior at William Howard Taft High School, Russ was selected as one of the top ten Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners. She graduated from Cornell University, where she studied with Vladimir Nabokov, in 1957, and received her MFA from the Yale Drama School in 1960. She was briefly married to Albert Amateau.
Russ taught at Queensborough Community College from 1966-1967, at Cornell from 1967-1972, SUNY Binghamton, from 1972-1975, and at the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1975-1977. In 1977 she started teaching at the University of Washington. She became a full professor in 1984 and retired in 1991. Russ was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1974-1975.
Russ came to be noticed in the science fiction world in the late 1960s, in particular for her award-nominated novel Picnic on Paradise. At the time, SF was a field dominated by male authors, writing for a predominantly male audience, but women were starting to enter the field in larger numbers. Russ was one of the most outspoken female authors to challenge male dominance of the field, and is generally regarded as one of the leading feminist science fiction scholars and writers. She was also one of the first major science fiction writers to take slash fiction and its cultural and literary implications seriously. Over the course of her life, she published over fifty short stories. Russ was associated with the American New Wave of science fiction.
Along with her work as a writer of prose fiction, Russ was also a playwright, essayist, and author of nonfiction works, generally literary criticism and feminist theory, including the essay collection Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts; How to Suppress Women's Writing; and the book-length study of modern feminism, What Are We Fighting For? Her essays and articles have been published in Women's Studies Quarterly, Signs, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Science Fiction Studies, and College English. Russ was a self-described socialist feminist, expressing particular admiration for the work and theories of Clara Fraser and her Freedom Socialist Party. Both fiction and nonfiction, for Russ, were modes of engaging theory with the real world; in particular, The Female Man can be read as a theoretical or narrative text. The short story, "When It Changed," which became a part of the novel, explores the constraints of gender and asks if gender is necessary in a society.
Russ's writing is characterized by anger interspersed with humor and irony. James Tiptree Jr, in a letter to her, wrote, "Do you imagine that anyone with half a functional neuron can read your work and not have his fingers smoked by the bitter, multi-layered anger in it? It smells and smoulders like a volcano buried so long and deadly it is just beginning to wonder if it can explode." In a letter to Susan Koppelman, Russ asks of a young feminist critic "where is her anger?" and adds "I think from now on, I will not trust anyone who isn't angry."
For nearly 15 years she was an influential (if intermittent) review columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Though by then she was no longer an active member of science fiction fandom, she was interviewed by phone during Wiscon (the feminist science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin) in 2006 by her friend and member of the same cohort, Samuel R. Delany.
Her first SF story was "Nor Custom Stale" in F&SF (1959). Notable short works include Hugo winner and Nebula Award finalist "Souls" (1982), Nebula Award and Tiptree Award winner "When It Changed" (1972), Nebula Award finalists "The Second Inquisition" (1970), "Poor Man, Beggar Man" (1971), "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand" (1979), and "The Mystery of the Young Gentlemen" (1982). Her fiction has been nominated for nine Nebula and three Hugo Awards, and her genre-related scholarly work was recognized with a Pilgrim Award in 1988. Her story "The Autobiography of My Mother" was one of the 1977 O. Henry Prize stories.
She wrote several contributions to feminist thinking about pornography and sexuality including "Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love" (1985), "Pornography and the Doubleness of Sex for Women", and "Being Against Pornography", which can be found in her archival pieces located in the University of Oregon's Special Collections.
These essays include very detailed descriptions of her views on pornography and how influential it was to feminist thought in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Specifically, in "Being Against Pornography", she calls pornography a feminist issue. Her issues with pornography range from feminist issues, to women's sexuality in general and how porn prevents women from freely express their sexual selves, like men can. Russ believed that anti-pornography activists were not addressing how women experienced pornography created by men, a topic that she addressed in "Being Against Pornography".
Her work is widely taught in courses on science fiction and feminism throughout the English speaking world. Russ is the subject of Farah Mendlesohn's book On Joanna Russ and Jeanne Cortiel's Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction. Russ and her work are prominently featured in Sarah LeFanu's In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988). She was named to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013.
Gwyneth Jones wrote a 2019 book about Joanna Russ that was part of the University of Illinois Press series called Modern Masters of Science Fiction.
In a 2004 essay about the connections between Russ's work and D. W. Griffith's film Intolerance, Samuel R. Delany describes her as being "one of the finest - and most necessary - writers of American fiction" since she published her first professional short story in 1959.
Her papers are part of the University of Oregon's Special Collections and University Archives.
The late 1960s and 1970s marked the beginnings of feminist SF scholarship—a field of inquiry that was all but created single-handedly by Russ, who contributed many essays on feminism and science fiction that appeared in journals such as College English and Science Fiction Studies. She also contributed 25 reviews to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, covering more than 100 books of all genres. In their article "Learning the 'Prophet Business': The Merril-Russ Intersection," Newell and Tallentire described Russ as an "intelligent, tough-minded reviewer who routinely tempered harsh criticism with just the sort of faint praise she handed out to Judith Merril", who in turn was among the foremost editors and critics in American science fiction in the late 1960s. Russ was also described as a fearless, incisive, and radical person, whose writing was often characterized as acerbic and angry.
Russ was acclaimed as one of science fiction's most revolutionary and accomplished writers. Helen Merrick went so far as to claim that Russ was an inescapable figure in science fiction history. James Tiptree, Jr. once commented on how Russ could be an "absolute delight" one minute, but then she "rushes out and bites my ankles with one sentence". For example, Russ criticized Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness, which won both the 1969 Nebula and 1970 Hugo awards for best science fiction novel, arguing that gender discriminations that permeated science fiction by men showed up just as frequently in science fiction by women. According to Russ, Le Guin's novel represented these stereotypes.
However, Russ was well aware of the pressures of writing for a living since she was also an author herself. Russ also felt that science fiction gives something to its readers that cannot be easily acquired anywhere else. She maintained that science should be accurate, and seriousness is a virtue. She insisted on the unique qualities of her chosen genre, maintaining that science fiction shared certain qualities with art and its flexibility compared to other forms writing. Russ was also interested in demonstrating the unique potentials of women science fiction writers.As her career moved into its second decade in the 1980s, she started to worry about reviewing standards. She once said, "The reviewer's hardest task is to define standards."
Russ's reviewing style was characterized by logic. She was attacked by readers because of her harsh reviews of Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane (1977) and Joy Chant's The Grey Mane of Morning (1977). She organized attacks into these seven categories, taken directly from the cited article:
Don't shove your politics into your reviews. Just review the books. "I will," Russ said, "when authors keep politics out of their books."
You don't prove what you say; you just assert it. "There is no way to "prove" anything in aesthetic or moral matters."
Then your opinion is purely subjective. "I might be subjective, but not arbitrary. It is based on a critic's whole education."
Everyone's entitled to his [sic] own opinion. "Writing is a craft too, and it can be judged. And some opinions are worth a good deal more than others."
I knew it. You're a snob. "Science fiction is a small world that often doesn't look outside of its own bounds."
You're vitriolic too. "The only way to relieve oneself of the pain that has to be endured by reading every line is to express one's opinions vividly, precisely, and compactly."
Never mind all that stuff. Just tell me what I'd enjoy reading. "Bless you, what makes you think I know?"
However, she felt guilty about dire and frank criticism. She apologized for her harsh words on Lloyd Biggle's The Light That Never Was (1972) by saying, "It's narsty to beat up on authors who are probably starving to death on turnip soup (ghoti soup) but critics ought to be honest."
Around the time of the publication of The Female Man in 1975, Russ came out as a lesbian. However, Russ remained protective of her personal life, and as late as a December 1981 interview with Charles Platt, she was still evasive on the subject.
In her later life she published little, largely because of chronic pain and chronic fatigue syndrome. On April 27, 2011, it was reported that Russ had been admitted to a hospice after suffering a series of strokes. Samuel R. Delany was quoted as saying that Russ was "slipping away" and had long had a "do not resuscitate" order on file. She died early in the morning on April 29, 2011.
Selected works:
Novels
Picnic on Paradise (1968)
And Chaos Died (1970)
The Female Man (1975)
We Who Are About To... (1977)
The Two of Them (1978)
On Strike Against God: A Lesbian Love Story (1980) (novella)
Short fiction collections
The Adventures of Alyx (1976) (includes Picnic on Paradise)
The Zanzibar Cat (1983)
Extra(ordinary) People (1985)
The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987)
Children's fiction
Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (1978)
Play
"Window Dressing" in The New Women's Theatre edited by Honor Moore. New York, Random House (1977)
Essays and collections
Speculations on the Subjunctivity of Science Fiction (1973)
Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband: The Modern Gothic (1973)
How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)
Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (1985)
To Write Like a Woman (1995)
What Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism (1997)
The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (2007).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Russ
Russell, Mary Doria
Mary Doria Russell (born August 19, 1950) is an American novelist, and is active on the lecture circuit, speaking at colleges, universities and libraries.
Russell was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Her parents were both in the military, her father a Marine Corps drill instructor and her mother a Navy nurse. She was raised as a Catholic but left the church at age fifteen, and her struggles to figure out how much of that culture to pass on to her children fueled the prominence of religion in her work. She resides in Lyndhurst, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. She and her husband Don have been married since 1970; they have one son.
She graduated from Glenbard East High School in Lombard, Illinois, which has registered its chapter of the National English Honor Society in her name (as Mary Doria Russell). She is also a major sponsor of a Glenbard East scholarship established in memory of English teacher Richard Cima.
Russell earned her B.A. in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; her M.A. in Social Anthropology at Northeastern University, Boston; and her Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Russell's doctoral research concentrations were in bone biology, craniofacial biomechanics, and paleoanthropology. She twice won the Trotter Award for outstanding work on bone by a doctoral student and went on to teach graduate-level osteology in the Anthropology Department of the University of Michigan and human gross anatomy at the Case Western University School of Dentistry in Cleveland, Ohio.
Her major scientific publications focused on Neandertal studies, and included work proposing a biomechanical explanation of the supraorbital torus (browridges) and statistical analyses to distinguish taphonomic evidence of secondary burial from that of butchery.
Russell's fiction has been recognized for meticulous research, fine prose and narrative drive. She has worked in a variety of genres.
Russell's first two novels, The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God—sometimes called the Sparrow series or Emilio Sandoz sequence—(Random House Villard in 1996 and 1998) have been called speculative fiction and focused on the religious and psychological implications of first contact with aliens. Both explore the problem of evil (theodicy) and how to reconcile a benevolent, omniscient, all-powerful deity with lives filled with undeserved suffering.
The Sparrow won the Arthur C. Clarke, BSFA, and Tiptree annual science fiction book awards (below), and it was the basis for Russell winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1998; in German translation, Sperling won the Kurd Lasswitz Prize for Best Foreign Novel. Children of God won the American Library Association's Readers Choice award. Together, the novels won the Spectrum Classics Hall of Fame award and earned Russell the Cleveland Arts Council Prize for Literature.
For the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, chief editor John Clute calls Russell an "author who established a strong reputation for cognitive subtlety and narrative power in her brief [science fiction] career; after the Emilio Sandoz sequence ... she turned her interest to other fields."
The rest of Russell's novels have been categorized as historical novels, although she draws from a variety of genres when telling these stories.
A Thread of Grace (Random House, 2005) is a World War II thriller set in Northern Italy and features both the Italian resistance movement and the plight of Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution throughout Europe. Much of story is based on accounts by survivors from the period, when many Italian citizens allowed Jews to seek safe harbor in their farmlands, cities, and ports. (Russell herself is of Italian heritage and is a convert to Judaism.)
Dreamers of the Day (Random House, 2008) is a historical romance set in the Midwestern United States and the Middle East during aftermath of the First World War and the Great Influenza. It focuses on the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, when Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and a group of British oilmen invented the modern Middle East, thus setting the region up for a hundred years of war.
Doc (Random House 2011) is a murder mystery as well as a realistic and compassionate portrait of the notorious "gambler and gunman" known as Doc Holliday. Doc is set in Dodge City, Kansas, during 1878, the last year that Dr. John Henry Holliday's tuberculosis was in check long enough for him to practice dentistry, a profession at which he excelled. The plot revolves around the mysterious death of a half-black, half-Indian boy who leaves a remarkable void in the life of the city. Doc was the American Library Association's Top Pick in Historical Fiction as well as the Kansas State Library's Notable Novel and the Great Lakes Great Reads pick.
Epitaph (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015) picks up where Doc left off, following Holliday and the Earp brothers to Tombstone, Arizona, and traces the political and social roots of the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as well as the making of the mythology that surrounds it. Epitaph is deeply researched; in addition to thorough study of the history of those involved, the 60-year-old Russell rode 58 miles on horseback through the mountains surrounding Tombstone, retracing the Earp Vendetta Ride. The novel was called the best ever written on the subject by Earp biographer Allen Barra and was recognized by True West Magazine as the Best Historical Western of 2015. The Ohioana Library Foundation awarded it the Best Fiction Prize of 2016; it also won the Ohioana Readers Choice Award for the year.
The Women of the Copper Country (Atria Books, 2019) is a painstakingly researched novel about the Copper Country strike of 1913–1914, the first unionized strike against all the copper mines in the Copper Country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The central character, "Big Annie" Clements, is based on "America's Joan of Arc," Anna Clemenc, who founded the Women's Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners and proudly carried the flag in many marches against the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company. Other historical figures, including James MacNaughton, General Manager of Calumet and Hecla, Woodbridge Ferris, governor of Michigan during the strike, and Mother Jones, prominent activist and union organizer, are also elaborately and credibly portrayed. The book received a Michigan Notable Book Award for 2020 from the Library of Michigan.
Books
The Sparrow (Villard, 1996; Ballantine, 1997)
Children of God (Villard, 1998; Ballantine, 1999)
A Thread of Grace (Random House, 2005; Ballantine, 2006)
Dreamers of the Day (Random House, 2008; Ballantine 2009)
Doc (Random House 2011; Ballantine, 2012)
Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015 hc, 2016 tradepaper)
The Women of the Copper Country: A Novel (Atria Books, 2019 hc, 2020 tradepaper)
Awards
James Tiptree, Jr. Award, 1997, The Sparrow
British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Best Novel Award, 1998, The Sparrow (UK edition: Transworld Publishers Black Swan, 1997)
Arthur C. Clarke Award, 1998, The Sparrow
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, 1998, citing The Sparrow
Cleveland Arts Council Prize for Literature
American Library Association Readers Choice Award
Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame Award, 2001, The Sparrow and Children of God
Kurd Lasswitz Preis (Germany), best foreign novel, 2001, The Sparrow
USA Friends of the Library Reader's Choice Award: Children of God, 1999
American Library Association Top Pick, Historical Fiction: Doc, 2011
Great Lakes Great Reads: Doc, 2011
Kansas State Library Notable Novel: Doc, 2011
True West: Best Historical Western: Epitaph, 2015
Ohioana Best Fiction Prize: Epitaph, 2015
Ohioana Readers Choice Award: Epitaph, 2015
Nominations
Hugo Award
Book of the Month Club Best First Fiction
Book of the Month Club First Fiction Award, finalist: The Sparrow, 1996
Dublin International Literary Prize: The Sparrow, 1998; Dreamers of the Day, 2006.
https://marydoriarussell.net/
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