Truman Capote, one of America's more colorful literary personalities, was born in New Orleans in 1924 and died in California in 1984. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction -- short stories, novels and novellas, travel writing, profiles, reportage, memoirs, plays and films. His work of fiction that i...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Influences Gabriel Garcia Márquez, a Colombian-born writer of astonishing skill, is thought by many to be one of the world's greatest living authors and is responsible for awakening interest in Latin American literature with his style of writing. He is con...

James Baldwin was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924. His name at birth was James Arthur Jones. Baldwin never knew his father; his mother, who was originally from Maryland, was named Emma Burdis Jones. In 1927, she married David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher and factory worker from New Orleans with a tw...

Women writers in the late 19th century struggled with their voices, their characters, and their writing, just as all writers do. However, many also had to struggle to be taken seriously by predominately male publishers, and such was the case with Kate Chopin. Throughout her career, "Chop...

Randall Kenan Randall Kenan was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1963. However, he spent most of his childhood in Chinquapin, North Carolina. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he received a B.A. in English in 1985. From 1985 to 1989, he worked in...

LITERATURE Literature can be a very complex subject, but does anyone really know what it is? "Literature, in its broadest sense, is everything that has ever been written"(Literature, 1). "But the word literature in its strictest sense, means more than the printed words"(Lit...