I was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, on November 21, 1908. I have lived all my life in New England, and though I love to travel I can't imagine ever calling any other place on earth home. Since I can't remember a time when I didn't intend to write, it is hard to explain why I took so long getting around to it in earnest. But the years seemed to go by very quickly. In 1936 I married Alden Speare and came to Connecticut. Not till both children were in junior high did I find time at last to sit down quietly with a pencil and paper. I turned naturally to the things which had filled my days and thoughts and began to write magazine articles about family living. Then one day I stumbled on a true story from New England history with a character who seemed to me an ideal heroine. Though I had my first historical novel almost by accident it soon proved to be an absorbing hobby." Elizabeth George Speare (1908-1994) won the 1959 Newbery Medal for THE WITCH OF BLACKBIRD POND, and the 1962 Newbery Medal for THE BRONZE BOW. She also received a Newbery Honor Award in 1983, and in 1989 she was presented with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for her substantial and enduring contribution to children’s literature.

Zander Hollander was an American sportswriter, journalist, editor and archivist. Many years before the internet and unfinished cable television system emerged, Hollander served as a prolific supplier of encyclopedias on every major sport. At this point, he edited, wrote or packaged around 300 books over a professional career that spanned 45 years. From 1971 to 1997, Hollander edited sports yearbooks, brick-sized tomes known as Complete Handbooks, which in the pre-Internet era were almost holy objects to a certain type of sports-crazed youngster. Here, in one glorious place, was information—statistics, team rosters, records, schedules, predictions for the coming season and more—freed from the restrictions of newspaper column inches and far beyond what a still embryonic cable television system was providing.

Leckie was born on December 18, 1920, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey. He began his career as a writer in high school, as a sports writer for ''The Bergen Evening Record'' in Hackensack, New Jersey. On January 18, 1942, Leckie enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.He served in combat in the Pacific theater, as a scout and a machine gunner in H Company, 2nd Battalion 1st Marines Regiment 1st Marine Division (United States). Leckie saw combat in the Battle of Guadalcanal, the Battle of Cape Gloucester, and had been wounded by blast concussion in the Battle of Peleliu. He returned to the United States in March 1945 and was honorably discharged shortly thereafter. Following World War II, Leckie worked as a reporter for the Associated Press, the ''Buffalo Courier-Express'', the ''New York Journal American'', the ''New York Daily News'' and ''The Star-Ledger''. He married Vera Keller, a childhood neighbor, and they had three children: David, Geoff and Joan According to Vera, in 1951 he was inspired to write a memoir after seeing ''South Pacific '' on Broadway and walking out halfway through. He said "I have to tell the story of how it really was. I have to let people know the war wasn't a musical His first and best-selling book, ''Helmet for My Pillow'', a war memoir, was published in 1957. Leckie subsequently wrote more than 40 books on American war history, spanning from the French and Indian War (1754–1763) to Operation Desert Storm (1991). Robert Leckie died on December 24, 2001, after fighting a long battle with Alzheimer's Disease.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. Jay Williams (May 31, 1914–July 12, 1978) was an American author born in Buffalo, New York, the son of Max and Lillian Jacobson. He cited the experience of growing up as the son of a vaudeville show producer as leading him to pursue his acting career as early as college. Between 1931 and 1934 he attended the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University where he took part in amateur theatrical productions. Out of school and out of work during the end of the Depression, he worked as a comedian on the upstate New York Borscht Belt circuit. From 1936 until 1941, Jay Williams worked as a press agent for Dwight Deere Winman, Jed Harris and the Hollywood Theatre Alliance. And even though he played a feature role in the Cannes prize winning film, The Little Fugitive produced in 1953, he turned his attention to writing as a full time career after his discharge from the Army in 1945. He was the recipient of the Purple Heart. While serving in the Army he published his first book, The Stolen Oracle, in 1943. Williams may be best-known for his young adult "Danny Dunn" science fiction/fantasy series which he co-authored with Raymond Abrashkin. Though Abrashkin died in 1960, he is listed as co-author of all 15 books of this series, which continued from 1956 until 1977. Jay Williams also wrote mysteries for young adults, such as The Stolen Oracle, The Counterfeit African, and The Roman Moon Mystery. Williams also wrote adult crime fiction using the pseudonym Michael Delving. This may be a reference to Michel Delving, a large hobbit-populated town in The Lord of the Rings. One of his series of mysteries feature the American rare book and manuscript collector, Dave Cannon, and take place in Britain. Jay Williams also wrote a number of successful historical novels for adults, including The Witches, a look at the eradication of the healing women in Scotland; Solomon and Sheba; The Siege, a tale of the 13th century wars initiated by the Pope against the Albigensian heresy; and The Rogue from Padua, a novel that takes place in the Renaissance. And he was interested in the future in his many speculative science fiction tales, often published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; eight of these stories were published under the title, Unearthly Beasts. His novel Uniad sees a world in which individuality has shrunk. Jay Williams' novel The Forger examines commercialism and art, and the relation of art to real life. His interest in history is reflected in the non-fiction books he wrote: The Middle Ages, Knights of the Crusades, The Spanish Armada, and Joan of Arc, as well as his young adult Landmark book on World War II, The Battle for the North Atlantic. Williams moreover wrote about the environment, in his Fall of the Sparrow, where he describes the loss of numerous animal and bird species, often due to man; and a travel book, A Change of Climate, a European trip with his son, Chris. In all, he published at least 79 books including 11 picture books, 39 children's novels, 7 adult mysteries, 4 nonfiction books, 8 historical novels and a play.

Scottish biologist, mostly known for his writings on cryptozoology and the paranormal. Sanderson published three classics of nature writing: Animal Treasure, a report of an expedition to the jungles of then-British West Africa; Caribbean Treasure, an account of an expedition to Trinidad, Haiti, and Surinam, begun in late 1936 and ending in late 1938; and Living Treasure, an account of an expedition to Jamaica, British Honduras (now Belize) and the Yucatan.

Don Whitehead was an American journalist. Among his many awards were the Medal of Freedom, the 1950 George Polk Award for wire service reporting, the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, and the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He studied at University of Kentucky from 1926 to 1928.He worked for the newspapers Lafollette Press (Harlan, Kentucky), and the Daily Enterprise beginning in 1928 where he covered the Harlan County War. He became a reporter for the Associated Press, in 1935. Whitehead was a combat reporter during World War II.He covered the Eighth Army (United Kingdom) in Egypt, for the AP in September 1942 and then the American Army in Algeria and Tunisia in 1943. He covered the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 with the First Infantry Division. In addition he reported on the Allied invasion of Italy at Salerno in September 1943, the bloody Italian campaign in the fall of that year and the Anzio landings in January 1944. Don Whitehead was on Omaha Beach with the 116th Infantry Regiment on June 6th, 1944 and was present for the Liberation of Paris and the first meeting of American and Russian forces on the Elbe River in May, 1945. All total Don Whitehead made five amphibious landings with assault forces during World War II. He received his first Pulitzer Prize, for international reporting (1951), for his coverage of the early months of the Korean War - where he again experienced months of front line combat. He received his second Pulitzer, for national reporting, in 1953 for his coverage of President Eisenhower's post-election trip to South Korea in 1953. He was Washington bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune, from 1956 - 1957 and later a columnist for the The Knoxville (Tennessee) News-Sentinel. His book, The FBI Story was adapted into a 1959 film starring James M. Stewart, aka: Jimmy Stewart. His papers are held at the University of Tennessee. Don Whitehead married Marie Patterson on December 20, 1928. They had a daughter, Ruth, and two grandchildren.

Bruce Bliven Jr. was born on Jan. 31, 1916, in Los Angeles but moved to New York when he was 17 months old. He later said, ''Fifty-four years later, I began to write New York history to find out where I was.'' He wrote three books about the city's history and one about the whole state, ''including Buffalo,'' as he said in a remark published in ''Contemporary Authors.'' His father, a journalist, was managing editor of The New Republic. The son inherited his father's liberal stance and joined him in quitting the Descendants of the American Revolution in February 1941 after the group opposed the Lend Lease Act aiding countries fighting the Nazis. Mr. Bliven wrote briefly for a newspaper in Stroudsburg, Pa., and for The Manchester Guardian, the British paper, before graduating from Harvard in 1937. He then wrote editorials for The New York Post, leaving to serve in World War II. ''I was a lieutenant in the field artillery and took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy and wrote a children's book about it a dozen years later to find out what happened,'' he said. That book was ''The Story of D-Day, June 6, 1944'' (Random House, 1956). When he returned to civilian life, he became a magazine writer who ranged across many subjects with deep knowledge but ''did not wear it on his sleeve,'' said Philip Hamburger, another New Yorker writer. He met his wife, the former Naomi Horowitz, at The New Yorker, where she was a writer, and they had a son, Frederic. Mr. Bliven was a prolific writer of popular books and magazine articles on subjects as diverse as military campaigns and the history of the typewriter. He died on January 2, 2002, at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.

Daniel Joseph Boorstin was a historian, professor, attorney, and writer. He was appointed twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress from 1975 until 1987. He graduated from Tulsa's Central High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the age of 15. He graduated with highest honors from Harvard, studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned his PhD at Yale University. He was a lawyer and a university professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years. He also served as director of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution. His The Americans The Democratic Experience received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in history. Within the discipline of social theory, Boorstin’s 1961 book The Image A Guide to Pseudo-events in America is an early description of aspects of American life that were later termed hyperreality and postmodernity. In The Image, Boorstin describes shifts in American culture—mainly due to advertising—where the reproduction or simulation of an event becomes more important or "real" than the event itself. He goes on to coin the term pseudo-event which describes events or activities that serve little to no purpose other than to be reproduced through advertisements or other forms of publicity. The idea of pseudo-events closely mirrors work later done by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. The work is still often used as a text in American sociology courses. When President Gerald Ford nominated Boorstin to be Librarian of Congress, the nomination was supported by the Authors League of America but opposed by the American Library Association because Boorstin "was not a library administrator." The Senate confirmed the nomination without debate. Boorstin died in 2004 in Washington, D.C.