American author and critic born Elizabeth Ames Hall. When her family fell on hard times during the Depression, Janeway was forced to end her Swarthmore College education and help support the family by creating bargain basement sale slogans (she graduated from Barnard College just a few years later, in 1935). Intent on becoming an author, Janeway took the same creative writing class again and again to help hone her craft. While working on her first novel, The Walsh Girls, she met and married Eliot Janeway, economic adviser to Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson (he was known as "Calamity Janeway" for his pessimistic economic forecasts). The Janeways mingled with United States Supreme Court justices and many other luminaries of the day. At the behest of labor organizer Walter Reuther, she aided General Motors workers with their mid-1940s strike against the company. Her 1949 novel The Question of Gregory attracted attention due to the eerie similarities between Gregory and James Forrestal, a Defense Secretary and acquaintance of the Janeways who committed suicide. Janeway denied any connection between fact and fiction; she said the real theme of the book was "liberals in trouble". In all, Janeway wrote seven novels; one, 1945's Daisy Kenyon, was made into a film starring Joan Crawford. For a time she was a reviewer for the New York Times. In that capacity she introduced writer Anthony Powell and served as a champion of controversial works such as Lolita. She was also a reviewer for Ms. magazine. From 1965-1969 she served as president of the Authors Guild, addressing lawmakers about copyright protection and other matters. Many of Janeway's early works focused on the family situation, with occasional glimpses at the struggles of women in modern society. In the early 1970s, she began a more explicitly feminist path with works such as Man's World, Woman's Place: A Study of Social Mythology. She befriended Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Kate Millet and was strongly in favor of abortion rights. Janeway continued to write and go on lecture tours. She learned to speak Russian so that she could visit the Soviet Union. Janeway was a judge for the National Book Awards in 1955 and for the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. She was an executive of International PEN. At its 1981 commencement ceremonies, her alma mater Barnard College awarded Janeway its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.

Also wrote westerns as Clay Fisher. Henry Wilson Allen (September 12, 1912 – October 26, 1991) was an American author and screenwriter. He used several different pseudonyms for his works. His 50+ novels of the American West were published under the pen names Will Henry and Clay Fisher. Allen's screenplays and scripts for animated shorts were credited to Heck Allen and Henry Allen. Allen's career as a novelist began in 1952, with the publication of his first Western No Survivors. Allen, afraid that the studio would disapprove of his moonlighting, used a pen-name to avoid trouble.[3] He would go on to publish over 50 novels, eight of which were adapted for the screen. Most of these were published under one or the other of the pseudonyms Will Henry and Clay Fisher. Allen was a five-time winner of the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America and a recipient of the Levi Strauss Award for lifetime achievement. Henry Wilson Allen was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Allen died of pneumonia on October 26, 1991 in Van Nuys, California. He was 79.

George Rippey Stewart was an American toponymist, a novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his only science fiction novel Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic novel, for which he won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was dramatized on radio's Escape and inspired Stephen King's The Stand . His 1941 novel Storm , featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm called Maria, prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms and inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical "Paint Your Wagon." Storm was dramatized as "A Storm Called Maria" on a 1959 episode of ABC's Disneyland. Two other novels, Ordeal by Hunger (1936) and Fire (1948) also evoked environmental catastrophes. Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956-57, and he once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names. His best-known academic work is Names on the Land A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945; reprinted, New York Review Books, 2008). He wrote three other books on place-names, A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names (1970), Names on the Globe (1975), and American Given Names (1979). His scholarly works on the poetic meter of ballads (published under the name George R. Stewart, Jr.), beginning with his 1922 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, remain important in their field. His 1959 book Pickett's Charge is a detailed history of the final attack at Gettysburg.

Born in the Bronx, New York, on April 11, 1902, to a school principal and his wife, Quentin James Reynolds grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Manual Training High School. He enrolled at Brown University and excelled in football, boxing, and swimming. In fact, after earning his Ph.D. he spent a year on a professional football team. Going from job to job, Reynolds couldn't find a career he enjoyed. His father suggested law school, and by the time he earned his degree, Reynolds had finally figured out what he wanted to do. Journalism, not law, appealed to Reynolds, and he worked as a reporter and then a sports columnist. In 1933 he was sent as a feature writer to report on Germany and the rise of Hitler. At that time, Reynolds was writing for the International News Service. The Germans didn't approve of Reynolds' slant against the Third Reich and national socialism; however, from the article Reynolds gained employment at Collier's Weekly for whom he eventually penned 384 articles and short stories over a fifteen year span, eventually rising to the position of associate editor. A prolific writer, Reynolds' fame came during an assignment to cover the erupting World War II. Reynolds spent time in France and then fled to England. While there he came to appreciate and respect the British. In account after account he portrayed the strong will and determination of a nation fighting for its very survival. He penned seven books about the war, broadcasted for the British Broadcasting Company, narrated two film documentaries, and lectured in the United States. Reynolds' popularity soared as people learned of his bravery and the risks he took to get the story. Unfortunately for Reynolds, not everyone found him admirable. A Hearst columnist disputed his claims and suggested Reynolds was cowardly. After five years in the court system, Reynolds won over $175,000 in the libel judgement. This wasn't his only time he was brought to the public's attention for questionable acts. In 1952 Reynolds had penned a book about a Canadian spy, only to later find out that he had been duped and misled into believing a false tale. The publisher in turn changed the book from nonfiction to fiction. When Reynolds traveled to Manila, Philippines, to research the president for a biography, he became ill with abdominal cancer. He passed away on March 17, 1965 at the age of sixty-two.

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.

Ralph Moody was an American author who wrote 17 novels and autobiographies about the American West. He was born in East Rochester, New Hampshire, in 1898 but moved to Colorado with his family when he was eight in the hopes that a dry climate would improve his father Charles' tuberculosis. Moody detailed his experiences in Colorado in the first book of the Little Britches series, Father and I Were Ranchers. After his father died, eleven-year-old Moody assumed the duties of the "man of the house." He and his sister Grace combined ingenuity with hard work in a variety of odd jobs to help their mother provide for their large family. The Moody clan returned to the East Coast some time after Charles' death, but Moody had difficulty readjusting. Following more than one ill-timed run-in with local law enforcement, he left the family home near Boston to live on his grandfather's farm in Maine. His later Little Britches books cover his time in Maine and subsequent travels through Arizona, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Kansas—including stints as a bust sculptor and a horse rider doing "horse falls" for motion pictures—as he worked his way back toward Colorado while continuing to support his family financially. Moody's formal education was limited, but he had a lifelong interest in learning and self-education. At age 50, he enrolled in a writing class, which eventually led to the publication of Father and I Were Ranchers. In addition to the Little Britches series, Moody wrote a number of books detailing the development of the American West. His books have been described as crude in the language of the times but are highly praised by Moody's readership and have been in continuous publication since 1950. After a period as livestock business owner in rural Kansas, Moody sent to Massachusetts for his former sweetheart, Edna. They married and moved to Kansas City. They had three children.—Source

Richard Tregaskis was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on November 28, 1916, and educated at the Pingrie Day School for Boys, Elizabeth, New Jersey, at Peddie School, Hightstonsic, New Jersey, and at Harvard University. Prior to World War II he worked as a journalist for the Boston Herald newspaper. Shortly after the U.S. entered World War II, Tregaskis volunteered as a combat correspondent representing the International News Service. (In fact, Tregaskis was one of only two journalists on location at Guadalcanal.) Assigned to cover the war in the Pacific, Tregaskis spent part of August and most of September, 1942 reporting on Marines on Guadalcanal, a pivotal campaign in the war against Japan. He subsequently covered the European Theater of Operations against Nazi Germany and Italy. Tregaskis' most renowned book, Guadalcanal Diary, recorded his experiences with the Marines on Guadalcanal. As the jacket of the book's first edition noted, "This is a new chapter in the story of the United States Marines. Because it was written by a crack newspaperman, who knew how to do his job... Until the author's departure in a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber on September 26th, he ate, slept, and sweated with our front-line units. His story is the straight day-by-day account of what he himself saw or learned from eyewitnesses during those seven weeks." As a testimony to the power of Tregaskis' writing, ''Guadalcanal Diary'' is still considered essential reading by present-day U.S. military personnel. (A modern edition is available with an introduction by [[Mark Bowden]], author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. Tregaskis later covered Cold War-era conflicts in China, Korea, and Vietnam. Tregaskis died at age 56 near his home in Hawaii as a result of drowning.

Called the "Storyteller of the Southwest," James Frank Dobie was born in 1888 on his family's cattle ranch in Live Oak County. During his long life, J. Frank Dobie would live astride two worlds: a rugged life on a Texas cattle ranch and the state's modern centers of scholarly learning. Dobie came to Austin in 1914 to teach at the University of Texas. In time he pioneered an influential course on the literature of the Southwest. By the late 1920s, Dobie discovered his mission: to record and publicize the disappearing folklore of Texas and the greater Southwest. Dobie became secretary of the Texas Folklore Society, a position he held for 21 years. J. Frank Dobie Dobie was a new kind of folklorist—a progressive activist. He called for UT to admit African-American students in the 1940s—long before the administration favored integration. Dobie's vocal politics led to his leaving the University in 1947, but he continued writing until his death in 1964, publishing over twenty books and countless articles. The inscription on Dobie's headstone in the Texas State Cemetery reads: "I have come to value liberated minds as the supreme good of life on earth." J. Frank Dobie was not content to simply preserve Southwestern heritage within libraries and museums. He gave life to that heritage and informed generations of Texans about their rich history.

Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson. She is best known for her dystopian short story, "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received." Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse." Jackson's husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that "she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years." Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson's works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of "personal, even neurotic, fantasies", but that Jackson intended, as "a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb", to mirror humanity's Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as revealed by Hyman's statement that she "was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned The Lottery', and she felt that they at least understood the story". In 1965, Jackson died of heart failure in her sleep, at her home in North Bennington Vermont, at the age of 48.

aka Geoffrey Coffin, Frank W. Mason, Ward Weaver Francis Van Wyck Mason (November 11, 1901 – August 28, 1978, Bermuda) was an American historian and novelist. He had a long and prolific career as a writer spanning 50 years and including 65 published novels.

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic, and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. He won the Pulitzer in 1947 for his novel All the King's Men (1946) and won his subsequent Pulitzer Prizes for poetry in 1957 and then in 1979. Warren was born on April 24, 1905, in Guthrie, Kentucky. He graduated from Clarksville High School in Tennessee, Vanderbilt University in 1925 and the University of California, Berkeley in 1926. Warren later attended Yale University and obtained his B. Litt. as a Rhodes Scholar from New College, Oxford, in England in 1930. That same year he began his teaching career at Southwestern College (now called Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He also taught at Vanderbilt University and LSU. In 1930, he married Emma Brescia; they later divorced in 1951. He then married Eleanor Clark in 1952. They had two children, Rosanna Phelps Warren (b. July 1953) and Gabriel Penn Warren (b. July 1955). Though his works strongly reflect Southern themes and mindset, Warren published his most famous work, All the King's Men, while a professor at The University of Minnesota and lived the latter part of his life in Fairfield, Connecticut, and Stratton, Vermont. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Italy during the rule of Benito Mussolini. He died on September 15, 1989, of complications from bone cancer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May\_McNeer Married to Lynd Ward, who illustrated several of her works. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. John Willard Toland (June 29, 1912 in La Crosse, Wisconsin - January 4, 2004 in Danbury, Connecticut) was an American author and historian. He is best known for his biography of Adolf Hitler.[1] Toland tried to write history as a straightforward narrative, with minimal analysis or judgment. This method may have stemmed from his original goal of becoming a playwright. In the summers between his college years, he travelled with hobos and wrote several plays with hobos as central characters, none of which achieved the stage.[2] At one point he managed to publish an article on dirigibles in Look magazine; it proved extremely popular and led to his career as a historian. One exception to his general approach is his Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath about the Pearl Harbor attack and the investigations of it, in which he wrote about evidence that President Franklin Roosevelt knew in advance of plans to attack the naval base but remained silent. The book was widely criticized at the time. Since the original publication, Toland added new evidence and rebutted early critics. Also, an anonymous source, known as "Seaman Z" (Robert D. Ogg) has since come forth to publicly tell his story. Perhaps his most important work, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, is The Rising Sun. Based on original and extensive interviews with high Japanese officials who survived the war, the book chronicles Imperial Japan from the military rebellion of February 1936 to the end of World War II. The book won the Pulitzer because it was the first book in English to tell the history of the war in the Pacific from the Japanese point of view, rather than from an American perspective. The stories of the battles for the stepping stones to Japan, the islands in the Pacific which had come under Japanese domination, are told from the perspective of the commander sitting in his cave rather than from that of the heroic forces engaged in the assault. Most of these commanders committed suicide at the conclusion of the battle, but Toland was able to reconstruct their viewpoint from letters to their wives and from reports they sent to Tokyo. Toland died in 2004 of pneumonia. While predominantly a non-fiction author, Toland also wrote two historical novels, Gods of War and Occupation. He says in his autobiography that he earned little money from his Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Rising Sun, but was set for life from the earnings of his biography of Hitler, for which he also did original research. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John\_Tol...

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. John Edward Jennings (1906–1973) was an American historical novelist, author of many best-selling novels of American history and seagoing adventure. He also wrote several nonfiction books on history. Wikipedia

Robert Tallant was one of Louisiana’s best-known authors. Born in New Orleans in 1909, he attended the city’s local public schools. Before “drifting” into writing, Tallant worked as an advertising copywriter, a bank teller, and a clerk. It was his friendship with Lyle Saxon that led Tallant to his position as editor on the Louisiana WPA Writers Project during the 1930s and 1940s. In that position, he coauthored Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana (pb) with Lyle Saxon and Edward Dreyer. By 1948, Tallant’s career had launched, and over the next eleven years, he produced eight novels, six full-length works of nonfiction, and numerous short stories and articles on subjects of local interest. He is also known to have corresponded with, as well as applied to, the Julius Rosenwald Fund for a fellowship in creative writing. During the last years of his life, he was a lecturer in English at Newcomb College as well as a reporter for the New Orleans Item. Robert Tallant died in 1957. http://pelicanpub.com/products.asp?ca...

Benjamin McKinlay Kantor, was an American journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He wrote more than 30 novels, several set during the American Civil War, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his 1955 novel Andersonville Kantor was born in Webster City, Iowa, in 1904. His mother, a journalist, encouraged Kantor to develop his writing style. Kantor started writing seriously as a teen-ager when he worked as a reporter with his mother at the local newspaper in Webster City. Kantor's first novel was published when he was 24. During World War II, Kantor reported from London as a war correspondent for a Los Angeles newspaper. After flying on several bombing missions, he asked for and received training to operate the bomber's turret machine guns (this was illegal, as he was not in service). Nevertheless he was decorated with the Medal of Freedom by Gen. Carl Spaatz, then the U.S. Army Air Corp commander. He also saw combat during the Korean War as a correspondent. In addition to journalism and novels, Kantor wrote the screenplay for Gun Crazy (aka Deadly Is the Female) (1950), a noted film noir. It was based on his short story by the same name, published February 3, 1940 in a "slick" magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. In 1992, it was revealed that he had allowed his name to be used on a screenplay written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, who had been blacklisted as a result of his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) hearings. Kantor passed his payment on to Trumbo to help him survive. Several of his novels were adapted for films. He established his own publishing house, and published several of his works in the 1930s and 1940s. Kantor died of a heart attack in 1977, at the age of 73, at his home in Sarasota, Florida.

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.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. 1837-1890

Thomas Sterling North was an American author of books for children and adults, including 1963's bestselling Rascal. Surviving a near-paralyzing struggle with polio in his teens, he grew to young adulthood in the quiet southern Wisconsin village of Edgerton, which North transformed into the "Brailsford Junction" setting of several of his books. For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling...