Anais Nin

Anais Nin (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) was a French author who became famous for her self-published diaries, which span a period of forty years, beginning when she was twelve years old.

Born in Neuilly, France, after her parents separated, her mother moved to New York City with her and her two brothers. While still a teenager, Nin abandoned formal schooling and began working as a model. In 1923, she married Hugh Parker Guiler and the following year they moved to Paris, France where Guiler pursued his banking career and Nin began to pursue her interest in writing, working with people such as D.H. Lawrence.

She is also appreciated for her erotica. She was the first woman to really explore the realm. Before her, erotica written by women was virtually (vide, e.g. Kate Chopin) unheard of.

Nin was a friend of many leading literary figures, including Henry Miller, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, James Agee, and Lawrence Durrell.

Her passionate love affair and friendship with the American author Henry Miller strongly influenced both the woman and the author. In 1990 Philip Kaufman made a film based on her novel Henry & June from The Journal of Love – The unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin 1931-1932.

In 1973 she received an honorary doctorate from Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974. She died of cancer in Los Angeles, California on January 14, 1977, her body was cremated, and her ashes were scattered over Santa Monica Bay.

Amy Tan

Amy Tan (Chinese: born February 19, 1952) is a Chinese American author. Born in Oakland, California to John (a Baptist minister) and Daisy (Shanghai nurse), she was 14 when her father and elder brother died of brain tumours. With her mother and younger brother Peter, Tan moved to Montreux, Switzerland shortly afterward. She received a master’s degree in linguistics at San Jose State University and her first job was as a children’s speech therapist.

Tan is best known for the critically acclaimed The Joy Luck Club, a book made into a feature film. She also wrote several other books, including The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses . Her fourth and latest book is The Bonesetter’s Daughter.

An author of what she calls “her inspiration; her mother,” Tan uses traditional Chinese customs clashing with American customs as the main foundation for her works.

Tan’s mother Daisy witnessed her mother committing suicide, and Amy believed that her grandmother, her mother and herself all suffered from depression. Tan currently takes Zoloft to treat her bouts of serious depression [1].

Since turning 40, Tan has been a member of the garage band Rock Bottom Remainders with Stephen King and Dave Barry. She married Lou De-Mattei in 1976.

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (born June 24, 1842, Meigs County, Ohio – date of death uncertain, possibly Dec. 1913 or early 1914, presumably in Mexico) was an American satirist, litterateur and critic, short story writer, editor and journalist. His dark, sardonic views gave him the nickname Bitter Bierce. His clear style and lack of sentimentality have kept him popular when many of his contemporaries have become obscure.

Born in a rural area of southeastern Ohio, he resided during his adolescence in the town of Elkhart, Indiana. At the outset of the American Civil War, Bierce enlisted in the Ninth Regiment, Indiana Volunteers, as part of the Union Army. In Feb. 1862, he was commissioned as a 1st lieutenant and served on the staff of Gen. William Babcock Hazen as a topographical engineer, making maps of likely battlefields. He fought bravely in several of the war’s most important battles, at one point receiving newspaper attention for his daring rescue under fire of a gravely wounded comrade at the battle of Girard Hill , West Virginia. In June, 1864, he received a serious head wound at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and spent the rest of the summer on furlough, but returned to active duty in September, and was ultimately discharged from the army in January 1865.

His military career, however, resumed when, in the summer of 1866, he rejoined Gen. Hazen as part of the latter’s expedition to inspect military outposts across the Western plains. The expedition proceeded by horseback and wagon from Omaha, Nebraska, arriving in San Francisco near the end of the year.

In San Francisco, Bierce resigned from the Army and received the rank of brevet Major. He remained there for many years, eventually becoming famous as a contributor and/or editor for a number of local newspapers and periodicals, including The San Francisco News Letter, The Argonaut, and The Wasp. Bierce lived and wrote in England from 1872 to 1875. Returning to the United States, he again took up residence in San Francisco. In 1879-1880, he went to Rockerville and Deadwood, South Dakota in the Dakota Territory to try his hand as local manager for a New York mining company, but when the company failed he returned to San Francisco and resumed his career in journalism. In 1887, he became one of the first regular columnists and editorialists to be employed on William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, eventually becoming one of the most prominent and influential among the writers and journalists of the West Coast. In Dec. 1899, he moved to Washington, DC, but continued his association with the Hearst newspapers until 1906.

Alice Malsenior Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an African American author whose most famous novel, The Color Purple, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.

Walker’s writings, including poems, stories, essays and novels, focus on the struggles of African-Americans, and particularly African-American women, against societies that are racist, sexist, and often violent. Her writings tend to emphasize the strength of black women and the importance of African-American heritage and culture.

Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the United States. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia and graduated in 1965 from Sarah Lawrence College in New York City. Her first book of poetry was written while she was still a senior at Sarah Lawrence. She returned to the South to work in the U.S. civil rights movement.

Walker was also an editor for Ms. Magazine. An article she published in 1975 was largely responsible for the renewal of interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston.

A political activist, in 1996 Walker wrote to President Bill Clinton to protest the Cuban embargo. She is also active in environmental, feminist, and civil rights causes.

Alexandre Dumas

He was the widely famous creator of the devil-may-care heroes, The Three Musketeers (1844).
He was born in france in 1802. His father , Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie rose from the rank of a private to commander-in-chief of the western pyrenees in France . His father could crush a steel helmet in between his hands or a horse between his legs.

He was frank and strongly humanitarian and fell out of favour with napoleon. He died a poor and broken man at the age of forty-four , when alexandre was just four year old.At an early age alexandre dumas showed the qualities of his father, physical size , intelligance, a love of action and a free and romantic spirit . By the time he was six, he had read the Bible, Robinson crusoe, arabian nights and a number of mythology books . His later youth was spent outdoors. he loved to hunt and roam in the woods.

He supplemented the meager income of his mother as a lawyer’s messenger. He became a friend of adolphe de leuven , an aspiring playwright and lover of the theatre. alexandre resolved to go to paris to seek his fortune . with the help of one of his father’s friends he got the job of a copy boy for the Ducd’s orleans. When 20, he had written three plays and as many of his plays were rejected .

He became a friend of lassagne, chief clerk for the Duc d’orleans, a talented critic of literature and theatre. At 27, his play henery III was well appreciated. His play anthony was an overwhelming success which brought him fame and money.

Albert Camus

Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 – January 4, 1960) was a French author and philosopher and one of the principal luminaries (with Jean-Paul Sartre) of existentialism.

Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria to a French Algerian (pied noir) settler family. His mother was of Spanish extraction. His father, Lucien, died in the Battle of Marne in 1914 during the First World War. Camus lived in poor conditions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers.

In 1923 Camus was accepted into the lycee and eventually to the University of Algiers . However, he contracted tuberculosis in 1930, which put an end to his soccer activities (he had been a goalkeeper for the university team) and forced him to make his studies a part-time pursuit. He took odd jobs including private tutor, car parts clerk, and work for the Meteorological Institute. He completed his licence de philosophie (B.A. in 1935; in May of 1936, he successfully presented his thesis on Plotinus, Néo-Platonisme et Pensée Chrétienne for his diplome d’études supérieures (roughly equivalent to an M.A. by thesis).

Camus joined the French Communist Party in 1934, apparently for concern over the political situation in Spain (which eventually resulted in the Spanish Civil War) rather than support for Marxist-Leninist doctrine. In 1936 the independence-minded Algerian Communist Party (PCA) was founded. Camus joined the activities of Le Parti du Peuple Algérien , which got him into trouble with his communist party comrades. As a result, he was denounced as “Trotskyite”, which did not endear him to communism.

In 1934 he married Simone Hie but the marriage ended due to Simone’s morphine addiction. In 1935 he founded Theatre du Travail — “Worker’s Theatre” — (renamed Theatre de l’Equipe in 1937), which survived until 1939. From 1937 to 1939 he wrote for a socialist paper, Alger-Republicain, and his work included an account of the Arabs who lived in Kabyles in poor conditions, which apparently cost him his job. From 1939 to 1940 he briefly wrote for a similar paper, Soir-Republicain. He was rejected from the French army because of his illness.

In 1940, Camus married Francine Faure and he began to work for Paris-Soir magazine. In the first stage of World War II (the so-called Phony War stage), Camus was a pacifist. However, he was in Paris to witness how the Wehrmacht took over. On December 19, 1941, Camus witnessed the execution of Gabriel Peri, an event which Camus later said crystallized his revolt against the Germans. Afterwards he moved to Bordeaux alongside the rest of the staff of Paris-Soir. In this year he finished his first books, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. He returned briefly to Oran, Algeria in 1942.

During the war Camus joined the French Resistance cell Combat, which published an underground newspaper of the same name. He took the moniker Beauchard. It was here that he became acquainted with Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus became the paper’s editor in 1943. When the Allies liberated Paris, Camus reported on the last fights. He resigned from Combat in 1947 when it became a commercial paper.

After the war, Camus became one member of Sartre’s entourage and frequented Café Flore on the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris. Camus also toured the United States to lecture about French existentialism. Although he leaned left politically, he was not a member of any party and his strong criticisms of communist doctrine did not win him any friends in the communistparties and eventually also alienated Sartre.

In 1949 his tuberculosis returned and he lived in seclusion for two years. In 1951 he published The Rebel, a philosophical analysis of rebellion and revolution which made clear his rejection of communism. The book upset many of his colleagues and contemporaries in France and led to the final split with Sartre. The dour reception depressed him and he began instead to translate plays.

Camus’s most significant contribution to philosophy was his idea of the absurd, the realisation that life has no meaning, which he explained in The Myth of Sisyphus and incorporated into many of his other works. Some would argue that Camus is better described not as an existentialist but as an absurdist.

In the 1950s Camus devoted his effort to human rights. In 1952 he resigned from his work for UNESCO when the UN accepted Spain as a member under the leadership of General Franco. In 1953 he was one of the few leftists who criticized Soviet methods to crush a worker’s strike in East Berlin. In 1956 he protested similar methods in Hungary.

He maintained his pacifism and resistance to capital punishment everywhere in the world.

When the Algerian War of Independence began in 1954 it presented a moral dilemma for Camus. He identified with pied-noirs, blamed the French government for the conflict and favored greater Algerian autonomy or even federation, though not full-scale independence. He believed that the pied-noirs and Arabs could coexist. During the war he advocated civil truce that would spare the civilians, which was rejected by both sides regarded as foolish. Behind the scenes, he began to work clandestinely for imprisoned Algerians who faced the death penalty.

From 1955 to 1956 Camus wrote for L’Express . In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, officially not for hisnovel The Fall, published the previous year, but for his writings against capital punishment. When he spoke to students at the University of Stockholm, he defended his apparent inactivity in the Algerian question and stated that he was worried what could happen to his mother who still lived in Algeria. Apparently French left-wing intellectuals used this as another pretext to ostracize him.

Camus died on January 4, 1960 in a car accident. The driver of the Facel Vega was also his publisher and close friend Michel Galliardi , who also perished in the accident. Camus was interred in the Lourmarin Cemetery, Lourmarin , Vaucluse, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France. His children, the twins Catherine and Jean, survived him. They hold the copyrights to his work.

Alan Coren

Alan Coren (born 1939) is a British writer and satirist. He is a regular panellist on The News Quiz with Simon Hoggart, and Call My Bluff. He writes both his own and the Notebook column for The Times of London. He has also written for Penthouse and The Daily Mail, and was editor of Punch magazine from 1978 to 1987.

He attended the University of Oxford, Yale University and University of California, Berkeley.

His son Giles Coren and daughter Victoria Coren have both followed him into journalism.

Alan Bleasdale

Alan Bleasdale (born March 23, 1946 in Liverpool, England, UK) is a British television dramatist, best known for several powerful social drama serials based around the lives of ordinary people. His first success came as a writer of radio drama for the BBC, with several plays following the character of Scully being broadcast on his local station, BBC Radio Merseyside, in 1971. Scully was a young man from Liverpool, and Bleasdale’s plays represented a more realistic, contemporary depiction of life there than would usually been seen in the media.

The character became so successful that Bleasdale wrote a stage play, two novels and in 1978 a BBC Television play about the character. The same year, he wrote another one-off play for BBC ONE, entitled The Black Stuff. This latter play concerned the story of a group of Liverpudlian tarmac-layers – the ‘black stuff’ of the title – and a job in Middlesbrough that goes disasterously wrong for all of them resulting in the loss of their jobs.

Although the play remained untransmitted for two years as it waited for an available slot, on its eventual broadcast in 1980 it won much praise, and producer Michael Wearing of BBC English Regions Drama managed to commission the sequel serial that Bleasdale had already been working on. The series, Boys from the Blackstuff, was transmitted on BBC TWO in 1982, and won much praise. It established Bleasdale as one of Britain’s most important television writers and social commentators.

Since Boys from the Blackstuff, Bleasdale has gone on to pen several other important television dramas, including The Monocled Mutineer (1986, BBC ONE) and G.B.H. (1991, Channel 4).

Al Franken

Al Franken (born May 21, 1951) is a well-known comedian, writer, radio host, lecturer and political activist who is perhaps best known for his performances on the NBC-TV variety program Saturday Night Live. He is half of the comedy duo “Franken and Davis.” He is also the host of Air America Radio’s flagship show, The Al Franken Show.

Franken was born in New York City, grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. He graduated from The Blake School in 1969, and Harvard University in 1973. He is married to Franni Franken and the couple lives in New York City with their son, Joe, and daughter, Thomasin. Al Franken is a distant cousin of Bob Franken of CNN.

Franken was one of the original writers on Saturday Night Live, and received three Emmy Awards and seven Emmy nominations for television writing and producing for his work there. He created characters such as self-help guru Stuart Smalley and schtick such as the “Al Franken Decade.” Franken was associated with SNL for more than 15 years and in 2002 interviewed former Vice President Al Gore while in character as Smalley.

Franken’s most notorious SNL sketch may have been “A Limo for the Lamo,” a commentary delivered by Franken near the end of the 1979–80 season. Franken mocked the controversial president of NBC, Fred Silverman, describing him as “a total unequivocal failure” and displayed a chart showing the poor ratings of NBC programs. According to some associates of the show, Silverman’s anger over the sketch prompted him to abandon negotiations with the show’s creator Lorne Michaels and seek a different producer for the sixth season of SNL.

Besides having written numerous books (including Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot ), Franken co-wrote (with Tom Davis) the screenplay for The Coneheads TV show. He also wrote the original screenplay and starred in the theatrical flop, Stuart Saves His Family . He created and starred in the TV show LateLine that suffered low ratings, causing it to be cancelled halfway through its second season with only a total 12 of the 19 episodes airing.

Franken has often been the subject of controversy for writing satirical books and editorial commentaries which convey his liberal political views.

In August 2003, Penguin Books published Franken’s book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, subtitled A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Fox News sued, claiming that Franken violated the company’s trademark rights to the phrase, “Fair and Balanced.” A Federal judge found the lawsuit to be “wholly without merit”; Fox then withdrew the suit. The lawsuit ultimately provided Franken’s book with a great deal of media attention and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the National Public Radio program Fresh Air on September 3, 2003, Franken said that Fox’s case against him was “literally laughed out of court”.

On January 13, 2004, it was announced that Franken would enter the radio business. He signed a one-year contract to become a talk show host for Air America Radio’s flagship show, The Al Franken Show, formerly the The O’Franken Factor. The show kicked off the network’s launch at 12 Noon EST on March 31, 2004. On July 12, 2004, the show was renamed The Al Franken Show. Franken has said that he chose the name The O’Franken Factor in hopes that Bill O’Reilly, who hosts “The Radio Factor ” and “The O’Reilly Factor,” would sue him, as such a move would garner publicity for Franken’s show. When no lawsuit materialized, Franken renamed his show. Franken has said that he reserves the right to revert to the original name at any time. He co-hosts the show with Katherine Lanpher.

Franken had been a strong supporter of Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone, who was dealing with a difficult re-election campaign in 2002 and died shortly before the election.

Franken announced in November 2003 that he was considering moving back to Minnesota, his home state, in order to run for the Senate seat held by Wellstone’s successor, Republican Norm Coleman, in the 2008 election. Now that his youngest daughter has left for college, such a move is more appealing to him. He has also said that he’d take lessons from Democratic New York senator Hillary Clinton on how to run for Senator

Al Alvarez

Al Alvarez was born in London 1929.

Alvarez was educated at Oundle School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

He was poetry critic of The Observer from 1956 to 1966 and is a poet and novellist, but some of his most famous works are in the realm of non-fiction: The Savage God: A Study of Suicide; and Biggest Game in Town, about poker players.

He says of his Penguin anthology, The New Poetry: “I had attacked the British poets’ nervous preference for gentility above all else.”

In her study, The Silent Woman – Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm provides an analysis of Alvarez and his relationships with Plath and Hughes.

Alvarez’s recent publications include Poker: Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats (2000), his autobiography Where Did It All Go Right? (first published 1999, Bloomsbury paperback 2002), and Feeding the Rat, the story of climbing legend Mo Anthoine.

You can look up Al Alvarez’s poker record on our celeb poker pages. According to the aforementioned, Biggest Game in Town, Al Alvarez plays poker every Tuesday

Aeschylus

Aeschylus was born in 525 BC at Eleusis and died in 456 BC.

He is generally regarded as the founder of Greek tragedy. By introducing a second actor, Aeschylus made dialogue anddramatic action possible.

He wrote many works including 60-90 plays, of which seven survive. These are The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, the Suppliants and the Oresteia (a trilogy of Agamemnon, Choephoroe, and Eumenides).

Andre Malraux in “The Voices of Silence” states:

“It is hard for us clearly to realise the gulf between the performance of an Aeschylean tragedy, with the instant Persian threat and Salamis looming across the Bay, and the effect we get from reading it; yet, albeit dimly, we feel the difference. All that remains of Aeschylus is his genius.”

Many of Aeshylus’ plays focus on destiny, divine will and hubris.

A.J. Ayer

Born in 1910 A.J. Ayer made his name in philosophy with the publication of ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ in 1936 advancing his belief in logical positivism. Ayer expounded his belief that philosophy is an activity of analysis, and that metaphysical truths can be neither established nor refuted and are meaningless.

A testimony to Freddie Ayer’s brilliant mind was the speed with which he produced such an important work at such a young age. According to Ayer:

“I began writing ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ in the Christmas vacation of 1933-4 and finished writing it in July 1935, three and a half months before my twenty-fifth birthday.”

He was constantly revising his ideas and in a television interview in 1979, A. J. Ayer was asked what were the main defects of the book, he replied:

“I suppose the most important of the defects was that nearly early of it was false.”

According to ‘Nigel Dempster’s Address Book’: “After revealing that he had ‘died’ for four minutes during an operation, Ayer remarried Dee [Wells] in April 1989 just two months before his death.

In his book, ‘A.J.Ayer A Life’, Ben Rogers describes how Freddie Ayer came to the rescue of model, Naomi Campbell: In 1987, while Ayer was visiting the Manhattan home of lingerie magnate Fernando Sanchez he heard a woman hollering that the boxer Mike Tyson was in the process of assaulting a woman in an adjoining room. At age seventy-seven, the buoyant Ayer sprang into action and discovered the figher attacking the model Naomi Campbell. Ayer ordered him to stop.

“Do you know who the fuck, I am?” Tyson yelled. “I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.”

“And I’m the former Wykeham Professor of Logic,” Ayer replied.”We are both pre-eminent in our fields, I suggest we talk about this like rational men.”

As their conversation ensued, Campbell escaped.