1973. An autobiographical memoir entitled One Writer's Beginnings, based on lectures Welty gave at Harvard University, was published in 1983 to wide critical acclaim.

She described the influence of her family and surroundings on her writing. The book of essays and reviews appeared in The Eye of the Story (1978). Her Complete Novels and Stories, Essays, and Memoirs were published in 1998.

Welty's widely recognized triumph is a painstaking accuracy in colloquial speech. The exactly right word always matters to her. She has always been fascinated by words; by the way people say things, by snatches of overheard dialogue. Welty's style combines delicacy with shrewd, robust humor. The mixture of realism and fantasy in some of her stories gives them an almost mythical quality. Her major themes extend beyond the South - loneliness, the pain of growing up, and the need for people to understand themselves and their neighbors.

She greatly admired the work of Katherine Anne Porter, who befriended her when she was sending out stories and getting back rejection slips. It was the literary agent Diarmuid Russell who shared Welty's belief in an ultimate success. He not only took her on as a client, but said of a certain Welty story that if the editor didn't accept it, "he ought to be horse-whipped." (The editor in question bought the story).

Welty admitted to being blessed with a visual mind, and she said that this gift made for "the best shorthand a writer can have." She once wrote, "To watch everything about me, I regarded grimly and possessively as a need." Clearly, that need became an enviable, artistic vision.

Irwin shaw 1913-1984

One of the most prominent American novelists, short-story writer and playwright of the twentieth century, Irwin Shaw (real name Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff), was born on 27 February, 1913 in Bronx, New York in the family of immigrants from Russia. Irwin left Brooklyn College after failing in freshman mathematics, worked in a cosmetic factory, a department store and a furniture company as a message boy. During his life he tried different other jobs - he worked as a driver, a professional football player, and a teacher.

On his return to the college he worked in the students' magazine and wrote plays for a dramatic society. After graduation from the college in 1934 with a bachelor's degree he went to Hollywood to create screenplays. Later he remembered that he had been writing under a great influence of Ernest Hemingway whom he considered to be his literary teacher.

During World War II Irwin Shaw served in the American Army, fought in Northern Africa and Europe, and witnessed the liberation of Paris.

Irwin Shaw took up writing realizing that it was his inborn vocation. In 1936 he completed his first work, the play Bury the Dead and enjoyed country-wide popularity at once. It was a rapid- fire grotesque, an antiwar drama: killed soldiers revolted against being buried, they came up outside their burial places giving no peace to the alive with a call to join them in their march against human annihilation. Then appeared his other works: a collection of short stories Sailor Off the Bremen (1939), the novels Five Decades (1940), Young Lions (1948). After a short break there appeared The Troubled Air (1951), Rich Man, Poor Man (1970).

Rich Man, Poor Man. It is a story about the fate of the Jordache family, the parents Axel and Mary Jordache and their three children - Tommy, Rudolf and Gretchen. Nartured on traditional views of American success, each pursues the illusion of happiness in his own way, determined to achieve his "brightright." Starting with their teen-age years in a Hudson River town, Irwin Shaw follows the Jar daches from Greenwich Village to Hollywood, from a small town in Ohio to a luxury resort in the Mediterranean. Robert Cromie wrote in Saturday Review, that "Irwin Shaw has the gift of all great storytellers: he creates characters as genuine as that odd couple across the street, the curious patrons of the corner bar, the tragic figures from the headlines. They are individuals who walk into the living room of your mind, ensconce themselves, and refuse to be dislodged."

Axel Jordache fled from Germany where he had killed a man, robbed him and came to America. "God bless America. He had killed to get there," Axel thinks to himself. Here he marries a young girl Mary Pease. But there was never love between them. "It was only a year after the wedding, but he already hated her... She knew that she had entered upon her sentence of life imprisonment."

Problems rolled over very fast. Gretchen, a neat, proper, beautiful girl (as Rudolph thought about her) after an unsuccessful try to sell her body to two black soldiers whom she attended at the hospital where she worked after her job at the Boylan Brick and Tile Works for the offer of eight hundred dollars, became the mistress of Teddy Boylan, a man without enthusiasm, self-indulgent and cynical. Later she got married to Willie, but the marriage was not happy either. She succeeded later in theatrical and cinema business somehow. Thomas (who smelled like a wild animal, as Rudolph said about him) had soon to leave school and leave his family and the town. He-was sent to live at his uncle's place. But there too he got into trouble and was accused of statutory rape. His father had to go there to settle the matter. He paid five thousand dollars to the man to free Thomas from prison. But he did that not for Thomas. He did it for Rudolph. He didn't want his beloved son to start life with a brother in a jail which could ruin him as a promising successful politician and businessman. Thomas was like a rolling stone, getting all the time from one trouble into another, and finally was killed, leaving his son Wesley to move on his own in the cruel world.

After Axel spent all the money he had saved during his life keeping a bakery in a rented house, he and his wife quarreled. It sent Axel into grief and depression. He even thought that maybe he would meet an Englishman here in America, would kill him as he had killed a man in Germany, and get back from where he came. He got too tired to live. For the last time he made the portion of rolls. Before putting them in the oven, "he kneaded the poison into the roll thoroughly, then reshaped the roll and put it back into the pan. My message to the world, he thought." He left the bakery, went to the river, got in the boat and let it be carried in the middle of the stream, and drowned himself. His body had never been found.

Rudolph had a talent for music and played the trumpet in the school band. He was handsome, well-mannered, well-spoken, admired by his teachers, affectionate. He was the only child in the family who kissed his mother when he left for school and when he came back. He was the hope of the family, unlike the younger son, Thomas, and their daughter - they were, as mother says "inhabitants of her house. Rudolph is her blood". He really succeeded in life and became the Mayor of Whit by. He cared about his parents, and he tried to help Gretchen and Thomas in their life. When Thomas intended to return five thousand dollars, he owed to the family, the money collected for the education of Rudolph, he didn't take it. He put the money in the bank in Thomas's name. It made the capital of sixty thousand dollars soon for Thomas. But it didn't bring him happiness, it didn't save him from death he was coming to all his life.

The deep changes in the life of the American society in the late 70s inspired Shaw to create Evening in Byzantium and Bread Upon the Water.

Irwin Shaw is also known as a playwright. He is the author of such works as Plain People, The Brooklyn Idyll, Sons and Soldiers, The Assasin.

Irwin Shaw spent the last years of his life in France and Switzerland where he mostly wrote memoirs and critical essays. In 1979 he visited the USA and it proved the creation of the novel The Top of the Hill. Some other works of Irwin Shaw are novels Voices of a Summer Day, Lucy Crown, Two Weeks in Another Town and short story collections Welcome to the City, Act of Faith, Mixed Company, Love on a Dark Street.

Irwin Shaw died on 16 May 1984 in Switzerland.

ROBERT LOWELL 1917-1977

Of all the poets who came to maturity in the years immediately after World War II, none displayed greater ability or exerted more influence than Robert Lowell. From virtually the beginning of his career, Lowell was a central figure in American poetry, earning the admiration of his peers and the recognition of the literary establishment. Lowell was born into an aristocratic Boston family whose ancestors went back to the Mayflower. Among them were well-known ministers, judges, politicians, educators, and literary figures. Nineteenth-century poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was his great- uncle; Amy Lowell (1874-1925), the poetess who helped promote the cause of Imagism, was his cousin. Amy received an excellent educe

In A New Life Malamud abandons the two-man relationship which forms the. Basis of most of his best work and returns to the problem of the hero solo, much as he set up in The Natural. In A New Life he puts some real effort into a heroine, Pauline Gilley, the married woman with whom Levin falls in love. She has suffered, she endures, she makes mistakes, and she gives somewhat too liberally of her love. Malamud explores the new avenues opened by the relationship between Levin and Pauline with insight and affection. Levin has his new life at hand, even if it may not be one of wine and song, his defeated adversary taunts him: Levin has now no money and no job, and no prospect of one; a wife of notorious weakness, poor health and inconsistency, and two expensive children not his own.

He was also a prolific master of short fiction. Through his stories in collections such as The Magic Barrel (1958), for which he received the National Book Award, Idiots First (1963), and Rembrandt’s Hat (1973) he conveyed - more than any other American- born writer - a sense of the Jewish present and past, the real and the surreal, fact and legend.

The story The Magic Barrel is one of the most beautiful recreations of Malamud's vision, but it is outdone in some respects at least by the remarkable Angel Levine. Here the problem of suffering is formally stated, in almost Biblical< or to be more exact, Cabalistic terms. The struggles of its humble hero Manischevits are those of Job: his business is wiped out, his health taken, even the insurance; his health is ruined, but he must work on for his wife, who is on her deathbed. He prays to God to give his sweetheart health: "Give Fanny backs her health, and to me for myself that I shouldn't 4 feel pain in every step. Help now or tomorrow is too late." Help comes to him from a characteristically ludicrous source: a Negro Levine who claims to be an angel sent from Heaven. At first Ma¬nischevits rejects him but finally he overcome his pride and his logic and seek for his own salvation, he publicly confesses his faith and at the last his faith has restored his wife and his health to him.

In his novels and short stories Bernard Malamud depicts the struggle of ordinary people, often focusing on their desire to improve their lives. He uses the Jewish people to represent all of humanity, capturing their attempts to maintain a link of their cultural heritage while trying to cope with the realities of the modern world. While some of Malamud's characters achieve success, others experience failure. By portraying people in both victory and defeat, Malamud creates a delicate balance between tragedy and comedy in his works.

Bernard Malamud's monumental work The Fixer (1966) earned him the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Set in Russia around the turn of the 20th century, it is a thinly veiled glimpse at an actual case of blood libel. Malamud underscores the suffering of his hero, Yaakov Bok, and the struggle against all odds to endure.

Bernard Malamud was one of the principal figures in the group of Jewish writers whose work has enriched American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet Malamud preferred not to be so easily pigeon-holed. He did indeed write about Jews, but he wrote for all people.

Malamud's characters are usually discovered at some barren level of bare subsistence. Though we may feel compassion for them, they themselves do not display the least self-pity. If their plight is sad, it is also triumphant, because they are surviving in heroic fashion against the odds all humans face. "As you are grooved, so you are grieved," Malamud once wrote as preamble to an account of his own bleak upbringing. It was the suffering of European Jews during World War II that convinced Malamud he had something to say as a writer. "I for one believe that not enough has been made of the tragedy of the destruction of six million Jews," he has said. "Somebody has to cry—even if it's a writer, twenty years later."

Malamud's unique drama is spun out of the commonplace, the tragicomedy of survival in a brutal world. But his stories are always informed by love and, indeed, his characters are largely redeemed by human love.

ROBERT LOWELL

1917-1977

Of all the poets who came to maturity in the years immediately after World War II, none displayed greater ability or exerted more influence than Robert Lowell. From virtually the beginning of his career, Lowell was a central figure in American poetry, earning the admiration of his peers and the recognition of the literary establishment. Lowell was born into an aristocratic Boston family whose ancestors went back to the Mayflower. Among them were well-known ministers, judges, politicians, educators, and literary figures. Nineteenth-century poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was his great- uncle; Amy Lowell (1874-1925), the poetess who helped promote the cause of Imagism, was his cousin. Amy received an excellent educe-

Perhaps the chief characteristic of Lowell's poetry is its vitality. He never overelaborates about a feeling or thought just so that it will fill a poem, but instead packs the lines he writes with exuberant energy. Sometimes he may prove difficult to understand, yet he is not one who loves obscurity for its own sake. His rhythm and rhyme are regular, and the beat of his verse is strong; we can feel the pulse in them.

In the 1960s, Lowell became more and more of a public figure. Like many writers of the time, he expressed opposition to the war in Vietnam in his writing and speeches, and, on one well-publicized occasion, he refused an invitation to participate in a White House Festival of the Arts. His poetry of this period remained personal, and he wrote a great many unrhymed sonnets, first published as Notebooks in 1969 and then in revised form as History in 1973. In addition to poetry, Lowell wrote a number of well-received dramas, most notably The Old Glory (1965), which adapted stories by Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In 1977, returning to New York from London, he died of a heart attack in a taxi coming from the airport.

SIDNEY SHELDON b.1917

Sidney Sheldon was born on February 11, 1917. Sheldon attended Northwestern for 6 months during the depression era, taking a full slate of classes while working as a hat checker at several Chicago hotels, and working for the Daily Northwestern.

Shortly, thereafter, he dropped out to help support his family, working initially as a movie usher in New York City. After a year of watching movies, he moved to Hollywood, where he got a $17 per week job as a reader for Universal Studios. During this period, Sheldon wrote five stories, which later launched his career.

Sheldon owned homes in Palm Springs, Los Angeles, and his married daughter is also an author.

Best known today for his exciting blockbuster novels, Sidney Sheldon is the author of The Naked Face (1970), The Other Side of Midnight (1974), A Stranger in the Mirror (1976), Bloodline (1977), Rage of Angels (1980), Master of the Game (1982), If Tomorrow Comes (1985), Windmills of the Gods (1987), The Sands of Time (1988), Memories of Midnight (1990), The Doomsday Conspiracy

(1991), The Stars Shine Down (1992), Morning, Noon and Night (1995), The Best Laid Plans (1997), The Sky is Falling (2000). '

Almost all have been number-one international bestsellers. His first book, The Naked Face, was acclaimed by the New York Times as "the best first mystery of the year" and received an Edgar Award. Most of his novels have become major feature films or TV mini- series.

Before he became a novelist, Sidney Sheldon had already won a Tony Award for Broadway's Redhead and an Academy Award for The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer. He is a famed author of many TV scripts and series, and also has written the screenplays for twenty-three motion pictures, including Easter Parade. In addition, he penned six other Broadway hits and created three long-running television series, The Patty Duke Show, Hart to Hart and I Dream of Jeannie, which he also produced1: With his award-winning plays, movies, novels, and television shows, Sidney Sheldon reigns as one of the most popular storytellers of all time.

JAMES JONES 1921 -1977

James Jones, one of the major novelists of his generation, is known primarily as the author of fiction that probes the effects of World War II on the individual soldier.

James Jones was born in Robinson, in the state of Illinois. For several years James Jones lived in the Hawaii where he studied at the University of Honolulu. Later on he went to the New York University from which he graduated in 1945. During the years of 1939-1944 Jones served in the Pacific with the USA Army. He took part in World War II, got wounded at Guadalcanal, and was awarded the order of The Purple Heart and the Silver Star. He returned to Robinson, where he started to write about his experiences. After shelving his unpublished first novel, They Shall Inherit the Laughter, Jones completed the critically acclaimed international bestseller From Here to Eternity (1951).

Jones had never written seriously until after he joined the regular Army. In his works he described the routines of American Army life, the treatment of the men aimed at making them obedient mechanical cogs of the dehumanizing war machine. His military experience furnished the background and provided the material and facts for his works. James Jones' novel From Here to Eternity is among the best books of the post-war period. It is a naturalistic undisguised presentation of peacetime Army life in Hawaii on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack. The novel aroused stormy criticism. Some readers admired the book; others were shocked by its lurid language and the deplorable, scandalous events.

From Here to Eternity. The events described in the novel take place in the Hawaii and refer to the period immediately preceding the Pearl Harbor attack. The book gives a brutal and almost ugly picture of Army life there. It is socially and politically significant as the servicemen are endowed with traits and features characteristic of their civilian compatriots.

The central figure of the novel is private Robert Lee Prewitt. The ways of Army life prove to be especially painful and unbearable to him as he is a sensitive man with a strongly developed sense of proper pride, a romantic sense of personal honor and an overdeveloped sense of justice. His philosophy is to fight for the rights of the underdog.

Prewitt, or Prew, as they call him in the company, was born in the Kentucky Mountains, the son of a miner. When his mother was dying she made her son promise that he would never hurt anyone "unless it's absolute a must, unless you just have to do it." He never broke the death-bed promise to his mother and kept his integrity intact to his last breath.

Prew was a gifted person, but he had no call for anything until the first time he handled a bugle. After his enlistment Prew had much success with the bugle, he was a member of the Bugle Corps, soon became the best bugler in the Regiment. His art was excellent, and he was selected to play Taps in Arlington, on the Memorial Day (May 30). He also became famous as a boxer and the commandment were proud to have such a soldier in the outfit. His rating was Private First Class and Fourth Class Specialist. After the end of the 1st hitch he re-enlisted for 3 years more. Robert E.Lee Prewitt loves not so much the army but the masculinity of barracks life. He wants to be a thirty-year-man because the raw violence, the drunken sprees, the sex without responsibility, the demands on physical endurance and technical skill express and challenge his maleness. Prewitt's war with the army is touched off by a breach of the freedom he expects in return for his loyalty and service as a soldier.

Prewitt had the bad luck to fall ill and was sent to the hospital for the treatment. When he returned to the outfit after two month absence he had lost his position. His pride was hurt when an inferior Bugler was promoted above him. Prewitt asked to be transferred to another outfit. After he refused pointblank to ever take part in a fight, he was sent to the kitchen, where his work was hard and humiliating, though he never complained. In a skirmish with a drunken sergeant, his senior, who wanted to stab Prewitt with a knife, he took him on, and the Tribunal sent him to the Stockade. In keeping with his life philosophy Prewitt did not mention the knife at the trial, which would have saved him from imprisonment. After three months in the Stockade Prew came out but didn't return to the barracks; he became a deserter. He missed his. comrades, he felt homesick for his outfit. After the Pearl Harbour air raid of the Japanese planes his decision to return to the regiment was made. He wanted to steal to the barracks under cover of night. A patrol car traced his movements and taking him for a spy shot him at a short distance from his regiment. Prewitt's history is an eloquent paean to a concept of individualism rapidly becoming anachronistic in an increasingly bureaucratic society. Milt Warden, the co-protagonist of the novel, embodies in his personality the masculine world of the enlisted man. He equates his integrity with the existence of the enlisted man, and when he falls in love with the company commander’s wife, Karen, and finally refuses the commission which would make her permanently available to him, he preserves his integrity and his individualism. He does not sell out to the bureaucracy or to women. At the end of the novel, Prew is dead, but Warden drinks and brawls on the way to Mrs.Kipfer's brothel as the Lurline sails from Hawaii with Karen aboard.

His other work, Some Came Running (1957), a long panoramic novel about a soldier, who came home from the war, is set in a Midwestern town at the time between World War II and the Korean War. It's also the story of love, the theme which Jones was unable to handle. The love affair in Some Came Running between the writer Dave and the teacher Gwen borders on the ludicrous. A college professor of English, Gwen has developed a naive thesis about the relation of frustration in love and artistic creativity. When Dave, one of the writers about whom she has been theorizing, returns to his small Midwestern hometown, Gwen immediately falls in love with him. Dave, who hates the town, has returned for a visit only to embarrass his brother. But after one meeting with Gwen, who has an undeserved reputation as a woman of the world, Dave decides to settle in the town until he succeeds in seducing her. After a visitor two, he is passionately in love with Gwen. The couple never do get together because the thirty-eight-year-old Ph.D. in literature would prefer to lose the man she loves rather than admit to him that she is still a virgin! The forty-year-old Dave, who has had plenty of experience with women, decides that Gwen will not sleep with him because she is a nymphomaniac! The interminable philosophical digressions on life and love that inflate the novel are equally sophomoric. James Jones fictional terrain is limited to that peculiar all- male world governed by strictly masculine interests, attitudes, and values. Into this world, no female can step without immediately altering its character. The female must remain on the periphery of male life - a powerful force in male consciousness, but solely as a provocative target for that intense sexual need that has nothing to do with procreation or marriage.

The Pistol (1959) is the story of an Army private who accidentally gets a pistol that comes to be his symbol of safety in war. The Thin Red Line (1962) is another war novel dealing with the life of a U. S. infantry company on Guadalcanal in 1942-1943 but its attitudes and theme belong to the 1960s. The title itself is a reflection of the main theme; it symbolizes the uncertainty of the borderline between sanity and insanity, between man and beast, lite and death.

In battle, the company, made up of platoons who are made up of squads, is deployed by the battalion commander according to a pre-established plan of attack. The battalions in the regiment are deployed by the regimental commander. The regiments are deployed by the division commander; the divisions deployed by the army commander, and the armies deployed all over the globe by a staff in Washington, D.C. Within this hierarchy, which gets larger and larger as it moves up the chain and farther and farther from the battle lines, the fighting soldier is a grain of sand on a beach encircling the globe. When the men see wounded and dead for the first time they are shocked and horrified. During their first battle, they react intensely to the suffering and death of their comrades. But as the fighting continues, the dead bodies of their fellow-soldiers no longer really bother them, and they lose all compunction about killing enemy soldiers. The starving Japanese prisoners are treated inhumanly, but only because the combat situation has revealed to their captors the insignificance of the individual human life except to the being who possesses it.

Jones vision of human existence is brutal and unsentimental, and he conveys it with superb artistry. His story of battle is fast- paced, tightly structured, and painfully realistic. James Jones's fictional terrain is limited, but within that limited area he has presented a frightening twentieth-century view of individual man's insignificance in society and in the universe.

Just Call. His novel Just Call is the reflection of life of the lost generation. The four central character^ Strange, Landers, Winch and Prell are recovering in the hospital from physical and psychological damage the war inflicted on them. The burden of their hard experience tells upon their fate. Prell dies in the quarrel, Winch finishes his life by suicide in the psychiatric department of the hospital, Landers leaves the hospital and is run over by the car ten steps away from the hospital. Strange, after recovering, goes back to war in Europe. But the prospect of future life horrifies him. He comes to the railings on the deck of the ship, intentionally leans over, and falls into the cold pit of ocean blackness.

His other novels are Go to the Widow-Maker (1967), The Marry Month of May (1971), A Touch of Danger (1973), and Whistle (1978). Jones published an acclaimed short-story collection, The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories (1968), a nonfictional history of World War II from the viewpoint of the soldier, World War II (1975), and a book of essays, Viet Journal (1975). Jones also published short fiction and articles throughout his adult life.

KURT VONNEGUT, JR. b. 1922

Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11,1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He studied chemistry and biology at Cornell University until 1943, when he enlisted in the army. During the Battle of the Bulge he was taken prisoner by the Germans. He was working in an underground meatlocker in January 1945 when the Allied air force firebombed the city of Dresden. That experience formed the centerpiece of Vonnegut's most successful novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade (1969). Vonnegut brought his characters to the planet of Tralfamador. The people of this planet can't under-stand why the people from the Earth dislike machines. The inhabitants of Tralfamador have solved many problems of the Universe and even know when their planet will be ruined. Different strange events happen with the main character Billy Pigrim. He was in German concentration camp, the place of which was occupied by slaughterhouse in the past. He was witness of Dresden bombing by English- American army in February 1945. And he discovered the "truth of time". The catastrophe with the plane helped him to drop out of time - to look at the world from outside and see it in a different way. The novel warns about serious danger of mass destruction weapon which makes disarmament undoubted.

After the war Vonnegut moved to Chicago, where he studied anthropology and worked for a local news bureau. His background in science and technology informed his early stories and novels, which can be classed as science fiction, although they center primarily. on the social consequences of technological change. Player Piano (1952), his first novel, is about a nightmare of automation, but it is also a satire on the tyranny of giant corporations. The Sirens of Titan (1959), a space opera in its conventions, is also a metaphysical comedy on the themes of free will and determinism. And Cat's Cradle (1963) uses science fantasy in a satire on the amorality of atomic scientists. Vonnegut's work is playful, but serious at the core; his humour is a rearguard defence of human dignity in a world whose impersonal forces seem to be making people less and less significant. Vonnegut's later works include his short-story collection God Bless You, Mr.Rosewater (1965), Welcome to the Mon-key House (1968), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Slapstick (1976), Jailbird (1979), and Palm Sunday (1981).

GORE VIDAL b. 1925

Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the Military Academy at West Point, New York where his father was posted and teaching. He grew up in Washington, D.C., under the influence of his maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore from whom Gore Vidal derived his intimate knowledge of American politics and history as well as his grounding in the classics and modern literature.

Upon graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy he enlisted in the army in 1943 and his war experiences were the subject of his first two novels, Williwaw (1946) and In a Yellow Wood (1947), which established his reputation as a post-war novelist. Then followed The Season of Comfort (1949), A Search for the King (1950), Dark Green, Bright Red (1951), The Judgment of Paris (1952), and Messiah (1954). He tried writing for television, films, and the stage and produced Visit to a Small Planet (1957), and The Best Man (1960).

Born to a family with a strong political background Gore Vidal in 1960 ran in New York State for election to the House of Representatives and then in 1982 for the Senate as a Democrat from California.

With the publication of Julian in 1964 Gore Vidal; returned to the novel form and has continued his historical and satirical depictions of contemporary society in Washington D.C. (1967), Myra Breckinridge (1968), Two Sisters (1970), Burr (1973), Myron (1974), 1876 (1976), Kalki (1978), Creation (1981), Duluth (1983), and Lincoln (1984).

Whether he writes about antiquity (Julian is a story about the Emperor of Byzantium who becomes an apostate because he attempts to revive the pagan Gods and the cult of philosophy in opposition to the state religion; in the novel Creation an enlightened and skeptical narrator encounters the world's major religions), or whether he writes about American history, the subject is the nature of governments, politics, and the wielding of power.

Gore Vidal himself divided his novels between reflections (reflections on Christianity and history, as in Julian and Creation and reflections on American politics and the American past which he considered extremely interesting, as in the trilogy Burr, 1876, Washington D.C. in which he goes back to the Revolutionary period to find out what the country's founders had in mind), and inventions which he also liked because he made them up out of his head, as he said (like the novel Kalki with its scenes about the end of the human race).

MARY HIGGINS CLARK b. 1929

Malry Higgins Clark was born on December 24, 1929 and raised in New York. She is of Irish descent. Her father died when she was ten leaving her mother with three children to rise. After graduating from high school Mary went to secretarial school so she could help her mother with the family finances. Soon afterwards she became a stewardess and satisfied her thirst for traveling.

She married her neighbor whom she had known since she was sixteen, but was left a young widow with five children by the death of her husband, Warren Clark, from a heart attack in 1964. She had put all her energy into her children's education.

Mary Higgins Clark's literary activity began with writing radio scripts. Her first book was a biographical novel about the life of George Washington, Aspire to the Heavens. It was followed by a suspense novel Where Are the Children?, which became a bestseller and marked a turning point in her life and career.