success, and the family was at last economically secure. Her other novels include An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), and Under the Lilacs (1878). Her last novel was Jo's Boys (1886), a sequel to Little Women. She died in Boston in 1888, only two days after her father.
Horatio Alger, Jr. (1834-99) He was born in Revere, Massachusetts, the son of a Unitarian minister, and was raised under a strict regimen of study and prayer in preparation for the ministry. He graduated from Harvard in 1852, entered Harvard Divinity School in 1855, but ran away to Paris before graduation exercises. He did enter the pulpit in 1864, but two years later fled again, to New York. There he became a close friend of Charles O'Connor of the Newsboys Lodging House, and began writing the boys' stories (of Ragged Dick, Tattered Tom, etc.) for which he is still remembered.
Rudolfo Anaya (1937-) Born in Pastura, New Mexico, Anaya has remained in the state of his birth. He is concerned with the life and image of Latinos in the Southwest and these concerns find articulation in his work. Anaya's most famous fiction is a trilogy about growing up in New Mexico: Bless Me Ultima (1972), The Heart of Aztlan (1976), and Tortuga (1979). -754-
Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) Born in southern Ohio to a poor and vagabond family, Anderson is best known for his collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and for the influence his unadorned but poetic prose style and his 'grotesque' characters had on other writers of his generation, notably Ernest Hemingway, Nathanael West, and William Faulkner. In 1912, after abruptly abandoning the mental pressures of a successful business career in Ohio, he moved to Chicago, where he became acquainted with and received encouragement from Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and Floyd Dell, to pursue the creative life that he yearned for. A writer of naturalistic stories and novels (Windy McPherson's Son [1916], Marching Men [1917], Poor White [1920], Many Marriages [1923], Tar [1926], Beyond Desire [1932], Kit Brandon [1936]) set usually in the Midwest, he depicted the demoralizing effect of an increasingly industrialized and corporate-minded America upon the imagination and spirit of the common people, a theme that extended to his nonfiction writing (Perhaps Women [1931]; Puzzled America [1935]).
Timothy Shay Arthur (1809-85) Born in rural New York state, Arthur trained to be a watchmaker and worked for several years as a clerk before he became editor of the Baltimore Athenaeum. A regular contributor to Godey's Lady's Book, he eventually founded several magazines of his own, the most successful of which was Arthur's Home Magazine. He was a prolific writer of cautionary tales and moral tracts, most notably the sensational and melodramatic Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, and What I Saw There (1854), dramatized in 1858 by William Pratt.
Isaac Asimov (1920-) Asimov was born in Russia and was brought to New York City as a small child. He graduated at nineteen from Columbia University, received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1948, and joined the faculty of Boston University in 1955. At eighteen he sold his first science fiction story. His first novel, Pebble in the Sky, was published in 1950, and Asimov embarked on an extremely prolific and eclectic writing ca-755- reer, sometimes under the pseudonym Paul French. His best-known work is the Foundation trilogy (Foundation [1951]; Foundation and Empire [1952]; and Second Foundation [1953]), to which he continues to add (Foundation's Edge [1982]; Foundation and Earth [1986]).
(1857–1948) Gertrude Atherton Born Gertrude Franklin in California, Atherton wrote several novels depicting California history, going back to its days as a Spanish colony: Before the Gringo Came (1894; revised in 1902 as The Splendid Idle Forties); The Californians (1898; revised 1935); The Horn of Life (1942). In addition she wrote short stories, essays, and a history of California (Golden Gate Country [1945]). The Conqueror (1902) is a fictionalized biography of Alexander Hamilton; her society novels include Julia France and Her Times (1912) and Black Oxen (1923).
Margaret Atwood (1939-) Atwood was born in Ottawa, grew up in Toronto, attended the University of Toronto, and took a graduate degree from Radcliffe. She has published many collections of poetry and has taught at several Canadian universities. Her second volume of poetry (The Circle Game [1966]) won a Governor General's Award, and her study Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) established her reputation as a critic. Her popular successes include The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), Life Before Man (1980), and The Handmaid's Tale (1985), for which she received a second Governor General's Award.
Mary Austin (1868–1934) Mary (Hunter) Austin was born in Illinois but moved to California at eighteen, where she made a study of Native American life and was involved with the artists' colony at Carmel before moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she taught and continued her own research. Her fictional themes include the West and Native American culture, -756-
the life of Jesus, women, radical politics, and social reform. Her bestknown works are Land of Little Rain (1903) and The Ford (1917).
James Baldwin (1924-87) Born in Harlem, New York City, Baldwin spent much of his spare time in the city library enthusiastically reading such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, and Horatio Alger. Throughout his difficult growing-up years, Baldwin endured much hostility from his fanatically religious stepfather, an experience that forms the theme of many of Baldwin's works, including his collection of stories, Going to Meet the Man (1965). At age fourteen, Baldwin underwent a religious conversion, which led to an evangelical calling until he was seventeen. Disenchanted with America's treatment of its African American population, in 1948 Baldwin purchased a one-way ticket to France. Although he returned sporadically to the United States, and was active in the Civil Rights movement, he remained an expatriate until his death. In such powerful and elegant novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Giovanni's Room (1955), and in such nonfiction as Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin explores life at the margins of society and what it means to be black in America. Other works include If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), The Devil Finds Work (1976), and Just Above My Head (1979).
Amiri Baraka (1934-) Born LeRoi Jones, he grew up in Newark, New Jersey. Baraka attended a predominantly white private school and then Harvard University. Dismissed from school in 1954, he joined the United States Air Force. However, in the wake of the Red scare and the prevalent fear of communist insurgency, Baraka was dishonorably discharged in 1957 because of his 'suspicious' activities. Baraka moved to New York's Greenwich Village, and became acquainted with the literati there. With his then wife, Hettie Cohn, Baraka edited a Beat journal, Yugen, publishing the work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. In 1960 Baraka visited Cuba. Tremendously affected by this trip, and later by the assassination of Malcolm X, Baraka left the Village for Harlem. During this same period, Baraka changed his name, com-
— 757- bining Islamic and Bantu references. In 1979 Baraka joined the African Studies Department at SUNY/Stony Brook. His works detail his shifting and maturing political consciousness. They include Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), Dutchman and The Slave (1964), The Dead Lecturer (1964), Black Magic (1969), In Our Terribleness (1970), Jello (1970), Spirit Reach (1972), and The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri
