states. Ford's novels include A Piece of My Heart (1976) and, most recently, Wildlife (1990).
Hannah Foster (1759–1840) Hannah (Webster) Foster was the daughter of a successful Boston merchant. In 1785 she married the Reverend John Foster of Brighton, Massachusetts, and bore him two daughters. Her novel, The Coquette, was published in 1797. This story of seduction was immediately popular, perhaps partly because of its basis in factual events. -777- She died in Montreal, where she had lived with her daughters following her husband's death.
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (18520-1930) Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, and lived there until 1902, when she married and moved to New Jersey. She is best known for her local color stories, collected in A Humble Romance (1887), A New England Nun (1891), and Edgewater People (1918). Her novels include Jane Field (1893); a historical novel, The Heart's Highway (1900); and The Portion of Labor (1901). In addition, she wrote a play dealing with the Salem witchcraft trials, Giles Corey (1893), and a collection of supernatural tales, The Wind in the Rosebush (1903).
Carlos Fuentes (1928-) Mexican author Carlos Fuentes was born in Panama City, Panama, the son of a career diplomat. As a result, his youth was exceptionally cosmopolitan. He attended the Colegio de Mexico and received a law degree from the National University of Mexico before studying economics at the Institute of Higher International Studies at Geneva, Switzerland. Fuentes's first novel was the experimental La región más transparente (1958; Where the Air Is Clear, 1960). Other major works include La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962; The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1964); Cambio de piel (1967; A Change of Skin, 1968); and Terra Nostra (1975; English translation, 1976). In addition to his career as a novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist, Fuentes has held a number of governmental appointments, including that of Mexican Ambassador to France (1974-77), and he continues to be active as critic, lecturer, and political essayist.
Gabriel García Márquez (1928-) García Márquez, Colombian-born novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, studied journalism and law at the University of Bogota and worked as reporter and foreign correspondent in Colombia, Europe, Venezuela, and the United States from 1950 to 1965. During the 1960s he lived in Mexico, where he wrote Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), a masterpiece of the -778- peculiarly Latin American style known as 'magic realism.' In 1975 he published El otoña del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976), also highly acclaimed, and in 1982 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. From 1967 to 1975, García Márquez made his home in Barcelona, Spain; more recently he divides his time between his native Colombia and his residence in Mexico City. A recent novel is El amor en los tiempos de cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988), and he continues to be an influential voice in the leftist press.
Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970) Gardner was a practicing California attorney who, though he wrote many novels under several pseudonyms, is most famous as the creator of defense attorney and sleuth Perry Mason, whose long life in print began with The Case of the Velvet Claws in 1933. Gardner also produced a series of crime-detection novels centered on the figure of district attorney Douglas Selby, who first appears in The D. A. Calls It Murder (1937).
John Gardner (1933-82) Born in Batavia, New York, Gardner grew up on a small farm and enjoyed the rhythms of a bucolic existence that would later flavor some of his fiction. Gardner attended DePauw University and Washington University in St. Louis, graduating in 1955. Increasingly intrigued by medieval literature, Gardner completed his graduate work at Iowa State University, receiving his doctorate degree in 1958. Despite his traditional academic direction, Gardner submitted a novel (The Old Men) as his dissertation. While teaching, Gardner not only engaged in writing criticism but also produced fiction and poetry. In 1966 he published The Resurrection; this novel was followed by a series of works that probed the past — Gardner's personal past and the world's more mythic history. Gardner continued to teach medieval literature at a number of institutions, including Oberlin College, California State University at San Francisco, and Bennington College. He also chaired the creative writing program at SUNY/ Binghamton. Gardner died in a motorcycle accident at the age of forty-nine. His works include The Wreckage of Agathon (1970), Grendel (1971), -779- The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), Nickel Mountain (1973), Jason and Medeia (1973), The King's Indian (1974), October Light (1978), On Moral Fiction (1978), Mickelsson's Ghosts (1982), and On Becoming a Novelist (1983).
Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) Garland was born on a Wisconsin farm and grew up under the hardships of life on the prairies; his parents moved to Iowa and then the Dakota Territory trying to earn a living. He went to Boston in 1884, worked, and educated himself in the public library. In 1892 he published Main-Travelled Roads, bitter stories of life in the Middle West. This work and the many novels, stories, and autobiographies that followed brought financial success and critical acclaim.
William Gass (1924-) Born in Fargo, North Dakota, and later trained in philosophy at Cornell University, Gass writes highly idiosyncratic, stylized fiction that merges experimentalism with familiar rural images of traditional American literature. Gass has lived in St. Louis since 1929 and teaches at Washington University. His works include Omensetter's Luck (1966), In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), The World Within the Word (1978), The First Winter of My Married Life (1979), and Habitations of the Word (1985).
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) Gilman was raised by her mother in Hartford, Connecticut. Trained as an art teacher, Gilman married a fellow artist, Charles Stetson. Following the birth of her daughter, Gilman suffered a bout with depression that forms the basis for her story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). Gilman subsequently divorced her first husband and married George Gilman, a cousin who shared her developing feminist perspective. Gilman's essays and speeches made her a significant member in the suffrage movement; she addressed the International Suffrage Convention in 1913 and the Woman's Peace Party in 1915. Her works, once out of print, have found renewed critical attention. They include -780- Women and Economics (1898), Human Work (1904), Man-Made World (1911), and the utopian Herland (1915).
Zane Grey (1827–1939) Born in Zanesville, Ohio, Grey had a successful dental practice, but by 1904 he found this vocation tedious. He began to write Westerns and in 1908 he published The Last of the Plainsmen. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) established Grey as a popular success. Authoring more than sixty books, Grey traveled back and forth across the desert. He died at his home in Altadena, California. His works include The Border Region (1916), The Man of the Forest (1920), The Call of the Canyons (1924), The Thundering Herd (1925), Arizona (1934), The Code of the West (1934), An American Angler in Australia (1937), and Black Mesa (1955).
Sutton Griggs (1872–1930) Griggs was born in Texas, where he attended Bishop College before entering the Richmond Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1893. His career as a Baptist minister spanned three decades. Griggs's novels include Imperium in Imperio (1899), about an independent African American state
