Born in Seattle, Washington, McCarthy worked as a book reviewer in New York, after attending Forest Ridge Convent in Seattle, Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma, and Vassar College. McCarthy's work as a critic and fiction writer reflects her shrewd wit, a willingness to surprise her reader, and an acute political consciousness. Her works include Venice Observed (1950), Theater Chronicles, 1937– 1962 (1963), The Group (1963), and Hanoi (1968).
Carson McCullers (1917-67) McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia, and was educated at Columbia University. Her original intent had been to study music at the Juilliard School of Music, but a financial accident prevented her enrollment. McCullers married, divorced, and remarried Reeves McCullers, a man who suffered from severe alcoholism and who committed suicide in 1953. McCullers herself was chronically ill from what is now believed to have been rheumatic fever. The distress and the loneliness suggested by McCullers's biography are mirrored in her works, which include The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), and Clock Without Hands (1961).
Thomas McGuane (1939-) A dedicated sportsman and Westerner, McGuane writes fiction that recalls earlier male modernist writers, in particular Ernest Hemingway. McGuane, however, employs Western themes and tropes to -793- achieve an ironic and highly individual vision of the West. Having exorcised the excesses of his earlier life, McGuane presently lives in Montana and raises cutting horses. Elegant, poetic, and funny, McGuane's fiction often powerfully evokes a sense of place. His works include The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwacked Piano (1971), Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973), Panama (1978), An Outside Chance (1980), Nobody's Angel (1982), Something to Be Desired (1984), To Skin a Cat (1986), and Keep the Change (1989).
Claude McKay (1889–1948) Born in Clarendon Hills, Jamaica, McKay immigrated to the United States as a college student. He was awarded, by the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, a scholarship to study agriculture at Tuskegee Institute. McKay left college for New York City where he worked for such political journals as The Liberator. Poet and novelist, McKay became closely associated with the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance. Like many of his generation, McKay wandered through Europe as an expatriate during the years between the world wars. He returned to the United States and died in Chicago. His works include Songs of Jamaica (1919), Harlem Shadows (1922), Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), Gingertown (1932), Banana Bottom (1933), and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940).
Herman Melville (1819-91) Melville was born into a well-established family in New York City, where his father was a successful merchant. However, the business had failed and the family was heavily in debt when the father died in 1832. Melville, third oldest of eight children, left school to help support the family, and in 1837 he went to sea. His first novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were based upon his sea adventures, and were popular and acclaimed. His next book, Mardi (1849), was more philosophical and less successful. Next came Redburn (1849) and White- Jacket (1840), works that appealed to a wider audience. Melville's masterpiece, Moby- Dick (1851), proved too challenging for most readers; he followed it with the highly complex Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852) and The Confidence-Man (1857), both financial failures. To earn money, he published more accessible short -794- fiction in Harper's Monthly and Putnam's Monthly Magazine, some of which (including 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' and 'Benito Cereno') was collected in The Piazza Tales (1856), and a serialized historical novel, Israel Potter (1855). He published no further novels after 1857, and worked for the rest of his life as an officer in the New York Custom House. He did publish poetry, most notably BattlePieces (1866) and Clarel (1876), and in his last years returned to fiction with Billy Budd, Sailor, which was left unfinished at his death in 1891 and first published in 1924.
Steven Millhauser (1943-) Millhauser was born in New York City and grew up in Connecticut. After working as a copywriter in New York, Millhauser studied medieval and Renaissance literature at Brown University from 1968 to 1971. These disparate influences find their way into Millhauser's satiric, demanding, and often parodic fiction, which often focuses on the banality, strangeness, and violence of ordinary life. Millhauser's most famous novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972), has been favorably compared to Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. Other works include Portrait of a Romantic (1977).
Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) Mitchell was a native of Georgia, the setting of her only novel, Gone with the Wind, the best-selling romantic saga of the Civil War and Reconstruction. A former feature writer, she spent a decade (much of it bedridden) writing Gone with the Wind, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1936, and which was adapted for the screen in 1939 (the screen rights were sold for $50,000 only one month after publication). Mitchell was struck by an automobile on an Atlanta street and died in that city in 1949.
N. Scott Momaday (1934-) Born in Lawton, Oklahoma, an heir to both Cherokee and Kiowa Indian culture, Momaday attended both reservation parochial and public schools, and eventually attended the University of New Mex-795- University of New Mex-. He later received a Ph.D. from Stanford University and commenced his teaching career. Like his life, Momaday's work seeks to bridge the Native American and non-Native American worlds. His House Made of Dawn (1968) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. His works include The Journey of Tai-Me — Retold Kiowa Indian Folktales (1968), The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), The Gourd Dancer (1976), and The Names: A Memoir (1976).
Toshio Mori (1910-) Born in San Francisco, Mori has spent his entire life in the California Bay area, except for the three years he spent in the Japanese relocation camp in Topaz Center, Utah. During this period, Mori wrote for and edited the camp magazine Trek. Mori had a brief career as a professional baseball player with the Chicago Cubs. He quit baseball in order to assist his parents, and began to write about the people in Chinatown, Oakland, and San Leandro. Yokohama, California (1949) details the experience of the Japanese Americans in California. Frequently anthologized, Mori has authored numerous short stories and has a number of manuscripts for novels that are, as yet, unpublished. His works include Woman from Hiroshima (1978) and The Chauvinist and Other Stories (1979).
Wright Morris (1910-) Morris was born in Nebraska, and though he moved to California in 1961, the Midwest is the setting for many of his novels. These include The Inhabitants (1946), The Works of Love (1952), Love Among the Cannibals (1957), A Life (1973), and Plains Song (1980), which won an American Book Award. Morris's excellent photography appears in some of his books: The Inhabitants, The Home Place (1948), God's Country and My People (1968).
Toni Morrison (1931-) Born in the industrial town of Lorain, Ohio, Morrison claims to have grown up in an environment relatively free of discrimination. In 1953 she graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and went on to earn a Master's degree from Cornell University. She is -796- presently a New Yorker. Morrison's innovative and lyrical fiction often integrates images from her rural upbringing with the sometimes disturbing realities of the minority
