Mother Night (1962), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls Before Swine (1965), Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade (1969), Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973), Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More! (1975), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galapagos (1985), and Bluebeard (1987).
Lew Wallace (1827–1905) Lewis Wallace was the son of David Wallace, governor of Indiana. His formal education ended at sixteen; though he was an avid reader, he disliked the confinement of the classroom. He served in the Mexican War and the Civil War, rising to the rank of major general. He was admitted to the bar in 1849, was elected to the Senate in 1856, became territorial governor of New Mexico in 1878, and was appointed minister to Turkey in 1881. His novels include The Fair God-816- (1873), about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and The Prince of India (1893), as well as the best-selling Ben-Hur (1880).
Susan B. Warner (1819-85) Born in New York City, Warner lived most of her life in a dilapidated farmhouse on Constitution Island, in the Hudson River near West Point, where she and her sister Anna (under the pseudonyms Elizabeth Wetherell and Amy Lothrop) attempted to generate enough money from their writing to keep pace with their father's improvident investments and litigations. Warner's first novel, The Wide, Wide World (1850), which was (after several rejections) published on the recommendation of George P. Putnam's mother, quickly became one of the sentimental best-sellers of the nineteenth century, and was soon followed by Queechy (1852), launching Warner's career as a prolific novelist and author of children's stories.
Frank J. Webb There are no birth and death dates available for Webb. It is possible that he lived in England at some point before the publication of his novel, The Garies and Their Friends, in London in 1857. The Garies is among the earliest novels by an African American; it is a chronicle depicting the themes of interracial marriage, greed, and 'passing' for white in the intermingled histories of three families: one white, one black, one mixed.
James Welch (1940-) Welch was born in Browning, Montana, graduated from the University of Montana, and attended Northern Montana College. His novel Winter in the Blood (1974) is the story of a young man growing up on a Montana reservation, and is narrated by a character who is, like Welch, part Gros Ventre and part Blackfoot Indian. Welch's early poems are collected in Riding the Earthboy 40 (1971).
Eudora Welty (1909-) Welty was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. In her richly poetic, stylized fiction, Welty admittedly attempts to capture the -817- rhythms and spirit of her Southern heritage. Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women, then graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1929. In 1931 Welty returned to Mississippi and five years later published her first story, 'The Death of a Traveling Salesman.' Her works include Losing Battles (1970), The Optimist's Daughter (1972), Collected Stories (1980), and One Writer's Beginnings (1984), a memoir.
Nathanael West (1903-40) Born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein, to Jewish immigrants in New York City, West made his way to the Pacific coast where he became obsessed with Hollywood and its lonely grotesques. The Day of the Locust (1939) — shocking in its exploration of the pathetic and perverse — remains West's most distinguished work. It was preceded by The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), and A Cool Million (1934), as well as by a number of short stories and essays. West died in a car crash as he and his wife rushed northward from Mexico to attend the Hollywood funeral of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) The first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, Wharton was born into the patrician world of New York society. She spent her formative years traveling between New York, Newport, and Europe, always accompanied by governesses and tutors. In 1885, at the age of twenty-three, Edith Jones married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Bostonian who was thirteen years her senior. Although the marriage would last twentyeight years, the relationship was marked by long separations, mutual unhappiness, nervous illnesses, and finally divorce in 1913. A highly prolific writer, Wharton published fifty texts in the course of her life, and also left numerous unpublished volumes. The Decoration of Houses (1897), Wharton's first book, dealt with her ideas concerning interior design. Her first short stories appeared in Scribner's Magazine, and these short pieces were quickly followed by longer volumes, including The Greater Inclination (1899), The Touchstone (1900), Crucial Instances (1901), The Valley of Decision (1902), Sanctuary (1903), and The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904). None of -818- these works received a great deal of recognition until Wharton published The House of Mirth (1905). This was followed by Madame de Treymes (1907), Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), The Age of Innocence (1920), and Old New York (1924). Wharton's work also includes two war novels — The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923) — as well as the autobiographical The Writing of Fiction (1925) and A Backward Glance (1934). Wharton's indictment of the Gilded Age, her exploration of the conflict between tradition and social change, and her acknowledgment that the individual is essentially trapped by stronger exterior forces made hers a significant voice in the troubled canon of early modernism.
Harriet E. Adams Wilson (1828?-1863?) Wilson was probably born in Milford, New Hampshire, around 1827 or 1828, although there is other evidence that posits her birth in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1807 or 1808. Her only novel, Our Nig, was published in 1859. It is the story of a white orphan's marriage to an African American man, and the trials of their mulatto daughter, Frado, as she struggles for love and autonomy, against racism, poverty, and abandonment.
Owen Wister (1860–1938) Wister was born in Philadelphia, attended an Eastern preparatory school, graduated from Harvard University, and later matriculated at Harvard Law School. Suffering from poor health, Wister traveled to Wyoming in 1885 and was greatly impressed by the Western landscape. At the urging of his friend and former classmate, Theodore Roosevelt, Wister began to write about his Western experience, producing several biographies and a number of short stories that were published in Harper's Magazine. Wister's most famous work, The Virginian (1902), is dedicated to Roosevelt and translates the 'rugged individualism' of the era into fiction.
Herman Wouk (1915-) Born in New York City, Wouk grew up in a predominantly Jewish community. He was educated in New York City and graduated from -819- Columbia University. Interested in writing at an early age, Wouk did commercial writing and then produced radio plays. He entered the Navy in 1942 and was employed as an officer in the Pacific. This experience he would later describe in The Caine Mutiny (1951). Wouk has enjoyed great commercial success, and has also been the recipient of various awards, notably a Pulitzer Prize. His works include Aurora Dawn (1946), The City Boy (1948), Marjorie Morningstar (1955), The Winds of War (1971), and War and Remembrance (1980).
Frances Wright (1795–1852) Scottish-born radical and freethinker Frances Wright was the daughter of wealthy Scottish reformer James
