Women In Literature (audio)

This autumn, Natasha Trethewey took up her duties as United States Poet Laureate, the 19th poet to serve since Congress created the position in 1985. Also known as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the Laureate is responsible for all the public poetry programs of the Library, as well as an annual lecture and reading. With her appointment as Poet Laureate, Trethewey crowns a career steeped in the complexities of American history. The marriage of her white, Canadian-born father and her African American mother was still illegal in Mississippi, where she was born, on Confederate Memorial Day, in 1966, although the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage the following year. Her parents divorced when she was young; she grew up with her mother in Georgia, spending summers with her grandmother in Mississippi and her father in New Orleans. When Natasha was 19, her mother was murdered by her second husband. In Trethewey’s words, “I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happene

Louise Glück is “a strong and haunting presence” among America’s greatest living poets. Her work is distinguished by a rare ability to deploy ostensibly simple language to evoke powerful emotion. While many of her poems clearly address the challenges of life and love in the contemporary world, they are at times informed by the themes and landscapes of classical mythology. She has published 12 volumes of verse to date, including The Seven Ages, Vita Novo, Triumph of Achilles and Averno. Her book The Wild Iris received the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has since received virtually every other major award for poetry, including the Bollingen Prize in 2001 for her lifetime achievement. In 2003, she was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. Born in New York City, she began writing at an early age. She studied at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University, and although she never took a degree herself, she has spent much of her life teaching in universities. For 20 years, she taught at Williams College in M

Born and raised in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer published her first short story in a children's magazine in 1937 at the age of 16. She left college without a degree and continued publishing short fiction in South African journals. She drew attention outside her country in 1951, when her stories began appearing in The New Yorker magazine. She published her first novel, The Lying Days in 1953. In her short stories and novels such as Burger's Daughter and July's People, she explored the distortions imposed on ordinary human relationships by oppressive social systems like that of apartheid in South Africa. The infamous Sharpeville massacre of 1960 drove the author into political activism. She joined the African National Congress while it was still listed as an illegal organization by the government. While her fiction was repeatedly banned by the South African government it received the highest acclaim abroad. She won Britain's most distinguished literary award the Booker Prize for her 1974 novel The Cons

The most exciting and acclaimed playwright in American drama today, Suzan-Lori Parks is the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Audiences across the country relish her rich blend of fantasy, humor, history and legend, bursting with the music and wordplay of African American vernacular speech. The powerful theatricality of her work forces audiences to re-examine their thinking about race, sex, family, society and life itself. Her plays, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and Venus, both won Off-Broadway's Obie Awards for Best Play. In Topdog/Underdog, written in only three days, two brothers named Lincoln and Booth work their way through a dense undergrowth of family grievances, until their names take on an awful relevance. A sensation at the Public Theatre in 2001, it moved to Broadway the following year, bringing the playwright a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" and the Pulitzer Prize. Another writer might have choked on the expectations raised by her success; Pa

In novels such as the modern classic, Beloved, Toni Morrison has fused history and legend, realism and fantasy, to craft an epic saga of African American life. Although her work is steeped in local history and folklore, the fundamental human values of her art have captured the hearts of readers around the world. After earning a Master's in English from Cornell University, Morrison taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C. for many years, and first took up writing as a form of escape from an unhappy marriage. She completed her first novel, The Bluest Eye, while raising two children on her own and working full time as an editor at Random House in New York. She received the National Book Critics Award for her second novel, Sula. Her third, Song of Solomon, attracted an international audience. A year after Beloved was published in 1987, Morrison received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1993, Morrison was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is the first African American to receive this honor,

Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012) achieved international success as a director and writer of feature films, a field that had been effectively closed to women for over half a century. Her earlier work as a journalist and essayist had already won her a reputation for sharp-eyed social observation and sharp-tongued humor. It also introduced a distinctive approach to her favorite subjects: New York City, food, and the baffling ways of men and women in love. She was pregnant with her second child when her husband left her, and she found herself at home with two babies to take care of while trying to break into screenwriting. In 1983, her script for the film Silkwood was nominated for an Oscar, and her novel Heartburn, a comic fictionalization of the end of her marriage, became a bestseller. Ephron's original screenplay, When Harry Met Sally, solidified her reputation as a screenwriter, but she wanted something more. She made her name as a director with Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, runaway successes that esta

Nora Ephron (1941 - 2012) achieved international success as a director and writer of feature films, a field that had been effectively closed to women for over half a century. Her earlier work as a journalist and essayist had already won her a reputation for sharp-eyed social observation and sharp-tongued humor. It also introduced a distinctive approach to her favorite subjects: New York City, food, and the baffling ways of men and women in love. She was pregnant with her second child when her husband left her, and she found herself at home with two babies to take care of while trying to break into screenwriting. In 1983, her script for the film Silkwood was nominated for an Oscar, and her novel Heartburn, a comic fictionalization of the end of her marriage, became a bestseller. Ephron's original screenplay, When Harry Met Sally, solidified her reputation as a screenwriter, but she wanted something more. She made her name as a director with Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, runaway successes that esta

Born and raised in a small town in rural Ireland, Edna O'Brien came to Dublin as a teenager to become a pharmacist, but a chance encounter with James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man helped her find her own voice as a writer. She completed her first novel, The Country Girls, in only a month when she was 23 years old. The book was banned in her native Ireland (the censor called it a libel on Irish womanhood), and a priest in her parish had the book burned, but thoughtful critics in Ireland and elsewhere reveled in her rich, forceful prose and she is now recognized as one of Ireland's greatest living storytellers. Although she has spent most of her life in London, the people and landscapes of Ireland continue to fill her fiction. The Country Girl trilogy was followed by A Pagan Place, Night, Johnny I Hardly Kew You, The high Road, Time and Tide, and second trilogy: House of Splendid Isolation, Down By the River and Wild Decembers. Her short story collections include A Scandalous Woman, A Fanatic

Sue Grafton is one of America's most popular mystery writers, the author of a series of best-sellers known as the alphabet mysteries, beginning with "A" is for Alibi and continuing through her latest, "U" is for Undertow due out in December 2009. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky and graduated from the University of Louisville. She was always interested in writing, but feared that she could never make a living at it. Her own father had published two mystery novels but died without achieving the success he had dreamed of. "From the age of twenty-two on, I wrote at night, every night, while I was working full time and raising a family," she says. "I wrote because I couldn't help it... I wrote in the face of rejection, frustration, hardship, weariness and stress. The very act of doing what I loved gave me energy." She completed four book-length manuscripts before publishing her first novel, Keziah Dane, in 1967, followed by The Lolly-Madonna War in 1969. She wrote the screen lay for the film version of Lolly-

In 1988, Amy Tan was earning an excellent living writing speeches for business executives. She worked around the clock to meet the demands from her many high-priced clients, but she took no joy in the work, and felt frustrated and unfulfilled. In her mid-thirties, she took up writing fiction. A year later her first book, a collection of interrelated stories called The Joy Luck Club was an international best-seller, and Amy Tan's life was changed forever. Only 20 years ago, a list of well-known American authors would have included virtually no Asian-Americans. Today Amy Tan is one of America's most popular novelists. Her subsequent books, The Kitchen God's Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses have been best-sellers, and the film of The Joy Luck Club was an unprecedented success. Although they are primarily concerned with the lives and concerns of Asian-American women, her stories have found an enthusiastic audience among Americans of all backgrounds, and have already been translated into 23 languages.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of America's most prolific and respected authors. She has distinguished herself in the academic world as teacher and critic, while earning a fortune as the author of best-selling novels in a wide range of genres, from the family chronicle to the historical novel, the gothic horror story and the suspense novel. Her work has been distinguished from the beginning by a keen, unflinching interest in the nature of evil and the sources of violence in American life. She won acclaim early in her career, receiving the National Book Award in 1970 for the novel "them." She has now written over 50 novels and more than 30 collections of short stories, as well as nonfiction works on literary subjects ranging from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and the fiction of Dostoyevsky and James Joyce, to such non-literary subjects as the painter George Bellows and the boxer Mike Tyson. In 1996, Joyce Carol Oates was honored by the international writers' association PEN with its Malamud award, presented for

The acclaimed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was born in Brooklyn, and grew up in Rockville Center, Long Island. Her invalid mother encouraged her love of books, while her father shared her love of baseball; she traces her interest in history to her childhood experience recording the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers. A graduate of Colby College in Maine, with a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard, she became a White House Fellow in 1967. Although she had recently published an article criticizing President Lyndon Johnson's conduct of the Vietnam War, when she met the President at a White House dance, rather than argue with her, he asked her to dance. At the end of the evening, he suggested that she be assigned to work directly with him at the White House. After his retirement, he sought her advice and assistance in the preparation of his presidential memoirs. "He's still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I've ever known in my entire life," she recalls. Her a

In 1988, Amy Tan was earning an excellent living writing speeches for business executives. She worked around the clock to meet the demands from her many high-priced clients, but she took no joy in the work, and felt frustrated and unfulfilled. In her mid-thirties, she took up writing fiction. A year later her first book, a collection of interrelated stories called The Joy Luck Club was an international best-seller, and Amy Tan's life was changed forever. Only 20 years ago, a list of well-known American authors would have included virtually no Asian-Americans. Today Amy Tan is one of America's most popular novelists. Her subsequent books, The Kitchen God's Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses have been best-sellers, and the film of The Joy Luck Club was an unprecedented success. Although they are primarily concerned with the lives and concerns of Asian-American women, her stories have found an enthusiastic audience among Americans of all backgrounds, and have already been translated into 23 languages.

Rita Dove is one of America's best-known and most honored poets. Her collection of poems, Thomas and Beulah, based on the lives of her grandparents, earned her the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She was only the second African-American to win this prize. In 1993, she was appointed to a two-year term as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She was the youngest person, and the first African-American, to receive this highest official honor in American letters. From an early age, Rita loved poetry and music. As one of the most outstanding high school graduates of her year, she was invited to the White House as a Presidential Scholar. She began to pursue writing seriously while studying at Miami University in Ohio. After graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English in 1973, she won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Germany for two years at the University of Tubingen. She then joined the famous Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, receiving her Ma

Born Jean Marie Untinen in Chicago, she was the second of five children of a housepainter. Today, Jean Auel is a story-writing phenomenon whose series of novels set in prehistoric Europe have sold nearly 50 million copies worldwide. A grandmother of nine, she put in 12 years of night school at the University of Portland; Jean Auel did not even try to write a book until she was past the age of 40. She quit work as a credit manager, and in 1977, "got the idea for a saga about a young woman's battle to survive in the early Cro Magnon era of the Ice Age." Jean Auel immersed herself in the history of the Ice Age. She joined a survival class to learn how to construct an ice cave, and researched primitive methods of making fire, tanning leather, and knapping stone from the aboriginal skills expert Jim Riggs. The first in her Earth's Children series, "The Clan of the Cave Bear" was rejected by several publishers, but eventually was sold to Crown Publishers for $130,000 (Crown Publishers paid Auel $25 million for the

One of America's most respected and honored poets, Mona Van Duyn (1921 - 2004) served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1992 to 1993. Born and raised in rural Iowa, she was drawn to literature at an early age, but her parents were unsympathetic to her literary ambitions. At Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa), a sympathetic teacher encouraged her writing. She earned a master's degree from the University of Iowa, where she participated in the early years of the University's famous Writers' Workshop and met her husband, Jarvis Thurston. The couple founded Perspective: A Quarterly Review of Literature while teaching at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. They and their journal soon moved to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where Van Duyn would teach for much of her life. Over the years, Van Duyn won every major award in American poetry, including the Bollingen Prize, the Sandburg Prize and the National Book Award. She received a 1991 Pulitzer Prize for her

As a child, Maya Angelou was traumatized by abuse. For five years, she was silent, but in time, she found her voice, and that voice has been heard around the world. A single mother at age 16, she embarked on a remarkable career as an actress and entertainer, as a journalist, educator and civil rights activist, and finally, as one of the world's most eminent authors and poets. Her autobiographical work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, created an international sensation when it was first published in 1970. Since then her books and poems have made her one of the world's favorite authors and one of America's best-loved public speakers. President Clinton requested that she compose a poem for his first inaugural in 1993; she read that poem, "On the Pulse of the Morning," to an audience of millions on live television.