Lyman Frank Baum

Born: May 15, 1856

Died: May 6, 1919

How did you first learn about the story of a cowardly lion, a scarecrow without a brain and a tin man without a heart? If your answer is the movie "The Wizard of Oz," you'd be right. But did you know there was a book before there was a movie?

"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"

The film version of the book was made in 1939 with Judy Garland as Dorothy, the girl from Kansas who has a wild adventure along a yellow brick road. The story is still loved all over the world and has been translated into many languages. How many times have you seen the movie? Have you read the book?

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Born: September 24, 1896

Died: December 21, 1940

Fiction writers are often asked, "How much of you is in your characters?" For writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, it was a lot. Born September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s) in which he thrived. Named for his distant cousin, Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star-Spangled Banner," he was brought up as an American aristocrat in St. Paul, but he was also driven by a highly charged, romantic imagination.

After turbulent years of schooling, Fitzgerald joined the army. While stationed at Camp Sheridan, he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre. To win her hand, he rewrote and published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1920. The novel, reflecting his years at Princeton University, tells the story of a young man's quest for fulfillment in love and career. Over the course of the next decade and a half, while struggling to cope with the demons of his alcoholism and Zelda's emerging mental illness, the Fitzgeralds enjoyed a life of literary celebrity.

In 1925, Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, considered his greatest work. Although it initially met with little commercial success, this novel about the American dream of material success has become one of the most popular, widely read, and critically acclaimed works of fiction in American literature. The life of the title character, Jay Gatsby, has been compared to Fitzgerald's life.

While living on the French Riviera, Zelda's illness became serious. She suddenly began to practice ballet, dancing night and day. After a second nervous breakdown, she was hospitalized for mental illness in Asheville, North Carolina. During the last years of his life, Fitzgerald lived in Hollywood, earning his living as a screenwriter. He died of a heart attack at the age of 45, leaving his final novel, The Last Tycoon (about life in Hollywood), only half done.

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Born: July 21, 1899

Died: July 2, 1961

There are some books--considered classics--that just about everyone reads in school. Sometimes a book is so good it becomes a classic almost as soon as it's written. One such book is The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. When Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, his father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, must have known he had a special son because he stepped out onto the porch of their home in Oak Park, Illinois, and blew his cornet.

Ernest Hemingway grew up to become one of America's most respected writers, known for his sense of adventure as well as his unique writing style--spare dialogue and short, simple sentences.

After high school, Hemingway worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star before signing up to fight in World War I. Unable to take up regular military duty because of a bad eye, he worked as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy. After he was badly injured, he stayed in a Milan hospital where he fell in love with his nurse, and wrote A Farewell to Arms (1929). Do you know the titles for any of Hemingway's other books?

Hemingway lived in Europe for many years. He traveled to Spain often and became a passionate fan of bull-fighting. He also wrote about bull-fighting. In 1953 The Old Man and the Sea, the story of a fisherman in a battle with a giant fish, won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and in 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1887 she was put under the charge of Anne Sullivan, who was visually impaired. She became a teacher and companion to Keller.

In 1915 she founded Helen Keller International, a non-profit organization for preventing blindness.

For more information about Helen Keller, visit the following sites:

• American Foundation for the Blind
• Helen Keller Kids Museum on the AFB Braille Bug web site
• Helen Keller Foundation

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

Born: Feb. 18, 1931

Toni Morrison writes of the African-American experience often focusing on the relationship between the individual and society. While teaching at Howard University, she began her budding career. Her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," was published in 1970 and she quickly became known as a promising writer. "Beloved," published in 1987, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Born: January 19, 1809

Died: October 7, 1849

If you like horror stories that run shivers up and down your spine, try reading the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Born on January 19, 1809, Poe was a master of tales of terror and the originator of the modern detective story. In his poem "The Raven," a big black bird comes into the narrator's den, sits upon a statue, and stares at him. "Nevermore," says the bird.

In"The Tell-Tale Heart," a man commits a murder and hides the body under the floorboards in the house. But, he begins to go mad, hearing the wild beating of his victim's heart getting louder and louder. Try reading "The Black Cat," or "Murders in the Rue Morgue."

Poe also wrote romance, like his haunting poem "Annabel Lee:"

"For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee

And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee"

What do you know about the life of the man who wrote these strange tales?

Poe was a successful editor, journalist, and critic of literature, but his personal life was full of tragedy and romance, much like his stories. Poe's parents, both actors, died when he was two. He was left in the care of kind, childless foster parents, the Allans. They sent him to excellent schools and supported him in every way, but Poe had problems with gambling and drinking. He experienced the loss of many of the women in his life: first his own mother, then a friend's mother when he was 15, his foster mother when he was 20, then his frail young wife, Virginia Clem.

Poe died in 1849, but his stories and poems live on as masterpieces of American horror, mystery, and romance. They are great to read aloud. Try reading one with your family or friends.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)

Born: November 30, 1835

Died: April 1910

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, and later moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, where he grew up. Although he had a number of odd jobs early in his life, Clemens is best known as a writer who took the pen name of Mark Twain about five years after he published his first major work. Twain was a traveling journalist, humorist, writer, and lecturer whose most famous novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His childhood in Hannibal along the Mississippi River inspired colorful tales of adventures on the waterway. Twain traveled around the world and he dazzled audiences far and wide with lectures filled with the same humor and spirit found in his writings.

Read this essay by Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin of Stanford University. Editor of a recent Library of America Twain anthology, Ms. Fishkin is considered by many the nation's leading Twain scholar. Her essay is entitled "Mark Twain: Novelist, Humorist and Citizen of the World".