Talbot Mundy (born William Lancaster Gribbon, 1879-1940) was a world-traveling Englishman and, before he found writing, a scoundrel with a rap sheet virtually as long as his future literary output (fraud, impersonation, swindling, adultery, bigamy, imprisonment, even deportation from Africa!) before emigrating to the United
Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961) is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential American writers of the 20th century. His economical and understated approach to writing netted him the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature "for mastery of the art of narrative, and for
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) was an eccentric and reclusive Serbian-American inventor, electrical and mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his lifelong feud with Thomas Edison, pioneering wireless technology, and his many contributions to the design of modern alternating current (AC) electricity. His autobiography My Inventions,
Charles Donald Lowrie (1875–1925) left his Massachusetts home as a young man and hopscotched westward working as a stenographer, construction camp timekeeper, bookkeeper, railroad laborer, and traveling salesman before finding himself in Los Angeles starving and broke save for a vandalized nickel in his pocket
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) was a legendarily prolific American author, writing over eighty books in thirty-six years. While best known as the creator of Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars, his Caspak trilogy, first serialized in 1918, is widely considered his most
Florence Scovel Shinn (1871–1940) was an American artist and illustrator of popular children’s literature and magazines, including Harper's, during the early 20th century. During the 1920s, she became a key member of the New Thought movement –– a loosely allied group of religious denominations, authors,
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was the pen name of Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, a Russian-American writer and philosopher known for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. The tenets of which are espoused in all of her writings, but especially in her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead
Algernon Henry Blackwood (1869–1951) in his rich and varied lifetime was an English broadcasting narrator, Canadian farmer, New York newspaper reporter, hotel operator, journalist, bartender, secretary, mystic, teacher, adventurer, novelist, and short-story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) was a reclusive novelist who in the 1950s became known in literary circles as "the English Secret," and was considered austere and unassuming by all who had the rare fortune to meet her. Publicly, she was so modest that any praise of
Philip Francis Nowlan (1888-1940) was a Pennsylvania-based journalist and science fiction author, best known as the creator of one of the genre's most well-known Radium Age (1904-33) characters: Buck Rogers. Whose popularity quickly dominated comic strip and radio serials of the early 20th century, culminating