Authors

Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway is a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he teaches brand strategy and digital marketing to second-year MBA students. A serial entrepreneur, he has founded nine firms, including L2, Red Envelope, Prophet, and Section4. In 2012, he was named one of the “World’s 50 Best Business School Professors” by Poets & Quants. His Prof G and Pivot podcasts, No Mercy / No Malice weekly blog, and Prof G YouTube channel reach millions worldwide.

Maurice Sendak

For more than forty years, the books Maurice Sendak has written and illustrated have nurtured children and adults alike and have challenged established ideas about what children's literature is and should be. The New York Times has recognized that Sendak's work “has brought a new dimension to the American children's book and has helped to change how people visualize childhood.” Parenting recently described Sendak as “indisputably, the most revolutionary force in children's books.” Winner of the 1964 Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are, in 1970 Sendak became the first American illustrator to receive the international Hans Christian Andersen Award, given in recognition of his entire body of work. In 1983, he received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award from the American Library Association, also given for his entire body of work. Beginning in 1952, with A Hole Is to Dig by Ruth Krauss, Sendak's illustrations have enhanced many texts by other writers, including the Little Bear books by Else Holmelund Minarik, children's books by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Randall Jarrell, and The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm. Dear Mili, Sendak's interpretation of a newly discovered tale by Wilhelm Grimm, was published to extraordinary acclaim in 1988. In addition to Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Sendak has both written and illustrated The Nutshell Library (1962), Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1967), In the Night Kitchen (1970), Outside Over There (1981), and, We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993). He also illustrated Swine Lake (1999), authored by James Marshall, Brundibar (2003), by Tony Kushner, Bears (2005), by Ruth Krauss and, Mommy? (2006), his first pop-up book, with paper engineering by Matthew Reinhart and story by Arthur Yorinks.

Shel Silverstein

"And now, children, your Uncle Shelby is going to tell you a story about a very strange lion- in fact, the strangest lion I have ever met." So begins Shel Silverstein's very first children's book, Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back. It's funny and sad and has made readers laugh and think since it was published in 1963. It was followed the next year by three more books. The first of them, The Giving Tree, is a moving story about the love of a tree for a boy. Shel returned to humor the same year with A Giraffe and a Half, delighting readers with a most riotous ending. The third book in 1964 was Uncle Shelby's Zoo Don't Bump the Glump! and Other Fantasies, Shel's first poetry collection, and his first and only book illustrated in full color. It combined his unique imagination and bold brand of humor in this collection of silly and scary creatures. Shel's second collection of poems and drawings, Where the Sidewalk Ends, was published in 1974. His recording of the poems won him a Grammy for best Children's Album. In this collection, Shel invited children to dream and dare to imagine the impossible, from a hippopotamus sandwich to the longest nose in the world. With his next collection of poems and drawings, A Light in the Attic, published in 1981, Shel asked his readers to turn the light on in their attics, to put something silly in the world, and not to be discouraged by the Whatifs. Instead he urged readers to catch the moon or invite a dinosaur to dinner- to have fun! A Light in the Attic was the first children's book to break onto the New York Times Bestseller List, where it stayed for a record-breaking 182 weeks.

Jacqueline Susann

Jacqueline Susann is a publishing and pop-culture legend. Her debut novel, Valley of the Dolls, published in 1966, has sold over 31 million copies in thirty languages. Susann was the first author to have three consecutive #1 New York Times bestsellers, following Valley of the Dolls with The Love Machine and Once is Not Enough. She was married to her beloved husband, producer Irving Mansfield, until her death on September 21, 1974, after a courageously fought battle with breast cancer. She was fifty-six.

Laura Hillenbrand

Laura Hillenbrand is an American author of books and magazine articles. Her two best-selling nonfiction books, Seabiscuit: An American Legend and Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption have sold over 10 million copies, and each was adapted for film. Her writing style is considered to differ from the New Journalism style, dropping verbal pyrotechnics in favor of a stronger focus on the story itself. Both books were written after she fell ill in college, barring her from completing her degree. She told that story in an award-winning essay, A Sudden Illness, which was published in The New Yorker in 2003. She was 28 years with Borden Flanagan, from whom she separated by 2014.

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958) was considered his magnum opus, and is the most widely read book in modern African literature. Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in South-Eastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (NBS) and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention for Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later novels include No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). Achebe wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a "language of colonisers", in African literature. In 1975, his lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" featured a famous criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist"; it was later published in The Massachusetts Review amid some controversy.

Joan Didion

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

John Irving

John Irving published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, in 1968. He has been nominated for a National Book Award three times-winning once, in 1980, for the novel The World According to Garp. He also received an O. Henry Award, in 1981, for the short story "Interior Space." In 1992, Mr. Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules-a film with seven Academy Award nominations. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jay Rubin

Jay Rubin (b. 1941) is an American academic, translator, and (as of 2015) novelist. He is best known for his translations of the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. He has written about Murakami, the novelist Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), the short story writers Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908) and Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), prewar Japanese literary censorship, Noh drama, and Japanese grammar. In May 2015 Chin Music Press published his novel THE SUN GODS, set in Seattle against the background of the incarceration of 120,000 U.S. citizens and non-citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Rubin has a Ph.D. in Japanese literature from the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Washington for eighteen years, and then moved to Harvard University, from which he retired in 2006. He lives near Seattle, where he continues to write and translate.

Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame was a British writer best remembered for the classic of children's literature The Wind in the Willows. Scottish by birth, he spent most of his childhood with his grandmother in England, following the death of his mother and his father's inability to look after the children. After attending St Edward's School in Oxford, his ambition to attend university was thwarted and he joined the Bank of England, where he had a successful career. Before writing The Wind in the Willows, he published three other books: Pagan Papers (1893); The Golden Age (1895); Dream Days (1898).

Eric Carle

Eric Carle is acclaimed and beloved as the creator of brilliantly illustrated and innovatively designed picture books for very young children. His best-known work, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, has eaten its way into the hearts of literally millions of children all over the world and has been translated into more than 62 languages and sold over 41 million copies. Since the Caterpillar was published in 1969, Eric Carle has illustrated more than 70 books, many best sellers, most of which he also wrote.

Tim O'Brien

TIM O'BRIEN received the 1979 National Book Award in fiction for Going After Cacciato. His other works include the acclaimed novels The Things They Carried and July, July. In the Lake of the Woods received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named the best novel of 1994 by Time. O'Brien lives in Austin, Texas.