Authors

Authors

• Very often, famous authors are much like other people. Gwendolyn Brooks, a poet who won the Pulitzer Prize, was a big fan of soap operas and would not talk on the telephone when a favorite soap opera was being broadcast. Her daughter, Nora, once called her, and Gwendolyn picked up the receiver, immediately said, "'All My Children,'" and hung up. By the way, Nora's parents met at a party, Gwendolyn said, when "this glorious man appeared in the doorway and posed for a moment, looking the situation over." She remembered, "I was always impressed by dignity in a man, and he certainly had that." Gwendolyn was so impressed by the man, whose name was Henry Lowington Blakely Jr., that she told her friend Margaret Taylor, "That's the man I'm going to marry." Margaret immediately yelled at the man, "Hey, boy, this girl wants to meet you." The couple's other child was a son, named Henry after his father. Young Henry spent a long time getting to bed because he said goodnight to everybody, including his fish (Water Boy) and his puppy (Cocoa).

• As a boy, poet Robert Frost found a job at a shoe factory in Salem, Massachusetts; however, he discovered that he did not enjoy the work, which paid $1.50 a day and was dangerous. His job was to use a machine to cut leather patterns; a previous employee, a boy, had lost a finger to the cutting machine while working at the same job. Robert resorted to creative thinking to get out of the job. He did not want to admit that he disliked the work, so he lied and told his very religious mother that he was subjected to profanity that other employees used incessantly. She insisted that he quit the job. By the way, an older Robert once rejected a deal proposed to him by his paternal grandfather, who had money. His grandfather offered to support Robert for a year as he wrote poetry; however, if Robert were not a successful poet at the end of the year, he would give up poetry and get a real job. Robert rejected the offer because he realized that becoming a successful poet takes time he figured that he needed at least 20 years.

• Mary Bly is a Renaissance scholar at Fordham University, and Eloisa James is a best-selling romance novelist. They are the same person. Ms. Bly for a long time kept secret the fact that she wrote romance novels using a pseudonym, worried that it could hurt her chances at gaining tenure. But once she earned tenure, she came out of the romance closet. In February 2011 she passed out copies of her romances following the end of a faculty meeting. The back cover photographs showed the author: Eloisa James, who is Ms. Bly without eyeglasses. Professional colleague Eva Badowska said, "I was speechless." Ms. Bly began reading romance novels as a young adult. She said, "I learned a lot about sex from those books. I remember sitting on the school bus going, How? Where?" Her father, poet Robert Bly, was OK with her reading romance novels, but the two did have an agreement: she had to read one classic novel for every five romance novels she read.

• Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of the novel "Pay It Forward," had a number of problems – alcohol, cigarettes, friends with attitude in high school and beyond. Fortunately, she had some positive influences in her life that helped her overcome her problems. One was her high-school sophomore-year English and creative-writing teacher, whose name was Lenny Horowitz. He encouraged her to write, and he once even read to the class a humorous essay she had written both he and the students laughed. In addition, he told the other teachers at the school that she could write. A positive influence she knew when she was an adult was a recovering alcoholic named Harvey, who told her, "You strike me as a person who could do just about anything you put your mind to." At age 34, she got clean and sober. She also thought that if she could do just about anything she put her mind to, she would become a full-time, working writer.

• John McPhee loved sports when he was young, and his father was a doctor of sports medicine at Princeton. When John was eight years old, the football team gave him a Princeton football jersey, made by the same company that made the Princeton team's football uniforms; his number was 33. At games, he ran onto the field with the team. In addition, he says, "When Princeton scored a touchdown, I went behind the goalpost and caught the extra point." He also stayed on the sidelines during games; however, one cold, wet day he looked up at the press box and realized that the sportswriters were dry and in an environment with heaters. That is when he decided to be a writer. Mr. McPhee says, "Now that story, which I have often told, is about three to five percent apocryphal. The rest of it is absolutely true."

• Jeff Kinney is the author of the Wimpy Kid humorous series of books, which appeal immensely to children. As of 2011, the then six books in the series had sold over 50 million copies worldwide. In fact, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of 2009, an assessment that Mr. Kinney disagreed with, saying, "I'm not even the most influential person in my own house." By the way, when he wrote the first Wimpy Kid book, he thought he was writing for adults: "I never thought I was writing for kids at all. It really shocked and unsettled me to hear kids were buying the books. If I'd known I was writing for kids, I might actually have spelt things out a bit more and that would probably have killed the appeal."

• English novelist Anthony Trollope once heard a couple of clergymen complaining about a character who appeared frequently in his novels: Mrs. Proudie, whom they found annoying. Mr. Trollope introduced himself to the two clergymen, and he promised, "I will go home and kill her before the week is over." He then wrote her death scene in his newest novel.