247 articles
Charles Brockden Brown
Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) was an American novelist, editor, and pamphleteer of Philadelphia, commonly called America's first professional novelist; his Gothic novels include Wieland and Edgar Huntly.
Charles Frazier
Charles Frazier (born 1950) is an American novelist from western North Carolina, author of Cold Mountain (1997), the National Book Award-winning Civil War novel of Inman's walk home to Ada, later filmed by Anthony Minghella; his other novels are Thirteen Moons, Nightwoods, Varina, and The Trackers.
Charles W. Chesnutt
Charles W. Chesnutt (Charles Waddell Chesnutt, 1858–1932) was an American author, lawyer, and civil-rights activist, the first African American fiction writer to win wide literary recognition.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), American feminist writer and sociologist, author of "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), Women and Economics (1898), and Herland; rediscovered by 1970s feminist critics.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, born in Kolkata around 1956, is an Indian-American author and University of Houston professor known for The Mistress of Spices and The Palace of Illusions.
Christopher Buckley (novelist)
Christopher Buckley (b. 1952), American novelist and political satirist, son of William F. Buckley Jr.; author of Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Boomsday; distinct from the poet Christopher Buckley.
Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk, born 1962 in Pasco, Washington, is the transgressive fiction author of Fight Club (1996) and Survivor, Choke, Haunted, Rant, and the Fight Club 2 and 3 graphic novels.
Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead (born 1969) is an American novelist raised in Manhattan who won two consecutive Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, for The Underground Railroad (2016) and The Nickel Boys (2019).
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023), born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., American novelist of Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road; National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and MacArthur Fellow.
Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick (born 1928) is an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose work centers on Jewish identity; her best-known work is the novella The Shawl.
Damon Runyon
Damon Runyon (born Alfred Damon Runyan, Manhattan, Kansas; died 1946) was an American sportswriter, Hearst columnist, and short-story writer of Broadway gamblers and gangsters, creator of Guys and Dolls and the Runyonese dialect.
Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers (born 1970) is an American author and publisher of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Circle, and Newbery winner The Eyes and the Impossible; founder of McSweeney's and co-founder of 826 Valencia.
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), American novelist and essayist, author of Infinite Jest (1996); known for maximalist, footnote-heavy prose, New Sincerity, essays, This Is Water, and posthumous The Pale King.
David Markson
David Markson (1927-2010), American experimental novelist from Albany, New York, author of Wittgenstein's Mistress and the Notecard Quartet (Reader's Block through The Last Novel), collage novels of fragments; also wrote the parodic Western The Ballad of Dingus Magee.
Deborah Eisenberg
Deborah Eisenberg (born 1945), American short story writer from Winnetka, Illinois, author of five collections including Twilight of the Superheroes and Your Duck Is My Duck; MacArthur Fellow (2009), PEN/Faulkner (2011), taught at Virginia and Columbia.
Delia Owens
Delia Owens (born 1949) is an American wildlife scientist and author of Where the Crawdads Sing (2018). She researched lions, hyenas, and elephants in Botswana and Zambia for 23 years, co-authored Cry of the Kalahari, and remains wanted for questioning in a 1995 Zambia killing.
Denis Johnson
Denis Johnson (1949–2017), American poet, novelist, and short story writer, author of Jesus' Son, Tree of Smoke (2007 National Book Award), and Train Dreams; born in Munich, raised abroad, died May 2017.
Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes (1892–1982), American modernist journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright; author of Nightwood (1936), Ryder, Ladies Almanack, and The Antiphon; championed by T. S. Eliot; lived with Thelma Wood in Paris 1920–31.
Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo (born 1936) is an American novelist, author of White Noise, Libra, Mao II, and Underworld; winner of the National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Jerusalem Prize, and PEN/Saul Bellow Award; a major postmodern American fiction writer.
Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme (1931-1989), American postmodern short story writer and novelist, author of Snow White, The Dead Father, and Sixty Stories; a New Yorker regular whose collage-style fiction won the 1972 National Book Award.
Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt, American novelist born 1963 in Greenwood, Mississippi, author of The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013), winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; known for decade-long gaps between novels and writing by hand in pencil.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879–1958) was an American author and educational reformer who popularized the Montessori method, helped choose books for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and wrote Understood Betsy.
DuBose Heyward
DuBose Heyward (Edwin DuBose Heyward, 1885-1940), Charleston novelist, poet, and playwright, author of the 1925 novel Porgy, source of the play Porgy (1927) and Gershwin's folk opera Porgy and Bess (1935); also wrote Mamba's Daughters and co-founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina.
E. L. Doctorow
E. L. Doctorow (1931-2015), American novelist and editor, author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March; known for blending real historical figures with invented characters; three-time NBCC and two-time PEN/Faulkner winner.
Edgar Allan Poe bibliography
The Edgar Allan Poe bibliography covers Poe's published books, beginning with Tamerlane and Other Poems in 1827, the posthumous collections, and the reference bibliographies cataloging them.
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton (1862–1937), born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist of Gilded Age New York society; author of The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, and the first woman to win the Pulitzer Novel Prize (1921).
Edna Ferber
Edna Ferber (1887–1968), American novelist and playwright, Pulitzer winner for So Big (1925); wrote Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant, and Broadway hits Dinner at Eight and Stage Door with George S. Kaufman.
Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey (1927–1989), American writer and self-described agrarian anarchist of the Southwest desert; author of Desert Solitaire (1968) and The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), whose eco-sabotage novel inspired Earth First!.
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat, born 1969 in Port-au-Prince, is a Haitian-American novelist, memoirist, and short-story writer known for Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Dew Breaker; her memoir Brother, I'm Dying won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout, American novelist born in Portland, Maine, author of Olive Kitteridge (Pulitzer Prize 2009) and the Lucy Barton books, including The Things We Never Say, her 11th novel and a 2026 Booker shortlistee.