Ernest Hemingway – great American writer

Ernest Hemingway was an American writer, journalist, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954. On the one hand Hemingway received wide recognition through his novels and numerous stories and on the other he was famous for his life full of adventures and surprises. His style greatly influenced the literature of XX century. He was a hero of several wars, a world-class sportsman in the fields of bullfighting, boxing, hunting, and fishing, and a connoisseur of food, wine, writing, and painting.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1898 in Oak Park, Illinois, USA. His father was a country physician, who taught his son hunting and fishing; his mother was a religiously puritanical woman, active in church affairs, who led her boy to play the cello and sing in the choir.
Hemingway’s father wanted him to study medicine but he left school at 16 and joined the staff of a newspaper.
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Charles Dickens – writer of life-changing stories

Charles Dickens was a popular English author and probably still is the most widely read Victorian novelist.
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 in Portsmouth, England. In 1822 his family moved to London. He was the second of eight children. His father always had problems with money. When Charles was 12 years old, his father went to prison because he was in debt. Charles had to leave school to help his family. He got a job putting labels on bottles of shoe polish in a dirty old factory.
Later, Charles went back to school and left it when he was 15 years old to become a newspaper reporter.
In 1836, while working as a newspaper reporter, he wrote The Pickwick Papers. This book, originally published as a serial in a magazine, was very popular and so Dickens was able to give up his job.
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Portrait of James Fenimore Cooper – American novelist. John Wesley Jarvis, 1822.

James Fenimore Cooper was the first important American novelist. He was also a critic of the political, social, and religious problems of the day.
Cooper was born on September 15, 1789 in Burlington, New Jersey and grew up in Cooperstown, New York. His father, Judge William Cooper, had a large estate on the shore of Otsego Lake. He was the eleventh of 12 children.
Since his childhood Cooper was interested in the Indians of the region and the life of the frontiersmen. From this background came his best-known works, the series of novels called The Leather-stocking Tales.
At the age of 13 James entered Yale. He was the youngest in his class. He proved to be the class’s best Latin student but showed a lack of discipline. He was expelled in his third year at Yale for exploding a charge of gunpowder.
Later Cooper received a commission as a midshipman in the US Navy and served in the Atlantic Ocean as well as on Lakes Ontario and Champlain. This gave him the foundation for the sea stories he would later write.
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Robert Burns – Scottish poet

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759 in Alloway, Scotland into a family of poor farmers. He was the eldest of seven children. His house is now a museum.
From a very young age Burns was a fanatical reader. His mother sang to him the songs and ballads of Scotland, and his mother’s friend Betty told the boy many fantastic tales about ghosts, fairies and witches. Later, Burns turned many of these stories into poems.
Robert helped his parents on the farm.
At the age of sixteen he began to write poetry. He wrote about love, the countryside, the life of working people, and his love of Scotland. Handsome Nell, his first love song, was dedicated to the girl who helped him in the fields.
In 1784 his father died in bankruptcy, and the family then moved a few miles away to Mossgiel.
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Mark Twain – Samuel Clemens

Mark Twain was one of America’s greatest authors. His Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi rank high on any list of great American books.
Mark Twain was the writer’s pen name. His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
Samuel was born on November 30, 1835 in the small town of Florida, Missouri. When he was 4 years old he moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River. His boyhood home at 206 Hill Street is now a museum. He lived there from 1844 until 1853. In 1847 his father died and the boy had to help support the family. At the age of 12 Sam had to go to work as a printer’s apprentice. 15-year-old boy worked as a printer for his brother Orion, publisher of the Hannibal Journal. Later he worked as a steamboat pilot.
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Agatha Christie – Queen of Crime

Agatha Mary Clarissa, Lady Mallowan, nee Miller, was an English writer. But she is better known by the name of her first husband – Agatha Christie (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976). She is one of world’s most famous detective fiction writers and one of the most published authors in history (after the Bible and Shakespeare). Christie had published more than 60 detective novels, 6 psychological novels (under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott) and 19 collections of short stories and 19 plays. Her books have been translated into more than 100 languages and her two most famous creations, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, solved hundreds of crimes.
One of her plays, The Mousetrap, is the longest-running play in history. It started showing in London in November 1952, and it has never stopped!
Agatha was born in 1890 in Devonshire, England. As a child, she loved to hear and tell stories. She taught herself to read before she was five years old.
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Alexander Pushkin – great Russian poet

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (1799-1837) was the great Russian poet and prose writer. He not only brought Russian poetry to its highest excellence but also had a decisive influence on Russian literature in the 19th and 20th centuries. His work has been set to opera by Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Peter Tchaikovsky.
His work is distinguished by brilliance of language, compactness, terseness, and objectivity.
Pushkin was born on May 26, 1799 into a family of the middle nobility. On his father’s side he was a descendant of one of the oldest lines of Russian nobility, and on his mother’s side he was related to an Abyssinian, Abram Petrovich Hannibal, who had been kidnaped in Africa, brought to Constantinople, and sent as a gift to Russian Tsar Peter the Great. Pushkin was the least favored child, perhaps in part because of his African features and awkward manner. Only his grandmother and his nanny Arina Rodionova nurtured him emotionally; the latter told him folk tales and entertained him with gossip, and served later as the model for Tatiana’s nanny in Eugene Onegin.
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