Henry Festing Jones (18511928) was the friend and posthumous biographer of Samuel Butler. His biography of Butler, entitled Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (18351902) A Memoir, won the inaugural James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 1919.
Charles Smith is an African-American playwright born in Chicago. Many of his plays consider political and historical themes from an African-American perspective. He is playwright-in-residence for Indiana Repertory Theatre, which commissioned his plays Les Trois Dumas and Sister Carrie, after the novel by Terre Haute, Indiana-born Theodore Dreiser.
William Walker Atkinson (December 5, 1862 November 22, 1932) was an attorney, merchant, publisher, and author, as well as an occultist and an American pioneer of the New Thought movement. He is also known to have been the author of the pseudonymous works attributed to Theron Q. Dumont and Yogi Ramacharaka. Due in part to Atkinson's intense personal secrecy and extensive use of pseudonyms, he is now largely forgotten, despite having obtained mention in past editions of Who's Who in America, Religious Leaders of America, and several similar publicationsand having written more than 100 books in the last 30 years of his life. His works have remained in print more or less continuously since 1900. http://worldcat. org/identities/lccn-n88-661832http://worldcat. org/identities/lccn-n87-863357
John Holbrook Vance (born August 28, 1916 in San Francisco, California) is an American fantasy and science fiction author. Most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance. Vance has published 11 mysteries as John Holbrook Vance and 3 as Ellery Queen. Other pen names include Alan Wade, Peter Held, John van See, and Jay Kavanse. Among his awards are: Hugo Awards, in 1963 for The Dragon Masters, in 1967 for The Last Castle, and in 2010 for his memoir This is me, Jack Vance!; a Nebula Award in 1966, also for The Last Castle; the Jupiter Award in 1975; the World Fantasy Award in 1984 for life achievement and in 1990 for Lyonesse: Madouc; an Edgar (the mystery equivalent of the Nebula) for the best first mystery novel in 1961 for The Man in the Cage; in 1992, he was Guest of Honor at the WorldCon in Orlando, Florida; and in 1997 he was named a SFWA Grand Master. A 2009 profile in the New York Times Magazine described Vance as "one of American literatures most distinctive and undervalued voices."
William Hutton (30 September 1723 - 1815) was a poet and the first significant historian of Birmingham, England. A Unitarian nonconformist born in Derby, he went to school when five years old. Aged seven years he was employed in a Derby Silk Mill on a seven year apprenticeship. In 1737 he took a second apprenticeship as a stocking maker in Nottingham under his uncle. In 1746, after his uncle had died, he taught himself bookbinding, and three years later opened a shop in Southwell. This was not successful and he moved to Birmingham in 1750 and opened a small bookshop. He married Sarah Cock from Aston-on-Trent in 1755 and they had three sons and a daughter, Catherine Hutton (1756-1846), who became a writer. In 1756 he opened a paper warehouse the first in Birmingham which became profitable. He built a country house on Bennetts Hill in Washwood Heath, and bought a house in High Street. He published History of Birmingham in 1782 and was also elected as Fellow of the Antiquarian Society of Scotland (F. A. S. S.). He was elected overseer of the poor, and in 1787, to the Court of Requests, a small claims court for nineteen years, handling over 100,000 claims. Both his houses were destroyed in the Birmingham Riots in 1791 leading to his historical account in Narrative of the riots. He managed to recover 5,390 in a claim for damages against the town. He is generally held to be the first person in modern times to walk the entire length of Hadrian's Wall, producing an account of his 1801 journey in The History of the Roman Wall. Walking 600 miles from his Birmingham home, along the wall, and back home again, he wrote in the preface, "I have given a short sketch of my approach to this famous Bulwark; have described it as it appears in the present day, and stated my return. Perhaps, I am the first man that ever traveled the whole length of this Wall, and probably the last that will ever attempt it... ".
Elliott O'Donnell (February 27, 1872 - May 8, 1965) was an Irish author known primarily for his books about ghosts. He claimed to have seen a ghost, described as an elemental figured covered with spots, when he was five years old. He also claimed to have been strangled by a mysterious phantom in Dublin. He claimed descent from Irish chieftains of ancient times, including Niall of the Nine Hostages (the King Arthur of Irish folklore) and Red Hugh, who fought the English in the sixteenth century. O'Donnell was educated at Clifton College, England, and Queen's Service Academy, Dublin, Ireland. In later life he became a ghost hunter, but first he traveled in America, working on a range in Oregon and becoming a policeman during the Chicago Railway Strike of 1894. Returning to England, he worked as a schoolmaster and trained for the theater. He served in the British army in World War I, and later acted on stage and in movies. His first book, written in his spare time, was a psychic thriller titled For Satan's Sake (1904). From this point onward, he became a writer. He wrote several popular novels but specialized in what were claimed as true stories of ghosts and hauntings. These were immensely popular, but his flamboyant style and amazing stories suggest that he embroidered fact with a romantic flair for fiction. As he became known as an authority on the supernatural, he was called upon as a ghost hunter. He also lectured and broadcast (radio and television) on the paranormal in Britain and the United States. In addition to his more than 50 books, he wrote scores of articles and stories for national newspapers and magazines. He claimed "I have investigated, sometimes alone, and sometimes with other people and the press, many cases of reputed hauntings. I believe in ghosts but am not a spiritualist. " In recent times his work has come into question by Scottish author Graeme Milne.
August Blanche (September 17, 1811 November 30, 1868) was a Swedish journalist, novelist, and a Socialist statesman. August Theodor Blanche was born in Stockholm, Sweden, the illegitimate child of a servant girl and a priest. His mother eventually married Johan Jacob Blanck, a blacksmith and the boy took his stepfather's name. A brilliant student, in 1838 he obtained a law degree and for a time, worked as a civil servant until taking up journalism. In the early 1840s, he began writing plays for the theater as well as translating plays from foreign languages into Swedish. By the middle of the decade, he was writing novels and short stories of intrigue, all of which met with a great deal of success. An activist, in 1859 Blanche was elected to the Swedish Parliament where he served until 1866. He died of a heart attack two years later while participating in a public parade in Stockholm. August Blanche is interred in the Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm.
