Authors From Chicago

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961) was an American author. He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho. He began his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in Sun Also Rises. Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms, the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter.

Saul Bellow

Born in Quebec in 1915, Bellow was raised in Chicago. He attended the University of Chicago, received his Bachelor's degree from Northwestern University in 1937, with honors in sociology and anthropology.

Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man, was published in 1944, and his second, The Victim, in 1947. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent two years in Paris and traveling in Europe, where he began The Adventures of Augie March, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1954.

He has taught at Bard College, Princeton University, and the University of Minnesota, and is a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Ray Bradbury

Born on August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. Bradbury graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947.

Ray Bradbury's work has been included in four Best American Short Story collections. He has been awarded the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, the PEN Center USA West Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. In November 2000, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was conferred upon Mr. Bradbury at the 2000 National Book Awards Ceremony in New York City.

On his 80th birthday in August 2000, Bradbury said, "The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me. The feeling I have every day is very much the same as it was when I was twelve. In any event, here I am, eighty years old, feeling no different, full of a great sense of joy, and glad for the long life that has been allowed me. I have good plans for the next ten or twenty years, and I hope you'll come along."

John Dos Passos

Dos Passos was born in Chicago in 1896. His mother was Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison. Alan Wald has argued: "Dos Passos spent his early years traveling semi-clandestinely about the United States and abroad with his mother. It was to these unusual circumstances of his birth and childhood that he would later attribute his lifelong sense of rootlessness."

Eventually the family settled in Virginia and he traveled with a private tutor on a six-month tour of France, England, Italy, Greece, and the Middle East to study classical art, architecture, and literature.
John Dos Passos died in Baltimore, Maryland, on 28th September, 1970.

Stuart Dybek

Born in Chicago Dybek was raised in Chicago's Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods in the 1950s and early 1960s. He writes about these neighborhoods and the ethnic shift that occurred when they went from being populated with Poles Czechs toward the primarily Hispanic areas of the city that still remain to this day.

Dybek earned his MA in literature from Loyola University in Chicago. He currently teaches at Northwestern University after more than 30 years teaching at Western Michigan University, where he remains an Adjunct Professor of English and a member of the permanent faculty of the renowned Prague Summer Program.