Biographies of American writers, novelists, and screenwriters, including authors whose books became films and TV series. Explore their early lives, major works, and literary careers.
American writers
Adele Morales was an American visual artist, writer, and Jack Kerouac’s second wife. She is best known for *The Beat Generation*, a firsthand memoir of her life with Kerouac and the people around the early Beat scene. Her book looks beyond the familiar Beat image of travel and literary
American actors
Viggo Mortensen is the Danish-American actor best known as Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but that role is only one part of a wide-ranging career. He is also a filmmaker, writer, photographer, musician, and publisher, with work that moves from fantasy and
Children's literature
Shel Silverstein was an American children’s author, poet, illustrator, cartoonist, songwriter, and playwright whose work ranges from playful poems to unsettling stories and adult material. He wrote classics such as *Where the Sidewalk Ends* and *The Giving Tree*, but not everything published under his name is for children. If
American writers
Paul Bowles (1910–1999) was an American novelist, short-story writer, translator, and accomplished modernist composer who spent much of his life in Tangier. He is best known for *The Sheltering Sky* (1949), a disturbing novel about American travelers in North Africa, but his fiction, music, travel writing, and work
American writers
Mason Williams is the American guitarist, composer, writer, and visual artist behind the 1968 instrumental hit “Classical Gas.” The song made him widely known, but his career also includes television comedy writing, live and recorded music, photography, and conceptual art. This is the Mason Williams associated with “Classical Gas,” not
Rock music
Henry Rollins is an American performer and writer best known as Black Flag’s vocalist from 1981 until the band broke up in 1986, a period that helped define hardcore punk. Beyond Black Flag, he has built long-running careers in spoken word, writing, independent publishing, radio, interviewing, acting, and
Poetry
George Watsky, commonly known as Watsky, is an American rapper, spoken-word poet, writer, and live performer from San Francisco. He first reached a wide online audience through energetic poetry and rap videos, then turned that visibility into independent hip-hop albums, books, and touring performances. A fast verse or
American writers
Annie Lanzillotto is a Bronx-based writer and multidisciplinary artist whose work moves among poetry, prose, performance, and theater. She writes about the Bronx, Italian American family history, working-class life, memory, loss, queer identity, and the ways people carry places with them. Her books stand on their own, but
Jazz
ruth weiss (1928–2020) was the German-born American Beat poet, performance artist, and filmmaker who styled her name in lowercase. A central figure in Beat-era San Francisco, she made poetry for the page but also for breath, rhythm, jazz accompaniment, the stage, and film. Her work offers a
American filmmakers
Willy Conley is a Deaf American playwright, filmmaker, performer, visual artist, and educator whose work places American Sign Language (ASL) and visual expression at the center of theatre. Rather than adding ASL to a conventional spoken-word script, he builds meaning through signing, movement, images, space, rhythm, projected media, and
American writers
Walt Curtis was a Portland poet, novelist, diarist, and countercultural literary figure whose writing drew on daily city life with unusual candor. Gus Van Sant adapted Curtis’s Mala Noche into the 1985 film, but the film is only one part of Curtis’s work in poetry, prose, journals, and
American writers
Vahe Berberian is an Armenian-American writer, actor, director, and visual artist whose work includes theater, books, screen projects, and painting. He is widely known for Armenian-language stage performances and sharply observed solo work that finds humor and feeling in family life, diaspora experience, language, and changing traditions. If