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.
Models
Janice Dickinson is an American model, television personality, and author best known for her prominent 1970s and 1980s fashion career and her later reality-TV work. She is associated with the rise of the modern supermodel because of her visibility in fashion, her forceful public persona, and her long-running
American writers
Helen Adam (1909–1993) was a Scottish-American poet, performer, and collage artist known for reviving traditional ballad forms in poems about witches, murder, desire, ghosts, and dangerous women. She was part of the wider San Francisco Renaissance and active in the Beat-era literary scene, but she was not
Photography
Gerard Malanga is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, and performer whose early work at Andy Warhol’s Factory made him a visible figure in 1960s Pop art and the Velvet Underground’s performance world. At the Factory, he helped produce screen prints, appeared in films, and danced in the Exploding
American actors
Gardner McKay was the actor who became widely known as Adam Troy, the skipper of the schooner Tiki on ABC's Adventures in Paradise, and later built a serious second career as a playwright and novelist. The role made him a recognizable 1960s television star and fixed him in
American actors
Fred Gwynne was an American actor, author, and illustrator whose career ran from the early 1950s until his death in 1993. He is best known as Herman Munster, the gentle, towering father in *The Munsters*, but he also gave memorable later performances in *Pet Sematary* and *My Cousin Vinny* and
Comics
Frank Miller is the American comics writer and artist behind landmark runs on Daredevil and Batman, as well as Sin City and 300. His comics are known for noir crime stories, hard-edged narration, bold stylized art, and superhero stories that question the people beneath the costumes. When comics readers
Independent cinema
Cookie Mueller was a Baltimore-born actress, writer, columnist, and downtown New York cultural figure whose work joined John Waters’s underground films with candid autobiographical prose. She became a cult-screen presence in Waters’s early Baltimore movies and later an important queer literary voice through her columns and
American actors
Burt Young was the American actor who played Paulie Pennino, Rocky Balboa’s rough-edged brother-in-law and longtime friend, in six Rocky films. His Oscar-nominated performance made Paulie one of the series’ defining supporting characters, but Young’s career also included crime dramas, comedies, television, painting, and
American writers
Brian Buccellato is an American comics writer and former colorist. He is the creator credited on books such as The Flash, Injustice: Gods Among Us, and Chicken Devil, although his role changes from project to project: he may be the writer, a co-writer, the colorist, or more than one
American actors
Adah Isaacs Menken was a nineteenth-century American actress, poet, journalist, and self-publicist whose performance in *Mazeppa* made her internationally famous. In 1861, she played a male prisoner bound to a horse in a flesh-colored costume that created the appearance of exposed flesh, turning a melodramatic scene into
American actors
Abbi Jacobson is an actor, comedian, writer, producer and illustrator best known for co-creating and starring in *Broad City* and for co-creating and leading Amazon Prime Video’s *A League of Their Own*. She first broke through with Ilana Glazer, turning their independent *Broad City* web series into
Indigenous literature
Thomas King is the Canadian-American novelist, essayist, broadcaster, and storyteller whose work appears frequently on literature and Indigenous studies reading lists. Of Cherokee and Greek descent, he writes fiction and nonfiction about Indigenous life, colonial history, public myths, and the consequences of the stories societies repeat. This is not