Great Writers

James Ellroy was born on 4 March 1948 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for L.A. Confidential (1997), Street Kings (2008) and The Black Dahlia (2006).

Elmore Leonard was born on 11 October 1925 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for Out of Sight (1998), Justified (2010) and Get Shorty (1995). He was married to Christine Kent, Joan Shepard and Beverly Claire Cline. He died on 20 August 2013 in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, USA.

Bret Easton Ellis was born on 7 March 1964 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is a writer and director, known for American Psycho (2000), Less Than Zero (1987) and The Canyons (2013).

A graduate of Mississippi State University and Ole Miss Law School, John Grisham obtained his law degree in 1981 and practiced law for about 10 years, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigation. He was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1983 and served until 1990. He gave up his law practice to write full-time. He began writing in 1984, and three years later finished his first novel, "A Time To Kill", published by Wynwood Press in June 1988. He is the best-selling author of "A Time to Kill", "The Firm", "The Pelican Brief" and "The Client". He lives with his wife and their two children on a farm in Oxford, Mississippi.

Andrew Kevin Walker was born on 14 August 1964 in Altoona, Pennsylvania, USA. He is a writer and actor, known for The Killer (2023), Se7en (1995) and Metalocalypse: Army of the Doomstar (2023).

Born in 1947 in Chicago, he was educated at Goddard College, in Vermont, and studied drama at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, before returning to Chicago and establishing the St Nicholas Theatre Company in 1972. He remained their resident writer for four years. The first of his plays to secure international recognition was 'Sexual Perversity in Chicago' (1974) and 'American Buffalo' (1975). The latter was eventually performed by Al Pacino on Broadway and London's West End earning him an 'Award Obie' when it transferred from Chicago to New York. His play 'Glengarry Glen Ross' won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. His other plays include 'A Life in the Theatre' (1977). 'Edmond' (1982). 'The Shawl' (1985) and 'Speed the Plow' (1988). The rejection of his screen adaption of 'Sexual Perversity in Chicago' was completely rewritten and released as 'About Last Night in 1986. He soon attracted wide acclaim as a screenwriter when his version of 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' (1981) was made by Bob Rafelson and his original screenplay for 'The Verdict (1982) was nominated for an Oscar. Subsequent screenplays include 'The Untouchables' (1987), 'We're No Angels' (1990), 'Glengarry Glen Ross' (1992). He then wrote and directed 'House of Games' (1987), 'Things Change' (1988) and 'Homicide' (1991). He's also published two collections of essays 'Writing in Restaurants' (1986) and Some Freaks' (1989). In 1987, he conducted a series of classes at Columbia University Film School which were put into print as 'On Directing Film' (1992).

Avid reader Charlie Kaufman wrote plays and made short films as a young student. He moved from Massapequa, New York to West Hartford, Connecticut in 1972 where he attended high school. As a comedic actor, he performed in school plays and, after graduation, he enrolled at Boston University but soon transferred NYU to study film. Charlie worked in the circulation department of the Star Tribune, in Minneapolis, in the late 1980s and moved to Los Angeles in 1991, where he was hired to write for the TV sitcom Get a Life (1990). He went on to write comedy sketches and a variety of TV show episodes. Between writing assignments, he wrote the inventive screenplay Being John Malkovich (1999), which created Hollywood interest and the attention of producer Steve Golin. Charlie works at home in Pasadena, California, where he lives with his wife Denise and children.

Joseph Wambaugh was born on 22 January 1937 in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Black Marble (1980), Police Story (1973) and The New Centurions (1972). He was married to Lawana Dee Allsup. He died on 28 February 2025 in Rancho Mirage, California, USA.

David Ayer is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. David Ayer was born in Champaign, Illinois and grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota, and Bethesda, Maryland, where he was kicked out of his house by his parents as a teenager. Ayer then lived with his cousin in Los Angeles, California, where his experiences in South Central Los Angeles became the inspiration for many of his films. Ayer then enlisted in the United States Navy as a submariner.

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, named David Poe Jr., and his mother, named Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were touring actors. Both parents died in 1811, and Poe became an orphan before he was 3 years old. He was adopted by John Allan, a tobacco merchant in Richmond, Virginia, and was sent to a boarding school in London, England. He later attended the University of Virginia for one year, but dropped out and ran up massive gambling debts after spending all of his tuition money. John Allan broke off Poe's engagement to his fiancée Sarah Royster. Poe was heartbroken, traumatized, and broke. He had no way out and enlisted in the army in May of 1827. At the same time Poe published his first book, "Tamerlane and Other Poems" (1827). In 1829, he became a West Point cadet, but was dismissed after 6 months for disobedience. By that time he published "Al Aaraf" (1929) and "Poems by Edgar A. Poe" (1831), with the funds contributed by his fellow cadets. His early poetry, though written in the manner of Lord Byron, already shows the musical effects of his verses.

Poe moved in with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, and her teenage daughter, Virginia Eliza Clemm, whom he married before she was 14 years old. He earned respect as a critic and writer. In his essays "The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe formulated important literary theories. But his career suffered from his compulsive behavior and from alcoholism. He did produce, however, a constant flow of highly musical poems, of which "The Raven" (1845) and "The Bells" (1849) are the finest examples. Among his masterful short stories are "Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House of Usher"(1839) and "The Masque of the Red Death". Following his own theory of creating "a certain unique or single effect", Poe invented the genre of the detective story. His works: "The Murder in the Rue Morgue" (1841) is probably the first detective story ever published.

Just when his life began to settle, Poe was devastated by the death of his wife Virginia in 1847. Two years later he returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with his former fiancée, Sarah Royster, who, by that time, was a widow. But shortly after their happy reconciliation he was found unconscious on a street in Baltimore. Poe was taken to the Washington College Hospital where Doctor John Moran diagnosed "lesions on the brain" (the Doctor believed Poe was mugged). He died 4 days later, briefly coming in and out of consciousness, just to whisper his last words, "Lord, help my poor soul." The real cause of his death is still unknown and his death certificate has disappeared. Poe's critic and personal enemy, named Rufus Griswold, published an insulting obituary; later he visited Poe's home and took away all of the writer's manuscripts (which he never returned), and published his "Memoir" of Poe, in which he forged a madman image of the writer.

The name of the woman in Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" was used by Vladimir Nabokov in 'Lolita' as the name for Humbert's first love, Annabelle Leigh. Nabokov also used in 'Lolita' some phrases borrowed from the poem of Edgar Allan Poe. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was set to music by Claude Debussy as an opera. Sergei Rachmaninoff created a musical tribute to Poe by making his favorite poem "The Bells" into the eponymous Choral Symphony.

Gérard Brach was born on 23 July 1927 in Montrouge, Hauts-de-Seine, France. He was a writer and director, known for Jean de Florette (1986), The Name of the Rose (1986) and Frantic (1988). He died on 9 September 2006 in Paris, France.

Although his name is often linked to that of the "movie brat" generation (Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, etc.) Paul Schrader's background couldn't have been more different than theirs. His strict Calvinist parents refused to allow him to see a film until he was 18. Although he more than made up for lost time when studying at Calvin College, Columbia University and UCLA's graduate film program, his influences were far removed from those of his contemporaries--Robert Bresson, Yasujirô Ozu and Carl Theodor Dreyer (about whom he wrote a book, "Transcendental Style in Film") rather than Saturday-morning serials. After a period as a film critic (and protégé of Pauline Kael), he began writing screenplays, hitting the jackpot when he and his brother, Leonard Schrader (a Japanese expert), were paid the then-record sum of $325,000, thus establishing his reputation as one of Hollywood's top screenwriters, which was consolidated when Martin Scorsese filmed Schrader's script Taxi Driver (1976), written in the early 1970s during a bout of drinking and depression. The success of the film allowed Schrader to start directing his own films, which have been notable for their willingness to take stylistic and thematic risks while still working squarely within the Hollywood system. The most original of his films (which he and many others regard as his best) was the Japanese co-production Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985).

Dennis Lehane was born on 4 August 1965 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for The Drop (2014), Mystic River (2003) and Live by Night (2016). He was previously married to Dr. Angela Mililani (Lieb) Bernardo and Sheila Fort Lawn.

Henry Miller was born on 26 December 1891 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Reds (1981), Quiet Days in Clichy (1970) and Quiet Days in Clichy (1990). He was married to Hoki Tokuda, Evelyn Byrd (Keven) McClure, Janina Martha Lepska, June Edith Smith and Beatrice Sylvas Wickens. He died on 7 June 1980 in Pacific Palisades, California, USA.

Charles Bukowski, the American poet, short-story writer, and novelist, was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, Jr. in Andernach, Germany on August 1920. He was the son of Henry Bukowski, a US soldier who was part of the post-World War I occupation force, and Katharina Fett, a German woman. His father, his wife and young "Henry Charles" returned to the United States in 1922, settling in Los Angeles, California, the setting of much of "Hank" Bukowski's oeuvre. With Raymond Chandler, Bukowski is the great chronicler of the City of Angels, and after John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers, who influenced Bukowski's poetry, he arguably is the most important and certainly one of the most influential writers produced by the Golden state.

Bukowski's childhood was marred by a violent father, who regularly beat him with a razor strop until his teen years, and then by the Great Depression. When Bukowski went through adolescence, he developed an awful case of acne vulgaris which disfigured his face and made him feel like an outsider. His father frequently was out of work during the Depression, and he took out his pain and anxiety on his son. The younger Bukowski took to drink at a young age, and became a rather listless underachiever as a means of rebellion against not only his father, but against society in general, the society his father wanted him to become a productive member of. The young Bukowski could care less.

During his school years, Bukowski read widely, and he entered Los Angeles City College after graduating from high school to study journalism and literature with the idea of becoming a writer. He left home after his father read some of his stories and went berserk, destroying his output and throwing his possessions out onto the lawn, a lawn that the young Bukowski had to mow weekly and would be beaten for if the grass wasn't perfectly cut. Bukowski left City College after a year and went on the bum, traveling to Atlanta, where he lived in a shack and subsisted on candy bars. He would continue to return to his parents' house when he was busted flat and had nowhere else to go.

At City College, Bukwoski briefly flirted with a pathetic, ad hoc, pro-fascist student group. Proud of being a German, he did not feel inclined to go to war against Hitler's Germany. When America entered World War II, Bukowski resisted entreaties from his friends and father to join the service. He began living the life of a wandering hobo and a bum, frequently living on skid row as he worked his way through a meaningless series of jobs in L.A. and other cities across the U.S. He wound up in New York City during the war after his short story, 'Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,' was accepted by "Story" magazine. He disliked New York and soon decamped for more hospitable climes. He was content to go to public libraries and read -- he discovered the L.A. writer John Fante, whom heavily influenced his own work and whom he would champion when he became famous -- and loaf.

The story, published in "Story" in 1944, was the highlight of the first part of his writing career. He returned to Los Angeles and became a Bottle Baby in his mid-twenties, forsaking the typewriter for John Barleycorn and Janet Cooney Baker, an alcoholic ten years his senior who became his lover, off and on, for the the next decade. They would shack up in a series of skid row rooms until the money and the booze would run out, and Jane would hurt the turf. She was a tortured soul who could match Bukowski drink for drink, and she was the love of his life. They would drift apart in the mid-1950s until coming together again at the beginning of a new decade, before she drank herself to death in 1962.

Bukowski got a temporary Christmas job at the Post Office in 1952, and stuck with his job as a mail carrier for three years. In 1955, he was hospitalized in a charity ward with a bleeding ulcer that nearly killed him. He was told never to drink again, but he fell off the water wagon the day he got out of the hospital and never regretted it.

After recovering from his brush with death -- he would have died if an idealistic doctor hadn't demanded from the nurses that had left Bukowski to die that they give him a massive blood transfusion -- he began to write again: poetry. Bukowski developed into one of the most original and influential poets of the post-War era, though he was never anthologized in the United States (though those that were influenced by him were). Bukwoski, who chronicled the low-life that he lived, never gained any critical respect in America, either in the journals or in academia.

Barbara Frye, a woman born to wealth who published the small poetry magazine "Harlequin," began to publish Bukowski. She sent a letter to him saying she feared no one would marry her because of a congenital conformity essentially leaving her with no neck. Bukowski, who had never met her, wrote back that he would marry her, and he did. The marriage lasted two years. In 1958, he went back to work for the Post Office, this time as a mail sorting clerk, a job he would hold for almost a dozen hellish years.

His first collection of poetry, "Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail" was published as a chapbook in 1959 in a run of 200 copies. The influence of Jeffers is very strong in the early work. One can also detect W.H. Auden, although Bukowski never mentioned him, and he was phlegmatic whereas Auden was dry. But that same sense of an outsider looking in critically at his society was there.

Bukowski's poetry, like all his writing, was essentially autobiographical and rooted in clinical detail rather than metaphor. The poems detailed the desperate lives of men on the verge -- of suicide, madness, a mental breakdown, an economic bust-out, another broken relationship -- whose saving grace was endurance. The relationship between male and female was something out of Thomas Hobbes, and while Bukowski's life certainly wasn't short, one will find in the poetry and prose much that is brutish.

Jon Edgar Webb, a former swindler who became a littérateur with his "The Outsider" magazine, became enamored of Bukowski's work in the early 1960s. Webb, who had published the work of Lawrence Ferlenghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs, published Bukowski, then dedicated an issue of his magazine to Buk was "Outsider of the Year," and eventually decided to publish, with his own bespoke hand press, a collection of Bukowski's poetry.

Bukowski began to establish a reputation in the small magazines that proliferated with the "mimeograph revolution" of the late 1960s, micro-circulation "magazines" run off on mimeograph and Gestetner machines. Bukowski began moving away from a more traditional, introspection poetry to more expressionistic, free-form "verse," and began dabbling in the short story, a form he became a master of. He also began a weekly column for an underground Los Angeles newspaper, "Open City," called "Notes of a Dirty Old Man." The texts of his column were collected in a collection of the same title published by Ferlenghetti's City Lights press in 1969. (City Lights also would publish his first book of short stories, entitled "Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness," in 1972).

In the column, Bukowski would introduce ideas, vignettes and stories, many of which would be further developed into the short stories that helped make his reputation. The Bukowski of the mid- to late- 1960s and 1970s became one of the greatest short story writers that America has produced, and his reputation grew steadily in Europe. (Though a literary lion on the West Coast, Buk never was much appreciated in the New York City that he had spurned which was, after all, the arbiter of culture. Since he didn't exist in their ken, he didn't exist at all, with the surprising result for Europeans that the most popular American writer in Europe was little known by Americans.)

There was envy as Bukowski became increasingly popular. Aside from the master of kitsch Rod McKuen, Bukowski was probably the best selling poet America produced after World War II. By the end of the 1970s, he was the most popular American writer in Germany and also had a huge reputation in France and other parts of Europe. Yet, he remained virtually unknown in the United States, except among the core of the Bukowski cult who faithfully bought his books.

Bukowski's success as a writer in the 1970s can be attributed to the patronage of John Martin, a book collector and chap book publisher who offered to subsidize Bukowski to the tune of $100 a month for life. Bukowski took him up on the offer, quit his job at the Post Office in 1969, and set out to be a writer who made his living by the typewriter alone (and an occasional poetry reading). Martin established his Black Sparrow Press to print Bukowski, and Bukowski proceeded to begin his first novel while continuing to write poetry and short stories. The first novel, "Post Office," was published by Black Sparrow in 1971. The Bukowski phenomenon began to gain momentum.

Around the time he quit the Post Office, Bukowski took up with the poet and sculptress Linda King, who was 20 years his junior. They began a tumultuous relationship juiced in equal parts with sadism and masochism that extended into the mid-1970s. In his 1978 autobiographical novel "Women," Bukowski writes about how his alter ego, "Henry Chinaski," had not had a woman in four years. Now, as Bukowski became a literary phenomenon in the small/alternative press world, he became a literary if not literal Don Juan, bedding down his legions of women fans who flocked to his apartment on DeLongre Avenue in the sleaziest part of Hollywood. (It was at this time that Bukowski was friends with a dirty book store manager who was the father of Leonardo DiCaprio.)

Bukowski's alter ego in his novels, Chinaski (who significantly shares Bukowski's real first name, the name he went by; he used his middle name "Charles" for his poetry as it seemed more literary, and possibly to deny his father, who shared the same Christian name), shares an affinity with with the underground denizens of Feodor Dostoyevsky's work and the protagonists of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novels "Journey to the End of Night" and "Death on the Installment Plan." Celine arguably is the largest influence on Bukowski's prose, aside from Hemingway (who influenced Bukowski's entire generation) and Fante. Like Celine, in World War II, Bukowski flirted with fascism (though Bukowski never descended into the anti-semitism of Celine or any other type of racism in his work); like Celine, he despised America and the brand of capitalism once known as "Fordism," assembly line industrialism and the petty consumer society Bukowski found abominable and which he tried to escape.

Chinaski is a hard-drinking, would-be womanizer who is ready to duke it out with the bums, crooks and assorted low-lives he lives and drinks amongst, though occasionally he visits high society through the ministrations of a woman. Like Bukowski himself, he will accept company but prefers to be alone to drink and listen to classical music on the radio: Beethoven, Mozart, and Mahler among others.

Chinaski was introduced in the autobiographical short-story "Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beats," his first published short story, printed in chap book form in 1965. Chinaski's life is chronicled in Bukowski's novels "Post Office" (1971), "Factotum" (1975), "Women" (1978), and "Ham on Rye" (1982). Bukowski is not naturally gifted as a novelist, and while "Women" is superb and the very short "Post Office" is highly readable, "Factotum" and "Ham on Rye" are not up to the standards of Bukowski's short stories.

As his social situation evolved, Bukowski's works broadened from tales of low-lives and bums and losers; he added to his repertoire meditative and sarcastic accounts of his new life. A constant in his work became poems and short stories about the race track, to which he had been introduced by Jane back in the 1950s. The race track as metaphor suited Bukowski as it represented something more than luck or chance. A horse player had to work at it to be any good and beat the odds, and the odds were definitely stacked against the crowd as the track took its vig right off the top, when it wasn't outright and forthrightly fixing the race.

Going with the crowd was to be avoided in order to improve one's odds, and the track, the establishment, was out to f--- the bettor, but spiritual kin to Camus' Sissyphus, the bettor on nags had to have the wit to at least get the stone to the crown of the hill and avoid getting crushed as it courses its way back. The bettor was hip to the fact that the rock always fell back and would always fall back, but a good living or at least survival could be had by beating the track, beating the establishment, if the bettor knew how to play the horses. It was all a matter of developing his own system, and standing aloof from the crowd, whose dumb, manipulated enthusiasms skewed the odds. And knowing when to change to a new system, to keep ahead of the track, and the crowd. Bukowski was the antithesis of Carl Sandburg and Sandburg's "The People."

Bukowski was and would remain a literary outsider. In 1973, Taylor Hackford presented Bukowski to a wider audience via an award-winning documentary for Los Angeles public television station KCET. "Bukowski" won the San Francisco Film Festival's Silver Reel Award after being voted the best cultural film on public TV. After his relationship with Linda King petered out, Bukowski met Linda Lee Beighle, a health food restaurateur twenty-five years his junior in 1976. They became a couple and Bukowski's life became more balanced. With a stable relationship and steady royalties in the low six-figure range, Bukowski became a home owner, albeit in a middle class neighborhood in San Pedro. He now had a swimming pool, a hot tub, and drove a black BMW he paid cash for to the track. He palled around with Sean Penn and U2 dedicated a song to him at a Los Angeles concert.

The Muse, whom Buk bet on as faithfully as he did the ponies, left him when it came to the short story sometime in the 1980s. The poetry always ran through his head and down into his fingers, but it became less artful, though the powerful voice remained. Buk wrote a screenplay for Barbet Schroeder, which was made into the movie Barfly (1987), and Bukowski became known in the United States at last. He refused to appear on The Tonight Show (1962) with Johnny Carson, but let "People" magazine interview him as in his reasoning, it would be read by normal people at the supermarket checkout lines. It was the "Crowd" he despised but honored in his own way by refusing to be part of the "better" part of society that kept them down.

Always immensely prolific when it came to his poetry, and aided by a personal computer in the 1980s, Bukowski generated so much material that originals are still being published 10 years after his death. He finished his last novel, an L.A./Chandler/private detective/noir spoof called "Pulp" shortly before he lost his battle with leukemia; it, like the final poetry collection published in his lifetime, "The Last Night of the Earth Poems," is full of intimations of mortality, and of course, his mordant humor.

On March 9, 1994, in his native Los Angeles, the man Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre called America's "greatest poet" died. In his short story collection "Hot Water Music," Bukwoski wrote, "There are so many," she said, "who go by the name of poet. But they have no training, no feeling for their craft. The savages have taken over the castle. There's no workmanship, no care, simply a demand to be accepted." The remarkable endurance of the man who never asked for acceptance, the endurance that took him nearly forty years beyond the near-death his drinking and despair had brought him in 1955, finally gave out, and not to the booze and the carousing and anomie, but to a cancer. Many of his fans thought it was remarkable that the "Dirty Old Man" had made it to 74, but it was a brave front: they greatly mourned the passing of their favorite writer, a man that could be read by anyone of any class or educational background.

His friend, Sean Penn, dedicated his film The Crossing Guard (1995) to Bukowski, with the words felt by many who had loved him: "Hank, I still miss you."

We still do.

Richard Price was born on 12 October 1949 in The Bronx, New York, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Ransom (1996), Sea of Love (1989) and The Color of Money (1986). He was previously married to Judith Hudson.

Laura Albert was born on 2 November 1965 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA. She is a writer and producer, known for Elephant (2003), The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004) and Radiance (2014).

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on 11 November 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Back to School (1986), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) and General Electric Theater (1953). He was married to Jill Krementz and Jane Marie Cox. He died on 11 April 2007 in New York City, New York, USA.

William S. Burroughs, one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation (the other two being his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. He grew up in patrician surroundings and attended private school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, chosen due to the climate as he suffered from sinus trouble (the school was later used to house the Manhattan Project during World War II)). Burroughs took his undergraduate degree at Harvard College (Class of 1936) but rebelled inwardly against the life that the upper-class Harvard man was supposed to lead during the pre-war period (outwardly he dressed the part of a patrician, with three-piece suit, necktie, black homburg and chesterfield overcoat being his standard wardrobe. His political options generally were also of his class, i.e., right-wing).

Planning to become a physician, Burroughs moved to Germany to study medicine. The plight of the Jews under the Nazis was desperate, and in 1937 Burroughs agreed to marry Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a German Jewish woman, so she could leave Germany and eventually become a U.S. citizen. The two remained friends for many years after they moved back to the U.S., meeting often for lunch when Burroughs eventually settled in New York City in the early 1940s. They never lived together, and Burroughs formally divorced her in 1946 so he could marry his second wife, Joan.

Perhaps it was his exposure to National Socialism in Adolf Hitler's Germany that raised Burroughs' interest in his lifelong fascination: control mechanisms used by the state against its citizens. Burroughs left Germany for the United States without completing his studies, bringing along Ilse.

A homosexual in an extremely homophobic age, back in the U.S. he drifted from job to job while continuing his education as an autodidact. He lived in Chicago, where he was an exterminator, which he claimed was the best job he ever had. While in Chicago he met the young Lucien Carr (later to be the father of best-selling novelist Caleb Carr, author of "The Alienist") and David Kammerer. Kammerer was a homosexual 14 years Carr's senior who had been his private school tutor and had stalked Carr obsessively afterward, following him from city to city. While Carr was disturbed by Kammerer's behavior, he was also immature and flattered by the attention, a moth attracted to the flame. When the moth got singed, he would fly away. Carr dropped out of the University of Chicago to attend Columbia in New York in order to escape Kammerer, and when Kammerer inevitably followed, Burroughs tagged along.

Through Carr, Burroughs made the connections that would change his life: Columbia drop-out Kerouac, then in the Merchant Marine, and Columbia undergrad Ginsberg, then studying pre-law with the idea of becoming a labor lawyer. Intrigued by what he heard from Carr and Kammerer of Kerouac, he dropped in to see him at the apartment of Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Kerouac Parker, who shared the flat with Burroughs' future wife Joan.

Before the momentous meet-up, Burroughs had begun experimenting with morphine when he acquired a stash of the drug to sell, and he subsequently became hooked. Long fascinated by "low lifes" and the vitality they retained while the rest of "normal" Americans seemed wan and dessicated (this was the Great Depression, after all), Burroughs began conducting field "research" into New York's demimonde, aided and abetted by Herbert Huncke, a junkie and thief whom Burroughs befriended and let share his apartment in lower Manhattan. With Huncke playing Virgil to his Dante, Burroughs met the "low-lifes" who would become part of his fiction as he journeyed through the rings of hell that was World War II New York. "Sailor", who showed up as a character in Naked Lunch (1991), was a thief and drug dealer who once borrowed Burroughs' pistol and went out and shot a storekeeper to death (Sailor later hanged himself in jail after being arrested for an unrelated crime. He was known as an informer and had turned in a rival narcotics dealer--he was facing beatings, torture and possibly murder when he decided to take his own life). Soon Burroughs began to deal drugs in earnest in order to keep up with his own habit and fence merchandise himself, becoming part of a den of thieves that spilled over into Edie and Joan's apartment. The patrician Burroughs, with his high standards, prided himself on giving the best "cut" of heroin available, with personal home delivery to boot.

Jack Kerouac first urged Burroughs to write. Burroughs spent a lot of time at the apartment Kerouac shared with Edie and Joan. He particularly liked to psychoanalyze Kerouac and Ginsburg, and enjoyed having them act out scenarios, little dramas in which they would play roles: Burroughs an old queen/con artist, Ginsburg her pimp, and Kerouac as the gullible young American, mouth agape in a foreign land, ripe for the plucking. Their imaginations were quite fertile, and it fed Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing. Burroughs had never really had any inclination to write until he met Kerouac, but he and Jack collaborated on a mystery novel they eventually entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," after the last sentence of a BBC-Radio report on a fire at the London Zoo. Each wrote alternating chapters, and after the book was complete, the manuscript was passed around among New York publishers. There were no takers, and for the time, Burroughs lost interest in writing.

In 1945 Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death during a stroll along the bank of the Hudson River below Morningside Heights that was a notorious gay cruising area. After holding the dying man in his arms, Carr weighted down the body of his former tutor with rocks and disposed of it in the Hudson. In bloodied clothes, Carr sought out Burroughs, soliciting advice. Ignoring the elder's wise counsel to get a good lawyer and turn himself in, Carr then went to see Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses. Both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested (Burroughs as a material witness; Kerouac as an accessory after the fact), but eventually both were released without being prosecuted. Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent off to the Elmira Reformatory, where he was incarcerated for two years.

New York City became increasingly untenable as Burroughs became known to the police, so -- after he and Joan married -- they moved to Louisiana to become farmers. Their crop was marijuana, and eventually they moved on to Mexico, where living was cheaper and drugs easier to come by (and there was less hassle from police). In 1951, at a party in which they both were drunk, an exhibitionistic Burroughs shot and killed Joan in an alleged accident where he reportedly attempted to mimic the "apple on the son's head" scene from "William Tell". As the story is told, Joan put a glass of liquor on top of her head after Burroughs beseeched her to perform their William Tell trick for the guests. There had never been a William Tell trick, Burroughs later ruefully admitted, and Joan wound up with a .32 ACP slug in her head. Accounts of the death, which the Mexican police ruled a misadventure caused by a mistake in judgment, have never been entirely satisfactory. Like Lucien Carr before him, Burroughs may have consciously or subconsciously rid himself of a lover whom he no longer had any use for, or was piqued at. Burroughs at the time of the shooting was in love, involved in a heavy gay affair.

After the death of Joan, Burroughs spent time journeying through Central and South America, looking for the drug called "Yage", which like peyote was rumored to offer a key to opening the doors of perception and heightening consciousness. He found it and distributed it among friends. In 1953 Allen Ginsburg managed to get Burroughs into print under the pen name "William Lee." His autobiographical novel, "Junkie", was published by Ace Books (the son of the owner, Carl Solomon, was one of Ginsburg's friends) as a 35-cent paperback original (its formal title was "Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Adict", and it was published as "Two Books in One" back-to-back with another paperback original in the same volume). Returning to Mexico City, in the mid-'50s he began writing in earnest while keeping up with his drug habit, living off the small trust fund he received as a scion of the Burroughs family. It was in Mexico City that he began writing the sketches that would turn into his major book, "Naked Lunch". In 1956 he left Mexico City for Tangiers, Morocco, as the living was even cheaper than it was in Mexico City (as were the drugs). He eventually returned to the US in the 1960s.

"Naked Lunch" has the distinction of being the last major book to be prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The novel was written in Mexico City and Tangiers, crafted from fragments he wrote while addicted to heroin. After it was published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1959, it quickly became notorious for its graphic descriptions of sexual encounters, sadism and murder, as well as its no-holds-barred use of language. Many stalwart defenders of the First Amendment drew the line at "Naked Lunch", stating that they did not fight the good fight to get James Joyce's "Ulysses" and the works of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller before the American public so that something like "Naked Lunch" could be published. Grove Press acquired the rights to the book, but it was not published until 1962, as the publishing house awaited the outcome of other obscenity trials, including one involving Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl", which featured Burroughs as one of its hipsters searching for "an angry fix". Guided by Justice William J. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court starting in the late 1950s had relaxed censorship standards to protect literature that had redeeming social value, no matter that passages in the works were accused of being obscene. To be banned, a work had to be utterly without redeeming social value. Undaunted, the Comonwealth of Massachusetts successfully prosecuted the book as obscene.

For the initial trial, Grove Press had gathered together an impressive list of "experts" such as Norman Mailer to defend the book, but Burroughs' modern classic initially lost, was declared obscene, and was banned in Massachusetts (a banned book would be destroyed, the copies already having been confiscated by the police). However, in 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court (in Memoirs v. Massachusetts) found that "Naked Lunch" was "not without social value, and therefore, not obscene." With this ruling an era that began in the 1870s when anti-smut crusader Anthony Comstock led the charge for stricter enforcement of obscenity laws by the federal and state governments came to an end.

By the late 1970s Burroughs had lived long enough to be hailed by critics and the public as a major American writer. He was embraced by punk rockers in New York and became an iconic figure by the 1980s. He died in 1997 at the age of 83.

Jean-Christophe Grangé was born on 15 July 1961 in Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine, France. He is a writer and actor, known for The Crimson Rivers (2000), Vidocq (2001) and Empire of the Wolves (2005).

John le Carré was born in Poole, Dorset in England on 19 October, 1931. He went to Sherborne School and, later, studied German literature for one year at University of Bern. Later, he went to Lincoln College, Oxford and graduated in Modern Languages. From 1956 to 1958, he taught at Eton and from 1959 to 1964, he was a member of the British Foreign Service as second secretary at British Embassy in Bonn, and then, as Politician Consul in Hamburg. His first novel was written in 1961 and, by the time of his death in December 2020, he had published nearly 30. His books took many prizes, and inspired numerous films.

Tom Stoppard was born on 3 July 1937 in Zlín, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]. He is a writer and producer, known for Shakespeare in Love (1998), Brazil (1985) and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990). He has been married to Sabrina Guinness since 2014. He was previously married to Miriam Stoppard and Jose Ingle.

Alex Garland is an English novelist, screenwriter, film producer and director. He is best known for the films Ex Machina (2015) and Annihilation (2018).

Garland's others works as a writer includes The Beach (2000), 28 Days Later (2002), Sunshine (2007), Never Let Me Go (2011) and Dredd (2012).

He is also the co-writer on the video game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

In 2015, Garland made his directorial debut with Ex Machina and was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Writing, Original Screenplay category.

Welsh's books have made him a cult figure within the writing world since the 1990s. Several of his books have become best sellers and all have a mixture of comedy, drama and hard-hitting issues...the best-known being Trainspotting (1996) which was made into a box-office smash worldwide at the movies in 1996. Of his other works, one other has been brought to screen, The Acid House (1998)..a trilogy of stories and though not as successful as Trainspotting commercially, became a cult success in his homeland of Scotland and the UK. At time of writing, Welsh is currently on a project writing the sequel to Trainspotting called 'Porn', which given the success of the first film, should make him even more famous when released as a film within the next year or so.

Hossein Amini was born in Iran, and when he was 11 years old, he and his family moved to England. Amini's first screenplay was for the 1994 TV movie The Dying of the Light, which was directed by Peter Kosminsky. The TV movie covered the murder of Sean Devereux, an aid worker who was murdered in Somalia in 1993 for criticizing arms sales. It was nominated "Best Single Drama" at the British Academy Television Awards. Amini also wrote an adapted screenplay of the 1895 novel Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Producer Andrew Eaton commissioned the screenplay in 1995, and it was filmed by Michael Winterbottom as Jude, released in 1996. Amini also wrote a screenplay for another TV movie, Deep Secrets, which aired in 1996. Amini wrote the adapted screenplay for The Wings of the Dove, which was based on the 1902 eponymous novel by Henry James. The film, directed by Iain Softley, was released in 1997 and received critical claim. Amini was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing - Adapted Screenplay. In September 2013, Amini delivered a screenwriting lecture as part of the BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters' Lecture Series.