Francis Steegmuller, 1906 - 1994

FRANCIS STEEGMULLER was born in New Haven, Connecticut, 1906, author of several dozens short stories, mysteries, comic novels, and pieces for the New Yorker and other magazines, but best known for her biographies, particularly of French artists: her biography of Jean Cocteau won the 1971 National Book Award.

Raymond Carver, 1938 - 1988

Raymond Carver was born in the town of Clatskanie, Oregon (1938), who was, in his own words, a "poet, short story writer, and occasional essayist-in that order." He got married just out of high school and had two children by the age of 21. To support his family, Carver worked as a gas station attendant, deliveryman, and janitor while his wife worked for the phone company. Carver wrote about the lives and problems of ordinary working people. He wrote about alcoholism, domestic abuse, and isolation, and characters who are more resilient than they think they are. His first collection of stories Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was published in 1976 and established him as a writer. He also wrote Furious Seasons and Other Stories (1977), Cathedral (1983), and Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985). Carver struggled with acute alcoholism for most of his life. He often said that he lived two lives, one that ended the day he quit drinking and another that began the same day. He died of lung cancer in 1988 at the age of fifty. He had been sober for eleven years.

Settling by Denise Levertov

I was welcomed here—clear gold
of late summer, of opening autumn,
the dawn eagle sunning himself on the highest tree,
the mountain revealing herself unclouded, her snow
tinted apricot as she looked west,
Tolerant, in her steadfastness, of the restless sun
forever rising and setting.
Now I am given
a taste of the grey foretold by all and sundry,
a grey both heavy and chill. I've boasted I would not care,
I'm London-born. And I won't. I'll dig in,
into my days, having come here to live, not to visit.
Grey is the price
of neighboring with eagles, of knowing
a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.

Jorge Luis Borges, 1899 - 1986

Bor·ges  [bawr-hes]  Jor·ge Luis  [hawr-he lwees]  , 1899–1986, Argentine poet, short-story writer, and philosophical essayist.

He was  born in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1899). After studying in Europe, he moved back to Argentina and got a job at a small municipal library, and eventually he worked his way up to director of the National Library of Buenos Aires. He was able to complete his library work in one hour every morning, and he spent the rest of the day wandering the stacks, reading, or writing.

Surrounded by books in that library, Borges began to write strange stories, often about imaginary books. He said, "It is a laborious madness ... the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." One of his stories, "The Library of Babel," is about a man who works in a library that contains all the books that have ever been written, as well as all the books that could ever be written, as well as an infinite number of books filled with gibberish, and nobody knows which books are worth reading.