Carolyn See (née Laws; January 13, 1934 – July 13, 2016) was a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of ten books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, an advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and the novels There Will Never Be Another You, Golden Days, and The Handyman. See was also a book critic for the Washington Post for 27 years.
Andrea Barrett (born November 16, 1954) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel and Natural History were finalists for the Story Prize.
Susan Minot (born December 7, 1956) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, screenwriter and painter.
John Dufresne (born January 30, 1948) is an American author of French Canadian descent born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He graduated from Worcester State College in 1970 and the University of Arkansas in 1984. He is a professor in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program of the English Department at Florida International University. In 2012, he won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his work.
Walter Michael Miller Jr. (January 23, 1923 – January 9, 1996) was an American science fiction writer. His fix-up novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), the only novel published in his lifetime, won the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Prior to its publication, he was a writer of short stories.
Maximilian Shulman (March 14, 1919 – August 28, 1988) was an American writer and humorist best known for his television and short story character Dobie Gillis, as well as for best-selling novels.
Isaac Rosenfeld (March 10, 1918 - July 14, 1956) was an American writer who became a prominent member of New York intellectual circles. Rosenfeld wrote one novel (Passage from Home, 1946), which, according to literary critic Marck Shechner, "helped fashion a uniquely American voice by marrying the incisiveness of Mark Twain to the Russian melancholy of Dostoevsky," and many articles for The Nation, Partisan Review, and The New Republic. Some of those articles were posthumously published in a volume titled An Age of Enormity, and his short stories were later published as Alpha and Omega.
Ross Macdonald was the main pseudonym used by the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar (; December 13, 1915 – July 11, 1983). He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in Southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer. Since the 1970s, Macdonald's works (particularly the Archer novels) have received attention in academic circles for their psychological depth, sense of place, use of language, sophisticated imagery and integration of philosophy into genre fiction. Brought up in the province of Ontario, Canada, Macdonald eventually settled in the state of California, where he died in 1983.
The Wall Street Journal wrote that:"... it is the sheer beauty of Macdonald’s laconic style—with its seductive rhythms and elegant plainness—that holds us spellbound. 'Hard-boiled,' 'noir,' 'mystery,' it doesn’t matter what you call it. Macdonald, with insolent grace, blows past the barrier constructed by Dorothy Sayers between 'the literature of escape' and 'the literature of expression.' These novels, triumphs of his literary alchemy, dare to be both."