AUTHORS

A collection of authors whose work I've read and enjoyed.

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a lecturer, writer, economist and leading theorist of the women’s movement in the United States.

Gilman was born on July 3, 1860, in Hartford, Connecticut. Her paternal great-grandfather was Calvinist preacher Dr. Lyman Beecher and her great-aunts were novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, women's education advocate Catherine Beecher, and suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker.

Gilman's father abandoned the family, leaving them in poverty. Although Gilman received little formal education, she did attend the Rhode Island School of Design for two years. In 1884 she married artist Charles W. Stetson, but after suffering a nervous collapse due to post-partum depression after the birth of their daughter a year later, she moved with her daughter to Pasadena, California, in 1888. Gilman divorced her husband in 1894.

In California, Gilman wrote poems and stories for periodicals, and in the early 1890s became a noted lecturer. After living for a short time at Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago in 1895, she spent five years lecturing around the country. In 1898, she published her famous treatise, Women and Economics. In 1900, Gilman married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman. Over the next 25 years, she wrote for periodicals and published more than a dozen books, including editing and publishing her own feminist magazine, Forerunner, from 1909-1916. Along with Jane Addams, she founded the Woman’s Peace Party in 1915.

Gilman died on August 17, 1935, in Pasadena, California, taking her own life after undergoing unsuccessful cancer treatments.

Merle Summers' Favorites:

The Yellow Wallpaper - a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

RICHARD PAUL EVANS

Richard Paul Evans is the #1 bestselling author of The Christmas Box. He has since written 41 consecutive New York Times bestsellers and is one of the few authors in history to have hit both the fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists. There are more than thirty-five million copies of his books in print worldwide, translated into more than 22 languages. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Mothers Book Award, the Romantic Times Best Women’s Novel of the Year Award, the German Audience Gold Award for Romance, five Religion Communicators Council Wilbur Awards, The Washington Times Humanitarian of the Century Award, and the Volunteers of America National Empathy Award. Evans lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife, Keri, and their five children and two grandchildren.

Merle Summers' Favorites:

Michael Vey - a young adult series by Richard Paul Evans

STEPHEN KING

Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In the fall of 1971, he began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co., accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 50 books and has become one of the world's most successful writers. King is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to the American Letters and the 2014 National Medal of Arts.

Stephen lives in Maine and Florida with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. They are regular contributors to a number of charities including many libraries and have been honored locally for their philanthropic activities.

Merle Summers' Favorites:

The Institute, a novel by Stephen King