MobyD's Author Lenses

Nevada Barr

Creator of Anna Pigeon, National Park Ranger

Born in Yerington, Nevada on March 1, 1952 and named for the state of her birth, Barr grew up in California. She began a career in theater but decided to become a park ranger. She created Anna Pigeon while working at Guadelupe National Park in Texas. Her first novel in the series Track of the Cat, is set in that park. While most books are set in different parks, Deep South and Hunting Season are set in the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. Barr's latest Anna Pigeon mystery, Winter Study, is set in Isle Royal National Park, also the setting for one of her earliest novels, A Superior Death. Currently, Barr lives in New Orleans with her husband, four cats, and two dogs.

Nevada Barr

Bill Bryson

Travel, Language and Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson is an American author who has written several books on travel in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has also written several books on the English language, as well as a book on the history of science, a memoir, and a book about William Shakespeare. All of Bryson's works reveal a sharp wit, engaging humor, and unrivaled storytelling.

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Bryson traveled in Europe in 1973, and when he reached England he decided to stay. He met his wife Cynthia and worked as a journalist and writer. In 1995 he moved with his family to Hanover, New Hampshire, then returned to England in 2003.

Bill Bryson

Danielle Corsetto - Girls With Slingshots

Web comic strip

Danielle Corsetto has been cartooning since she was eight. Her high school-era comic strip "Hazelnuts" evolved into "Girls With Slingshots," a strip noted for a distinct absence of slingshots, although a drink by that name has made an appearance. It's about Hazle and her best friend Jamie and their friends, with occasional appearances by McPedro, the talking cactus with an Irish accent and a mustache with a mind of its own.

Girls With Slingshots

Jasper Fforde

Creator of the Alternate World of Thursday Next

Jasper Fforde is a British writer known for his five novels about Thursday Next, literary detective, and the Nursery Crimes series.

Thursday Next lives in an alternate England circa 1985. It's a world where airships rule the skies, extinct animals have been cloned (Thursday has a pet dodo, Pickwick), and people can read themselves into books, which is how Thursday manages to save a great novel in The Eyre Affair.

The Nursery Crimes series features Detective Jack Spratt and Sergeant Mary Mary of the Reading Police Department. In The Big Over Easy they are called on to find out who did in Humpty Dumpty. In The Fourth Bear they're on the hunt for missing journalist Goldie Hatchett, last seen by three bears who like their porridge hot, cold, and just right. Meanwhile there's a crazed Gingerbreadman on the loose.

Jasper Fforde

Brian Froud

Faeries, Pixies and Goblins Inhabit the World of Froud

Faeries and other fey creatures caught the interest of English fantasy artist Brian Froud when he found a book by master illustrator Arthur Rackham in his college library. After spending five years as a commercial illustrator in London, all the while doing faerie art on his own, he moved to Dartmoor's misty and mystical countryside where he shared a house with fellow artists, Alan Lee, Lee's wife Marja and their two children. With Alan Lee, he collaborated on the lavishly illustrated book Faeries, which became a best seller in Britain and the United States.

Brian Froud

Wendy Froud

Yoda's "Mom" and Creator of the Gelflings for "The Dark Crystal"

Wendy Froud was born in Detroit, Michigan, daughter of artists Walter and Peggy Midener. She began making dolls when she was five years old. She went to the Interlochen Arts Academy for high school, followed by the Center for Creative Studies - College of Art and Design, where her parents were on the faculty. After her schooling was completed, she got a job with Jim Henson's studios in New York and London, where she worked on The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movie and The Dark Crystal.

Wendy Froud

Tony Hillerman

Author of Navajo Tribal Police Mysteries

Tony Hillerman is best known for his mystery novels about the Navajo Tribal Police, known officially as the Navajo Department of Law Enforcement. His two main characters are Joe Leaphorn, the "Legendary Lieutenant," and Sergeant Jim Chee. His books have won a number of awards.

Hillerman was born in Oklahoma in 1925 and is a combat veteran of World War II. He was wounded in the war and received several medals. Since the 1950's he has lived in New Mexico. He married in 1948 and the Hillermans have six grown children. He died at age 83 on October 26, 2008.

Tony Hillerman

Molly Ivins

She Could Say That, and She Did

Molly Ivins, known for her sharp wit and keen sense of observation, was a newspaper columnist and author of several best-selling books on politics. She started her journalism career in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle, wrote for The New York Times where she was also their Rocky Mountain bureau chief, and wrote a column that was syndicated in more than 300 newspapers.

Her first book, Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? was on The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. She co-authored three books on George W. Bush with Lou Dubose.

Molly Ivins

Erik Larson

Historical Nonfiction with the Feel of a Novel

Erik Larson is an American journalist who has turned to historical non-fiction. He is a former features writer for The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, to which he still contributes. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's.

Before he wrote the best-selling Isaac's Storm he wrote The Naked Consumer and Lethal Passage. His two books following Isaac's Storm, The Devil in the White City and Thunderstruck, are set in the same period of the turn from the 19th to the 20th century.

Erik Larson

Kenneth Libbrecht

Snowflake photography

Kenneth Libbrecht is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in the warm and sunny southern part of the state. Trained as a solar astronomer, in the mid-1990s he became interested in the physics of how water vapor freezes and forms snowflakes. This led to research in the labs at Caltech, where snowflakes can be produced regardless of outside temperatures, and field trips all over the colder parts of North America. This research and the photography that goes with it have resulted in a series of books that combine science and art.

Snowflake Photography: Kenneth Libbrecht

Todd McCaffrey, Dragon Harper

When Anne McCaffrey began writing about the planet Pern, its dragons and their dragonriders, her son Todd was about the same age as a young candidate who might take his first stand on the Hatching Grounds, hoping to Impress and form a life-long bond with a hatchling who would grow into a mighty fire-breathing battler of the deadly Thread. He literally grew up with dragons as his mother developed the complex society of Pern with its Holders, Crafters and Weyr-dwelling Dragonriders.

Todd McCaffrey, Dragon Harper

John McPhee

A Pioneer of Creative Nonfiction

John McPhee is regarded as one of the founders of "new journalism," a field which includes Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. He does not agree with that assessment. For one thing, other "new journalists" tended to insert themselves into the narrative, whereas McPhee wrote a whole book where he used the word "I" to refer to himself only once toward the end of the book. His editor said he should be in there more, so McPhee went back to an earlier part of the book and found a place to use "I" one more time.

John McPhee

Spider Robinson

Callahan's Saloon, Stardance and More

Spider Robinson is a science fiction author best known for his stories of Callahan's saloon, its regular patrons, and the two bars that succeeded it. Robinson combines humor and science fiction elements in these stories, which are noted for their memorable characters, who often find the bar because they need to share a problem. The motto of Callahan's is "Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased."

Robinson also is known for the Stardance trilogy, novels of zero-gravity dance and alien contact, written with his wife Jeanne. When an outline of a Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1955 was found, Spider Robinson was chosen to turn it into the novel Variable Star.

Spider Robinson

Allen Steele

Adventures in Near Space and Beyond

Allen Steele is a science fiction author born January 19, 1958 in Nashville, Tennessee. He has been a staff writer for newspapers in Massachusetts, Missouri, Tennessee, and Washington, DC. He and his wife now live in western Massachusetts.

He has written of humankind's ventures into Earth orbit, to the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt. He has also written a series about the colonization of a moon, Coyote, orbiting a gas giant planet 46 light years from Earth.

Allen Steele

Tom Tomorrow - This Modern World

Web and print comic

Tom Tomorrow is the pen name for editorial cartoonist Dan Perkins, who uses a retro mid-20th century advertising art style in a weekly strip about American politics.

His strip runs in about 150 alternative and mainstream publications as well as on Salon.com and CREDOaction.com. (CREDO was formerly known as Working Assets.)

Tom Tomorrow

John Varley

Creator of the Eight Worlds

John Varley was one of the first writers to be called "The New Heinlein." "This flattered and troubled him, since the Old Heinlein was a major role model - and not yet dead." (from his website) He has won many awards, including four for "Press Enter []."

He has written stories and novels about his Eight Worlds, where aliens kicked humans off Earth, and the surviving humans live on Luna, Mars, and other places in the Solar System except around Jupiter, where the aliens came from. Humans have undergone various modifications to adapt, and gender changing is relatively easy and common.

John Varley

Sarah Vowell

The Voice of Violet Writes

Sarah Vowell, known to many as the voice of Violet Parr in The Incredibles, has also been, with her unforgettable voice, a regular contributor to Chicago Public Radio's This American Life. She has written five books. Her sharp wit, quirky humor, and intelligence are evident in both sound and print.

"Any writer who can put James A. Garfield and Lou Reed in the same sentence leaves me in slack-jawed awe," wrote Charles Matthews of the San Jose Mercury News. But Vowell does this all the time, as on This American Life in April 2007 when she stated that explorer John Charles Fremont's "iconic moment," climbing what he thought was the highest peak in the Rockies, was "what crossing the Delaware was to Washington, what tripping over the ottoman was to Dick Van Dyke."

Sarah Vowell