Southern Gothic

Cormac McCarthy is an American writer who has written twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays and three short stories, spanning the Western and post-apocalyptic genres. He is known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. McCarthy is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary American writers.

Wesley Stace is an English folk/pop singer-songwriter and author, who has used the stage name John Wesley Harding. Under his legal name, he has written four novels. He is also an occasional university teacher and the curator of Wesley Stace's Cabinet of Wonders.

Sam Taylor is a British author, translator and former pop culture correspondent for The Observer, a job he left in 2001. His first book, The Republic of Trees, was published in 2005 and received critical acclaim. His second novel, The Amnesiac, tells the story of James Purdew, a man obsessed with uncovering the events of three years of his life about which he remembers nothing. Taylor lives in Texas with his family.

Glen Duncan is a British author born in 1965 in Bolton, Lancashire, England to an Anglo-Indian family. He studied philosophy and literature at the universities of Lancaster and Exeter.

Spirit of the Hills is a 1988 western mystery novel by Dan O'Brien.

Mark Helprin is an American novelist, journalist, conservative commentator, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. While Helprin's fictional works straddle a number of disparate genres and styles, he has stated that he "belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend".

Howard Frank Mosher was an American author of thirteen books: eleven fiction and two non-fiction. Much of his fiction takes place in the mid-20th century and all of it is set in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, a region loosely defined by the three counties in the northeastern corner of the state. His characters are often quirky, reflecting the distinctive peculiarities of the region's taciturn residents. The community struggle with changing times is often a theme, with the more traditional ways of rural Yankee life coming in conflict with an expanding, modern society. The last novel published during his lifetime was God's Kingdom.

Robin Stender Swicord (born October 23, 1952) is an American screenwriter and film director. She is best known for literary adaptations. In 2009 the screenplay for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, credited to Swicord (story) and Eric Roth (story and screenplay) and based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. Swicord also wrote the screenplay for the film Memoirs of a Geisha, based on the novel of the same name by Arthur Golden, for which she won a 2005 Satellite Award. Her other screenplay credits include Little Women, Practical Magic, Matilda, The Perez Family, and Shag.

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (January 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015) was an American novelist, editor, and professor, best known for his works of historical fiction.

He wrote twelve novels, three volumes of short fiction and a stage drama. They included the award-winning novels Ragtime (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989), and The March (2005). These, like many of his other works, placed fictional characters in recognizable historical contexts, with known historical figures, and often used different narrative styles. His stories were recognized for their originality and versatility, and Doctorow was praised for his audacity and imagination.

A number of Doctorow's novels and short stories were also adapted for the screen, including Welcome to Hard Times (1967) starring Henry Fonda, Daniel (1983) starring Timothy Hutton, Billy Bathgate (1991) starring Dustin Hoffman, and Wakefield (2016) starring Bryan Cranston. His most notable adaptations were for the film Ragtime (1981) and the Broadway musical of the same name (1998), which won four Tony Awards.

Robert James Waller (August 1, 1939 – March 10, 2017) was an American author best known for The Bridges of Madison County, an enormously successful book in 1993. He was also a photographer and musician.

Robert James Waller Jr. was born in Charles City, Iowa, and grew up in Rockford, Iowa. Waller received his BA ('62) and MA ('64) from University of Northern Iowa (then known as Iowa State Teachers College). He received his PhD in business from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington in 1968.

Later that year he returned to UNI and began teaching management and economics, and in 1977 became a full professor. He became dean of the College of Business in 1980 and retired from that position in 1986. It was announced in 2000 that he made a "seven figure" donation to Indiana University.

John Barrett "Jay" McInerney Jr. (; born January 13, 1955) is an American novelist, screenwriter, editor, and columnist. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, and The Last of the Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote the screenplay for the television film Gia, which starred Angelina Jolie. He was the wine columnist for House & Garden magazine, and his essays on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me (2000) and A Hedonist in the Cellar (2006). His most recent novel is titled Bright, Precious Days, published in 2016. From April 2010 he was a wine columnist for The Wall Street Journal. In 2009, he published a book of short stories which spanned his entire career, titled How It Ended, which was named one of the 10 best books of the year by Janet Maslin of The New York Times.

Joe Richard Lansdale is an American writer and martial arts instructor.

Mary Doria Russell (born August 19, 1950) is an American novelist.

Russell was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Her parents were both in the military, her father a Marine Corps drill instructor and her mother a Navy nurse. She was raised as a Catholic but left the church at age fifteen, and her struggles to figure out how much of that culture to pass on to her children fueled the prominence of religion in her work.

She graduated from Glenbard East High School in Lombard, Illinois, which has registered its chapter of the National English Honor Society in her name (as Mary Doria Russell). She is also a major sponsor of a Glenbard East scholarship established in memory of English teacher Richard Cima.

Robert Olmstead (born January 3, 1954) is an American novelist and educator.

Olmstead was born in 1954 in Westmoreland, New Hampshire. He grew up on a farm. After high school, he enrolled at Davidson College with a football scholarship, but left school after three semesters in which he compiled a poor academic record. He later attended Syracuse University, where he studied with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and received both bachelor's and master's degrees, in 1977 and 1983, respectively.

He was the former Director of Creative Writing at Ohio Wesleyan University and now serves as an emeritus faculty member at the university. He has also served as the Senior Writer in Residence at Dickinson College and as the director of creative writing at Boise State University. Olmstead teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in creative writing at Converse College.

Lewis Nordan (August 23, 1939 – April 13, 2012) was an American writer.

Nordan was born to Lemuel and Sara Bayles in Forest, Mississippi, grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. He received his B.A. at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, his M.A. from Mississippi State University, and his PhD from Auburn University in Alabama. In 1983, at age forty-five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. The collection established him as a writer in the Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O'Connor. It also established a place for Nordan's fiction, the fictional Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small town in the Mississippi Delta based loosely on Nordan's hometown of Itta Bena.