Mario Francis Puzo was an American author and screenwriter. He wrote crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a film trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola. He received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the first film in 1972 and for Part II in 1974. Puzo also wrote the original screenplay for the 1978 Superman film and its 1980 sequel. His final novel, The Family, was released posthumously in 2001.
Nachem Malech Mailer, known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, and filmmaker. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II.
John Simmons Barth was an American writer best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include The Sot-Weed Factor, a whimsical retelling of Maryland's colonial history; Giles Goat-Boy, a satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world; and Lost in the Funhouse, a self-referential and experimental collection of short stories. He was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.
The Other is a 1972 American horror psychological thriller film directed by Robert Mulligan, adapted for film by Thomas Tryon from his 1971 novel of the same name. It stars Uta Hagen, Diana Muldaur, and twins Chris and Martin Udvarnoky, with Victor French, John Ritter, and Jenny Sullivan in supporting roles.
John Champlin Gardner Jr. was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic, and university professor. He is best known for his 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view.
New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction. Using extensive imagery, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. In traditional journalism, the journalist is "invisible"; facts are meant to be reported objectively.
Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet who explored death, social injustice, and human misery in controversial literature that was deeply pessimistic about modern civilization in general and Austrian culture in particular. Bernhard's body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II." He is widely considered to be one of the most important German-language authors of the postwar era.
Thomas Louis Berger was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure.
Albert L. Murray was an American literary and music critic, novelist, essayist, and biographer. His books include The Omni-Americans, South to a Very Old Place, and Stomping the Blues.
Robert Patrick Mulligan was an American director and producer. He is best known for his sensitive dramas, including To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Summer of '42 (1971), The Other (1972), Same Time, Next Year (1978), and The Man in the Moon (1991). He was also known in the 1960s for his extensive collaborations with producer Alan J. Pakula.
Thomas Lester Tryon was an American actor and novelist. As an actor, he was billed as Tom Tryon and is best known for playing the title role in the film The Cardinal (1963), featured roles in the war films The Longest Day (1962) and In Harm's Way (1965), acting with John Wayne in both movies, and especially the Walt Disney television character Texas John Slaughter (1958–1961). Tryon later turned to the writing of prose fiction and screenplays, and wrote several successful science fiction, horror and mystery novels as Thomas Tryon.
Thomas Tryon was an English sugar merchant, author of popular self-help books, and early advocate of animal rights and vegetarianism.
Peter Matthiessen was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher and onetime CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he is the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction and fiction. He was also a prominent environmental activist.
The Dragon Murder Case is a novel in a series by S. S. Van Dine about fictional detective Philo Vance. It was also adapted to a film version in 1934, starring Warren William as Vance.
Emma Lathen is the pen name of two American businesswomen: economic analyst Mary Jane Latsis and attorney Martha Henissart. The pseudonym is constructed from two authors' names: "M" of Mary and "Ma" of Martha, plus "Lat" of Latsis and "Hen" of Henissart.
Robert Gerald Goldsborough is an American journalist and writer of mystery novels. He worked for 45 years for the Chicago Tribune and Advertising Age, but gained prominence as the author of a series of 17 authorized pastiches of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe detective stories, published from 1986 to 1994 and from 2012 to 2023. The first novel, Murder in E Minor (1986), received a Nero Award.
James Carroll is an American author, historian, journalist, and former Catholic priest. He has written extensively about the contemporary effort to reform the Catholic Church, and has published not only novels, but also books on religion and history. He has received nine honorary doctorates, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Alix Kates Shulman is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism. She is best-known for her bestselling debut adult novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, hailed by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement."
Harvey Aronson is an American journalist and journalism teacher, and a former Newsday editor who also wrote or co-wrote several books. He was part of a group of Newsday reporters involved in writing the bestselling hoax novel Naked Came the Stranger, initially credited to fictional author Penelope Ashe, and published as a parody of commercialized book publishing in general and of novels in the genre of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls in particular. Aronson co-edited the project with his colleague, Mike McGrady, who had conceived the idea, and Aronson also wrote a chapter of the book about a character described in a later news article as "Melvin Corby, a meek real-estate lawyer, unsatisfied in his marriage yet incapable of adultery, the only character in the book thus afflicted." In a Life magazine article written after the ruse was revealed, Aronson commented that he thought the book had ended up being more comedic than pornographic, and he opined that Susann "writes about sex as if she were a virgin".
