John Updike

John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and spent his first years in nearby Shillington, a small town where his father was a high school science teacher. The area surrounding Reading has provided the setting for many of his stories, with the invented towns of Brewer and Olinger standing in for Reading and Shillington. An only child, Updike and his parents shared a house with his grandparents for much of his childhood. When he was 13, the family moved to his mother's birthplace, a stone farmhouse on an 80-acre farm near Plowville, eleven miles from Shillington, where he continued to attend school.

At home, he consumed popular fiction, especially humor and mysteries. His mother, herself an aspiring writer, encouraged him to write and draw. He excelled in school and served as President and co-valedictorian of his graduating class at Shillington High School. For the first three summers after high school, he worked as a copy boy at the Reading Eaglenewspaper, eventually producing a number of feature stories for the paper. He received a tuition scholarship to Harvard University, where he majored in English. As an undergraduate, he wrote stories and drew cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine, serving as the magazine's president in his senior year. Before graduating, he married fellow student Mary E. Pennington. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954, and in that same year sold a poem and a short story to The New Yorker magazine.

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/upd0bio-1

Arlene Hutton

Arlene Hutton is a MacDowell Colony fellow and member of the Dramatists’ Guild. Her first full-length, LAST TRAIN TO NIBROC, received a 2000 NY Drama League nomination for Best Play and more than fifty regional productions. AS IT IS IN HEAVEN premiered in Edinburgh, opened in NYC at the 78th Street Theatre Lab, moved to the ArcLight Theatre and received a highly-acclaimed four-month run at the Actors’ Co-op in LA. Both plays are published by Dramatists Play Service and in the Smith & Kraus Best Women Playwrights anthologies. A four-time Heideman Award finalist and a three-time Samuel French Short Play Festival winner, her NY credits include: The Barrow Group, Circle-in-the-Square Downtown, Alice’s Fourth Floor, Ensemble Studio Theatre, HERE, and Vital Theatre. At the Australian National Playwrights Conference, she workshopped a sequel to NIBROC. She teaches at Fordham University and The Barrow Group and is writing a play about the Brontë family, a commission for Clear Channel Theatrical Division

http://www.newdramatists.org/arlene_hutton.htm

Leight was born on January 15, 1957, in New York City. When he was sixteen, he began attending Stanford University, where he studied journalism. In interviews, Leight has noted that Side Mantouches on issues that were relevant to his own childhood. So much so, in fact, that the author notes that it was a difficult play for him to write. However, Leight is quick to note that many of the specific situations in the play were invented for dramatic purposes and that the play is not totally autobiographical.

http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-sidem/bio.html

Bob Dylan

Folk/rock songwriter, singer. Born Robert Allen Zimmerman, on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota. Driven by the influences of early rock stars like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard (whom he used to imitate on the piano at high school dances), the young Dylan formed his own bands, including the Golden Chords and Elston Gunn and His Rock Boppers. While attending the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, he began performing folk and country songs at local cafés, taking the name "Bob Dylan," after the late Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

http://www.biography.com/articles/Bob-Dylan-9283052

The Story of an Hour

American author Kate Chopin (1850–1904) wrote two novels and about a hundred short stories in the 1890s. Most of her fiction is set in Louisiana and most of her best-known work focuses on the lives of sensitive, intelligent women.

Her short stories were well received in her own time and were published by some of America's most prestigious magazines—Vogue, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Young People, Youth's Companion, and the Century. A few stories were syndicated by the American Press Association. Her stories appeared also in her two published collections, Bayou Folk(1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), both of which received good reviews from critics across the country. About a third of her stories are children's stories—those published in or submitted to children's magazines or those similar in subject or theme to those that were. By the late 1890s Kate Chopin was well known among American readers of magazine fiction.

Under the Banyan Tree

Under the Banyan Tree and other Stories is a collection of short stories by R. K. Nanayan, set in and around the fictitious town of Malgudi in South India. The stories range from the humorous to the serious and all are filled with Narayan's acute observations of human nature. The concluding story, Under the Banyan Tree, is about a village story-teller who concludes his career by taking a vow of silence for the rest of his life, realizing that a story-teller must have the sense to know when to stop and not wait for others to tell him.