Photo: David Shankbone (2009) CC BY 3.0
Sample of authors
Vidal, Gore
The American novelist and essayist Gore Vidal was born at West Point, New York. He was originally christened Eugene Vidal, but in his teens he changed his first name to his maternal grandfather’s surname. Gore Vidal was the only child of the pilot Eugene Luther Vidal and his wife, Nina S. Gore, an actress. He was not close to either. His parents were divorced when Vidal was ten, and although he m...
Photo: Stuart Black / Hulton Archive via Getty Images (1953)
Sample of authors
Crispin, Edmund
Edmund Crispin was the pseudonym for Robert Bruce Montgomery, an English pianist and organist, composer and author of detective stories born in Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire. He was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School, London, and St. John’s College, Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Modern Languages in 1943. While in Oxford he befriended Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, and he tra...