San Antonio College Library

A critical biography of suspense author Patricia Highsmith draws on a vast archive of diaries, notebooks, and letters, as well as interviews with friends, colleagues, and lovers, to offer a portrait of the lesbian author and her literary works.

"Anne McCaffrey: A Life with Dragons is the biography of a writer who vividly depicted alien creatures and new worlds. As the author of the Dragonriders of Pern series, McCaffrey (b. 1926) is one of the most significant writers of science fiction and fantasy. She is the first woman to win the Hugo and Nebula awards, and her 1978 novel The White Dragon was the first science-fiction novel to appear on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. This...

Joseph Heller was a Coney Island kid in New York, the son of Russian immigrants, who went on to great fame and fortune. His most memorable novel took its inspiration from a mission he flew over France in WWII when his plane was filled with so much shrapnel it was a wonder it stayed in the air. Altogether, Heller wrote seven novels, all of which remain in print. Something Happened and Good as Gold, to name two, are still considered the epitome of satire....

"In The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty, the critically acclaimed author of Hiding Man (a New Yorker and New York Times Notable book) and Just One Catch, delves deep into the life of distinguished American author and journalist Joan Didion in this, the first printed biography published about her life. Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in...

For Andre Dubus, "The quotidian and the spiritual don't exist on different planes, but infuse each other. His is an unapologetically sacramental vision of life in which ordinary things participate in the miraculous, the miraculous in ordinary things. He believes in God, and talks to Him, and doesn't mince words. He believes in ghosts ... He is open to mystery, and of all mysteries the one that interests him most is the human potential for transcendence."...

"Conrad Richter: A Writer's Life is the story of an aspiring writer who failed and then, desperate for money, tried again and wrote himself out of penny-a-word pulp magazines and into a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Based upon unrestricted access to all of Richter's letters, journals, notebooks, and private papers, this biography offers an intimate account of Richter's personal struggle to achieve success in his own and in other people's...

Reveals the dimensions of the man and the events of his life as he pursued his artistic vocation.