L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) wrote 69 books beloved by children, including The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which became a classic movie. Lyman Frank Baum was born on May 15, 1856, near Syracuse, New York. His father, Benjamin, was a wealthy oil b...

Lyon Sprague de Camp is one of America's leading writers and scholars of fantasy and science fiction. His interests in technology, history, and language have also resulted in the publication of numerous works of popular science, archaeolog...

Marie Laberge belongs to a new generation of Quebec dramatists. The author of some seventeen plays, twelve of which have been produced in theaters in Quebec and sometimes elsewhere, she has also written a novel and taught classes in theate...

The name Ed Lacy was the most successful pseudonym of writer Len Zinberg; his other pen name was Steve April, which he used for one book. Zinberg began his career as an aspiring writer of serious fiction and wrote at first under his own na...

Joseph Brown Ladd is noteworthy chiefly as a transitional figure. As eighteenth-century classicism withered and the preromantic movement blossomed in Europe, Ladd was receptive to the new trends. With Philip Freneau and Timothy Dwight, he ...

Lady Anne Clifford left one of the most extensive autobiographical records of the seventeenth century, including a memoir of the year 1603; a diary for the years 1616, 1617, and 1619; an autobiography dated 1653; summary accounts of each y...

Born on 13 November 1785 in London, Caroline Ponsonby was the third child and only daughter of Frederick Ponsonby, third Earl of Bessborough, and his wife, the former Lady Henrietta Frances Spencer. During her life Caroline inhabited the h...

Although she was a popular and prolific writer during the first half of the twentieth century, Lady Margaret Sackville has been all but forgotten by contemporary literary critics. There are no biographies of Sackville, no modern editions o...

Sydney Owenson, who became Lady Morgan when she married in 1812, began one of the most successful and controversial writing careers of the nineteenth century in 1801, a pivotal moment in British history after the Act of Union made Ireland ...

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), European-born American author, wrote novels and articles with exotic themes in highly precise and polished prose. Lafcadio Hearn was born June 27, 1850, on the Greek island of Santa Maura. His mother was Maltese...

Kojo Laing belongs to the generation of Ghanaian writers that immediately follows Ayi Kwei Armah (1939- ) and Kofi Awoonor (1935- ). He gained prominence during the 1980s as one of the most prolific and original imaginative writers in West...

Born on 5 August 1951 in Baltimore, Maryland, to Paul S. Lake and Barbara Hull Lake, poet Paul Lake grew up in a close family with two brothers, James and Stephen, and one sister, Melody. Remaining in his home state of Maryland, Lake, betw...

Michèle Lalonde is one of the poets of the Hexagone generation. Although she has been a poet since she first began to write, her poetry has perceptibly evolved from the obscure works written toward the end of the 1950s to the poems ...

Betty Lambert, who wrote in several genres, is best known as a dramatist. Born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1933, she was the oldest of Christopher and Bessie Copper Lee's three daughters. As Elizabeth Minnie Lee, she grew up in Calgary, gradua...

In his own age Lancelot Andrewes was well known as a churchman, a controversialist, and, above all, an extraordinary preacher at the courts of Queen Elizabeth and King James I. With Richard Hooker he was the architect of the Church of Engl...

Chroniclers of Acadian letters mention Father Napoléon-P. Landry's poetic attempts for the completeness of the historical record and for the particular documentary value of his two volumes (preparation of a third was interrupted by ...

In their introduction to a 2001 volume of essays about the contemporary Jewish novelist Jakov Lind, Andrea Hammel and Edward Timms claimed that "few authors exemplify the phenomenon of writing after the bestialities of the Nazi regime more...

F. C. Lane's career as a sportswriter comprised only a part of a long and various life. Joining the staff of Baseball Magazine sometime in 1910 or early 1911 at the age of twenty-five, he is first listed as co-editor with the founder of th...

M. Travis Lane was born Millicent Travis in San Antonio, Texas, the daughter of Elsie Ward Travis and William Livingston Travis, a colonel in the United States Air Force. The family left San Antonio within the year. "I have no hometown," t...

Al Laney, a native of Florida, was a reporter for the Dallas Dispatch, the Minneapolis News, and the New York Evening Mail before his move to Paris in 1924. There he spent most of the next decade on the staff of the Paris Herald (the Europ...

Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld is best known as a champion and defender of the rights of the accused in the witchcraft trials that took place throughout Germany in the seventeenth century; only since the 1980s has his stature as a major poe...

Historians of literature routinely group Elisabeth Langgässer with German religious writers of the first half of the twentieth century who had their roots in expressionism, such as Werner Bergengruen, Rudolf Alexander Schröder, G...

Edwin Lanham began his writing career in Paris in 1928 when Robert McAlmon urged him to write about his sea voyages. Lanham's experiences preceding and during what he called his "Montparnasse Period" shaped much of his later work, which in...

The son of a banker, Antoine Lapointe, and his wife, Antoinette Rousseau Lapointe, Joseph-Auguste-Julien-Paul-Marie Lapointe was born 22 September 1929 at Saint-Félicien in the Lac Saint-Jean region of Quebec. He studied at the S&ea...

Nancy Larrick has exerted a significant influence on contemporary children's poetry as the editor of numerous poetry anthologies and also as a teacher and critic. Through her work as a university professor of education and her many periodi...