Herman Melville, born August 1, 1819, in New York City, was educated at the New York Male High School (1825-29), Grammar School of Columbia College (1829-30), and Albany Academy (1830-31). He entered service in merchant shipping in 1839 and travelled the seas until 1844.

Charles Dickens was born on Feb. 7, 1812, in Portsea and grew up in Chatham. At twelve years old, his father was jailed for debt, and the entire family suffered poverty and humiliation.

Charles William Shirley Brooks was born on 29 April, 1816 at 52 Doughty Street, London. The son of Elizabeth and William Brooks (an architect), he was articled to his uncle Charles Sabine of Oswestry after receiving his early education. In 1938, he passed the Incorporated Law Society's examination, but there is no record of Brooks becoming a solicitor.

Mary Ann Evans was born on Nov. 22, 1819, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, to Robert Evans and Christiana Pearson. She was educated at Nuneaton and Coventry (1841-). Her first publication was a poem in the Christian Observer (Jan. 1840). After leaving the Church, she moved to London in 1849 and edited The Westminster from 1851 to 1853.

Born at Poole, Dorset, on January 30, 1837, as Julia Augusta Davies, Augusta Webster spent her young years on the ship Griper, stationed at such places as Banff Castle and Penzance, and then in 1851, at Cambridge. Her education was informal but she studied at the Cambridge School of Art.

William Carlos Williams served as a physician in his home town of Rutherford, New Jersey, from 1910 to 1951, and in hours after work wrote fiction, poetry, plays, and criticism. He was born on September 17, 1883, in Rutherford, educated at Horace Mann School in New York, and from 1902 until 1906 studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle.

British-born novelist, children's playwright, and poet, educated in Point Levy, Quebec, and Sarnia, Ontario, where she and her sisters operated a school for ladies, Walker published poetry widely in newspapers on both sides of the border before collecting them in Leaves from the Backwoods in 1861-62.

Marge Piercy was born March 31, 1936, in Detroit, of mother Bert Bunnin Piercy and father Robert Douglas Piercy. She was brought up Jewish by her mother and grandmother. In Early Grrrl, Marge Piercy says, "I started writing poetry regularly and seriously when I was fifteen and my family moved into a house larger by far than we had ever lived in.

Rosanna Eleanor Mullins was born in Montreal and educated at the Convent of the Congregation of Notre Dame. She contributed poems, serialized novels, and short stories to the Literary Garland (1847-51) and other journals. She married in 1851 Dr. Jean-Lukin Leprohon and, of their 13 children, eight survived. The two poems in this selection reveal what this marriage meant to her.

David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, to a coal-mining father he could sometimes despise and a mother whom he revered. Later Lawrence wrote about his life with them in Sons and Lovers.