Tea Obreht Eleven-year-old Silvia comes with her mother to live in Island City, reminiscent of Manhattan in the not too distant future. They...

Woman Standing 1840-1850, Jean Baptiste Corot Catherine Hudson, of English and Irish stock, came from New England to Patagonia with her husb...

Hannah Arendt did not know she was precocious growing up. “I thought everyone was like me,” she says. She was born near Hanover, in 1906, bu...

Geraldine Brooks Anna Frith is 20 when plague comes to the village of Eyam, Derbyshire, England, in 1665. She is the main witness to what be...

James McBride and Ruth MacBride Jordan Ruth Jordan was born in Poland in 1921. Two years after her birth, her father, a Jewish rabbi, moved ...

Gish Jen Hattie Kong is born in Shandong province, China, her father a distant descendant of the Confucius family. Her mother is a Christian...

Jamaica Kincaid At 19, Lucy is sent by her mother to the United States from her native place, the island of Antigua in the Caribbean. She is...