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Many Canadian women fiction writers have become justifiably famous. But what about women who have written non-fiction?

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The Library of Author Biographies: Lynne Reid Banks
Born in London in 1929, Lynne Reid Banks' life was soon influenced by war. Banks and her mother fled London in 1940, during World War II, and settled in Canada for five years. It was during her teenage years in Saskatoon that Banks was exposed to the myths and legends of the Cree Indians. These stories would later inspire her to write her bestselling Indian in the Cupboard series. After returning to London, and completing university, Banks worked as a journalist and was sent to Israel on assignment, where she met her husband, and lived for nine years. Her experience in Israel led to the publication of two books: Letters to My Israeli Sons: The Story of Jewish Survival (1979) and Torn Country: An Oral History of the Israeli War of Independence (1982). Sherri Liberman's biography successfully intertwines the story of Banks' life with the history of the places she lived and shows how her writing was influenced by her surroundings and experiences. This well-researched biography includes an interview with Banks, a timeline, selected reviews, a glossary, and a list of recommendations for further reading. The popularity of the Indian in the Cupboard series will likely increase this biography's appeal to young adult readers. Ages 11-14.Reviewed by Alison Kelly ... Read more

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A must have for teachers and students
The book is excellent for young readers.It is well organized.Teachers will enjoy the depth look at Scott O'Dell's life and contributions.The book provides a framework to formulate lesson plans for classrooms to study by. ... Read more

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A panoramic compendium of powerful works, written between 1970 and 1994, includes critical pieces on Soviet communism, analyses of the works of fellow writers, and semi-fictional tales that mirror the fragility of the planet and its human inhabitants. 15,000 first printing.Amazon.com Review
The Polish writer Gustaw Herling, who resides in Naples and survivedone of Stalin's labor camps to produce the superb memoir A World Apart,writes keen, striking essays and stories about his adopted homeland, Italy.Tackling topics from the eruption of Vesuvius to the annual liquefaction ofSan Gennaro's blood to the 1657 plague that ravaged Naples, Herling employs abeautiful command of language to present a vision of the transcendence of artand literature. ... Read more

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This travelogue is from 1916 when the author traveled through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.

Chapters:
1.The Rose Window
2.The Scenic Route
3.Across the Meadows to the Passaic
4.The Piety and Eggs of Paterson
5.Across the Delaware
6.An American Summer Resort
7.The Pennsylvanians
8.Beautiful Wilkes-Barre
9.In and Out of Scranton
10. A Little American Town
11. The Magic of the Road and Some Tales
12.Railroads and a New Wonder of the World
13.A Country Hotel
14.The City of Swamp Root
15.A Ride BY Night
16.Chemung
17.Chicken and Waffles and the Toon O' Bath
18.Mr. Hubbard and an Automobile Flirtation
19.The Rev. J. Cadden McMilckens
20. The Capital of the Fra
21.Buffalo Old and New
22.Along the Erie Shore
23.The Approach to Erie
24.The Wreckage of a Storm
25.Conneaut
26.The Gay Life of the Lake Shore
27.A Summer Storm and Some Comments on The Picture Postcard
28.In Cleveland
29. The Flat Lands of Ohio
30.Ostend Purged of Sin
31.When Hope Hopped High
32.The Frontier of Indiana
33.Across the Border of Boyland
34.A Middle Western Crowd
35.Warsaw at Last
36.Warsaw in 1884-6
37.The Old House
38.Day Dreams
39.The Kiss of Fair Gusta
40.Old Haunts and Old Dreams
41.Bill Arnold and His Brood
42.In the Chautauqua Belt
43.The Mystery of Coincidence
44.The Folks at Carmel
45.An Indiana Village
46.A Sentimental Interlude
47.Indianapolis and a Glympse of Fairyland
48.The Spirit of Terre Haute
49.Terre Haute After Thirty-Seven Years
50.A Lush, Egyptian Land
51.Another "Old Home"
52.Hail, Indiana!
53.Fishing in the Busseron and a County Fair
54.The Ferry at Decker
55.A Minstrel Brother
56.Evansville
57.The Backwoods of Indiana
58.French Lick
59.A College Town
60."Booster Day" and a Memory
61.The End of the Journey

Notes on the author, Theodore Dreiser:
American author, outstanding representative of naturalism, whose novels depict real-life subjects in a harsh light. Dreiser's novels were held to be amoral, and he battled throughout his career against censorship and popular taste. This started with "Sister Carrie" (1900). It was not until 1981 that the work was published in its original form. Dreiser's principal concern was with the conflict between human needs and the demands of society for material success.

"He had an enormous influence on American literature during the first quarter of the century - and for a time he was American literature, the only writer worth talking about in the same breath with the European masters. Out of his passions, contradictions, and sufferings, he wrenched the art that was his salvation from the hungers and depressions that racked him. It was no wonder that he elevated the creative principle to a godhead and encouraged by word and example truthful expression in others." (from Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey 1908-1945 by Richard Lingeman, 1991)

Dreiser wrote novels reflecting his mechanistic view of life, a concept that held humanity as the victim of such ungovernable forces as economics, biology, society, and even chance. In his works, conventional morality is unimportant, consciously virtuous behavior having little to do with material success and happiness. While his style and language tended to be clumsy and plodding, he played an important role in introducing a new realism and sexual candor into American fiction. Dreiser was born into a large and poor family. His education was irregular, but, with help from a sympathetic high school teacher, he spent the year 1889-90 at the Univ. of Indiana. After working as a journalist on several midwestern newspapers, in 1894 he went to New York City, where he began a career in publishing, eventually rising to the presidency of Butterick Publications. **
...**summary from Encyclopedia.com

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Dreiser's motor trip back home to Indiana

In the summer of 1915, at a party in NYC for Edgar Lee Masters, illustrator Franklin Booth, a fellow Hoosier, asked Dreiser if he would care to accompany him on a motor trip to Indiana. Sensing the possibility of making a book out of the trip, Dreiser agreed. On August 11, Dreiser and Booth, along with a driver/mechanic named Speed, left NYC for the great midwest of their childhoods.

This, the book that resulted from the trip, is many things: travelogue, personal memoir, soap box for Dreiser's unorthodox beliefs, among other things. As a travelogue, it's relatively easy to trace their journey almost town to town (no maps are in the book) because Dreiser names many of them; he is also impressed by a lot of them and seems to be consistently enthused about what might be around the next bend. The year being 1915, one might assume they would've taken the newly established Lincoln Highway, but they didn't, electing to go via a more circuitous route through Scranton, Elmira, and Buffalo. Dreiser is obviously thrilled by motor travel and waxes ecstatically about it throughout the trip.

After reaching Indiana and visiting some old familiar places, Dreiser's comments are sometimes cynical and critical (especially of small-town attitudes and prejudices), but are also enthusiastic and proud (he has a Whitmanesque belief in the American people). But the reader must also endure sentences like these: "I often ask myself what it is all about, anyhow, and what are we here for, and why should anyone worry whether they are low or high, or moral or immoral. What difference does it really make?" Expressing sentiments like these is what kept Dreiser in trouble with the critics.

All in all, it's a very interesting book. Dreiser's muscular prose pulls the reader along, and most of what he has to say is still relevant. The only thing sorely missing is an index, which would be very helpful. Like all long car trips there are slow, dreary stretches, but not nearly enough to wish you stayed home.

Dreiser and Me
I read Sister Carrie when I was a teenager in China.The other day I listened to a Hoosier's holiday on Talking Books.He went back to his hometown after some thirty years.I went back to my hometown, Hangzhou,China and saw my old house now completely destroyed and replaced by a hugescaffolding.Somehow I felt my experience wasn't so different fromDreisers.I liked the book so much I'm going to order a copy to readcertain parts again, although I have been in Indianapolis exactly once inmy lifetime. Indianapolis and Hangzhou are world's apart.Dreiser and meare only 50 years apart but I feel I knew how he felt.Kai Lai Chung

Dreiser and Me
I read Sister Carrie when I was a teenager in China.The other day I listened to a Hoosier's holiday on Talking Books.He went back to his hometown after some thirty years.I went back to my hometown, Hangzhou,China and saw my old house now completely destroyed and replaced by a hugescaffolding.Somehow I felt my experience wasn't so different fromDreisers.I liked the book so much I'm going to order a copy to readcertain parts again, although I have been in Indianapolis exactly once inmy lifetime. Indianapolis and Hangzhou are world's apart.Dreiser and meare only 50 years apart but I feel I knew how he felt.Kai Lai Chung

The Wit, Wisdom, and Cynicism of Dreiser at its Very Best
Theodore Dreiser is one of America's great authors, but he is also an enigma wrapped inside a contradiction. Forever in awe of the "great social forces" lurching mankind forward, and inspired by the greatfinancial titans and clever capitalist geniuses who attempted to reap thewhirlwind, Dreiser nevertheless embraced communism late in his life as theantidote for the injustices plaguing mankind. He was a spirited socialrebel, railing against orthodoxy and Puritan "Babbitts" who wouldfoist their Midwestern morality down upon him, but at the same time, as hedemonstrates in this book, his idealization of the small-town Hoosierphilistines in Warsaw, Sullivan, and other whistle stop towns far removedfrom the Broadway footlights he had known intimately by the time this epicjourney to the Heartland commences. Dreiser devoted hundreds, perhapsthousands of pages of prose to attacking the small-town"Babbitts" sharing the views of another world-weary cynic, HenryLouis Mencken. And yet, for all his caustic attitudes toward rigidconventions, Dreiser swoons in near reverie after catching first glimpse ofthe mundane streets, the old grammar school, feed store, and the simplefolk he remembered from his youth. In other passages,examples of plaincountry living he encounters along the bumpy, dusty backroads of Americacirca 1914, are ridiculed and scorned as one would commonly expect ofTheodore Dreiser and his war against society's religious and socialconventions. Nevertheless, Dreiser's personal observations on life areoften more engaging and inciteful than in some of his later novels. He isan American master; a pioneer of literary realism, and despite thecontradictions, this is a fine and engaging volume exploring a vanishedAmerican landscape. Mr. Brinkley is to be commended for presenting it tothe reading public again after all these years. ... Read more

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Discusses the life, novels, and writing habits of S.E. Hinton, author of such popular books as "The Outsiders" and "That Was Then, This Is Now." ... Read more