Emilio Salgari

Emilio Salgari (1862 – 1911) was an Italian writer of action adventure swashbucklers and a pioneer of science fiction.

For over a century, his novels were mandatory reading for generations of youth eager for exotic adventures. In Italy, his extensive body of work was more widely read than that of Dante. Today he is still among the 40 most translated Italian authors.

Life

Emilio Salgari was born in Verona to a family of modest merchants. From a young age, he had a desire to explore the seas and studied seamanship at a Naval Academy in Venice, but his academic performance was too poor, and he never graduated.

He began his writing career as a reporter on the daily La Nuova Arena, which published some of his work as serials. As his powers of narration grew, so did his reputation for having lived a life of adventure. He claimed to have explored the Sudan desert, met Buffalo Bill in Nebraska (he had actually met him during his "Wild West Show" tour of Italy), and sailed the Seven Seas. His early biographies were filled with adventurous tales set in the Far East, events which he claimed were the basis for much of his work. Salgari had actually never ventured farther than the Adriatic Sea.

Jack London

Jack London fue autor, periodista y activista social. Fue uno de los primeros escritores de ficción en obtener fama mundial y fortuna de su trabajo de ficción.

La madre de Jack, Flora Wellman, descendía de Marshall Wellman, constructor del canal de Pennsylvania. Flora se mudó a la costa del Pacifico cuando su padre se volvió a casar. Trabajó como maestra de música y espiritualista. Se cree que el padre de Jack fue el astrólogo William Chaney.

London nació en San Francisco. La casa donde nació se quemó con el incendio de 1906. Aunque la familia era trabajadora no era tan pobre como el autor señalaba.

En 1885 London descubrió la novela Signa de Ouida y le acredita a esto su éxito literario.

En 1889 London comenzó a trabajar de 12 a 18 horas al día en Hickmott´s Cannery. Buscando salir de la miseria pidió dinero prestado de su madre adoptiva, compró un barco y se convirtió en pirata de ostras.

En 1893 se embarcó en el Sophie Sutherland en viaje a Japón. Cuando retornó el país estaba en medio del Pánico del ´93 y Oakland se hallaba inmersa en una crisis laboral. Después de largas horas de trabajo en una fábrica de yute y en una estación de trenes, London se unió a la Armada Kelly y comenzó su vida como vagabundo. En 1894 pasó treinta días en la penitenciaría por vagancia.

Sketching Mark Twain´s biography

Mark Twain wrote numerous books, made speeches and established a local-color literature describing his time and region like nobody else…

When he was four, Twain's family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Missouri was a slave state and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he would later explore in his writing.

Twain headed west. Twain and his brother traveled more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City. The experiences inspired “Roughing It” and provided material for “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”. Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner. Twain failed as a miner and worked at a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise. Here he first used his pen name.

His first success as a writer came when his humorous tall tale, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," was published in a New York weekly, The Saturday Press, on November 18, 1865.