Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist. He was born on August 24, 1947 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As a teenager, Coelho wanted to become a writer to which his family was opposed. At 17, Coelho's introversion and opposition to following a traditional path led to his parents committing him to a mental institution from which he escaped three times before being released at the age of 20.

Songwriter

At his parents' wishes, Coelho enrolled in law school and abandoned his dream of becoming a writer. One year later, he dropped out and lived life as a hippie, traveling through South America, North Africa, Mexico, and Europe and becoming immersed in the drug culture of the 1960s. Upon his return to Brazil, Coelho worked as a songwriter which made him earn a living. In 1974, Coelho was arrested for "subversive" activities by the ruling military government, who had taken power ten years earlier and viewed his lyrics as left-wing and dangerous.
In 1986, Coelho walked the 500-plus mile Road of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, a turning point in his life. On the path, Coelho had a spiritual awakening, which he described autobiographically in The Pilgrimage. In an interview, Coelho stated

"[In 1986], I was very happy in the things I was doing. I was doing something that gave me food and water – to use the metaphor in "The Alchemist", I was working, I had a person who I loved, I had money, but I was not fulfilling my dream. My dream was, and still is, to be a writer."

Succes as a writer

After making the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1986, Coelho wrote The Pilgrimage. The following year, Coelho wrote The Alchemist which has gone on to sell more than 65 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling books in history, and has been translated into more than 70 languages.
After this success Paulo Coelho is a strong advocate of spreading his books through peer-to-peer file sharing networks and pirating websites. He even provides free translations of many of his books.

Who is Dan Brown?

Dan Brown

Dan Brown is an American author of thriller fiction. He is best known for the 2003 bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code.

Early life

He was born on June 22, 1964,  in Exeter, New Hampshire, USA. He is the eldest of three children. His early life was influenced by his parents:

• His father, Richard G. Brown, was a teacher of mathematics, and wrote textbooks from 1968 until his retirement in 1997.
• In Addition both of his parents are also singers and musicians, having served as church choir masters.

After graduating from Phillips Exeter, Brown attended Amherst College. Brown spent the 1985 school year abroad in Seville, Spain, where he was enrolled in an art history course at the University of Seville. Brown graduated from Amherst in 1986. 1991, he moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as singer, songwriter and pianist. It was there that he met Blythe Newlon, a woman 12 years his senior, who later became his wife. Dan Brown Started teaching to support himself.

Secrets and Puzzles

The presenece of secrets and puzzles in Dan Brown's novels has their origine in his childhood. In fact, mathematics, music and languages were a common characteristic of his education. When he was a child, he participated in elaborate treasure hunts devised by their father on birthdays and holidays. For example on Christmas Brown and his siblings did not find gifts under the tree, but followed a treasure map with codes and clues throughout their house and even around town to find the gifts. In addition this, Brown spent a lot of time working out anagrams and crossword puzzles.

Career

After dabbling with a musical career, Dan Brown started writing. He read Sidney Sheldon's novels and was influenced by his style especially in the novel The Doomsday Conspiracy. He was inspired to become a writer of thrillers and started working on Digital Fortress, setting much of it in Seville, Spain, where he had studied in 1985. His wife, with whom he co wrote a book with his wife, 187 Men to Avoid: A Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman, did much of the promotion of the novel when it was released.
Brown subsequently wrote Deception Point and Angels & Demons, the latter of which was the first to feature the lead character, Harvard symbology expert Robert Langdon.
Brown's first three novels had little success. However, when he released The Da Vinci Code, it quickly became a bestseller, going to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list during its first week of release in 2003. It is now credited with being one of the most popular books of all time, with 81 million copies sold worldwide as of 2009.
Brown's next novel featuring Robert Langdon, The Lost Symbol, was released on September 15, 2009.It had a huge success and according to the publisher, on its first day the book sold over one million in hardcover and e-book versions in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. The story takes place in Washington D.C. over a period of 12 hours, and features the Freemasons.

Writing habits

Because Dan  Brown does a lot of research, he spends years writing his novels. He has a habit of rising at 4:00am when there are no distractions (a practice he began with Digital Fortress when he had two daytime teaching jobs) and when he feels most productive, in order to give symbolic importance to the first order of business each day. He keeps an antique hourglass on his desk in his lof where he does his writing, so that he can stop briefly every hour to do push-ups, sit-ups and stretching exercises to keep his blood flowing.
Recuring themes in his books include Chritianity, historical events, codes, puzzles, treasure hunts, secretive organizations and academic lectures on obscure topics.

Bibliography

• Digital Fortress, 1998
• Angels & Demons, 2000
• Deception Point, 2001
• The Da Vinci Code, 2003
• The Lost Symbol, 2009

Gabriel García Márquez

 

Gabriel García Márquez

• Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist.  
• García Márquez, affectionately known as Gabo throughout Latin America, is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. 

Early life

• Gabriel José de la Concordia "Gabo" García Márquez was born March 6, 1927.
• When his parents fell in love, their relationship met with resistance from Luisa Santiaga Marquez's father, the Colonel. 
• Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: he (Gabriel Eligio) was a Conservative, and had the reputation of being a womanizer.
• He was brought up by his grandparents who had an important influence on his education.
  

Success

• In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
•  He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism.
•  He started as a journalist, and has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best-known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).
• From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics.
• Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. 
• His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magical realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. 
• Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo, and most of them express the theme of solitude.

Illness

• Gabriel García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1999. 
• His impeding death was was incorrectly announced by Peruvian daily newspaper in 2000. 
• Later newspapers published Garcia Marquez’s alleged farewell poem, “La Marioneta” (“the puppet”). 
• However shortly afterwards García Márquez denied being the author of the poem. 
• In fact, it was was the work of a Mexican ventriloquist. The poem is republished below. I think it may constitute a very good piece of material to teach English.

Works

Novels

• In Evil Hour 1962
• One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967
• The Autumn of the Patriarch 1975
• Love in the Time of Cholera 1985
• The General in His Labyrinth 1989
• Of Love and Other Demons 1994

Novellas

• Leaf Storm 1955
• No One Writes to the Colonel published 1961 in Spanish (written in 1956-1957)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold 1981
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores 2004

Short Story Collections

• Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories 1978
• Collected Stories 1984
• Strange Pilgrims 1993

Non Fiction

• The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor 1970
• The Solitude of Latin America 1982
• The Fragrance of Guava 1982, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza
• Clandestine in Chile 1986
• News of a Kidnapping 1996
• A Country for Children 1998
• Living to Tell the Tale 2002

Related Links about Gabriel García Márquez

• Wikipedia
• Gabriel García Márquez - Alleged poem

Who is Ernest Hemingway?

Ernest Hemingway

• Ernest Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois on July 21, 1899.
• He was an American writer and journalist.
• When he left high school, he worked for a few months as a reporter.
• He later became an ambulance driver during World War I.
• His first novel, The Sun Also Rises>, was written in 1924.
• He returned to the United Sates in the following year because he was seriously wounded.
• Ernest Hemingway married 4 times.
  
• He first married Hadley Richardson in 1922 with whom he travelled to Paris.
• In Paris he met famous expatriate who who formed a community called the lost generation.
• After divorcing Hadley Richardson in 1927 Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer.
• They divorced following Hemingway's return from covering the Spanish Civil War.
• After the Spanish Civil war he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls.
• He then married Martha Gellhorn in 1940, but he left her for Mary Welsh Hemingway after World War II,
• During World War II, was present at D-Day and the liberation of Paris.
• In 1952 Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in a plane crash that left him in pain or ill-health for much of the rest of his life.
• Before he went to Africa, he published The Old Man and the Sea. for which he got a Nobel Prize in 1954.
  
• In 1959 he moved from Cuba to Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961.
• Hemingway's distinctive writing is called the iceberg theory is characterized by economy and understatement.
• Hemingway's fiction is considered successful because the characters he presents exhibit an authenticity that reverberates with the audience.

Works

Some of Ernest hemingway's works:

• "Indian Camp" (1926)
• The Sun Also Rises (1927)
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1935)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
• The Old Man and the Sea (1951)
• True at First Light (1999)