Thursday, January 21, 2010

Biographies!

Students! This time we are going to write biographies of our favorite authors! Directions... Please post your biographies as comments to this post!

2 comments:

Sarah said...

(This was written by J.K. Rowling from her website : http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/biography.cfm -- normally the student would have written the essay)

My mother and father were both Londoners. They met on a train travelling from King's Cross station to Arbroath in Scotland when they were both eighteen; my father was off to join the Royal Navy, my mother to join the WRNS (the women's equivalent). My mother said she was cold, my father offered her a half share in his coat, and they got married just over a year later, when they were nineteen.

Both left the navy and moved to the outskirts of Bristol, in the West of England. My mother gave birth to me when she was twenty. I was a rotund baby. The description in 'Philosopher's Stone' of the photographs of 'what appeared to be a beach ball wearing different coloured bobble hats' would also apply to the pictures of my early years.

Sarah said...

(came from http://www.jasa.net.au/jabiog.htm)

Jane Austen was born on 16 December, 1775, at the rectory in the village of Steventon, near Basingstoke, in Hampshire. The seventh of eight children of the Reverend George Austen and his wife, Cassandra, she was educated mainly at home and never lived apart from her family. She had a happy childhood amongst all her brothers and the other boys who lodged with the family and whom Mr Austen tutored. From her older sister, Cassandra, she was inseparable. To amuse themselves, the children wrote and performed plays and charades, and even as a little girl Jane was encouraged to write. The reading that she did of the books in her father's extensive library provided material for the short satirical sketches she wrote as a girl.

At the age of 14 she wrote her first novel, Love and Freindship (sic) and then A History of England by a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian, together with other very amusing juvenilia. In her early twenties Jane Austen wrote the novels that were later to be re-worked and published as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey. She also began a novel called The Watsons which was never completed.