The Open Road Blog

We're spotlighting archival photos a day early this week in honor of Mother's Day!

Check out two new slideshows featuring gorgeous archival snapshots of authors with their mothers—and, in the case of authors who are mothers, authors with their children! Have a look:

Above: Lois Lenski in this picture with her son, Stephen, and  her husband, Arthur, in 1946, just after she had won the Newbery Award for Strawberry Girl. With them is their pet goat, Missy.

Lois Lenski graduated from high school in 1911 and moved with her family to Columbus, where her father joined the faculty at Capital University. Because Capital did not yet allow women to enroll, she attended college at Ohio State University. Lenski took courses in education, planning to become a teacher like her mother, but also studied art, and was especially interested in drawing. In 1915, with ...

For the last day of National Poetry Month, we are delighted to feature this photo of Josephine Hart at her Poetry Hour at the British Library celebrating Robert Browning in 2009 (from left: Charles Dance, Rupert Evans, Josephine Hart, and Jeremy Irons).

"The story of the individual soul on its journey is the only one worth telling. That’s why I write. I have little or no interest—nor, I believe, any ability whatsoever—to describe the surface experiences of life." – Josephine Hart

Hart is the international bestselling author of six novels and two poetry anthologies. Her novels, which include Damage (1991), ...

The girl pictured here is a young Rachel Carson (1907–1964) with her pet dog. She would grow up to become one of the most influential American nature writers of the twentieth century. Born in the rural town of Springdale, Pennsylvania, near the Allegheny River, Carson spent much of her childhood roaming her family’s sixty-five-acre farm and exploring the woods around her home. She described herself as a “solitary girl” who was always happiest with “wild birds and creatures as companions.”

Grounded in the scientific discoveries of the day, Carson’s works were notable for their intimate lyric prose that appealed to ...

Muriel Spark is on our minds here at Open Road: the sixth anniversary of her passing occurred on April 13^th; we recently released eight of her titles in ebook form; and we're gearing up for Muriel Spark Reading Week (April 23-29), hosted by a couple of literary-minded bloggers.

Spark was born and raised in Edinburgh and from an early age attended James Gillespie’s High School. There her education was closely guided by an idiosyncratic teacher named Christina Kay, the inspiration for the title character in her best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. After school, Spark ...

This photograph was pictured in Erskine Caldwell's passport from 1946 to 1950. Throughout much of his adult life, Caldwell traveled extensively as a journalist, writing pieces from every corner of the globe. During World War II, he had received special permission from the U.S.S.R. to travel to the Ukraine, where he reported on the war effort.  

 

Caldwell was born in 1903 in Moreland, Georgia. His father was a traveling preacher, and his mother was a teacher. The Caldwell family lived in a number of Southern states throughout Erskine’s childhood. Caldwell’s tour of the South exposed him to ...

In honor of International Children's Book Day, this picture shows beloved children's book author Jean Craighead George circa 2001, feeding a wolf pup near the Bob Marshall Wilderness in western Montana.

Born in Washington, DC, on July 2, 1919, Jean loved nature from an early age. Her parents, aunts, and uncles, all naturalists, encouraged her interest in the world around her, and she has drawn from that passion in her more than one hundred books for children and young adults.

In 1963 George and her three children, Twig, Craig, and Luke, began to travel around the country, visiting parks ...

This photograph shows author Iris Murdoch with her husband John Bayley. The two married in 1956, two years after the publication of Murdoch’s first novel Under the Net, about a struggling young writer in London. The American Modern Library would later select this title as one of the one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, and Time magazine would list it as among the twenty-five best novels since 1923.

Murdoch and Bayley met at Oxford University, where Murdoch studied classics, ancient history, and philosophy, and where she later lectured in philosophy for fifteen years. Bayley was also ...

The photograph shows author Alice Walker being arrested and taken into custody during a protest in Concord, California in the 1980s, against weapons shipments being sent to Central and South America. Her shirt “Remember Port Chicago,” refers to an explosion during World War II that killed mostly black sailors, which occurred while the sailors were loading munitions.

Born the youngest of eight children, Alice Walker was raised by parents who believed in the power of education, despite being a family of black sharecroppers in the South. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1956, she moved back to the South, ...

This week, we're proud to feature a collection of treasures from Pat Conroy's childhood. Conroy was born in 1945 in Atlanta, Georgia. Growing up as the first of seven children in a military family, Conroy moved twenty-three times before he turned eighteen. Today, he is one of America’s most acclaimed and widely read authors and the New York Times bestselling writer of ten novels and memoirs, including The Water Is Wide, The Lords of Discipline, The Great Santini, and The Prince of Tides.

Have a look at childhood portraits, family holidays, a report card, and more—all courtesy ...

This photo shows bestselling writer, Josephine Hart in her younger years. Born and raised in Ireland, Hart attended a Mullingar Catholic School, where she was taught about the transformative power of poetry and writing. In 1964, she moved to London and eventually became the director of Haymarket Publishing.  She went on to be a revered producer of West End plays and was also a founder of Gallery Poets and West End Poetry Hour. One of her most notable feats with poetry was her ability to recruit some of the most respected actors of the time and persuade them to perform ...

This week’s archival photo shows Susan Isaacs at home in New York during a New York Post photo shoot. Isaacs was born in 1943 in Brooklyn, New York. After attending Queens College, she became a writer, and eventually the senior editor, for Seventeen magazine. After her marriage and birth of her children, Isaacs left Seventeen to take care of her children, but also worked as a freelance writer, and continued to write magazine articles as well as political speeches. It was during her time at home that she cultivated a love for mystery novels, inspiring her to write one of ...

Today’s archival photo shows Michael Murphy in the early 1980s. While studying pre-med at Stanford University, Murphy developed an interest in meditation and subsequently dropped his pre-med program in favor of studying psychology. After graduating and moving to Puerto Rico for two years to work as a psychologist for the Army, he returned to the United States to study philosophy at Stanford. However, Murphy ultimately dropped out to practice meditation at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in India. Even after he returned to California, he continued to reside at a Sri Aurobindo Ashram, located in San Francisco.  While he was there, ...