Smith College

Margaret Edson is an American playwright. As a child, she wrote and acted in amateur plays with neighborhood friend Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She... graduated with a B.A. in Renaissance History from Smith College, and received a master's in English literature from Georgetown University. Her jobs have included being a bicycle shop sales clerk and a volunteer ESL teacher. Edson's first play was Wit, first produced in 1995 at South Coast Repertory in California, about a John Donne scholar who is hospitalized for and dying of ovarian cancer. Edson did use her work experience in a hospital as part of the background in writing the play. At the time of its first New York production in late 1998, Edson was a kindergarten teacher at Centennial Place Elementary School . The play won her the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The award brought her a large amount of publicity, including an interview on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. Edson has written a second play, Satisfied, whose subject is "country-gospel radio in Kentucky"--still, as of April 2008, unproduced. Edson gave the address during the commencement ceremony of 2008 at Smith College.
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Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American author and journalist. One novel by Mitchell was published during her lifetime, the American Civil... War-era novel, Gone with the Wind. For it she won the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. In more recent years, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, Lost Laysen, have been published. A collection of articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form. These additional works have enabled scholars and the public to more fully comprehend the richness and depth of Margaret Mitchell's writing. Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner and a lifelong resident and native of Atlanta, Georgia, who was born in 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel "May Belle" Stephens, was a suffragist. She had two brothers, Russell Stephens Mitchell, who died in infancy in 1894, and Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in 1896.
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Mary Ellen Greenfield was a Washington Post and Newsweek editorial writer and a Washington, D.C. insider known for her wit and for being reclusive.... Greenfield was born in Seattle, where she attended The Bush School. She graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1952. She also studied at Cambridge University as a Fulbright Scholar, and there was friends with Norman Podhoretz, who also went on to a distinguished career in journalism. She became influential in a male-dominated world and a close confidante of Post publisher Katharine Graham. She was awarded journalism's highest honor, a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing, in 1978, and spent 20 years as the editorial page editor for the Washington Post, and 25 years as a columnist for Newsweek. She never married, something she came to regret. When diagnosed with cancer, Greenfield partly retired to Bainbridge Island in her native Washington, where she wrote a posthumously-published memoir entitled Washington. She died of the disease, aged 68.
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Ann Matthews Martin is an American children's author. Ann Martin grew up in Princeton, New Jersey with her parents and her younger sister, Jane.... After graduating from Smith College, Martin became a teacher and then an editor of children's books; she is now a full-time writer. Martin finds the ideas for her books from many different sources; some are based on personal experiences, while others are based on childhood memories and feelings. Many are about contemporary problems or events. All of Ann's characters, including the members of The Baby-Sitters Club, are fictional, but many of her characters are based on real people. Sometimes Ann names her characters after people she knows, and other times she simply chooses names that she likes. Martin has always enjoyed writing. Even before she was old enough to write, she would dictate stories to her mother to write down for her. Some of her favorite authors at that time were Lewis Carroll, P. L. Travers, Hugh Lofting, Astrid Lindgren, and Roald Dahl. They inspired her to become a writer herself.
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Richard Purdy Wilbur is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of... Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989. Wilbur was born in New York City and grew up in North Caldwell, New Jersey. He graduated from Montclair High School in 1938, having worked on the school newspaper as a student there. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942 and then served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1945 during World War II. After the Army and graduate school at Harvard University, Wilbur taught at Wesleyan University for two decades and at Smith College for another decade. At Wesleyan, he was instrumental in founding the award-winning poetry series of the University Press. He received two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and, as of 2011, teaches at Amherst College. He is also on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. He married Charlotte Hayes Ward in 1942 after his graduation from Amherst; she was a student at nearby Smith College.
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Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College,... Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy. Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections: The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. Plath was born during the Great Depression on October 27, 1932 at the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood.
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Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American physicist with expertise in the techniques of experimental physics and radioactivity. Wu worked on the... Manhattan Project . She later performed experiments that contradicted the "Law of Conservation of Parity" and which confirmed the theories of colleagues. Her honorary nicknames include the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Marie Curie", and "Madame Wu". Wu was born on May 31, 1912, in her ancestral hometown in Taicang, Jiangsu Province, China. Wu was the only child. She was raised in Liuhe, a small town in Taicang about 40 miles from Shanghai. Her father, Wu Zhongyi , was a proponent of gender equality, and he founded the Mingde Women's Vocational Continuing School. Wu left her hometown at the age of 11 to go to the Suzhou Women's Normal School No. 2. In 1929 Wu was admitted to the National Central University which later became the Nanjing University in mainland China and was reinstated in Taiwan.
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Richard Purdy Wilbur is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of... Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989. Wilbur was born in New York City and grew up in North Caldwell, New Jersey. He graduated from Montclair High School in 1938, having worked on the school newspaper as a student there. He graduated from Amherst College in 1942 and then served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1945 during World War II. After the Army and graduate school at Harvard University, Wilbur taught at Wesleyan University for two decades and at Smith College for another decade. At Wesleyan, he was instrumental in founding the award-winning poetry series of the University Press. He received two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and, as of 2011, teaches at Amherst College. He is also on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. He married Charlotte Hayes Ward in 1942 after his graduation from Amherst; she was a student at nearby Smith College.
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