Graham Greene was born on 2 October 1904 in Berkhampsted, Hertfordshire, England, the fourth of six children.
After graduation, he worked briefly for the Nottingham Journal, but then moved to London, as a Sub Editor for The Times.
His first novel, The Man Within, was published in 1929, to public and critical acclaim. A lucrative contract with Heinemann followed, enabling him to resign from The Times and devote more time to his novels.
During World War II, Greene worked "in a silly useless job", as he later said, for the Foreign Office in London. Greene left the Service in May 1944 and was commissioned to write a film script based on Vienna, a city then occupied by the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The result was The Third Man; a film which won the first prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1949.
Asia stimulated The Quiet American, which is about American involvement in Indochina. It was considered sympathetic to Communism in the Soviet Union and a play version of the novel was produced in Moscow. The 2002 film version was held back for nearly a year because of concerns that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States would turn off audiences from depictions of terrorist attacks and 1950s U.S. involvement in Indochina.
Greene died in Vevey, Switzerland, on 3 April 1991.

Eugene O'Neill was born in New York into an Irish-catholic theatrical family on October 16, 1888. During his early years his mother's addiction to morphine left profound emotional scars on the growing O'Neill.
He started at Princeton University, but left it after a year. In 1909 he married but the marriage ended two years later.
O'Neill went to sea in 1910, but later was forced by the onset of tuberculosis to spend six months in a sanatorium. After recovering he began writing plays.
With his third wife he settle in France, then in Sea Island, Georgia, and finally in California. His daughter Oona married Charles Chaplin at the age of eighteen.
In 1936 O'Neill received the Nobel Prize in literature for his dramatic works. But poor health prevented him from attending the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm, Sweden. His remaining creative years were characterized by long periods of illness.
After a failed production of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1943 he wrote no major new plays. O'Neill became gradually paralyzed. He died on November 27, 1953, in Boston.

AILSA CHANG: Students have been fighting the removal of Toni Morrison's novel, "The Bluest Eye." And a warning - the story contains a mention of sexual violence.
HANNAH HIPOLITO: There is irony in banning books when so many of the greatest works of literature warn us of the repercussions of doing so.
ANDREW LARSEN: I believe that the decision to ban the book was made hastily and without the proper procedures.
PRISHA SHERDIWALA: Even though others may not want to read this in public, as young humans - some of us who will be adults in less than a year - we are capable of engaging with these challenging ideas.
SHERIDAN: Those were high school students. At issue are two pages of "The Bluest Eye," a novel first published in 1970. Those passages describe a father raping his daughter. The parents who brought the complaint didn't come to this meeting.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: If you would not be comfortable reading the material in a public setting, then you should lean towards not making the material available in a public school library for children.
SHERIDAN: Pinellas County School Board lawyer David Koperski said Morrison's book was pulled because employees were heeding the state's instructions.
DAVID KOPERSKI: And so we now have to follow that because, as I said, that has the force of the law at this point.
SHERIDAN: Among those addressing the board in mid-February was 16-year-old Eliza Lane. She pointed to legal arguments for keeping "The Bluest Eye" on shelves at schools. For one, the same law, she says, requires a book's literary merit on the whole to be considered, and...
ELIZA LANE: "The Bluest Eye" was banned, to my knowledge, for pornographic content. Pornography is defined in these guidelines as the depiction of erotic behavior intended to cause sexual excitement. That is not the purpose of those passages in "The Bluest Eye." It is to shock and horrify readers into empathy for this character and to help us to realize the flaws in our own society.
SHERIDAN: The students' complaints may have had an effect. District leaders said this week they're working on a new process for reviewing books and that they'll reexamine the decision to remove "The Bluest Eye" in the months ahead.

Katherine Mansfield was born on October 14,1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, into a middle-class colonial family. Her father was a banker and her mother was of genteel origins. She lived for six years in the rural village of Karori.
At the age of nine she had her first text published. As a first step to her rebellion against her background, she withdrew to London in 1903 and studied at Queen's College.
Back in New Zealand in 1906, she took up music.
Her lifelong friend Ida Baker persuaded Mansfield's father to allow Katherine to move back to England, with an allowance of £100 a year. There she devoted herself to writing. Mansfield never visited New Zealand again.
After an unhappy marriage in 1909 to George Brown, whom she left a few days after the wedding, Mansfield toured for a while as an extra in opera.
During the first world war she travelled restlessly between England and France.
As a writer of stories Katherine Mansfield helped to put New Zealand literature on the world map.
In her last years Mansfield spent much of her time in southern France and in Switzerland, seeking relief from tuberculosis.
Mansfield died on January 9, 1923 near Fontainebleau, France.

Arthur Miller was born in New York City on October 17, 1915. The son of a small businessman, Miller worked in a warehouse after graduating from high school. When he had saved enough money, working for two years in an automobile parts warehouse, he attended the University of Michigan.
After graduating in English in 1938, Miller returned to New York. There he joined the Federal Theatre Project, and wrote scripts for radio programs. Miller's first play to appear on Broadway was THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE LUCK in 1944. It closed after four performances. Three years later ALL MY SONS was produced, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle award. This play brought Miller international fame.
In the 1950s Miller was subjected to scrutiny by a committee of the United States Congress investigating Communist influence in the arts. He was denied a passport to attend the Brussels premiere of his play THE CRUCIBLE.
In 1956 Miller was awarded an honorary degree at the University of Michigan, but also called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Miller admitted that he had attended certain meetings, but denied that he was a Communist.
In 1956 he married the motion-picture actress Marilyn Monroe; they divorced in 1961. Miller became one of the best-known American playwrights after WW II. But in an interview he stated that "It happens to be a very bad historical moment for playwriting, because the theater is getting more and more difficult to find actors, since television pays so much and the movies even more than that."
In 2002 Miller was honored with Spain's prestigious Principe de Asturias Prize for Literature, making him the first U.S. recipient of the award.
Arthur Miller died on February 10, 2005.

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston on October 27, 1932 as the daughter of German immigrant parents. Her father was a professor of biology at Boston University. He died when Plath was eight years old. Her mother, Aurelia, worked at two jobs to support Sylvia and her brother Warren.
At school Plath appeared to be a model student: she won prizes and scholarships.She entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950, but in her junior year she made the first of her suicide attempts. She later wrote about her breakdown through the summer and winter of 1953 in the semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.
After winning a Fulbright scholarship, Plath attended Newham College, Cambridge (England). She met there in 1956 the English poet Ted Hughes, whom she married a year later.
They lived in London for a while and then settled in a small market town in Mid Devonshire. The marriage was difficult and they were separated.Their separation was mainly due to Sylvia's mental illness, and the affair that Hughes had with a fellow poet's wife. Plath returned to London with their children, Frieda and Nicholas.
On February 11, 1963, Plath gassed herself in her kitchen, ending her life at the age of thirty.

Russia should repeal and not expand already restrictive LGBTI laws, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said on Friday.
The appeal from the UN’s new rights chief, Volker Türk, followed Thursday’s decision by the Russian parliament to move towards broadening a ban on the sharing of information about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and their rights.
The Russian Duma’s decision infringes "even further on international human rights norms and standards" and is deeply concerning, OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani told journalists in Geneva.
She explained that the latest LGBTI restrictions stem from 2013 legislation, that was itself condemned by independent human rights experts as "discriminatory and violating fundamental rights to freedom of expression."
"One of the arguments that is sometimes brought forth is that such legislation is important for the protection of children. In fact, what the Committee on the Rights of the Child has found is that rather than protecting children, such legislation leads to the targeting and ongoing persecution - including abuse and violence – of children, as well."