Explorations in literature -- Seventh Edition

Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers. Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2. His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old. He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of...

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), an English writer, poet, mathematician, logician and photographer, born at Daresbury, Cheshire. He lectured in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871), along with the nonsense poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark. Under his own name he published work on mathematics and logic and devised word puzzles such as Doublets.

Ray Bradbury is one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think. His more than five hundred published works -- short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, and verse -- exemplify the American imagination at its most creative. Once read, his words are never forgotten. His best-known and most beloved books, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, are masterworks that readers carry wi...

Ruth S. Cohen is the author of Discoveries in Literature -- Seventh Edition. Her work provides readers with an accessible guide to literary study.