Jane Austen (1775-1817) was born in Steventon, Hampshire, where her father, Rev. George Austen, was a rector. She was the second daughter and seventh child in a family of eight. The Austens did not lose a single one of their children. Cassandra Leigh, Jane's mother, fed her infants at the breast a few months, and then sent them to a wet nurse in a nearby village to be looked after for another year or longer.
Samuel Beckett (1906 –1989) was born in Dublin. He belonged to an upper-middle class Protestant family. He completed his school and university education in Dublin. While living in Dublin he had developed his intimacy with the French and the Italian languages.
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), America's first significant novelist, was born as the son of Quakers, Judge William Cooper and Elisabeth Fenimore Cooper in New Jersey. During his youth, James stayed partly on the family estate on the shores of Otsego Lake. He used to roam in the forest and had developed a strong love of nature which later marked his books.
John Fowles (1926-2005), a British modern novelist, was born in Leigh-on-Sea, in the southeast of England, as the son of Robert Fowles, a prosperous cigar merchant, and Gladys Richards Fowles. Fowles received his formal education at Alleyn Court School and Bedford School. Later, Fowles lamented that as a captain of prefects at Bedford School, he allowed himself to exercise dictatorship over the younger boys. During World War II, his family banished to a small Devonshire village near Dartmoor.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born in a part of Poland that was then under Russian rule. His father Apollo Korzeniowski was an aristocrat without lands, a poet and translator of Shakespeare and Dickens and French literature. The family estates had been confiscated in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. As a boy the young Joseph read Polish and French versions of English novels with his father.
Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010) was born as a son of a well to do family. His father was a Jewish importer of cheese and mother was Scotch-Irish. He was grown up in the fashionable apartment district of Manhattan, New York. In his childhood the young Jerome David Salinger was called Sonny. He was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy in 1934 and in 1936 he graduated from there.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was born in London. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was one of the first feminists, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and the novel The Wrongs of Woman, in which she wrote: "We cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavor to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us.
William Faulkner (1897-1962) was as the first son of Murray Charles Faulkner and Maud Faulkner in New Albany, Mississippi. At the age of thirteen he began writing poetry. He did not complete his graduation, he dropped out the school in 1925 and started working in Grandfather's bank. During First World War, he joined with the Royal Canadian Air Force but he never got the chance to see the war.
Toni Morrison (Born on February 18, 1931), novel prize winner writer, was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents had moved there to escape the problems of southern racism. Toni Morrison was brought up in the black community of Lorain. She spent her childhood in the Midwest and enjoyed reading from Jane Austen to Tolstoy.
Henry James (1843-1916), an American expatriate writer was born in New York City into a wealthy family. His father, Henry James Sr., was one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-nineteenth-century America, whose friends included Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorne. In his youth James traveled back and forth between Europe and America.