Born: April 27, 1822 Died: July 23, 1885 Ohio connection: Birth Point Pleasant In a one-story, three-room Point Pleasant cottage in Clermont County, Ohio, Ulysses Simpson Grant was born on April 27, 1822, the son of Jesse and Hannah Simpson Grant. The following year, the family relocated further down the Ohio River to Georgetown, Brown …
Read More Ulysses Simpson GrantBorn: September 10, 1840 Died: December 13, 1937 Ohio connection: Birth Cleveland Leonard Gurley Foster, a Civil War veteran whose avocation brought him the epithet, “the Buckeye poet” was the son of Ebenezer and Elmyra (Williams) Foster. He was born on the family homestead in the Cuyahoga Valley near Denison Avenue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Cleveland. He …
Read More Leonard Gurley FosterBorn: August 27, 1911Died: December 22, 1998 Ohio connection: Resident Yellow Springs Louis Filler, son of Pit and Sara (Kutcher) Filler, was born in Odessa, Russia, in 1911. Filler, whose family emigrated to the United States in 1914, was reared in Philadelphia, PA. Filler received a B.A. from Temple University in 1934 and then an M.A. …
Read More Louis FillerBorn: October 26, 1890Died: September 23, 1981 Ohio connection: Birth Cincinnati Gustav Eckstein, son of Gustav and Emma (Imig) Eckstein, was born in 1890 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He received a D.D.S. from the Cincinnati College of Dental Surgery in 1911 and a M.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 1924. He practiced dentistry from 1911 until 1918 and was …
Read More Gustav EcksteinBorn: June 20, 1911 Died: October 23, 1964 Ohio connection: Birth Toledo Edward McMaken Eager was born in 1911 in Toledo, Ohio. He was raised in Toledo, but spent most of the summers of his childhood and youth in rural Indiana, where he developed a love of nature, gardening, and bird-watching. These interests stayed with him the rest …
Read More Eager, Edward McMakenBorn: June 27, 1872Died: February 9, 1906 Ohio connection: Birth Dayton Writer, poet, and lyricist, Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, on June 27, 1872. Dunbar, the son of Matilda Murphy Dunbar and Joshua Dunbar (who served in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment), two formerly enslaved people, wrote his first poem at the age of six. …
Read More Paul Laurence DunbarBorn: October 4, 1924 Died: July 8, 2009 Ohio connection: Birth Cleveland Author of The Coming of Fabrizze and A Lost King, Cleveland native Raymond DeCapite was born on October 4, 1924. After serving in the United States Coast Guard between 1942-1945, DeCapite received his A.B. from Western Reserve University in 1951, and his M.A. the following year. Prior to becoming …
Read More DeCapite, RaymondBorn: May 20, 1914Died: May 14, 1978 Ohio connection: Birth Cincinnati Mary Margaret Deasy was born in 1914 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of William Paul and Clara (Woelfel) Deasy. She received a Mus.B. from the University of Cincinnati in 1935. She was a concert pianist who gave up music as a vocation for a career in writing. …
Read More Deasy, Mary MargaretBorn: May 27, 1934Died: June 27, 2018 Ohio connection: Birth Cleveland Harlan Jay Ellison, speculative fiction writer, novelist, editor, and critic, was born to a Jewish family in Cleveland, Ohio. The son of Louis Laverne and Serita (Rosenthal) Ellison, Ellison was raised in Painesville, Ohio; however, after his father died in 1949, Ellison and his mother returned to …
Read More Harlan Ellison(Sharon Rigg) Born: 1945 Ohio connection: Birth South Euclid Sharon Creech, a writer of more than 20 picture books for children and novels for young adults (YA), was born and raised in South Euclid, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. She grew up there as part of, as she says, “a noisy and rowdy family.” Relatives told …
Read More Creech, Sharon