Born: February 28, 1907Died: April 3, 1988 Ohio connection: Birth Hillsboro An award-winning cartoonist, Milton Caniff began drawing the Boy Scout page for a local newspaper at age thirteen. Best known as the creator of the comic strips “Terry and the Pirates” and “Steve Canyon,” Caniff once considered a career in acting. Graduating from The Ohio State University in …
Read More Milton CaniffBorn: October 29, 1906Died: March 11, 1972 Ohio connection: Birth Cincinnati Fredric Brown was born in 1906 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father, S. Karl Lewis, was a newspaperman and his mother, Emma Amelia, was a homemaker. Brown’s early life was difficult. His mother passed away in 1920, when he was fourteen years old. His father died …
Read More Fredric BrownBorn: 1940 Ohio connection: Birth Cincinnati Born in Cincinnati, son of Edmund Valentine II (an engineer) and Delilah Teddlie (a psychologist). Edmund Valentine III White has been regarded as the unofficial spokesman of the social, cultural, and political aspirations of the gay community. A novelist at age five, White has since authored several critically acclaimed fiction …
Read More White, EdmundBorn: 1948 Ohio connection: Birth Cincinnati Jonathan Louis Valin, son of Sigmund and Marcella (Fink) Valin, was born in 1948 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Valin married Katherine Brockhaus in 1971 and did his undergraduate work at the University of Cincinnati; he received an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1974; and did doctoral study at Washington University …
Read More Valin, Jonathan LouisBorn: November 27, 1874 Died: December 25, 1950 Ohio connection: Birth Xenia Frederic Ridgely Torrence, son of Findley David and Mary (Ridgely) Torrence, was born in 1874 in Xenia, Ohio. He attended Miami University of Ohio, 1893-95, and Princeton University, 1895-96. He worked as a librarian at the Astor Library and the Lenox Library, both …
Read More Frederic Ridgely TorrenceBorn: 1975 Ohio connection: Birth Cincinnati Curtis Sittenfeld was born in Cincinnati. The second child of four, she is the daughter of Paul G. Sittenfeld (an investment banker) and Elizabeth Curtis (an art history teacher). She attended Seven Hills School in Cincinnati through 8th Grade and then moved to the Groton School, a boarding school in Massachusetts …
Read More Sittenfeld, CurtisBorn: May 2, 1950Died: April 12, 2009 Ohio Connection: Birth Dayton Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was born May 2, 1950, in Dayton, Ohio, to Leon Kosofsky (an engineer) and Rita Goldstein Kosofsky (a high school teacher). She had two siblings, a brother and a sister. During her childhood the family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, when her father accepted …
Read More Eve Kosofsky SedgwickBorn: 1944 Ohio Connection: Birth Cincinnati Stanley Albert Schmidt was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Schmidt received his B.S. from the University of Cincinnati in 1966 and both an M.A. and Ph.D., from Case Western Reserve University in 1968 and 1969, respectively. From 1969 to 1978 he was the assistant professor of physics at Heidelberg College in …
Read More Schmidt, StanleyBorn: November 25, 1895Died: February 21, 1986 Ohio connection: Birth Cincinnati Born on November 25, 1895, Cincinnati-native Helen Hooven Santmyer was the daughter of Joseph Wright and Bertha (Hooven) Santmyer. As a youth she loved to write, penning her stories in a makeshift office that her mother prepared. After recovering from an attack of typhoid fever, she …
Read More Helen Hooven SantmyerBorn: November 25, 1899Died: April 25, 1982 Ohio connection: Birth Springfield Although an author of Westerns and a successful screenwriter, William Riley Burnett is best known as the originator of the gangster novel. The underworld icons of sleek cars, flashy clothes, bootleg liquor, and tommy guns find their origins in Burnett’s first novel, Little Caesar (1929). The …
Read More William Riley Burnett