Friday, September 28, 2012

Famous writers from different states

So I was trying to think of the most famous writers I could from each state.  A few were obvious (Cather, Faulkner, Toole).  Still, I didn't come up with too many--it turns out I'm not actually sure where most writers are from.  I put the name in italics if I've never read a book by the author.

California--John Steinbeck?  Jack London?  Charles Bukowski?  Raymond Chandler?

Colorado--Hunter S. Thompson?

Georgia--Carson McCullers

Illinois--Ernest Hemingway

Indiana--Kurt Vonnegut

Louisiana--John Kennedy Toole

Maine--Stephen King

Massachusetts--Melville?  Nathaniel Hawthorne? (no, I never made it through The Scarlet Letter), Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, oh, I've got a recent one--Robert Parker (the Spenser mysteries)

Mississippi--William Faulkner, Eudora Welty (I think)

Missouri--Mark Twain

Nebraska--Willa Cather

New Jersey--Junot Diaz (Oscar Wao was set there, I assume he's from there)

New York--Walt Whitman (Ok, he's more of a poet, but he's who I came up with), Langston Hughes? Ralph Ellison? (obviously they lived in Harlem, but were they from there?), Stan Lee (!), about a million others who lived in NY but weren't from there

North Carolina--David Sedaris

Ohio--Harriet Beacher Stowe (I think), P.J. O'Rourke, Harvey Pekar

Oklahoma--S. E. Hinton (Lee told me this one, and how great is it that OK's most famous author is YA?)

Pennsylvania--John Updike (aren't his books set in suburban Philadelphia?)

Virginia--Edgar Allan Poe (I know Baltimore claims him but I think he was from Richmond originally)

Washington State--Frank Herbert



Leave any others you know in the comments and I'll add them to the list.

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