Agatha Christie was born as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay , Devon , to an American father and an English mother. She never held or claimed United States citizenship. Her father was Frederick Miller, a rich American stockbroker, and her mother was Clara Bohemer, a British aristocrat. Christie had a sister, Margaret Frary Miller (1879-1950), called Madge, eleven years her senior, and a brother, Louis Montant Miller (1880-1929), called Monty, ten years older than Christie. Her father died when she was very young. Her mother resorted to teaching her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. At the age of 16 she went to a school in Paris to study singing and piano.

DICKENS, CHARLES JOHN HUFFAM (1812—1870), English novelist, was born on the 7th of February 1812 at a house in the Mile End Terrace, Commercial Road, Landport (Portsea)—a house which was opened as a Dickens Museum on 22nd July 2904.

Birth
Douglas Noel Adams was born on March 11, 1952 in Cambridge. His mother, Janet Adams, born Donovan, was a nurse at Addenbrooke's and his father, Christopher Douglas Adams, was a postgraduate theology student at Ridley Hall. He later became a teacher of theology, but this was obviously not his final goal and he became a probation officer and later even a lecturer on probationary theory and practice.

Eric Van Lustbader (he dropped his middle name, Van for several years due to a confusion about his last name) was born and raised in Greenwich Village. He is the author of more than twenty-five best-selling novels, including THE NINJA, in which he introduced Nicholas Linnear, one of modern fiction's most beloved and enduring heroes. THE NINJA was sold to 20th CenturyFox, to be made into a major motion picture.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

Jack London (1876-1916) , prolific American novelist and short story writer, whose works deal romantically with the overwhelming power of nature and the struggle for survival. His left-wing philosophy is seen in the class struggle novel The Iron Heel (1908).

Jack London was born on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco. He was deserted by his father, William Henry Chaney, , and raised in Oakland by his mother Flora Wellman, a music teacher and spiritualist, and stepfather John London, whose surname he took. London's youth was marked by poverty. At the age of ten he became an avid reader, and borrowed books from the Oakland Public Library.

After leaving school at the age of 14, London worked as a seaman, rode in freight trains as a hobo and adopted socialistic views as a member of protest armies of the unemployed. In 1894 he was arrested in Niagara Falls and jailed for vagrancy. Without having much formal education, London educated himself in public libraries, and at the age of 19 gained admittance to the University of California at Berkeley. He had already started to write. For the remainder of 1898 London again tried to earn his living by writing. His early stories appeared in the Overland Monthly and the Atlantic Monthly . In 1900 he married Elisabeth Maddern, but left her and their two daughters three years afterwards, eventually to marry Charmian Kittredge.

In 1901 London ran unsuccessfully on the Socialist party ticket for mayor of Oakland. He started to steadily produce novels, nonfiction and short stories, becoming in his lifetime one of the most popular authors. London's first novel, The Son Of The Wolf , appeared in 1900. His Alaska stories, The Call Of The Wild (1903), in which a giant pet dog Buck finds his survival instincts in Yukon, White Fang (1906) and Burning Daylight (1910) gained a large reading public. Among his other works are The Sea-Wolf (1904) and The Road , a collection of short stories.

In 1902 London went to England, where he studied the living conditions in East End and working class areas of the capital city. His report about the economic degradation of the poor, The People Of The Abyss (1903), was a surprise success in the U.S. but criticized in England. In 1906, he published his first collection of non-fiction pieces, The War Of The Classes , which included his lectures on socialism. London also published a semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909) and a travel book The Cruise of the Snark (1911).

London had purchased in 1910 a large tract of land near Glen Ellen in Sonoma County, and devoted his energy and money improving and enlarging his Beauty Ranch. In 1913 London's Beauty Ranch burned to the ground, and his doctor told him that his kidneys were failing.

A few months before his death, London resigned from the Socialist Party. Debts, alcoholism, illness, and fear of losing his creativity darkened the author's last years. He died on November 22, 1916, officially of gastro-intestinal uremia. However, there have also been speculations that London committed suicide with morphine.

BECKE, GEORGE LEWIS (LOUIS) (1855-1913), author, was born on 18 June 1855 at Port Macquarie, New South Wales, son of Frederick Becke, clerk of petty sessions, and his wife Caroline Matilda, née Beilby, both English-born. Becke received little formal education before 1867 when the family moved to Sydney and he attended Fort Street Model School. Two years later, with his brother Vernon, he took passage to San Francisco and was away for nineteen months. At 16 he stowed away to Samoa, taking a job in Apia as a book-keeper. He was 18 when he met the notorious Captain 'Bully' Hayes who was to become a central character in his later writings. Early in 1874 Hayes signed Becke on as supercargo on the Leonora which, some ten weeks later, sank off Kusaie, stranding the survivors there. When a British warship arrived in pursuit of Hayes six months later, Becke was arrested for piracy and taken to Brisbane. Acquitted, he joined the Palmer River gold rush, worked at Ravenswood station (1877), and as a bank clerk in Townsville (1878-79).

Many people ask about me and my family. I was born in Middlesex, England in 1943 and came out to Australia when I was six years old. I have a younger sister called Ruth. I went to Bentleigh West Primary School, where English and Library were my favourite subjects. When I was very small I loved Rupert The Bear books. Later on I enjoyed William books by Richmal Crompton.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay, but educated in England at the United Services College, Westward Ho, Bideford. In 1882 he returned to India, where he worked for Anglo-Indian newspapers. His literary career began with Departmental Ditties (1886), but subsequently he became chiefly known as a writer of short stories. A prolific writer, he achieved fame quickly.

Terry Pratchett sold his first story when he was thirteen, which earned him enough money to buy a second-hand typewriter. His first novel, a humorous fantasy entitled The Carpet People, appeared in 1971 from the publisher Colin Smythe. Terry worked for many years as a journalist and press officer, writing in his spare time and publishing a number of novels, including his first Discworld novel, The Color of Magic, in 1983. In 1987 he turned to writing full time, and has not looked back since. To date there are a total of 36 books in the Discworld series, of which four (so far) are written for children. The first of these, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, won the Carnegie Medal. A non-Discworld book, Good Omens, his 1990 collaboration with Neil Gaiman, has been a longtime bestseller, and was reissued in hardcover by William Morrow in early 2006 (it is also available as a mass market paperback (Harper Torch, 2006) and trade paperback (Harper Paperbacks, 2006). Terry's latest book, Making Money, was published in September 2007 and was an instant New York Times and London Times bestseller. In 2008, Harper Children's will publish Terry's new standalone non-Discworld YA novel, Nation.

Regarded as one of the most significant contemporary English-language satirists, Pratchett has won numerous literary awards, was named an Officer of the British Empire “for services to literature” in 1998, and has received four honorary doctorates from the Universities of Warwick, Portsmouth, Bath, and Bristol. His acclaimed novels have sold more than 45 million copies (give or take a few) and have been translated into 33 languages.

Terry Pratchett lives in England with his family, and spends too much time at his word processor.

William Lane 6 September 1861 – 26 August 1917 ) was a journalist , pioneer of the Australian labour movement and utopian .

Lane was born in Bristol , England . His father was Protestant Irish and worked in a nursery, his mother was English. When Lane was born his father was earning a miserable wage, but later on his circumstances improved and he became an employer of labour. The boy was educated at Bristol grammar school and showed ability, but he was sent early to work as an office boy. His mother died when he was 14, and at 16 he migrated to Canada , then to the United States , where he worked first as a printer, then as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press (1881), there meeting his future wife Ann MacGuire. In 1885 they migrated to Brisbane , Australia , where Lane immediately got work as a feature writer for the weekly Queensland Figaro , then as a columnist for the Brisbane Courier and Evening Telegraph, writing under a number of pseudonyms ("Lucinda Sharpe", who some consider to be the work of Annie Lane, "John Maurice Miller" and "Sketcher").

SHAKESPEARE'S ANCESTRY
As a brief introductory detail it should be mentioned that, during the sixteenth century, there were many families with the name Shakespeare in and around Stratford. "Shakespeare" appears countless times in town minutes and court records, spelled in a variety of ways, from Shagspere to Chacsper.