Efraim's Notes

• Born: 29 November 1898
• Birthplace: Belfast, Northern Ireland
• Died: 22 November 1963 (natural causes)
• Best Known As: Author of The Chronicles of Narnia

Name at birth: Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis was a high-powered Oxford and Cambridge professor and one of the 20th century's most famous converts to Christianity. An atheist from boyhood, he converted at age 33 and devoted much of the rest of his life to writing about faith. His series of allegorical books known as The Chronicles of Narnia remains especially popular with children. (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of the seven in the Narnia series, was published in 1950; The Last Battle, the final book, was published in 1956.) Lewis taught at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925-1954, when he moved to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he remained until 1963. Lewis and his close friend J.R.R. Tolkien were part of the casual Oxford literary group known as The Inklings.
Lewis died on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated... The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was made into a 2005 feature film with Liam Neeson providing the voice of Aslan, the heroic lion.

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 Here are some little known facts about J. K. Rowling.

J. K. stands for Joanne Kathleen. J. K. Rowling chose to use initials for her books because her publisher feared that if readers knew she was female, they would lose interest in the boy wizard, Harry Potter. Of course,
 everyone later learned this was hardly the case.

Harry Potter was created on napkins while J. K. Rowling was a single mother traveling by train. She completed her first book-length manuscript on an old manual typewriter while she was unemployed and living on state benefits.

Twelve publishing houses initially rejected her first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. A small publisher, Bloomsbury, finally decided to give Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling a chance, awarding the author a small advance.

J. K. Rowling experienced quite a turnaround with the success of Harry Potter, and in 2006, the author was named the second richest female entertainer in the world behind Oprah Winfrey. Her fortune is estimated at just over One Billion U.S. Dollars.

The sixth book of the Harry Potter series sold more copies in twenty-four hours than The Da Vinci Code sold in a year. It also earned the Guinness Book of World Records Award for being the fastest selling book ever.

J. K. Rowling has assured the world that the seventh book in the Harry Potter series will also be the last. Although famous authors such as Stephen King and John Irving have begged J. K. Rowling not to kill off Harry Potter, the author has remained ambiguous about the boy wizard's fate.

J. K. Rowling contributes a good deal of money and support to charitable causes. She has suggested that she might publish an encyclopedia of the Harry Potter world, and contribute any and all earnings from the publication to charity.

(http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/16088/little_known_facts_about_j_k_rowling.html?cat=38

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1. Tolkien’s full name is John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
2. He was born January 3, 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
3. Three of the first languages that Tolkien worked on as a child were Animalic (he explored this one with friends, and did not actually invent it himself), Nevbosh (meaning “new nonsense,” Tolkien helped to construct it and enjoyed conversing with his friends in it), and Naffarin (the first language he worked on alone at age eight or nine.)
4. By 1904, Tolkien and his brother were orphans. His father (Arthur) died of rheumatic fever in February of 1896. Mabel, their mother, died of complications from diabetes on 14 November 1904.
5. Tolkien met Edith Bratt about four years after his mother died. They lived in the same lodging house. She was three years older than Tolkien, but they gradually fell in love. Actually, Tolkien adored her. Unfortunately, his guardian felt that she was distracting him from his studies, and that at eighteen he was too young to marry. Tolkien agreed to not see her for three years, and she moved away to stay with friends. At midnight on the day he turned twenty-one Tolkien wrote to Edith asking when he could see her again. When he learned that she had become engaged to marry another man he boarded a train and went to convince her to marry him instead. Needless to say, he was successful.
6. At one point during his first semester at Oxford, Tolkien stole a city bus as a prank, and took his friends on a joyride.
7. Tolkien fought in World War I and lost all but one of his childhood friends there.
8. In 1918, Tolkien was hired to work on what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary. Started in 1879, by the time Tolkien joined the team they had finally reached the “W”s.
9. Tolkien earned a professorship at Oxford in 1925. (Very few of the faculty actually had a “professorship” at that time. A high honor indeed.)
10. Tolkien’s four children were the ultimate inspiration for his fiction writing. Can you imagine the sorts of bedtime stories that they got to hear?
11. Tolkien was a big fan of clubs. Two of the clubs he was a member of at Oxford were the “Coalbiters” and “The Inklings.” C.S. Lewis was one of the members of The Inklings.
12. Rayner Unwin, age ten at the time, is the one who judged The Hobbit worthy of publishing. He was paid a shilling for his review. (For the record, his father, Sir Stanley Unwin, was the director of publisher George Allen & Unwin at that point.)
13. When Tolkien’s son Michael entered the army he listed his father’s profession on his paperwork as “Wizard.” It would seem that Michael really understood his father.

(From : Biography Resource Center Database , J. R. R. Tolkien: Creator of Languages and Legends by Doris Lynch)

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Rick Riordan is the award-winning, bestselling author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and the creator of a new series The 39 Clues. For Rick Riordan (pronounced Ryer'-dan), a bedtime story shared with his oldest son was just the beginning of his journey into the world of children's books.


Already an award-winning author of mysteries for adults, Riordan, a former teacher, was asked by his son Haley to tell him some bedtime stories about the gods and heroes in Greek mythology. "I had taught Greek myths for many years at the middle school level, so I was glad to comply," says Riordan. "When I ran out of myths, (Haley) was disappointed and asked me if I could make up something new with the same characters."

At the time, Haley had just been diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. Greek mythology was one of the only subjects that interested the then second-grader in school. Motivated by Haley's request, Riordan quickly came up with the character of Percy Jackson and told Haley all about "(Percy's) quest to recover Zeus's lightning bolt in modern-day America," says Riordan. "It took about three nights to tell the whole story, and when I was done, Haley told me I should write it out as a book."

Despite his busy schedule, Riordan managed to carve some time out of his daily routine to write the first Percy Jackson and the Olympians book, The Lightning Thief. And in deference to his son, Riordan chose to give the character of Percy certain attributes that hit close to home.

"Making Percy ADHD and dyslexic was my way of honoring the potential of all the kids I've known who have those conditions," says Riordan. "It's not a bad thing to be different. Sometimes, it's the mark of being very, very talented. That's what Percy discovers about himself in The Lightning Thief."

Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Riordan started writing as a young adult. He wrote short stories, unsuccessfully submitted a few of those stories for publication, and edited his high school newspaper. But he didn't take writing seriously until after he graduated from college and was teaching in San Francisco. While Riordan and his family (wife Becky and sons Haley and Patrick) enjoyed living in California, he was nostalgic for Texas. On an impulse, Riordan decided to try his hand at a mystery novel, which he set in his hometown of San Antonio. Featuring a private-eye/English Ph.D. named Tres Navarre, Big Red Tequila was published to rave reviews in 1997. Today, Riordan's Tres Navarre series has won the top three awards for the mystery genre-the Edgar, the Anthony, and the Shamus.

Despite his success in the adult mystery market, writing for children was never far from Riordan's mind.

"Back when I taught middle school and wrote adult mysteries, my students often asked me why I wasn't writing for kids," says Riordan. "I never had a good answer for them. It took me a long time to realize they were right. Kids are the audience I know best."

And while it's obvious that Riordan has a knack for writing for kids, he readily admits that writing for young readers is not that much different than writing for an older audience.

"I think kids want the same thing from a book that adults want-a fast-paced story, characters worth caring about, humor, surprises, and mystery," says Riordan. "A good book always keeps you asking questions, and makes you keep turning pages so you can find out the answers."

For fifteen years, Rick taught English and history at public and private middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Texas. In 2002, Saint Mary's Hall honored him with the school's first Master Teacher Award. Riordan made a "reluctant" decision to leave teaching, a career he thoroughly enjoyed, to write full-time. However, he's keeping his hand in education by conducting lots of author appearances in classrooms across the country, and even some in Europe. "I love teaching," says Riordan. "I love working with kids . . . maybe some day I'll go back to the classroom. I'm not ready to say it'll never happen. But for now, the books are keeping me very busy."

To learn more about Rick Riordan, visit his Web site at www.rickriordan.com

(from http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/contributor.jsp?id=10315)

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