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Authors & Books · the city's literature, works first
South Bend's literary record is stronger at the top than its size promises, and stranger in shape. The city has produced three National Book Award winners in a single generation of novelists and children's writers, a Beat-era poet it can claim only by birth, the screenwriter of Miracle on 34th Street, and a mayor who wrote a best-selling memoir of governing it. Its deepest bench, though, sits across the river: for most of a century the colleges at Notre Dame have employed working writers — a nun who ran a college and published a dozen volumes of verse, a president who was a published poet, a philosopher who wrote a hundred books including thirty detective novels, and the faculty who built a national creative writing program. This section takes the books one author at a time, tie stated exactly, bibliography from the publishers' and catalog records. The institutions that publish the region's students and faculty stand in Arts; the historians stand, briefly, first.
The historians, as authors
1880–1923 · THE SHELF THAT SOURCES KEEPS
In brief. The men and women who wrote this city's history are entered as sources, with their books' standing weighed, in Sources, and they are not re-weighed here. As authors they belong on this page in one paragraph each. The…
Susan Choi — six novels from a South Bend birth
BORN IN SOUTH BEND, 1969 · RAISED HERE AND IN HOUSTON
The tie. Susan Choi was born in South Bend on 28 January 1969, to a Korean father and a Jewish mother, and was raised in South Bend and in Houston, Texas, where the family moved during her childhood — Famous People carries the…
Tess Gunty — the novelist of the city itself
BORN AND RAISED IN SOUTH BEND · NOTRE DAME, CLASS OF 2015
The tie. Tess Gunty's is the fullest tie this section uses: born and raised in South Bend, a bachelor's degree at the University of Notre Dame — English, with an honors concentration in creative writing — and an MFA at New York…
Kenneth Rexroth — the poet, by birth alone
1905–1982 · BORN IN SOUTH BEND, 22 DECEMBER 1905
The tie, exactly. Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend and spent an early childhood here; the family moved to Chicago while he was a small child, his formation was Chicago's, and his fame is San Francisco's. Famous People…
Sister M. Madeleva — the poet who built a college
1887–1964 · SAINT MARY'S COLLEGE, ITS POET AND ITS PRESIDENT
The tie. Mary Evaline Wolff was born in Cumberland, Wisconsin, in 1887, graduated from Saint Mary's College in 1909, and took her doctorate at Berkeley in 1925. As Sister M. Madeleva, C.S.C., she taught English at Saint Mary's…
Phillip Hoose — the basketball town's historian, for young readers
BORN IN SOUTH BEND, 31 MAY 1947 · GREW UP HERE
The tie. Phillip Hoose was born in South Bend on 31 May 1947 and grew up in South Bend, Angola and Speedway — the publisher biographies carry the three towns together, and this entry prints all three rather than trimming the list…
April Pulley Sayre — the resident nature writer
1966–2021 · LIVED AND DIED IN SOUTH BEND
The tie. April Pulley Sayre was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on 11 April 1966, trained as a biologist at Duke, and took her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2000. Her tie to this city is residence, printed exactly…
Kenn Kaufman — the field guide, from a South Bend childhood
BORN IN SOUTH BEND, 1954 · BIRDING HERE FROM AGE SIX
The tie. Kenn Kaufman was born in South Bend in 1954 and began bird-watching here at the age of six; the family moved to Wichita, Kansas, when he was nine, and the record of Famous People carries the tie at that strength — a…
John Bellairs — the Gothic children's novelist Notre Dame formed
1938–1991 · NOTRE DAME, CLASS OF 1959
The tie. John Bellairs was born in Marshall, Michigan, on 17 January 1938. His South Bend tie is formation, printed exactly: he took his bachelor's degree in English at the University of Notre Dame in 1959, magna cum laude, wrote…
Valerie Sayers — the novelist who founded the Review
BORN IN BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA · NOTRE DAME FACULTY, 1993–2021
The tie. Valerie Sayers was born and raised in Beaufort, South Carolina, and her tie to this city is the working life: she joined the University of Notre Dame's English faculty in 1993, held the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship…
Ralph McInerny — a hundred books, thirty of them mysteries
1929–2010 · NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHY FACULTY, 1955–2009 · DIED IN SOUTH BEND
The tie. Ralph McInerny was born in Minneapolis on 24 February 1929 and came to the University of Notre Dame in 1955 to teach philosophy; he stayed fifty-four years, retired in the spring of 2009, and died in South Bend on 29…
Nicholas Sparks — the alumnus, at an alumnus's strength
BORN IN OMAHA, 1965 · NOTRE DAME, CLASS OF 1988
The tie, exactly. Nicholas Sparks was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1965 and raised in Fair Oaks, California. South Bend's claim is the formation and nothing more, printed at the strength Famous People prints it: he came to the…
Ring Lardner — the Times years
1885–1933 · FIRST NEWSPAPER JOB: THE SOUTH BEND TIMES, 1905
The tie. Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan, on 6 March 1885, twenty miles from this city, and South Bend gave him his start: in the fall of 1905 — on the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame's account, drawn from…
The screenwriters born here — George Seaton and Larry Karaszewski
SEATON 1911–1979 · KARASZEWSKI BORN 1961
George Seaton. George Seaton was born George Edward Stenius in South Bend on 17 April 1911; the family moved to Detroit while he was a child, and the formation — the raised-in-Detroit years, the Jesse Bonstelle stock company, the…
Pete Buttigieg — the mayor as memoirist
BORN AND RAISED IN SOUTH BEND · MAYOR, 2012–2020
The tie. Pete Buttigieg was born and raised in South Bend and governed it as its thirty-second mayor from 1 January 2012 to 1 January 2020 — the personal and political record stands in Famous People and in Government. This entry…
Jerry Scott — the comics, written from a Tribune paper route
BORN IN SOUTH BEND, 2 MAY 1955
The tie. Jerry Scott was born in South Bend on 2 May 1955 — and his publisher's biography ties the birth to the trade in one stroke: he was introduced to the newspaper business delivering the South Bend Tribune from his bicycle…
The local shelf — picture books, museum books, and the county's own keeping
THE DOCUMENTED LOCAL-PRESS RECORD, AT ITS SIZE
The Arcadia volume. South Bend's volume in Arcadia Publishing's Images of America series is South Bend, Indiana (2001, 128 pages), by Kay Marnon Danielson, a native of this city. The series' method is the caption-book: more than…