Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

• Algebra
• Calculus
• Geometry
• Topology
• Trignometry
• Combinatorics
• Logic
• Number theory

Applied mathematics

• Dynamical systems and differential equations
• Mathematical physics
• Computing
• Information theory and signal processing
• Probability and statistics
• Game theory
• Operations research

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• 
  

• 
  Blair Academy
  Blair Academy is a private, coeducational, secondary boarding high school with an enrollment of about 448 students for grades nine through twelve. The school has 78 faculty members. The school's campus is situated on 435 acres (1.76 km²) hilltop in Blairstown, approximately 60 miles (97 km) west of New York City, in rural Warren County, New Jersey, United States.
  As of the 2009-10 school year, the school has an enrollment of 448 students and 59.5 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a student–teacher ratio of 7.5:1.
  Blair’s academic program follows the traditional four-year college-preparatory plan. Diploma requirements are governed by college entrance requirements, and they ensure that all students graduate with an exposure to a wide variety of disciplines.
  The academic year is divided into two semesters. To graduate, a four-year student must successfully complete the following units (with each semester yielding 1.5 credits): English, 12; mathematics, 9; modern or classical language, 6; laboratory science, 6; world history, 3; U.S. history, 6; arts, 4.5; religion, 1.5; and health, 1.5. Electives include area studies in Africa, Asian history, politics and government, computer science, environmental science, and the philosophy of religion. A full complement of courses is offered in the visual and performing arts. In addition, for every year a student attends Blair, he or she must complete 3 units of physical activity or athletics.
  
  wn.com/Blair_Academy
• 
  Canada
  Canada ( /ˈkænədə/) is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean. Spanning over 9,900,000 km² (3,800,000 sq mi), Canada is the world's second-largest country by total area, and its common border with the United States is the longest land border in the world.
  The land that is now Canada has been inhabited for millennia by various Aboriginal peoples. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and French colonial expeditions explored, and later settled, along the region's Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy; the Canada Act 1982 severed the vestiges of legal dependence on Britain.
  
  wn.com/Canada
• 
  Choate Rosemary Hall
  Choate Rosemary Hall (also known as Choate) is a private, college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school located in Wallingford, Connecticut. It took its present name and coeducational form with the merger in 1971 of two single-sex establishments, The Choate School (founded in 1896 in Wallingford) and Rosemary Hall (founded in 1890 in Wallingford, but resident from 1900 to 1971 in Greenwich, Connecticut). At the merger, the Wallingford campus was enlarged with a complex of modernist buildings on its eastern edge to accommodate the girls from Greenwich.
  Choate is a member of the Eight Schools Association, begun informally in 1973–74 and formalized in 2006, when former Choate headmaster Edward Shanahan was appointed its first president. The member schools are Choate, Phillips Academy (known as Andover), Phillips Exeter Academy (known as Exeter), Deerfield Academy, St. Paul's School, Hotchkiss School, Lawrenceville School, and Northfield Mount Hermon.
  Choate is also a member of the Ten Schools Admissions Organization, established in 1966 and comprising Choate, Andover, Exeter, Deerfield, St. Paul's, Hotchkiss, Lawrenceville, Taft School, Loomis Chaffee, and The Hill School.
  
  wn.com/Choate_Rosemary_Hall
• 
  Deerfield Academy
  Deerfield Academy is an independent, coeducational boarding school in Deerfield, Massachusetts, United States. It is a four-year college-preparatory school with approximately 600 students and about 100 faculty, all of whom live on or near campus.
  Deerfield is a member of the Eight Schools Association (ESA), begun informally in 1973–74 and formalized in 2006, and of the Ten Schools Admissions Organization, founded in 1966. There is a seven-school overlap of membership between the two groups. Deerfield is additionally a member of the G20 Schools group.
  In 2007 Deerfield's endowment was valued at US$415 million, or roughly $680,000 per student. Fees were around $33,000 for day students and $45,000 for boarders in 2010–2011.
  Deerfield was never affiliated with a religion, but attendance at Congregationalist Church services was required of boarding students until the 1970s, and school meetings included the singing of Christian hymns.^{[citation needed]}
  Deerfield Academy was founded in 1797 when Massachusetts Governor Samuel Adams granted a charter to found a school in the town of Deerfield. It began to educate students in 1799. The academy quickly established itself as one of the finest schools in the new republic, drawing boys from prominent families across New England. The school produced influential men that occupied many congressional and gubernatorial seats in New England. By the end of the 19th century, the shifting trends in industrialization had left rural Deerfield behind. The economic hardships of the times impoverished local farmers and drove them away to the wealthy cities. The board of trustees was considering closing the Academy, as only nine students remained. These were the school's darkest times. With little support from local farmers and a dire economic situation, the 100-year-old school was on the brink of collapse.
  
  wn.com/Deerfield_Academy
• 
  Ghana
  Ghana ⁱ/ˈɡɑːnə/ is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south. The word Ghana means "Warrior King" and is derived from the ancient Ghana Empire.
  Ghana was inhabited in pre-colonial times by a number of ancient predominantly Akan kingdoms, including the inland Ashanti Empire, the Akwamu, the Akyem, the Bonoman, the Denkyira, and the Fante among others. Non-Akan states created by the Ga also existed as did states by the Dagomba. Prior to contact with Europeans trade between the Akan and various African states flourished due to Akan's gold wealth. Trade with European states began after contact with the Portuguese in the 15th century, and the British established the Gold Coast Crown colony in 1874 over parts but not all of the country.
  The Gold Coast achieved independence from the United Kingdom in 1957, becoming the First sub-Saharan African nation to do so from European Colonialism. The name Ghana was chosen for the new nation to reflect the ancient Empire of Ghana, which once extended throughout much of west Africa.
  
  wn.com/Ghana
• 
  Groton School
  Groton School is a private, Episcopal, college preparatory boarding school located in Groton, Massachusetts, U.S. It enrolls approximately 375 boys and girls, from the eighth through twelfth grades.
  The school is a member of the Independent School League and is one of the most selective and elite boarding schools in New England. In late 2007, the Wall Street Journal listed Groton School as one of the world's top 50 schools for its success in preparing students to enter top American universities.
  Groton School was founded in 1884 by the Rev. Endicott Peabody, a member of a prominent Massachusetts family and an Episcopal clergyman. The land for the school was donated to Peabody by two brothers, James and Prescott Lawrence, whose family home was located on Farmers Row in Groton, Massachusetts, north of Groton School's present location. Backed by affluent figures of the time, such as the Rt. Rev. Phillips Brooks, the Rev. William Lawrence, William Crowninshield Endicott, J.P. Morgan, and his father, Samuel Endicott Peabody, Peabody received pledges of $39,000 for the construction of a schoolhouse, if an additional $40,000 could be raised as an endowment. (According to the school's 2006 calendar year tax returns, the endowment is worth over $368,000,000 today.)
  
  wn.com/Groton_School
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  Harrow School
  Coordinates: 51°34′23″N 0°20′02″W / 51.573103°N 0.333792°W / 51.573103; -0.333792
  Harrow School, commonly known simply as "'Harrow", is an English independent school for boys situated in the town of Harrow, in north-west London. There is some evidence that there has been a school on the site since 1243 but the Harrow School of today was officially founded by John Lyon under a Royal Charter of Elizabeth I in 1572. Harrow is one of the original nine public schools that were defined by the Public Schools Act 1868.
  The school has an enrollment of approximately 850 boys spread across twelve boarding houses, all of whom board full time.
  Harrow has many traditions and rich history, which includes the use of Straw Hats, morning suits, top hats and canes as uniform. Its long line of famous alumni include eight former Prime Ministers (including Churchill, Baldwin, Peel, and Palmerston), numerous foreign statesmen, former and current members of both houses of the UK Parliament, two Kings and several other members of various royal families, 20 Victoria Cross and one George Cross holders, and a great many notable figures in both the arts and the sciences. It is widely considered one of the best secondary schools in the world along with its rival Eton. Good Schools Guide said the school "Does well, does the boys well, couldn't do better."
  
  wn.com/Harrow_School
• 
  India
  India (ⁱ/ˈɪndiə/), officially the Republic of India (Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the south-west, and the Bay of Bengal on the south-east, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west;China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north-east; and Burma and Bangladesh to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; in addition, India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.
  Home to the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation and a region of historic trade routes and vast empires, the Indian subcontinent was identified with its commercial and cultural wealth for much of its long history. Four of the world's major religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—originated here, whereas Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived in the 1st millennium CE and also helped shape the region's diverse culture. Gradually annexed by and brought under the administration of the British East India Company from the early 18th century and administered directly by the United Kingdom from the mid-19th century, India became an independent nation in 1947 after a struggle for independence that was marked by non-violent resistance led by Mahatma Gandhi.
  
  wn.com/India
• 
  Israel
  Coordinates: 31°N 35°E / 31°N 35°E / 31; 35
  Israel, officially the State of Israel ( /ˈɪzriːəl/ or  /ˈɪzreɪəl/; Hebrew: מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל‎, Medīnat Yisrā'el, IPA: [me̞diˈnät jisʁäˈʔe̞l] ( listen); Arabic: دَوْلَة إِسْرَائِيل‎, Dawlat Isrāʼīl, IPA: [dawlat ʔisraːˈʔiːl]), is a parliamentary republic in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan and the West Bank in the east, Egypt and the Gaza Strip on the southwest, and the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea to the south, and it contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area. Israel is defined as a Jewish and Democratic State in its Basic Laws and is the world's only Jewish-majority state.
  Following the adoption of a resolution by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 29 November 1947 recommending the adoption and implementation of the United Nations plan to partition Palestine, on 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization and president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, a state independent from the British Mandate for Palestine. Neighboring Arab states invaded the next day in support of the Palestinian Arabs. Israel has since fought several wars with neighboring Arab states, in the course of which it has occupied the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Portions of these territories, including east Jerusalem, have been annexed by Israel, but the border with the neighboring West Bank has not yet been permanently defined.^{[neutrality is disputed]} Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have so far not resulted in peace.
  
  wn.com/Israel
• 
  Kent School
  Kent School is a private, co-educational college preparatory school in Kent, Connecticut, USA. The Reverend Frederick Herbert Sill, Order of the Holy Cross, established the school in 1906 and it retains its affiliation with the Episcopal Church of the United States.
  Students at Kent come from more than 40 foreign countries and nearly as many states . Situated between the Appalachian Trail and the Housatonic River, the 1,200-acre (490 ha) campus currently serves 560 students, about 510 of whom board. The school was one of the first New England boarding schools to educate both young men and women in 1960^{[citation needed]}. Kent School Boat Club also became the first American school crew to row at British Henley Royal Regatta and compete for the Thames Challenge Cup in 1927.
  Kent is a member of the Founders League of New England preparatory schools which consists of, among others, Choate Rosemary Hall, Hotchkiss School and The Taft School.
  As of the 2008-09 school year, the school had an enrollment of 560 students and 80.1 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a student-teacher ratio of 7.1.
  
  wn.com/Kent_School
• Millbrook School
  Coordinates: 41°51′20″N 73°37′16″W / 41.85556°N 73.62111°W / 41.85556; -73.62111
  Millbrook School is a private, coeducational preparatory school located in Dutchess County, New York, USA. It is governed by a self-perpetuating Board of Trustees, and is accredited by the New York State Association of Independent Schools and the Board of Regents of the State University of New York. Institutional memberships include the Cum Laude Society, the Secondary School Admission Test Board, the National Association of Independent Schools, the New York State Association of Independent Schools, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, and A Better Chance. As of 2009, the school's endowment stood at approximately $20 million; relatively modest in comparison to other private schools in the region.
  Millbrook School was founded in 1931 by Edward Pulling. Pulling was a graduate of both Princeton University and Cambridge University and he taught at both Groton School and Avon Old Farms as well as private schools in the United Kingdom. While at Avon, Pulling began to think of creating his own school. His philosophy for a school was heavily influenced by the traditional setting he experienced at Groton and in the UK as well as the progressive ideology that Avon possessed. After searching for suitable grounds to house the school-including an offer from then Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to build in Hyde Park, New York- Pulling and his wife decided on the Stephenson farm just 5 miles (8 km) outside of Millbrook NY.
  
  wn.com/Millbrook_School
• 
  New Zealand
  New Zealand (Māori: Aotearoa) is an island country located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. The country geographically comprises two main landmasses ‒ that of the North and South Islands ‒ as well as numerous smaller islands. New Zealand is situated some 1,500 kilometres (900 mi) east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and roughly 1,000 kilometres (600 mi) south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. Because of its remoteness, it was one of the last lands to be settled by humans.
  During its long isolation, New Zealand developed a distinctive biodiversity of both animal and plant life. Most notable are the large number of unique bird species, many of which became extinct after the arrival of humans and introduced mammals. With a mild maritime climate, the land was mostly covered in forest. The country's varied topography and its sharp mountain peaks owe much to the tectonic uplift of land and volcanic eruptions caused by the Pacific and Indo-Australian Plates clashing beneath the earth's surface.
  
  wn.com/New_Zealand
• 
  Pakistan
  Pakistan (ⁱ/ˈpækɨstæn/ or ⁱ/pɑːkiˈstɑːn/; Urdu: پاکستان) (Urdu pronunciation: [paːkɪˈst̪aːn] ( listen)), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (Urdu: اسلامی جمہوریۂ پاکستان), is a sovereign country in South Asia. It sits at the crossroads of the strategically important regions of South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. It has a 1,046-kilometre (650 mi) coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west and north, Iran to the southwest and China in the far northeast. It is separated from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan Corridor in the north, and it shares a marine border with Oman.
  The territory of modern Pakistan was the site of several ancient cultures, including the Neolithic Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation, and has undergone invasions or settlements by Hindu, Persian, Indo-Greek, Islamic, Turco-Mongol, Afghan and Sikh cultures. Thus the area has been ruled by numerous empires and dynasties, including the Indian Mauryan Empire, the Persian Achaemenid Empire, the Arab Umayyad Caliphate, the Mongol Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Durrani Empire, the Sikh Empire and the British Empire. As a result of the Pakistan Movement led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and India's struggle for independence, Pakistan was created in 1947 as an independent nation for Muslims from the regions in the east and west of India where there was a Muslim majority. Initially a dominion, Pakistan adopted a new constitution in 1956, becoming an Islamic republic. A civil war in 1971 resulted in the secession of East Pakistan as the new country of Bangladesh.
  
  wn.com/Pakistan
• 
  Phillips Academy
  Phillips Academy (also known as Phillips Andover, Andover, Phillips Academy Andover or PA) is a selective, co-educational independent boarding high school for boarding and day students in grades 9–12, along with a post-graduate (PG) year. The school is located in Andover, Massachusetts, United States, 25 miles north of Boston.
  Phillips Academy is the oldest incorporated academy in the United States, established in 1778 by Samuel Phillips, Jr.. Phillips's uncle founded Phillips Exeter Academy three years later, starting a rivalry that has continued through the centuries. Phillips Academy's endowment stood around $800 million in June 2011, the fourth-highest of any American secondary school. The three secondary schools with higher endowments are: Phillips Exeter ($1.0 billion) the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, and Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii ($6.8 billion). Andover is subject to the control of a board of trustees, headed by Oscar Tang, a New York financier and philanthropist. In July 2012, Tang will retire and Peter Currie '74, business executive and former Netscape Chief Financial Officer, will take over as Chairman of the Board of Trustees. On November 14, 2011, John G. Palfrey Jr., Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, was named the 15th Head of School.
  
  wn.com/Phillips_Academy
• 
  Sri Lanka
  Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka (ⁱ/ʃriː ˈlɑːŋkə/, /sriːˈlɑːŋkə/, or /sriːˈlæŋkə/;Sinhala: ශ්‍රී ලංකාව, Tamil: இலங்கை), is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent in South Asia. Known until 1972 as Ceylon ( /sɨˈlɒn/, /seɪˈlɒn/, or /siːˈlɒn/), Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar, the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the Maldives.
  As a result of its location in the path of major sea routes, Sri Lanka is a strategic naval link between West Asia and South East Asia. It was an important stop on the ancient Silk Road. Sri Lanka has also been a center of the Buddhist religion and culture from ancient times, being the nation where the Buddhist teachings were first written down as well as the oldest continually Buddhist country. Sri Lanka boasts a diverse range of cultures, languages and religions. The Sinhalese people form the majority of the population; Tamils, who are concentrated in the north and east of the island, form the largest ethnic minority. Other communities include Moors, Burghers, Kaffirs, Malays and the aboriginal Vedda people.
  
  wn.com/Sri_Lanka
• 
  Switzerland
  Switzerland (German: die Schweiz[ˈʃvaɪts]; French: Suisse [sɥis(ə)]; Italian: Svizzera [ˈzvit͡sːɛra]; Romansh: Svizra [ˈʒviːtsrɐ] or [ˈʒviːtsʁːɐ]), in its full name the Swiss Confederation (Latin: Confoederatio Helvetica, hence its abbreviation CH), is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in western Europe, where it is bordered by Germany to the north, France to the west, Italy to the south, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east.
  Switzerland is a landlocked country geographically divided between the Alps, the Swiss Plateau and the Jura, spanning an area of 41,285 km² (15,940 sq mi). While the Alps occupy the greater part of the territory, the Swiss population of approximately 8 million people is concentrated mostly on the Plateau, where the largest cities are to be found. Among them are the two global cities and economic centres of Zurich and Geneva.
  The Swiss Confederation has a long history of armed neutrality—it has not been in a state of war internationally since 1815—and did not join the United Nations until 2002. It pursues, however, an active foreign policy and is frequently involved in peace-building processes around the world. Switzerland is also the birthplace of the Red Cross and home to a large number of international organizations, including the second largest UN office. On the European level, it is a founding member of the European Free Trade Association and is part of the Schengen Area – although it is notably not a member of the European Union, nor the European Economic Area.
  
  wn.com/Switzerland
• 
  The Hill School
  The Hill School is a preparatory boarding school for boys and girls located in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, about 35 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
  Founded in 1851, The Hill is part of an organization known as the Ten Schools Admissions Organization. This organization was founded more than forty years ago on the basis of a number of common goals and traditions. Member schools include The Hill, Choate Rosemary Hall, Deerfield Academy, The Lawrenceville School, The Taft School, The Hotchkiss School, St. Paul's School, Loomis Chaffee, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Phillips Academy Andover.
  In 2010, The Hill's endowment was approximately $100 million.
  
  wn.com/The_Hill_School
• 
  United Kingdom
  The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK, or Britain) is a sovereign state located off the north-western coast of continental Europe. The country includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea.
  The United Kingdom is a unitary state governed under a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system, with its seat of government in the capital city of London. It is a country in its own right and consists of four countries: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There are three devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, the capitals of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Associated with the UK, but not constitutionally part of it, are three Crown Dependencies. The United Kingdom has fourteen overseas territories. These are remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in 1922, encompassed almost a quarter of the world's land surface and was the largest empire in history. British influence can still be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former territories.
  
  wn.com/United_Kingdom
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  United States
  The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
  At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
  
  wn.com/United_States
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  Westminster School
  Coordinates: 51°29′54″N 0°07′42″W / 51.4984°N 0.1284°W / 51.4984; -0.1284
  The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, better known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading independent schools, with the highest Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rate of any secondary school or college in Britain. Standing in the precincts of Westminster Abbey in central London, and with a history stretching back to the 11th century, the school's notable alumni include Ben Jonson, Robert Hooke,Christopher Wren, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham,Edward Gibbon, Henry Mayhew, A. A. Milne, Tony Benn and seven Prime Ministers. The school traditionally encourages independent and individual thinking. Boys are admitted to the Under School at age seven, and to the senior school at age thirteen; girls are admitted only at sixteen. The school has around 750 pupils; around a quarter are boarders, most of whom go home at weekends, after Saturday morning school. It is one of the original nine British public schools as defined by the Public Schools Act 1868.
  
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  Westtown School
  Westtown School is a coeducational, college preparatory day and boarding school for students in pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade.
  Founded in 1799 by the Religious Society of Friends, Westtown’s 600 acre (2.4 km²) campus is located in Chester County, PA, 25 miles west of Philadelphia. Boarding is available in the upper school (grades 9-12) and is required in 11th and 12th grades.
  Westtown is a Quaker school affiliated with the orthodox branch of the Religious Society of Friends, but it does not discriminate on the basis of religious affiliation. Students are required to attend Meeting for Worship (once a week for day students, and twice a week for boarding students). Westtown uses the traditional Quaker practice of coming to unity in making many high-level decisions.
  Westtown has been a coeducational school since its founding in 1799. Over 20% of students are American students of color, and another 20% are Quakers. Students come from more than 25 states and 20 foreign countries.
  Westtown School first opened in May, 1799. It was founded by Philadelphia Quakers who raised the money to build a boarding school and purchased 600 acres (2.4 km²) of land in rural Chester County—a full day’s coach ride from Philadelphia—where they could provide a “guarded” education in a healthy environment away from the secular influences of the city. For many years Westtown was nearly self-sufficient, with the campus providing raw materials used in construction of its buildings and food for the people who lived and worked at the school.
  
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  Winchester College
  Coordinates: 51°03′30″N 1°18′45″W / 51.05834°N 1.31259°W / 51.05834; -1.31259
  Winchester College is an independent school for boys in the British public school tradition, situated in Winchester, Hampshire, the former capital of England. It has existed in its present location for over 600 years and claims the longest unbroken history of any school in England (see List of the oldest schools in the United Kingdom). It is the oldest of the original nine English public schools defined by the Public Schools Act 1868 and is one of four remaining full boarding independent schools, meaning all pupils are boarders, in the United Kingdom (the others are Eton College, Harrow School and Radley College).
  According to its statutes, the school is called in Latin Collegium Sanctae Mariae prope Wintoniam, or Collegium Beatae Mariae Wintoniensis prope Winton, which translates into English as St Mary's College, near Winchester, or The College of the Blessed Mary of Winchester, near Winchester. It is sometimes referred to by pupils, former pupils and others as "Win: Coll:", and is more widely known as just "Winchester".
  
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  Angela Brazil
  Angela Brazil (pronounced "brazzle") (30 November 1868 – 13 March 1947) was one of the first British writers of "modern schoolgirls' stories", written from the characters' point of view and intended primarily as entertainment rather than moral instruction. In the first half of the twentieth century she published nearly 50 books of girls' fiction, the vast majority being boarding school stories. She also published numerous short stories in magazines.
  Her books were commercially successful, were widely read by tween girls, and influential upon their readers^{[citation needed]}. While interest in girls school stories waned after World War II, her books remained popular until the 1960s. They were seen as disruptive and a negative influence on moral standards by some figures in authority during the height of their popularity, and in some cases were banned by headmistresses in British girls' schools.
  While her stories have been much imitated in more recent decades, and many of her motifs and plot elements have since become clichés or the subject of parody, they were innovative when they first appeared. Brazil made a major contribution to changing the nature of fiction for girls. She presented a young female point of view which was active, aware of current issues and independently minded; she recognised adolescence as a time of transition, and accepted girls as having common interests and concerns which could be shared and acted upon.
  
  wn.com/Angela_Brazil
• Anthony Buckeridge
  Anthony Malcolm Buckeridge OBE (20 June 1912 – 28 June 2004) was an English author, best known for his Jennings and Rex Milligan series of children's books. He also wrote the 1953 children's book A Funny Thing Happened which was serialised more than once on Children's Hour.
  He was awarded the OBE in 2003.
  Buckeridge was born in London but following the death of his banker father in World War I he moved with his mother to Ross-on-Wye to live with his grandparents. Following the end of the war they returned to London where the young Buckeridge developed a taste for theatre and writing. A scholarship from the Bank Clerks' Orphanage fund permitted his mother to send him to Seaford College boarding school in Sussex. His experiences as a schoolboy there were instrumental in his later work.
  Following the death of Buckeridge's grandfather, the family moved to Welwyn Garden City where his mother worked in promoting the new suburban utopia to Londoners. In 1930 Buckeridge began work at his late father's bank but soon tired of it. Instead he took to acting including an uncredited part in Anthony Asquith's 1931 film Tell England.
  
  wn.com/Anthony_Buckeridge
• Antonia Forest
  Antonia Forest (26 May 1915 - 28 November 2003) was the pseudonym of a British children's author who was christened Patricia Giulia Caulfield Kate Rubinstein (her real name was not made public during her life). Born of part Russian-Jewish and Irish parents, she grew up in Hampstead, London, and was educated at South Hampstead High School and University College, London.
  It could be said that she embraced the way of life of the upper middle classes of the English shires with the zeal of the convert. From 1938 until her death she lived in Bournemouth, and from the end of 1946 onwards she was a Catholic; she would eventually sum herself up as "middle-aged, narrow-minded, anti-progressive AND PROUD OF IT".^{[citation needed]} Most of her books are concerned with the Marlow family, an ancient landed family whose patriarch is a Royal Navy commander (later captain), and whose six daughters (out of eight children in all) all go to Kingscote, a boarding school where all the Marlow books with "Term" in the title are set. The complete list of modern-day Marlow books is below, with their setting in the school career of Nicola and Lawrie (twins).
  
  wn.com/Antonia_Forest
• Antonia White
  Antonia White (born 1 March 1899, London — died 10 April 1980) was a British writer.
  White was born as Eirine Botting to parents Cecil and Christine Botting. She later took her mother's maiden name, White. Her father taught Greek and Latin at St. Paul’s School. She was baptized in the Protestant Church of England but converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of 7 when her father converted. She struggled with religion and did not feel that she fitted in with the other girls at her school, many of whom were from upper-class Catholic families. She attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton (later Woldingham School, Surrey).^{[citation needed]}
  Although she is remembered as a modernist writer, she developed a terrible fear of writing after a misunderstanding when she was 15. She had been working on what was going to her first novel, which was to be a present for her father. She wanted to surprise him with a book about wicked people whose lives are changed as they discover religion. She attempted to give a detailed description of the evil characters, but, because of her lack of experience, she was unable to describe their wickedness except to say that they “Indulged in nameless vices”. The story was found unfinished by officials at her Catholic school and she was then expelled from the school without being given the opportunity to explain her book. She describes this incident as being her most vivid and tragic memory. “My superb gift to my father was absolutely my undoing” she remarked in an interview. She did not begin writing novels again until 20 years later, when her father died.
  
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  Bryce Courtenay
  Arthur Bryce Courtenay AM (born 14 August 1933) is a South-African-born naturalized Australian novelist and one of Australia's most commercially successful authors.
  Born in Johannesburg, Courtenay spent most of his early years in a small village in the Lebombo Mountains in South Africa's Limpopo province.
  In 1955, while studying journalism in London, Courtenay met his future wife, Benita, and eventually emigrated to Australia. They married in 1959 and had three sons, Brett, Adam and Damon. Courtenay entered the advertising industry and over a career spanning 34 years was the Creative Director of McCann Erickson, J. Walter Thompson & George Patterson Advertising. In 1991, Damon (who was born with the blood condition haemophilia) died at age 24 from AIDS-related complications, contracted through a blood transfusion.
  Courtenay divorced Benita in 2000 and has acknowledged some indiscretions during their 42-year marriage. He now lives in Canberra, ACT, with his wife, Christine Gee. Benita Courtenay died on 11 March 2007, at the age of 72, four months after being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.
  
  wn.com/Bryce_Courtenay
• Cecily Von Ziegesar
  Cecily Brooke von Ziegesar (born June 27, 1970) is an American author best known for the young adult Gossip Girl series of novels.
  Cecily von Ziegesar was born in New York City in a family with Jewish-Hungarian origins. Her childhood dream was to grow up to be a ballerina; she began lessons at age 3 and auditioned for the School of American Ballet at age 8, but was rejected. As a teenager, she commuted to Manhattan at 6 a.m. to attend The Nightingale-Bamford School. After graduating from Nightingale, Von Ziegesar attended Colby College. Then she spent a year in Budapest working for a local radio station. She then returned to the United States to study creative writing at the University of Arizona, only to drop out shortly thereafter.
  In New York City, while working at book-packaging firm Alloy Entertainment, she became inspired to create the Gossip Girl series, which present a view of high-end teenage lifestyles. The series climbed to the top of The New York Times Best-Sellers list in 2002. The spin-off, The It Girl, made the list in 2005.
  
  wn.com/Cecily_Von_Ziegesar
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  Charles Dickens
  Charles John Huffam Dickens ( /ˈtʃɑrlz ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic who is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period and the creator of some of the world's most memorable fictional characters. During his lifetime Dickens' works enjoyed unprecedented popularity and fame, but it was in the twentieth century that his literary genius was fully recognized by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to enjoy an enduring popularity among the general reading public.
  Born in Portsmouth, England, Dickens left school to work in a factory after his father was thrown into debtors' prison. Though he had little formal education, his early impoverishment drove him to succeed. He edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Dickens
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  Charlotte Brontë
  Charlotte Brontë ( /ˈbrɒnti/; 21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards. She wrote Jane Eyre under the pen name Currer Bell.
  Charlotte was born in Thornton, Yorkshire in 1816, the third of six children, to Maria (née Branwell) and her husband Patrick Brontë (formerly surnamed Brunty or Prunty), an Irish Anglican clergyman. In 1820, the family moved a few miles to the village of Haworth, where Patrick had been appointed Perpetual Curate of St Michael and All Angels Church. Charlotte's mother died of cancer on 15 September 1821, leaving five daughters and a son to be taken care of by her sister Elizabeth Branwell.
  
  wn.com/Charlotte_Brontë
• Curtis Sittenfeld
  Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld (born 1975) is an American writer. She is author of three novels: Prep, the tale of a Massachusetts prep school, The Man of My Dreams, a coming-of-age novel and an examination of romantic love, and American Wife, a fictional story loosely based on the life of First Lady Laura Bush, as well as a number of short stories.
  Sittenfeld was born August 23, 1975 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the second of four children (three girls and a boy) of Paul G. Sittenfeld, an investment adviser, and Elizabeth (Curtis) Sittenfeld, an art history teacher and librarian at Seven Hills School, a private school in Cincinnati. Her brother, P.G., is a member of Cincinnati City Council .
  She attended Seven Hills School through the eighth grade, then attended high school at Groton School, a boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1993. In 1992, the summer before her senior year, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest.
  She attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York before transferring to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. At Stanford, she studied Creative Writing, wrote articles for the college newspaper, and edited that paper's weekly arts magazine. At the time, she was also chosen as one of Glamour magazine's College Women of the Year. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
  
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  Edward the Confessor
  Edward the Confessor, (Old English: Ēadƿeard se Andettere; French: Édouard le Confesseur; 1003–05 to 4 or 5 January 1066), son of Æthelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy, was one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings of England and is usually regarded as the last king of the House of Wessex, ruling from 1042 to 1066.
  He has traditionally been seen as unworldly and pious, and his reign as notable for the disintegration of royal power in England and the advance in power of the Godwin family. His biographers, Frank Barlow and Peter Rex, dispute this, picturing him as a successful king, who was energetic, resourceful and sometimes ruthless, but whose reputation has been unfairly tarnished by the Norman conquest shortly after his death. Other historians regard this picture as only partly true, and not at all in the later part of his reign. In the view of Richard Mortimer, the return of the Godwins from exile in 1052 "meant the effective end of his exercise of power". The difference in his level of activity from the earlier part of his reign "implies a withdrawal from affairs".
  
  wn.com/Edward_the_Confessor
• Elizabeth George
  Susan Elizabeth George (born February 26, 1949) is an American author of mystery novels set in Great Britain.
  Eleven of her novels featuring her main character, Inspector Lynley, have been adapted for television by the BBC as The Inspector Lynley Mysteries.
  Elizabeth George was born in Warren, Ohio, to Robert Edwin and Anne (née Rivelle) George, their second child – she has an older brother, Robert "Rob" George. Her mother was a nurse, and her father a salesman for a conveyor company. The family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when she was eighteen months old. Her father wanted to get away from the Midwestern weather and to get her mother away from her mother's large extended Italian family.
  She is a student of English, having received a teaching certificate from the University of California, Riverside. Whilst teaching English in the public school system, she completed a master's degree in counseling and psychology.
  George married Ira Jay Toibin in 1971 and they divorced in 1995.
  Her first published novel was A Great Deliverance, (1988). It introduces Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, actually Lord Asherton, privately educated (Eton College and Oxford University) and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lynley's partner, (secondary modern educated and from a working-class background) – both from Scotland Yard. Also, Lady Helen Clyde, Lynley's girlfriend, and Lynley's former school friend, Simon St.James.
  
  wn.com/Elizabeth_George
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  Enid Blyton
  Enid Mary Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968) was a British children's writer also known as Mary Pollock.
  She is noted for numerous series of books based on recurring characters and designed for different age groups. Her books have enjoyed huge success in many parts of the world, and have sold over 600 million copies.
  One of Blyton's most widely known characters is Noddy, intended for early years readers. However, her main work is the genre of young readers' novels in which children have their own adventures with minimal adult help. Series of this type include the Famous Five (21 novels, 1942–1963, based on four children and their dog), the Five Find-Outers and Dog, (15 novels, 1943–1961, where five children regularly outwit the local police) as well as The Secret Seven (15 novels, 1949–1963, a society of seven children who solve various mysteries).
  Her work involves children's adventure stories, and fantasy, sometimes involving magic. Her books were and still are enormously popular throughout the Commonwealth and across most of the globe. Her work has been translated into nearly 90 languages.
  
  wn.com/Enid_Blyton
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  Erich Kästner
  Emil Erich Kästner (German pronunciation: [ˈʔeːʁɪç ˈkɛstnɐ]) (23 February 1899 – 29 July 1974) was a German author, poet, screenwriter and satirist, known for his humorous, socially astute poetry and children's literature.
  Kästner was born in Dresden, Kingdom of Saxony. He grew up in the Königsbrücker Straße of Dresden's Äußere Neustadt. Close by, the Erich Kästner Museum is located on the ground floor of Kästner's uncle Franz Augustin's former villa on Antonstraße next to the Albertplatz.
  Kästner's father Emil was a master saddlemaker. His mother Ida, née Augustin, was a maidservant and housewife, and in her thirties trained to be a hairstylist in order to supplement her husband's income. Kästner had a particularly close relationship with his mother. While he lived in Leipzig and Berlin, he wrote her fairly intimate daily letters and postcards. His novels, too, seem to be pervaded by overbearing mothers. It was rumored that Erich Kästner's natural father was not Emil Kästner, but rather the Jewish family doctor, Emil Zimmermann (1864–1953). These rumors never were substantiated. Kästner wrote about his childhood in his 1957 autobiography When I Was a Little Boy. According to Kästner, he did not suffer from being an only child, had many friends, and was not lonely or over-indulged.
  
  wn.com/Erich_Kästner
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  Erving Goffman
  Erving Goffman (June 11, 1922 – November 19, 1982) was a Canadian-born sociologist and writer.
  The 73rd president of American Sociological Association, Goffman's greatest contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction in the form of dramaturgical analysis that began with his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
  In 2007 Goffman was listed as the 6th most-cited intellectual in the humanities and social sciences by The Times Higher Education Guide, behind Anthony Giddens and ahead of Jürgen Habermas.
  Goffman was born in 1922 in Mannville, Alberta, Canada to parents Max Goffman, and his wife, Ann (née Averbach). He was descended from a family of Ukrainian Jews who had joined the great inflow of Russians into Canada just before the beginning of the century. The family later migrated to Dauphin, in Manitoba, where his father kept what must have been a fairly successful tailoring business. After three years at high school of Winnipeg, he became a student at the University of Manitoba (with chemistry as his ‘major subject’) in the first year of the Second World War, but left off studying to move to Ottawa to work for the National Film Board of Canada established by John Grierson. Later he developed his interest in sociology. It was also during this time that he met Dennis Wrong, who was a renowned North American sociologist at the time. This meeting worked as a motivation to leave Manitoba and enroll at the University of Toronto, where he graduated with a B.A. in sociology and anthropology in 1945. Afterwards, he moved on to the University of Chicago and received his M.A. and Ph.D for sociology, in 1949 and 1953 respectively. He was the younger brother of actress Frances Bay.
  
  wn.com/Erving_Goffman
• Geoffrey Willans
  Herbert Geoffrey Willans, RNVR, (4 February 1911 – 6 August 1958), an English author and journalist, is best known as the co-creator, with the illustrator Ronald Searle, of Nigel Molesworth, the "goriller of 3b and curse of St. Custard's".
  He was educated at Blundells School in Tiverton, and became a schoolmaster there. He enjoyed sailing in small boats and during the war took part in the Greek Campaign and the Battle of Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea serving on the corvette HMS Peony. He later joined the carrier HMS Formidable.
  Molesworth first appeared in Punch in the 1940s and was the protagonist and narrator of five books, beginning with 1953's Down with Skool!, and followed by How to be Topp, Wizz for Atomms and, posthumously, Back in the Jug Agane and the anthology, The Compleet Molesworth. Comic misspellings, erratic capitalisation and 1950s public schoolboy slang are threads running through all the books.
  According to Ronald Searle in his obituary:
  Willans co-wrote the screenplay for the 1959 film The Bridal Path, which starred George Cole, but died at the age of 47 before the film was released. He also wrote a number of other, mostly humorous, books, including The Dog's Ear Book (also with Searle), My Uncle Harry (an exploration of the British gentlemen's club), Fasten Your Lapstraps! (an account of the early days of intercontinental flight), and Admiral on Horseback (a rather serious one about the navy). He was a keen amateur botanist, and spent so long in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew that the staff gave him a key.
  
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  George Orwell
  Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism.
  Considered perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), which together have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, language and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
  Orwell's influence on popular and political culture endures, and several of his neologisms, along with the term Orwellian—a byword for totalitarian or manipulative social practices—have entered the vernacular.
  
  wn.com/George_Orwell
• Gillian Rubinstein
  Gillian Rubinstein (born 29 August 1942) is an English-born children's author and playwright. Born in Potten End, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England, Rubinstein split her childhood between England and Nigeria, moving to Australia in 1973. As well as eight plays, numerous short stories and articles, she has written over 30 books. Her award-winning and hugely popular 1986 debut Space Demons introduced the themes of growing up and fantasy worlds which emerge often in her other writings. Books such as At Ardilla, Foxspell and Galax-Arena all received critical acclaim and multiple awards.
  In 2001, Rubinstein published Across the Nightingale Floor, the first of the best-selling five book Tales of the Otori series under the pseudonym, Lian Hearn. The series is set in a fictional island nation resembling feudal Japan and is her first work to reach an adult audience.
  The name 'Lian', comes from a childhood nickname and 'Hearn' apparently refers to herons which are a prominent theme in the series. It has also been suggested that the surname is most likely borrowed from Lafcadio Hearn; one of the first Western writers to tackle Japanese mythology.
  
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  Harrow School
  Coordinates: 51°34′23″N 0°20′02″W / 51.573103°N 0.333792°W / 51.573103; -0.333792
  Harrow School, commonly known simply as "'Harrow", is an English independent school for boys situated in the town of Harrow, in north-west London. There is some evidence that there has been a school on the site since 1243 but the Harrow School of today was officially founded by John Lyon under a Royal Charter of Elizabeth I in 1572. Harrow is one of the original nine public schools that were defined by the Public Schools Act 1868.
  The school has an enrollment of approximately 850 boys spread across twelve boarding houses, all of whom board full time.
  Harrow has many traditions and rich history, which includes the use of Straw Hats, morning suits, top hats and canes as uniform. Its long line of famous alumni include eight former Prime Ministers (including Churchill, Baldwin, Peel, and Palmerston), numerous foreign statesmen, former and current members of both houses of the UK Parliament, two Kings and several other members of various royal families, 20 Victoria Cross and one George Cross holders, and a great many notable figures in both the arts and the sciences. It is widely considered one of the best secondary schools in the world along with its rival Eton. Good Schools Guide said the school "Does well, does the boys well, couldn't do better."
  
  wn.com/Harrow_School
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  Hugh Walpole
  Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. A prolific writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, his high profile as a lecturer and his driving ambition brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. A best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death.
  Walpole was born in Auckland, New Zealand, the eldest of three children of the Rev George Henry Somerset Walpole (1854–1929), Canon of St Mary's Cathedral, Auckland (later Bishop of Edinburgh from 1910 to 1929) and his wife, Mildred Helen née Barham (1854–1925). Walpole was educated at a series of boarding schools in England, principally at Truro School for two years, the King's School, Canterbury for two years and as a day boy for four years at Durham School, when his father was principal of Bede College at the university. Walpole's popular character Jeremy lived in the cathedral town of Polchester in Glebeshire, an amalgam of Truro and Durham, which featured in many of his later books. The dust-jacket of The Inquisitor (1935) depicted a street map of this imaginary town. Walpole's brief experience of teaching is reflected in his third novel Mr Perrin and Mr Traill.
  
  wn.com/Hugh_Walpole
• James Hilton
  James Hilton (9 September 1900 – 20 December 1954) was an English novelist who wrote several best-sellers, including Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
  Born in Leigh, James Hilton was the son of John Hilton, the headmaster of Chapel End School in Walthamstow. He was educated at Leys School, Cambridge.
  Hilton wrote his two most remembered books, Lost Horizon and Goodbye, Mr. Chips while living in a rather ordinary semi-detached house on Oak Hill Gardens, Woodford Green. The house still stands, with a blue plaque marking Hilton's residence.
  He was married twice, first to Alice Brown and later to Galina Kopineck. Both marriages ended in divorce. He died in Long Beach, California from liver cancer. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/mrchips/images/hilton_01.jpg
  Hilton found literary success at an early age. His first novel, Catherine Herself, was published in 1920, when he was 20. Several of his books were international bestsellers and inspired successful film adaptations, notably Lost Horizon (1933), which won a Hawthornden Prize; Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934); and Random Harvest (1941).
  
  wn.com/James_Hilton
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  Jean Webster
  Jean Webster (pseudonym for Alice Jane Chandler Webster, July 24, 1876 – June 11, 1916) was an American writer and author of many books including Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. Her best-known books feature lively and likeable young female protagonists who come of age intellectually, morally, and socially, but with enough humor, snappy dialogue, and gently biting social commentary to make her books palatable and enjoyable to contemporary readers.
  Alice Jane Chandler Webster was born in Fredonia, New York. She was the eldest child of Annie Moffet Webster and Charles Luther Webster. She lived her early childhood in a strongly matriarchal and activist setting, with her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother all living under the same roof. Her great-grandmother worked on temperance issues and her grandmother on racial equality and women's suffrage.
  Alice's mother was niece to Mark Twain, and her father was Twain's business manager and subsequently publisher of many of his books by Charles L. Webster Publishing, founded in 1884. Initially the business was successful, and when Alice was five the family moved to a large brownstone in New York, with a summer house in Long Island. However, the publishing company ran into difficulties, and increasingly the relationship with Mark Twain broke down. In 1888, her father had a breakdown and took a leave of absence, and the family moved back to Fredonia. He subsequently committed suicide in 1891 from a drug overdose.
  
  wn.com/Jean_Webster
• Jenny Nimmo
  Jenny Nimmo (born 15 January 1944) is a British author of children's books including many fantasy and adventure novels, beginning reader books, and picture books.
  The Snow Spider won the Smarties Prize (1986) and the Tir na n-Og Award (1987), The Stone Mouse was highly commended^{[clarification needed]} for the Carnegie Medal (1995), and several others of her books have been well-received or shortlisted for children's book awards.
  Her best-known work may be Children of the Red King —or Charlie Bone series, or Red King series— in which the main character Charlie Bone's magical talent embroils him in the sinister intrigues of his new school. Originally intended as a quintet, the series has been extended to eight books.
  Jenny Nimmo was born in Sjokoladeland, Berkshire, England. She was an only child, and her father died when she was five. According to a short article by the American publisher of the series, Nimmo was a voracious reader as a child, which led her to write her own stories to share with friends.
  
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• Jill Murphy
  Jill Murphy (born 5 July 1949) is an English children's author, best known for The Worst Witch series and the Large Family picture books. She has been described as "one of the most engaging writers and illustrators for children in the land".
  Born in London, Murphy showed an interest in writing and drawing at the age of 6, and despite not excelling in other school subjects, had made her own enormous library of hand-written and illustrated books while still at primary school. She attended the Ursuline High School, Wimbledon which, together with the boarding school stories that she enjoyed reading, provided much of the material and inspiration for Miss Cackle's Academy in The Worst Witch series. She grew up a Roman Catholic, but is no longer practising. Her stay-at-home mother was a "book maniac" and her father was an Irish engineer.
  She started to write The Worst Witch while still at school, but put the book on hold while she attended Chelsea and Croydon Art Schools. She continued to write it during a year living in a village in Togo, West Africa and later while working as a nanny back in the UK. The book was published by Allison & Busby when Murphy was 24 and proved an instant success. Murphy continued working as a nanny until the publication of The Worst Witch Strikes Again prompted her to devote herself to writing full-time.
  
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  John Irving
  John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt, Jr.; March 2, 1942) is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
  Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. Some of Irving's novels, such as The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, have been bestsellers. Five of his novels have been adapted to film. Several of Irving's books (Garp, Meany, A Widow for One Year) and short stories have been set in and around Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999 for his script The Cider House Rules.
  Irving was born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Helen Frances (née Winslow) and John Wallace Blunt, Sr., a writer and executive recruiter. Irving grew up in Exeter, as the stepson of an Exeter faculty member, Colin F.N. Irving (1941), and nephew of another, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell (1929). Irving was in the Exeter wrestling program both as a student athlete and as an assistant coach, and wrestling features prominently in his books, stories and life. Irving's biological father, whom he never met, had been a pilot in the Army Air Forces and during World War II was shot down over Burma in July 1943, but survived (an incident incorporated into the novel The Cider House Rules). Irving did not find out about his father's heroism until 1981.
  
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• John Knowles
  John Knowles (September 16, 1926 – November 29, 2001) was an American novelist best known for his novel A Separate Peace. He died in 2001 at the age of seventy-five.
  Knowles was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, the son of James M. Knowles, a purchasing agent from Lowell, Massachusetts, and Mary Beatrice Shea Knowles from Concord, New Hampshire. In his home town, Knowles’ father was the vice president of a coal company and they received a steady income affording them a decent standard of living. He attended St. Peter's High School^{[disambiguation needed ]} in Fairmont, West Virginia from 1940 until 1942, before continuing at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, graduating in 1945. He married Beth Anne Dyment Hughes at the age of 19. Knowles graduated from Yale University as a member of the class of 1949. While at Yale, Knowles served on the Board of Yale Daily News during his sophomore, junior and senior years, specifically as Editorial Secretary during his senior year. He was a record-holding varsity swimmer during his sophomore year.^{[citation needed]}A Separate Peace is based upon Knowles's experiences at Phillips Exeter Academy. The setting for The Devon Woolbert School is a thinly veiled fictionalization of Phillips Exeter Academy. The plot should not be taken as autobiographical, although many elements of the novel stem from personal experience, including Knowles' membership in a secret society and sustaining of a foot injury while jumping from a tree during society exercises. In his essay, "A Special Time, A Special Place," Knowles wrote:
  
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  John van de Ruit
  John Howard van de Ruit (born 20 April 1975) is a South African novelist, actor, playwright and producer. He has been a professional actor, playwright and producer since 1998. He was born in Durban and educated at Michaelhouse, where he stayed in Founders House and from where he matriculated in 1993. He then went on to complete a Masters degree in Drama and Performance at the then University of Natal.
  He is best known for his collaboration with Ben Voss on the satirical sketch show Green Mamba which has toured extensively throughout Southern Africa since 2002. His first novel was published in 2005 by Penguin, entitled Spud. The book was a runaway success in South Africa. It won the 2006 Bookseller's Choice Award. The sequel Spud - The Madness Continues... was released in mid 2007. The third book Spud - Learning to Fly was released on 10 June 2009. The first book Spud has also been recorded as an audio book, read by the author.
  Following the sale of the rights to film producer Ross Garland, the film Spud - the Movie was shot between March and April 2010, and released on 3 December 2010. Van der Ruit portrays the teacher, Mr Lennox, in a cameo role.
  
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  Josiah Bunting III
  Josiah Bunting III (born 1939) is an American educator. He has been a military officer, college president, and an author and speaker on education and Western culture.
  Josiah Bunting was born and raised in Torrington, Connecticut he attended The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, but did not graduate.^{[citation needed]} Instead, he entered the U.S. Marine Corps. He went on to Virginia Military Institute where he graduated third in his class as an English major. and was elected to a Rhodes scholarship to attend the University of Oxford, where he achieved a M.A. and also served as president of the American Students Association. He entered the United States Army in 1966. After six years of service, he reached the rank of Major. He was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Vietnam; and West Point, where he was assistant professor of history and social sciences.
  Bunting's 1972 novel The Lionheads was a scathing account based on his experiences as an officer of the 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1968. The novel's main antagonist, General Lemming, was based heavily on the commanding general, Julian Ewell.
  
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• Lemony Snicket
  Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American novelist Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970). Snicket is the author of several children's books, serving as the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events (his best-known work) and appearing as a character within the series. Because of this, the name Lemony Snicket may refer to both a fictional character and a real person. This article deals primarily with the character.
  As a character, Snicket is a harried, troubled writer and researcher falsely accused of felonies and continuously hunted by the police and his enemies, the fire-starting side of the secret organization Volunteer Fire Department (V.F.D.). As a child he was kidnapped and inducted as a "neophyte" into V.F.D., where he was trained in rhetoric and sent on seemingly pointless missions while all connections to his former life, apart from his siblings Jacques and Kit (who were also kidnapped and inducted), were severed. In the organization he met and fell in love with a peer named Beatrice, to whom he eventually became engaged. After a series of unfortunate events (after which the real-world series is in some ways named), he became falsely accused of murder and arson. Eventually the fallacies grew so much that The Daily Punctilio reported his death. Beatrice eventually moved on and married Bertrand Baudelaire, becoming the mother of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, the protagonists of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Fourteen years thereafter Beatrice and Bertrand were murdered in a house fire, leaving the Baudelaires orphans. Feeling indebted to his former fiancée, Snicket embarks on a quest to chronicle the lives of the Baudelaire children until they become old enough to face the troubles of the world on their own.
  
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  Libba Bray
  Libba Bray (born Martha E. Bray on March 11, 1964 in Alabama) is an author of young adult novels, including the books A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, The Sweet Far Thing and Going Bovine.
  She lived in Texas until she was 26 years old. After that she moved to New York City, New York, where she now lives with her husband and nine-year-old son. Her father was a preacher and her mother, a teacher. In her autobiography on her official site she states:
  At the age of eighteen, Bray was involved in a serious car accident and had to undergo thirteen surgeries in six years to reconstruct her face. She has an artificial left eye because of this accident.
  Bray graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988 as a Theatre major. As a budding playwright, she felt it important to be in New York. When her childhood best friend, already living in Manhattan, called saying she was looking for a roommate, Bray was soon on her way to New York. Her first job was in the publicity department of Penguin Putnam, followed by three years at Spier, an advertising agency specializing in book advertising.
  
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• Ludwig Bemelmans
  Ludwig Bemelmans (April 27, 1898 – October 1, 1962) was an Austrian author, an internationally known gourmet, and a writer and illustrator of children's books. He is most noted today for his Madeline books, six of which were published from 1939-1961. A seventh was discovered after his death and published posthumously in 1999.
  Bemelmans was born to the Belgian painter Lambert Bemelmans and German Frances Fischer in Meran, Austria-Hungary (now Merano, Italy). His father owned a hotel. He grew up in Gmunden on the Traunsee in Upper Austria. His first language was French and his second German.
  In 1904, his father left the family for Ludwig's governess. His mother Frances took Ludwig and his brother to her native city of Regensburg, Germany. Bemelmans had difficulty in school as he hated the German style of discipline. He was apprenticed to his uncle Hans Bemelmans at a hotel in Austria, but he reportedly shot and seriously wounded a waiter. Given the choice between being institutionalized and emigrating to the United States, he chose the latter.
  
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• Melina Marchetta
  Melina Marchetta (born 25 March 1965) is an Australian writer and teacher. She is the middle child of three daughters. Melina is best known as the author of Looking for Alibrandi. She has twice been awarded the CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award: Older Readers, in 1993 and 2004.
  Melina Marchetta was born in Sydney on 25 March 1965. She is of Italian descent. Marchetta attended high school at Rosebank College in the Sydney suburb of Five Dock. She left school at age fifteen as she was not confident in her academic ability. She then enrolled in a business school which helped her gain employment with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and later at a travel agency. This work gave her confidence to return to school and gain a teaching degree. She then got a job teaching at St Mary's Cathedral College, Sydney in the heart of the Sydney CBD until 2006. She now writes full time.
  Her first novel, Looking for Alibrandi was released in 1992 to much acclaim with a first print-run sellout within two months of its release. Published in 14 countries, including 11 translated editions, Looking for Alibrandi swept the pool of literary awards for young adult fiction in 1993 including the coveted CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award: Older Readers. Dubbed "the most stolen library book" the popular novel has sold more than half a million copies worldwide and was followed by her film adaptation of the same title released in 1999.
  
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• Michelle Magorian
  Michelle Magorian (born 6 November 1947 in Portsmouth, Hampshire) is an English author of children's books, including Goodnight Mister Tom, Back Home and A Little Love Song.
  Michelle Magorian was the daughter of a navy man. She was born in hampshire, Portsmouth, before travlling to live in singapore, Austrailia, when she was seven and returning at the age of nine. As a child she spent as much time as possible in the King's Theatre in Portsmouth and her ambition was to become an actress. After three years of study at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, she spent two years at Marcel Marceau's L'école Internationale de Mime in Paris. From there she launched into a professional acting career and spent a few years touring all over the country - from Scotland to Devon and then Yorkshire - working in repertory companies, taking any part she could. Michelle's worst stage part was playing Orinoco the Womble in a musical. All this time she had been secretly writing stories. In her mid-twenties she became interested in children's books, and decided to write one herself.
  
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• Muriel Spark
  Dame Muriel Spark, DBE (1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006) was an award-winning Scottish novelist. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
  She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, the daughter of Sarah Elizabeth Maud (née Uezzell) and Bernard Camberg, an engineer. Her father was Jewish and her mother had been raised a Presbyterian, as was Spark. She was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls (1923 – 1935). The family lived in the Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh. In 1934–35 she took a course in "Commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a brief time and then worked as a secretary in a department store.
  On 3 September 1937 she married Sidney Oswald Spark, and soon followed him to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Their son Robin was born in July 1938. Within months she discovered that her husband was manic depressive and prone to violent outbursts. In 1940 Muriel left Sidney and Robin. She returned to the United Kingdom in early 1944, taking residence at the Helena Club in London; years later the club would be her inspiration for the fictional May of Teck Club in The Girls of Slender Means. She worked in Intelligence for the remainder of World War II. She provided money at regular intervals to support her son as he toiled unsuccessfully over the years. Spark maintained it was her intention for her family to set up home in England, but Robin returned to Britain with his father later to be brought up by his maternal grandparents in Scotland.
  
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  Psmith
  Rupert Psmith (or Ronald Eustace Psmith, as he is called in the last of the four books in which he appears) is a recurring fictional character in several novels by British comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, being one of Wodehouse's best-loved characters.
  The P in his surname is silent ("as in pshrimp" in his own words) and was added by himself, in order to distinguish him from other Smiths. A member of the Drones Club, this monocle-sporting Old Etonian is something of a dandy, a fluent and witty speaker, and has a remarkable ability to pass through the most amazing adventures unruffled.
  Wodehouse said that he based Psmith on Rupert D'Oyly Carte (1876–1948), the son of the Gilbert and Sullivan impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte, as he put it "the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a silver plate with watercress around it". Carte was a school acquaintance of a cousin of Wodehouse at Winchester College, according to an introduction to Leave it to Psmith. Rupert's daughter, Bridget D'Oyly Carte, however, believed that the Wykehamist schoolboy described to Wodehouse was not her father but his elder brother Lucas. Lucas was also at Winchester.
  
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  Rick Riordan
  Richard Russell "Rick" Riordan (/ˈraɪərˌdɛn/), Jr. (born June 5, 1964) is an American author best known for writing the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. He also wrote the Tres Navarre mystery series for adults and helped to edit Demigods and Monsters, a collection of essays on the topic of his Percy Jackson series. He helped develop the ten books in The 39 Clues series, published by Scholastic Corporation, and wrote the first book in the series, The Maze of Bones. He recently completed a trilogy that focuses on Egyptian mythology, The Kane Chronicles, and is working on The Heroes of Olympus, which is the sequel to the Percy Jackson series and focuses on Greek and Roman mythology.
  Rick was raised in Texas. He graduated from Alamo Heights High School in 1982 and the University of Texas at Austin in 1986, where he double-majored in English and Social Studies. Riordan taught English and Social Studies in Presidio Hill School in San Francisco for eight years. He was awarded St. Mary's Hall's first Master Teacher Award in 2002.
  
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  Roald Dahl
  Roald Dahl ( /ˈroʊ.ɑːl ˈdɑːl/,Norwegian: [ˈɾuːɑl dɑl]; 13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter.
  Born in Wales to Norwegian parents, he served in the British Royal Air Force during the Second World War, in which he became a flying ace and intelligence officer, rising to the rank of Wing Commander. Dahl rose to prominence in the 1940s with works for both children and adults, and became one of the world's best-selling authors. He has been referred to as "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century". In 2008 The Times placed Dahl 16th on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". His short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children's books for their unsentimental, often very dark humour.
  Some of his notable works include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Twits, George's Marvellous Medicine and The BFG.
  
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• Ronald Searle
  Ronald William Fordham Searle CBE, RDI (3 March 1920 – 30 December 2011) was a British artist and satirical cartoonist. He is perhaps best remembered as the creator of St Trinian's School and for his collaboration with Geoffrey Willans on the Molesworth series.
  Searle was born in Cambridge, England, where his father was a porter at Cambridge Railway Station. He started drawing at the age of five and left school at the age of 15. He trained at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University) for two years.
  In April 1939, realizing that war was inevitable, he abandoned his art studies to enlist in the Royal Engineers. In January 1942, he was stationed in Singapore. After a month of fighting in Malaya, Singapore fell to the Japanese, and he was taken prisoner along with his cousin Tom Fordham Searle. He spent the rest of the war a prisoner, first in Changi Prison and then in the Kwai jungle, working on the Siam-Burma Death Railway. Searle contracted both beri-beri and malaria during his incarceration, which included numerous beatings, and his weight dropped to less than 40 kilograms. He was liberated in late 1945 with the final defeat of the Japanese.
  
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  Rudyard Kipling
  Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( /ˈrʌdjəd ˈkɪplɪŋ/ RUD-yəd KIP-ling; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. Kipling is best known for his works of fiction, including The Jungle Book (a collection of stories which includes "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"), Just So Stories (1902) (1894), Kim (1901) (a tale of adventure), many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888); and his poems, including Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), The White Man's Burden (1899) and If— (1910). He is regarded as a major "innovator in the art of the short story"; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and his best works are said to exhibit "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".
  
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  Sarah Fielding
  Sarah Fielding (8 November 1710 – 9 April 1768) was a British author and sister of the novelist Henry Fielding. She was the author of The Governess, or The Little Female Academy (1749), which was the first novel in English written especially for children (children's literature), and had earlier achieved success with her novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744).
  Henry and Ursula, and her younger siblings were Anne, Beatrice, and Edmund. Sarah's father, Edmund Feilding, the third son of John Feilding, was a military officer and relative of the Earls of Denbigh (his father, John, was the youngest son of the 3rd Earl). Although Edmund spelled his last name "Feilding" as often as "Fielding," both Henry and Sarah spelled the name "Fielding." When asked by an Earl of Denbigh why, Henry Fielding's son said, "I cannot tell, my Lord, except it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to spell" (Battestin 7-8). Sarah's mother, Sarah Gould, was the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a judge on the King's Bench who had been reappointed to the Queen's Bench, and Sarah Davidge Gould. This descent is important for understanding the early life and education of Edmund Feilding's children.
  
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  Talbot Baines Reed
  Talbot Baines Reed (3 April 1852 – 28 November 1893) was an English writer of boys' fiction who established a genre of school stories that endured into the second half of the 20th century. Among his best-known work is The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's. He was a regular and prolific contributor to The Boy's Own Paper (B.O.P.), in which most of his fiction first appeared. Through his family's business, Reed became a prominent typefounder, and wrote a classic History of the Old English Letter Foundries.
  Reed's father, Charles Reed, was a successful London printer who later became a Member of Parliament (MP). Talbot attended the City of London School before leaving at 17 to join the family business at the Fann Street type foundry. His literary career began in 1879, when the B.O.P. was launched. The family were staunchly Christian, pillars of the Congregational Church, and were heavily involved in charitable works. However, Reed did not use his writing as a vehicle for moralising, and was dismissive of those early school story writers, such as Dean Farrar, who did. Reed's affinity with boys, his instinctive understanding of their standpoint in life and his gift for creating believable characters, ensured that his popularity survived through several generations. He was widely imitated by other writers in the school story genre.
  
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  Thomas Hughes
  Thomas Hughes (20 October 1822 – 22 March 1896) was an English lawyer and author. He is most famous for his novel Tom Brown's School Days (1857), a semi-autobiographical work set at Rugby School, which Hughes had attended. It had a lesser-known sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861).
  Hughes was the second son of John Hughes, editor of the Boscobel Tracts (1830). Thomas Hughes was born in Uffington, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire). He had six brothers, and one sister, Jane Senior who later became Britain's first female civil servant. At the age of eight he was sent to Twyford School, a preparatory public school near Winchester, where he remained until the age of eleven. In February 1834 he went to Rugby School, which was then under Dr Thomas Arnold, a contemporary of his father at Oriel College, Oxford, and the most influential British schoolmaster of the 19th century. Though never a member of the sixth form, his impressions of the headmaster were intensely reverent, and Arnold was afterwards idealised as the perfect schoolmaster in Hughes's novel. Hughes excelled at sports rather than in scholarship, and his school career culminated in a cricket match at Lord's Cricket Ground. In 1842 he went on to Oriel College, Oxford, and graduated B.A. in 1845. He was called to the bar in 1848, became Queen's Counsel in 1869 and a bencher in 1870, and was appointed to a county court judgeship in the Chester district in July 1882.
  
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  Tobias Wolff
  Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American author. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989), and his short stories. He has also written two novels.
  Wolff was born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama. After attending Concrete High School in Concrete, Washington, Wolff applied to, and was accepted by, The Hill School under the self-embellished name Tobias Jonathan von Ansell-Wolff, III. He was later expelled. He served in the US Army during the Vietnam War era. He holds a First Class Honours degree in English from Hertford College, Oxford (1972) and an M.A. from Stanford University. In 1975 he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford.
  Wolff is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, where he has taught classes in English and creative writing since 1997. He also served as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford from 2000 to 2002.
  Prior to his current appointment at Stanford, Wolff taught at Syracuse University from 1980 to 1997. While at Syracuse he served on the faculty with Raymond Carver and was an instructor in the graduate writing program. Authors who worked with Wolff while they were students at Syracuse include Jay McInerney, Tom Perrotta, George Saunders, Alice Sebold, William Tester, Paul Griner, Ken Garcia, and Paul Watkins.
  
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  Trudi Canavan
  Trudi Canavan (born 23 October 1969) is an Australian writer of fantasy novels, best known for her best-selling fantasy trilogies The Black Magician trilogy and Age of the Five. While establishing her writing career she worked as a graphic designer. She is now in the process of writing her third trilogy The Traitor Spy trilogy, the final book in the trilogy, The Traitor Queen is to be released in 2012. After this Canavan will be writing a new trilogy on a completely new world called Millennium’s Rule and will consist of multiple worlds which characters can cross between.
  Canavan was born in Kew, in Melbourne, Australia and grew up in the suburb of Ferntree Gully. From early in her childhood she was creative and interested in art, writing and music. After deciding to become a professional artist she completed an Advanced Certificate in Promotional Display at the Melbourne College of Decoration, where she received an award for Highest Aggregate Mark in Art Subjects in 1988.
  In 1995 Canavan started The Telltale Art, a freelance business specialising on graphical design services. In that same year she began working for Aurealis, a magazine of Australian Fantasy and Science Fiction, working a do-it-all job as art and cover editor, reading manuscripts, creating web pages and stuffing envelopes. By taking on this job she was able to start writing in her spare time. Canavan states that until the age of 25 she dreamed of writing a novel but lacked the focus to do so. When she turned 25 she took several writing courses, worked on refining her fiction writing skills, while she fought her way through several rejections.
  
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  Westminster School
  Coordinates: 51°29′54″N 0°07′42″W / 51.4984°N 0.1284°W / 51.4984; -0.1284
  The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, better known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading independent schools, with the highest Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rate of any secondary school or college in Britain. Standing in the precincts of Westminster Abbey in central London, and with a history stretching back to the 11th century, the school's notable alumni include Ben Jonson, Robert Hooke,Christopher Wren, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham,Edward Gibbon, Henry Mayhew, A. A. Milne, Tony Benn and seven Prime Ministers. The school traditionally encourages independent and individual thinking. Boys are admitted to the Under School at age seven, and to the senior school at age thirteen; girls are admitted only at sixteen. The school has around 750 pupils; around a quarter are boarders, most of whom go home at weekends, after Saturday morning school. It is one of the original nine British public schools as defined by the Public Schools Act 1868.
  
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  William of Wykeham
  William of Wykeham (1320 or 1324 – 27 September 1404) was Bishop of Winchester, Chancellor of England, founder of Winchester College, New College, Oxford, New College School, Oxford, and builder of a large part of Windsor Castle.
  William was born to a peasant family, in Wickham, Hampshire, and educated at a school in Winchester. He was appointed Justice in Eyre south of the Trent along with Peter Atte Wode in 1361, a position he held until about 1367. He became secretary to the constable of Winchester Castle and in that capacity learned a lot about building. This led to architectural work for King Edward III, for whom he reconstructed Windsor Castle whilst residing at Bear's Rails in Old Windsor. William was paid for these services by being given the incomes of various churches, and eventually, in 1362, he was ordained. He had shown considerable talent as an administrator and in June 1363 was appointed Lord Privy Seal and then in October 1366 he was elected Bishop of Winchester, and in 1367, Chancellor of England. He resigned this position in 1371 and began a long conflict with John of Gaunt. However, with the ascension of Richard II to the throne, William was reappointed Chancellor in 1389, retaining that office through 1391.
  
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