Elie Wiesel was born on September 30,1928 in Sighet, Romania. He grew up in a small village in Romania where his life revolved around his family, religious study, his community, and God. In 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz with his family. He survived Auschuwitz, Buna, Buchenuald, and Gleiwitz and in April 1945 the camps were liberated. He lived in a French orphanage for a while and in 1948 he began to study in Paris and Sorbonne. He worked for a French newspaper. In 1958 his first book Night was published. He has written over thirty books and has won the Noble Peace Prize. Wiesel was appointed to chair the President's Commission on the Holocaust, and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement. He has dedicated his life so no one will forget the Holocaust and the lives it took. [1]

[ 2]

Maya Angelou was born on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her real name is Maguerite Annie Johnson. At age three, she and her brother were sent to live with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. While she lived there, she experienced much racial discrimination. Angelou gives credit to her grandmother and extended family for teaching her the values that influenced her later life and career. Her love for the arts won her a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco's Labor School. She dropped out at the age of 14. She later finished high school and had her son shortly thereafter. In 1958, she moved to New York and joined the Harlem Writers Guild and wrote and performed Cabaret for Freedom. She worked as an editor in Egypt and taught music and drama in Ghana. After that, she moved back to the United States and wrote I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings which was published in 1970. She has written over thirty best-selling works. One of her screenplays, Georgia, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Angelou has served on two presidential committees and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000. She also has received the Lincoln Medal in 2008 and three Grammy's. Angelou has earned over thirty honorary degrees and is currently the Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. [3]

Bruce Catton is a famous writer of nonfiction. He was born on October 9, 1899 and died August 28, 1978. Being born and raised in a town in Michigan with much history, the older men in the town always told him and the other children there the stories of what had happened during the Civil War and their personal accounts of it. This is where he might have had the idea to write about the Civil War. He was an American Historian and went to Oberlin College. He was a journalist from 1926-1942 as well as an editor of the American Heritage magazine. His first book was The Warlords of Washington. [4][5]

Dave Pelzer was born December 29, 1960. Until the age of twelve he was brutally abused by his mentally disturbed alcoholic mother. His child abuse case was the worst case ever seen in California. He had a very rough childhood and was forced to do many things. As discipline for being a bad boy, his mother made him eat out of his brother's dirty diapers, and eventually she even stabbed him in the stomach. Dave's father was a witness to the whole thing, but never did anything about it. Eventually his father became an alcoholic to forget about it. At age twelve a teacher of his reported the child abuse, and until the age of eighteen he was in foster care. At age eighteen he enlisted in the army. During that time he won the JC Penny Golden Rule Award and carried the flame at the 1996 Olympics.[6][7][8][9] Nowadays he travels promoting self reliance, and proves to people that you can overcome things if you try. [6]

Resources:

1. Dove, Laura. "Elie Wiesel." Memory Made Manifest: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 3 October 1997. The Capitol Project. 10 Dec. 2009.

     <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/HOLO/ElieBio.Htm>

2. "Elie Wiesel." Wikipedia. 10 Dec. 2009. 10 Dec. 2009. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel>

3. "Global Renaissance Woman." Maya Angelou Global Renaissance Woman 2009. 8 December 2009 <http://mayaangelou.com/bio/>

4. "Bruce Catton." The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.  Encyclopedia.com, 2008. Web. 4 May 2010. <http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Bruce_Catton.aspx> 

5. "Biography for Bruce Catton." IMDb.  Internet Movie Database, 2010. Web. 4 May 2010. <http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1713407/bio>

6. "Dave Pelzer."wikipedia the free encyclopedia. 9 Dec 2010. Web. 2Dec2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Pelzer>

7. "Dave Pelzer."Bizography the business biography site. n.d. Web. 2Dec2010. <http://www.bizography.org/biographies/dave-pelzer.html> 

8. Meyer, Callista."Biography:Dave Pelzer."Helium.  2002. Web. 3Dec2010. <http://www.helium.com/items/1186060-child-abuse-dave-pelzer> 

9. "About Dave."Pelzer.com. n.d. Web.3Dec2010. <http://www.davepelzer.com>