Margaret Atwood, one of the twentieth century's most forceful, innovative poets, novelists, and humanistic Cassandras, delights in a Connecticut relative, Mary Webster. After being hanged for witchcraft, Webster revived and escaped a second date with the noose. Such resilience and tenacity is the stuff of Atwood's fiction, as demonstrated by one of her most enigmatic characters, Offred, the resourceful, enduring heroine of Atwood's nightmarish The Handmaid's Tale (1986). As a result of the novel's success, the author has assumed a place among science fiction writers in the wing reserved for eminent dystopians.
Margaret Eleanor "Peggy" Atwood, multitalented Canadian essayist, scriptwriter, children's author, fiction writer, and social critic, reached world-class status with the bestselling novel The Handmaid's Tale, a complex and disturbing futuristic thriller that placed the author among the twentieth century's leading feminist writers. The second of three children of native Nova Scotians — Margaret Killam Atwood and Carl Edmund Atwood, a forest entomologist for the Department of Agriculture — Margaret Atwood was born November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario. From infancy through most of her childhood, she and her older brother, Harold, backpacked in the north Quebec cutback half the year, abandoning the city and missing weeks of school as her family took to the woods, where her father studied insects. (Atwood's sister Ruth was not born until 1951.)
