Marguerite Yourcenar

Born Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour in Brussels in June 1903, she spent her early years between France and Belgium before settling into a writing life that spanned continents. Her fiction and essays earned her the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, and in 1965 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She became a US citizen in 1947, though her work remained rooted in European letters. When the Académie Française elected her in 1980, it ended centuries of exclusion. She died in December 1987.