Biography
Borchardt was born Alice O'Brien in New Orleans on Oct. 6, 1939. She was one of five sisters. Her father, Howard, a postal worker, helped her apply for her first library card at age 7. "It was the best gift I ever received," Borchardt said in a 1999 interview with the Austin American-Statesman.
Her mother, Katherine, was a feminist who taught Alice to pursue her career goals. The O'Brien family moved to Richardson, Texas, when Alice was a teenager. She began her nursing career in Houston, where she met and married her husband.
After a 30-year career as a licensed vocational nurse, Borchardt faced staff reductions at the hospital where she worked. Alice's sister Anne encouraged her, helped her find an agent, and wrote introductions to several of her books.
Read more about this topic: Alice Borchardt
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)