Peer Resources - Famous Mentor Pairings - Artists, Writers, Photographers, Publishers, Novelists, Poets

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The Mentor Hall of Fame

ARTISTS, WRITERS, PHOTOGRAPHERS, PUBLISHERS, NOVELISTS, AND POETS

Virtually anyone can benefit from having a mentor. And most well-known, accomplished and successful artists can identify people in their lives who acted as mentors.
The following list of mentor pairs was compiled by Rey Carr from a variety of sources including autobiographies, biographies, newspaper articles, personal interviews, and diligent historical research.
If you know of mentor pairs that ought to be added, we have provided an opportunity for you to submit the names and details: Add a Mentor Pair.

ARTISTS, WRITERS, PHOTOGRAPHERS, PUBLISHERS, NOVELISTS, AND POETS

Elizabeth George (British mystery novelist) mentor to Patricia Smiley (American crime fiction novelist) - Details and photos (Requires membership in the Peer Resources Network)
Jerome Liebling (photographer, Bio) mentor to Ken Burns (American documentary filmmaker Bio) and Buddy Squires (cinematographer)
Terrence Ranger (Oxford professor) mentor to Yvonne Vera (award-winning novelist)
Joseph Lelyweld (former executive editor, NY Times) mentor to Bill Keller (executive editor, NY Times and Pulitizer Prize journalist)
Gottfried Mueller mentor to Thom Hartmann (best-selling author, including Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights)
Richard Evans Schultes (explorer and botanist) mentor to Wade Davis (ethnobotanist and best selling author including Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures Bio)
Howard Pyle mentor to Stanley Massey Arthurs (US historical scene artist)
Lawren Harris mentor to Emily Carr
Lucy Sprague Mitchell mentor to Margaret Wise Brown (pioneer of picture books for children)
Hugh MacLennan (Canadian novelist and academic) mentor to Anne Coleman (Canadian writer and author of I'll Tell You a Secret: A Memory of Seven Summers)
Edmund Wilson (Canadian literary critic) mentor to Marie-Claire Blais (award-winning writer, Bio)
Tyrone Guthrie (English stage director, playwright, and writer, artistic director of the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario) mentor to Robertson Davies (Canadian author of, among others, The Deptford Trilogy, editor Bio)
Stella Linden mentor to John Osborne (playwright and author of Look Back in Anger)
Isaac Asimov mentor to Gene Roddenberry
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904, Russian short story writer, novelist, and dramatist, Bio) mentor to Raymond Carver (1938-1988, American poet and short story writer, Bio) mentor to Jay McInerney (American, short story writer, novelist, author of The Good Life and Bright Lights, Big City)
Sir Isaiah Berlin (English social historian, Bio) mentor to Michael Ignatieff (Canadian writer and author of several books including The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience)
Sharon Salzberg (author of A Heart as Wide as the World: Stories on the Path of Lovingkindness) mentor to Naomi Wolf (former Rhodes Scholar and author of several books, including: The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women)
W.E.B. DuBois (social explorer, writer and revolutionary, Bio) mentor to Herbert Aptheker (writer, historian, author of Documentary History of the Negro People)
Oliver Sacks (neurologist and author of Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood) mentored by his uncle, David
Dick Schaap (sports reporter, author Flashing Before My Eyes: 50 Years of Headlines, Deadlilnes and Punchlines) mentor to Tony Kornheiser (columnist, Washington Post)
Isabel LeBourdais (author of The Trial of Steven Truscott) mentor to June Callwood (Canadian writer, Bio)
Hunter S. Thompson mentor to Warren Zevon
F. Scott Fitzgerald (author of many great books, including The Last Tycoon) mentor to Frances Kroll (secretary, author Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Howard Adams (Canadian writer, orator, Métis Bio) mentor to Maria Campbell (Canadian writer and teacher)
John Taylor Gatto (writer, educator, author of A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling) mentored by his grandfather, Henry Taylor Zimmer (proprietor, Zimmer Printing Company)
Paul Bowles (author of The Sheltering Sky Bio) mentor to William Burroughs (writer, Bio) and Allen Ginsberg (poet Bio)
E.J. Pratt (Canadian poet) mentor to Northrop Herman Frye (editor and literary critic)
Yvor Winters (Stanford professor and poet) mentor to Robert Pinsky (1997 US poet laureate)
Mentor Softball Association can be found at www.mentorsoftball.com
Edward Kosner (Editor of the New York Daily News and former Editor of Newsweek and Esquire) mentor to Tony Schwartz (Author of What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America and Life/Work Contributing Editor for FastCompany
Mentor, Ohio is named after Hiram Mentor, an early settler
Father Flye mentor to James Agee (Pulitzer prize author of African Queen and A Death in the Family)
Graham Greene (writer and author of The End of the Affair) mentor to Muriel Spark (novelist and author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)
Anne Carroll Moore mentor to Frances Clarke Sayers (librarian, educator, author)
Dr. Joseph Plummer (Executive Vice-President, McCann-Erickson World Group) mentor to Elissa Moses (author of $100 Billion Allowance: Accessing the Global Teen Market)
Joseph Campbell (mythologist, author of Hero with a Thousand Faces Bio) mentor to Phil Cousineau (author, Once and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in Modern Times Bio)
William Faulkner (awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949, Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards) was mentored by Phil Stone and Sherwood Anderson
Rick Warren (author of the Purpose Driven Life) was mentored by his father, Billy Graham, and Peter Drucker.
Joseph Wambaugh (crime novelist) mentor to Michael Connelly (crime novelist)
Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) was mentored by Peter Drucker, who told him, "The real discipline comes in saying no to the wrong opportunities."
Pio Baroja (writer) mentor to Camilo Jose Cela (Nobel Prize winner for literature, 1989)
Harold Simmons (painter) mentor to Derek Walcott (Nobel Prize winner for literature, 1992)
Hans Werner Richter mentor to Gunter Grass (Nobel prize winner for literature, 1999)
Leon Rooke (author of Shakespeare's Dog: A Novel) mentor to Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)
Pierre Berton (Canadian journalist, author of many books, including The Klondike Fever) mentored by his Boy Scout troop leaders and Hal Straight, Jack Scott, Ralph Allen, Arthur Irwin and Bruce Hutchinson (newspaper and magazine editors)
Marshall McLuhan mentor to Neil Postman (culture writer and author of Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future) and Frank Zingrone (poet, professor and author of The Media Symplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos)
V.S. Naipaul mentor to Paul Theroux (travel writer and author of Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings)
Delmore Schwartz (poet) mentor to Saul Bellow and Lou Reed (musician)
Saul Bellow (Nobel prize Canadian and author of Ravelstein) mentor to Martin Amis (Canadian writer and author of Experience: A Memoir)
Eugene Norris (high school English teacher) mentor to Pat Conroy (novelist and author of Beach Music)
Mina Curtis (Smith College English professor) mentor to Anne Morrow Lindbergh (writer, Bio)
Ruth Graham (spouse of Billy Graham) mentor to Patricia Cornwell (writer)
Thomas Wentworth Higginson (clergyman and author) mentor to Emily Dickinson
Mentor Avenue is near Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio
Harriet Beecher Stowe (author) mentor to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (writer)
Ambrose Bierce (US Civil War writer) mentor to Jack London and Ernest Hemingway
Sherwood Anderson mentor to Ernest Hemingway (A HREF="http://www.empirezine.com/spotlight/hemmingway/hem1.htm">Bio)
Dr. Joseph Bell (professor, University of Edinburgh Medical School) mentor to Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes stories)
Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams (physician and poet Bio) mentor to Allen Ginsberg (poet Bio)
Allen Tate (American poet Bio) mentor to Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell (American poets)
Romare Bearden (black artist, Bio) mentor to August Wilson (dramatist Bio)
Joan Littlewood (British dramatist) mentor to Brendan Behan (Irish dramatist, Bio)
Ford Madox Ford (British expatriate writer) mentor to Caroline Gordon (Southern writer)
Carl Van Vechten (novelist) mentor to Langston Hughes (poet)
Caroline Gordon (Southern writer) mentor to Flannery O'Connor (novelist)
Marianne Moore (Pulitizer Prize American poet Bio) mentor to Elizabeth Bishop (US poet Bio)
Pauline Johnson (Canadian poet, author and Mohawk Bio) mentored by her grandfather, Smoke Johnson
Toni Morrison (poet and Pulitzer Prize author The Bluest Eye) mentor to Toni Cade Bambara (author, Those Bones Are Not My Child)
Zora Neale Hurston (author, Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel) and Tillie Olsen (author, Tell Me a Riddle mentors to Alice Walker (author, The Way Forward is With a Broken Heart)
Tillie Olsen (author, Tell Me a Riddle mentor Margaret Atwood (Canadian writer, Bio) and Grace Paley (American short story writer, Bio)
Molly Giles (author, Iron Shoes) mentor to Amy Tan (author, The Kitchen God's Wife)
Louise Erdrich (author Bio) mentored by a character, Lamartine, who appeared in three of her novels
Robert Penn Warren (poet, Pulitizer Prize novelist Bio) mentor to Randall Jarrell (poet)
Theodore Roethke (Pultizer prize American poet Bio) mentor to David Wagoner, Carolyn Kizer, and Richard Hugo (American poets)
Irving Layton (Canadian poet, 1912-2005, Bio) mentor to Leonard Cohen, Al Purdy and hundreds of other poets.
Al Purdy (Canadian poet) mentor to Joe Rosenblatt (poet)
Endre Farkas (Canadian poet) mentor to Ruth Ellen Taylor (Canadian poet)
George Santayana (Harvard professor) mentor to Wallace Stevens (poet)
Sarah Orne Jewett mentor to Willa Cather (novelist, writer)
Adelaide Fogg mentor to Maureen Murdoch (artist, photographer)
George Frederic Watts mentor to Julia Margaret Cameron (British portrait photographer)
Erwin A. Bauer mentor to Peggy Bauer (wildlife photographer)
Josef Sudek (Czech photographer) mentor to Sonja Bullaty (photographer and Holocaust survivor)
Yousuf Karsh (Canadian photographer) mentor to Herman Leonard (jazz photographer)
Edward Weston (photographer, work samples) mentor to Tina Modotti (photographer, work samples and bio) and mentored by Margrethe Mather (photographer, Bio)
Mathew Brady (photographer) mentor to Alexander Gardener (US Civil War photographer)
Ansel Adams (landscape photographer and environmentalist, Bio) mentored by his father, Charles Hitchcock Adams, who he described as "tenderly keeping alive my inner spark"
J. Douglas MacFarlane mentor to Sandy Naiman
Walter Winchell mentor to Jack O'Brian (late New York newspaper columnist)
H.L. Mencken (journalist, editor, essayist Bio) mentor to Sinclair Lewis (Nobel Prize for literature, author, critic Bio)
Robert Frost (poet Bio) mentor to Wallace Stegner (writer, professor, environmentalist Bio)
James Chace (publisher) mentor to Caleb Carr (novelist and author of Killing Time: A Novel)
Alan Moore (comics writer) mentor to Neil Gaimon (award-winning comics author and writer, Bio)
Amy Tan (best-selling novelist, The Bonesetter's Daughter) mentored by her father
Sol Steinmetz (Editor in Chief, Random House) mentor to William Safire (New York Times columnist)
Ezra Pound mentor to T.S. Eliot and Louis Dudek (Canadian poet)
Andy Warhol mentor to Tama Janowitz (author of Slaves of New York) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (painter)
Saul Bellow mentor to Philip Roth
Maxwell Evarts Perkins (book editor Bio) mentor to Thomas Clayton Wolfe (author of Look Homeward, Angel among many great books, Bio), Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald)
W.P. Kinsella (author of Shoeless Joe) mentor to Dorothy Speak (author of Object of Your Love)
William Maxwell (novelist and former editor, New Yorker) mentor to Alec Wilkinson (writer) described in Alec Wilkinson's 2002 book: My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell
Harrison Salisbury (author) mentor to Liu Yadong
Fred Bridgen (landscape artist) mentor to Glen Loates (Canadian wildlife artist)
Glen Loates (Canadian wildlife artist Bio) mentor to Janice Tanton (Canadian artist)
Dr. William Brody mentor to Tom Thomson (Canadian artist Bio and gallery)
Lawren Harris (member of the Canadian artist Group of Seven, BIo) mentor to Emily Carr
Emily Carr (Canadian artist Bio and work) mentor to Myfanwy Spencer Pavelic (Canadian artist Bio)
Paul-Emile Bourdas mentor to Charles Daudelin (Quebec sculptor and artist)
Hasegawa Saburo (artist) mentor to Isamu Noguchi (sculptor, Bio)
Joseph Sheppard (artist) mentor to Susan Sykes (watercolorist)
Jean Griffith (potter) mentor to Rosette Gault (ceramic artist)
Auguste Rodin (sculptor Bio) mentor to Camille Claudel (sculptress)
Edward Garnett mentor to D.H. Lawrence (author)
James Joyce (Life and Works) mentor to Anthony Burgess (Bio) and Samuel Beckett (Bio)
Samuel Beckett (poet) mentor to Peggy Guggenheim (Bio)
Irving Layton (Canadian poet, 1912-2005, Bio) mentor to Leonard Cohen, Al Purdy and hundreds of other poets.
Deepak Chopra mentored by his parents
Mordecai Richler mentor to Guy Vanderhaeghe (author of The Englishman's Boy)
Thornton Wilder (playwright, author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey among others) mentor to John Knowles (author of A Separate Peace among others) and the great and late Canadian author, Timothy Findley, who wrote among others Famous Last Words)
Timothy Findley mentor to Marie Woodrow and Elizabeth Ruth (Canadian writers)
Sherwood Anderson (writer) mentor to Ernest Hemingway
Jane Austin (novelist) mentor to Martha Stewart (can make toothpaste from cat pooh)
Henry James (writer) mentor to Edith Wharton (novelist)
Gustav Flaubert (Madame Bovary) mentor to Guy de Maupassant (A Woman's Life)
Bret Harte (writer) mentor to Mark Twain
Mentor Street is off of Martin Luther King Blvd in Cincinnati, Ohio
Samuel Crisp (English writer) mentor to Fanny Burney
Dr. Benjamin Mays and Dr. Howard Zinn (professor at Spelman College) mentors to Marian Wright Edelman (author of Lanterns: a Memoir of Mentors)
Katherine Ann Porter (novelist) mentor to William Humphrey (novelist)
D.H. Lawrence mentor to Lady Dorothy Brett
Richard Wright (writer, Black Boy) mentor to Ralph Ellison (writer, Invisible Man)
Paulo Freire (educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed) mentor to Jonathan Kozol (teacher and author of Ordinary Resurrections)
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (Russian novelist) mentor to the Serapion Brothers
Boris Pasternak mentor to Andrei Voznesensky (Russian poet)
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky in his book, The Idiot, portrays Prince Mishkin as a mentor to those around him
Leo Tolstoy mentor to Peter Verigin (Doukhobor's spiritual leader in Canada)
Next time you watch the Rose Parade travel along Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, California, watch for it to cross Mentor Avenue
Miguel Costa i Llobera (Catalonian poet and orator) mentor to Josep Maria de Sagarra (Catalonian poet, novelist and playwright)
Wayne Fairhead (high school drama teacher) mentor to Mira Friedlander (Canadian theatre critic)
Feliks Przyñubski (Polish writer) mentor to brothers Tadeusz Rùfiewicz (writer) and Stanisñaw Rùfiewicz (film-maker)
Dr. Elizabeth Bradford Holbrook (Canadian portrait artist, painter) mentor to Christian Cardell Corbet (Canadian portrait artist, sculptor, painter work)

Summer Evening
Childe Hassam
1886

Celia Laighton Thaxter (poet) mentor to Childe Hassam (American impressionist, 1859-1935, paintings)

Benjamin West (historical painter Bio) mentor to Washington Allston (artist, poet)
Alfred Stieglitz (husband, American artist Works) mentor to Georgia O'Keeffe (American painter Bio)

Freedom of Speech
Norman Rockwell
1942

Norman Rockwell (illustrator and painter, biography) mentor to John Cullen Murphy (wrote the Prince Valiant comic strip for 33 years)

William Gillies (landscape artist) mentor to Elizabeth Blackadder (contemporary painter)
Lawren Harris (Canadian Group of Seven) mentor to Thomas John Thomson (Canadian Group of Seven) and Emily Carr (Canadian artist)
Arthur Lismer (Canadian painter) mentor to Isabel McLaughlin (painter)
André Breton (Surrealist, Bio), Alfred Pellan (Canadian painter, Bio and work) mentors to Mimi Parent (Canadian Surrealist painter, Bio)
Pegi Nichol MacLeod (Canadian painter, Bio) mentored by Marius Barbeau (Anthropologist, Bio) and Maud and Eric Brown (Director of the National Gallery of Canada)
Jack Shadbolt (Canadian painter) mentor to Molly Jean Bobak (illustrator) and Kazumi Kawaguchi (Canadian muralist and painter)
James Orrock mentor to William Hesketh Lever (18th century British painter)
Joseph Pennell (art teacher) mentor to Charles Henry White (Canadian-born painter-etcher of American cities)
Arshile Gorky (American painter) mentor to Willem de Kooning (American abstract expressionist painter)
Willem de Kooning (abstract impressionist painter) mentor to Robert Rauschenberg (modern painter)
Peter Pauwel Rubens (17th century Flemish master) mentor to David Teniers (Flemish painter) and Diego Velásquez (Spanish painter)
Andrea del Verrocchio (painter, bio) mentor to Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci mentor to Raphael Sanzio (painter, Bio and work)
Diederik Tulp (17th century physician) mentor to Paulus Potter (17th century painter)
George III mentor to John Hoppner (English portrait painter)
Lorenzo de' Medici mentor to Luigi Pulci (Italian poet)
Cosimo de' Medici mentor to Benedetto Varchi (Italian poet and historian)
Gustavus III mentor to Carl Michael Bellman (18th century Swedish poet)
Paul Verlain (French poet) mentor to Arthur Rimbaud (French poet)
William Dean Howells (American novelist and former editor of The Atlantic Monthly) mentor to Henry James (brother of William James and American novelist), Mark Twain, Thorstein Veblen and Stephen Crane
Ed Ricketts mentor to John Steinbeck
H.L. Mencken (Bio) mentor to William Manchester (author and historian)
Robert Penn Warren (writer) mentor to Larry Leavitt (friend of Rey Carr)
Sammy Sampas mentor to Jack Kerouac
Dashiel Hammett (writer Bio) mentor to Lillian Hellman (writer, Bio)
Arthur Krock (editor) mentor to James Reston (Pulitzer Prize author and writer)
Hermann Hesse mentor to Hans Carossa (German poet and novelist)
The W.O. Mitchell Literary Prize is awarded annually to an author that demonstrates both excellence and mentorship in writing
Ralph Waldo Emerson mentor to Henry David Thoreau, Charles Ives (composer), and Daniel Chester French (sculptor and creator of the Lincoln Memorial)
Henry David Thoreau mentor to Stephanie Mills (author, Epicurean Delight)
Walter Ufer (Taos artist) mentor to Carl Woolsey (artist)
G.H. Lewes mentor to George Eliot (English novelist)
When you visit Philadelphia, take a trip to Mentor Street near the Greenmount Cemetery
Stella Linden (actress) mentor to John Osborne (British playwright and film producer)
James Lind (British doctor created cure for scurvy) mentor to Percy Bysshe Shelley (British poet, Bio)
George William Russell (poet) mentor to Pamela Lyndon Travers (creator of Mary Poppins)
Franz Boas (anthropologist) mentor to Margaret Mead (anthropologist)
Margaret Mead (anthropologist) mentor to Gail Sheehy (writer)
Frank Sargeson (New Zealand writer) mentor to Janet Frame (New Zealand novelist) and Maurice Duggan
H.P. Lovecraft mentor to Robert Bloch (writer of the screenplay Psycho) and August Derleth (American author and editor)
Virgilio Pinera (Cuban dramatist) mentor to Reinaldo Arenas (Cuban writer, author of Before Night Falls)

Poets Often Act As Cross-Gender Mentors To Other Poets

WCW
William Carlos Williams
Elizabeth Bishop
RPW
Robert Penn Warren

Marianne Moore

Theodore Roethke

Carolyn Kizer

Wallace Stevens

Alan Ginsberg

Samuel Beckett

Edna St. Vincent-Millay

Poets Often Act As Cross-Gender Mentors To Other Poets
William Carlos Williams	Elizabeth Bishop	Robert Penn Warren	Marianne Moore	Theodore Roethke
Carolyn Kizer	Wallace Stevens	Alan Ginsberg	Samuel Beckett	Edna St. Vincent-Millay