Mona Simpson, author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Mother and The Lost Father, has been writing since her high school days. In order to survive as a poet and writer, Simpson found herself working several jobs just to keep going. But once she published her first book, her finances became much easier.

Astonishingly, novelist Simpson never knew until she was an adult she was the sister of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple computer. As infants, the two had been dispatched to separate sets of parents. It didn't become clear, not even to them until they were adults, that Jobs, who essentially led us all to the computer systems known and used today, and Simpson, a literary stylist, were actually brother and sister! It took years for them to discover their relationship (a story in itself).

Later, Simpson tentatively wrote about her connection to her brother in her novel, A Regular Guy. In a 1992 CBS Wired for Books interview, Simpson alludes to Jobs, and had I (Don Swaim) been aware of the connection between these two brilliant people -- their relationship unknown to me at the time -- I would have developed it. While this poignant brother-sister connection remains popularly obscure (though not hidden), it's one of the great family-literary-technological convergences of the twentieth century.

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For over a decade, many of the best writers of the English language found their way onto Don Swaim's daily two-minute CBS Radio show, Book Beat . His New York-based program was derived from longer interviews, sometimes 40-minutes in length. Found exclusively here, Wired for Books proudly webcasts these conversations in their entirety using RealAudio.