Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
a novel by D. H. Lawrence, published in 1922. Aaron Sisson, a checkweighman in a Nottinghamshire colliery, and amateur piccolo player, suddenly leaves his wife and children on Christmas Eve immediately after the First World War. He goes to London, where he joins the Covent Garden orchestra and becomes involved with a smart set of bohemian people, led by Jim Bricknell, a man obsessed with the impor…
Guyanese play-wright, born in British Guyana, educated there and in Quebec and Montreal. His plays offer a view of black immigrant life in Britain and present difficult situations within a broad tradition of comedy. The humour arises primarily from incongruity, though there are fine instances of verbal felicity and wit. He established his reputation with his play Sweet Talk in 1973, and in 1974 be…
the home of the Irish National Theatre Society, named after Abbey Street in Dublin, where its permanent theatre was established in 1904. Following discussions between W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and Edward Martyn, the Irish Literary Theatre was founded and staged its first productions of Yeats's The Countess Cathleen and Martyn's The Heather Field in 1899. In 1901 Yeats's disagreements with…
British poet, dramatist, and critic, born in Ashton-under-Mersey, Cheshire, educated at Victoria University, Manchester. Having distinguished himself as a literary journalist, he lectured at the universities of Liverpool and Leeds before becoming Goldsmiths' Reader in English at New College, Oxford. With Wilfrid Gibson and Walter de la Mare, he was a recipient of the posthumous royalties produced …
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Vienna; he grew up in China and Israel before settling in the USA. He has worked as a lecturer and teacher in a variety of American colleges and universities since 1975. His work is characterized by an experimentalism and a sense of philosophical enquiry which have led to some claims that he can in some way be separated from the sources and strengt…
South African novelist and journalist, born in Vredetorp, Johannesburg, and largely self-taught. His first work, a collection of short stories, Dark Testament (1942), appeared after he settled in London in 1941. Several novels about life in South Africa's ghettoes followed, including Song of the City (1945), Mine Boy (1946), and The Path of Thunder (1948). Though mainly in a naturalistic style, na…
a novel by William Faulkner, published in 1936. The story, which centres on the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, begins in 1833 when Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi, having left his home state of West Virginia and settled in Haiti where he married a planter's daughter, Eulalia Bon. By Eulalia he had a son, Charles Bon, but on his discovering Eulalia's black ancestry both she and the son we…
British poet, born of a Welsh-Jewish family in Cardiff, where he attended the Welsh National School of Medicine before studying in London at King's College and Westminster Hospital. He qualified as a doctor in 1950. After Every Green Thing (1948) was the first of his principal collections of poetry, which also include Tenants of the House (1957), Funland and Other Poems (1973), Ask the Bloody Hors…
a play by Alan Ayckbourn, first performed in 1972; it well exemplifies its author's technical adventurousness and the moral seriousness he brings to comedy. Each of the three acts is set in a different kitchen on a consecutive Christmas Eve, and each charts the changing circumstances of three couples: the lower middle-class Sidney Hopcroft, who moves from insecurity to assurance with his growing b…
was a term pioneered by the British critic Martin Esslin and used to characterize the work of certain key playwrights in the 1950s and 1960s. Though its roots may be traced back as far as Jarry's Ubu Roi in 1896, and perhaps to Strindberg's expressionist work, its more immediate inspiration was Camus's essay The Myth of Sisyphus, published during the Second World War, in 1942. This disseminated th…
Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic, born in Ogidi, Eastern Nigeria, educated at the University College of Ibadan. Before the Nigerian Civil War (1967?70), Achebe worked as a broadcaster. Among other academic appointments, he was Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, and Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of Nigeria (Nsukka). His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1…
American dramatist, novelist, and poet, born in New York, educated at the Universities of Brandies and California. In her narratives, documentary accounts of historical events are juxtaposed with grim imaginings on the modern world. Classic texts are often used to pass comment on literary tradition, and to provide a disquieting context for her bleak visions of late twentieth-century Western societ…
British novelist, memoirist, and belletrist, born in London, educated at Cambridge University. As literary editor of The Listener (1935?59), he commissioned work from writers such as E. M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood. Hindoo Holiday (1932) describes his experiences as private secretary to an Indian Maharajah. Ackerley shows a determination to accept vagaries of human behaviour, a refusal to …
British dramatist, born in Westcliffe-on-Sea, educated at Balham Grammar School and the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art. He worked as an actor while developing his craft as a playwright. His work includes adaptations, notably of Hugh Walpole's The Old Ladies (1935) and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1947), as well as Strange Orchestra (1931), Birthday (1934), Before the Part…
British novelist, poet, biographer, and literary critic, born in London, educated at Clare College, Cambridge, and Yale. London is a touchstone as much as a setting for many of his works. With Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism (1976), Ackroyd announced his impatience with contemporary English culture and the tradition of realistic fiction. He launched into literary fiction with The Gr…
Chicano writer, born in El Paso, Texas. Acosta was a controversial figure whose narratives focused on ethnicity and the cultural history of the Chicano people. Also a lawyer, he was lead attorney for the defence of some of the Chicano movement members whose exploits are detailed in his work. He was a friend of Hunter S. Thompson and provided the basis for the presentation of his ?sidekick? Dr Gonz…
British art historian, poet, and aesthete, born in Florence, educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. His early volume of poems Aquarium (1923), which appeared while he was at Oxford, was followed by further volumes including This Chaos (1930). Acton travelled widely from 1932, in America, Europe, and China. His fascination with China led to the publication of several books on its theatre, cult…
a literary quarterly published in London since 1941. (Adam is an acronym for ?Arts, Drama, Architecture, Music?.) The editor, Miron Grindea (1909??), originally from Romania, settled in England in September 1939. Grindea conceived of his journal as a showcase for the best British and European writing, with occasional forays into the literature of other continents. Its contributors, writing both in…
British novelist and scriptwriter, born in Cambridge, educated at St John's College, Cambridge. He is best known for The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and its sequels, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), and Mostly Harmless (1992), all of which originated in a 1978 BBC radio series late…
American historian and man of letters, born in Boston, educated at Harvard. Adams was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of President John Adams, and the son of Charles Francis Adams, an ambassador to Britain. He served as his father's secretary in London during the American Civil War. His first published work, on Captain John Smith, appeared in 1867, after which he…
Australian poet, born in Sydney. As a youth he spent some time in reform schools and in prison. Subsequently he became involved in the development of the ?New Australian Poetry? movement of the 1960s and 1970s becoming editor, in 1970, of the magazine New Poetry which was a platform for the movement's predominantly modernist and experimental outlook. His first collection, Canticles on the Skin (19…
There is a sense in which every literary work involves some degree of adaptation. From the classical Greek tragedies, which adapted myths, to their Renaissance equivalents, through to the modernist experimentations of the twentieth century, adaptation seems to be a structural literary device. The Roman writers Terence, Plautus, and Seneca adapted the works of the classical Greek playwrights (mainl…
New Zealand poet, born in Papakura, New Zealand; much of her childhood was spent in Britain. Having returned to New Zealand in 1947, she was educated at the Victoria University of Wellington, where she obtained an MA in Classics. After a period lecturing at the University of Otago, Dunedin, she worked as a librarian at the Turnbull Library in Wellington and then at the Foreign and Commonwealth Off…
a literary periodical founded in 1923 by John Middleton Murry, who edited it until 1930 and remained influential in determining its character until 1948. Murry's intentions centred on providing a platform for the ideas of D. H. Lawrence, who contributed nineteen pieces, and himself; he also saw the magazine as a medium for the posthumous publication of the work of Katherine Mansfield, his wife, wh…
a play by James Barrie, first performed in 1902. A prominent peer, Lord Loam, his daughters, and others are shipwrecked on a desert island, where English social divisions quickly prove themselves irrelevant. The butler, Crichton, takes command, Loam becomes a ?jolly-looking labouring man?, and others find the level their abilities decree. But just as Loam's eldest daughter, Lady Mary, has grateful…
poet and writer, born in Beirut to a Muslim Arab father and a Greek mother, educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, and at Berkeley and Harvard in the USA. Though much of her early work was in French, Adnan has, since the early 1980s, written exclusively in English in a variety of genres. Her poetry, collected in volumes such as The Indian Never Had a Horse (1982), The Arab Apocalypse (1989), and The S…
a novel by Saul Bellow, published in 1953. A retrospectively narrated autobiography, this picaresque novel charts the life of Augie March, a Chicago Jew, through early childhood to his post-war maturity as a black marketeer in Europe. The opening line, ?I am an American, Chicago born?Chicago, that somber city?and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own …
British dramatic critic, born in Pendleton, Lancashire, the son of a cotton manufacturer's agent, and educated at Manchester Grammar School. He went into his father's business, and was still working there when, in 1907, he joined the Manchester Guardian's team of reviewers. His first book of essays on the theatre, Buzz, Buzz!, was published in 1918, while he was serving as a captain in the Army Se…
American novelist, poet, film critic, and screenwriter, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, educated at Harvard. His early collection Permit Me Voyage (1934) was the only volume of poems to be published in his lifetime. In conjunction with the photographer Walker Evans, he produced Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a moving account of the plight of Southern sharecroppers during the Depression, which …
a quarterly journal devoted to poetry and criticism, founded in 1959 by William Cookson. Ezra Pound, with whom Cookson had corresponded since 1955, was the ?minence grise behind the magazine and its stated policy of ?communication between isolated outposts? of poetic activity; its interest in foreign poetry was also made clear and early editions featured translations of work by poets from various …
a long poem by W. H. Auden, published in 1947. Almost entirely in alliterative verse, its six parts are set in wartime New York. Malin, Quant, Emble, and Rosetta, the protagonists, respectively represent thought, intuition, sensation, and feeling, the Jungian psychic faculties, which Auden designates explicitly in For the Time Being (1944). As an allegory of the reintegration of the fragmented sel…
a novel by Edith Wharton, published in 1920. It won the first Pulitzer Prize to be awarded to a woman and was dramatized in 1928 by Margaret Ayer Barnes. The young lawyer Newland Archer is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a beautiful girl from a high society New York family of the 1870s. Although he loves her, he perceives her innocence as artificial. Before their marriage, Countes…
a name given to specific Southern US poets and writers who espoused an ideology that championed regionalism and an agrarian economy for the South in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This group published The Fugitive (1922?5), a bi-monthly magazine based in Nashville, Tennessee, which combined poetry and criticism attacking the ?high-caste Brahmins of the Old South?, in the phrase of the editorial. …
American poet, born in Tucson, Arizona, of mixed Japanese, Choctaw, African-American, and Irish ancestry, raised in Las Vegas and San Francisco, and educated at the University of Arizona where she immersed herself in Buddhism. Her eclectic and peaceable upbringing makes a striking contrast to the world of her first collection of poems, Cruelty (1973), soliloquies which speak from, and to, sexual v…
British writer, born and educated in London. He played an important part in the founding of the Inland Waterways Association after the Second World War. From the publication of We Are for the Dark (1951; with Elizabeth Jane Howard), he became increasingly recognized as a fine exponent of the ghost story. On his title pages, Aickman described his work as ?strange stories?. His collections include D…
Ghanaian playwright, novelist, poet, and short-story writer, born in Ghana, educated at the University of Ghana in Legon, and Stanford University. She has taught at various African universities. Her plays are much concerned with the position of women in African society, and with constructively firm criticism of Ghanaian society. Formally, her work is greatly inspired by oral sources and story-tell…
American poet and critic, born at Savannah, Georgia, educated at Harvard, where he began a long friendship with T. S. Eliot. During the 1920s he supplied ?Letters from America? for the London Mercury and the Athenaeum. The narrative poems of Earth Triumphant (1914), which reflect the influence of John Masefield, began his prolific career as a poet; succeeding collections include The Jig Forslin: A…
British writer, the daughter of Conrad Aiken, born in Rye, Sussex. She is best known for her highly imaginative stories for young children in All You've Ever Wanted (1953) and many subsequent volumes. Her sharp sense of fantasy made her tales remarkably unpredictable. Among her novels for older children were The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962) and its sequels, set in an alternative eighteenth-ce…
American playwright, born in Washington, DC, and adopted by a millionaire theatre owner. He had an unhappy childhood, attending expensive private schools and later working at unskilled jobs before becoming established as a writer in his early thirties. Thornton Wilder encouraged him to write seriously, and he became one of the dominant group in the American theatre in the early 1960s, with Richard…
British poet, novelist, and biographer, born in Hampshire, educated at University College, London. An early exponent of Imagism, he met Hilda Doolittle, whom he married in 1913, through his friendship with Ezra Pound. He became assistant editor of The Egoist in 1914. His experiences on the Western Front in the First World War engendered the deep embitterment which informs much of his later work. I…
British writer, born in East Dereham, Norfolk, educated at Framlingham College and East Buckland College. He served in the Royal Signals during 1943?7, an experience which generated more than one book. He is best known for his science fiction works and his involvement in science fiction as a literary genre. His early publications include the fine stories collected in Space, Time, and Nathaniel: Pr…
American novelist, journalist, and short-story writer, born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, of a Swedish immigrant family; educated at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Though not a native of Chicago, Algren's writings are associated with that city in a way which invites comparison with the work of Theodore Dreiser and Saul Bellow. Algren followed various occupations before assuming…