Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
African-American critic, born in Louisville, Kentucky, educated at Howard University and UCLA; amongst other academic posts, he was appointed Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His considerable scholarly output has long established him as a major African-American literary authority and critic. The best known of his studies include Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literatu…
American novelist, born in New York, educated at Haverford College, Pennsylvania. His first novel, The Mezzanine (1989), is a comic odyssey compressing a wide variety of reflections on life, death, consumer society, and literature into the space of a single lunch-hour as described by Howie, its eccentrichero. In Room Temperature (1990) the narrator, Mike, muses about his marriage and other related…
American novelist, dramatist, and social critic, born in New York City, where he was educated. He was on the National Advisory Board of CORE (Congress on Racial Equality). From 1948 onwards he divided his time between New York and France. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), inspired by his own childhood, is a modern classic of Black American literature. His second, the skilfully st…
a trilogy of novels by O. Manning, consisting of The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962), and Friends and Heroes (1965), published in one volume in 1987 (see also Levant Trilogy, The). The Great Fortune opens with the arrival in Bucharest of Guy Pringle, a young British Council lecturer, and his wife, Harriet, whom he has just married. Set in 1939, with Europe on the point of war, the Buc…
British writer, born in Shanghai, educated at King's College, Cambridge. During the Second World War he was interned by the Japanese and this traumatic experience of his early years has influenced much of his fiction; he made direct use of the material only in his autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun (1984; later filmed by S. Spielberg), the success of which widened the high reputation he had…
African-American short-story writer, novelist, and scriptwriter, born in New York, where she was educated at City University. During the early 1960s, when she emerged as a noted civil rights activist, she worked in a New York community centre. After teaching at City University, she became an assistant professor at Rutgers University in 1969. Her writing is closely aligned with her political convic…
a novel by C. McKay, published in 1933. Set in Jamaica, its theme is cultural dualism, the clash between European and indigenous black values. The central character is Bita Plant, from the village of Banana Bottom, who is raped at the age of 12 by an idiot youth. The Craigs, a white missionary couple, adopt Bita as their prot?g?e and send her to be educated in England. After years abroad, Bita ret…
a literary journal founded in 1975 by Emma Tennant, who intended it as a means of publishing a broad range of imaginative writing. It was originally subtitled ?the literary newspaper?, appearing in folio with a striking red and black cover design and featuring short stories, poems, articles, reviews, and illustrations. Contributors to early issues included Angela Carter, Tom Disch, J. G. Ballard, …
Scottish writer, born in Fife, educated at Stirling University. He lived in London and Kent from 1979 to 1988, then moved to Edinburgh. He is best known for his first novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), in which the mental games of an isolated adolescent become part of reality, and for The Bridge (1986), in which a comatose patient is compelled to discover the significance of the great bridge which co…
American novelist, born in Newton, Massachusetts, educated at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York, and the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill. His first novel, Family Life (1974), is a satirical fable set in an imaginary kingdom. Other novels, though they may be set in the past, follow a post-modernist trajectory. These include Hamilton Stark (1978); The Book of Jamaica (1980), in which an aca…
Irish novelist, born in Wexford, Ireland, educated at the Christian Brothers School and St Peter's College, Wexford. In 1970 he published Long Lankin, a collection of short stories which, like Joyce's Dubliners, examined Irish life from the perspective of several characters, dealing with different stages in their lives from childhood to adulthood; a novella, ?The Possessed?, was also included. Nig…
African-American playwright and social activist, born in Newark, New Jersey, educated at Howard and Columbia Universities. Baraka exerted a profound influence on the development and direction of black writing and culture. His first published work was the long sardonic poem Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) with its vivid imagery and infusion of black culture and reference. This was fo…
British diarist, born in Barnstaple, Devon. As a boy he conceived a keen interest in natural phenomena and achieved a high degree of self-education in biology. In 1912 he became an official of the Natural History Museum in London. He published work in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society and the Journal of Botany, and supplied other periodicals with more general articles. He resigned from his…
Canadian novelist, born in Owen Sound, Ontario, educated at the University of Western Ontario. After graduating she began working as a journalist and joined the London, Ontario, Free Press in 1976. Abra (1978, UK title Gaining Ground, 1980), the first of Barfoot's radical feminist novels, deals with a young woman who leaves her husband and child to live in the Canadian wilderness. In Dancing in th…
British writer, born in London, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. After the crash of his family's bank (Baring's Bank) in 1890 he worked as a diplomat in Europe, forming a close association with Russia, where he went to live in 1904, reporting on the Russo-Japanese war. He is credited with having discovered Chekhov's work in Moscow and introducing it to the West. His nonfiction works include…
British short-story writer and novelist, born in Kent. Her first highly praised collection of stories, The Innocents (1948), was followed by a novel, Apology for a Hero (1950). Further collections of stories confirmed her reputation as a leading practitioner of her craft; she also continued to experiment with form. The Middling (1967) and A Heavy Feather (1978) are fragmented narratives loosely li…
British poet, born in Loughton, Essex, educated at the Regent Street Polytechnic. From 1930 onward he lived mainly as a freelance writer and held visiting professorships at universities in America, Japan, and elsewhere. Following the appearance of Thirty Preliminary Poems in 1933, he gained considerable critical attention in 1935 with Poems and Janus, the latter consisting of two prose pieces enti…
British dramatist, born in London, educated at Sussex University. His first substantial works were Claw (1975), about a petty criminal exploited and finally eliminated by a corrupt establishment, and Stripwell (1975), in which it is the representative of authority, a self-doubting judge, who ends up killed, this time by a vengeful sociopath. These plays, which can be compared with those of Howard …
British novelist, born in Thornaby-on-Tees, educated at the London School of Economics. Barker's early novels focused on the grim lives of working-class people in the north of England. Her first novel, Union Street (1982), was more a collection of linked stories about the lives of seven women on a working-class street in a northern English city. Though often shocking in its depiction of violence, …
American novelist, poet, short-story writer, and playwright, born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, educated at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn and the Arts Student League, New York. She worked as a journalist and also published some stories in The Dial and Vanity Fair. Her first collection of poems and stories appeared in The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), which satirized the stereotypes of female …
British novelist, born in Leicester, educated at Oxford University. In his first novel, Metroland (1980; Somerset Maugham Award, 1981), his precocious hero, Christopher Lloyd, recounts the events of his suburban childhood, his student days in Paris in 1968, and his eventual return, with wife and baby, to the peaceful suburban landscapes of ?Metroland?. Before She Met Me (1982), a study of murderou…
British dramatist, born in London, educated at Stroud Grammar School. He was a film critic, a film story editor, and a screenwriter before he turned his attention to the theatre. His first successful work was The Ruling Class (1968), a ?baroque comedy? satirizing a supposedly decadent and moribund British aristocracy in scathing terms. It was followed by other plays ambitious in terms of both styl…
a novel by Ellen Glasgow, published in 1925. Its central figure, Dorinda Oakley, is the daughter of a poor farmer in Virginia of Scottish-Irish stock. She goes to work in Nathan Pedlar's store and falls in love with Jason Greylock, the feckless son of the village doctor; the day before their wedding Jason is obliged to marry an earlier fianc?e. Distressed, Dorinda leaves for New York where she is …
British writer, born in Kirriemuir, Scotland, the son of a weaver, educated at Edinburgh University. He turned first to journalism with the Nottinghamshire Journal, a period reflected in When a Man's Single (1888). After producing several sentimental Kailyard sketches and stories about Thrums (a fictional version of Kirriemuir), such as Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889), and The …
American dramatist, born in Rochester, New York, educated at Yale. Barry was a frail child whose early years of invalidism turned him into an avid reader, who developed a reputation for precocious wit. At Yale he won the Yale dramatic society prize for his first play, Autonomy. He enrolled in George Pierce Baker's famous ?47 Workshop? at Harvard, a workshop drama school for aspiring playwrights la…
English novelist, born in Horbury, Yorkshire into a mining family, and educated at Ossett Grammar School. From 1944 to 1962 he worked as a draughtsman and sales executive in the engineering industry; he graduated with an MA from the Open University in 1982. Barstow's emergence as a writer in 1960 coincided with that of John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, and other ?angry young men?. His first novel, A Kin…
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Cambridge, Maryland, educated at Julliard School of Music, New York City, where he studied orchestration, but he turned towards an academic career in literature after completing a Master's degree at Johns Hopkins University. From 1953 until 1965 he taught in the Department of English at Pennsylvania State University and he was a Professor of Englis…
American short-story writer and novelist, born in Philadelphia; he was brought up in Texas, and later moved to New York. Variously described as an ?anti-novelist? and a ?poet of order gone?, Barthelme will be remembered for pushing the short story to its furthest experimental limits, and for the poetic and unvarnished beauty of his prose style. He was a member of a generation of writers such as Co…
British novelist and short-story writer, born in Northamptonshire. His first novel, The Two Sisters (1926), was followed by a stream of novels and short stories as well as plays, essays, gardening books, children's books, and several volumes of autobiography. He was at his best with the short story and acknowledged Guy de Maupassant as his major influence. Early novels such as The Fallow Land (193…
British critic and editor, the son of a cotton broker, born at Styal in Cheshire, educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and Harvard. His early publications include English Comic Drama, 1700?1750 (1929). As an editor with Cambridge University Press from 1929 to 1940, he was responsible for preparing the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1940). After a period as an agricultural administra…
New Zealand poet, born in England; despite parental opposition she attended London University. She then became involved with women's suffrage and worked amongst the poor in London's East End before settling in New Zealand in 1900. Her first works, Verses (1898) and Reuben and Other Poems (1903), were published in England but subsequent works in New Zealand, the first of which, Shingle-Short and Ot…
British novelist, born in London, educated at Somerville College, Oxford. Bawden has published many books for both adults and children. The cross-fertilization between her adult and her children's works is unusually marked. She reworked her adult novel Evil by the Sea (1957), publishing a version for children in 1976, and many of her concerns?difficult children, neglected childhoods, the gap betwe…
New Zealand poet, born in Dunedin, educated at Quaker schools in England and New Zealand. A major spiritual and literary figure, he blended a passionate concern for everyday New Zealand life with a dedication to basic Christian principles and myths. With the collections Beyond the Palisade (1944) and Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness (1948), Baxter became the leading poet of his generation in New Zealand…
Australian author, born in New South Wales. Her early life was turbulent; having been deserted by her first husband in 1887, she moved to Sydney and in 1890 married Thomas Baynton, a retired surgeon with literary interests. In 1896 she began publishing stories, first in the Bulletin. After her first visit to London in 1902, and Baynton's death in 1904, she spent more frequent periods in England an…
a term applied to a group of writers who established a rebellion against society and came to prominence about 1956, centred in San Francisco and New York City. Whilst their activities overlapped with the development of the San Francisco Renaissance, and with the influences and developments of figures like Charles Olson and Robert Creeley of the Black Mountain School, their inception came about in …
a popular music group from Liverpool consisting of George Harrison (1943??), John Lennon (1940?80), Paul McCartney (1942??), and Ringo Starr (1940??), which enjoyed enormous international acclaim from 1963 until it disbanded in 1970. Lennon and McCartney composed most of the group's repertoire, showing increasingly innovative melodic and lyrical abilities as their careers progressed. In 1965 each …
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Washington, DC, educated at the American University and the University of Connecticut; she has taught at Harvard and the University of Virginia. Beattie is known for her precise observations of suburban, middle-class life. Her early work in the collection of stories Distortions (1976) and the novel Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976) documents the fate …