Encyclopedia of Literature: Bible in English to [Thomas] Edward Bond Biography
Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
Ambrose Bierce (Ambrose Gwinett Bierce) Biography - (1842–1914?), (Ambrose Gwinett Bierce), Nuggets and Dust Panned out in California, The Fiend's Delight
American journalist, born in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. He fought in the Civil War, and after extensive travels in America, moved to San Francisco and became a columnist for numerous magazines and newspapers. He travelled to England in 1872, where he wrote under the pseudonym ?Dod Grile?, and published three compilations of his witty sketches: Nuggets and Dust Panned out in California (1873), The Fie…
Rachel Billington Biography - (1942– ), All Things Nice, The Big Dipper, Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, Cock Robin, Beautiful
British novelist, born in Oxford, educated at London University. She is the daughter of Francis Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford, and Elizabeth, Countess of Longford, and the sister of Antonia Fraser. Her protagonists are almost invariably drawn from the gentry. Her first two novels, All Things Nice (1969) and The Big Dipper (1970), are comedies of manners, but beneath the caustic wit, there is …
Bim - Kyk-Over-Al, Bim, Savacou
a Caribbean literary magazine which first appeared in December 1942, published by the Young Men's Progressive Club, under the founding editorship of the late Barbadian writer Frank Collymore; among subsequent editors have been A. N. Forde, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John Wickham, and E. L. Cozier. Together with the Guyanese journal Kyk-Over-Al (1945?61) it exerted a great influence over the developm…
Laurence Binyon (Robert Laurence Binyon) Biography - (1869–1943), (Robert Laurence Binyon), Painting in the Far East
British poet and art historian, born in Lancaster, educated at Trinity College, Oxford. He worked throughout his career at the British Museum, where he became Keeper of the Department of Oriental Prints and Books. The best-known of his numerous works as an art historian is Painting in the Far East (1908). As a poet, he is inevitably remembered for his ?For the Fallen? (?They shall not grow old, as…
Biography; - The Life of Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of National Biography, Eminent Victorians, Elizabeth and Essex
modern biography begins with James Boswell's comprehensive attention to his subject's character and habits in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), which bears out his preface's claim that ?I profess to write not his panegyrick, ? but his life?. Throughout the Victorian era, however, biography was largely given over to memorializing the great and good as examples of the link between virtue and achiev…
George A. Birmingham, pseudonym of James Owen Hannay Biography - (1865–1950), pseudonym of James Owen Hannay, The Seething Pot, Hyacinth, The Bad Times, Spanish Gold
Anglo-Irish novelist and Church of Ireland clergyman, born in Belfast, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and ordained in 1889. He was rector of Westport, County Mayo, from 1892 to 1913. In such early novels as The Seething Pot (1905), Hyacinth (1906), and The Bad Times (1908), he explored Irish political issues from a moderate nationalist standpoint. He is best known for his light-hearted popul…
Earle Birney (Alfred Earle Birney) Biography - (1904–95), (Alfred Earle Birney), Down the Long Table, David, Strait of Anian
Canadian poet and novelist, born in Calgary and brought up on farms in Alberta and British Columbia; he was educated at the universities of British Columbia, Toronto, and California (Berkeley). Birney was a prominent Trotskyite in the 1930s, an experience about which he wrote in his novel Down the Long Table (1955). From 1946 until his retirement in 1965 he was Professor of Medieval Literature at …
Birthday Party, The
a play by Harold Pinter, performed in 1958 and published in 1959. Pinter's first full-length play, a critical and box office failure when first produced, it involves the mental destruction of a young pianist living obscurely in a seaside town. It is never clear what Stanley Webber has done to attract the malignant attentions of Goldberg and McCann; but these two sinister intruders come to stay in …
Elizabeth Bishop Biography - (1911–79), Collected Prose, North & South, Poems: North & South / A Cold Spring
American poet, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, educated at Vassar College, New York; she was brought up from early infancy by her grandparents after her father died and her mother became chronically ill. She spent her first six years in Great Village, Nova Scotia, which is vividly recalled in her short story ?Primer Class?, then returned to Worcester. The poetry she wrote as a student includes ?…
John Peale Bishop Biography - (1892–1944), The Undertaker's Garland, This Side of Paradise, Green Fruit, Now with His Love
American poet, born in West Virginia, educated at Princeton. As a student he began lasting friendships with Edmund Wilson, his collaborator on The Undertaker's Garland (1922), a humorous miscellany of verse and prose about death, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is said to have taken Bishop as the model for Tim D'Invilliers in This Side of Paradise (1920). Althoug many of his contemporaries admired th…
Neil Bissoondath Biography - (1955– ), Digging Up the Mountains, A Casual Brutality, On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows
Trinidadian novelist and short-story writer, born in Arima, Trinidad, the nephew of V. S. Naipaul; in 1973 he emigrated to Canada, and was educated at York University, Toronto. The bleakly compassionate treatments of the lives of immigrants to Canada in Digging Up the Mountains (1985), his first collection of stories, initiated the concern with exile and cultural displacement which pervades his wo…
Paul Blackburn Biography - (1926–71), Nation, The Dissolving Fabric, Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, The Nets, Black Mountain Review, The Cities
American poet, born in St Albans, Vermont, educated at New York University and the University of Wisconsin. He was poetry editor of the Nation in 1962 and subsequently held various appointments as a writer-in-residence before becoming a lecturer at the City College of New York in 1968. His earlier collections of verse include The Dissolving Fabric (1955), Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (1960), and The…
Thomas Blackburn (Thomas Eliel Fenwick Blackburn) Biography - (1916–77), (Thomas Eliel Fenwick Blackburn), The Outer Darkness, The Next Word, A Smell of Burning
British poet, born in Hensingham, Cumberland, educated at Cambridge and Durham Universities. He was a lecturer at the University of Leeds from 1964 to 1966. His first collection of poetry, The Outer Darkness (1951), was followed by numerous others, including The Next Word (1958), A Smell of Burning (1961), The Fourth Man (1971), Bread for the Winter Birds (1980), and The Adjacent Kingdom: Collecte…
Black Elk Biography - (1863–1950), wichasha wakon, Black Elk Speaks, The Sacred Pipe
Native American, a Lakota of the Oglala band of Sioux Indians. Cousin to Crazy Horse, he was a wichasha wakon?a holy man or priest?visited by a series of visions which gave him confirmation of his adopted role. In August 1930 the American poet John G. Neihardt, known also as Flaming Rainbow, visited Black Elk and, using Black Elk's son Ben as an interpreter, conducted a series of talks with him. T…
Black Mask - Black Mask, Dime Mystery, Spicy Detective
American pulp magazine, specializing in hardboiled detective fiction. Originally founded (and later repudiated) by H. L. Mencken in 1920, Black Mask was at its peak under the editorship of Captain Joseph T. Shaw from 1920 to 1936. Between eye-catchingly lurid covers, the magazine offered unadorned, briskly told violent stories, introducing the highly influential character of the world-weary privat…
Black Mountain Writers - The Black Mountain Review, Origin, Letters for Origin, The New American Poetry
a group of American poets and writers, who were associated with Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. Black Mountain College was established in 1933, largely funded by John Andrew Rice, as an experiment in communitarian, liberal arts education, but its fame as a centre of vibrant experimentation in the arts was largely made in the early 1950s. The philosopher John Dewey became a mem…
R. P. Blackmur (Richard Palmer Blackmur) Biography - (1904–65), (Richard Palmer Blackmur), From Jordan's Delight, The Second World, The Good European
American critic and poet, born in Springfield, Massachusetts. Self-taught, at first a freelance essayist and man of letters, he later became a much-admired professor at Princeton University. He is often associated with the New Criticism, but too eccentric to be easily assimilated to any movement. He published three volumes of verse?From Jordan's Delight (1937), The Second World (1942), and The Goo…
Caroline Blackwood, (born Caroline Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood) Biography - (1931–96), (born Caroline Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood), The Dolphin, The Stepdaughter, Great-Granny Blackwood
British novelist and essayist, daughter of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, born in Ireland where she grew up on her family's estates in Clandeboye, Co. Down; she was educated mainly in England. She married the painter Lucien Freud; after her divorce, she married the musician Israel Citkovitz, and later, the poet Robert Lowell who wrote about their relationship in The Dolphin (1973). Her first no…
Clark Blaise Biography - (1940– ), Lunar Attractions, Lusts, A North American Education, Tribal Justice, Resident Alien
Canadian novelist and short-story writer, born in Fargo, North Dakota, educated at Denison University and the University of lowa. Since 1964, when he began lecturing at the University of Wisconsin, Blaise has held a succession of posts at universities throughout North America. He became a Canadian citizen in 1973. The autobiographical dimension in much of his highly regarded fiction is integral to…
Blast - Blast, The Good Soldier, Vortex: Pound, Eliot, and Lewis
a magazine, subtitled ?the Review of the Great English Vortex?, founded in London in 1914 by Wyndham Lewis. The first issue generated much publicity and controversy; only one further edition was published, the ?War Number? of July 1915, which, with the exception of T. S. Eliot's ?Preludes? and ?Rhapsody on a Windy Night?, contains less work of interest than its predecessor. Ezra Pound, the magazin…
Alan Bleasdale Biography - (1946– ), Having a Ball, Are You Lonesome Tonight?, Fat Harold and the Last Twenty Six
British playwright, born in Liverpool, educated at Padgate Teacher Training College and Liverpool Polytechnic. He worked as a teacher before writing a series of plays, many of them combining humour with dramatic punch, for theatres in his native city, Liverpool. Two of these, Having a Ball (1981), a farcical comedy involving a series of confusions in a vasectomy clinic, and Are You Lonesome Tonigh…
Karen Blixen (Karen Christentze Blixen), née Dinesen Biography - (1885–1962), (Karen Christentze Blixen), née Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales, Last Tales
Danish writer, born in Rungsted, Denmark; she studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Her works in English were written mainly under the name Isak Dinesen. In 1914 she married her cousin, Baron Blor-Blixen Finecke, and together they set up a coffee plantation in Kenya. The marriage was dissolved in 1921, but she stayed on in Kenya until 1931, and then returned to live in her Danis…
Bloody Chamber, The - Fireworks, Black Venus, The Company of Wolves
a collection of stories by Angela Carter, published in 1979. The stories are united by their common origin in the world of European folklore and fable, refracted through the lens of contemporary critical and psychoanalytical theories; the influence of Freud, Propp, and Barthes may be discerned. Carter's lavish prose style also displays her affection for the gothic, and the influence of such master…
Harold Bloom Biography - (1930– ), Shelley's Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, The Anxiety of Influence, The Flight to Lucifer
American critic, born in New York, educated at Cornell and Yale universities. Among other academic posts he was Professor of English at Yale (1965?74). He is known for his early work on the English Romantic poets (Shelley's Mythmaking, 1959; The Visionary Company, 1962) and for his theory of ?strong? reading, expressed in a series of books beginning with The Anxiety of Influence (1973). In Bloom's…
Leonard Bloomfield Biography - (1887–1949), An Introduction to Linguistics, Language, Outline Guide for the Study of Foreign Languages
American linguist, born in Chicago, educated at Harvard, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Chicago, where he became Professor of Germanic Philology in 1927. From 1940 until his death he was Professor of Linguistics at Yale. An Introduction to Linguistics (1914) based its theory of language on the mentalist psychology of Wilhelm Wundt (1832?1920), presenting an orthodox survey of s…
Bloomsbury Group: - Eminent Victorians, Bloomsbury
a loosely knit group of friends, who began to meet in or around 1905, initially at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, the home of the children of Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Adrian and Thoby Stephen). In 1899 Thoby Stephen, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney Turner, and Leonard Woolf had all entered Trinity College, Cambridge. As members of the Apostles (except for Stephe…
Bluest Eye, The - The Bluest Eye
a novel by Toni Morrison, published in 1970. The voices of Claudia, a young black girl, and an omniscient narrator describe a year in the grim life of Pecola Breedlove, a black girl from Ohio. Pecola is maddened by the disparity between her life and the images of beauty and sophistication disseminated by the hegemonic white culture. In her search for a more acceptable face, she finds this in the b…
Edmund Blunden (Edmund Charles Blunden) Biography - (1896–1974), (Edmund Charles Blunden), Undertones of War, Goodbye to All That, The Athenaeum, Times Literary Supplement
British poet, born in London; he grew up in Yalding, Kent, and was educated at Queen's College, Oxford. Of the many poems he wrote during active service on the Western Front from 1915 to 1919, a number are among the best examples of the poetry of the First World War (see war poetry). His experiences as a soldier strongly informed his later writing, achieving their fullest expression in the autobio…
Wilfred Scawen Blunt Biography - (1840–1922), demimondaine, Sonnets and Songs, Esther, Griselda, Love Poems, The Poetical Works of Wilfred Scawen Blunt
British poet and campaigner against imperialism; born into a family of wealthy Sussex landowners, he entered the diplomatic service at the age of 18. He was posted to various European capitals, including Paris, where he sustained an affair with ?Skittles?, a well-known demimondaine, from which much of his subsequent love poetry derived. In 1869 he married Annabella King-Noel, the granddaughter of …
Robert Bly (Robert Elwood Bly) Biography - (1926– ), (Robert Elwood Bly), The Fifties, Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Light around the Body
American poet, born in Madison, Minnesota, educated at Harvard and the University of Iowa. In 1958 he founded The Fifties, a important literary magazine of the period, in conjunction with the Fifties Press. He is also well known as a prolific translator of poetry. His first collection of poetry, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), derived much of its imagery from his native surroundings in rural M…
Ronald Blythe (Ronald George Blythe) Biography - (1922– ), (Ronald George Blythe), The Stories of Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion
British author, born in Suffolk; he began by writing fiction and short stories, many of them based on gossip and ghost stories from his native county. The Stories of Ronald Blythe (1985) includes work published from 1957. With The Age of Illusion (1963), a study of England between the wars, he moved to highly literate sociological reflection. He is perhaps best known for his eloquent attention to …
Louise Bogan Biography - (1897–1970), New Yorker, Body of This Death, Dark Summer, The Sleeping Fury, Poems and New Poems
American poet, born at Livermore Falls, Maine, educated at Boston University. From 1931 to 1968 she was poetry critic for the New Yorker, exercising considerable influence through her concisely articulate reviews. She became Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress in 1945. Body of This Death, her first volume of poetry, appeared in 1923. Her other principal collections are Dark Summer (1929),…
Alan Bold (Alan Norman Bold) Biography - (1943– ), (Alan Norman Bold), Times Educational Supplement, Society Inebrious, To Find the New
Scottish poet and critic, born in Edinburgh, where he was educated at the University. After working on the editorial staff of the Times Educational Supplement, he became a freelance writer in 1967. Society Inebrious (1965), his first collection of poetry, was followed by numerous further volumes, which include To Find the New (1967), A Perpetual Motion Machine (1969), This Fine Day (1979), In This…
Dermot Bolger Biography - (1959– ), The Bright Wave/An Tonn Gheal, logainmeacha, The Woman's Daughter
Irish novelist, playwright, poet, and publisher, born in Finglas, north Dublin, educated at Beneavin College, Finglas. As editor of The Raven Arts Press in Dublin, Bolger was responsible for the production of an important anthology of contemporary poetry written in the Irish language, The Bright Wave/An Tonn Gheal (1986). He is committed to the publication of work which reinterprets the history of…
Robert Bolt (Robert Oxton Bolt) Biography - (1924–95), (Robert Oxton Bolt), Flowering Cherry, The Tiger and the Horse, Vivat, Vivat Regina
British dramatist, born and educated in Manchester, the son of a shopkeeper. He was working as a schoolmaster when his Flowering Cherry was performed in London in 1957. That play, about a salesman who impotently dreams of escape to the country, was followed by The Tiger and the Horse (1960), which reflected Bolt's own involvement in anti-nuclear politics. Vivat, Vivat Regina (1970) and State of Re…