Encyclopedia of Literature: Bridgnorth Shropshire to Anthony Burgess [John Anthony Burgess Wilson Burgess] Biography

Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction

James Bridie, pseudonym of Osborne Henry Mavor Biography - (1888–1951), pseudonym of Osborne Henry Mavor, The Sunlight Sonata, Tobias and the Angel

Scottish playwright, born in Glasgow, the son of an engineer, educated at Glasgow University. Bridie became a prominent physician and did not begin seriously to write for the theatre until he was 40, when The Sunlight Sonata was performed in his home city of Glasgow. Thereafter he became enormously prolific; by his death he had completed forty-two plays, and was regarded as Scotland's leading dram…

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Walter Brierley Biography - (1900–72), Means Test Man, Sandwich Man, Dalby Green, Danny

English novelist, born in Waingroves, Derbyshire, of a mining family. Brierley became a miner himself and after attending Workers' Educational Association classes he won a miners' union scholarship to Nottingham University; however, unable to adjust to academic life, he returned to the pit. He sent an early manuscript to John Hampson, who passed it to Walter Allen; it aroused both writers' attenti…

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Briggflatts - Briggflatts, par excellence

a poem by Basil Bunting, published in 1966, and widely regarded as the last major work of poetic Modernism. Prior to its composition in 1965, Bunting had written little since returning to Britain from Persia in 1952; the growth of interest in his poetry initiated by Tom Pickard stimulated Bunting to produce Briggflatts. Having accumulated over 10,000 lines, he concentrated his material into the 70…

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Asa Briggs Biography - (1921– ), History of Birmingham: 1865–1938, Victorian People, The Age of Improvement: 1783–1867, Victorian Cities

English historian, born in Keighley, Yorkshire, educated at Keighley Grammar School, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and the University of London. Amongst other academic posts he was Provost of Worcester College, Oxford during 1976?91, and Chancellor of the Open University 1978?1994. A pioneer in the historical study of Victorian cities, Briggs stresses the important role of literature in illumi…

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Brighter Sun, A - Turn Again Tiger

S. Selvon's first novel, published in 1952, in which the author deals with race relations in Trinidad, particularly the integration of the descendants of East Indian indentured workers with the island's people of African descent. Tiger, the reflective Indian peasant hero, is the son of an agricultural labourer who, fresh from an arranged Hindu marriage, leaves his family in the sugar-cane belt to …

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Brighton Rock - Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter

a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1938. Set among Brighton racecourse razor gangs, it is in part a detective story, showing the murder of Hale by the 17-year-old Pinkie and his gang; Pinkie's courtship of Rose, whom he marries to prevent her giving evidence against him; and his pursuit by Ida Arnold, strangely determined, after a brief meeting with Hale, to give up her life of pleasure until …

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André Brink (André Philippus Brink) Biography - (1935– ), (André Philippus Brink), Looking on Darkness, Kennis van die aand, File on a Diplomat

South African novelist and playwright, born in Vrede, educated at the University of Potchefstroom and at the Sorbonne. The extension of his cultural and political horizons as a student in Paris led Brink to declare: ?I was born on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in the early spring of 1960.? While his many plays are in Afrikaans, his novels are generally written and published in both A…

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Vera Brittain (Vera Mary Brittain) Biography - (1893–1970), (Vera Mary Brittain), Verses of a V. A. D, The Dark Tide

British author, pacifist, and feminist, born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire. Her education at Somerville College, Oxford, was interrupted from 1915 to 1918 by service in London, France, and Malta as a nurse with the Volunteer Aid Detachment; her Verses of a V. A. D. (1918) reflect the vigorous pacifism with which she responded to her experiences of warfare. The Dark Tide (1923), the first …

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C. D. Broad (Charlie Dunbar Broad) Biography - (1887–1971), (Charlie Dunbar Broad), Perception, Physics, and Reality, Scientific Thought

British philosopher, born at Harlesden, Middlesex, the son of a wine merchant, educated at Dulwich College and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He began his academic career as a lecturer at the University of St Andrews. After holding a professorship in philosophy at Bristol from 1920 to 1922, he became a fellow and lecturer of Trinity College. He remained at Cambridge, where he was Knightsbridge Pro…

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Edwin Brock Biography - (1927–1997), Ambit, An Attempt at Exorcism, A Family Affair, With Love from Judas

British poet, born in London; following a grammar school education he worked as a police constable and an advertising copywriter until 1972, when he became a freelance writer. He became poetry editor of Ambit in 1960. His earlier collections of poetry include An Attempt at Exorcism (1959), A Family Affair (1960), and With Love from Judas (1963), which contain numerous disquietingly intense treatme…

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Harold Brodkey Biography - (1930–96), The Runaway Soul, The New Yorker, Esquire, First Love and Other Sorrows

American novelist and short-story writer, born in Alton, Illinois, educated at Harvard. He was Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and also taught at the City University of New York. Until the publication of his novel The Runaway Soul (1991), Brodkey's reputation was based mainly on a handful of short stories, most of them published in The New Yorker and Esquire. His first collect…

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Joseph Brodsky (Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky) Biography - (1940–96), (Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky), samizdat, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems

Russian poet, born in Leningrad; he left school at the age of 15. Some of his poetry appeared in samizdat magazines before his arrest in 1964 for ?social parasitism?. Sentenced to five years' servitude in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia, he was released after eighteen months following appeals on his behalf by Dmitri Shostakovich, Anna Akhmatova, and others who affirmed the value of his v…

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Louis Bromfield Biography - (1896–1956), The Green Bay Tree, Possession, Early Autumn, A Good Woman

American novelist, born in Mansfield, Ohio; he studied at Columbia University before serving in the First World War. His sequence of four novels, The Green Bay Tree (1924), Possession (1925), Early Autumn (1926; Pulitzer Prize), and A Good Woman (1927), which centred on a New England farming family, effectively illustrated Bromfield's egalitarian philosophy with its emphasis on the virtues of agra…

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Jocelyn Brooke Biography - (1908–66), The Military Orchid, A Mine of Serpents, The Goose Cathedral, Private View, The Scapegoat

British novelist, born at Sandgate, Kent, educated at Worcester College, Oxford. He worked in the book and the wine trades, and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War. Brooke's novels explore the public school world, with its post-educational bastions, the army, the Foreign Office, the artistic professions, and homosexuality. The Military Orchid (1948), a fictionalized …

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Rupert Brooke (Rupert Chawner Brooke) Biography - (1887–1915), (Rupert Chawner Brooke), Lithuania, Poems, Georgian Poetry, jeunesse dorée, Westminster Gazette, Letters from America

British poet, born in Rugby, educated at King's College, Cambridge, where he was president of the Fabian Society and became a fellow in 1913. In 1911 and 1912 he lived in Germany, where he wrote a melodrama entitled Lithuania (1915) and numerous poems, of which ?The Old Vicarage, Grantchester? is the best-known. His first collection, Poems, appeared in 1911. He subsequently assisted Edward Marsh i…

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Christine Brooke-Rose Biography - (1926– ), nouveau roman, Out, Such, Between, Thru, The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus, Amalgammemnon, Xorandor, Verbivore

British novelist and critic, born in Brussels; she grew up in Switzerland and later attended Somerville College, Oxford. In 1975 she became a professor of American literature at the University of Paris VII. Though her fiction began to appear in the late 1950s, Brooke-Rose's early novels were much influenced by Murdoch. An illness in the 1960s and her readings in the nouveau roman radically changed…

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Anita Brookner Biography - (1928– ), Watteau, The Genius of the Future: Studies in French Art Criticism, Greuze

English novelist and art historian, born in London, educated at King's College, University of London, and the Courtauld Institute. Brookner has held several distinguished academic posts (Slade Professor, University of Cambridge, 1967?8; Reader at the Courtauld Institute, 1977?8; Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge) and has published books on eighteenth-century painting (Watteau, 1968; The Genius of the …

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Cleanth Brooks Biography - (1906–1994), The Southern Review, belles-lettristic, Modern Poetry and the Tradition

American literary critic, born in Murray, Kentucky, educated at Vanderbilt, Tulane, and Oxford Universities. A key figure in the development of the New Criticism, he was taught by John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt University where he was befriended by Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, and loosely associated with the Fugitive (Agrarian) group. He became professor at Louisiana State University and, w…

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Gwendolyn Brooks Biography - (1917–2000), A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen, The Bean Eaters, In the Mecca, Aurora

American poet, born in Topeka, Kansas. She grew up in Chicago, where she was educated at Wilson Junior College; the city, where she has spent most of her life, and its black community are central to most of her work. She has held visiting posts at various American universities and was Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1985 and 1986. A Street in Bronzeville (1945) was her first col…

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Brooks, Van Wyck - (1886–1963), The Wine of the Puritans, The Malady of the Ideal

American critic, born in Plainfield, New Jersey, educated at Harvard. From 1907 to 1909 he lived in London, where he wrote The Wine of the Puritans (1908); its thesis that the Puritan ethos led to the aesthetic impoverishment of American literary culture was sustained in The Malady of the Ideal (1913). America's Coming of Age (1915) outlined his conception of an American literature liberated from …

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Brigid Brophy (Brigid Antonia Susan Brophy) Biography - (1929–95), (Brigid Antonia Susan Brophy), Hackenfeller's Ape, The King of a Rainy Country, Flesh

British novelist, biographer, and critic, born in London, educated at St Hugh's College, Oxford. A classicist, atheist, and humanist, she campaigned tirelessly for animals' and authors' rights. In 1972 (with Maureen Duffy, Lettice Cooper, and Francis King) she was a founder member of the Writers' Action Group which secured Public Lending Rights (1979); she also held offices at the Writers' Guild, …

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Brother Man - The Hills Were Joyful Together

the second of R. Mais's three novels, published in 1954; it features the Kingston shanty town that was also the setting for Mais's earlier The Hills Were Joyful Together. The book's eponymous protagonist is a shoemaker and an adherent of the Rastafarian religious movement that began in Jamaica in the early 1930s, a response by a minority of the under-privileged black community to the hopelessness …

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Olga Broumas Biography - (1949– ), Beginning with O, Sole Sauvage, Pastoral Jazz, What I Love, The Little Mariner, Perpetua

American poet, born in Syros, Greece, educated at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Oregon. Her collection Beginning with O (1977) won the Yale University Younger Poets Award and received praise from Stanley Kunitz for its ?explicit sexuality and Sapphic orientation?. The poems in Sole Sauvage (1979) and Pastoral Jazz (1983) focus on images and language reflecting experience from a woman's view…

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George Douglas Brown Biography - (1869–1902), Love and a Sword, The House with the Green Shutters, The Novelist, The Incompatibles

Scottish novelist, born in Ayrshire, the illegitimate son of a farmer, and brought up in difficult circumstances. He was educated at Glasgow University and Balliol College, Oxford. Moving to London to pursue a writing career, he began writing fiction for magazines and published pseudonymously a historical romance, Love and a Sword (1899). His single masterpiece, The House with the Green Shutters (…

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George Mackay Brown Biography - (1921–96), Loaves and Fishes, The Year of the Whale, Winterfold, The Wreck of the Archangel

British poet and novelist, born in Stromness, Orkney, educated at Stromness Academy and Newbattle Abbey College, Dalkeith, where Edwin Muir, warden of the college, encouraged him as a poet. He later gained an MA at the University of Edinburgh. Loaves and Fishes (1959), his first substantial collection of verse, was followed by numerous volumes, including The Year of the Whale (1965), Winterfold (1…

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Rita Mae Brown Biography - (1944– ), Rubyfruit Jungle, A Plain Brown Rapper, The Hand that Cradles the Rock

American novelist and poet born in Hanover, Pennsylvania, educated at the University of Florida, New York University, and the New York School of Visual Arts. Brown's works are deeply influenced by her commitment to the feminist and Gay Liberation movements. She is best known as the author of Rubyfruit Jungle, a sparklingly funny account of one woman's intellectual and sexual odyssey which, because…

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Sterling A. Brown (Sterling Allen Brown) Biography - (1901–89), (Sterling Allen Brown), Southern Road, The Negro in American Fiction, Negro Poetry and Drama

African-American poet and critic, born in Washington, DC, educated at Williams College, Massachusetts and at Harvard. In 1929 he became Professor of English at Howard University. Regarded as one of the fathers of modern African-American literature, his contribution as writer, teacher, editor, and reviewer spanned half a century from the Harlem Renaissance to the era of Black Power. His first book,…

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Stewart Brown Biography - (1951– ), Zinder, Lugard's Bridge, Caribbean Poetry Now, Writers from Africa

British poet and editor, born in Southampton, educated at Sussex University and University College, Aberystwyth. After teaching at schools and colleges in Britain, Jamaica, and Nigeria, he became a lecturer at the Centre for West African Studies in the University of Birmingham in 1988. Brown published numerous pamphlets before the appearance of Zinder (1986), his first substantial collection of po…

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Browning Version, The - Agamemnon

a one-act play by Terence Rattigan, first performed in 1948. It involves Arthur Crocker-Harris, once a brilliant classical scholar, now ?the Himmler of the Lower Fifth?, a schoolmaster said to be ?shrivelled up inside like a nut?. He is forced to leave the school where he has long taught, denied a pension, and even asked to cede pride of place at Prize Day to a younger, more popular man. When a pu…

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Alan Brownjohn (Alan Charles Brownjohn) Biography - (1931– ), (Alan Charles Brownjohn), The Railings, Sandgrains on a Tray, A Song of Good Life

British poet, born in Catford, South London, educated at Merton College, Oxford. After working as a schoolteacher from 1957 to 1965, he was a senior lecturer at Battersea College of Education until 1979, when he became a freelance writer. He was chairman of the Poetry Society from 1982 to 1988. He is one of the foremost poets to have been associated with the Group. His first substantial publicatio…

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Dennis Brutus Biography - (1924– ), Sirens, Knuckles, Boots, Letters to Martha, Poems from Algiers, China Poems

South African poet, teacher, and political activist, born in Salisbury, Rhodesia, educated at Fort Hare University College, and the University of Witwatersrand, where his studies were cut short by arrest in 1963 for activities against racialism in South African sport. He was frequently in prison or under house arrest for the next few years and finally left South Africa in 1966. He has served as Di…

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Bryher, pseudonym of Annie Winifred Ellerman Biography - (1894–1983), pseudonym of Annie Winifred Ellerman, Development, Two Selves, Close Up, The Fourteenth of October

British novelist and philanthropist; born in Kent, she grew up in London. She was patron of many Modernist writers, including Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes, Edith Sitwell, and Hilda Doolittle (H.D) with whom she had a close relationship from 1918. In 1921, Bryher, a lesbian, entered a marriage of convenience with Robert McAlmon and funded his Contact Editions. Two autobiographical novels, Devel…

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John Buchan 1st Baron Tweedsmuir Biography - (1875–1940), Sir Quixote of the Moors, Scholar Gypsy, The Yellow Book, The Thirty-Nine Steps

Scottish writer, diplomat, and politician, born in Perth, the eldest son of a minister in the Free Church of Scotland; he was educated at Glasgow University and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he was President of the Union, took a first in Greats, won the Stanhope history and the Newdigate poetry prizes, published a novel (Sir Quixote of the Moors, 1895) and a volume of essays (Scholar Gypsy, 189…

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Pearl S. Buck (Pearl Sydenstricker Buck) Biography - (1892–1973), (Pearl Sydenstricker Buck), East Wind: West Wind, The Good Earth, Sons, A House Divided

American novelist, born in West Virginia. She lived in China until her early middle age which gave her a unique, double perspective which was reflected in her most famous works of fiction. Her first novel, East Wind: West Wind (1930), was followed by The Good Earth (1931; Pulitzer Prize), the first volume of the saga of a Chinese family, written in the poetic rhythms and lyrical prose of the Bible…

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Vincent Buckley Biography - (1925–89), The World's Flesh, Masters in Israel, Arcady and Other Places

Australian poet and critic, born in Romsey, Victoria, educated at Melbourne and Cambridge Universities. He is a poet and critic of considerable influence in Australia, not least in his strong sense of Irish ancestry and his involvement with the Catholic Church in Australia. Buckley's poetry engages an impressive range of concerns, from love to politics, horse-racing to history. Both of his first v…

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Charles Bukowski (Henry Charles Bukowski) Biography - (1920–94), (Henry Charles Bukowski), The Outsider, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands

American poet, novelist, and short-story writer, born in Andernach, Germany, to a German mother and an American soldier; he was brought to Los Angeles as a small child. After attending Los Angeles City College he worked intermittently at a variety of unskilled jobs, most durably as a postman. He published stories in the mid-1940s, but his authentic writing career stemmed from a decade later when h…

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Bulletin - Bulletin

an Australian journal, founded in 1880 by J. F. Archibald and John Haynes. In 1961 it was sold to Consolidated Press and became more of a newspaper, although literature was reintroduced in a quarterly supplement in 1980, edited by Geoffrey Dutton. In its early stages the Bulletin contained a mixture of humour, illustrations, cartoons, political comment, and sports news. The new element in Bulletin…

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Ed Bullins Biography - (1935– ), Black Theatre, The Duplex: A Love Fable in Four Movements, The Wine Time

American playwright, born in Philadelphia, educated at Los Angeles City College and San Francisco State College. He was associate director of New Lafayette Theatre, New York (1967?73), editor of Black Theatre magazine (1969?74), and became producing director of Surviving Theatre, New York, from 1974. His plays are explorations of the constraints of ghetto life, and strategies of liberation, among …

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Alan Bullock (Alan Louis Charles Bullock) Biography - (1914–2004), (Alan Louis Charles Bullock), Hitler: A Study in Tyranny

British historian, born in Bradford, educated at Wadham College, Oxford. He began his academic career at Oxford as a fellow of New College in 1945. He was instrumental in the formation of St Catherine's College, of which he became Founding Master in 1960. From 1967 to 1973 he was Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952) gained him an international reputation and has …

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Shan Bullock Biography - (1865–1935), By Thrasna River: The Story of a Townland, The Squireen, The Loughsiders

Northern Irish novelist, born in Crom, Co. Fermanagh, educated at Farra School, Co. Westmeath; he was the son of a prosperous Protestant farmer and a bailiff to a large Fermanagh estate. He grew up with first-hand experience of the effects of economic and sectarian division in rural Ulster, an experience he reflected in most of his novels, including By Thrasna River: The Story of a Townland (1895)…

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Basil Bunting Biography - (1900–85), Transatlantic Review, Redimiculum Mattelarum, Collected Poems, The Spoils, Shah-nama, Briggflatts, Poems, Evening Chronicle

British poet, born at Scotswood, Northumberland, educated at Quaker schools in Yorkshire and Berkshire and at the London School of Economics. He became Ford Madox Ford's assistant on the Transatlantic Review in Paris in 1923 and was subsequently a journalist in London. In 1929 he joined Ezra Pound, whom he had known in Paris, at Rapollo in Italy, remaining there until 1933. Bunting's first volume …

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Robert Burchfield (Robert William Burchfield) Biography - (1923–2004), (Robert William Burchfield), Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, Supplement

New Zealand lexicographer, born in Wanganui, near Wellington, New Zealand, educated at Victoria University College, Wellington, and at Magdalen College, Oxford. After lecturing at Magdalen and Christ Church Colleges, he was appointed to the editorship of the new Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1957. From 1971 to 1984 he was the Chief Editor of Oxford English Dictionaries. The four v…

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Anthony Burgess, pseudonym of John Anthony Burgess Wilson Biography - (1917–93), pseudonym of John Anthony Burgess Wilson, Ulysses, Blooms of Dublin, Time for a Tiger

British novelist, composer, and critic, born in Manchester into a Catholic family, educated at the University of Manchester. An accomplished musician, Burgess maintained his interest in music throughout his varied career, composing orchestral works as well as those in more popular forms, including a musical version of Joyce's Ulysses (Blooms of Dublin, performed in 1982). After serving with the Ro…

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