Encyclopedia of Literature: Burghers of Calais to Peter Carey Biography

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

Kenneth Burke (Kenneth Duva Burke) Biography - (1897–93), (Kenneth Duva Burke), The White Oxen, Dial, Counter-Statement

American critic, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, educated at Ohio State and Columbia Universities. Having established a reputation with his exotic short stories in The White Oxen (1924), during the late 1920s he gained wide notice for the critical articles containing his innovative theories of literary form which appeared in the Dial and elsewhere. He subsequently held numerous posts as a lectur…

1 minute read

John Horne Burns Biography - (1916–53), The Gallery, Lucifer with a Book, A Cry of Children

American novelist, born in Andover, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard. Burns's reputation has grown considerably since his death at the age of 36 and his first novel, The Gallery (1947), is now recognized as one of the great American novels of the Second World War. After service in military intelligence in the US Army in North Africa and Italy, Burns returned to the USA but subsequently took up r…

less than 1 minute read

William S. Burroughs (William Seward Burroughs) Biography - (1914–1997), (William Seward Burroughs), On The Road, Queer, Junkie, The Naked Lunch

American novelist, born in St Louis, educated at Harvard. Burroughs served as the basis for the character of Old Bull in Kerouac's On The Road. Despite having close relations with the Columbia circle who formed the early core of the Beat Generation, he later disclaimed any real affinity with this aesthetic movement, seeing his work as standing in a more ?European? line of experimentalism. He prese…

3 minute read

Octavia Butler Biography - (1947–2006), Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Wild Seed, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago, Parable of the Sower

American science fictionwriter, born in Los Angeles, educated at Pasadena City College and California State University at Los Angeles. She received Hugo Awards for her short story ?Speech Sounds? and her novelette ?Bloodchild? in 1984 and 1985. Butler's novels incorporate African mythology, urban realism, and spiritual exegeses into tales of aliens, genetic mutation, and telepathy. Her heroes are …

1 minute read

Robert Olen Butler Biography - (1945– ), The Alleys of Eden, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, They Whisper

American novelist and short-story writer, born in Granite City, Illinois, educated at Northwestern University and the University of Iowa. Butler spent 1971 in Vietnam as a Vietnamese linguist while working for the US army military intelligence. His first novel, The Alleys of Eden (1981), introduced his three main themes of sexual obsession, cultural displacement, and the problematic legacy of Viet…

1 minute read

Samuel Butler Biography - (1835–1902), A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, Erewhon, The Fair Haven, Life and Habit

British novelist, satirist, and speculative writer, born at Langar, Nottinghamshire, educated at St John's College, Cambridge. Renouncing the ecclesiastical traditions of his family, he went to New Zealand in 1859. His letters to his parents, which provide a vivid record of life on a sheep-station, were published by his father in 1863 as A First Year in Canterbury Settlement. His articles for the …

2 minute read

Alexander Buzo (Alexander John Buzo) Biography - (1944–2006), (Alexander John Buzo), Three Plays, Norm and Ahmed, Rooted, the Roy Murphy Show, Macquarie, Tom

Australian dramatist, born in Sydney, educated at the University of New South Wales. Three Plays (1973) contains Norm and Ahmed (1969), Rooted (1969), and the Roy Murphy Show (1971), the best-known of his earlier Absurdist treatments of alienating conflicts between the individual and society. The Brechtian historical play Macquarie (1971) marks the closer approach to naturalistic realism which is …

1 minute read

A. S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) Biography - (1936– ), (Antonia Susan Byatt), Shadow of a Sun, The Game, The Virgin in the Garden

British novelist and critic, born in Sheffield, educated at The Mount School, York and Newnham College, Cambridge. Among several academic posts she has been a lecturer at University College, London; she has also travelled widely as a lecturer for the British Council. Her first novel, Shadow of a Sun (1964), describing young Anna Severell's division in loyalties between her novelist father and one …

2 minute read

Robert Byron Biography - (1905–41), Europe in the Looking-Glass, The Station, The Byzantine Achievement, The Road to Oxiana

British travel writer, born in Wembley, London, educated at Merton College, Oxford, where he cultivated the independent aesthetic values central to his writings. In his final undergraduate year he made the journey to Greece recorded in Europe in the Looking-Glass (1926), its buoyant tone anticipating the energetic style of later works. The Station (1928), dealing with the monasteries of Mount Atho…

1 minute read

James Branch Cabell Biography - (1879–1958), Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, The Eagle's Shadow, The Cords of Vanity

American novelist, born in Richmond, Virginia, educated at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. Cabell enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success in the 1920s, largely as a result of the suppression by the Comstock Society of his seventh novel, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice (1919). Between 1898 and 1902 he worked for various newspapers before beginning ten years of gene…

1 minute read

G. Cabrera Infante (Guillermo Cabrera Infante) Biography - (1929– ), (Guillermo Cabrera Infante), Holy Smoke, Three Trapped Tigers, Infante's Inferno

Cuban novelist, born in Gibara, Oriente Province, educated at the School of Journalism in Cuba, the son of the founders of the Cuban Communist Party. Among other posts, he was director of the Cuban Film Institute and cultural attach? at the Cuban Embassy in Brussels, before leaving Cuba in 1965 and becoming a British subject. Holy Smoke (1985), a wittily surreal account of cigars, combines the his…

1 minute read

John Cage Biography - (1912–92), Silence: Lectures and Writing, A Year From Monday: New Lectures and Writings

American composer, author, and printmaker, born in Los Angeles; he studied music and composition under Arnold Schoenberg, and at the New School for Social Research, with Adolph Weiss. Cage also travelled and studied a variety of disciplines, including architecture, Dadaism, oriental philosophy, and noise music with Edgard Var?se. In 1944?6, he was the musical director for the Merce Cunningham Danc…

1 minute read

Abraham Cahan Biography - (1860–1951), Neie Zeit, Arbiter Zeitung, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto

American novelist and journalist, born in Podberezy, Lithuania, educated at Vilna Teachers Institute and law school in New York City. Cahan emigrated to the USA in 1882 and became an important figure in the Yiddish-speaking community of the Lower East Side of New York. He co-edited Neie Zeit, a Yiddish socialist newspaper, and from 1891 to 1894 was editor of the Arbiter Zeitung, a radical weekly w…

1 minute read

James M. Cain (James Mallahan Cain) Biography - (1892–1977), (James Mallahan Cain), The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, The Butterfly, Galatea

American novelist aligned to the ?hardboiled? school of crime writers, born in Annapolis, Maryland, and educated at Washington College, Maryland. His first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), helped establish the darker and more explicit style of crime writing; written as an unmediated first-person confession, it dramatizes the obsessions that sexual attraction and money create in weak c…

less than 1 minute read

Cakes and Ale - The Skeleton in the Cupboard

a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, published in 1930. Subtitled The Skeleton in the Cupboard, Maugham's novel raised contemporary ire for its satirical portraits. Hugh Walpole detected a cruel caricature of himself in the character of the meretricious author, Alroy Kear, and the superficially respectable Grand Old Man of English Letters, Edward Driffield, was commonly assumed to represent Thomas Hard…

less than 1 minute read

Erskine Caldwell (Erskine Preston Caldwell) Biography - (1903–87), (Erskine Preston Caldwell), Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre, Journeyman, Trouble in July

American novelist, born in White Oak, Georgia, the son of a Presbyterian minister, educated at the University of Virginia. His first major success was Tobacco Road (1932), dramatized by Jack Kirkland, about the Lesters, poor white farmers struggling to eke out an existence in the Deep South. This was followed by God's Little Acre (1933), a tale of sexual jealousy and intrigue in the Walden family …

2 minute read

Calendar of Modern Letters, The - Criterion, Calendar, Calendar's, Scrutiny, Towards Standards of Criticism

a journal of criticism, poetry, and fiction founded in 1925 by Edgell Rickword, Douglas Garman, and Bertram Higgins as a forum for critical discourse of a standard they felt the Criterion, had initiated but failed to maintain. Poetry by Roy Campbell, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Laura Riding was published and Llewellyn Powys and William Plomer were among the contributors of short stories.…

1 minute read

Hortense Calisher Biography - (1911– ), In the Absence of Angels, Collected Stories, Saratoga, Hot, False Entry, The New Yorkers

American novelist and short-story writer, born in New York, educated at Hunter College. Calisher is widely held to be a more skilful writer of short fiction than of novels, but she has continued to experiment with both genres. Her short stories, collected in In the Absence of Angels (1953), Collected Stories (1975), Saratoga, Hot (1985), and other volumes, show a talent for the humorously absurd a…

1 minute read

Morley Callaghan Biography - (1903–90), Three Stories and Ten Poems, That Summer in Paris, Strange Fugitive

Canadian novelist, born in Toronto, educated at Toronto University and Osgoode Law School. In 1923, Callaghan met Ernest Hemingway to whom he showed his Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923); Hemingway encouraged Callaghan to write, and took some of his work back to Paris with him. The day after his marriage in April 1929 Callaghan left for Paris. That Summer in Paris (1963) is an introduction to thi…

1 minute read

Call of the Wild, The

a novel by Jack London, published in 1903. The novel deals with the values of reciprocal love and fair play, and the qualities of hardiness and courage in adversity. Buck, the offspring of a St Bernard and a Scotch shepherd dog, lives on a comfortable home on a California estate. He is stolen and shipped to the Yukon, where he is trained as a sledgedog and put into brutal service before winning th…

1 minute read

James Cameron (Mark James Walter Cameron) Biography - (1911–85), (Mark James Walter Cameron), Western Eyewitness, Witness, Touch of the Sun, Indian Summer

British journalist and travel writer, born in London; after attending various schools in France and England, he began his career as a journalist in 1930. From 1945 onward he worked as a foreign correspondent, becoming well known for the compassionately outspoken liberalism of his work, which included reports from the Korean War, conflicts in Africa, and Maoist China. He was the first Western journ…

less than 1 minute read

Norman Cameron (John Norman Cameron) Biography - (1905–53), (John Norman Cameron), The Winter House, Forgive Me, Sire, New Verse, Horizon, needs

British poet and translator, born in India, the son of a Scottish clergyman, educated at Oriel College, Oxford. After a posting in Nigeria with the Colonical Service, he spent some time in Majorca with Robert Graves, whom he had met at Oxford, before working as an advertising copywriter in London from 1933 to 1939. Throughout the war he produced propaganda from British Forces' bases in North Afric…

1 minute read

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell Biography - (1925– ), Mine Eyes Dazzle, Sanctuary of Spirits, Wild Honey, Blue Rain, The Dark Lord of Savaiki

New Zealand poet, born in the Cook Islands in the Pacific, the son of a New Zealand trader and a Cook Island Maori, educated at Otago and Victoria Universities. At the age of seven, after the death of his parents, he was sent to Dunedin, in Otago, New Zealand, where he was raised in a less privileged environment, spending some years in an orphanage. His early poems, on themes of grieving and loss …

1 minute read

David Campbell Biography - (1915–79), Speak With the Sun, The Miracle of Mullion Hill, Poems

Australian poet, born in New South Wales, educated at Cambridge University. Campbell's first volume of poems, Speak With the Sun (1949), with its ballads portraying the characters and landscape of the Australian outback, and his highly acclaimed war poem ?Men in Green?, established his early reputation as a distinctly Australian poet. The Miracle of Mullion Hill (1956) develops these themes but in…

1 minute read

Joseph Campbell Biography - (1879–1944), The Irish Review, Songs of Uladh, The Garden of Bees, The Rushlight

Irish poet, born in Belfast; he became a participant in the Irish Revival after Padraic Colum introduced him to Dublin literary circles in 1902. In 1906 he became a teacher in London, where he was secretary of the Irish Literary Society. Interned as a Republican during the upheavals leading to Ireland's independence, he went to New York upon his release, where he formed the School of Irish Studies…

1 minute read

Roy Campbell (Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell) Biography - (1901–57), (Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell), The Flaming Terrapin, Voorslag, The Wayzgoose, Adamastor, The Georgiad, Flowering Reeds

South African poet, born in Durban, South Africa; he fought in the First World War, having succeeded in joining the South African infantry at the age of 15, and arrived in England in 1918. In 1924 his reputation as a poet was established by The Flaming Terrapin; the work, in 1,400 rhymed lines, allegorically celebrates the principle of vitality, emblematized by the terrapin, and is characterized b…

1 minute read

campus novel - Lucky Jim, Eating People Is Wrong, The History Man, Rates of Exchange, Changing Places, Small World

a term describing a particular genre of novels, usually comic or satirical, which have a university setting and academics as principal characters. An early example was Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), which is set at a Midlands red-brick university and features the comic escapades of a junior lecturer; other notable examples include Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People Is Wrong (1959), about life at …

1 minute read

Canadian Forum - The Rebel, Canadian Forum, Canadian Bookman, Forum: Canadian Life and Letters, 1920–1970

a monthly journal of political commentary and literature begun in 1920 by students and staff at the University of Toronto; it is the longest established periodical of its kind in Canada. It began as the successor to The Rebel, a little magazine based at the University of Toronto, with which Barker Fairley, Canadian Forum's first literary editor, and other founding members of the editorial board ha…

1 minute read

Canadian Literature - Canadian Literature, The Sixties: Canadian Writers and Writing of the Decade

the first periodical to be devoted exclusively to critical consideration of writing produced in Canada. It has appeared quarterly since its establishment in 1959 by George Woodcock at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Woodcock was succeeded in 1977 by W. H. New. The journal's inception marked the growing confidence in the value of indigenous writing which was intrinsic to the strength…

less than 1 minute read

Dorothy Canfield Fisher Biography - (1878–1958), Gunhild, The Squirrel-Cage, The Bent Twig, The Brimming Cup

American novelist born in Lawrence, Kansas, educated at the University of Nebraska (where she formed an enduring friendship with Willa Cather), Ohio State University, and Columbia University. From 1907 onward she lived in Arlington, Vermont, drawing on its middle-class social milieu in most of her fiction. Her earlier novels, published under her maiden name of Dorothy Canfield, include Gunhild (19…

1 minute read

Cantos, The - magnum opus, A Draft of XVI Cantos, Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX to CXVII

Ezra Pound's compendious magnum opus, published in numerous sections between A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925) and Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX to CXVII (1970); the fullest available text is The Cantos (1987). Having become dissatisfied with the essentially miniaturist idiom of Imagism after about 1915, Pound sought to discover a form capable of accommodating the wide range of tones, thematic inte…

1 minute read

Robert Cantwell Biography - (1908–78), Laugh and Lie Down, The Land of Plenty, New Republic, The Nation, Time, Newsweek

American novelist, biographer, and editor, born in Little Falls (Vader), Washington, educated at the University of Washington. Cantwell is chiefly associated with the group of proletarian realists (see Proletarian Literature in the USA) who emerged in the USA in the early 1930s. Cantwell worked at an assortment of jobs, including coastguard and factory operator in a lumber mill, before moving to N…

1 minute read

Truman Capote Biography - (1924–84), Other Voices, Other Rooms, A Tree of Night and Other Stories, The Glass Harp

American writer, born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He left school at 15, by which time he had already been writing short stories for over a year. His earlier works defined many of the social conventions of the deeply conservative post-war years by their sympathetic portrayal of characters normally deemed immoral or amoral. Among his works of fiction are Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), which discus…

1 minute read

Caretaker, The

a play by Harold Pinter, performed and published in 1960. The drama that first brought Pinter substantial recognition and success involves the subtly shifting relationships of three characters. A former mental patient, Aston, rescues the tramp Davies from a brawl and brings him back to the junk-filled London attic which he inhabits, but which is actually owned by his brother Mick, a jobbing builde…

1 minute read

Jan Carew (Jan Rynveld Carew) Biography - (1925– ), (Jan Rynveld Carew), Black Midas, A Touch of Midas, The Wild Coast, The Last Barbarian

Guyanese novelist and poet, born in Agricola, British Guiana (now Guyana), educated at universities in America, Czechoslovakia, and France. He has lived and taught in Ghana, Jamaica, Canada, and more recently in Chicago, and was made Professor of African-American Studies at Northwestern University. His early novels, Black Midas (1958; US title A Touch of Midas, 1958) and The Wild Coast (1958), are…

1 minute read

Peter Carey Biography - (1943– ), The Fat Man in History, War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, Father and Son

Australian novelist and short-story writer, born in Victoria, educated at Monash University, where he studied science. After working for advertising agencies in Melbourne and London he later established his own advertising agency in Sydney. His first two publications were short stories collected in The Fat Man in History (1974) and War Crimes (1979); grotesquely funny, set in frightening, futurist…

1 minute read