Encyclopedia of Literature: Henry Carey Biography to Chekhov Biography

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

Rudolf Carnap Biography - (1891–1970), Der Logische Aufbau der Welt, Erkenntnis, Logische Syntax der Sprache, Logical Foundations of Probability

philosopher, born at Ronsdorf in Germany, educated at the universities of Freiburg and Jena. After military service in the First World War he was active within the Vienna Circle and lectured at the University of Vienna from 1926 to 1930, gaining recognition as a leading exponent of logical positivism. His first major work, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (?The Logical Structure of the World?), appear…

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Edward Carpenter Biography - (1844–1929), Days with Walt Whitman, Towards Democracy, England's Ideal

British writer on social reform, born in Brighton, educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1869 he was ordained in the Church of England but relinquished holy orders in 1872 and moved to Leeds to lecture with the University Extension movement. He met Walt Whitman, whom he revered, on trips to America in 1877 and 1884, recording his experiences in Days with Walt Whitman (1906). Carpenter employed W…

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Humphrey Carpenter (Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter) Biography - (1946–2005), (Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter), J. R. R. Tolkien

British biographer, born in Oxford, educated at Keble College, Oxford. He was a radio producer from 1968 to 1974, when he became a freelance writer and broadcaster. J. R. R. Tolkien (1977) was the first of his numerous biographies of literary figures; with Christopher Tolkien, he edited the Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981). The Inklings (1977) deals with Tolkien, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, a…

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E. H. Carr (Edward Hallett Carr) Biography - (1892–1982), (Edward Hallett Carr), The Times, Dostoevsky, Karl Marx, Michael Bakunin

British historian, born at Highgate, London, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1916 to 1936 he worked at the Foreign Office, where he rose to the rank of First Secretary. His wide diplomatic experience subsequently gained him a succession of academic posts. Throughout much of the Second World War he was assistant editor of The Times. During his years with the British Legation at Riga in…

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Emily Carr Biography - (1871–1945), Klee Wyck, The Book of Small, The House of All Sorts, Growing Pains

Canadian painter and prose writer, born in Victoria, British Columbia. Canada's best-known woman artist, Carr studied painting in San Francisco, England, and Paris, but achieved wide-spread recognition only in her fifties. Her art is characterized by a passionate commitment to Native Canadian themes. She turned to writing when failing health forced her to curtail her work as a painter and potter. …

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J. L. Carr (James Joseph Lloyd Carr) Biography - (1912–1994), (James Joseph Lloyd Carr), A Day in Summer, A Season in Sinji, The Harpole Report

English novelist, born in Carlton Miniott, Yorkshire, educated at Castleford Secondary School, Yorkshire. Carr was a schoolteacher for many years, and served as an Intelligence Officer in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. His first published novel, A Day in Summer (1963), a characteristic pot-pourri of convention and fancy, was followed by A Season in Sinji (1968), The Harpole Repor…

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John Dickson Carr Biography - (1906–77), The Hollow Man, juge d'instruction, It Walks by Night, Hag's Nook

American detectivenovelist who lived from 1932 to 1948 in England, where the majority of his books are set. His novels, which appeared under his own name and under that of Carter Dickson, are complicated puzzles, often highly ingenious variants of the locked-room mystery: a lecture on this subject is included in The Hollow Man (1935). In their method they can be compared with the stories of S. S. …

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Leonora Carrington Biography - (1917– ), The Debutante, The House of Fear, The Seventh Horse, Down Below, The Stone Door

British novelist, short-story writer, and artist, born in Lancashire, educated in various Catholic convents. As a debutante in 1934, she was presented at court to George V (the inspiration of her 1936 story, The Debutante). While at art school at the Amedee Ozenfant Academy in London, she discovered Surrealism through the work of Herbert Read; shortly afterwards she met Max Ernst, with whom she we…

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Paul Vincent Carroll Biography - (1900–68), Things that Are Caesar's, Shadow and Substance, The White Steed, The Coggerers

Irish dramatist, born in Blackrock, Co. Louth, educated at St Patrick's College, Dublin. He emigrated to Scotland in 1921 and taught in Glasgow until his first theatrical success in 1937. Carroll was one of a number of playwrights, including Lennox Robinson, who contributed significantly to the prevalence of Realism at the Abbey Theatre in the 1930s and 1940s. Things that Are Caesar's (1932), prod…

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Ciaran Carson Biography - (1948– ), The New Estate, The Irish For No, Belfast Confetti, First Language

Northern Irish poet, born in Belfast, where he was educated at Queen's University. After working as a schoolteacher and subsequently as a civil servant, he became Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 1975. The New Estate (1976), his first collection of verse, contained a wide range of poems on historical, social, and personal themes which frequently anticipated the u…

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Angela Carter Biography - (1940–92), Shadow Dance, The Magic Toyshop, Love, conte cruel, Fireworks, The Bloody Chamber

British novelist and short-story writer, born in Eastbourne, Sussex, educated at Bristol University. Although magical realism may have been the inspiration for some of Carter's early novels, which include Shadow Dance (1966), The Magic Toyshop (1967), and Love (1971), from the beginning she showed a much wider cultural and historical awareness of the polyglot aesthetic tradition within which she w…

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Martin Carter (Martin Wylde Carter) Biography - (1927–1997), (Martin Wylde Carter), To a Dead Slave, The Kind Eagle, Poems of Resistance

Guyanese poet and politician, born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana), educated at Queen's College in Georgetown. He wrote and published poems privately in the 1950s, including To a Dead Slave (1951) and The Kind Eagle (1952), but it was a spell of three months in detention for his anti-colonial political activities which led to Poems of Resistance (1954), the collection which established …

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Justin Cartwright Biography - (1933– ), The Revenge, The Horse of Darius, Interior, Masai Dreaming, Look At It This Way

British novelist, born in South Africa, educated at Trinity College, Oxford; he worked as a maker of documentary films and commercials before becoming a full-time writer. Cartwright's early novels The Revenge (1978) and The Horse of Darius (1980) are skilfully plotted thrillers about assassination attempts against powerful political figures. He first received considered acclaim for Interior (1989)…

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Raymond Carver Biography - (1938–88), Put Yourself in My Shoes, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, Furious Seasons

American short-story writer and poet, born in Oregon, educated at Chico State College and Humboldt State College; he also attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first volume of stories, Put Yourself in My Shoes (1974), was followed by Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), Furious Seasons (1977), and What We Talk about when We Talk about Love (1981). Carver wrote mostly about the domestic liv…

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Joyce Cary (Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary) Biography - (1888–1957), (Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary), The House of Children, Aissa Saved, An American Visitor

British novelist, born in Londonderry, educated at Clifton College and Trinity College, Oxford. Much of his childhood was spent in Ireland, in Donegal, which provides the setting of The House of Children (1941). Cary studied art in Edinburgh, served in the Balkan War of 1912?13, and in 1913 joined the Nigerian political service, where he remained, except for an interval with the Nigerian regiment …

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Catch-22

a novel by Joseph Heller, published in 1961. Heller's first and finest novel, it is generally regarded as one of the greatest comic works of postwar American fiction. It is equally often seen as a powerful expression of anti-war sentiment, but its concerns, as many critics have noted, are as much with the relationship of the individual to society as they are with the nature of war and patriotism. …

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Catcher in the Rye, The

a novel by J. D. Salinger, published in 1951. The novel is narrated in lively vernacular by the 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, agileminded, maverick, imaginative, and a boarder at an expensive prep school, Pencey. We see him leaving the school he disliked and going to New York City, where, dreading a confrontation with his parents (very distant figures throughout the novel) he checks into a cheap h…

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Willa Cather Biography - (1876–1947), April Twilights, The Troll Garden, McClure's Magazine, Alexander's Bridge, O Pioneers!

American novelist, born in Virginia where she lived until she was nine; her family then moved to Nebraska, to the prairie country pioneered by Central European and Scandinavian emigrants, individuals at once dour and passionately nostalgic, who were to inspire her most famous novels. She was educated at the University of Nebraska, where she studied classical literature (also an influence on her wo…

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Cathleen Ni Houlihan - Cathleen Ni Houlihan

a play by W. B. Yeats, published in 1902, the year of its production at St Theresa's Hall by the Irish Literary Theatre in which Maud Gonne played the title role. It was enormously successful and must be considered Yeats's only truly popular work for the theatre. By comparison with his other dramas Cathleen Ni Houlihan, which is written mainly in prose, has a highly effective straightforwardness a…

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

a play by Tennessee Williams, published in 1955 and revised in 1974, when it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The play became notorious for its treatment of homosexuality, which is never directly presented, but is depicted in a way that took contemporary audiences by surprise. Set in the Deep South, in the Mississippi Delta, the drama has as its pivot the sixty-fifth birthday celebrations of the pa…

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Cat's Eye

a novel by Margaret Atwood, published in 1989. Told from the perspective of a painter, Elaine Risley, this reflective yet profoundly critical novel works on several levels: as a sensitive exploration of women's relationships with other women, with their families, and with men; as an examination of the changing mores of feminism, and of the post-feminist ideology of the 1980s; as an account of the …

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Christopher Caudwell, pseudonym of Christopher St John Sprigg Biography - (1907–37), pseudonym of Christopher St John Sprigg, Yorkshire Observer, The Airship

British critic, born in Putney; at the age of 15 he became a reporter on the Yorkshire Observer. Having become interested in aviation, he moved to London as a writer on aeronautics, producing numerous books, which include The Airship (1931) and Let's Learn To Fly (1937). These and his detective stories, among which are Fatality in Fleet Street (1933) and The Perfect Alibi (1934), were published un…

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Charles Causley Biography - (1917–2003), Farewell Aggie Weston, Union Street, Johnny Alleluia, Secret Destinations, A Field of Vision, Collected Poems

British poet, born at Launceston, Cornwall, educated at Launceston College and Peterborough Training College. Between 1940 and 1946 he served in the Royal Navy, an experience informing many of his earlier poems, and was a teacher in Cornwall until he became a freelance writer in 1976. Among his numerous collections of poetry are Farewell Aggie Weston (1951), Union Street (1958), Johnny Alleluia (1…

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David Caute (John David Caute) Biography - (1936– ), (John David Caute), At Fever Pitch, The K-Factor, News from Nowhere, The Occupation

British novelist and historian, born in Alexandria, Egypt, educated at Wadham College, Oxford. A fellow of All Souls until 1965, he has subsequently held numerous visiting professorships in Britain and the USA. A radical Marxist view of Western civilization and its relations with the Third World informs a number of novels, including At Fever Pitch (1959), set during Ghana's emergence into nationho…

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Lord David Cecil (Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne Cecil) Biography - (1902–86), (Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne Cecil), The Stricken Deer, The Young Melbourne

British biographer and critic, the youngest son of James Gascoyne-Cecil, the fourth Marquess of Salisbury; he was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1924 he became a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and was Goldsmith's Professor of English Literature at Oxford from 1948 to 1970. His study of Cowper, The Stricken Deer (1929), gained him wide notice as a scholarly biographer. His subsequent biog…

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Sir E. K. Chambers (Sir Edmund Kerchever Chambers) Biography - (1866–1954), (Sir Edmund Kerchever Chambers), Richard II, The Mediaeval Stage, The Elizabethan Stage

British historian of the English stage, born at West Ilsley, Berkshire, educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he produced an edition of Shakespeare's Richard II (1891). From 1892 until his retirement he held a succession of posts in the Civil Service, rising to become a Second Secretary. His reputation as a scholar was established with The Mediaeval Stage (2 volumes, 1903), a study of …

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R. W. Chambers (Raymond Wilson Chambers) Biography - (1874–1942), (Raymond Wilson Chambers), Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend, Beowulf

British philologist and literary historian, born at Staxton in East Yorkshire, educated at University College London (UCL). In 1900 he became a fellow of UCL, where he succeeded W. P. Ker as Quain Professor in 1922. Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend (1912), an edition of Beowulf (1914), and Beowulf: An Introduction (1921) were among the works that established him as one of the twentiet…

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Chance - New York Herald, Ferndale

a novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1913, serialized in the New York Herald, 1912. It was Conrad's first novel to achieve popular success and marked the return of Marlow as narrator. It is divided into two parts, ?The Damsel? and ?The Knight?. Part I recounts the early life of Flora de Barral, the traumatic incident in which Flora's sense of her own worth is destroyed by her governess, and show…

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Raymond Chandler Biography - (1888–1959), Black Mask, The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window

American crime writer, born in Chicago, but brought up from the age of seven in England, where he was educated at Dulwich College. He returned to America in 1912 and, after serving in the Canadian Army and the Royal Air Force during the First World War, settled in California and became an executive for an oil company. Sacked for drunkenness in 1932, he wrote detective stories for pulp magazines, i…

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Sid Chaplin Biography - (1916–86), The Day of the Sardine, The Watchers and the Watched, My Fate Cries Out

British novelist and shortstory writer, born in Shildon, County Durham. After leaving school at the age of 14, he worked as a miner. Later, he won a scholarship to Fircroft College for Working Men, where he started writing, and became a specialist writer for the National Coal Board. An influence on writers like Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow, his novels offer a realistic evocation of life among Ty…

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Bruce Chatwin Biography - (1840–89), In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, Utz

British novelist and travel writer, born in Sheffield, educated at Marlborough and at Edinburgh University, where he gained a degree in anthropology, a lifelong interest. His first book, In Patagonia (1978), a collection of travel writing, was followed by The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), a fictional account of the life of a Brazilian adventurer, Francisco Manoel da Silva, set in Africa in the early 1…

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Denise Chavez Biography - (1948– ), Noviates, Shattering the Myth: Plays by Hispanic Women

Hispanic dramatist, born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, educated at New Mexico State University, Trinity University in San Antonio, and the University of New Mexico. Her allegiance to the Southwest and the Latina experience has shaped her fiction and drama. While she grew up valuing education, Chavez was also critical, from an early age, of the institutions which can marginalize women and minorities. …

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John Cheever Biography - (1912–82), The Way Some People Live: A Book of Stories

American novelist and short-story writer, born in Quincy, Massachusetts, educated at Thayer Academy, his expulsion from which became the subject of his earliest works. As well as producing a rich stream of books, he also taught creative writing at several colleges including Boston University. Cheever's short stories satirized New England suburban life with a sharply observant eye. These appeared i…

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