Encyclopedia of Literature: Cheltenham Gloucestershire to Cockermouth Cumbria
Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
G. K. Chesterton (Gilbert Keith Chesterton) Biography - (1874–1936), (Gilbert Keith Chesterton), Daily News, The Bookman, Illustrated London News, Eye Witness, New Witness
English novelist, essayist, poet, and journalist, born on Campden Hill, London, educated at St Paul's School, London, and the Slade School of Art. An outspoken and controversial journalist, Chesterton wrote for the Daily News, The Bookman, and the Illustrated London News, contributed to Eye Witness, and was editor of New Witness (1916?23) and G. K.'s Weekly (1925?36). His friend, Hilaire Belloc, s…
Erskine Childers (Robert Erskine Childers) Biography - (1870–1922), (Robert Erskine Childers), Asgard, The Riddle of the Sands, Dulcibella
British novelist, born in London, educated at Haileybury, and at Trinity College, Oxford. He fought in the Boer War and served in the Royal Naval Air Service during the First World War. In peacetime he was a clerk in the House of Commons (1895?1910). From 1910 he agitated for Home Rule in Ireland and used his own yacht, the Asgard, to supply German arms to the Irish volunteers in 1914. Elected to …
Alice Childress Biography - (1920–1994), Trouble in Mind, Wedding Band, A Hero ain't Nothing but a Sandwich
African-American play-wright and novelist; born in Charleston, South Carolina, she grew up in Harlem, New York. She became an actress in the late 1930s and was director of the American Negro Theater School from 1941 to 1952. Among the best-known of her many plays are Trouble in Mind (1955), an inventive exploration of the theme of racial stereotyping, and Wedding Band (1961), centring on an inter-…
Frank Chin Biography - (1940– ), The Chickencoop Chinaman, The Year of the Dragon
Asian-American novelist and playwright, born in Berkeley, California, educated at the University of California, Berkeley, the State University of Iowa, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Chin, who was the first Chinese-American brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad, later became the first contemporary Chinese-American playwright to have his work staged in New York at the American…
Chinweizu Biography - (1943– ), Energy Crisis and Other Poems, Invocations and Admonitions, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature
Nigerian poet and critic, born in Eluama Isuikwuato, in Imo State, Eastern Nigeria, educated at Government College, Afikpo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. In the late 1970s, he taught Afro-American Studies at San Jose University, California. Chinweizu's statement that the ?great unfinished business of African decolonization and development i…
Frank M. Chipasula (Frank Mkalawile Chipasula) Biography - (1949– ), (Frank Mkalawile Chipasula), Visions and Reflections, O Earth Wait for Me, Nightwatcher, Nightsong
Malawian poet, born in Luanshya, Zambia; he was educated at the Universities of Zambia and Malawi and became a citizen of Malawi. After working as a freelance broadcaster with the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation and as an editor with the National Education Company of Zambia, he came under threat from the Malawian authorities as a political dissenter and entered voluntary exile in America in 1978. …
Noam Chomsky Biography - (1928– ), tabula rasa, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Syntactic Structures, Cartesian Linguistics
American critic and linguist, born in Philadelphia, educated at the University of Pennsylvania. He has held many academic posts in America and Britain, and in 1976 he became Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For Chomsky the approaches to language of both traditionalists and structuralists were flawed or short-sighted. He saw the learning mind as neither a genet…
Dame Agatha Christie (Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie), née Miller Biography - (1890–1976), (Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie), née Miller, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
British detective fiction writer, born in Torquay, Devon; she studied singing and piano in Paris, and in 1914 married Archibald Christie, an officer in the Royal Flying Corps. As a hospital dispenser during the First World War she acquired a knowledge of poisons which she later put to good use in her detective stories. In 1926 an attack of amnesia, brought on by the death of her mother and the imp…
Richard Thomas Church Biography - (1893–1972), The Flood of Life, The Dream, News From the Mountain, The Burning Bush
British poet and novelist, born in London, educated at Dulwich Hamlet School. He was a civil servant from 1909 to 1933, when he became a publisher's reader. The Flood of Life, his first collection of verse, appeared in 1917; some seventeen further volumes included The Dream (1922), News From the Mountain (1932), and The Burning Bush (1967). Church's poetry reflects his belief in the poet's duty to…
Caryl Churchill Biography - (1938– ), Owners, Objections to Sex and Violence, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Cloud Nine
British playwright, born in London, educated in Canada and at Oxford University. She first attracted critical notice with Owners (1972), a sardonic comedy about the effects of property and profiteering on personal relationships. This was followed by Objections to Sex and Violence (1975), an exploration of the subjects of the title; Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1975), about radical politics in…
Winston Churchill Biography - (1871–1947), The Celebrity: An Episode, Richard Carvel, métier, The Crisis, The Crossing, Coniston
American novelist, born in St Louis, Missouri, educated at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland. Churchill's first novel, The Celebrity: An Episode (1898), was a satire on New York politics and journalism. Richard Carvel (1899), set during the American Revolution, brought Churchill fame and established his m?tier for romantic fiction with a historical setting in the American past. The Crisis …
Sir Winston Spencer Churchill (Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill) Biography - (1874–1965), (Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill), The Story of the Malakand Field Force, The River War
British statesman and historian, born in Blenheim Palace, educated at Harrow and Sandhurst. While on military service in Cuba, India, and Africa from 1895 to 1899, he acted as war correspondent for various periodicals. Among his early publications are the campaign histories The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) and The River War (1899). His only novel, Savrola, a politically acute tale of r…
Amy Clampitt Biography - (1920–94), Multitudes, Multitudes, The Kingfisher, What the Light Was Like, Archaic Figure, Westward
American poet, born into a Quaker family at New Providence, Iowa; she was educated at Grinnell College, and spent much of her working life in New York publishing. Her writing has been a case of spectacular late development: Multitudes, Multitudes appeared in 1974, and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982. Clampitt's breakthrough came with The Kingfisher (1983), which won extravagant pra…
Brian Clark Biography - (1932– ), Can You Hear Me at the Back?, The Petition, Whose Life Is It, Anyway?
British playwright, born in Bournemouth, educated at the Central School of Speech and Drama and at Nottingham University; he became a teacher and, from 1968 to 1972, a staff tutor in drama at the University of Hull. His stage plays have attempted to give a human dimension to large social and political issues. They include Can You Hear Me at the Back? (1979), in which a middle-aged architect reasse…
J. P. Clark Bekederemo (John Pepper Clark Bekederemo) Biography - (1935– ), (John Pepper Clark Bekederemo), America, Their America, Poems, A Reed in the Tide
Nigerian dramatist, poet, and critic, born in Kiagbodo, Ijaw country, Niger Delta, educated at the University of Ibadan. Clark travelled to the USA as Parvin Fellow at Princeton in 1962; his view of America, in his hard-hitting, splenetic America, Their America (1964), caused considerable controversy. The poetry contained in Poems (1962) and A Reed in the Tide (1965) combines African and European …
Arthur C. Clarke (Arthur Charles Clarke) Biography - (1917– ), (Arthur Charles Clarke), Astounding, Childhood's End, The City and the Stars
British writer, born in Somerset, educated at King's College, London. He is the only contemporary British author to dominate the entire field of science fiction. He was noted for the originality and clarity of his non-fiction, much of it promulgating the lure and necessity of space travel, and as early as 1945 originated in an article the concept of the geosynchronous communication satellite. In h…
Austin Clarke Biography - (1896–1974), The Vengeance of Fionn, The Sword of the West, Pilgrimage, The Plot Succeeds, Collected Plays
Irish poet and dramatist, born in Dublin, educated at University College, Dublin, where he became an English Assistant in 1917. His first volume of verse, a reworking of the legend of Diarmid and Grainne entitled The Vengeance of Fionn, appeared in 1917. Succeeding volumes included The Sword of the West (1921) and Pilgrimage (1929); these works made use of Irish myth and history from the medieval …
Austin C. Clarke (Austin Chesterfield Clarke) Biography - (1934– ), (Austin Chesterfield Clarke), Survivors of the Crossing, Amongst Thistles and Thorns, The Meeting Point
Barbadosborn novelist, journalist, and broadcaster; he went to Canada in 1955 and studied at the University of Toronto. He has worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, served as cultural attach? at the Barbados Embassy in Washington, and taught at several universities including Yale. His first two novels, Survivors of the Crossing (1964) and Amongst Thistles and Thorns (1965), depict the …
Gillian Clarke Biography - (1937– ), Anglo-Welsh Review, Snow on the Mountain, The Sundial, Letter from a Far Country
British poet, born in Cardiff, educated at University College, Cardiff. She became a news researcher with the BBC in 1958, lectured at Gwent College of Art and Design (1975?84), and has worked extensively as a teacher of creative writing. From 1976 to 1984 she edited the Anglo-Welsh Review. Although her first two collections of poetry, Snow on the Mountain (1972) and The Sundial (1978), were favou…
Clayhanger Trilogy - Clayhanger, Hilda Lessways, These Twain, The Roll Call
a series of three novels by Arnold Bennett. Clayhanger (1910), set in the Five Towns (the ?Potteries? in Staffordshire), tells the story of the boyhood and young manhood of Edwin Clayhanger, son of the autocratic and strong-willed printer Darius Clayhanger who is determined that Edwin shall follow him into the printing works rather than pursue his own bent as an architect. The novel opens as Edwin…
Jack Clemo (Jack Reginald John Clemo) Biography - (1916–94), (Jack Reginald John Clemo), Wilding Graft, The Clay Verge, The Map of Clay
British poet, born near St Austell; he received elementary education at Trethosa village school. During childhood he suffered attacks of blindness, and became deaf prior to the complete loss of his sight in 1955. He began writing in his teens out of what he described as the ?instinctive effort to come to terms with abnormal circumstances?. His novel Wilding Graft was published to critical acclaim …
Clergyman's Daughter, A
a novel by George Orwell, published in 1935. Orwell's first novel has an erratic story-line that is not entirely justified by the wanderings of its heroine Dorothy Hare, the clergyman's daughter of the title; after an attack of amnesia, she is plunged into the miseries of unemployment and vagrancy. The contrast between the setting of her restricted, church-going life and the harshness of the paupe…
Clockwork Orange, A
a novel by Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. The narrative is by 15-year-old hooligan Alex, using a teenage slang, ?Nadsat?, invented by Burgess; it is set in an anarchic urban culture of the near future. Alex has a passion for music and hi-fi, and is a drug user. He and his friends embark on orgies of violence and destruction, in one of which a woman dies. In prison Alex is selected as guinea-p…
Stuart Cloete Biography - (1897–1976), Turning Wheels, Watch for the Dawn, Rags of Glory, The Soldier's Peach
South African novelist and short-story writer, born in Paris, and educated in England. He served in the First World War, and remained in the British Army until 1925, subsequently taking up farming in South Africa. A prolific writer, he is best known for his trilogy of realistic historical novels about the Afrikaners: Turning Wheels (1937), which was banned in South Africa; Watch for the Dawn (1939…
Bob Cobbing Biography - (1920–2002), Kroklok, Sound Poems: An ABC in Sound, A Peal in Air, Vowels and Consequences
British poet, born in Enfield, Middlesex, educated at Enfield Grammar School and Bognor Training College. After working as a teacher and bookshop manager, he became a freelance writer and performer of his work in 1967. He has also edited several magazines, notably Kroklok, and publishes editions of experimental poetry under the Writers' Forum imprint. Although some of his early poems followed conv…