Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
founded in 1860 by George Murray Smith; it quickly achieved huge sales through its policy of offering the serialization of two novels in each issue. William Makepeace Thackeray, who edited it from 1860 to 1862, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins were eminent among the contributors in its early years. Henry James and Thomas Hardy supplied novels serialized during the 1870s, when the…
American poet, born in New York; he was irregularly educated and sentenced to three years' imprisonment for attempted robbery at the age of 17. He subsequently worked as a labourer, a reporter, and a merchant seaman while pursuing his self-education. The Vestal Lady on Brattle (1955), his first collection of verse, was published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where In This Hung-Up Age, the first of …
Canadian poet, born in South Africa, educated at the University of Natal. In 1966 she emigrated to Britain and established herself as a freelance writer. She became a Canadian citizen in 1975 and was appointed writer-in-residence at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, in 1976. Flying, her first collection of poetry, was published in 1970; subsequent volumes include Christmas in Africa (1…
British actor, dramatist, and composer, born in Teddington, Middlesex, the son of a piano salesman, and brought up in genteel poverty in the London suburbs. He went on the stage as a boy, and began to write prolifically as a young man, achieving fame and notoriety with The Vortex (1924), in which he himself appeared as a drug addict tormented by his mother's adulteries. His long career as a dramat…
American historian, translator, critic, writer, and editor, born in Belsano, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard. After some time in Europe, where he became associated with Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos (see Lost Generation), Cowley became an editor with the New Republic. Associated with the literary and political left in the 1930s, he helped organize the first League of American Write…
American novelist, born in Chicago, educated at Harvard University where he completed Confusion (1924), his first novel. Other early novels include The Son of Perdition (1929) and S.S. San Pedro: A Tale of the Sea (1931), set in Cuba and the US merchant navy, respectively. Cozzens's fiction is more generally concerned with the precise delineation of social manners and mores and the place of instit…
British novelist and short-story writer, born in Hertfordshire, educated at Birmingham College of Commerce and at London University. He worked for some time in educational television in the Sudan, and settled in Birmingham. His first full-length work was Continent (1986; Whitbread Prize), a collection of seven loosely connected but thematically interlinked stories from fictitious regions of an ima…
American poet, born in Garrettsville, Ohio, he grew up and was educated in Cleveland. In 1916 he established contacts with the literary circles associated with the Little Review and The Seven Arts; the international Modernism of the former and the latter's more conservative and nationalist aesthetics both affected his development as a poet?in much of his best work an experimental ethos and an emph…
American poet, born in Arlington, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard University, Black Mountain College, and the University of New Mexico. He edited the Black Mountain Review from 1954 to 1957 and assisted Charles Olson in developing his theories of Projective Verse; Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence (eight volumes, 1980?7) was edited by George F. Butterick. From the ea…
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Bacon County, Georgia; he served in the US Marine Corps (1953?6) then graduated from the University of Florida in 1960 where he taught and became professor of English in 1974. His early life was marked by poverty, extreme violence, the separation of his parents, and the premature death of his father. The horror of his background, as well as its par…
a periodical founded with the financial support of Lady Rothermere in 1922 by T. S. Eliot, who remained its editor until the final issue in 1939. Eliot's first wife Vivien supplied the title. The Waste Land was published in the first issue. The magazine was taken over by the publishers Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber) after Eliot joined the firm in 1925. It rapidly gained an unrivalled repu…
a literary periodical founded in 1959 by C. B. Cox and A. E. Dyson to provide a widely accessible forum for contemporary poetry and criticism. The poetic and critical tenets of the Movement were reflected in its editorial policy, and Donald Davie and Philip Larkin were eminent among early contributors of poems and reviews. Other poets whose work appeared in its pages in the 1960s included Ted Hugh…
a novel by A. Huxley, published in 1921. First establishing Huxley's reputation for witty dialogue and cynically funny observation, it has usually been read as a roman-?-clef, satirizing Ottoline Morrell's circle at Garsington. Lady Ottoline is caricatured as ?Priscilla Wimbush?, devotee of astrology and Inspirational writings such as her guest Mr Barbecue-Smith's Pipe-Lines to the Infinite. ?Scog…
Irish poet, novelist, and critic, born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, educated at University College, Dublin. In 1951 he became associate editor of The Bell. His reminiscences of the city during the early 1950s are contained in Dead as Doornails (1976), which provides detailed portraits of Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, and Brendan Behan. His numerous collections of poetry include Poems (1957),…
Scottish novelist, born into an Irish-Scottish Catholic family in Cardross, Dumbartonshire, and educated at the University of Glasgow, where he studied medicine. He served in the First World War as a surgeon sublieutenant with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve; he then practised as a GP in Glasgow and London, and as a medical inspector of mines in South Wales. His first novel, Hatter's Castle (193…
British poet and translator, born in Mursley, Buckinghamshire, educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He became Editorial Director at Victor Gollancz in 1972 and has held various academic posts. His first full collection, The Rain Giver (1972), was followed by several other volumes including The Dream-House (1976), Waterslain (1986), The Painting Room (1988), and New and Selected Poems, 1965?1990 (19…
a sequence of some sixty poems by Ted Hughes, published in 1970, which features the figure of Crow as the central protagonist. The actuality of the bird as a feeder on carrion and its sinister associations in legend inform Hughes's characterization of Crow as a mythical embodiment of the instinct of survival; the book's gnostic vision of ?the horror of Creation? postulates a metaphysical context i…
a play by Arthur Miller, first directed by Jed Harris at the Martin Beck Theatre on 22 January 1956, when it ran for 197 performances. John and Elizabeth Proctor employ Abigail Williams, the promiscuous niece of the Reverend Samuel Parris. Elizabeth dismisses the girl. In revenge, Abigail accuses Elizabeth of witchcraft, a volatile charge in the political/religious atmosphere of late seventeenth-c…
a novel by Thomas Pynchon, published in 1966. The plot is essentially a fictional tool of convenience whereby Pynchon can explore what he takes to be the problematic, if not frequently conspiratorial, nature of reality. Oedipa Maas discovers she has been made the executrix of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a former lover. This sets her off on an increasingly bizarre and sinister trail of detecti…
A. Paton's best-known and most successful novel?subtitled ?A story of comfort in desolation??published in 1948. Its first two parts each begins with the identical lyrical sentences that are characteristic of Paton's emotional prose: ?There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills ?? In the first section, a humble old African priest, Stephen Kumalo, sets out from his home in Natal for J…
American poet, born in Louisville, Kentucky; he grew up in Harlem, New York and was educated at New York University and Harvard, where his poetry was praised by Irving Babbitt. Color (1925) gained him widespread acclaim. His subsequent volumes include Copper Sun (1927) and The Black Christ (1929). His poetry made fluent use of the traditional modes of English verse to articulate his impassioned co…
is a term which has, from the 1980s, become something of a catch-all, implying an interdisciplinary theoretical orientation which approaches ?cultural texts? (by no means exclusively literary ones) as materially produced by political and social forces, institutions of patronage, and ideological ?discourses? (educational, legal, religious, etc.) specific to their historical moment. Ostensibly coini…
American poet and graphic artist, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard. In 1917 he volunteered for service in France with the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. A censor's confusion over remarks in his letters led to his imprisonment for three months on suspicion of treasonable activity. The interlude formed the basis of his widely acclaimed first book, The Enormous Room (1922), which…
American poet, born in Cumberland, Maryland, educated at Stanford University. His books include The Helmsman (1942), The Judge Is Fury (1947), Doctor Drink (1950), Trivial, Vulgar & Exalted: Epigrams (1957), The Exclusions of a Rhyme: Poems and Epigrams (1960), To What Strangers, What Welcome: A Sequence of Short Poems (1964), and Some Salt: Poems and Epigrams (1967). The Collected Poems and Epigr…
Scottish author, born in London, educated at Harrow. Much of his writing is deeply informed by his experiences of the various South American countries in which he lived from 1870 to 1881. His numerous biographies of South American figures include Hernando de Soto (1903) and Pedro de Valdivia (1926). In 1886 he became Member of Parliament for North-West Lanark, which he represented until 1892. He w…
New Zealand poet and critic, born in Timaru, educated at the universities of Canterbury and Auckland. He worked in journalism in New Zealand, London, and the USA before taking up academic posts at Auckland University. Not in Narrow Seas (1939) was a poem sequence with prose ?commentary? treading a mythopoeic line on New Zealand history and poetry; Island & Time (1941) included the fine long poem ?…
a novel by Edith Wharton, published in 1913. Set in the early twentieth century, the narrative recounts the successive marriages of the beautiful and ruthlessly avaricious Undine Spragg: to Ralph Marvell, the gentle yet vulnerable representative of the older New York; to the Marquis Raymond de Chelles of the old French aristocracy, with houses in Burgundy and the Faubourg St Germain; and to the im…
British humourist and poet; Cutler grew up in Glasgow, where he was educated at Shawlands Academy. He has been a freelance writer and performer of his work since the late 1950s. Gruts (1962) contained short stories and songs which had provoked controversy when they were previously broadcast on BBC radio; the stories, which established Cutler as an eccentric literary talent, are characteristically …