Encyclopedia of Literature: Walter John De La Mare Biography to Hilda Doolittle Biography
Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
R. F. Delderfield (Ronald Frederick Delderfield) Biography - (1912–72), (Ronald Frederick Delderfield), God Is an Englishman, Cheap Day Return, Return Journey, The Green Gauntlet
English popular novelist and playwright, born in Greenwich, London. Many of his best-selling novels are family sagas with romantic overtones, often spanning the period between the First and Second World Wars and beyond. He often focused on middle-aged love between men and women, one of whom, at least, had already been married, or between a more experienced partner and a virtual novice. God Is an E…
Don Delillo Biography - (1936– ), Americana, End Zone, Ratner's Star, Players, The Names, White Noise, Libra, Mao II
American novelist, born in New York, educated at Fordham University. Since he began publishing fiction in the early 1970s, he has established a reputation as a social satirist and critic of the ?American Dream?, whose novels frequently incorporate disturbing and occasionally surreal metaphors of contemporary life. These include his first novel, Americana (1971), whose protagonist, David Bell, is a…
Herbert George De Lisser Biography - (1878–1944), Daily Gleaner, Jane's Career, Planters' Punch, Susan Proudleigh, Triumphant Squalitone
Jamaican novelist and journalist, born in Falmouth, Jamaica. In 1904 he was appointed editor-in-chief of the Daily Gleaner, a position which gave him extensive knowledge of Jamaican society and an influential role in colonial politics. His allegiance was to a Fabian socialist, gradualist view of political development, similar to that of his lifelong friend, Sydney Oliver, one of the most liberal g…
Floyd Dell Biography - (1887–1969), The Masses, The Liberator, Moon-Calf, The Briary-Bush, Janet March, Runaway
American novelist and radical journalist, born in Illinois. Dell established himself as a journalist in Chicago and became a leading light of the Chicago literary renaissance, where he furthered the careers of Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser. He moved to New York in 1914, and became involved with the bohemian radical intelligentsia of Greenwich Village. Here, he worked as a journalist and e…
Vine Deloria Jr Biography - (1933– ), Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto
Native American writer, born in South Dakota, educated at Iowa State University, the Lutheran School of Theology, and the University of Colorado. Deloria, a Sioux, is well known for his historical and ethnographical writings which present the Indian perspective upon modern history. His work gains great satirical power from the inversion of the official historical picture which Deloria uses with co…
Paul De Man Biography - (1919–83), Blindness and Insight, Allegories of Reading, Resistance to Theory
Belgian scholar and critic, born in Antwerp, educated at the University of Brussels and at Yale; he became Professor of Humanistic Studies at Johns Hopkins University and Professor of Humanities at Yale. His work on German, French, and English literature had a special emphasis on irony and rhetoric. He came to prominence with his book Blindness and Insight (1971), which offered English-speaking re…
Nigel Dennis (Nigel Forbes Dennis) Biography - (1912–89), (Nigel Forbes Dennis), Encounter, Boys and Girls Come out To Play, Cards of Identity
British novelist and dramatist, born in Bletchingley, Surrey, educated in Rhodesia, Austria, and Germany. He was an outstanding journalist and became co-editor of Encounter. Much of his first novel, Boys and Girls Come out To Play (1949), is set in America where he had worked as a journalist from 1931 to 1949. Cards of Identity (1955), which Dennis adapted for the stage in 1956, is widely regarded…
Anita Desai Biography - (1937– ), Cry, the Peacock, Voices in the City, Where Shall We Go This Summer?
Indian novelist and shortstory writer, born in Mussoorie, educated in Delhi. Her novels of the 1960s signalled the emergence of a distinctive and original talent, but are now dismissed by the author as overwritten and melancholy. Her first work, Cry, the Peacock (1963), is compelling in its lyrical account of a frustrated young woman's madness and murder of her husband. Other novels, such as Voice…
G. V. Desani (Govindas Vishnoodas Desani) Biography - (1909– ), (Govindas Vishnoodas Desani), All About H. Hatterr, All About Mr Hatterr, a Gesture
Indian novelist and dramatist, born in Nairobi, Kenya, educated privately; he came to England in 1926 and worked as a journalist. Throughout the Second World War he lectured on Indian Affairs for the Ministry of Information. From 1952 to the mid-1960s, he lived in monasteries in India and became a professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1968. Desani's most celebrated work is…
Shashi Deshpande Biography - (1938– ), The Legacy, The Dark Holds no Terrors, Roots and Shadows, That Long Silence
Indian novelist, born in Dharwar, North Karnataka, India, educated at Bangalore University. Both her first collection of short stories, The Legacy (1978), and her highly praised novel, The Dark Holds no Terrors (1980), signalled the arrival of an important new feminist voice in Indian fiction; through a network of familial relationships, and above all men and women, Deshpande explores contemporary…
detective fiction - Bleak House, The Moonstone, A Study in Scarlet, Monsieur Lecoq, Trent's Last Case
Among the most enduring and widely read styles of popular writing in the twentieth century, the detective novel is a formulaic and conventionalized strand of crime fiction, emphasizing the ?puzzle? element. Within a restricted setting (often a country house or isolated rural community), a terrible crime is committed. There are several suspects, all variously plausible as the culprit. After a numbe…
Babette Deutsch Biography - (1895–1982), Banners, Honey Out of the Rock, Fire for the Night, Epistle to Prometheus
American poet, born in New York, where she was educated at Barnard College, after which she was secretary to the radical economist Thorstein Veblen. From 1944 to 1971 she taught at Columbia University. Banners (1919), her first collection of verse, was followed by Honey Out of the Rock (1925), Fire for the Night (1930), and Epistle to Prometheus (1931), a long poem celebrating the Promethean spiri…
Jean Devanny Biography - (1894–1962), The Butcher's Shop, Lenore Divine, Old Savage and Other Stories, Riven, Bushman Burke
New Zealand and Australian novelist, born Jane Crook in Ferntown, Nelson, the daughter of a miner; she left school at the age of 13. At 17 she married the militant miner and unionist Hal Devanny. Her first novel, The Butcher's Shop (1926), which dramatizes in romantic mode the argument for women's right to sexual autonomy, was banned in Australia and New Zealand for its sexual politics and its exp…
Devil's Disciple, The
the best-known of G. B. Shaw's ?Three Plays for Puritans?, first performed in Albany, New York in 1897 and published in 1901. It is set during the American War of Independence and primarily concerns Dick Dudgeon, regarded as demonic by his loveless mother and most of the other members of their conventional and pious New Hampshire community. When the British come to arrest the local minister, Antho…
Peter De Vries Biography - (1910–93), Poetry, The New Yorker, But Who Wakes the Bugler?
American novelist, born in Chicago, educated at Northwestern University. He was an editor of Poetry and in 1944 joined The New Yorker. Connecticut and New York State form the background for many of the comic novels for which he became known, beginning with But Who Wakes the Bugler? (1940). The tales in No, but I Saw the Movie (1952) established him as a writer of verbal dexterity and exuberant ima…
John Dewey Biography - (1859–1952), The Child and the Curriculum, Moral Principles in Education, Democracy and Education, Experience and Education
American philosopher and educationist, born in Burlington, Vermont, educated at the University of Vermont and Johns Hopkins University. After lecturing at the universities of Minnesota, Michigan, and Chicago, in 1905 he became a professor at Columbia University. The political and social stimuli to which he was exposed during his ten years in Chicago brought about the convergence of his socio-cultu…
Farrukh Dhondy Biography - (1944– ), No Problem, King of the Ghetto, Mama Dragon, Kipling Sahib, Bombay Duck, Come to Mecca
Indian playwright and novelist, born in Poona, India, educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the University of Leicester. After working as a schoolteacher in London he was a freelance writer until 1985 when he became a commissioning editor for multicultural television programmes. His highly regarded works as a television dramatist include No Problem, which was written with Mustapha Matura fo…
Dial, The - The Waste Land, Dial
a literary periodical founded in Chicago in 1880 by F. F. Browne. It was purchased by Scofield Thayer and J. S. Watson in 1919, following its move to New York in the previous year. Under Thayer's editorship it became the finest American magazine of literature and the arts of its day, publishing innovative work of the highest standard by leading American, British, and European writers. D. H. Lawren…
Philip K. Dick (Philip Kindred Dick) Biography - (1928–82), (Philip Kindred Dick), Time out of Joint, The Man in the High Castle
American science fictionnovelist, born in Chicago, educated at the University of California. Of his more than thirty novels, the best-known include Time out of Joint (1959); The Man in the High Castle (1962), an alternative history; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), which depicts a society controlled by drug-induced fantasy and television; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), l…
Monica Dickens Biography - (1915–92), One Pair of Hands, One Pair of Feet, My Turn to Make the Tea
British novelist, born in London, educated at St Paul's Girls' School. During the 1930s she detached herself from her middle-class background and worked as a maid and a cook, an interlude providing the material for her first book, the lightly satirical autobiography One Pair of Hands (1939). Her earlier works include two further autobiographies, One Pair of Feet (1942), concerning her training as …
James Dickey (James Lafayette Dickey) Biography - (1923–1997), (James Lafayette Dickey), Into the Stone, Helmets, Buckdancer's Choice
American poet and novelist, born in Atlanta, Georgia, educated at Vanderbilt University. Having held posts at numerous American colleges and universities, he became Professor of English at the University of South Carolina in 1969. Into the Stone (1960) and Helmets (1964) are among his earlier collections of verse, which gained him wide notice as a powerfully direct poet of considerable conventiona…
Patric Thomas Dickinson Biography - (1914–94), The Seven Days of Jericho, The Sailing Race, The World I see, A Wintering Tree
British poet, born in Nasirabad, India, educated at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. After working as a school-teacher he became a producer with the BBC and then a freelance writer and broadcaster. His first collection of poetry, The Seven Days of Jericho, appeared in 1948. Numerous succeeding volumes include The Sailing Race (1952), The World I see (1960), A Wintering Tree (1973), and A Rift in…
Joan Didion Biography - (1934– ), Vogue, The National Review, Saturday Evening Post, Run River, Play It as It Lays
American novelist and essayist, born in Sacramento, California, educated at the University of California at Berkeley. Didion was a features editor for Vogue magazine, a contributing editor for The National Review, and a columnist for the Saturday Evening Post before establishing herself as a freelance writer. Her novels include Run River (1963), Play It as It Lays (1970), A Book of Common Prayer (…
Peter Didsbury Biography - (1946– ), A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull, The Butchers of Hull, The Classical Farm
British poet, born in Fleetwood, Lancashire, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. Until 1981 he was a schoolteacher in Hull, since when he has been an archaeologist by profession. His poetry first attracted wide critical notice when it appeared in Douglas Dunn's edition of A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull (1982), which was published in the same year as his first collection, The Butchers of Hul…
Annie Dillard Biography - (1945– ), Tickets for a Prayerwheel, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, Teaching a Stone to Talk
American writer, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, educated at Hollins College. Her first published work was a volume of poems, Tickets for a Prayerwheel (1974), but it was Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek (1974), her first work of prose?an extended meditation on nature?that established her reputation as a fine and original stylist, and gained her a Pulitzer Prize. Since then, Dillard has written a varie…
Diane Di Prima Biography - (1934– ), Kulchur, Floating Bear, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, Dinners and Nightmares, Revolutionary Letters
American novelist, playwright, and poet, born in New York City, educated at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. Di Prima's writings, particularly her verse, are frequently associated with both Beat and confessional modes in modern American poetry and her poetic forms echo those of Beat contemporaries such as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. She was a contributing editor to Kulchur magazine …
Thomas M. Disch Biography - (1940– ), The Genocides, Mankind under the Leash, 102 H-Bombs, Echo round His Bones
American novelist, poet, and short-story writer, born in Des Moines, Iowa, educated at New York University. He has been a visiting lecturer at the universities of Minnesota, Michigan State, and Wesleyan. He is part of the ?New Wave? of writers which swept through science fiction in the 1960s. The Genocides (1965) was quickly followed by Mankind under the Leash (1966), 102 H-Bombs (1966), Echo roun…
Discourse - Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish
is a word with three very different meanings in current critical and theoretical usage. First, it is a name for the flow of language, particularly dialogue and spoken language, in specific, practical situations. Discourse analysis attends to the structures and strategies by which we organize even our apparently unorganized verbal exchanges?interviews, for example, or gossip, or the succeeding spee…
Jenny Diski Biography - (1947– ), Nothing Natural, Rain-forest, Like Mother, Then Again, Happily Ever After
British novelist of Jewish descent, born in London. After being in institutional care when she was 14, she lived for four years with the novelist Doris Lessing. In her early years she spent periods in psychiatric hospitals but subsequently trained as a teacher, and taught for five years before studying anthropology as a mature student. Her first novel, Nothing Natural (1986), a disturbing study of…
dissociation of sensibility - Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century
a term originated by T. S. Eliot in his essay ?The Metaphysical Poets?, which first appeared in 1921 as a review of H. J. C. Grierson's edition of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921). Eliot's approval of the poetry of Donne and others, which was of considerable influence in establishing the high regard in which their work has since been held, emphasized their possession…
Maurice Herbert Dobb Biography - (1900–76), Political Economy and Capitalism, Studies in the Development of Capitalism
British economist and eminent Marxist scholar, educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics, subsequently Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Among his many books and articles, two stand out. The first is Political Economy and Capitalism (1937) which the obituary writer for the British Academy claimed marked ?the emergence of Marxist economics as a really serious e…
Rosemary Dobson Biography - (1920– ), Bulletin, The Ship of Ice, In a Convex Mirror, Child with a Cockatoo, Cock Crow
Australian poet, born in Sydney; she studied art at the University of Sydney. She spent some time in England and Europe where she became deeply interested in Greek antiquities and Italian paintings. Many of her poems first appeared in Bulletin, including the title poem of The Ship of Ice (1948) in which she reflects upon the timeless quality of art and its ability to capture moments suspended in t…
E. L. Doctorow (Edgar Lawrence Doctorow) Biography - (1931– ), (Edgar Lawrence Doctorow), Welcome to Hard Times, Bad Man From Bodie, Big as Life
American novelist, born in New York, educated at Kenyon College and Columbia University. After working as a screenplay reader for Columbia Pictures, he wrote Welcome to Hard Times (1960; UK title Bad Man From Bodie, 1961) which examines the illusory foundations of the American myth of progress through the conventions of the Western. There followed the appearance of Big as Life (1966), a science fi…
Dodsworth
a novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1929, dramatized by the author and Sidney Howard in 1934. A successful car manufacturer from the Mid-western city of Zenith, Samuel Dodsworth is unhappily married to Fran, a frivolous and pretentious snob. The pair visit Europe where Fran indulges in several flirtations, with an Englishman, Major Clyde Lockert, and in Paris with Arnold Israel. Fed up with th…
J. P. Donleavy (James Patrick Donleavy) Biography - (1926– ), (James Patrick Donleavy), The Ginger Man, Fairy Tales of New York, A Singular Man
Irish novelist and playwright, born in America. His literary reputation rests to a large extent on his first novel, The Ginger Man (1955), which was first published in Paris by the Olympia Press, well known as publishers of erotica. An expurgated version was published in New York in 1958 and a ?complete and unexpurgated? edition in 1965, also in New York. The novel describes the adventures of Seba…