Encyclopedia of Literature: Englefield Green Surrey to William Faulkner Biography
Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
English Review, The - Review, Parade's End, English Review, National Review
a literary journal begun in 1908 by Ford Madox Ford (then Hueffer) in association with various writers including Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. Increasingly dissatisfied with existing periodicals, Ford was motivated in founding the magazine when Thomas Hardy's poem ?A Sunday Morning Tragedy? was rejected by other editors. The poem appeared in the first issue, along with work by Henry James, Wells,…
D. J. Enright (Dennis Joseph Enright) Biography - (1920–2002), (Dennis Joseph Enright), The Laughing Hyena, Addictions, The Terrible Shears, Sad Ires, Paradise Illustrated
British poet, born in Leamington, Warwickshire, educated at Downing College, Cambridge. From 1947 onwards he taught at universities in Egypt, Japan, Germany, Thailand, Singapore, and Leeds. In 1971 he joined the publishers Chatto and Windus, becoming a director in 1974. His first collection, The Laughing Hyena (1953), was followed by a succession of volumes which include Addictions (1962), The Ter…
Entertainer, The
a play by John Osborne, first performed in 1957. It involves Archie Rice, a seedy musichall comic who regards himself as ?dead behind the eyes ? I don't feel a thing?. His plan to leave his long-suffering wife, Phoebe, for a much younger woman is aborted after her parents are informed of the affair by his father Billy, a comedian whom Osborne sees as representing the lost decencies of an older gen…
Louise Erdrich Biography - (1954– ), Love Medicine, Jacklight, The Beet Queen, Tracks, The Crown of Columbus, The Bingo Palace
American novelist and poet, born in Little Falls, Arizona, to a father of German origin and a Native American mother. She was educated at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school, and later graduated from Dartmouth College. Erdrich's first and highly praised novel, Love Medicine (1984), was the richly poetic story of the interlinked destinies of two Chippewa families. Ranging from 1934 to 1984…
Erewhon Revisited - Erewhon, Erewhon Revisited, The Fair Haven
Samuel Butler's sequel to Erewhon (1872), published in 1901. The earlier work describes the experiences of its chief protagonist, whom Erewhon Revisited identifies as Thomas Higgs, in the remote land of Erewhon, the name being an anagram of ?nowhere?. The utopian society in which Higgs finds himself forms the basis for a succession of satires on the religious, social, and moral conventions of Vict…
Steve Erickson Biography - (1950– ), Los Angeles Reader, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Days between Stations, Rubicon Beach
American novelist, born in Santa Monica, California, educated at the University of California at Los Angeles. Erickson wrote the ?Guerilla Pop? column for the Los Angeles Reader for three years, also writing for Esquire and Rolling Stone, and has worked as a freelance editor and writer in Europe and Los Angeles. His first novel, Days between Stations (1985), is a tale about Lauren and Michel's sea…
Erik Erikson (Erik Homburger Erikson) Biography - (1902–1994), (Erik Homburger Erikson), Observations on the Yurok: Childhood and World Image, Insight and Responsibility
American psychoanalytical author, born of Danish parents in Frankfurt, Germany. His eclectic education included a period as an art student in Munich, followed by study under Anna Freud at the Vienna Psychoanalytical Institute. In 1933 he emigrated to the USA, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1939. Despite his lack of formal qualifications he was welcomed at Harvard, where he conducted research an…
Essays in Criticism - Scrutiny
a quarterly journal founded by F. W. Bateson in 1951, which continues to be published from Keble College, Oxford. Early issues contained articles by numerous noted critics of varying persuasions, including W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Kingsley Amis, Raymond Williams, Donald Davie, John Middleton Murry, Frank Kermode, and Hugh Kenner. In his ?The Function of Criticism? (1953) Bateson reasoned in favou…
Ethan Frome - en route
an ironic novelette of repressed love in New England, by Edith Wharton, published in 1911. The novel explores the rural decay of New England, and the way in which the poverty of the surroundings, the harsh climate, and the economic depression affect the lives of its inhabitants. The narrative is recounted by a young engineer, Ethan Frome, a sallow, embittered man, trapped by a strike in a small we…
ethnicity - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Uncle Tom's Cabin
The word ?ethnic? has a long history. In the Bible it is used of the ?Gentiles?, that is, all those who are not Israelites. Later, it is used to define all those nations who are not Christians or Jews, who are therefore categorized as ?heathens? or ?pagans?. In contemporary Western culture, the term is now used to describe a racial and cultural group, especially one that has migrated into a pre- e…
Eustace and Hilda - The Shrimp and the Anemone, The Sixth Heaven, Eustace and Hilda, The Go-Between
a trilogy of novels by L. P. Hartley, published in 1944, 1946, and 1947, and as a single volume in 1958. Hilda is the dominant older sister of Eustace: the trilogy describes their relationship throughout their lives. The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944) takes its title from the striking opening image, an episode in a characteristically observed childhood seaside holiday. Eustace is a gentle, reflecti…
Caradoc Evans (David Caradoc Evans) Biography - (1878–1945), (David Caradoc Evans), T. P.'s Weekly, English Review, My People, Capel Sion
Welsh short-story writer and novelist, born in Llanfihangel-ar-Arth, Carmarthenshire, though associated with Rhydlewis, the Cardiganshire village where his mother worked a nine-acre smallholding. At 14 he became a draper's assistant. Following evening classes at the Workingmen's College, he began a career as a journalist which culminated in T. P.'s Weekly, which he and Con O'Leary co-edited, with …
Margiad Evans, pseudonym of Peggy Eileen Whistler Biography - (1909–58), pseudonym of Peggy Eileen Whistler, Country Dance, The Wooden Doctor, Turf or Stone, Creed, Autobiography
British novelist and poet, born in Uxbridge, London, to English parents of Welsh descent. Between 1920 and 1936 she lived at Bridstow, near Ross-on-Wye; following her marriage in 1940 she moved to Llangarron, near Ross, and later to Gloucestershire and Sussex. Her work is permeated with an awareness of her Welsh ancestry and a love of the Welsh Border country to which she felt she belonged. Her fi…
Everyman's Library - Life of Johnson, Metaphysics
a series of 1,000 pocket-sized volumes established in 1906 by the publisher Joseph Malaby Dent, who envisaged it as ?the most complete library for the common man the world has ever seen?. Dent devised the project in consultation with the poet Ernest Rhys, who edited the series until his death in 1946. Fiction, poetry, drama, biography, philosophy, and history were among the thirteen original secti…
Gavin Ewart (Gavin Buchanan Ewart) Biography - (1916–95), (Gavin Buchanan Ewart), New Verse, Poems and Songs, Londoners, The Gavin Ewart Show
British poet, born in London, educated at Christ's College, Cambridge. After active service in the Second World War, he worked in publishing and with the British Council before becoming an advertising copywriter in 1952. From the age of 17, when his poetry was first printed in Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse, he acquired a reputation for wit and accomplishment through such works as ?Phallus in Wonder…
Expressionism - Die Brücke, The Adding Machine, The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Silver Tassie, The Emperor Jones
a tendency in the arts during the first three decades of the twentieth century, initially defined in relation to painting and subsequently applied to theatrical, literary, and cinematic works; the term denotes one of the many sub-divisions of Modernism. Expressionism emerged as a coherent movement in the graphic arts in 1905, when the group named Die Br?cke (literally ?the bridge?) was formed in D…
Eyeless in Gaza - Eyeless in Gaza
a novel by A. Huxley, published in 1936. Much criticized at the time for its pacifist ideology, it can now be read as an autobiographical, emotionally introspective work which marked Huxley's evolution from satirist to moralist. The carefully shuffled chronology of the novel is crucial in showing the development of Anthony Beavis, a detached observer of human behaviour insistent on his own freedom…
Nissim Ezekiel Biography - (1924–2004), The Unfinished Man, The Exact Man, Hymns in Darkness, Latter Day Psalms
Indian poet, born in Bombay to a Jewish family long resident in India, educated at the University of Bombay. He has held academic posts in Britain, Bombay, and America. Ezekiel's honest response to the challenge of expressing the cosmopolitan culture of which he is a product has made him the most respected of contemporary poets writing in English in India. He has an easy colloquial style, has expe…
Faber and Faber - Criterion
a leading British publishing house of the twentieth century, especially notable for its contributions to the fields of poetry and drama. With Sir Maurice Gwyer (1878?1952), Sir Geoffrey Faber (1889?1961) founded Faber and Gwyer Ltd in 1925, the two having been in partnership since 1923 as directors of the Scientific Press Ltd. T. S. Eliot was appointed to the board of directors in 1925, with the r…
Faber Book of Modern Verse, The - New Signatures, New Country
an anthology of twentieth-century poetry, edited by Michael Roberts, published in 1936. The only nineteenth-century poet included was Gerard Manley Hopkins; his influence following the first collection of his work in 1918 was integral to the book's attempt to define the modern movement in terms of technique and sensibility. Roberts's introduction argued that social and moral factors were significa…
Fabian Society - Manifesto, Fabian Essays in Socialism, The Story of Fabian Socialism, The First Fabians, Bernard Shaw
a group of socialist intellectuals dedicated to the principle of gradualist reform, which originated as a splinter group from Thomas Davidson's Fellowship of the New Life, a movement devoted to philosophical speculation. Its name was derived from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, whose delaying tactics in battle earned him the nickname ?Cunctator? or ?the Delayer?. In 1884 the Society was …
Ruth Fainlight (Ruth Esther Fainlight) Biography - (1931– ), (Ruth Esther Fainlight), Cages, The Region's Violence, Fifteen to Infinity, Selected Poems
American poet, born in New York; she attended schools in the USA and England, afterwards studying at Brighton and Birmingham Colleges of Art. Cages (1966), her first substantial collection of poetry, was followed by further volumes including The Region's Violence (1973), Fifteen to Infinity (1983), Selected Poems (1987), The Knot (1990), and This Time of Year (1993). Fainlight's essential qualitie…
Zoe Fairbairns Biography - (1948– ), Benefits, Stand We at Last, Here Today, Closing, Daddy's Girls
British novelist, born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, educated at St Andrews University, Scotland. Fairbairns read history at university, and a historian's sensibility may be detected in her preference for a large canvas which crosses time and place to intertwine the experiences of women from different generations and backgrounds. Fairbairns specializes in reworking popular genre from a feminist perspe…
A. R. D. Fairburn (Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn) Biography - (1904–57), (Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn), We New Zealanders, Strange Rendezvous, Three Poems, Collected Poems, Fairburn, Letters
New Zealand poet, born in Auckland and educated at the grammar school there, where he became friendly with R. A. K. Mason. He travelled widely, doing various jobs, though his period in England from 1930 to 1932 was a disillusioning experience. Upon his return he was an editor, scriptwriter, and university lecturer, and was instrumental in awakening New Zealand sensibility and nationalism; though h…
John Meade Falkner Biography - (1858–1932), Handbook for Travellers in Oxfordshire, Handbook for Berkshire, Bath in History and Social Tradition
British novelist and topographical writer, born in Wiltshire, educated at Oxford University. He worked as a tutor to the children of Sir Alfred Noble, a partner in Armstrong's, the Newcastle armaments company. He was later Noble's secretary and was chairman of Armstrong's from 1915 to 1921. In 1925 he became Honorary Librarian at Durham Cathedral and Honorary Reader in Palaeography at the city's u…
Padraic Fallon Biography - (1905–74), Poems, Lighting up Time, The Vision of MacConglinne, Steeple Jerkin, The Hags of Clough
Irish poet and playwright, born in Athenry, County Galway. He was a customs official, principally in Wexford, for forty years. Although his poems in anthologies and his writing for radio gained him a reputation as one of the most noteworthy Irish poets in the years following the death of W. B. Yeats, no independent collection of his verse appeared until Poems (1974). His only other publication was…
Family Reunion, The
a play by T. S. Eliot, first performed in 1939, a modern variation on the Orestes story. Harry Lord Monchensey returns to his house, Wishwood, obsessed with the idea that he has killed the manic-depressive wife who was emotionally destroying him, and convinced that he is pursued by ?sleepless hunters that will not let me sleep?. In this loveless, ossified place, he eventually learns that it was hi…
fantasy
A term used to describe the vast range of non-realistic works frequently known as the ?literature of the Fantastic?, a phrase which incorporates myths and legends, folklore and fairy tales, allegory, dream stories, science fiction, utopias, and fantasy itself. Within this framework a fantasy can be described as an internally coherent story dealing with events and worlds which are impossible. This …
John Fante (John Thomas Fante) Biography - (1909–83), (John Thomas Fante), American Mercury, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, Ask the Dust, Dago Red
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Colorado; he attended a Jesuit boarding school, then Long Beach City College. His stories appeared in H. L. Mencken's American Mercury and in popular magazines throughout the 1930s. Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938) and Ask the Dust (1939) are picaresque novels featuring ?Arturo Bandini?, an aspiring writer, the latter set amidst cheap hotels and r…
U. A. Fanthorpe (Ursula Askham Fanthorpe) Biography - (1929– ), (Ursula Askham Fanthorpe), Side Effects, Standing To, A Watching Brief, Neck-Verse, Selected Poems
British poet, born in Lee Green, London, educated at St Anne's College, Oxford. In 1954 she entered school-teaching, becoming Head of English at Cheltenham Ladies' College in 1962. She resigned in 1970 in order to further her writing, becoming, in her own words, ?a middle-aged drop-out?; she took temporary jobs and later worked as a clerk in a Bristol hospital. She held an Arts Council Writer's Fe…
Nuruddin Farah Biography - (1945– ), From a Crooked Rib, A Naked Needle, Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines, Close Sesame
Somali novelist, born in Baidoa, in what was then Italian Somaliland, educated at Institution di Magistrale di Mogadishu, and the Universities of London and Essex. He has travelled widely and held academic posts in Europe, the USA, and Africa. His novels, written in English, have been described as political thrillers, but he uses the form to examine not only Somali society and politics, but also f…
Beverley Farmer Biography - (1941– ), Alone, Milk, Hometime, Place of Birth, A Body of Water, The Seal Woman
Australian short-story writer and novelist, born in Melbourne, educated at the University of Melbourne. Following her marriage to a Greek she lived in Greece for several years before returning to Australia. Her first novel, Alone (1980), deals with the romantic, poeticized lesbian relationship of Shirley, a young woman afraid of heterosexual experience. It was followed by two volumes of short stor…
J. G. Farrell (James Gordon Farrell) Biography - (1935–79), (James Gordon Farrell), A Man from Elsewhere, The Lung, A Girl in the Head, Troubles
Anglo-Irish novelist, born in Liverpool, educated at Rossall School and Brasenose College, Oxford. As well as travels to the USA, Europe, and the East, he spent several years teaching in France, the setting of his first novel, A Man from Elsewhere (1963). His next novel, The Lung (1965), centres on a victim of poliomyelitis, an illness which Farrell had contracted while at Oxford. A Girl in the He…
James T. Farrell (James Thomas Farrell) Biography - (1904–79), (James Thomas Farrell), Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy, Young Lonigan
American author, born on the South Side of Chicago, where he lived until he was 27. He was educated at Chicago University, where he wrote the first parts of his famous Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy (1935): comprising Young Lonigan (1932), a stream-of-consciousness narrative which records the youth as a baseball enthusiast and pupil at a Catholic school living in Chicago's seedy South Side; The Young Ma…
Howard Fast Biography - (1914–2003), Two Valleys, Conceived in Liberty: A Novel of Valley Forge, The Unvanquished
American novelist, born in New York City; he spent two years at the National Academy of Design but, convinced that he would never be an artist, he embarked on a career as a writer. His first novel, Two Valleys (1933), established his forte for historical fiction used to promote radical, leftwing politics. Two Valleys is a tale of the American frontier during the Revolutionary War, a historical set…
William Faulkner Biography - (1897–1962), The White Rose of Memphis, Mississippian, The Marble Faun, Heart of Darkness
American novelist, poet, and short-story writer, born in New Albany, Mississippi, educated at the University of Mississippi; he served with the Royal Air Force in Canada in 1918. Faulkner's great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner (Faulkner added the ?u? to his surname in 1924), commanded a Southern regiment during the American Civil War and wrote one of the most popular Southern novels of…