Encyclopedia of Literature: Sebastian Faulks Biography to Football Milieu
Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
Jessie R. Fauset (Jessie Redmon Fauset) Biography - (1882–1961), (Jessie Redmon Fauset), The Crisis, There Is Confusion, Plum Bun, The Chinaberry Tree
African-American novelist, born in New Jersey, educated at Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Sorbonne. She was a high-school teacher and, during 1912?26, an editor of Du Bois's The Crisis, a periodical associated with the Harlem Renaissance. As a novelist, she was primarily concerned with the African-American middle class, and its struggle for betterment and for a fair de…
Kenneth Fearing (Kenneth Flexner Fearing) Biography - (1902–61), (Kenneth Flexner Fearing), Angel Arms, Poems, Dead Reckoning, Afternoon of a Pawnbroker
American poet and novelist, born in Oak Park, Illinois, educated at the University of Wisconsin. The radical antagonism towards middle-class values expressed in Angel Arms (1929) and Poems (1935), his first two collections of verse, gained him eminence among the American socialist poets of the 1930s; his expansive free verse employs vigorously colloquial diction to frame its blackly humorous and s…
Federal Theatre Project - (1935–9), Works Progress Administration, Arena, the Story of the Federal Theatre
Founded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of the most productive of Roosevelt's New Deal agencies, it was established to provide work for thousands of theatre workers made idle by the Depression. According to WPA director Harry Hopkins, its secondary aim was to provide ?free, adult, uncensored theatre?, but censorship in the form of the House Un-American Activities Committee caused i…
Federal Writers' Project - Works Progress Administration, Travels with Charley in Search of America
A branch of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Federal Writers' Project was established in 1935 to sponsor national projects for the relief of unemployed writers. The project employed some 4,500 to 5,000 people and produced a steady stream of books, pamphlets and ?issuances?, including the series of guides to American cities and states (celebrated in John St…
Raymond Federman Biography - (1928– ), Double or Nothing, Take It or Leave It, The Voice in the Closet
American novelist and critic, born in Paris, educated at Columbia University and the University of California at Los Angeles. Federman migrated to the USA in 1948 and took American citizenship in 1953. He is generally considered one of the central figures in the ?school? of post-modernist, anti-realist fiction which began to dominate the American novel in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his wo…
Elaine Feinstein Biography - (1930– ), In a Green Eye, The Magic Apple Tree, The Celebrants and Other Poems
British poet and novelist, born in Lancashire of Ukrainian Jewish descent, educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. After working as an editor and a university lecturer Feinstein made her reputation as a poet: her collections include In a Green Eye (1966), The Magic Apple Tree (1971), The Celebrants and Other Poems (1973), The Feast of Euridice (1980), and City Music (1990). Feinstein's early influ…
Alison Fell Biography - (1944– ), The Grey Dancer, Every Move You Make, Kisses for Mayakovsky, The Bad Box
Scottish novelist and poet, born in Dumfries, Scotland; she trained as a sculptor in Edinburgh, and moved to London in 1970. Involved for several years with the women's movement, she was a member of the Spare Rib Collective. Her first published work was a novel for children, The Grey Dancer (1981). Her first adult novel, Every Move You Make (1984), was in the realist mode of confessional feminism.…
feminist criticism - A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas, Sexual Politics, Literary Women
There were, of course, feminists and feminist criticism long before the terms were used with any frequency, but a convenient modern landmark is Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929), perhaps best read in conjunction with her less conciliatory Three Guineas (1938). Woolf addressed the question of women both as writers and as characters in works written by men, concluding that there was a huge…
Ernest Fenollosa (Ernest Francisco Fenollosa) Biography - (1853–1908), (Ernest Francisco Fenollosa), Imagination in Art, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, Cathay, Noh
American orientalist and aesthetician, born in Salem, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard; in 1877 he began teaching at Tokyo University, where he developed a deep interest in Japanese painting. He was appointed Imperial Commissioner of Fine Arts by the Japanese administration in 1886. He subsequently lectured widely in the USA on art education and Japanese art. His numerous works include Imaginati…
James Fenton (James Martin Fenton) Biography - (1949– ), (James Martin Fenton), New Statesman, All the Wrong Places, The Times, Independent, Our Western Furniture
British poet, born in Lincoln, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He worked at the New Statesman from 1971 to 1973, when began two years as a freelance correspondent in Indo-China; All the Wrong Places (1988) is a collection of his despatches from Cambodia during a time of great political and military turbulence. After a period as chief literary critic for The Times he returned to the Far East …
Edna Ferber Biography - (1885–1968), Dawn O'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed, So Big, Showboat, Cimarron, Saratoga Trunk
American novelist, born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She began her writing career as a cub reporter with a local paper but soon turned to fiction; her first novel, Dawn O'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed, was published in 1911. A prolific writer, she enjoyed popular success with such later novels as the family drama So Big (1924), set on a farm. The colourful Showboat (1926), with its tragic sub-plot of raci…
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Biography - (1920– ), Beatitude, Pictures from the Gone World, A Coney Island of the Mind
American poet, born in New York, educated at the University of North Carolina, Columbia University, and the Sorbonne. He was the fifth son of an Italian immigrant father and Portuguese mother; on his father's sudden death his mother went insane and was placed in an asylum. He was rescued from a New York orphanage by a relative, and taken to France for several years; after returning to America he w…
Patrick Leigh Fermor (Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor) Biography - (1915– ), (Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor), A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water
born in London, educated at King's School, Canterbury. From 1935 to 1939 he travelled from Rotterdam to Istanbul; the first two books of a trilogy describing the journey, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1985), form a richly evocative record of European social and cultural patterns destroyed by the Second World War. He received the OBE and DSO for his active service in A…
Leslie A. Fiedler (Leslie Aaron Fiedler) Biography - (1917–2003), (Leslie Aaron Fiedler), An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics, Partisan Review
American critic, born in Newark, New Jersey, educated at the universities of New York and Madison, Wisconsin. After war service he was, from 1947 to 1963, Professor of English at Montana State University and since then has taught at the University of New York, Buffalo. An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (1955) showed Fiedler's polemical flair, and also included ?Come Back to the R…
Field Day Theatre Company - Translations, An Open Letter, Civilians and Barbarians, The Whole Protestant Community
founded in Derry city by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea in 1980. Since staging Friel's play Translations (1980), Field Day has reassessed the borders of its initial identity as a theatre company and has become a broader intellectual project seeking possible cultural and political solutions to the problems of Northern Ireland. With the addition of Seamus Heaney, David Hammond, Tom Paulin, and Seamus D…
Gabriel Fielding, pseudonym of Alan Barnsley) Biography - (1916–87), pseudonym of Alan Barnsley), Brotherly Love, In the Time of Greenbloom, The Birthday King
British novelist, born in Hexham, Northumbria, educated at Trinity College, Dublin; he practised as a doctor. A descendant of Henry Fielding, and a convert to Catholicism, much of Fielding's work is characterized by an intense feeling for a sinful man's desire for grace and for the battle between the flesh and the spirit. Brotherly Love (1954) introduces the Blaydons, a country clergyman's family;…
Harvey Fierstein Biography - (1954– ), Torch Song Trilogy, The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, Women and Children First
American playwright, born in Brooklyn. He came to prominence with the 1981 Off-Broadway production of Torch Song Trilogy which won a Tony award for its 1982 Broadway production; the author starred in both the play and his screen adaptation of 1988. The trilogy consists of three previously produced one-act plays (The International Stud, 1978; Fugue in a Nursery, 1979; Women and Children First!, 197…
Eva Figes Biography - (1932– ), Equinox, Winter Journey, Light, The Seven Ages, Ghosts, The Tree of Knowledge, The Tenancy
British novelist and cultural critic, born in Berlin; her family moved to England in 1939. She was educated at Queen Mary College, University of London, and has worked as an editor for a number of publishers. Her novels focus on the subjective consciousness and show acute sensitivity to historical realities, and a debt to Kafka. In her rejection of external realism, Figes explains that ?The Englis…
Timothy Findley Biography - (1930–2002), The Last of the Crazy People, The Wars, Famous Last Words
Canadian novelist, born in Toronto. He was an actor and a Hollywood dialogue writer before becoming a full-time author in the early 1960s. He has continued to write for the media, producing radio and television plays and documentaries, usually in collaboration with William Whitehead. Findley's fiction explores boundaries in ?the countries of our invention? between fiction, history, and truth. His …
Ian Hamilton Finlay Biography - (1925–2006), Glasgow Herald; The Sea-Bed and Other Stories, The Dancers Inherit the Party
Scottish poet, graphic artist, and sculptor; born in Nassau in the Bahamas, he grew up in Scotland. During the early 1950s he worked on farms in the Orkneys and began publishing short stories in the Glasgow Herald; The Sea-Bed and Other Stories (1958) contained work notable for its simplicity and symbolic power. The Dancers Inherit the Party (1960), a selection of his ?sophisticated folk poems?, i…
Finnegans Wake - Scienza Nuova
an experimental prose work by James Joyce, published in 1939. Written in a dense, richly textured, and allusive style, whose punning, fragmentary quality mirrors the free-associating nature of the dreaming mind, the book is perhaps the definitive and most extreme work of literary Modernism. At once simple and complex, its narrative, which takes place in a single night but also incorporates the who…
Ronald Firbank (Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank) Biography - (1886–1926), (Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank), Vainglory, Inclinations, Caprice, Valmouth, The Princess Zoubaroff, Santal
British novelist, born in London. His grandfather was a Durham miner who made his fortune as a railway contractor, his father a Unionist MP who was knighted on the accession of Edward VII. His childhood was spent in Chislehurst, a town whose connections with the exiled Empress Eugenie may have fed his enduring fascination with both royalty and Catholicism. His first book, containing the two tales …
Ruth First Biography - (1925–82)
South African journalist, political activist, and theorist, born in Johannesburg, educated at the University of Witwatersrand. She began her writing career as an investigative journalist exposing the grim working conditions of non-white and migrant labourers. She was killed by a letter bomb sent to the Centre for African Studies in Maputo, Mozambique, where she had been research director since 197…
First Men in the Moon, The - The First Men in the Moon, Out of the Silent Planet
a novel by H. G. Wells, published in 1901. In Wells's only interplanetary novel, two ill-assorted explorers, Mr Cavor and Mr Bedford?the pure scientist and the entrepreneur?travel to the moon in a sphere powered by the mysterious anti-gravity substance Cavorite. After experiencing weightlessness, the miraculous lunar sunrise, and the thinness of the moon's atmosphere, they are captured by the ant-…
First Statement - Preview, Northern Review, First Statement's, The Western Free-Lance, When We Are Young
a Montreal magazine primarily devoted to poetry, founded in 1942 by John Sutherland in association with Robert Simpson, Keith MacLellan, and others. Sutherland is said to have been prompted to begin the journal in response to the rejection of his verse by Preview; a measure of sometimes antagonistic rivalry existed between the two in the earlier years of their comparatively short publishing histor…
Stanley Fish (Stanley Eugene Fish) Biography - (1938– ), (Stanley Eugene Fish), John Skelton's Poetry
American critic, born in Providence, Rhode Island, educated at the University of Pennsylvania and at Yale. He subsequently held a succession of posts including Professor of English at the University of California and at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English and Law at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. John Skelton's Poetry (1965) was w…
Roy Fisher Biography - (1930– ), City, The Memorial Fountain, The Thing about Joe Sullivan, Running Changes, A Furnace, Poems
British poet, born in Handsworth, Birmingham, educated at the University of Birmingham. He has held several teaching posts, including lecturer in American Studies at the University of Keele. The imaginative involvement with Birmingham in much of his writing pervades the impressionistic survey of City (1961), his first collection of poetry. Numerous subsequent volumes have included The Memorial Fou…
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald) Biography - (1896–1940), (Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald), This Side of Paradise, Flappers and Philosophers
American novelist and short-story writer, born in St Paul, Minnesota. He entered Princeton University at the age of 17 where he took part in a variety of extracurricular literary and dramatic activities and befriended campus intellectuals like Edmund Wilson. He then joined the army and was posted to Montgomery, Alabama, where he fell in love with Zelda Sayre, a local belle, who refused to marry hi…
Penelope Fitzgerald Biography - (1916–2000), Punch, The Golden Child, The Bookshop, Offshore, Human Voices, At Freddie's, Innocence
British novelist and biographer, born in Lincoln, educated at Somerville College, Oxford. Her father, Edward (?Evoe?) Knox, edited Punch from 1932 to 1940; her uncles were Dillwyn Knox, the Greek scholar and cryptographer, and Wilfred and Ronald Knox, the theologians. Fitzgerald worked at the BBC during the Second World War and began her writing career in her sixties. Her novels draw on her experi…
R. D. Fitzgerald (Robert David Fitzgerald) Biography - (1902–87), (Robert David Fitzgerald), Vision, To Meet the Sun, Moonlight Acre, Heemskerck Shoals, Between Two Tides
Australian poet, born in Sydney. A surveyor by profession, Fitzgerald was also involved in the production of the journal Vision in which his early work appeared. He won wide recognition with his second volume of poems, To Meet the Sun (1929), which contained ?The Greater Apollo? (published separately in 1927), a series of poems mediating upon the opposing themes of transience and reality. Moonligh…
George Fitzmaurice Biography - (1878–1963), The Country Dressmaker, The Playboy of the Western World, The Pie-Dish
Irish play-wright, born near Listowel, Co. Kerry; his father was a Church of Ireland clergyman and his mother a Catholic. He went to work for the Civil Service in Dublin in 1901, and lived in the city for most of his life, working at the Department of Agriculture. Though less renowned, Fitzmaurice ranks with Synge and O'Casey as one of the Abbey Theatre's most important early dramatists. He began …
Peter Flannery Biography - (1951– ), Savage Amusement, Our Friends in the North, Singer, Blind Justice
British dramatist, born in Jarrow, educated at Manchester University. His first successful play, Savage Amusement (1978), involves the search for survival in the slums of a disintegrating Manchester at some unspecified date in the future, and his subsequent work has also been critically concerned with social and political subjects. This includes the epic Our Friends in the North (1982), about corr…
Flaubert's Parrot - The History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Bouvard et Pécuchet, Un Coeur Simple
a novel by Julian Barnes, published in 1984. With its eclectic mixture of first-person narrative and scholarly digression (also used to effect in Barnes's later The History of the World in 10? Chapters), the work displays the author's playfully post-modern approach to his subject, which in this instance is the life of Gustave Flaubert. Narrated by a retired doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, who is on …
James Elroy Flecker (Herman James Elroy Flecker) Biography - (1884–1915), (Herman James Elroy Flecker), The Bridge of Fire, The Last Generation, Forty-Two Poems
British poet, born in Lewisham, London, educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and at Caius College, Cambridge. Having written poetry since the age of 12, his style matured at Oxford, where he absorbed the influences of the aesthetic movement of the 1890s. The Bridge of Fire (1907) was his first collection of verse. In 1910 he entered the Consular Service and was vice-consul in Beirut from 1911 to 1…
Ian Fleming (Ian Lancaster Fleming) Biography - (1908–64), (Ian Lancaster Fleming), Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever
British thriller writer and journalist, educated at Eton and Sandhurst. He worked as a journalist, serving in Moscow, and during the Second World War worked for British Naval Intelligence. These experiences provided the background for his hugely successful series of James Bond novels, beginning with Casino Royale (1953) and including Live and Let Die (1954), Diamonds Are Forever (1956), and On Her…
Peter Fleming (Robert Peter Fleming) Biography - (1907–71), (Robert Peter Fleming), My Aunt's Rhinoceros, Goodbye to the Bombay Bowler, Brazilian Adventure
British travel writer and military historian, born in London, the brother of Ian Fleming, educated at Christ Church, Oxford. From 1931 onward he wrote for the Spectator; collections of his articles include My Aunt's Rhinoceros (1956) and Goodbye to the Bombay Bowler (1961). Brazilian Adventure (1933), his humorously understated account of an ill-managed expedition to find the lost explorer Colonel…
John Gould Fletcher Biography - (1886–1950), Irradiations: Sand and Spray, Goblins and Pagodas, Japanese Prints, Branches of Adam
American poet, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, educated at Harvard. In 1908 he moved to London and privately published five volumes of his poetry. Following the development of his firm friendship with Amy Lowell, he emerged as a leading exponent of Imagism. Irradiations: Sand and Spray (1915) and Goblins and Pagodas (1916) contained musically experimental verse rich in imagery of vivid precision. J…
F. S. Flint (Frank Stuart Flint) Biography - (1885–1960), (Frank Stuart Flint), In the Net of the Stars, Cadences, Otherworld, Times Literary Supplement
British poet, born in Islington, London; he left school at 13 and worked in various capacities before beginning his long and distinguished career in the Civil Service in 1904. By 1910, his intensive private study had gained him recognition as one of Britain's most highly informed authorities on modern French poetry. His first collection of poems, In the Net of the Stars (1909), consisted mainly of…
Fools of Fortune
a novel by William Trevor, published in 1983. Divided into six sections of decreasing length, the novel is narrated alternately by William, a son of the Protestant Irish gentry, and by Marianne, his English cousin and lover. The third and sixth sections, told in the third person, focus on their daughter. The first section begins in 1918 with William relating the history of his family, the Quintons…
Michael Foot (Ford Mackintosh Ford) Biography - (1913– ), (Ford Mackintosh Ford), Evening Standard, The Pen and the Sword, Aneurin Bevan
British politician, essayist, and biographer, born in Plymouth, educated at Wadham College, Oxford. He became editor of the Evening Standard before beginning his long and distinguished career as a Labour Member of Parliament in 1945. His historical and biographical studies include The Pen and the Sword (1957), on Jonathan Swift as a political pamphleteer; Aneurin Bevan (2 volumes, 1962, 1973); and…