Encyclopedia of Literature: Samuel Foote Biography to Furioso

Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction

Carolyn Forché Biography - (1950– ), Gathering the Tribes, The Country Between Us, The Angel of History

American poet, born in Detroit, educated at Michigan State and Bowling Green universities. Gathering the Tribes (1976), her first collection, was selected for the Yale Younger Poets series. The Country Between Us (1981) made a remarkable impact with its critique of regimes in Eastern Europe and El Salvador. The poems are frequently graphic in their details of imprisonment, torture, and mutilation:…

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Ford Madox Ford, formerly Ford Hermann Hueffer Biography - (1873–1939), formerly Ford Hermann Hueffer, The Times, Memories and Impressions, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

British novelist and editor, born in Surrey. The son of Dr Francis Hueffer, a music critic on The Times, and grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, Ford's earliest influences were the Pre-Raphaelite artists and writers of his parents' circle including Dante Gabriel Rossetti (about whom he wrote a study in 1902). Ford wrote of this period, ?[I] came out of the hothouse atmosphere …

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Richard Ford Biography - (1944– ), A Piece of My Heart, The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Wildlife, Rock Springs

American novelist and short-story writer, born in Jackson, Mississippi. Although Southern in origin he is more obviously associated with a group of writers emerging from the MidWest. His first novel, A Piece of My Heart (1976), concerns the quest of two men, one in search of a woman, the other trying to discover the truth about his own past. The Sportswriter (1986) is an evocative and moving study…

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Formalism - required

is a term generally applied to works of art or critical approaches which highlight formal properties?often, it is characteristically suggested, at the expense of the content of the object in question, so the term has acquired a faintly derogatory note. One solution to this problem has been to argue, as much modern criticism does, that form and content are inseparable, if not the same thing. This m…

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Maria Irene Fornes Biography - (1930– ), Promenade, Fefu and Her Friends, Eyes on the Harem, A Visit, The Conduct of Life

American dramatist, born in Havana, Cuba, where she was educated in public schools; she went to the US in 1945 and became an American citizen in 1951. Initially trained as a painter, throughout the 1960s she served a long apprenticeship as a writer and director of Off-Off-Broadway theatre working in an experimental and anti-realist style, developing her distinctive voice within the Actors' Studio …

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E. M. Forster (Edward Morgan Forster) Biography - (1879–1970), (Edward Morgan Forster), Abinger Harvest, Independent Review, Where Angels Fear To Tread, The Longest Journey

British novelist, critic, and essayist. He was the only child of Edward Forster, an architect, who died nine months after the birth of his son, and Alice ?Lily? Whichelo. Forster's happiest childhood years were spent in Rooksnest, a house near Stevenage, where he was cared for by servants and a loving mother until they moved to Tonbridge in 1893, in order that Forster might attend Tonbridge School…

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Margaret Forster Biography - (1938– ), Dame's Delight, Georgy Girl, The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury

British novelist and biographer, born in Carlisle, educated at Somerville College, Oxford. Ever since her early novels, Dame's Delight (1964), the story of a Northern scholarship girl's rebellion against male authority at Oxford, and Georgy Girl (1965), which examined seduction traps and sexual liberation, Forster has tended to use her own circumstances as a starting-point for her fiction, which e…

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Forsyte Saga, The - The Man of Property, In Chancery, To Let, Awakening, The Forsyte Saga, A Modern Comedy

a sequence of novels by J. Galsworthy, published in 1922. Previously published separately as three novels (The Man of Property) 1906; In Chancery, 1920; and To Let, 1921), and two interludes (?Indian Summer of a Forsyte?, 1918, and Awakening, 1920), the sequence chronicles the social, financial, and emotional vicissitudes of the Forsyte family whose paterfamilias, Soames Forsyte, epitomizes both t…

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Fortunes of Richard Mahony, The - Australia Felix, The Way Home, Ultima Thule

a trilogy of novels by Henry Handel Richardson, consisting of Australia Felix (1917), The Way Home (1925), and Ultima Thule (1929), published in one volume in 1930. Based largely on the life of the author's father, the work describes the central character's life from the early 1850s onwards. Australia Felix opens in 1852, and gives an account of the life of Richard Mahony, a 28-year-old immigrant …

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For Whom the Bell Tolls

a novel by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1940. A novel of the Spanish Civil War, in which an American volunteer in the Loyalist forces, Robert Jordan, has been sent into the mountains near Segovia to execute the bombing of a bridge. As he waits with a guerrilla band he encounters Maria, a victim of Fascist attack and rape, and they fall passionately in love. A sense of foreboding develops as the …

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David Foster Biography - (1944– ), The Pure Land, Moonlite, Plumbum, Dog Rock, The Pale Blue Crotchet Coathanger Cover

Australian writer, born in Sydney, educated at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University. His work eschews realism for satirical allegory, parable, and comic pastiche and has attracted critical attention for its exuberant inventiveness. His first novel, The Pure Land (1974), centres on three generations of an Australian family beginning with Albert Manwaring, a photographer w…

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Four Quartets - Collected Poems, 1909–1935, New English Weekly, Murder in the Cathedral

the last of T. S. Eliot's major poetic works, first published in its entirety in New York in 1943. Each of its four sections, which sustain a meditation on the temporal and eternal orders of reality, reflects one of the four seasons and draws concrete and associational imagery from the location whose name supplies its title: ?Burnt Norton? is a Cotswold house the poet initially visited in 1934; ?E…

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H. W. Fowler (Henry Watson Fowler) Biography - (1858–1933), (Henry Watson Fowler), Popular Fallacies, Between Boy and Man, The King's English

English lexicographer and grammarian, born in Tonbridge, Kent, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. After retiring as a schoolmaster on an issue of principle, he wrote literary essays for periodicals, including those collected in Popular Fallacies (1904) and Between Boy and Man (1908). With his brother, Francis George Fowler (1870?1918), he wrote The King's English (1906), a popular work of gramma…

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John Fowles Biography - (1926–2005), The Collector, The Aristos: A Self Portrait in Ideas, The Magus

British novelist and essayist, born in Leighton-on-Sea, Essex, educated at New College, Oxford. Fowles was a teacher in France and Greece (which resurface as landscapes in his fiction), there increasing his knowledge of classical and contemporary philosophies, and assimilating the French literary influences absorbed during his university years. His first novel, The Collector (1963), was a best-sel…

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Janet Frame Biography - (1924–2004), The Lagoon, Faces in the Water, Owls Do Cry, The Edge of the Alphabet

New Zealand writer, born in Dunedin, educated at Otago University and Dunedin Teachers' Training College. Early stories were published in The Lagoon (1951, revised 1961). Faces in the Water (1961) drew creatively and with harrowing directness upon her many years of incarceration in institutions for the mentally ill. Frame left New Zealand in 1956, and lived for many years in England and the USA be…

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Ronald Frame Biography - (1953– ), Watching Mrs Gordon, A Long Weekend with Marcel Proust, A Woman of Judah, Winter Journey

Scottish novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, born in Glasgow, educated at Glasgow University and at Oxford. In his volumes of short stories Frame has displayed his gift for ironic counterpoint and the evocation of period. Among these are Watching Mrs Gordon (1985); A Long Weekend with Marcel Proust (1986), which contained short stories and a novella, ?Prelude and Fugue?, about a young wo…

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Waldo Frank (Waldo David Frank) Biography - (1889–1967), (Waldo David Frank), The New York Times, Evening Post, The Seven Arts, Nouvelle Revue Française

, American novelist, literary and social critic, born in Long Branch, New Jersey, educated at Yale University. A freelance writer for The New York Times and Evening Post, he was a co-founder and editor of The Seven Arts, and also US correspondent for the Nouvelle Revue Fran?aise. Several early novels appeared, among them The Unwelcome Man (1917), The Dark Mother (1920), Rahab (1922), City Block (…

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Pamela Frankau Biography - (1908–67), The Marriage of Harlequin, She and I, Tassell-Gentle, The Devil We Know

, British novelist, born in London. After refusing the offer of a place at Cambridge, she devoted herself to writing. Her first published novel, The Marriage of Harlequin (1927), appeared when she was 19 and was followed by over thirty others, including She and I (1930); Tassell-Gentle (1934), about a man losing his memory in an air crash; The Devil We Know (1939), which explores her feelings abo…

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Miles Franklin (Miles Stella Marie Sarah Franklin) Biography - (1879–1954), (Miles Stella Marie Sarah Franklin), My Brilliant Career, All That Swagger, My Career Goes Bung

, Australian novelist, born in New South Wales. Her early years were spent at Brindabella, her parents' remote farm in New South Wales, and later at Possum Gully which formed the background for her most famous work, My Brilliant Career (1901), a largely autobiographical novel about a young girl, Sybylla Melvyn, whose aspirations to become a writer are thwarted by the conventions and strictures of…

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G. S. Fraser (George Sutherland Fraser) Biography - (1915–80), (George Sutherland Fraser), The Fatal Landscape, The White Horseman, Home Town Elegy

, Scottish poet and critic, born in Glasgow, educated at St Andrew's University. He was a journalist in Aberdeen until 1939, when he joined the Black Watch regiment; some of his most memorable poems are derived from his extended periods on active service in the Middle East. After working in various capacities, principally as a literary journalist, he became a lecturer at the University of Leicest…

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Michael Frayn Biography - (1933– ), Manchester Guardian, Observer, The Tin Man, The Russian Interpreter, Towards the Edge of the Morning

, British novelist and playwright; he was born, brought up, and educated in the South London suburbs, took a degree in moral philosophy at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, became proficient as a Russian speaker during his National Service, and became a journalist, writing humorous columns first for the Manchester Guardian, then for the Observer. His novels include The Tin Man (1965); The Russian Inte…

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Sir James George Frazer Biography - (1854–1941), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Totemism, The Golden Bough, Totemism and Exogamy

, British anthropologist, historian of religion, and classical scholar, born in Glasgow, where he obtained his MA at the University in 1874. In 1879 he became a fellow of Trinity College, where he remained in residence for most of his life. He was introduced to anthropology by his close friend Robertson Smith (1846?94), co-editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1875?89), for…

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Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman) Biography - (1852–1930), (Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman), Pembroke, The Shoulders of Atlas, Harper's Bazaar

American writer, born in Randolph, Massachusetts. She is known primarily for her regional fiction set in her native Massachusetts and in Vermont where she lived. She wrote essays, plays, poetry, children's books, and novels, including Pembroke (1894) and The Shoulders of Atlas (1908), but she is best remembered for her short stories. Many of these appeared in magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and …

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R. Austin Freeman (Richard Austin Freeman) Biography - (1862–1943), (Richard Austin Freeman), Travels and Life in Ashanti and Jaman, The Adventures of Romney Pringle

British detectivestory writer. The son of a Soho tailor, he studied medicine, entered the Colonial Service, and in 1887 was posted to the Gold Coast. Invalided home with blackwater fever in 1891, he turned to writing, producing Travels and Life in Ashanti and Jaman (1898), a classic in the travel genre. His first detective stories, The Adventures of Romney Pringle, written in conjunction with a fr…

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free verse - vers libre, The Faber Book of Modern Verse, varied

a poetic mode given wide currency from around 1910 onward by the emergence of Imagism, whose practitioners sought, in F. S. Flint's words, to ?compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome?. The versions of the Psalms in the Authorized Version, Walt Whitman's incantationally flexible measures, and the vers libre of Jules Laforgue and others were among the preced…

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French Lieutenant's Woman, The - nouveau roman

a novel by John Fowles, published in 1969. The narrative centres on a Victorian romance between Sarah Woodruff, a governess isolated by the local community for her reported former liaison with a French naval officer, and Charles Smithson, an aristocratic Victorian palaeontologist who is engaged to Ernestina Freeman, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Sarah is dismissed from her post in Lyme Re…

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Bruce Jay Friedman Biography - (1930– ), Scuba Duba, Stern, A Mother's Kisses, The Dick, About Harry Towns, Tokyo Woes

American novelist and dramatist, born in the Bronx, New York City, educated at the University of Missouri. He served in the US Army, and then worked in publishing. Friedman is best known as a novelist and short-story writer, whose one successful play is the comedy Scuba Duba, produced at the New Theatre in New York in 1967. Like his novels, Scuba Duba is a witty comedy of the tensions of Jewish fa…

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Milton Friedman Biography - (1912–2006), Essays in Positive Economics, Capitalism and Freedom, Dollars and Deficits, Free To Choose

American economist, born in New York City, educated at Rutgers, and the universities of Columbia and Chicago, where he became Professor of Economics in 1946. Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1977, he is the best-known advocate of the universal advantages of freemarket capitalism and of monetarist economic policies, and is the foremost member of the so-called Chicago School of Economic…

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Brian Friel Biography - (1929– ), Philadelphia, Here I Come, Freedom of the City, Volunteers, Translations

Northern Irish dramatist, born in Omagh, Co. Tyrone, educated in Derry and Belfast; he later became a teacher. His first substantial success was Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964), in which two actors embody the private and public frustrations of a young Irishman about to emigrate to America. This has been followed by many plays, some of them directly concerned with the agonies of Northern Ireland, …

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George Friel Biography - (1910–75), The Bank of Time, The Boy Who Wanted Peace, Grace and Miss Partridge

Scottish novelist, born and brought up in Glasgow, where he worked as a teacher. Of a poor background, Friel portrayed the lives of the underprivileged and uncharted, and his work is dense with the life of the poorer districts of Glasgow. He published The Bank of Time (1959), The Boy Who Wanted Peace (1964), Grace and Miss Partridge (1969), Mr. Alfred MA (1972), and An Empty House (1975). Of these…

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Robert Frost (Robert Lee Frost) Biography - (1874–1963), (Robert Lee Frost), New York Independent, Twilight, A Boy's Will, North of Boston

American poet, born in San Francisco; he grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, after the death of his father, a newspaper editor originally from New England, and was educated at Lawrence High school, where he was elected ?class poet? in his final year. He attended Dartmouth College in 1892 and, having worked as a cobbler, a farmer, and editor of a local newspaper, studied at Harvard from 1897 to 189…

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Frost in May

a novel by A. White, published in 1933. It was described by Elizabeth Bowen as not only a classic girls' school story, but a work of art: ?intense, troubling, semi-miraculous?. In 1908, nine-year-old Nanda Grey, the daughter of a convert, arrives at the Convent of the Five Wounds, where the creation of ?soldiers of Christ, accustomed to hardship and ridicule and ingratitude? is a governing princip…

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Christopher Fry (Christopher Harris Fry) Biography - (1907–2005), (Christopher Harris Fry), The Boy with a Cart, The Firstborn, A Sleep of Prisoners

British poet and playwright, born in Bristol, the son of a Church of England lay preacher, educated at Bedford Modern School. He later adopted the name of his mother's Quaker family and served in a non-combatant unit in the Second World War. He was a schoolmaster, an actor, and a producer before writing a dramatic tale about St Cuthman, The Boy with a Cart, in 1938. Much of his subsequent work?for…

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Roger Fry (Roger Eliot Fry) Biography - (1866–1934), (Roger Eliot Fry), Athenaeum, Burlington Magazine, Discourses, Vision and Design, Transformations, Cézanne, Last Lectures

British art critic and painter, born in London, educated at King's College, Cambridge. Having read natural sciences Fry turned to painting and became interested in Renaissance art after visits to Italy. He was art critic of the Athenaeum in 1901, co-founded the Burlington Magazine in 1903, and was director of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1905 to 1910. In 1910 he founded th…

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Northrop Frye (Herman Northrop Frye) Biography - (1912–91), (Herman Northrop Frye), Fearful Symmetry, A Natural Perspective, Fools of Time, The Educated Imagination

Canadian critic, born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, educated at Victoria College, University of Toronto; he studied theology at Emmanuel College, Canada, and literature at Merton College, Oxford. From 1940 Frye was a member of the faculty of the University of Toronto, becoming Chancellor of Victoria College in 1979. His early work on Blake (Fearful Symmetry, 1947) gained him instant notice, and his conti…

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Athol Fugard (Athol Harold Lannigan Fugard) Biography - (1932– ), (Athol Harold Lannigan Fugard), Tsotsi, No-Good Friday, Nongogo, ‘Dimetos’ and Two Early Plays

South African playwright, born in Middleburg, Cape Province; he grew up in Port Elizabeth and was educated at Cape Town University. His father, of English descent, was a shopkeeper, and his mother an Afrikaner. Fugard became actively involved in theatre when he married Sheila Meiring, an actress and novelist, and both moved to Johannesburg, where his work as Clerk to the Native Commissioner's Cour…

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Henry Blake Fuller Biography - (1857–1929), The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani, The Chatelaine of La Trinité, The Cliff-Dwellers

American novelist and playwright, born in Chicago, educated at Allison Classical Academy, Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Fuller drew on his travels in Europe in 1879 and 1883 in his first book, The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani (1890; revised 1892), a series of linked stories often with a Jamesian theme of the confrontation of American innocence and brashness with European sophistication, and pursued these i…

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John Fuller (John Leopold Fuller) Biography - (1937– ), (John Leopold Fuller), Fairground Music, Cannibals and Missionaries, Lies and Secrets, Selected Poems: 1954–1982

British poet and novelist, born at Ashcroft in Kent, the son of Roy Fuller, educated at New College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry in 1960. In 1966 he became a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His numerous volumes of poetry include Fairground Music (1961), Cannibals and Missionaries (1972), Lies and Secrets (1979), Selected Poems: 1954?1982 (1985), The Grey Among the Green…

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Roy Fuller (Roy Broadbent Fuller) Biography - (1912–91), (Roy Broadbent Fuller), New Verse, The Middle of a War, A Lost Season

British poet, born at Failsworth in Lancashire, educated at Blackpool High School. An articled clerk from the age of 16, in 1934 he qualified as a solicitor, practising with a building society throughout his career. He was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1968 to 1973. In the later 1930s he was a contributor to New Verse, producing poetry of social and political concern which indicated the influenc…

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