Ellen Gilchrist Biography - (1935– ), In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, The Annunciation, Victory over Japan, Drunk with Love

American short-story writer and novelist, born in Grace, Mississippi, educated at Millsaps College; she later worked in a variety of journalistic occupations. Though Gilchrist began her writing career as a poet, it was the publication of her first volume of stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), that placed her in the ranks of noted Southern women writers, inspired by Katherine Anne Porter,…

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Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus - Giles Goat-Boy

Eric Gill, (Arthur Eric Rowton Gill) Biography - (1882–1940), (Arthur Eric Rowton Gill), Stations of the Cross, Prospero and Ariel, The Four Gospels

British stone-carver, engraver, letter-cutter, and typographer, born in Brighton, educated at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London. His home in Ditchling became the centre of a group of artists which included David Jones. Having become a Roman Catholic in 1913, Gill carved the Stations of the Cross (1914?18) at Westminster Cathedral; this and Prospero and Ariel on Broadcasting House are a…

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Penelope Gilliatt Biography - (1932–93), Observer, New Yorker, Unholy Fools, Three Quarter Face, One By One, A State of Change

British novelist and short-story writer, born in London, educated at Queen's College. She worked at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York before beginning her long career as a distinguished film critic with the Observer and the New Yorker, her criticism is collected in Unholy Fools (1971) and Three Quarter Face (1980). Her first novel, One By One (1965), gained wide notice for its wittily…

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman) Biography - (1860–1935), (Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman), Women and Economics, What Diantha Did, Benigna Machiavelli, The Forerunner, Herland

American novelist and social theorist, born in Hartford, Connecticut. After an insecure and unhappy childhood she studied art, and supported herself by teaching until her marriage to Charles Stetson in 1884. After recurrent periods of severe depression she left her husband, moved to California, and wrote ?The Yellow Wallpaper? (1892), a chilling fantasy of mental breakdown whose subtext is a power…

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Dame Mary Gilmore Biography - (1865–1962), Bulletin, Marri'd and Other Verses, The Passionate Heart, The Tilted Cart

Australian poet, born in New South Wales. After a childhood spent in the bush, she taught in mining towns and in Sydney, and became involved with contemporary radical movements. Her poetry first appeared in Bulletin from 1903 onwards, and in 1912 she published her first collection, Marri'd and Other Verses. This was followed by numerous others, including The Passionate Heart (1918), an indictment …

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Beryl Gilroy Biography - (c.1925– ), Black Teacher, Frangipani House, Boy Sandwich, Sunlight on Sweet Water

Guyanese novelist and autobiographical writer, born in Berbice, British Guiana (now Guyana). She moved to Britain in 1951, where she worked for the BBC Caribbean service. She later became a schoolteacher in London and a counselling psychologist. Her autobiographical book, Black Teacher (1976), hard-hitting, but often cheerful and humorous in tone, examines primary education and racial discriminati…

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Ginger Man, The

Allen Ginsberg Biography - (1926–97), Howl and Other Poems, Kaddish and Other Poems, Planet News, The Fall of America

American poet, born in New Jersey, educated at Columbia University. After working in various capacities from 1948 to 1954, he settled in San Francisco where Howl and Other Poems was published in 1956, establishing him as the most widely noted participant in the San Francisco Renaissance. The influence of William Carlos Williams, whom he had known since the late 1930s, was apparent in a number of t…

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Nikki Giovanni (Nikki Yolande Cornelia Giovanni) Biography - (1943– ), (Nikki Yolande Cornelia Giovanni), The Women and the Men, Black Judgement, My House

African-American poet, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, educated at Fisk University, Nashville, University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, Philadelphia, and Columbia University, New York. She has held several academic appointments. Her poetry reflects the political turbulence, and African-American struggle for civil rights, of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Colloquial and expansive in style, …

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Giovanni's Room - succès de scandale

a novel by James Baldwin, published in 1956. The candour of Baldwin's treatment of homosexuality gave the novel something of a succ?s de scandale. Told in the first person by a young white American, it is a story of sexual evasion, infatuation, and betrayal. David, whose true inclinations are homosexual, arrives in Paris, where he encounters Giovanni, a young Italian waiter, with whom he falls in …

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Girls of Slender Means, The

Robert Gittings (Robert William Victor Gittings) Biography - (1911–92), (Robert William Victor Gittings), Wentworth Place, Famous Meetings, This Tower My Prison, American Journey

British biographer and poet, born in Portsmouth, educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was a supervisor in History from 1933 to 1940. He subsequently worked as a writer and producer with the BBC and became a freelance writer in 1963. His earlier collections of poetry include Wentworth Place (1952), the title sequence of which centres on incidents during the latter part of John Keats's lif…

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Ellen Glasgow Biography - (1874–1945), The Descendant, The Voice of the People, The Battleground, The Deliverance, The Wheel of Life

American novelist, born in Richmond, Virginia, the first major novelist of the South. Her first novel, The Descendant (1897), was followed by The Voice of the People (1900), which began her long series of novels charting the social and political history of the South from the Antebellum through the Civil War to the ravages of the ?carpetbaggers? during the Reconstruction and the subsequent assimila…

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Susan Glaspell Biography - (1876–1948), Trifles, The Outside, Inheritors, The Verge, Alison's House, Fidelity, Brook Evans

American novelist and dramatist, born in Davenport, Iowa, educated at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. Glaspell wrote ten novels and many short stories but made her enduring reputation as a playwright. In 1913 she married George Cram Cook, writer, director, and moving spirit behind one of the most important theatre companies in modern American history, the Provincetown Players, who discovered E…

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Glass Menagerie, The

a play by Tennessee Williams, produced in 1944 and published in 1945. Partly expressionist in form, it is the play in which Williams came to terms with the emotional side of his own early life in St Louis, and in doing so, greatly extended the range of contemporary American theatre. Tom Wingfield, who stands for Williams himself and who also acts as narrator/chorus, lives with his mother, Amanda, …

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Glastonbury Romance, A - A Glastonbury Romance

the most widely read of John Cowper Powys's novels, first published in New York in 1932. Vividly pictorial and of a rich thematic and imaginative texture, the work runs to over 1,100 pages in standard editions. Some forty principal characters manifest the variousness of human life in its emotional, social, and, most importantly, spiritual aspects. As the book's central symbol, the Holy Grail denot…

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Victoria Glendinning Biography - (1937– ), Times Literary Supplement, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer

British biographer and novelist, born in Sheffield, educated at Somerville College, Oxford, and the University of Southampton. She was a part-time schoolteacher from 1960 to 1969, when she became a psychiatric social worker; she was subsequently an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement until 1978. Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (1977) argued persuasively for the importance of…

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Denis Glover Biography - (1912–80), The Wind and the Sand, Sings Harry and Other Poems, Arawata Bill, Hot Water Sailor

New Zealand poet, born in Dunedin, educated at Canterbury University College, where he later taught English. In 1936 he founded the Caxton Press, which was to have a distinguished role in New Zealand literature, especially poetry. Artistic respect for ordinary human endeavour informs Glover's work. He referred to his ?observational verse?; for one volume he described himself as ?enjoys talking, dr…

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Louise Gluck Biography - (1943– ), Firstborn, The House of Marshland, Descending Figures, The Triumph of Achilles, Ararat, The Wild Iris

American poet, born in New York City, educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. Like her contemporary Frank Bidart, Louise Gluck is frequently described as a ?post-confessional? poet and in her early work the influence of Sylvia Plath is strongly felt, notably in her first published volume, Firstborn (1969). Later volumes, among them The House of Marshland (1975) and Descending F…

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Elinor Glyn Biography - (1864–1943), The Visits of Elizabeth, Three Weeks

Go-Between, The

a novel by L. P. Hartley, published in 1953. Leo, now aged 60-plus, recalls the events of a childhood summer half a century earlier: invited to Brandham Hall in Norfolk, the country home of his schoolfriend Marcus Maudsley, he rapidly falls under the spell of Marcus's beautiful older sister Marian. He becomes the innocent courier of secret letters between Marian and local farmer Ted Burgess, only …

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John Godber (John Harry Godber) Biography - (1956– ), (John Harry Godber), Up ‘n’ Under, Bouncers, Teechers, On the Piste, The Ritz

British playwright, born in Upton, Yorkshire, educated at Bretton Hall College and the University of Leeds. After working as a schoolteacher, in 1984 he became artistic director of the Hull Truck Theatre Company, where he has directed the first productions of most of his plays. Predominantly in the mode of comic social commentary, Godber's plays often deal with events and activities within the com…

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Rumer Godden (Margaret Rumer Godden) Biography - (1907–98), (Margaret Rumer Godden), Black Narcissus, In This House of Brede, The River

British novelist, born in Sussex; she spent her childhood in India and from the age of 12 was educated in various English schools. She returned to India to start a dancing school, married, and spent the war years alone in Kashmir with her small children. The predominant themes in her novels are the lives of foreigners in Eastern settings, the inner thoughts of children, and religious life. Her fir…

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A. D. Godley (Alfred Dennis Godley) Biography - (1856–1925), (Alfred Dennis Godley), The Histories of Tacitus, The Odes and Epodes of Horace

British poet and classicist, born in Co. Leitrim, educated at Balliol College, Oxford; he became a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College. In 1910 he was appointed public orator of Oxford, an office he held until his death. His numerous volumes of translation include The Histories of Tacitus (1887, 1890) and The Odes and Epodes of Horace (1898). Among his other works are Socrates and Athenian Societ…

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God that Failed, The: Six Studies in Communism

a book containing six autobiographical essays, edited and introduced by Richard Crossman, and published in 1950. The book, which grew out of a discussion between Crossman and Arthur Koestler, made a great impact at the time and was considered one of the most effective intellectual weapons in the Western armoury of the Cold War. The six contributors were Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Andr? Gide, Stephe…

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Oliver St John Gogarty (Oliver Joseph St John Gogarty) Biography - (1878–1957), (Oliver Joseph St John Gogarty), Ulysses, Hyperthuleana, An Offering of Swans, Wild Apples

Irish poet and memoirist, born in Dublin, where he trained as a surgeon at Trinity College's medical school. In 1904 he and James Joyce lived briefly in the Martello Tower at Sandymount that provides the setting for the start of Ulysses, in which Gogarty is cast as ?stately plump Buck Mulligan?. He was a senator of the Irish Free State for fourteen years and was well known in Irish public and lite…

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Going After Cacciato

Herbert Gold Biography - (1924– ), Birth of a Hero, The Prospect before Us, The Optimist, Salt

American novelist, born in Cleveland, Ohio, educated at Columbia University and the Sorbonne. Gold's early novels, for example Birth of a Hero (1951) and The Prospect before Us (1954), are characteristic of much of the American realist writing of the 1950s, emphasizing the plight of the individual in a conformist society. His later novels, such as The Optimist (1959), are markedly less realist in …

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Michael Gold, pseudonym of Itzok Granich Biography - (1893–1967), pseudonym of Itzok Granich, Masses, The Liberator, New Masses

American novelist, playwright, and political journalist, born in New York City, educated at New York and Harvard Universities. Gold was one of the most important and influential members of the group of left-wing intellectuals associated with such publications as Masses, The Liberator, and the New Masses between 1916 and 1930. He was born to a poor immigrant Russian-Jewish family, brought up on New…

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Golden Age;

Golden Bough, The - magnum opus, Aftermath, The Golden Bough, Aeneid, The Making of The Golden Bough

Sir James Frazer's magnum opus, subtitled ?a study in magic and religion?, first published in two volumes in 1890 and completed in twelve volumes which appeared between 1907 and 1915. A one-volume abridgement appeared in 1922, and a supplement, Aftermath, in 1936. The Golden Bough presents an enormously detailed anthropological thesis in accordance with Darwinian evolutionism: all religions, Fraze…

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Golden Bowl, The - The Golden Bowl, The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, James: The Later Novels

a novel by Henry James, published in 1904. The Golden Bowl is the last of the three great final novels?the others are The Wings of a Dove (1902) and The Ambassadors (1903)?which many critics hold to be the pinnacle of his achievement in fiction. The plot, one of labyrinthine moral complexity, revolves, essentially, around Maggie Verver, the daughter of an American millionaire, who marries Prince A…

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Golden Notebook, The

a novel by Doris Lessing, published in 1962. Anna Wulf, a writer who has not published anything for some years, lives alone with her young daughter, surviving on the proceeds of her successful first novel, which she now condemns as a work of nostalgia. Five sections ironically entitled ?Free Women? present Anna and her close friend Molly in the third person, while the bulk of the book is taken fro…

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Sir William Golding (Sir William Gerald Golding) Biography - (1911–93), (Sir William Gerald Golding), Poems, Lord of the Files, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, Free Fall

British novelist, born in Columb Minor, Cornwall, educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. He worked as an actor and producer in small theatre companies before the Second World War when he joined the Royal Navy, becoming lieutenant in charge of a rocket ship; from 1945 to 1961 he was a schoolteacher. His early Poems were published in 1935. Golding won immediate critica…

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Emma Goldman Biography - (1869–1940), Die Freiheit, Mother Earth, Anarchism and Other Essays, My Disillusionment in Russia, Living My Life

American essayist, critic, and editor, born in Kovno, Lithuania, of Jewish parents, educated at the Realschule in K?nigsberg; she emigrated to the USA in 1885. She was ?radicalized? by the events surrounding the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in May 1886. Within a few years she had established herself as a leading advocate of anarchism in the USA, notably through her reading of Johann Most's anarchist …

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Gollancz (Victor Gollancz Ltd) - (Victor Gollancz Ltd), Journey's End, The Story of a Publishing House, 1928–1978

the British publishing business founded in 1927 by Victor Gollancz (1893?1967) with the stated intention of steering between ?the Scylla of preciousness and dilettantism and the Charybdis of purely commercialised mass production?. The first list, announced in February 1928, was chiefly made up of histories, biographies, and fiction, with additional plays, volumes of poetry, and works on architectu…

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Sir E. H. Gombrich Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich Biography - (1909–2001), Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, The Story of Art, Art and Illusion

British art historian, born in Vienna, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1933. He emigrated to Britain in 1936, becoming a research assistant at the University of London's Warburg Institute; he remained at the Warburg Institute throughout his career, becoming its Director in 1959 and publishing a biography of its founder, Aby Warburg, in 1970. Gombrich's earliest major publication, The Story of Art (…

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Albert Gomes Biography - (1911–78), The Beacon, Through a Maze of Colour, Selected Speeches

Gone with the Wind

Good-Bye, Mr Chips

Goodbye to All That - Goodbye to All That, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Undertones of War

Robert Graves's autobiography of his early life, written at the age of 33 and published in 1929, the year of his departure for Majorca with Laura Riding. Although the period covered extends beyond Graves's meeting with Riding, whose influence over him at the time of its composition was considerable, there is no reference to her in the text; Graves did not wish to include her in a work that was a c…

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Goodbye to Berlin - demi-mondaine, I Am a Camera, Cabaret

a collection of sketches and short stories by Christopher Isherwood (1939). The work, taken as a whole, presents a unified picture of Berlin in the last years of Weimar. Isherwood, disguised in this book as Herr Issyvoo, lived in Berlin in 1929?33, supporting himself in the harsh economic climate by giving English lessons. The stories are technically brilliant but no less so in their insights into…

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Good Companions, The

David Goodis Biography - (1917–67), Dark Passage, The Burglar, The Moon in the Gutter, Down There, Shoot the Piano Player

American crime novelist mainly associated with the Hardboiled school of the 1940s, born in Philadelphia, educated at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Temple University, Philadelphia. Goodis benefited from the 1980s revival of interest in the darker styles of crime writing although his reputation in France has been consistently high. Like Jim Thompson, Goodis presents a sombre and disillusioned…

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Lorna Goodison Biography - (1947– ), Tamarind Season, I Am Becoming My Mother, Heartease, To Us All Flowers Are Roses

Jamaican poet, born in Kingston, Jamaica, educated at the Jamaica School of Art and the Art Student League of New York. Her paintings have been widely exhibited and she is highly regarded as a book illustrator. She has worked as an art teacher and as a writer-in-residence at the University of the West Indies and at Radcliffe College, Massachusetts. Her principal collections of poetry are Tamarind …

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Nelson Goodman (Henry Nelson Goodman) Biography - (1906–98), (Henry Nelson Goodman), The Structure of Appearance, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast

American philosopher, born in Massachusetts, educated at Harvard. Among several academic posts he has held professorships in philosophy at Tufts College and at Brandeis University; in 1968 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. The Structure of Appearance (1951) gained him notice for its penetrating analysis of phenomenalistic systems of philosophy. His reputation increased with the …

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Paul Goodman Biography - (1911–72), Growing Up Absurd, Ten Lyric Poems, The Empire City

American novelist, playwright, poet, and social and educational commentator, born in New York City, educated at City College, New York, and the University of Chicago. Although Growing Up Absurd (1960) brought Goodman a wide readership, his earliest writings, chiefly drama and verse, were published in the 1930s (the first volume of verse, Ten Lyric Poems, appeared in 1934) and he continued to publi…

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Good Soldier, The - Blast, The Saddest Sotry

a novel by Ford Madox Ford, published in 1915, first serialized in Blast (1914) as The Saddest Sotry. The novel, in which the author perfected the allusive impressionistic style he had been moving towards in his earlier fiction, counterpoints themes of love and betrayal with masterly economy. Narrated in the first person by a wealthy expatriate American, John Dowell, it describes the relationships…

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Nadine Gordimer Biography - (1923– ), The Lying Days, A World of Strangers, Occasion for Loving, The Late Bourgeois World

South African novelist and short-story writer, born in Springs, Transvaal, educated at the University of Witwatersrand. Gordimer is known for her sensitivity to the repression of the black majority in South Africa. Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), about a young woman growing up in a South African mining community, was followed by A World of Strangers (1958) and Occasion for Loving (1963), b…

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Caroline Gordon Biography - (1895–1981), Penhally, Aleck Maury, Sportsman, None Shall Look Back, The Garden of Adonis, Green Centuries

American novelist, short-story writer, and literary critic, born in Todd County, Kentucky, educated at Bethany College, West Virginia. She married the poet and critic Allen Tate in 1924 and in 1928 went to Europe with Tate who was on a Guggenheim Fellowship; she herself was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing in 1929. In New York and in Paris she acted as Ford Madox Ford's secretar…

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Mary Gordon (Mary Catherine Gordon) Biography - (1949– ), (Mary Catherine Gordon), Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, The Other Side

American novelist, born in Long Island, of Jewish and Roman Catholic heritage, educated at Barnard College and Syracuse University. Gordon is often classified as a writer who conflates the concerns of feminism and Catholicism, but since her first novel, Final Payments (1978), which deals with a young woman's mourning for her father, she has proved to be a writer in the modern mainstream of America…

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Gormenghast

Sir Edmund Gosse (Sir Edmund William Gosse) Biography - (1849–1928), (Sir Edmund William Gosse), Father and Son, Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe

British critic, biographer, and essayist, born in London and privately educated. His childhood and difficult relations with his father, the eminent zoologist Philip Henry Gosse (1810?88), are recounted in his most highly regarded work, Father and Son, the autobiography which first appeared anonymously in 1907. Having become an assistant librarian in the British Museum in 1867, he developed a speci…

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Go Tell It on the Mountain

Elizabeth Goudge Biography - (1900–84), Island Magic, A City of Bells, Towers in the Mist, Green Dolphin Country, Gentian Hill

British novelist, born in Wells, Somerset; she studied art at Reading College. An only child, her father, Dr Henry Leighton Goudge, became Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford; her mother was a descendant of a Guernsey Norman-French family. Goudge's first novel, Island Magic (1934), set in Guernsey, was followed by many others, including A City of Bells (1936), about an imaginary cathedral city …

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Sir Ernest Gowers (Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers) Biography - (1880–1966), (Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers), Plain Words: A Guide to the Use of English

British civil servant and grammarian, born in London, educated at Clare College, Cambridge. In 1902 he entered the Civil Service, where he rose to become Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue. Plain Words: A Guide to the Use of English (1948) was written at the suggestion of Sir Edward Bridges, the Head of the Civil Service, who admired the clarity of expression Gowers commanded. It was reprinte…

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William Goyen Biography - (1915–83), The House of Breath, Ghost and Flesh, Faces of Blood Kindred, Collected Stories

American novelist and short-story writer, born in Trinity, Texas, educated at Rice Institute. During the Second World War he served as an officer in the navy. Goyen's first novel, The House of Breath (1950), composed of the linked accounts of lives in a small town loosely connected by a first-person narrator, was distinguished by the voluptuous texture of its prose and its lush evocations of lands…

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Patricia Grace Biography - (1937– ), Waiariki, The Dream Sleepers, Electric City and Other Stories, Selected Stories, The Sky People

New Zealand Maori writer, born in Wellington. Her collection of stories Waiariki (1975) was the first published by a Maori woman writer; later collections include The Dream Sleepers (1980), Electric City and Other Stories (1987), Selected Stories (1991), The Sky People (1994), whose stories are linked by the Maori myth of the title, and Collected Stories (1994). In addition to prize-winning childr…

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Sue Grafton Biography - (1940– ), Keziah, Lolly Madonna War, Is for Alibi, Is for Lawless

Jorie Graham Biography - (1951– ), Erosion, symbolistes, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness

American poet, born in Italy, educated at the Sorbonne, New York University, and the University of Iowa. Graham's complex linguistic and cultural background (she was born of American parents, attended a French lyc?e in Rome, and is fluent in English, French, and Italian) provides much of the material for her intellectual, frequently erudite, verse. Graham's mother, the painter and sculptor Beverly…

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W. S. Graham (William Sydney Graham) Biography - (1918–86), (William Sydney Graham), Cage without Grievance, 2nd Poems, The White Threshold, The Nightfishing

British poet, born in Greenock, Renfrewshire, educated at Greenock High School. He subsequently studied at the Workers' Educational Association College, New-battle Abbey, Edinburgh. After a period as a journey-man engineer he settled in Cornwall, often referring in his poetry to the topography around Zennor and his acquaintances in its community of artists. His early poetry, principally represente…

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Winston Graham (Winston Mawdsley Graham) Biography - (1910–2003), (Winston Mawdsley Graham), Marnie, Take My Life, Night without Stars, Fortune Is a Woman