Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
a novel by Ngugi, published in 1967. Set on the eve of Kenyan independence in 1963, the novel returns to the emergency period of the 1950s. The action centres on Mugo, a farmer; Mumbi and her carpenter husband Gikonyo; John Thompson, a British district officer; and Karanja, who once sympathized with the freedom movement. During preparations for Uhuru Day, it becomes clear how far people's lives an…
originally The Granta, a periodical founded as the latest in a succession of Cambridge undergraduate journals by Murray Guthrie in 1889. Although the matter of whether or not women should be permitted to take degrees was earnestly debated in the 1890s, the magazine's tone was generally humorous and satirical; several writers associated with The Granta, notably A. A. Milne, later contributed to Pun…
British playwright, scholar, and critic, born in London, the son of a property speculator; he rose to eminence in the Edwardian theatre. He created the character of Tanner in Man and Superman, played leading roles in other plays by Shaw, and did much to prove the value of the repertory system during the period from 1905 to 1907, when he co-managed the Royal Court Theatre. In later years he turned …
is a term used to describe a long comic in book form containing a fictional or non-fictional narrative with a thematic unity. Since 1986 graphic novels have become increasingly popular. They are mainly about 50 pages in length, in full colour, and with card covers. Technically, for story-telling purposes, graphic novels depend on the characteristics of a traditional comic: they utilize a weave of …
Irish poet and editor, son of the Protestant Bishop of Limerick and the father of Robert Graves; born in Dublin, where he was educated at Trinity College. Before taking his final examinations he left Dublin to become a clerk at the Home Office in London and in 1874 began his career with the Board of Education. In Dublin he had been encouraged as a poet by Sheridan Le Fanu, whose Poems he edited in…
British poet, novelist, critic, and historian of mythology, born in Wimbledon, London, the son of A. P. Graves, and educated at Charterhouse School. At the outbreak of the First World War he volunteered for active service and remained on the Western Front until invalided out in 1917. Over the Brazier (1916), Goliath and David (1916), and Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), his first three volumes of poe…
a novel by Thomas Pynchon, published in 1973. The novel is generally considered one of the most important works of post-war American fiction. Like Pynchon's other works its value as a work of art lies in its intellectual, linguistic, and philosophical complexity rather than its use of the conventional resources of realistic fiction. The principal metaphor is the German V-2 rocket, and its gravity-…
Scottish novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, born in Glasgow, educated at Glasgow Art School. Prior to the publication of his 1981 novel Lanark, Gray lived mostly by teaching, painting, and writing and was best known for his lavish portraits and murals, and for more than a dozen television, radio, and stage plays. He has since become the outstanding figure in a Glasgow literary renaissan…
British poet, born in Bethnal Green, London; he began publishing poems while working as a librarian at the Foreign Office. In 1890 he met Oscar Wilde, with whose support Silverpoints, his first collection of verse, appeared in 1893; the opulent exoticism of its imagery was complemented by a lavish binding designed by Charles Ricketts. The volume also contained translations of poems by French Symbo…
British dramatist, born in Hampshire, educated at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was for many years a lecturer in English at Queen Mary College, London. After achieving a modest success with Wise Child (1967), a dark comedy about a transvestite criminal on the run, he established himself with Butley (1971), about a witty, sadistic academic, and Ot…
South African novelist, poet, and playwright, born in Cape Town, educated at the University of Cape Town, Queen's College, Cambridge, where he edited Granta, and Iowa State University. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1991, Gray was a professor of English at the Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg. His principal academic work is South African Literature: an Introduction (1979). Gray's poe…
a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925. The Great Gatsby is generally thought to be Fitzgerald's finest novel and one of the major achievements of twentieth-century American literature. The life of its eponymous hero, Jay Gatsby, is, in part, a merciless satire of the ?rags to riches? story, but Gatsby's accumulation of great wealth and a vast estate on Long Island is motivated not by g…
a long poem by Patrick Kavanagh, published in 1942. In fourteen parts, the poem is noted for its radical innovations in the treatment of rural material. The work exhibits great flexibility of style and form in sustaining its critique of the social and religious orthodoxy within which its chief protagonist, the peasant farmer Patrick Maguire, is confined. The intellectual, spiritual, imaginative, a…
British novelist, born in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, educated at Eton and at Magdalen College, Oxford. The third son of a wealthy family descended from the Earls of Hardwicke, he was brought up in a manor house in Gloucestershire, and sent to boarding school at the age of six. He joined the family business, H. Pontifex & Sons, Birmingham, beginning work in the stores, then on the shop-floor as a…
American dramatist, born in Lillington, North Carolina, educated at the University of North Carolina and Cornell University. He was a member of the Carolina Playmakers (which included Thomas Wolfe), a writing and producing group founded at the University of North Carolina in 1918 by Frederick Koch. They had their own theatre, but also toured extensively through the Southern states, providing an in…
English novelist, born in Berkhamsted, near London, educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford. His father was the headmaster of Berkhamsted School; Greene has encouraged critics to see the divided loyalties which resulted as an origin of his fiction's distinctive antinomies and conflicting faiths?what he calls, quoting Robert Browning, its general concern with ?the dangerous edge …
W. H. Hudson's best-known work, first published in 1904. The novel takes its title from the words of its central protagonist, the political refugee Abel Guevez de Argensola, whose wanderings lead him to ?that wild forest, those green mansions where I ? found so great a happiness?. Abel receives hospitality from an Indian tribe who live on the fringes of the tropical Venezuelan forest, but incurs d…
a novel by George Mackay Brown, published in 1972. The island of Hellya and the village of Greenvoe which form the book's setting are imaginative adaptations of the Orkney landscapes and communities reflected throughout Brown's work. The main body of the novel presents a period of five days in the lives of the inhabitants of Greenvoe; the farming and fishing which form their principal occupations …
British novelist and playwright, born in Salford, Lancashire. He left school at the age of 13 and, between long periods of unemployment, worked as an office boy, stable boy for a cotton millionaire, signwriter, chauffeur, warehouseman, and salesman. His early experiences of deprivation provided the background for his first and most famous novel, Love on the Dole (1933), which made a great impact a…
Australian feminist writer, born in Melbourne, educated at the universities of Melbourne, Sydney, and Cambridge. In 1964 she settled in Europe, spending much of her time in Britain and Italy. Among other academic posts she has been a lecturer at the University of Warwick and Director of the Tulsa Center for the Study of Women's Literature. She achieved worldwide fame with The Female Eunuch (1970) …
British bibliographer, editor, and literary historian, born in Wimbledon, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1900 he completed his first work of bibliography, a finding list of plays written before 1643 and published before 1700. His unrivalled expertise in Elizabethan palaeography enabled him to produce his editions of Henslowe's Diary (1904) and Papers (1908). He also worked extensively …
American poet and critic, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. After graduation he moved to New York where he married the poet Marya Zaturenska and published his first volume of poems, Chelsea Rooming House (1930); it was his evocation of the crowded slums of New York's lower west side that briefly associated him with Marxist and proletarian writers of …
Irish playwright and folklorist, the youngest daughter of an Anglo-Irish landowner; she was born in Roxborough, Co. Galway. Following the death of her husband Sir W. H. Gregory in 1892, she took over the management of his estate at Coole Park, County Galway. A leading figure in the Irish Revival, her close association from 1897 onward with W. B. Yeats, who regularly stayed at Coole, resulted in th…
British poet, the eldest son of Lord Desborough; he was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, after which he took a commission with the Royal Dragoons in 1910. A keen sportsman and much admired officer, he won the Distinguished Service Order for a courageous act of reconnaissance. He died of a head wound on 26 May 1915, the day upon which his poem ?Into Battle?, sent to his mother the previous mont…
Australian writer, born in Sydney, educated at Sydney University and the University of Colorado. She travelled in Europe and the USA for several years and has worked as a teacher, journalist, and film editor. Her first collection of stories, Bearded Ladies (1984), displayed her command of a variety of styles from black comedy to symbolism. Lillian's Story (1985) is a novel whose central character …
American novelist, born in Zanesville, Ohio, educated at the University of Pennsylvania. A youthful enthusiasm for dime novels and stories of his great- great-grandfather's heroic actions against the Indians gave rise to Grey's lasting conviction that literature and life were inextricably linked. He moved to New York ostensibly to practise dentistry, but in reality to get closer to the heart of pu…
British editor and critic, born in Quendale on the southern tip of Shetland, educated at King's College, the University of Aberdeen, and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1894 he became the first Professor of English Literature at Aberdeen and was subsequently Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Following his contribution of the chapter on John Donne to The Cambrid…
British playwright, born in Manchester, the son of a labourer, educated at Manchester University. Occupations (1970), set during the 1920 Fiat strike in Turin, and focusing on arguments between a humane Gramsci and the ruthless Soviet apparatchik Kabak, was followed by two other plays written from a Marxist stance and asking how radical social change is best achieved: these were The Party (1973), …
British poet, critic, editor, and topographical writer, born at Pelynt, Cornwall, educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He began his career as a journalist at the London office of the Yorkshire Post in 1927. In 1933 he founded New Verse, which provided the principal platform for his famously vehement style as a critic. During the war he worked at the BBC and subsequently became a freelance writer. H…
American novelist, born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, he studied law at Mississippi State University and the University of Mississippi and practised as a lawyer from 1981 to 1990. He also served in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1984 to 1990. Grisham's fiction is informed by his knowledge of the American legal system. A Time to Kill (1989), his first novel, concerns the father of a rape v…
British poet, born in Cornwall, educated at the University of Sussex, subsequently training as a librarian. Gross's work first attracted wide notice when his poem ?The Ice Factory? won the Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition in 1982. His first collection, Familiars (1983), was followed by other volumes including The Ice Factory (1984), Cat's Whisker (1987), The Son of the Duke of Nowhere …
a term denoting both a critical method forming a basis for the meetings of various writers, predominantly poets, and the name by which they came to be known as a loosely coherent movement. Philip Hobsbaum initiated regular gatherings of poets in Cambridge in 1952 for discussions intended to bring F. R. Leavis's principles of textual scrutiny to bear upon their work. In 1955 he convened a similar a…
American theatre company. Founded by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, and based in New York, it was an offshoot of the Theatre Guild, and planned as a permanent acting company committed to the highest ideals of professionalism in all aspects of theatre work. It encouraged new writers, and sought new plays which expressed some of the social and artistic ideals of its members. It …
an experimental theatre company begun in 1932 by Rupert Doone to provide a focus for the activities of various actors, writers, and producers who were dissatisfied with the possibilities afforded by London's existing commercial facilities. The venture was also committed to working in broad alignment with the socialist doctrines pervasive in the arts during the 1930s. Doone, a ballet dancer and cho…
Canadian novelist, born Felix Paul Greve in Radomno, Prussia (now Poland); he was brought up in Hamburg and subsequently attended university in Bonn and Munich. His picaresque early life involved associations with Stefan George and Andr? Gide, a year in prison for fraudulently obtaining money from a friend, periods in Italy, Sicily, France, and Berlin, a host of translations, and the publication o…
American playwright, born in Manhattan, educated at Georgetown University and at Yale. Much of Guare's work revolves around themes of family and success. His writing is recognized for its dark humour and his seemingly paradoxical romanticism. Among his best-known plays is The House of Blue Leaves (1971), the story of a would-be songwriter and his disastrous relationship with his family. Landscape …
British historian and biographer, born in London, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. After he had repeatedly failed to become a Member of Parliament, Supers and Supermen (1920) established him as an author; its epigrammatically irreverent treatments of historical figures owed something to Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918). Similar in approach, A Gallery (1924) surveyed contemporary literary r…
a novel by V. S. Naipaul, published in 1976, based on a murder case involving Michael X which the author reported for the Sunday Times Magazine in May1974 (his exploration of the true story is to be found in The Return of Eva Per?n and the Killings in Trinidad, 1980). The novel is set in an unnamed recently independent Caribbean island that is being sustained by foreign interests, and the ?guerril…
Sri Lankan novelist and short-story writer, born in Sri Lanka; he lived in the Philippines and the USA before settling in England. Gunesekera's first collection of stories, Monkfish Moon (1992), was praised for its restrained, subtle prose. Set in Sri Lanka and in Britain, the stories explore, from a variety of perspectives, the violence, conflict, and strife prevalent in the author's native land,…
Scottish novelist and leading figure of the Scottish Renaissance, born in Dalbeath, Caithness, the son of a fishing boat skipper and owner. All his work is set in the Scottish Highlands, particularly in Caithness and Sutherland. Gunn worked in the Customs and Excise from 1911 to 1937. His first stories and articles were published in 1923; the following year he met C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) wh…
Anglo-American poet, born in Gravesend, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. From the mid-1950s he has lived chiefly in California, where he began lecturing at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958. Fighting Terms (1954), his first substantial collection of verse, displayed the energetic engagement of experience that has remained a central characteristic of his verse throughout contin…
British memoirist and essayist of Persian origin, born and brought up in Tehran. She later studied Middle Eastern languages and philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris, before moving to England where she established her career as a singer, songwriter, and recording artist, and as a critic, essayist, and travel writer. Her first book, The Blindfold Horse (1988), a memoir, tells the story of her scholarly…
Indian novelist, born in Calcutta, educated at Princeton University and Imperial College, London. She was brought up mainly in Africa, and has spent much of her adult life in Britain. Her first novel, Memories of Rain (1992), tells the story of the Indian Moni's growing estrangement from her adulterous English husband and his native country. It was highly praised for its elaborate prose style, and…
British poet and composer, born in Gloucester, educated at the Royal College of Music. He was on active service in Flanders from 1915 to 1918, when he was discharged after being wounded and gassed. He returned to the Royal College of Music in 1919. Severn and Somme (1917), his first collection of verse, was favourably reviewed; War's Embers (1919) was well received, though reservations were expres…
Canadian poet, born in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, educated at Bishop's University and Oxford University. He worked as a journalist in England, where his earliest verse was published in the 1930s, and subsequently in New York, during which time his early romanticism gave way to a verse more concerned with exploring social issues and the decline in moral values. After returning to Canada in 19…