Encyclopedia of Literature: John Hersey Biography to Honest Man's Revenge
Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
Herzog
a novel by Saul Bellow, published in 1964. Moses Elkanah Herzog, a frustrated moderately successful university lecturer on the brink of divorce from Madeleine, his attractive yet destructive second wife, reaches a point of near insanity and neurosis. In an effort to explore his failure to be happy, he bombards his friends, his family, even famous people dead and alive like Napoleon, the American P…
Dorothy Hewett Biography - (1923–2002), Bobbin Up, Meanjin, Windmill Country, Rapunzel in Suburbia, Greenhouse, Journeys, Alice in Wormland
Australian playwright and poet, born and brought up on an isolated farm in Western Australia, educated at the University of Western Australia. Her experience working in factories in Sydney provided material for her only novel Bobbin Up (1959). She had published some early poems in Meanjin and subsequently produced several collections including Windmill Country (1968), Rapunzel in Suburbia (1975), …
John Hewitt (John Harold Hewitt) Biography - (1907–87), (John Harold Hewitt), Conacre, No Rebel Word, Collected Poems, Out of My Time
Northern Irish poet, born in Belfast, where he was educated at Queen's University. In 1930 he began working in Belfast Museum and Art Gallery and was for many years Art Director of the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry. Conacre (1941) and No Rebel Word (1948) established the rationally discursive manner of his best-known verse, which makes accomplished use of rhymed traditional forms. His n…
Maurice Hewlett (Maurice Henry Hewlett) Biography - (1861–1923), (Maurice Henry Hewlett), The Forest Lovers, Richard Yea-and-Nay
English novelist, poet, and essayist, born in Kent. He was called to the Bar but never practised, and during 1897?1900 he was Keeper of Land Revenue Records. Instant success came with his first novel, The Forest Lovers (1898), a historical romance set in medieval England. He wrote numerous other historical novels and romances including Richard Yea-and-Nay (1900), about Richard the Lionheart; The Q…
DuBose Heyward Biography - (1885–1940), Porgy, Porgy and Bess, Mamba's Daughters, Peter Ashley, Star Spangled Virgin, Carolina Chansons
American novelist, dramatist, and poet, born in Charleston, South Carolina. He was an insurance salesman before his great success with Porgy (1925); its fatalistic story of a beggar driven to murder is set among a community of African-Americans in a ghetto area of Charleston immortalized as Catfish Row. In 1927 Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, collaborated on a popular dramatic version which won the…
Jack Hibberd Biography - (1940– ), Three Popular Plays, White with Wire Wheels, Dimboola, A Stretch of the Imagination, The Overcoat
Australian playwright and novelist, born in Victoria, educated at the University of Melbourne. He became a leading figure in the alternative theatre of the 1960s, writing and directing plays for the Australian Performing Group at La Mama. The new ?rough-theatre? made energetic use of vernacular idiom, social satire, audience participation, and declining censorship; his introduction to Three Popula…
Sir John Hicks (Sir John Richard Hicks) Biography - (1904–89), (Sir John Richard Hicks), Value and Capital, A Theory of Economic History
British economist, born in Warwick, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He became Professor of Economics and a Fellow of All Souls, received the Nobel Prize for Economics (1972), and was knighted in 1964. Value and Capital (1939), his greatest theoretical work, presented the first sophisticated approach to the integration of micro-economics and macro-economics?though not fully taken up by the eco…
Aidan Higgins Biography - (1927– ), Felo de Se, Asylum and Other Stories, Langrishe, Go Down, Balcony of Europe
Irish novelist and short-story writer, born in Celbridge, Co. Kildare, educated at Clongowes Wood College. After various jobs, he toured Europe and then Southern Africa with a puppet theatre company. He has lived in Spain, Germany, England, and, more recently, Ireland. Higgins belongs to that significant minority of Irish writers, such as Joyce and Beckett, who have been prepared to experiment. Hi…
Brian Higgins Biography - (1930–65), The Only Need, Notes while Travelling, The Northern Fiddler
British poet, born in Batley, Yorkshire, educated at the University of Hull. During the 1950s and early 1960s he travelled extensively in Europe and worked in various capacities, including as an aero-elastician, railway clerk, and schoolteacher. Prior to his unexpected death in 1965, he was increasingly productive as a freelance literary journalist. His first collection of poetry, The Only Need (1…
F. R. Higgins (Frederick Robert Higgins) Biography - (1896–1941), (Frederick Robert Higgins), Island Blood, The Dark Breed, Arable Holdings, The Gap of Brightness
Irish poet, born at Foxford, County Mayo, he became a clerk for a builders' merchant at the age of 14 and was subsequently active as an official in the emergent Irish trades union movement. The fervent interest in the Irish folk tradition that runs throughout his work is evident in his early collection Island Blood (1925), though the conventional lyricism of the poems lacks the more imaginative qu…
George V. Higgins (George Vincent Higgins) Biography - (1939–99), (George Vincent Higgins), The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Digger's Game
American lawyer and crime writer, born in Brocton, Massachusetts, educated at Stanford University and Boston Law School. A former newspaper reporter and Boston district attorney, Higgins has used his knowledge of criminal life, law, and local politics to good effect in a series of critically acclaimed and successful novels set in and around Boston whose characters, for the most part, come from the…
Patricia Highsmith, (Mary Patricia Highsmith), née Plangman Biography - (1921–95), (Mary Patricia Highsmith), née Plangman, Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr Ripley
American writer of mixed German and English-Scots parentage, born in Fort Worth, Texas, educated at Barnard College, New York. Her first crime novel, Strangers on a Train (1950; filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1951) was an immediate success, and was followed by a number of novels and short stories which are hard to categorize, but which usually involve crime; often based on a sensational idea, they ar…
Christopher Hill (John Edward Christopher Hill) Biography - (1912–2003), (John Edward Christopher Hill), Puritanism and Revolution, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution
British historian, born in York, educated at Balliol College, Oxford; he became a fellow of the college in 1938 and its Master in 1965. Puritanism and Revolution (1958), Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), and The World Turned Upside Down (1972) are among the publications which established his reputation as the leading historian of the Civil War period. Hill's socialist convicti…
Errol Hill Biography - (1921–2003), Man Better Man, Plays for Today, The Theatre of Black Americans
Trinidadian playwright, poet, actor, and theatre director, born in Trinidad, educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, and at the Yale School of Drama. His first version of his best-known play, Man Better Man, in vernacular prose, was first performed in Jamaica in 1957. The second version, written in calypso-inspired verse and music, was first performed in 1960. The play celebrates th…
Geoffrey Hill Biography - (1932– ), For the Unfallen, King Log, Mercian Hymns, Tenebrae
British poet, born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, educated at Keble College, Oxford. He taught at the University of Leeds from 1954 to 1980, when he became a university lecturer in English at Cambridge. For the Unfallen (1959), his first substantial collection of verse, displayed his virtuosity in the use of traditional forms. His preoccupations with religious and historical themes are expressed i…
Selima Hill Biography - (1945– ), Saying Hello at the Station, My Darling Camel, The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness
British poet, born in London, educated at New Hall, Cambridge University. She was assistant manager of a London bookshop until 1985, when she became a freelance writer and teacher of writing in schools. Saying Hello at the Station (1984), her first collection of poems, gained wide notice for its unusually striking imagery and individual directness of tone. It was followed by My Darling Camel (1988…
Susan Hill Biography - (1942– ), Gentlemen and Ladies, A Change for the Better
British novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, born in Scarborough, educated at King's College, University of London. A regular reviewer and broadcaster, her reputation as a writer was established with a series of novels displaying a powerful and versatile imagination and a gift for exploring the bonds people form between themselves, particularly within families. Gentlemen and Ladies (1968)…
Tony Hillerman Biography - (1925– ), The Blessing Way, Skinwalkers, A Thief of Time, Talking God, Dance Hall of the Dead
American crime novelist, born in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, educated among Pottawatomie and Seminole Indians and at Oklahoma State University. After distinguished war service with the US Army, he became a journalist and later taught journalism at the University of New Mexico. The main purpose of Hillerman's tales of mystery and suspense is to engage readers with the religions, cultures, and values of…
Robert Hillyer (Robert Silliman Hillyer) Biography - (1895–1961), (Robert Silliman Hillyer), Sonnets and Other Lyrics, The Five Books of Youth
American poet, born in East Orange, New Jersey, educated at Harvard, where he taught from 1919 until his retirement as a professor in 1945. Sonnets and Other Lyrics (1917) and The Five Books of Youth (1920), his first two collections of verse, demonstrated the fluent accomplishment in traditional forms which characterizes his poetry. Arthur Machen's introduction to The Halt in the Garden (1925) em…
James Hilton Biography - (1900–54), Catherine Herself, Storm Passage, The Dawn of Reckoning, Lost Horizon, British Weekly
British novelist, born at Leigh, Lancashire; he grew up in Walthamstow, London, and was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he produced his first novel, Catherine Herself (1920). During the 1920s he worked as a journalist in London and Dublin, writing eleven further novels, among them Storm Passage (1922) and The Dawn of Reckoning (1925), before Lost Horizon made him famous in 1933; thi…
Chester Himes Biography - (1909–84), La Reine des pommes, For Love of Imabelle, A Rage in Harlem
African-American crime writer, born in Jefferson City, Missouri, educated at Ohio State University. Convicted of armed robbery in 1926, he served seven years in Ohio State Penitentiary. In 1953 he moved to Europe and, on the suggestion of a French publisher, wrote a detective story set in Harlem. La Reine des pommes (1958; published in the USA as For Love of Imabelle, 1959; also as A Rage in Harle…
Barry Hines (Melvin Barry Hines) Biography - (1939– ), (Melvin Barry Hines), The Blinder, A Kestrel for a Knave, Kes, The Gamekeeper
British novelist, born in Hyland Common, near Barnsley, the son of a miner, educated at Ecclesfield Grammar School. He played football for Barnsley, while working variously as an apprentice mining surveyor, a labourer, and a blacksmith's assistant, then attended Loughborough College of Education. Hines emerged as a writer in the wake of northern working-class novelists like Sillitoe and Braine, an…
Rolando Hinojosa (Rolando Hinojosa-Smith) Biography - (1929– ), (Rolando Hinojosa-Smith), Estampas del valle y otras obras, estampas
Chicano short-story writer, novelist, and poet, born in Mercedes, Texas, educated at the University of Texas, Highlands University, and the University of Illinois, Urbana. A master of humour, irony, and subtlety, Hinojosa weaves the tales of his characters with the history of his fictional Rio Grande Valley town, Klail City. The first of the Klail City death trip series, Estampas del valle y otras…
Albert Otto Hirschman Biography - (1915– ), The Strategy of Economic Development, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, The Passions and the Interests
American economist, born in Berlin, educated at the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics, and the University of Trieste. An active anti-fascist in the 1930s, he fled Nazi- occupied France for the USA in 1941, subsequently holding academic posts at Yale, Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton. In The Strategy of Economic Development (1958) Hirschman first displayed that independent turn of mind which…
Historical Novel - Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, Redgauntlet
a novel set in a specific historical period, in which some attempt at accurately describing the customs of the period has been made. Sir Walter Scott is generally recognized as the father of the modern historical novel; novels such as Rob Roy (1817), Ivanhoe (1819), Kenilworth (1821), Redgauntlet (1824) and others were widely admired and imitated by writers such as Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot…
History of Mr Polly, The - The History of Mr Polly, you can change it
a novel by H. G. Wells, published in 1910. The story of a small shopkeeper who rebels against his station in life, The History of Mr Polly is a unique mixture of social realism, romance, and vivacious and exuberant comedy. Alfred Polly is the archetypal Wellsian ?little man?, an oppressed, frustrated, and highly imaginative individual who can find no outlet for his dreams and desires until he sets…
Edward Hoagland Biography - (1932– ), Cat Man, The Circle Home, Seven Rivers West, The Courage of Turtles
American writer, born in New York, educated at Harvard University. He has taught at several universities including Iowa and California, Davis. His first novel, Cat Man (1956), about life in the circus, was followed by others, often focusing on the struggles faced by society's outcasts. Characters whose occupations require physical strength recur in his fiction, including The Circle Home (1960), wh…
Russel Hoban (Russel Conwell Hoban) Biography - (1925– ), (Russel Conwell Hoban), The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit
American novelist and children's writer, born in Pennsylvania; he settled in London in 1969. Trained as an illustrator, he worked in television and advertising before becoming a full-time writer of great originality. His first novel for adults, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973), introduces the themes and symbols common to all his fiction, yet every one of his novels is unique in subje…
Philip Hobsbaum (Philip Dennis Hobsbaum) Biography - (1932–2005), (Philip Dennis Hobsbaum), A Group Anthology, The Place's Fault, In Retreat
British poet and critic, born in London, educated at Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied under F. R. Leavis, and Sheffield University, where William Empson supervised his Ph.D. In 1962 he began his academic career at Queen's University, Belfast; in 1985 he commenced a professorship at Glasgow University. He was the founder of the Group in 1955 and, with Edward Lucie-Smith, edited A Group …
Eric Hobsbawm (Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm) Biography - (1917– ), (Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm), Primitive Rebels, Labouring Men, Industry and Empire
British historian, born in Alexandria, Egypt, educated at Cambridge University. Throughout his academic career he has taught at London University, where he became Professor of Economic and Social History in 1970. Primitive Rebels (1959), Labouring Men (1964), and Industry and Empire (1968) were among the publications that gained him recognition as a leading historian of the working classes. His su…
Hobson's Choice
a comedy by Harold Brighouse, performed in 1916. The best-known product of the so-called ?Manchester School? of realistic drama, this principally involves Henry Horatio Hobson, owner of a Salford shoe shop but a drinker and a drone, dependent on his three daughters for the running of his business. Maggie, the ablest and least sentimental of the three, decides to marry her father's bootmaker, Willi…
Jack Hodgins Biography - (1938– ), The Invention of the World, Spit Delaney's Island, The Barclay Family Theatre
Canadian novelist and short-story writer, born on Vancouver Island, educated at the University of British Columbia. Hodgin's fiction shows the influence of Latin American magic realism, but expresses a strong sense of regional cultural identity. Like much contemporary Canadian fiction, his novel The Invention of the World (1977) dramatizes a quest for origins; employing a broad range of narrative …
Ralph Hodgson (Ralph Edwin Hodgson) Biography - (1871–1962), (Ralph Edwin Hodgson), The Last Blackbird, Georgian Poetry series, Poems, The Skylark and Other Poems
British poet, born in Darlington, County Durham. His life is not well documented due to the reclusiveness of his later years; he is known to have worked as a scene-painter in New York and as an illustrator in London prior to the appearance of The Last Blackbird (1907), his first collection of verse. Under the imprint of ?The Sign of the Flying Fame? he became a publisher in 1913, producing edition…
Michael Hofmann Biography - (1957– ), Nights in the Iron Hotel, Acrimony
poet, born in Freiburg, Germany, the son of Gert Hofmann, a distinguished German novelist; he grew up in England and was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, the University of Regensburg, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Since 1983 he has been a freelance writer, and taught creative writing at the University of Florida in 1990. Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), his first collection of poetry, g…
Desmond Hogan Biography - (1950– ), The Ikon Maker, The Leaves on Grey, A Curious Street, A New Shirt
Irish writer, born in Co. Galway, educated at University College, Dublin. His first novel, The Ikon Maker (1976), was set in a remote part of Galway and depicted the obsessional relationship between a mother and son. The Leaves on Grey (1980) was a lyrical account of three friends growing up in 1950s' Dublin. This was followed by A Curious Street (1984), in which a young man remembers his father, …
David George Hogarth Biography - (1862–1927), Accidents of an Antiquary's Life, A Wandering Scholar in the Levant
British archaeologist and writer on the Middle East, born at Barton-on-Humber, educated at Winchester and at Magdalen College, Oxford. His early work in Asia Minor, Cyprus, Egypt, and elsewhere is described in the autobiographical Accidents of an Antiquary's Life (1910). The richly evocative descriptions of A Wandering Scholar in the Levant (1897) gained him the reputation as a travel writer which…
Hogarth Press, The - Two Stories, Prelude, Poems, Kew Gardens, A Checklist of the Hogarth Press
a publishing house begun in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf with a handpress at Hogarth House, their Richmond residence. An edition of 150 copies of their jointly written Two Stories (1917) was encouragingly received and in 1918 a list of subscribers was established. The success of Katherine Mansfield's Prelude (1918) led to the adoption of commercial printing methods. T. S. Eliot's Poems and V…
David Holbrook (David Kenneth Holbrook) Biography - (1923– ), (David Kenneth Holbrook), Imaginings, Against the Cruel Frost, Object Relations, Chance of a Lifetime
British poet, critic, and novelist, born in Norwich, educated at Downing College, Cambridge, where he was appointed Director of English Studies in 1981. His collections of poetry include Imaginings (1961), Against the Cruel Frost (1963), Object Relations (1967), Chance of a Lifetime (1978), and Selected Poems 1961?1978 (1980). He has stated that in his poetry and prose fiction he is ?trying to fin…
Molly Holden Biography - (1927–81), A Hill Like a Horse, To Make Me Grieve, Air and Chill Earth
British poet, born in Peckham, London; she grew up in Surrey and Wiltshire, and was educated at King's College, London. Having had poems published in leading periodicals as a student, she resumed writing during the early 1960s when she became increasingly disabled with multiple sclerosis. The privately published A Hill Like a Horse (1963) was her first collection of verse. Her reputation was estab…
Ursula Holden Biography - (1921– ), Endless Race, Eric's Choice, Tin Toys, Unicorn Sisters, A Bubble Garden
British novelist, born in Dorset; she has lived in Egypt, Dublin, and London. She published her first novel, Endless Race (1975), when she was 54. Her austere, almost staccato style and fastmoving narrative contrasts with the dreamy fairy-tale quality of many of her books. The unease and the black humour which she cultivates comes partly from this contrast and also from the sudden unveiling of the…
John Hollander Biography - (1929– ), A Crackling of Thorns, Movie-Going and Other Poems, Visions from the Ramble
American poet and critic, born in New York City, educated at Columbia University and Indiana University. Allen Ginsberg was a fellow student and friend at Columbia, though their poetry is entirely antithetical. Hollander has taught at Harvard, Connecticut College, Hunter College, and at Yale. His first book, A Crackling of Thorns (1958), had an Introduction by W. H. Auden, who praised the ?literar…
Andrew Holleran Biography - (1948– ), Dancer from the Dance, Nights on Aruba, Ground Zero, The Violet Quill Reader
American novelist, educated at Harvard and at the University of Iowa. Little is known of his life or his real name, although Holleran has intimated that the white, affluent milieu of his novels reflects his own life. His first novel, Dancer from the Dance (1978), was a major break-through in mainstream gay fiction. Narrated by the campy Sutherland, it describes the rise and fall of Malone, a young…
Alan Hollinghurst Biography - (1954– ), Times Literary Supplement, Confidential Chats with Boys, The Swimming Pool Library, flâneur, The Folding Star
British novelist, born in Stroud, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He has taught at the universities of Oxford and London, and has worked on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement. His first published work was a collection of poems, Confidential Chats with Boys (1982). Hollinghurst's highly praised and controversial novels are, on one level, depictions of gay life in contemporary Europe, …
Robert Holman Biography - (1952– ), Mud, German Skerries, Rooting, The Estuary, Other Worlds, Examples Are Today, The Overgrown Path
British dramatist, born in Guisborough, Cleveland, the son of a farmer, educated at the local grammar school. His most successful plays are marked by a strong sense of atmosphere, usually that of his native north Yorkshire, and the understated style in which he evokes ordinary people and their relationships. Among these are Mud (1974) and German Skerries (1977), set on a cliff overlooking the Nort…
John Clellon Holmes Biography - (1926–88), Partisan Review, Poetry, New York Times Magazine, The Bowling Green, The Beat Boys, The Horn
American novelist and journalist, born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, educated at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. He was credited by some authorities with coining the phrase ?the Beat Generation?. He contributed articles to such magazines as Harper's, Partisan Review, Poetry, and the New York Times Magazine, and later held posts at various American universities. Although hi…
Richard Holmes Biography - (1945– ), Shelley: The Pursuit, Coleridge, Coleridge: Early Visions
British biographer, born in London, educated at Churchill College, Cambridge. Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) was written in the course of travels in England, Wales, Switzerland, France, and Italy, which he undertook to reconstruct Shelley's journeyings from 1811 onward. Coleridge (1982), a valuable critical introduction, was succeeded by Coleridge: Early Visions (1989), the first volume of an ambitio…
Michael Holroyd (Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd) Biography - (1935– ), (Michael de Courcy Fraser Holroyd), Who's Who, The Best of Hugh Kingsmill
British biographer, born in London; he was educated, as he states in Who's Who, at Eton and Maidenhead Public Library. In the latter he discovered the works of Hugh Kingsmill, the subject of his first biography (1964) and of his edition of The Best of Hugh Kingsmill (1971). The Unknown Years (1967) and The Years of Achievement (1968), his two-volume biography of Lytton Strachey, won considerable a…
Winifred Holtby Biography - (1898–1935), Manchester Guardian, Yorkshire Post, Daily Herald, Time and Tide, Virginia Woolf, Anderby Wold
British novelist and journalist, born in Yorkshire. Her studies at Somerville College, Oxford, were interrupted by the First World War, during which she served with the WAAC in France. At Oxford, her lifelong friendship with Vera Brittain began. Between the wars, Holtby became an influential journalist in London, writing for the Manchester Guardian, the Yorkshire Post, the Daily Herald, and Time a…
Homage to Catalonia - Homage to Catalonia
a mixture of personal memoir and political analysis of the Spanish Civil War, by George Orwell, published in 1938. Homage to Catalonia includes some of Orwell's most moving and finely judged writing. It is restlessly balanced between an enduring commitment to the ideals of socialism and a growing dismay at the inefficiencies and factionalism of the Republican campaign against Franco. The book open…
William Douglas Home Biography - (1912–92), Now Barabbas, The Chiltern Hundreds, The Reluctant Debutante, The Secretary Bird
British dramatist, born in Edinburgh, son of the 13th Earl of Home, educated at New College, Oxford, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. After working as an actor, and serving as a captain in the Royal Armoured Corps, he came to public notice in 1947 with Now Barabbas, set in a prison as a murderer waits to be executed. His subsequent work has included drawing-room comedies, notably The Chilter…
Homecoming, The
a play by H. Pinter, performed and published in 1965. One of its author's darkest dramas, the play involves the homecoming of Teddy, an academic living in America, with his English wife Ruth, once a photographic model, born in the same north London area where his family still lives. Their welcome is far from conventional. Teddy's widowed father, Max, is alternately insulting, bullying, and ingrati…