Encyclopedia of Literature: Mary Lavin Biography to Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

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

Ray Lawler (Raymond Evenor Lawler) Biography - (1921– ), (Raymond Evenor Lawler), The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Kid Stakes, Other Times

Australian playwright, born in Melbourne; he left school at the age of 13, and later began working as an actor with the National Theatre Company of Melbourne. He received widespread fame with his play The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955), a tragi-comic drama about two sugar-cane cutters, Barney and Roo, and their Melbourne girlfriends whom they visit annually, during the summer ?lay-off? peri…

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Emily Lawless Biography - (1845–1913), Grania, Hurrish, Maelcho, With the Wild Geese

Anglo-Irish novelist, poet, and biographer, daughter of the 3rd Baron Cloncurry, born in Co. Kildare and educated privately. While her success as a writer brought her public prominence and close connections with the British government, her personal life was one of suffering. The suicides of her father and her two sisters, coupled with her intense disillusionment with the development of a strong Ho…

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D. H. Lawrence (David Herbert Richards Lawrence) Biography - (1885–1930), (David Herbert Richards Lawrence), Sons and Lovers, English Review, The White Peacock, The Trespasser

British novelist, short-story writer, poet, playwright, critic, and essayist, born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. Lawrence had one of the most extraordinary yet representative twentieth-century literary careers in its fierce alienation from mainstream British culture. He was the fourth son of a coal-miner and a mother who had trained as a school-teacher and whose family had wider cultural and socia…

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T. E. Lawrence (Thomas Edward ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ Lawrence) Biography - (1888–1935), (Thomas Edward ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ Lawrence), Crusader Castles, The Wilderness of Zin

British soldier and writer, born at Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire, the illegitimate son of an Anglo-Irish baronet and a governess, educated at Oxford High School and Jesus College, Oxford; his undergraduate dissertation on the military architecture of the Middle East was published with a collection of his letters as Crusader Castles (two volumes, 1936). In 1910 he was sent to assist with the excavatio…

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Henry Lawson Biography - (1867–1922), Republican, Bulletin, In the Days When the World was Wide, Popular Verses, Humorous Verses

Australian short-story writer and poet, born in the goldfields of New South Wales. Lawson published his first poems in journals such as the Republican and Bulletin. In 1892?3 he spent eighteen months in Bourke in New South Wales; this harsh experience of bush life was the source of much of his prose and verse. His first collection of verse, In the Days When the World was Wide (1896), contained som…

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Irving Layton Biography - (1912– ), Collected Poems, Selected Poems, Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton, Uncollected Poems, 1936–1959

Canadian poet, born in Neamtz, Romania, and taken to Montreal at the age of one; originally named Lazarovitch, he has used the name Layton since 1937. After war service he studied economics at McGill University, Montreal; he was Professor of English at York University, Toronto, from 1969 to 1978. Layton has published many volumes of verse in addition to critical, political, and general writings. A…

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Stephen Leacock Biography - (1869–1944), Elements of Political Science, Literary Lapses, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Canadian humorist, born at Swanmore in Hampshire; he was taken to Canada when he was six. He grew up in Ontario and was educated at the universities of Toronto and Chicago; he lectured in political economics at McGill University from 1903 to 1936. His first book was Elements of Political Science (1906), but it was Literary Lapses (1910) that launched him on the career as a humorist that made him a…

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F. R. Leavis (Frank Raymond Leavis) Biography - (1895–1978), (Frank Raymond Leavis), Ulysses, Scrutiny, Fiction and the Reading Public, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture

British literary critic, born in Cambridge, where he was educated at Emmanuel College, gaining his doctorate in 1924 for work on the relationship between literature and journalism. As a probationary lecturer at Cambridge from 1927 to 1931 he was censured for introducing students to James Joyce's Ulysses, which was banned at the time. From 1932 onward he was occupied in establishing Scrutiny in col…

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David Leavitt Biography - (1961– ), Family Dancing, A Place I've Never Been Before, The Lost Language of Cranes

American writer, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; he grew up in California, and was educated at Yale. His two collections of stories, Family Dancing (1984), which has been praised for its evocative studies of modern American family life, and A Place I've Never Been Before (1990), earned him a reputation as a fashionable minimalist. His first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), is expansive…

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John Le carré, pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell Biography - (1931– ), pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell, Call for the Dead, The Deadly Affair

British writer of spy fiction, born in Poole, Dorset, educated at Sherborne School, Berne University, and Lincoln College, Oxford; he taught briefly at Eton before joining the Foreign Office in 1959. His first novel, Call for the Dead (1961; filmed by Sidney Lumet as The Deadly Affair, 1967; republished with this title), introduced the British intelligence agent George Smiley, who also features in…

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Francis Ledwidge Biography - (1891–1917), Songs of the Fields, Songs of the Peace, Last Songs, Complete Poems

Irish poet, born in Slane, Co. Meath; he received elementary education and worked as a copper miner and an overseer of roadworks for the local council. Despite his strong nationalist sympathies, he joined the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers soon after the outbreak of the First World War, partly out of disappointment in love, and was killed on the Western Front. A number of his poems express regret th…

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Laurie Lee Biography - (1912– ), The Sun My Monument, My Many-Coated Man, Selected Poems, A Rose for Winter

British writer and poet, born and educated in Gloucestershire. The Sun My Monument (1944), Lee's first collection of verse, contained numerous responses to the Spanish Civil War; these form some of his best work as a poet in their imaginative sensings of tensions between the lyrical vitality of nature, a dominant theme in all his verse, and man's fatally destructive proclivities. Subsequent volume…

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Left Book Club, The - Left Book Club News, Days of Contempt, Forward from Liberalism, A. R. P

a scheme for the dissemination of politically educative literature begun in 1936 by the publisher Victor Gollancz in collaboration with Harold Laski and John Strachey. Members received books and the journal Left Book Club News on a monthly basis. While the doctrinaire character of the majority of the publications was apparent, all shades of opinion on the political left were represented and the in…

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Left Review - Left Review

a monthly journal of politics and literature founded in 1934 as the platform of the British section of the pro-Soviet Writers' International. Until December 1935 it was edited by a group in which Montague Slater's was the dominant voice. Early issues were preoccupied with defining the functions of writers as instruments of revolutionary socialism. Although much of the content of Left Review justif…

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Richard Le Gallienne Biography - (1866–1947), My Ladies' Sonnets, Volumes in Folio, The Yellow Book, The Romantic Nineties

British poet and memoirist, born in West Derby, near Liverpool, educated at Liverpool College. Encouraged as a poet by Oliver Wendell Holmes, he published My Ladies' Sonnets in 1887. In 1888 he moved to London and became a publisher's reader. Volumes in Folio (1889) established his reputation as a poet, its refined sensuality manifesting the influence of Oscar Wilde, with whom he was acquainted. A…

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Ursula K. Le Guin (Ursula Kroeber Le Guin) Biography - (1929– ), (Ursula Kroeber Le Guin), Rocannon's World, City of Illusions

American science fictionwriter, born in Berkeley, California, educated at Radcliffe College and Columbia University. Rocannon's World (1966) and City of Illusions (1967) demonstrated her literary talents which she firmly established with The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), a serene narrative in which a human ethnologist visits a new planet whose humanoid trans-sexual inhabitants challenge his innate…

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John Lehmann (Rudolph John Frederick Lehmann) Biography - (1907–87), (Rudolph John Frederick Lehmann), Thrown to the Woolfs, New Writing, The Penguin New Writing

British poet and editor, born at Bourne End in Buckinghamshire, the brother of Rosamond Lehmann, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the Hogarth Press as an assistant in 1931 and became a partner in the venture in 1938. Thrown to the Woolfs (1978) contains his reminiscences of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. In 1936 he established New Writing, which was succeeded by The Penguin New Writi…

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Rosamond Lehmann (Rosamond Nina Lehmann) Biography - (1901–90), (Rosamond Nina Lehmann), Dusty Answer, A Note in Music, Invitation to a Waltz

British novelist, born in Buckinghamshire, educated at Girton College, Cambridge; she married her first husband, Leslie Runcimann, in 1924. Her first novel, Dusty Answer (1927), a frank account of a young woman's first emotional involvement, brought her instant success, tinged with scandal; A Note in Music (1930) was less enthusiastically received. Invitation to a Waltz (1932) and its sequel The W…

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Fritz Leiber (Fritz Reuter, Jr Leiber) Biography - (1910–92), (Fritz Reuter, Jr Leiber), The Wanderer, Our Lady of Darkness, Gather, Darkness!

American short-story writer and novelist, born in Chicago, educated at the University of Chicago. Most of his work has been fantasy, though he is highly regarded for his occasional science fiction novels. He is perhaps best known for his ?Sword and Sorcery? tales (a term which he coined) involving two characters, Fafhrd (a self-portrait) and Gray Mouser (based on a long-time friend), but his other…

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Mike Leigh Biography - (1943– ), Bleak Moments, Babies Grow Old, Abigail's Party, nouveau-riche, Ecstasy

British dramatist, born and educated in Salford, where his father was a doctor, and trained as an actor and a designer in London. He has become known as a pioneer of ?improvised? drama: that is, of work that emerges in rehearsal with actors and is then scripted under his or her name by the director. In the theatre, the most successful have been somewhat pessimistic comedies about lonely people. Th…

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Maurice Leitch Biography - (1933– ), The Liberty Lad, Poor Lazarus, Stamping Ground, Silver's City, Chinese Whispers, Burning Bridges

Northern Irish novelist, born in Muckamore, Co. Antrim, educated at Stran Mills Training College, Belfast. He taught in secondary schools for several years before joining BBC Northern Ireland in 1960 as a producer. In 1970 he moved to London where he was head of BBC radio's drama feature department until 1989. Leitch's first novel, The Liberty Lad (1965), is characteristic of his continuing portra…

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Brad Leithauser Biography - (1953– ), Hundreds of Fireflies, The Cats of the Temple, Between Leaps: Poems, 1972–1985

American poet, born in Detroit, Michigan, educated at Harvard, obtaining a doctorate in jurisprudence in 1980. From 1980 to 1983 he was a research fellow at Kyoto Comparative Law Centre, Japan. Hundreds of Fireflies (1982) and The Cats of the Temple (1986), the latter strongly informed by his impressions of Japan, gained him wide notice for their fusions of great descriptive precision with persona…

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Elmore Leonard Biography - (1925– ), Pronto, Fifty-Two Pickup, Unknown Man No. 89, The Switch, Gold Coast

American crime novelist, born in New Orleans, educated at the University of Detroit. After writing Westerns and screenplays, Leonard emerged as a foremost practitioner of the modern crime novel (see detective fiction). In a range of astringent novels about urban life he has used crime to present a distinctive and sophisticated vision of the world. His principal settings are Miami and Detroit (alth…

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Tom Leonard Biography - (1944– ), Poems, Bunnit. Husslin, Ghostie Men, Situations Theoretical and Contemporary, Intimate Voices, Sane Words Rhyme

Scottish poet, born in Glasgow, where he was educated at the University. In addition to his activities as a writer, he has worked in a variety of clerical capacities. Poems (1973) confirmed his reputation as a poet of stylistic versatility and seriocomic power. While much of Leonard's poetry is written in Glasgow dialect, the highly inventive and politically outspoken character of his work is equa…

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Laurence Lerner (Laurence David Lerner) Biography - (1925– ), (Laurence David Lerner), Domestic Interior, Selves, The Man I Killed, Rembrandt's Mirror

British poet, critic, and novelist, born in Cape Town, South Africa, educated at the University of Cape Town and at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After holding a succession of academic posts in Africa and Britain, he became a professor at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA, in 1985. His collections of poetry include Domestic Interior (1959), Selves (1969), The Man I Killed (1980), and Rembrandt'…

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Less Deceived, The - The Less Deceived

the second of Philip Larkin's principal collections of verse, published in 1955. The book's title, taken from the poem ?Deceptions?, suggests its recurrent critique of what ?Next Please? terms the ?bad habits of expectancy? fostered by romantic ideals of fulfilment or escape; conventional notions of emotionally significant attachment of particular persons or places are repudiated in several poems,…

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Doris Lessing (Doris May Lessing), née Tayler) Biography - (1919– ), (Doris May Lessing), née Tayler), The Grass is Singing, Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage

British novelist and short-story writer, born in Persia of British parents who moved when she was five to a farm in Southern Rhodesia. She left school at 15 and worked as a nursemaid, then as a shorthand typist and telephone operator in Salisbury. After the break-up of her first marriage she became involved in radical politics. She remarried in 1945, but in 1949 left for England with her youngest …

3 minute read

Meridel Le Sueur Biography - (1900– ), The New Masses, The Daily Worker, Salute to Spring, The Girl, Annunciation, North Star Country

American poet, novelist, and journalist, born in Murray, Iowa; she dropped out of high school, then lived in New York where she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. Known for her political radicalism, she contributed to The New Masses and The Daily Worker. The stories and reportage collected in her early works, Salute to Spring (1940) and the novel The Girl (written in 1939 and publish…

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Levant Trilogy, The - The Danger Tree, The Battle Lost and Won, The Sum of Things, The Balkan Trilogy

a trilogy of novels by Olivia Manning consisting of The Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978), and The Sum of Things (1980). It is the second trilogy of a six-volume sequence entitled ?The Fortunes of War?, the first being The Balkan Trilogy. The Danger Tree opens with the arrival in Cairo in 1942 of Simon Boulderstone, a young lieutenant in the British Army. After reporting for duty,…

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Ada Leverson (née Beddington) Biography - (1862–1933), (née Beddington), Punch, habitués, The Yellow Book, Love's Shadow, Tenterhooks

British novelist, born in London. Through her contributions to Punch and other periodicals, she came to the notice of Oscar Wilde, who named her ?Sphinx? and declared her the wittiest woman in the world. Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent, Mrs Patrick Campbell, and Max Beerbohm were all habitu?s of her salon. In the 1890s she published two stories in The Yellow Book. At the time…

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Denise Levertov Biography - (1923– ), The Double Image, Here and Now, Overland to the Islands

American poet, born in Ilford, Essex, and privately educated. Her experiences as a nurse during the Second World War inform her first collection of verse, The Double Image (1946), which showed affinities with the poetry of the New Apocalypse. After moving to New York, she took American citizenship in 1955. During the 1950s she was associated with the Black Mountain poets. She began teaching at Ame…

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Peter Levi (Peter Chad Tigar Levi) Biography - (1931– ), (Peter Chad Tigar Levi), The Gravel Ponds, Death Is a Pulpit, Collected Poems 1955–1975

British poet, born in Ruislip, London, educated at Campion Hall, Oxford. He was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1964 and lectured at Campion Hall from 1965 to 1977 when he resigned from the priesthood and became a fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. His collections of poetry include The Gravel Ponds (1960), Death Is a Pulpit (1971), Collected Poems 1955?1975 (1976), Private Ground (19…

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Norman Levine Biography - (1923– ), Canada Made Me, One Way Ticket

Canadian short-story writer and novelist, born to Polish-Jewish parents in Ottawa, educated at Cambridge and McGill Universities. Levine settled in England, where he lived mainly in the artistic community of St Ives, Cornwall, from 1949 to 1980, when he returned to Canada. The experience of his early years is examined in Canada Made Me (1958), a work which documents his ambiguous feelings as a Can…

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Philip Levine Biography - (1928– ), On the Edge, Silent in America: Vivas for Those Who Failed, Not This Pig

American poet, born in Detroit, educated at Wayne State University and at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Levine was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry at Standford University in 1958. His books include On the Edge (1961), Silent in America: Vivas for Those Who Failed (1965), Not This Pig (1968), Red Dust (1971), Pili's Wall (1971), They Feed They Lion (1972), 1933 (1974), The Na…

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Alun Lewis Biography - (1915–44), Raiders' Dawn, The Last Inspection, Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets

Welsh poet, born in Cwmaman, Glamorgan, educated at the Universities of Aberystwyth and Manchester. After prolonged indecision due to his pacifist views, he joined the army in 1940 and served as an officer in India and Burma. He died at Arakan after the discharge of his own revolver in circumstances which remain unclear. The elegiac lyricism and descriptive acuteness of Raiders' Dawn (1942), his f…

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C. S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis) Biography - (1898–1963), (Clive Staples Lewis), The Pilgrim's Regress, The Allegory of Love

British literary scholar, critic, Christian apologist, and novelist, born in Belfast, educated at University College, Oxford. Among several academic posts he was Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford and Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. His literary reputation was established in the 1930s, after his conversion to Christianity, partly reflected in The Pilgrim's Regress (1933…

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Janet Lewis Biography - (1899– ), The Invasion, Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, The Wife of Martin Guerre

American writer, born in Chicago, educated at Lewis Institute and the University of Chicago. Her early travels in Europe, particularly France, had a considerable influence on her writings. Her first novel, The Invasion (1932), is an imaginative creation of Native American life (Lewis herself is of part-Indian origin). Lewis is best known for her three historical novels based on Phillips's Famous C…

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Norman Lewis Biography - (1918– ), Naples '44, Within the Labyrinth, A Dragon Apparent, Golden Earth

British travel writer and novelist, born in London, educated at Enfield Grammar School. His experiences of active service in Italy during the Second World War were drawn upon in Naples '44 (1978), a documentary treatment of the city in wartime, and the novel Within the Labyrinth (1950). Lewis's reputation as a travel writer was established with A Dragon Apparent (1951) and Golden Earth (1952), whi…

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Sinclair Lewis (Harry Sinclair Lewis) Biography - (1885–1951), (Harry Sinclair Lewis), Our Mr. Wrenn, The Trail of the Hawk, The Job

American novelist, born in Sauk Center, Minnesota, educated at Yale University; he was the son of a country doctor of Welsh descent whose life provided details for some of his later fiction. Lewis held a variety of jobs, mostly connected with publishing; for a short time, he worked as the janitor of Upton Sinclair's socialist colony, Helicon Hall, in New Jersey. In 1916, after publishing the two n…

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Wyndham Lewis (Percy Wyndham Lewis) Biography - (1882–1957), (Percy Wyndham Lewis), The English Review, Blast, The Review of the Great English Vortex, Tarr

British artist, novelist, and critic, the son of an American father and an English mother; he was born on his father's yacht off the coast of Nova Scotia and spent his early childhood in New England. In 1888 his parents, who separated when he was 11, moved to England. Lewis was educated at a succession of schools, and later studied at the Slade School of Art. Between 1902 and 1908 he travelled ext…

3 minute read

Life and Letters - Life and Letters Today, London Mercury, Bookman, Life and Letters

a literary periodical initially edited by Desmond MacCarthy, who began it in 1928. During its early years it frequently included work by MacCarthy's associates in the Bloomsbury Group; Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, J. M. Keynes, Clive Bell, and E. M. Forster were among the contributors. Writing by D. H. Lawrence, Cyril Connolly, and Evelyn Waugh was also featured. Following the end of MacCarthy…

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Light in August

a novel by William Faulkner, published in 1932. The central character, Joe Christmas, is the son of Milly Hines and a circus man. Milly's father, Eupheus Hines, murders Milly's lover, believing him to be partly negro, and she dies in childbirth. On Christmas (the origin of Joe's surname) night Hines leaves his hated baby grandson on the steps of an orphanage for white children. At the age of five,…

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