Encyclopedia of Literature: Earl Lovelace Biography to Madmen and Specialists

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

Earl Lovelace Biography - (1935– ), While Gods Are Falling, The Schoolmaster, The Dragon Can't Dance

West Indian novelist and playwright, born in Trinidad, where he studied agriculture. His first novel, While Gods Are Falling (1965), shows acute awareness of the economic deprivation and cultural fragmentation caused by colonialism in Trinidad. The Schoolmaster (1968), set in a remote Trinidadian village, considers the same subject through a story of suspense, violation, disintegration, and reinte…

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Amy Lowell (Amy Lawrence Lowell) Biography - (1874–1925), (Amy Lawrence Lowell), A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, Des Imagistes, Some Imagist Poets

American poet and critic, born in Brookline, Massachusetts, of the influential New England family to which Robert Lowell also belonged; she was educated at private schools in Boston. She engaged in travel and voluntary work from the age of 16 until 1902, when she acquired the intense interest in poetry which thereafter dominated her life. Following the appearance of her first collection of convent…

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Robert Lowell (Robert Traill Spence Lowell) Biography - (1917–77), (Robert Traill Spence Lowell), Land of Unlikeness, Lord Weary's Castle, Poems, 1938–1949

American poet, born in Boston of the distinguished New England family whose earlier generations include James Russell Lowell (1819?91) and Amy Lowell. He entered Harvard University in 1935 but left during his second year, and spent several months near Nashville with Alan Tate, whose stylistic example determined the strict formalism of Lowell's earlier verse. In 1938 he enrolled at Kenyon College, …

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John Livingston Lowes Biography - (1867–1945), All's Well that Ends Well, Hamlet, Convention and Revolt in Poetry

American scholar and critic, born in Decatur, Indiana, educated at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin, and at Harvard, where he was Professor of English from 1918 to 1930. Greatly admired as a teacher, Lowes lectured throughout the USA and was the first holder of the Eastman Visiting Professorship at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1930?1. Among his earlier works are editions of Shakespeare's All'…

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Malcolm Lowry (Clarence Malcolm Lowry) Biography - (1909–57), (Clarence Malcolm Lowry), Ultramarine, Under the Volcano

English novelist, born in New Brighton, Cheshire, the son of a Liverpool cotton broker. After working as a deckhand on a tramp steamer he continued his education at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. These early experiences at sea led to his first novel, Ultramarine (1933); highly experimental in technique, with Conrad Aiken and Joyce as two of several models, this autobiographical work concerns a…

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Mina Loy Biography - (1882–1966), Camera Work, Lunar Baedeker, Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables, Last Lunar Baedeker

British/American poet, artist, and polemicist, born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London. She was an artist before she began to write and changed her surname to Loy in 1903. Loy published her first piece of modernist writing, ?Aphorisms on Futurism?, in Camera Work journal (1914). Her plays and manifestos (including her important ?Feminist Manifesto?) are significant for their formal experimentation and t…

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Percy Lubbock Biography - (1879–1965), The Middle Years, The Sense of the Past, The Ivory Tower

British editor, biographer, and critic, born in London, educated at King's College, Cambridge. In 1906 he became librarian of the Pepys Library at Magadalene College, Cambridge, which supplied the materials for his biography of Samuel Pepys (1909). His editions of the The Middle Years, The Sense of the Past, and The Ivory Tower, the unfinished novels of his friend Henry James, appeared in 1917. He…

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E. V. Lucas (Edward Verrall Lucas) Biography - (1868–1938), (Edward Verrall Lucas), Punch, The Open Road, A Wanderer In, Listener's Lure

British journalist, essayist, travel writer, and novelist, born in Eltham, Kent; he received an irregular education before starting work at a bookshop in Brighton where he began to read widely. After working as a journalist in Sussex and London, he joined the staff of Punch, of which he became assistant editor. The Open Road (1899) was followed by well over a hundred titles. His travel writings ar…

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F. L. Lucas (Frank Laurence Lucas) Biography - (1894–1967), (Frank Laurence Lucas), Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy, Euripides and His Influence

British critic, novelist, and poet, born at Hipperholme in Yorkshire, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was elected in 1920 to a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, where he lectured until 1962. His early publications include Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (1922), Euripides and His Influence (1924), and his edition of The Complete Works of John Webster (4 volumes, 1927). From the mid…

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Doug Lucie Biography - (1953– ), John Clare's Mad Nuncle, Hard Feelings, Progress, Fashion, Grace, Gaucho

British dramatist, born in Chessington, educated at Worcester College, Oxford. His first play, John Clare's Mad Nuncle (1975), was followed by subsequent works which have been widely admired for their sardonic portrayal of Britain in the 1980s, a place and period he sees as corrupt, acquisitive, and callous. Key plays include Hard Feelings (1982), about bright young Londoners not above harassing t…

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Edward Lucie-Smith (John Edward Mackenzie Lucie-Smith) Biography - (1933– ), (John Edward Mackenzie Lucie-Smith), A Group Anthology, A Tropical Childhood, Confessions and Histories

British poet and art historian, born in Kingston, Jamaica, educated at Merton College, Oxford. He was an advertising copywriter from 1956 to 1966, when he became a freelance writer. He was a prominent member of the Group and, with Philip Hobsbaum, co-edited A Group Anthology (1963). His principal collections of poetry are A Tropical Childhood (1961), Confessions and Histories (1964), Towards Silen…

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Lucky Jim

a novel by Kingsley Amis, published in 1954. Amis's first novel established him as one of the most anarchic and irreverent comic writers of his generation; like Osborne's Jimmy Porter, his protagonist, Jim Dixon, epitomized the iconoclasm of the ?Angry Young Men?. The novel opens as Dixon, a young lecturer in medieval history much given to pulling faces and to practical jokes, is attempting to ing…

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Lupercal - The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal

a collection of poetry by Ted Hughes, published in 1960. The volume maintained the confidence and energy which had distinguished his first book, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), but displayed greater stylistic control and fluency across an increased thematic range; A1 Alvarez's statement that ?Hughes has found his own voice ? and has emerged as a poet of the first importance? is indicative of the high…

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Alison Lurie Biography - (1926– ), Love and Friendship, Imaginary Friends, The War between the Tates, Real People

American writer, born in Chicago, educated at Radcliffe College. Lurie has chronicled contemporary North American life in her elegantly composed and witty novels. Like Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Lurie shows great skill in relating the idiosyncrasies of university life and charting intellectual fashions. Love and Friendship (1962) concerns the rivalries within a small New England campus comm…

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Andrew Lytle (Andrew Nelson Lytle) Biography - (1902– ), (Andrew Nelson Lytle), The Fugitive, I'll Take My Stand, The Sewanee Review

American novelist and critic, born in Tennessee, educated at Vanderbilt University where he was associated with the Fugitive group, in particular Allen Tate (see Agrarians). He shared their vision of the need for the South to assert its cultural and spiritual independence and refuse collusion with the materialistic industrial world. He contributed to the magazine The Fugitive and to the movement's…

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Dame Rose Macaulay Dame Emelie Rose Macaulay Biography - (1881–1958), Dame Emelie Rose Macaulay, Abbots Verney, Bildungsroman, Non-Combatants and Others, Potterism, Dangerous Ages

British novelist, essayist, and travel writer, a cousin of the historian Lord Macaulay, born in Rugby, educated at Somerville College, Oxford; her early life was spent in Italy, Aberystwyth, and Cambridge. Her novels began with Abbots Verney (1906), a Bildungsroman set in Rome, ?Verney? being the first of numerous androgynously named central characters in her fiction. During the First World War sh…

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George Macbeth (George Mann MacBeth) Biography - (1932–92), (George Mann MacBeth), The Broken Places, The Night of Stones, The Burning Cone

British poet and novelist, born in Shotts, Lanarkshire and brought up in Yorkshire, educated at New College, Oxford. He was a producer of features on poetry and the arts for BBC radio, a teacher, and broadcaster. A member of the Group in the late 1950s, MacBeth's early work, most substantially represented in The Broken Places (1963), showed great accomplishment in the adaptation of conventional te…

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Norman Maccaig (Norman Alexander Maccaig) Biography - (1910–96), (Norman Alexander Maccaig), Far Cry, The Inward Eye, Riding Lights, The Sinai Sort

Scottish poet, born in Edinburgh, where he was educated at the Royal High School and the University. He was a schoolteacher and latterly a headmaster from 1937 to 1970, when he became a reader at the University of Stirling. During the 1940s MacCaig was associated with the New Apocalypse and his early work, collected in Far Cry (1943) and The Inward Eye (1946), partook of the movement's wildly ener…

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Sir Desmond Maccarthy Sir Charles Otto Desmond Maccarthy Biography - (1878–1952), Sir Charles Otto Desmond Maccarthy, New Statesman, Sunday Times

English critic and journalist, born in Plymouth, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group, though not of its inner circle. He served with the Red Cross during the First World War, and was knighted in 1951. Throughout his journalistic career he edited a number of periodicals, including the New Statesman, for which he also wrote articles under…

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Hugh Macdiarmid, pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve Biography - (1892–1978), pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve, Northern Numbers, Annals of the Five Senses, Sangschaw, Penny Wheep

Scottish poet, critic, and Scottish nationalist, born at Langholm, Dumfriesshire, educated at Broughton Student Centre and the University of Edinburgh. In 1912 he began his career as a journalist in Scotland and South Wales. He became involved in 1920 in the movement to revive indigenous Scottish culture and edited three editions of Northern Numbers (1920, 1921, 1922), an anthology of Scottish poe…

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Donagh Macdonagh Biography - (1912–68), Twenty Poems, Murder in the Cathedral, Happy as Larry

Irish poet and playwright, born in Dublin, the son of Thomas MacDonagh, educated at University College, Dublin. He was a barrister from 1935 to 1941, when he became a District Justice in Wexford and Dublin. As a student he published Twenty Poems (with Niall Sheridan, 1934) and mounted the first Irish production of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. His own plays are either verse-dramas or ball…

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Thomas Macdonagh Biography - (1878–1916), When the Dawn Is Come, Metempsychosis, Through the Ivory Gate, Songs of Myself, Lyrical Poems

Irish poet and playwright, born in Cloughjordan, County Tipperary, educated at University College, Dublin. In 1908 he became a teacher at Patrick Pearse's St Enda's School. His first play, When the Dawn Is Come, was produced by the Abbey Theatre in 1908, after revisions suggested by Yeats and Synge had made its nationalist content more explicit. Yeats was later satirized in another of MacDonagh's …

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John D. Macdonald (John Dann Macdonald) Biography - (1916–86), (John Dann Macdonald), The Brass Cupcake, Dead Low Tide, Murder in the Wind, Hurricane

American crime writer, born in Pennsylvania; he studied at the Harvard Business School and served (1940?6) with the OSS in the US Army in the Far East, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After contributing many short stories in a variety of genres to pulp magazines under his own name and a number of pseudonyms, he published his first novel, The Brass Cupcake, in 1950. It was followed by man…

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Philip Macdonald Biography - (1899–1981), Rebecca, The Rasp, The White Crow, The Link, The Nursemaid Who Disappeared, Warrant for X

British crime writer, grandson of George MacDonald, born in London; he served in Mesopotamia in a cavalry regiment in the First World War, and in 1931 moved to Hollywood where he worked as a scriptwriter?working on, among many other films, Alfred Hitchcock's version of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca?and bred Great Danes. One of the many detective story writers who appeared in the 1920s, he brought ou…

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Ross Macdonald (Ross Kenneth Millar Macdonald) Biography - (1915–83), (Ross Kenneth Millar Macdonald), The Moving Target, The Drowning Pool, The Zebra-Striped Hearse

American crime writer, born in Los Gatos, California, raised in Canada, educated at the University of Western Ontario; he has held posts at the universities of Toronto and Michigan. Within a mainly California setting, MacDonald's series of mystery novels featuring private eye Lew Archer successfully reproduce the style of Raymond Chandler and the political sensibility of Dashiell Hammett. In a flu…

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A. G. Macdonell (Archibald Gordon Macdonell) Biography - (1895–1941), (Archibald Gordon Macdonell), London Mercury, England, Their England, Autobiography of a Cad

British novelist, born in India, educated at Winchester. Following two years of active service in Flanders, he was invalided out of the army in 1918 and rapidly established himself as a freelance journalist, becoming drama critic for the London Mercury in 1919. From 1922 to 1927 he was a member of staff with the League of Nations; he subsequently produced a succession of thrillers using the pseudo…

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Gwendolyn Macewen Biography - (1941–87), Canadian Forum, The Rising Fire, A Breakfast for Barbarians, The Armies of the Moon

Canadian poet, novelist, and short-story writer, born in Toronto; her poetry first appeared in Canadian Forum several years before she left school at the age of eighteen to devote herself to writing. The Rising Fire (1963), her first substantial collection of verse, was followed by eight further volumes, which include A Breakfast for Barbarians (1966), The Armies of the Moon (1972), The T. E. Lawr…

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Arthur Machen (originally Arthur Llewellyn Jones) Biography - (1863–1947), (originally Arthur Llewellyn Jones), The Chronicle of Clemendy, The Great God Pan, The Three Impostors

British short-story writer, born in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, educated at Hereford Cathedral School. He was the only son of a Welsh Anglican clergyman. His early immersion in Welsh myth and legend disposed him toward the esoteric; following his move to London in 1880 he worked as a cataloguer of arcane and cabbalistic literature and joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, of which W. B. Yeats was the …

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Colin Macinnes Biography - (1914–73), To the Victor the Spoils, June in Her Spring, City of Spades, Absolute Beginners

British novelist and essayist, born in London, brought up in Australia; he was the son of popular novelist Angela Thirkell. His first novel, To the Victor the Spoils (1950), which chronicled a Field Security unit in occupied Europe, was followed by June in Her Spring (1952), an adolescent love story set in the Australian outback. His best-known work, an informal trilogy about bohemian London, cons…

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Shena Mackay Biography - (1944– ), Dust Falls on Eugene Shlumberger, Toddler on the Run, Music Upstairs, Old Crow

Scottish writer, born in Edinburgh, educated at Tonbridge Girls' Grammar School and Kidbrooke Comprehensive School. She left school at 16, and at 17 wrote her first short novel, Dust Falls on Eugene Shlumberger, which, along with Toddler on the Run, was published in 1964. Music Upstairs (1965) is an evocative account of life in the Earl's Court Road in the early 1960s. The novels Old Crow (1967) a…

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Percy Mackaye (Percy Wallace Mackaye) Biography - (1875–1956), (Percy Wallace Mackaye)

American playwright, born in New York, educated at Harvard; he was the son of Steele Mackaye, an important figure in the modernization of nineteenth-century American theatre. Percy MacKaye wrote many plays in a variety of modes including the tetralogy The Mystery of Hamlet, King of Denmark; or, What We Will (1949), imagining events which preceded Shakespeare's play. His single success, The Scarecr…

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Sir Compton Mackenzie (SirEdward Montague Mackenzie Biography - (1883–1972), (SirEdward Montague Mackenzie, The Passionate Elopement, Carnival, Sinister Street, Vestal Fire, Extraordinary Women, Greek Memories

British novelist, born in West Hartlepool, County Durham, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. Following successes with the novels The Passionate Elopement (1911) and Carnival (1912), he was acclaimed as a major novelist for Sinister Street (two volumes, 1913, 1914), a psychologically penetrating narrative of a young man's passage through Oxford towards moral dissolution in the East End of London…

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Bernard Maclaverty Biography - (1942– ), Secrets, Lamb, Cal, A Time to Dance and Other Stories

Northern Irish novelist and short-story writer, born in Belfast. From 1960 to 1970 he worked as a laboratory technician before taking an English degree at Queen's University, Belfast. Upon graduating he moved to Scotland and taught there until 1981, when he became a fulltime writer. MacLaverty's fiction has tended to concern themes of victimization, loneliness, and the destruction of desire by gla…

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Sorley Maclean (Sorley Somhairle MacGill-Eain Maclean) Biography - (1911–1996), (Sorley Somhairle MacGill-Eain Maclean), Seventeen Poems for Sixpence, Dàin do Eimhir

Gaelic poet, born in Osgaig on the island of Raasay, educated at the University of Edinburgh. He was a schoolteacher, and latterly a headmaster, subsequently becoming writer-in-residence at the University of Edinburgh and at the Gaelic College in Skye. In 1940 he was conscripted into the army and fought at the Battle of El Alamein where he was severely wounded. His experiences in wartime inform nu…

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Archibald Macleish Biography - (1892–1982), The Pot of Earth, Streets in the Moon, The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, Nobodaddy

American poet and dramatist, born in Glencoe, Illinois, educated at Harvard; he practised as a lawyer until 1923, when he moved to Paris. He remained there for five years, associating with members of the ?Lost Generation? of American expatriate authors and developing innovative verse techniques under the influence of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The Pot of Earth (1925), Streets in the Moon (1926), …

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Hugh Maclennan (John Hugh Maclennan) Biography - (1907–90), (John Hugh Maclennan), Barometer Rising, Two Solitudes, The Watch that Ends the Night

Canadian novelist, born in Glace Bay, Cape Breton Island, educated at Dalhousie University (Halifax), Oxford University, and Princeton. One of Canada's best-known novelists, MacLennan was primarily a writer of allegorical fiction with a humanist message and a strong commitment to exploring the changing nature of Canadian identity. He took a complex view of his country, seeing Canada as occupying a…

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Francis Macmanus Biography - (1909–65), Stand and Give Challenge, Candle for the Proud, Men Withering, This House Was Mine

Irish novelist, born in Kilkenny, educated at University College, Dublin. He joined Radio Eireann as general features editor in 1948, in which capacity he introduced the Thomas Davis lectures series. His first novel, Stand and Give Challenge (1934), is the first volume of a trilogy about life in eighteenth-century Ireland; Candle for the Proud (1936) and Men Withering (1939) completed the trilogy,…

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Louis Macneice (Frederick Louis Macneice) Biography - (1907–63), (Frederick Louis Macneice), Christopher Columbus, The Dark Tower, Blind Fire-works, Poems

British poet, born in Belfast, educated at Merton College, Oxford, where he began friendships with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. After lecturing at the University of Birmingham and London University from 1930 to 1940, he was a writer and producer with the BBC from 1941 until his death. Among the many plays for radio he produced were a number of his own works, of which Christopher Columbus (1944…

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Jay Macpherson (Jay Jean Macpherson) Biography - (1931– ), (Jay Jean Macpherson), Nineteen Poems, O Earth Return, The Boatman, Welcoming Disaster, Poems Twice Told

Canadian poet, born in London; from 1940 onward she grew up in Canada, principally in Ottawa. She was educated at McGill University and at the University of Toronto, where she became Professor of English at Victoria College in 1974. The contents of Nineteen Poems (1952), published by Robert Graves's Seizin Press, and O Earth Return (1954), issued by Emblem Books, Macpherson's own small press (see …

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Deirdre Madden Biography - (1960– ), Hidden Symptoms, First Fictions, Birds of the Innocent Wood, Remembering Light and Stone

Irish novelist, born in Co. Antrim, educated at Trinity College, Dublin and the University of East Anglia. Her novella Hidden Symptoms (1988) was published in Faber's First Fictions anthology. She won critical acclaim and the Somerset Maugham Prize for Birds of the Innocent Wood (1988), set in Ireland during the 1970s. Remembering Light and Stone (1992), which moves between Ireland and Italy, conc…

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Charles Madge (Charles Henry Madge) Biography - (1912–96), (Charles Henry Madge), Britain By Mass Observation, War-Time Pattern of Saving and Spending

British poet and sociologist, born in Johannesburg, South Africa, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. Kathleen Raine was his first wife. After working as a journalist, in 1937 he joined T. Harrisson and H. Jennings in founding Mass-Observation, an organization for the collation of sociological data supplied by widespread observers. With Harrisson, he edited four compilations of reports, which in…

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