Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
a novel by Jack London, published in 1909. The narrative begins with Martin Eden, an uncouth sailor and labourer, entering the luxurious house of a cultured friend. Although uneasy in the cultivated company, he craves knowledge and life, and the narrative describes the quest upon which Eden's intellectual curiosity leads him. At the house he falls in love with Ruth Morse, an educated society woman…
Irish playwright, born in Co. Galway, educated in Dublin and at Christ Church College, Oxford. His family were wealthy Catholics who had gained exemption from the Penal Laws in 1709. After his return to Ireland, he took an active interest in music and in the revival of the Irish language. He founded the Palestrina Choir in Dublin's Pro-Cathedral, and helped to establish the Feis Cheoil, an annual …
begins with Marx, who was interested in the way the contradictions of capitalism are revealed in a writer like Balzac, of prodigious gifts and rightist sympathies. With the success of the Russian Revolution, and above all with the ascent to power of Joseph Stalin, a regimented and highly prescriptive Marxist literary criticism developed, devoted to so-called Socialist Realism; but there were alway…
British poet, born in Ledbury, Herefordshire; from the age of 13 he trained for a career in the merchant navy. After a crossing to New York in 1895, he deserted ship and remained in America for two years, where he began writing poetry. Shortly after returning to Britain in 1897 he formed a friendship with W. B. Yeats, to whom he paid tribute in Some Memories of W. B. Yeats (1940). His reputation a…
American novelist, short-story writer, and critic, born in Mayfield, Kentucky, educated at the University of Kentucky, the State University of New York at Binghamton, and the University of Connecticut. Mason describes her work as ?Southern Gothic going to the supermarket?, a phrase by which she captures both her indebtedness to great Southern writers of the first half of the century, notably Willi…
New Zealand playwright, born in Wellington, educated at Victoria University College, Wellington. Of Mason's early plays, The End of the Golden Weather (1962), and his ?Maori plays?, particularly The Pohutukawa Tree (1960) and Awatea (1969), were of most interest. The End of the Golden Weather became synonymous with the New Zealand intellectual culture of the 1960s, as Mason toured the country pres…
New Zealand poet, born near Auckland, educated at the University of Auckland. His early interest in Latin writers became a lasting influence on his own work. Mason lived most of his life in Auckland. A committed Marxist, and politically active during the Depression of the 1930s, he was an important influence on other writers, though he wrote but little himself; Charles Brasch, A. R. D. Fairburn, a…
a monthly magazine founded in 1911 by Piet Vlag in New York as a platform for socialist views; Thomas Seltzer was the first editor. Following a financial crisis, Vlag resigned his interest early in 1912 and Max Eastman assumed the editorship. The political content, consistently of a socialist and pacifist character, was supplied by Eastman, John Reed, Floyd Dell, James Oppenheim, and others; birth…
Scottish novelist, biographer, and historian, born in Singapore, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. His first novel, Change and Decay in All Around I See (1978), was an absurdist pastiche in which the well-educated Atwater, determined to fulfil no one's expectations, drifts through London from pub to betting-shop. The Last Peacock (1980) tells the story of Belinda, another drifter, who return…
originated in 1937 as a social survey group under the leadership of Tom Harrisson (an anthropologist), Charles Madge (leftist poet/journalist), and Humphrey Jennings (documentary film-maker), with the project of producing ?the anthropology of ourselves?. As such it pre-empted in its interests (if not methodology) some of the concerns now studied as popular culture. It was characteristic of a growi…
British writer on social conditions, born in Wimbledon, educated at Christ's College, Cambridge. The zealous social concern produced by his Christian idealism and liberal political principles led him to take up residence in one of the poorest parts of south-east London in 1900, where he planned The Heart of Empire (1901); subtitled ?Discussions of modern city life in England?, the book contained c…
British writer, born in London, the son of Cockney parents, educated at University College Cardiff and the University of Montpelier in France. Having written several studies on French authors, Masters became interested in the aristocracy through his friendship with the Marquess of Londonderry and went on to write The Dukes (1975), a history of the origin and ennoblement of all the dukedoms. Severa…
American poet, novelist, and biographer, born in Garnett, Kansas; he grew up in a remote part of Illinois, conceiving the dislike for rural American culture which informs much of his poetry. From 1891 to 1920 he was a partner in a successful Chicago legal practice, after which he devoted himself to writing. He published eleven books, which include A Book of Verse (1898) and the blank-verse drama M…
Australian novelist, born in Fulham, London; he moved to Australia in infancy. He studied at Sydney Technical College and held various jobs until 1964, when he left Australia to live in Britain and the United States, returning in 1968. Trap (1966), his first novel, established him as an important voice in Australian fiction. Its part-Aborigine protagonist Jack Trap embodies an iconoclastic ambival…
American novelist, born in New York; he studied music at Harvard, then at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, and has lived mainly in France since 1952. A friend of John Ashbery, Mathews edited Locus Solus, the magazine of the New York school of poets, from 1960 to 1962. He was the only American member of OULIPO, or Workshop of Potential Literature, an experimental group including Queneau, Pere…
Native American writer, born in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, educated at the University of Oklahoma. He is known for his literary autobiography, Talking to the Moon (1945), written in the tradition of Thoreau's Walden. After a life of international study and travel which began in France with the Signal Corps during the First World War and took him to Oxford University, the School of International Relations…
American critic, born in Pasadena, California, educated at Yale and at Harvard, where he became Professor of English in 1942. His initial specialization in Elizabethan literature, represented by Translation: An Elizabethan Art (1931), was supplanted by the interest in American writing stimulated by his reading of Van Wyck Brooks's works in the late 1920s. Sarah Orne Jewett (1929), his first treatm…
American novelist and travel writer, born in New York City, educated at Yale University. In 1953 he was co-founder of the Paris Review. His early novels Race Rock (1954), Partisans (1955), and Raditzer (1961) have in common the theme of the disjunctions between thought and action. Wildlife in America (1959) initiated his career as a writer on natural history and travel. His many expeditions to rem…
Trinidadian dramatist, born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where he was educated at Belmont Boys Roman Catholic Intermediate School. After working in various capacities, he emigrated to Britain in 1961 and became a full-time writer in 1968. He co-founded the Black Theatre Co-operative with Charles Hanson in 1978. Internationally regarded as pre-eminent among contemporary West Indian dramatists, his p…
English novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, born in Paris, the sixth and youngest son of the solicitor to the British Embassy. His adored mother died of TB when he was eight years old, and the trauma of the event apparently stayed with him until his own death at the age of 91. Following the death of his father two years later, Maugham was sent to live in Whitstable, Kent with a middle-ag…
American journalist and novelist, born in Washington DC, educated at the University of North Carolina. From the mid-1970s Maupin has published short, witty accounts of the hedonistic lifestyles of some of San Francisco's citizens in the San Francisco Examiner. These pieces, with engaging recurrent characters, form a continuous chronicle that has been published in the form of successive novels. Tal…
a novel by E. M. Forster, published in 1971. Written in 1914, the novel remained unpublished for over fifty years, on account of its subject: the homosexual relationship between two young men, one of whom eventually conforms to social convention by marrying, the other of whom remains unmarried and unrepentant about his sexual inclinations. The novel opens with the latter, Maurice Hall, on the poin…
an epic poem by Charles Olson. Conceived of in 1945, but not started until 1950, The Maximus Poems occupied the last twenty years of Olson's life. Ezra Pound's The Cantos and William Carlos Williams's Paterson were the most insistent contemporary influences, though Olson, in Mayan Letters (1954), objected to Pound's egotism and Williams's historical na?vety. He also felt that Pound had not gone ba…
British writer on travel and natural history, born at Elrig, Wigtown; his aristocratic family background is described in the autobiographical The House of Elrig (1965). He was educated at Hertford College, Oxford. Harpoon at a Venture (1952), his first book, describes the commercially unsuccessful shark fishery he opened in 1944 on the Hebridean island of Soay. During the 1950s he travelled widely…
American author and publisher, born in Clifton, Kansas; he attended the University of Southern California and subsequently lived in New York. With William Carlos Williams, he founded Contact (1920?3), a little magazine which contributed valuably to the development of American literary Modernism. In 1921 he married Winifred Bryher, who later became Hilda Doolittle's companion. They settled in Paris…
Australian poet and critic, born in Lakemba, New South Wales, educated at the University of Sydney. Wartime experience in New Guinea led to a series of distinguished articles in the 1940s and 1950s on that country's life and culture. His first verse collection, Under Aldebaran (1946), was followed by A Vision of Ceremony (1956), Selected Poems (1963), Collected Poems 1963?1970 (1971), Music Late a…
American writer, born Salvatore A. Lombino in New York, educated at Hunter College; he served in the US Navy in the Second World War and worked briefly as a teacher. Under his own name Hunter wrote a large amount of popular fiction, plays, and screenplays, including the celebrated novel The Blackboard Jungle (1954), which depicts the violence and racial tension in the New York school system. He is…
Irish playwright and fiction writer, born in Glasgow, educated at University College, Cork. He ran his family's dairy farm in Co. Monaghan for ten years and has subsequently become one of Ireland's most talented, but least prolific, playwrights. King of the Castle (1964), his powerfully realistic play about the corrupting effects of wealth in rural Ireland, won the first Irish Life Drama Award. Th…
American novelist, born in Rhode Island but brought up in Knoxville, Tennessee, educated at the University of Tennessee. McCarthy is a reclusive writer who presents a dark vision of America. His prose style is an extraordinary hybrid which intermingles Faulkner and Melville, Joyce and Stephen Crane. Resonant and imagistic, it focuses upon an almost exclusively masculine universe, marked by the cur…
American novelist, essayist, and teacher, born in Seattle, Washington. Her parents died when she was six, and she was brought up by relatives, in Minneapolis, Seattle, and Tacoma. McCarthy's early life is recorded in Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). She attended Vassar College, where she knew Muriel Rukeyser and Elizabeth Bishop. She taught literature at Sarah Lawrence and Bard Colleges and …
American poet, born in Marysville, Kansas, educated at the University of Wichita and San Francisco State University. In 1962 he commenced teaching at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. His reputation as a poet was established during the San Francisco Renaissance; collections of his earlier verse, which repeatedly displays violently passionate imagery and language, include Passage …
Australian poet, born in Melbourne, where he was articled to an architect. He then became a freeland writer and moved to Sydney in 1904. Satyrs and Sunlight (1909) was described by Kenneth Slessor as the beginning of modern Australian poetry. Creating a mythical landscape of satyrs, centaurs, and unicorns, he departed from the nationalist-realist school of the 1890s. The titles of subsequent colle…
American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, born in Columbus, Georgia, educated at Columbia and New York Universities and the Juilliard School of Music. She suffered a series of crippling strokes in her twenties which left her partially paralysed and confined to a wheelchair towards the end of her life. Her reputation was established with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), immediately…
American novelist, born in Brooklyn, New York, educated at Williams College and Columbia University. McElroy is one of several highly regarded contemporary American novelists such as William Gaddis, William Gass, Thomas Pynchon, and Don Delillo, who make few concessions to the ordinary reader. His first novel, A Smuggler's Bible (1966), was followed by Hind's Kidnap (1969), Ancient History (1971),…
British novelist and short-story writer, born in Aldershot, Hampshire educated at the Universities of Sussex and East Anglia. He created something of a stir with his first book, First Love, Last Rites (1975, Somerset Maugham Award), a collection of stories startling in their cool portrayal of ordinary people caught up in ordinary nightmares; masturbation, incest, castration, and the bewildering po…
Irish novelist and short-story writer, born in Dublin, educated at St Patrick's Training College, Dublin. He achieved immediate fame with his first book, The Barracks (1963), for its depiction of Irish rural life, its attention to detail, and its elegant prose, but The Dark (1965), with its uncompromising attitude to sex and its scabrous language, fell foul of the puritanical 1929 Censorship of Pu…
New Zealand playwright, born in Oamaru in the South Island, educated at the University of Otago, Dunedin. Both McGee's experience as a law student and his time as a Junior All Black (rugby player) contributed to the creation of his successful first play Foreskin's Lament (1979/81). Its first half is set in the changing shed on practice night; the action is about young Foreskin's unsuccessful attem…
Irish poet and novelist, born in Glenties, Co. Donegal; he left school at the age of 12 to work locally as a farm labourer, and emigrated to Scotland when he was 14, where he worked as a potato picker and a navvy. Writing from his own experience, McGill became the voice of the Irish immigrant worker. His early collections of poetry, Songs of a Navvy (1911) and Songs of the Dead End (1912), are ref…
Irish novelist, born in Donegal; he was educated at Galway University and spent several years teaching in Ireland before moving to London where he took up a career as a publisher. His first novel, Bogmail (1978), centred on the hard-drinking philosophers of his home country and was much admired for its earthiness and exuberant language. Its successor, Goosefoot (1982), marked an ambitious developm…
British poet, born in Liverpool, educated at the University of Hull. He was a teacher in Liverpool from 1960 to 1964. With work by Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, McGough's poetry was first published in The Mersey Sound (1967), which introduced the work of the three, collectively the Liverpool Poets, to a remarkably wide readership. He subsequently became a member of the recording group ?The Scaffo…
British dramatist, born in Birkenhead, educated at Oxford University. His early plays, notably Events while Guarding the Bofors Gun (1966) and Bakke's Night of Fame (1968), about a murderer on the eve of his execution, brought an element of complexity to social subjects. His work has become simpler and more didactic, though always also robust and humorous, since 1971, the year he founded the 7:84 …
American poet, born near Sheldon, North Dakota, educated at the University of North Dakota, Louisiana State University, and New College, Oxford. After working as a writer of scripts for documentary films he became Associate Professor of English at Moorhead State College, Minnesota, in 1969. Much of his verse is informed by a political radicalism originating in his early involvement with militant s…
American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, born in Michigan, educated at Michigan State University, the Yale School of Drama, and Stanford. None of his first three novels is set exclusively in the West, though they all borrow ingredients from its traditional Western, most notably in their portrayal of lonely, disaffected individuals who court violence and who deliberately flout conventio…
Irish poet, born in Belfast, where she was educated at Queen's University. In 1974 she began teaching at St Patrick's College, Knock, Belfast, and in 1986 became the first woman to be appointed writer-in-residence at Queen's University. Her principal collections of verse, The Flower Master (1982), Venus and the Rain (1984), and On Bally-castle Beach (1988) have established her as a writer of note.…
Irish playwright, born in Buncrana, Co. Donegal, educated at University College, Dublin. Since the Abbey's production of his play The Factory Girls (1982), McGuinness has been of crucial importance to contemporary Irish drama. His reputation was confirmed with Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching toward the Somme (1985), a play which follows the thoughts and friendships shared between eight Ulster …
Scottish novelist and poet, born in Kilmarnock, the son of a miner; he attended Glasgow University and became an English teacher before taking up creative writing fellowships in Scotland and overseas. McIlvanney's novels often feature ?hard men? who have to reckon with the tensions of their working-class inheritance, as well as their own violence, in order to define a sense of integrity. Such them…
American writer, born in Hartford, Connecticut, educated at Williams College and Syracuse University. His first novel, Bright Light, Big City (1983), dealing with the decadent habits of a group of middle-class New Yorkers, initiated a trend in American fiction of the early 1980s, which was characterized by a certain metropolitan brittleness, sexual cynicism, and a concern with the conspicuous cons…
Jamaican/American novelist and poet, born in the Clarendon region of Jamaica. McKay was influenced by the English folklorist Walter Jekyll, who introduced him to poetry and encouraged him in the writing of local ?dialect? verse. His collections Songs of Jamaica (1911) and Constab Ballads (1912) mark an important step forward in anglophone Caribbean verse, being the first volumes of West Indian ver…
Irish novelist and short-story writer, born in Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, educated at Queen's University, Belfast. McLaverty taught mathematics in Belfast, becoming headmaster of St Thomas's School on the Falls Road. He has published several novels and collections of short stories. In his first novel, Call My Brother Back (1939), he explores the attitudes of Ulster people towards the land again…
Canadian critic and theorist of popular culture and media, born in Edmonton, Alberta, educated at the universities of Manitoba and Cambridge. In the 1960s, when he was director of the University of Toronto's Center for Culture and Technology, his teasing publications on the history and contemporary cultural significance of technological developments in communications achieved controversial status …
American novelist, born in Wichita Falls, Texas, educated at North Texas State in Denton and at Rice University in Houston. McMurtry's father and grandfather were both cattlemen; his books reveal a nostalgia for the values of the Old West, though he is shrewdly aware that its reputation has been inflated by myth, a process he has attempted to reverse in books like Anything for Billy (1988), which …
Irish novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, born in Delvin, Co. Westmeath. In 1910, while studying in Dublin for a career with the Customs and Excise, he joined the Abbey Players and accompanied them on their first tour of the USA. His first, and most notorious, novel, The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918), is a vituperative study of the narrow-mindedness and religious orthodoxy of a …
Native American writer of mixed Cree/Salish and white descent, born in St Agnatius, Montana, educated intermittently at universities in Montana, Oxford, and Grenoble. Active in Indian affairs throughout his life, McNickle worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1936?52) and was chair of the Division of Social Sciences of the University of Saskatchewan, Regina (1965?71); he cofounded the National …
African-American story-writer, born in Savannah, Georgia, educated at Morris Brown College (Atlanta), Morgan State College (Baltimore), Harvard, and Iowa Writers' Workshop. His considerable reputation rests upon two highly accomplished volumes of short stories, Hue and Cry (1969; Pulitzer Prize) and Elbow Room (1977), which received unstinting praise from Ralph Ellison. McPherson's strengths lie i…
British philosopher, born in London, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. An idealist philosopher concerned with developing Hegelian notions of metaphysics, religion, and personal identity, McTaggart spent his academic life in Cambridge. Eager to reinforce ?a conviction of harmony between ourselves and the universe at large?, yet critical of conventional, institutionalized religion and of Chris…