Encyclopedia of Literature: Cynthia Ozick Biography to Ellis Peters Biography

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

Cynthia Ozick Biography - (1928– ), Art and Ardor: Essays by Cynthia Ozick, Trust, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories

American novelist and short-story writer, born in New York City, educated at New York and Ohio State Universities. In her essay ?Towards a New Yiddish: Note? in Art and Ardor: Essays by Cynthia Ozick (1983), Ozick describes herself as ?a third-generation American Jew ? perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and yet perfectly marginal?. Her imaginative expression of th…

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P. K. Page (Patricia Kathleen Page) Biography - (1916– ), (Patricia Kathleen Page), Preview, As Ten as Twenty, The Metal and the Flower, Cry Ararat!

Canadian poet, born in Swanage, Dorset; she grew up in Canada from 1919 onward and was educated at St Hilda's School for Girls in Calgary, Alberta. She was among the founders of Preview magazine in 1942. From 1953 to 1964 she lived in Australia, Brazil, and Mexico, where her husband was successively Canadian Ambassador. As Ten as Twenty (1946), her first collection of verse, displayed the politica…

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George D. Painter (George Duncan Painter) Biography - (1914–2005), (George Duncan Painter), Studies in Fifteenth Century-Printing, André Gide, The Chelsea Way

British biographer, born in Birmingham, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1938 to 1974 he worked in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum, where he became an assistant keeper in charge of fifteenth-century material in 1954. Studies in Fifteenth Century-Printing (1984) collects his internationally respected writings as a bibliographer and incunabulist. Andr? Gide (1951) w…

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Pale Fire - Pale Fire, tour de force

a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1962. Pale Fire is Nabokov's fictional tour de force, a ?novel? comprising the foreword to a 999-line poem, ?Pale Fire? by John Shade, the text of the poem itself, a commentary on the poem by Charles Kinbote, Shade's editor, and an index. The commentary forms by far the longest part of the novel and it is here that Kinbote, who had befriended Shade, his ne…

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Grace Paley (Grace Goodside Paley) Biography - (1922–2007), (Grace Goodside Paley), Esquire, Atlantic, New American Review, The Little Disturbances of Man

American short-story writer and poet, born of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx, New York City, educated at Hunter College and New York University. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. She is widely regarded as a quintessentially New York writer, the city's environment and its rich variety of spoken idioms being integral to her work. Her stories began to ap…

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Parade's End - Tietjens Tetralogy, Some Do Not, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, Last Post

a tetralogy of novels by Ford Madox Ford, also known as the Tietjens Tetralogy after its central character, and originally published as Some Do Not ? (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928). The work is set at the time of the Great War and attempts to show the interaction between public and private events, so that Ford's hero, Christopher Tietjens, a Yorks…

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Sarah Paretsky Biography - (1947– ), Indemnity Only, Deadlock, Killing Orders, Bitter Medicine, Blood Shot, Toxic Shock, Burn Marks, Guardian Angel

American crime novelist, born in Ames, Iowa, educated at the universities of Kansas and Chicago. Paretsky's private eye novels, featuring the plausible character of V. I. Warshawski, represent the impact of feminist thinking on a traditionally male form. With Barbara Wilson, Amanda Cross, and others, Paretsky uses the crime novel to investigate the role of women in American society and to uncover …

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Paris Review, The - The Paris Review, gravitas

an international literary periodical begun in Paris in 1953 by Peter Matthiessen and Harold Humes and latterly published in Paris and New York. Matthiessen remains prominent among the unusually numerous editorial personnel, as do George Plimpton and Donald Hall, who joined him on the second issue in 1953. The Paris Review was founded to pursue a policy of filling its pages with all forms of creati…

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Dorothy Parker Biography - (1893–1967), Vogue, Vanity Fair, Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, Death and Taxes

American writer, born in West End, New Jersey and raised in New York City. After an education in convents and exclusive girls' schools, she worked for a procession of the most famous magazines, publishing poems in Vogue in 1916, and becoming the drama critic for Vanity Fair in 1917. She married Edwin Parker, whose surname she kept after their divorce. She achieved fame among New York society circl…

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Robert B. Parker (Robert Brown Parker) Biography - (1932– ), (Robert Brown Parker), The Godwulf Manuscript, The Judas Goat, Looking for Rachel Wallace

American crime novelist, born in Springfield, Massachusetts, educated at Boston University; he has taught in various American colleges. Working firmly within the tradition of Raymond Chandler, Parker's first novel, The Godwulf Manuscript (1974), introduces the central character of Spenser, almost a caricature of the traditional private eye?an efficient boxer, a crack shot, a man of letters, and a …

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Stewart Parker (James Stewart Parker) Biography - (1941–88), (James Stewart Parker), The Casualty's Meditation, Maw, Spokesong, Kingdom Come, Nightshade, Northern Star

Northern Irish playwright, born in Belfast, educated at Queen's University, Belfast. Between 1965 and 1969 he lectured in the USA. Following the publication of two collections of poetry, The Casualty's Meditation (1966) and Maw (1968), Parker began writing plays for radio and television. His first play for the theatre, Spokesong (1975), concerns the efforts of a young man to save his family's bicy…

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Tim Parks Biography - (1954– ), Tongues of Flame, Loving Roger, Home Thoughts, Family Planning, Cara Massimina, John MacDowell

British novelist, born in Manchester, educated at Cambridge and Harvard Universities. He received instant critical acclaim with his first two novels, Tongues of Flame (1985; Somerset Maugham Award), a powerful study of a family torn apart by the confusions of religious and sexual hysteria; and Loving Roger (1986), which deals with an obsessional love affair that ends in death. The author's ambival…

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Partisan Review, The - Review

a periodical founded in New York in 1934 and run by an editorial board whose members included Philip Rahv and Dwight MacDonald. The magazine originally had strong affiliations with the Communist Party and espoused the cause of proletarian literature; literary standards were often subordinated to ideological evaluations of the poetry, prose, and criticism featured. Following its reconstitution in 1…

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Frances Partridge (Frances Catherine Partridge) Biography - (1900– ), (Frances Catherine Partridge), ménage à trois, The Greville Memoirs, Love in Bloomsbury: Memories

British diarist and translator, born in Bloomsbury, London, educated at Bedales School and Newnham College, Cambridge, after which she worked in a bookshop from 1921 to 1928. Having become well acquainted with Lytton Strachey and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, in 1933 she married Ralph Partridge, whose m?nage ? trois with Strachey and Dora Carrington had ended with the deaths of both in th…

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Passage to India, A

a novel by E. M. Forster, published in 1924. The novel, which drew on the author's experiences in India in 1912 and 1921?2, when he was personal secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, describes the class-ridden and fundamentally unstable society which existed under the British Raj, foreshadowing the eventual decline of British imperialism and the rise of Indian nationalism with extraordinary prescie…

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Kenneth Patchen Biography - (1911–72), Before the Brave, The Teeth of the Lion, Pictures of Life and Death

American poet, born in Niles, Ohio, briefly attended the University of Wisconsin and the Commonwealth College, Arkansas, but did not complete his studies. Patchen was an abstract expressionist painter as well as a poet. His first book of poems was Before the Brave (1936), followed by The Teeth of the Lion (1942), Pictures of Life and Death (1946), Because It Is (1960), Collected Poems (1968), and …

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Paterson - Paterson

William Carlos Williams's compendious poem in five books presenting the social, topographical, cultural, and historical characters of a typical American industrial community; the work takes its title and local and historical particulars from Paterson, New Jersey, a large town not far from Williams's home in Rutherford. Books I to III appeared in 1949, Book IV in 1951, and Book V in 1958; a single …

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Alan Paton (Alan Stewart Paton) Biography - (1903–88), (Alan Stewart Paton), Debbie Go Home, Cry, the Beloved Country, Lost in the Stars

South African novelist, educator, and biographer, born in Pietermaritzburg, educated at Natal University College, where he studied mathematics and physics. Though he was National President of the South African Liberal Party until it was declared illegal in 1968, Paton's profound knowledge of South African society and the apartheid system stems not only from his political activities, but also from …

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Brian Patten Biography - (1946– ), Bootle Times, The Mersey Sound, Portraits, Maud, Little Johnny's Confession

British poet, born in Liverpool, where he was educated at Sefton Park Secondary School and worked as a reporter on the Bootle Times. Prior to the enormous success of The Mersey Sound (1967), as a result of which Patten, McGough, and Henri became collectively well known as the Liverpool Poets, he had published Portraits (1962) and Maud (1965). His numerous subsequent volumes include Little Johnny's…

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Orlando Patterson Biography - (1940– ), The Children of Sisyphus, An Absence of Ruins, Die the Long Day

Jamaican novelist, born in Jamaica, educated at Kingston University and the London School of Economics; he subsequently taught at Harvard University. In his first novel, The Children of Sisyphus (1964), Patterson, like Roger Mais, exposes the squalor, violence, and dehumanization of Jamaican slum dwellers, but he also suggests Sisyphus-like defiance and resilience especially through the story of D…

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Tom Paulin (Tom Thomas Neilson Paulin) Biography - (1949– ), (Tom Thomas Neilson Paulin), A State of Justice, The Strange Museum, The Book of Juniper

Northern Irish poet and critic, born in Leeds; he grew up in Belfast and was educated at the University of Hull and Lincoln College, Oxford. In 1972 he became a lecturer at the University of Nottingham. A State of Justice (1977), his first collection of poetry, was followed by The Strange Museum (1980), The Book of Juniper (1981), Liberty Tree (1983), Fivemiletown (1987), Selected Poems, 1972?1990…

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Okot p'Bitek Biography - (1931–82), Song of Lawino, Song of Ocol, Two Songs, Horn of My Love

Ugandan poet, born in Gulu, educated at King's College, Budo, Bristol University, and the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. The subject of his thesis at the Institute of Social Anthropology in Oxford was Acoli and Longo traditional songs. Among other posts he was Director of Uganda's National Theatre, and a Lecturer in Literature at Nairobi University. His most famous work, Song of Lawino …

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Mervyn Peake (Mervyn Laurence Peake) Biography - (1911–68), (Mervyn Laurence Peake), Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone, Mr Pye, Boy in Darkness, The Glassblowers

, British novelist, poet, and artist, born in China, the son of a medical missionary, educated at the Royal Academy Schools in London. Originally an illustrator, art teacher, and writer of verse and stories for children, Peake became a war artist in the Second World War; his experiences of the horrors of war and a visit to Belsen in 1945 deeply affected him. His best-known work is his Gormenghast…

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Hesketh Pearson (Hesketh Edward Gibbon Pearson) Biography - (1887–1964), (Hesketh Edward Gibbon Pearson), Modern Men and Mummers, Iron Rations, Doctor Darwin

British biographer, born at Hawford, Worcestershire, educated at Bedford Grammar School; he worked in a shipping office and spent two years in America before beginning his career as an actor in 1911. He continued to work successfully in the theatre until 1931, when he became a full-time writer. Pearson's early works include Modern Men and Mummers (1921), sketches of well-known figures in the theat…

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Charles Sanders Peirce Biography - (1839–1914), Collected Papers, Letters to Lady Welby, icon, index, symbol, context

American philosopher, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard; he was a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University between 1879 and 1884. Peirce is considered to be the founder of pragmatism, in which he took truth to be the sum total of the conceivable effects of a particular object, as he states in his wellknown axiom: ?Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearing…

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Penguin Books - A Farewell to Arms, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Ariel, Poet's Pub

a paperback publishing venture, whose intention was to make good reading available cheaply, begun by Allen Lane (1902?70) in 1935, when its first ten titles appeared; priced at sixpence each, they included A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ariel by Andr? Maurois, and Poet's Pub by Eric Linklater. By the end of 1936, the year in whi…

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Walker Percy Biography - (1916–90), The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, The Second Coming

American novelist, born in Birmingham, Alabama, educated at the University of North Carolina. Percy studied medicine at Columbia University and while working in New York's Bellevue Hospital contracted tuberculosis; during his long stay in a sanatorium, he decided to be a writer and moved towards an existential Catholicism, joining the Catholic Church in 1946. His first novel, The Moviegoer (1961),…

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Bob Perelman Biography - (1947– ), Hills, Writing/Talks, Face Value, The Trouble with Genius, rapprochement

American poet, born in Youngstown, Ohio, educated at the University of Michigan and the Ohio Writers' Workshop; after various jobs he took a Ph.D. and became a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He was editor of Hills magazine and the centrally important series of Talks at the Langton Street Gallery, some of which are collected in Hills (1981) and Writing/Talks (1985). He writ…

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S. J. Perelman (Sidney Joseph Perelman) Biography - (1904–79), (Sidney Joseph Perelman), Judge, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, feuilletoniste, New Yorker, New York Times Magazine

American humorist, playwright, screenwriter, and cartoonist, born in Brooklyn, educated at Brown University. He established himself as a writer and cartoonist with Judge, a New York magazine of humour and satire. His humour is characterized by his ear for puns and the absurd meanings generated by words used in false contexts, a gift that he exploited to startling effect in his screenplays for the …

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Periodicals: - The Yellow Book, The Savoy, Little Review, Poetry, Egoist, Blast, Contact, Exile, The Fifties

the proliferation of literary magazines and reviews from the mid-nineteenth century onward had important consequences for twentieth-century literature. The popularity of serialized fiction in many periodicals fostered the emergence of the novel as the pre-eminent modern literary form. Critical methods were advanced through the abundant production of essays and reviewing to a high general standard.…

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Petals of Blood

a novel by Ngugi, published in 1977. A disturbing, passionately political book that also works as a thriller, the story begins after a fire in a brothel has killed three prominent, corrupt African directors of the foreign-owned brewery in Ilmorog, a traditional village now transformed into a sprawling modern industrial town. Held for questioning are the novel's four important characters?Munira, Ka…

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