Encyclopedia of Literature: William Sansom (William Norman Trevor Sansom) Biography to Dr Seuss [Theodor Giesel] Biography

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

William Sansom (William Norman Trevor Sansom) Biography - (1912–76), (William Norman Trevor Sansom), New Writing, Horizon, Fireman Flower, South, The Passionate North

British short-story writer and novelist, born in Camberwell, London, educated at Uppingham School. He joined the National Fire Service at the outbreak of war and witnessed the bombing raids on London. At the time, he contributed short stories to New Writing and Horizon. Many of the stories in his first collection, Fireman Flower (1944), display documentary realism, while others are in the surreal …

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George Santayana Biography - (1863–1952), The Life of Reason, Scepticism and Animal Faith, The Realms of Being

Spanish-American philosopher, born in Madrid, educated at Harvard. Christened Jorge Ruiz de Santayana y Borrais, he used the English form of his name after he was taken to the USA in 1872. Santayana is now best remembered for his cultural analyses of the American character. He formulated a materialist philosophy in his major early work, The Life of Reason (5 volumes, 1905?6), in which he argued th…

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Frank Sargeson Biography - (1903–82), Conversations with My Uncle and Other Sketches, A Man and His Wife, I for One

New Zealand short-story writer and novelist, born in Hamilton, educated at the University of New Zealand, Auckland. Experience of the 1930s Depression shaped his early work which displayed a mastery of a highly individual monologue style, and an accurate rendering of laconic New Zealand expression in the face of adversity. These early stories were collected in Conversations with My Uncle and Other…

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Ken Saro-Wiwa Biography - (1941–95), The Transistor Radio, Bride by Return, Four Farcical Plays

Nigerian novelist, dramatist, and political writer, born in Bori, Nigeria, educated at the University of Ibadan. He lectured at the University of Lagos and held government office before founding Saros International Publishers in 1973. In 1994 he was arrested for his leading role in the violent campaign against the dispossession of the Ogoni people by the development of Nigeria's oil resources. The…

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May Sarton (Eleanor May Sarton) Biography - (1912–95), (Eleanor May Sarton), Encounter in April, The Lion and the Rose, Land of Silence

American poet and novelist, born at Wondelgem in Belgium; from 1916 onward she grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was educated at the Latin School. From 1937 she taught creative writing at American colleges and universities. Encounter in April (1937), her first collection of verse, established the meditative and descriptive concerns central to much of her poetry; in both free verse and…

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Siegfried Sassoon (Siegfried Louvain Sassoon) Biography - (1886–1967), (Siegfried Louvain Sassoon), The Old Huntsman, Not about Heroes, Counter-Attack, Picture Show

British poet, born in Brenchley, Kent, educated at Clare College, Cambridge. He was on active service in Flanders throughout much of the First World War and is generally recognized as the first poet to record the horrors and privations of life in the trenches. The Old Huntsman, the first volume of his war poetry, appeared in 1917, the year in which he threw away his Military Cross and published hi…

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Satanic Verses, The - The Satanic Verses

a novel by Salman Rushdie, published in 1988. This complex, polyphonic novel is an ambitious attempt to conflate the harsh realities of migrants' lives in Britain's inner cities with the cultural fantasies that inhabit them and constitute another, phantasmagoric dimension of reality. These conflicting levels of consciousness are embodied in the antithetical characters of Saladin Chamcha, an Anglic…

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William Satchell Biography - (1860–1942), The Land of the Lost, The Greenstone Door, William Satchell

New Zealand novelist, born in England, educated partly in Germany. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1883 and worked at various occupations, from storekeeper to stockbroker, and published, among other novels and journalistic works, The Land of the Lost (1902) and The Greenstone Door (1914). Both were pioneering examples of the imaginative exploration of New Zealand landscape and history in fictional …

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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

a novel by Alan Sillitoe, published in 1958. Arthur Seaton, the bullish young hero of Sillitoe's first novel, is a worker in a Nottingham bicycle factory, whose week is spent in grinding repetition at the lathe, and who erupts into hedonistic action in his evenings and weekends. Rebelling against the hypocritical conventions and morality of society, he lives according to his own rules and values. …

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James Saunders Biography - (1925–2004), Next Time I'll Sing to You, A Scent of Flowers

British dramatist, born in Islington, educated at Southampton University; he worked as a chemistry teacher before writing Next Time I'll Sing to You (1962), an attempt to uncover the motives of a modern hermit. His subsequent work, often notable for its sympathy for those who find it difficult to fit in with a society intolerant of oddity or strong emotion, includes A Scent of Flowers (1964), a dr…

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Savacou - Bim

a Caribbean literary journal in the tradition of Bim. It was first published in 1970 (between then and 1989 eleven issues were produced), taking its name from the bird-god in Carib mythology with control over thunder and strong winds. Announced as the Journal of the Caribbean Artists' Movement, which had been started in London a few years earlier, it was edited initially by Edward Brathwaite in Ja…

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Dorothy L. Sayers (Dorothy Leigh Sayers) Biography - (1893–1957), (Dorothy Leigh Sayers), Whose Body?, The Documents in the Case, Unnatural Death, The Dawson Pedigree

British detective novelist, born in Oxford, the daughter of the headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral choir school, educated at Somerville College, Oxford. She published two volumes of verse while teaching modern languages at a girls' school in Hull; in 1921 she moved to London and worked as a copy-writer for Benson's advertising agency (where she considerably influenced the style of contemporary …

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William Scammell Biography - (1939– ), Queen Mary, Yes and No, Jouissance, The Game: Tennis Poems, Bleeding Heart Yard

British poet, born in Hythe, Hampshire; he left school at the age of 15 and worked in various capacities, including as a journalist and as a photographer aboard the Queen Mary, before entering the University of Bristol. In 1975 he became a lecturer at the University of Newcastle. His collections of verse include Yes and No (1979), which established his reputation as a poet of considerable technica…

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Vernon Scannell Biography - (1922–2007), Graves and Resurrections, The Masks of Love, The Winter Man, Funeral Games, Soldiering On

British poet and novelist, born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, educated at the University of Leeds after active service in the Second World War and a period as a professional boxer. He was a schoolteacher from 1955 to 1962, when he became a freelance writer. His numerous collections of poetry include Graves and Resurrections (1948), The Masks of Love (1960), The Winter Man (1973), Funeral Games (1987),…

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Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Biography - (1941– ), Mainland, The Injured Party, Buffalo Afternoon, Falling, Anya, The Madness of a Seduced Woman

American novelist, born in Brooklyn, New York, educated at the University of Chicago. Influenced by both her literary studies (her Ph.D. dissertation was on the novels of Nabokov) and her familial experience of the Jewish Holocaust experience, Schaeffer is most frequently classified as a Jewish-American writer. She has enriched the genre of the family saga by adding a growing awareness of feminist…

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Schindler's Ark - Schindler's List

a novel by Thomas Keneally, published in 1982 (Booker Prize). An epic account of the Second World War, the novel, based on extensive research and interviews with survivors of concentration camps, questions the boundaries between the genres of historical documentation and imaginative fiction. Set in Nazi Germany, and based on a real person, it tells the story of Oskar Schindler, an amoral and profl…

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Arthur Jr Schlesinger (Arthur Meier Jr Schlesinger) Biography - (1917–2007), (Arthur Meier Jr Schlesinger), The Age of Jackson, The Age of Roosevelt

American historian, born in Columbus, Ohio, educated at Harvard, where he began his academic career; in 1966 he became Albert Schweitzer Professor in Humanities at the City University of New York. He was special assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson from 1961 to 1964. The Age of Jackson (1945) won a Pulitzer Prize; its rejection of widely held assumptions on the early nineteenth-century deve…

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Michael Schmidt (Michael Norton Schmidt) Biography - (1947– ), (Michael Norton Schmidt), Poetry Nation, Bedlam and Oakwood, My Brother Gloucester, A Change of Affairs

poet, born in Mexico City, educated at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. In 1969 he became managing director of the Carcanet Press. He was Gulbenkian Fellow in Poetry at the University of Manchester from 1972 to 1975 and became editor of the literary periodical Poetry Nation in 1984. His first full collection was Bedlam and Oakwood (1970). Subsequent volumes have included My Brother Glouceste…

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Olive Schreiner (Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner) Biography - (1855–1920), (Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner), The Story of an African Farm, Wuthering Heights

South African writer, born in Cape Colony, the daughter of a German missionary and an English mother. Her first published novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), is a classic of modern South African literature. In its intense and poetic evocation of mood and landscape the novel shows the influences of Hardy and of Emily Bront?'s Wuthering Heights. Set in the Bible-belt veld in the 1860s, on a …

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Budd Schulberg (Budd Wilson Schulberg) Biography - (1914– ), (Budd Wilson Schulberg), What Makes Sammy Run, Esquire, The Four Seasons of Success, The Disenchanted

American novelist and screenwriter, born in New York City, educated at Dartmouth College. The son of a Hollywood screenwriter and producer, Schulberg has always been intimately associated with the film industry, largely through the commercial success of his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run (1941), a frenzied account of how its hero, Sammy Glick, rises from an inauspicious beginning on New York's …

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E. F. Schumacher (Ernst Friedrich Schumacher) Biography - (1911–77), (Ernst Friedrich Schumacher), Small Is Beautiful, A Guide for the Perplexed

German economist, journalist, and economic adviser, born in Bonn, educated at Oxford University. Schumacher became a guru of the so-called ?New Age? movement late in his life thanks largely to the impact of his best-selling Small Is Beautiful (1973). He worked and studied in Britain and the USA during much of the 1930s, and eventually returned to research at Oxford after being released from intern…

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Joseph Alois Schumpeter Biography - (1883–1950), The Theory of Economic Development, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Ten Great Economists, Essays

Austrian-born economist, born in Triesch, Moravia, Austria-Hungary, educated at the University of Vienna. His The Theory of Economic Development (1934), although written first in German (1912), was influential when it appeared in English for introducing into the discussion of the dynamics of the economic process the centrality of innovation and investment undertaken by ?heroic entrepreneurs?. In p…

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James Schuyler Biography - (1923–91), Art News, Salute, May 24th or So, Freely Espousing, The Crystal Lithium

American poet and novelist, born in Chicago, educated at Bethany College, West Virginia. Schuyler lived in Italy for some years, but spent much of his life in New York working for the Museum of Modern Art and, like other members of the New York School such as John Ashbey and Frank O'Hara, wrote for Art News and other art journals. His books of poems include Salute (1960), May 24th or So (1966), Fr…

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Delmore Schwartz Biography - (1913–66), In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, Partisan Review, New Republic, Genesis I, Vaudeville for a Princess

American poet, born in Brooklyn, New York, educated at Harvard and at New York University. Schwartz published his first book of poems, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, in 1938. He was poetry editor for the Partisan Review and the New Republic and taught writing at numerous colleges. A man of wide-ranging intellect, a brilliant teacher and conversationalist, he partook of a life of bohemian excess…

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Science fiction - displaced, The Time Machine, When the Sleeper Wakes, Lensman, Billion Year Spree, Frankenstein

is a term used in two broadly conflicting senses, and no single definition, for this reason, has ever satisfied any student of the form. The first is ostensibly descriptive and refers to a body of literature defined as science fiction by those Americans who invented the term in the 1920s, and who published what they called scientifiction or science fiction in pulp magazines dedicated to the form. …

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Scoop - Daily Beast, Beast's

a novel by E. Waugh, published in 1938. Mistaken identity is the central plot device in the novel, which satirizes the cynical opportunism of Fleet Street journalists in search of a story as well as Waugh's more familiar target of contemporary morality. William Boot is a na?ve young man who lives with his parents and a large extended family of grandparents and elderly retainers on the decaying est…

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David Scott Biography - (1947– ), Sunday Times, A Quiet Gathering, Playing for England, How Does It Feel?, Bendigo Boswell

British poet, born in Cambridge; he studied theology at the University of Durham and at Cuddleston College, near Oxford, before entering the Anglican Ministry. In 1980 he became vicar of Torpenhow and Allhallows, near Wigton, Cumbria. His poetry attracted notice when his ?Kirkwall Auction Mart? won the Sunday Times/BBC poetry competition in 1978. A Quiet Gathering (1984), his first collection of v…

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Dennis Scott Biography - (1939–91), An Echo in the Bone, Plays for Today, Uncle Time, Dreadwalk: Poems 1970–78

Jamaican poet and playwright, born in Kingston, educated at the University of the West Indies at Mona and the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He was Director of the Jamaica School of Drama, and was Visiting Associate Professor of Playwriting at the Yale School of Drama. His play An Echo in the Bone (1974) was published, together with a play by Derek Walcott and another by Errol Hill, in Plays f…

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Duncan Campbell Scott Biography - (1862–1947), Toronto Globe, The Magic House, Labor and the Angel, New World Lyrics and Ballads

Canadian poet, born in Ottawa. With Charles G. D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, and Bliss Carman, he is usually grouped as one of the ?Confederation Poets?. He collaborated with Lampman on ?At the Mermaid Inn?, a column published in the Toronto Globe in 1892 and 1893. His occupation as a civil servant in the Department of Indian Affairs led to his travelling in remote parts of Canada, which gave him…

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F. R. Scott (Francis Reginald Scott) Biography - (1899–1985), (Francis Reginald Scott), Social Planning for Canada, New Provinces, The Blasted Pine, Overture, Selected Poems

Canadian poet, born in Quebec, educated at Bishop's College, Lennoxville, Quebec, and at Magdalen College, Oxford. Scott followed a distinguished dual career as practising lawyer and as cosmopolitan and satiric poet; from the 1920s his energies were often devoted to promoting the cause of modern poetry and to satirizing what he saw as the tedious solemnity of much Canadian poetry of the period. Sc…

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Geoffrey Scott Biography - (1883–1929), The Architecture of Humanism, A Box of Paints, Poems, Oxford Book of Modern Verse

British architectural historian and poet, educated at New College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem ?The Death of Shelley? and the Chancellor's Prize for his essay ?The National Character of English Architecture?. During a tour of Italy with John Maynard Keynes in 1906 he met Bernard Berenson, who subsequently employed him as a secretary and librarian. Berenson's theories of a…

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Paul Scott (Paul Mark Scott) Biography - (1920–78), (Paul Mark Scott), Country Life, The Times, Johnnie Sahib, A Male Child, The Bender

British novelist, born in north London, educated at Winchmore Hill Collegiate School, the second son of a family of freelance commercial artists. Despite early ambitions as a poet he began training in accountancy (passing exams with ease thanks to his photographic memory). In 1940 he was called up to work in the British Intelligence Department in London, and in 1943 he was transferred to the India…

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Scottish Renaissance - Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, The Scottish Chapbook, Sangshaw, Penny Wheep

a term coined by the French critic Denis Saurat in 1924 to describe the contemporary revival in consciousness and culture in Scotland, between the World Wars, which is now more loosely associated with the writing of Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Edwin Muir, and Neil M. Gunn. This creative resurgence was prompted partly by the growth of national consciousness and political turbulence in Sc…

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C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff) Biography - (1889–1930), (Charles Kenneth Scott-Moncrieff), The Song of Roland, Chanson de Roland

Scottish translator, born in Stirlingshire, educated at the University of Edinburgh. Best known for his inspired translations from the French, beginning with The Song of Roland (1919, Chanson de Roland), his letters, collected in C. K. Scott-Moncrieff: Memories and Letters (1931, edited by J. M. Scott-Moncrieff and L. W. Lunn), reveal his own accomplishment as a writer. After working as a private …

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Screenwriting - caméra-stylo, and, Citizen Kane, The Servant, Accident, The Go-Between

In its early days, true to the etymology of the word ?photography?, the cinema was described as a form of ?writing with light?. Much later, the French director and critic Alexandre Astruc coined the concept of the cam?ra-stylo, the camera as a pen. But the relations between writers and film have characteristically been bumpier than these images suggest, and Hollywood mythology is in large part con…

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Scrutiny - Calendar of Modern Letters, Fiction and the Reading Public, Scrutiny, Scrutiny's

a critical periodical produced at Cambridge University from 1932 to 1953 which, in the words of its chief editor F. R. Leavis, accomplished ?a comprehensive revaluation of English literature? through its rigorously maintained standards of textual analysis and evaluation. Leavis and his wife Q. D. Leavis were the principal contributors and dominant in the editorial group; their collaborators includ…

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Peter Scupham (John Peter Scupham) Biography - (1933– ), (John Peter Scupham), The Snowing Globe, The Hinterland, The Air Show, Selected Poems

British poet, born in Liverpool, educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He began his career as a schoolteacher in 1957. Since 1974 he has owned the Mandeville Press, specializing in limited editions of new poetry. His first full collection, The Snowing Globe (1972), was followed by numerous volumes of poetry, including The Hinterland (1977), The Air Show (1988), Selected Poems (1990), Watching t…

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John Searle Biography - (1932– ), Speech Acts, Expression and Meaning, Intentionality, The Foundations of Illocutionary Logic

American linguistic philosopher, born in Denver, Colorado; he became Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959. Searle's influence first became apparent in his 1959 study of the philosophical problems arising from the use of proper names, a highly specialized topic which had implications for wider issues. In his most important work, Speech Acts (1969), he developed…

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Sea-Wolf, The - Ghost

a novel by Jack London, published in 1904. The delicate aesthete Humphrey Van Weyden, who has led a sheltered existence, is cast adrift from a ferryboat in San Francisco Bay after a collision with a steamer. He is picked up by Wolf Larsen, captain of the Ghost, a sealing schooner. Larsen is a man of immense strength, amoral, and contemptuous of society's morality of servitude. Although something o…

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Secret Agent, The - émigré

a novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1907. The misleading subtitle??A Simple Tale??signals the profoundly ironic tone with which Conrad treats the familial relations of Verloc, the secret agent who runs a seedy Soho shop as cover for his political activities, and his wife Winnie, who wilfully blinds herself to Verloc's shady dealings in a marriage she suffers for the sake of her simpleton younge…

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Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Biography - (1950– ), Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Epistemology of the Closet, Between Men

American theoretician, born in Dayton, educated at Yale. She became a professor of English at Duke University and a key figure in the emergence of ?queer theory? as an academic discipline. Her two most influential texts, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990), argue that the homosexual?heterosexual binary develops as an instrument to…

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Alan Seeger Biography - (1888–1916), Harvard Monthly, North American Review, Poems of Alan Seeger

American poet, born in New York City, educated at Harvard, where he contributed poems to the Harvard Monthly, which he edited in his final year. He went to Paris in 1912 to pursue a bohemian existence and was among forty Americans who joined the French Foreign Legion at the outbreak of the First World War. He gained wide notice in America following the publication of ?Ode in Memory of the American…

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Hubert Jr Selby Biography - (1928–2004), Black Mountain Review, Kulchur, Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Room, The Demon

American novelist and short-story writer, born in Brooklyn, New York. Selby left school to join the Merchant Marines in the Second World War but he contracted TB and was hospitalized for three years, during which time he developed a dependency on morphine which was to teach him much about the horrors of addiction. His work began to appear in the 1950s in magazines like Black Mountain Review and Ku…

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Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

a collection of poems by John Ashbery, published in 1975, which achieved the unprecedented distinction of winning all three of America's principal book awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. It consists of thirty-four shorter poems, ?Grand Galop?, ?Hop O'My Thumb?, and ?The One Thing That Can Save America? being among the best-known, and t…

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Ernest de Selincourt Biography - (1870–1943), The Poems of John Keats, Hyperion: A Facsimile of Keats's Autograph Manuscript

British scholar and literary critic, born in Streatham, London, educated at University College, Oxford. He became Professor of English Language and Literature at Birmingham University in 1908 and was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1928 to 1933. At both universities he made an essential contribution to the emergence of English studies as an independent academic discipline. His first notable works …

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Samuel Selvon (Samuel Dixon Selvon) Biography - (1923–94), (Samuel Dixon Selvon), Trinidad Guardian, A Brighter Sun, An Island Is a World

Trinidadian novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright, born in Trinidad, educated at Naparima College in southern Trinidad. He worked briefly as a journalist on the Trinidad Guardian before emigrating in 1950 to England; in 1975 he left for Canada and later became a Canadian citizen. His first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952), paints a loving portrait of Indian peasants engulfed by squalor an…

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Semiotics

is the study of signs and of systems of signs. It has a dual origin in the work of the American philosopher C. S. Peirce and the Swiss linguist F. de Saussure (1857?1913; see also structuralism). The word is used more or less interchangeably with semiology, although we can, if we are anxious to make a distinction, see semiotics, following Peirce, as something pragmatic, the study of signs at work,…

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Sipho Sepamla (Sipho Sidney Sepamla) Biography - (1932–2007), (Sipho Sidney Sepamla), Hurry up to It!, The Blues Is You in Me

South African poet and novelist, born in Krugersdorp. He trained as a teacher, was highly active in promoting writing and the arts in the South African townships, and edited two journals, one of which covered black theatre. His own writing focuses on fear, tension, and political resistance in township life. Books of poetry include Hurry up to It! (1975), The Blues Is You in Me (1976), described by…

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Mongane Wally Serote Biography - (1944– ), Yakhal'inkomo, Tsetlo, No Baby Must Weep, Behold Mama, Flowers

South African poet, born in Sophiatown, educated in Soweto and later at Columbia University. Together with Oswald Mtshali and Sipho Sepamla, he is among the most prominent South African township poets. Serote's poems contain a strong element of political protest; he was tested to the limits of endurance in 1969 when he spent nine months in solitary confinement, though in the end was released witho…

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Robert William Service Biography - (1874–1958), Songs of a Sourdough, The Spell of the Yukon, Collected Verse, More Collected Verse

Canadian poet, born in Preston and raised in Glasgow; he emigrated to Canada in 1895. His collection Songs of a Sourdough (1907) included the ballads ?The Shooting of Dan McGrew? and ?The Cremation of Sam McGee?, both of which drew upon his personal experience of the Yukon gold rushes and which became popular classics. A sequel volume was The Spell of the Yukon (1907). His Collected Verse was firs…

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Vikram Seth Biography - (1952– ), From Heaven Lake, The Humble Administrator's Garden, The Golden Gate

Indian poet and novelist, born in Calcutta, educated in India and at the universities of Oxford and Stanford. His experiences as a student and traveller in China, where he researched economic demography, are chronicled in From Heaven Lake (1983). His first collection of poems, The Humble Administrator's Garden (1985), earned him a reputation as a skilled and witty poet. His reputation was greatly …

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Ernest Thompson Seton Biography - (1860–1946), Wild Animals I Have Known, Lives of the Hunted, Animal Heroes, Survival

Canadian naturalist and writer, born in England at South Shields and taken to Canada in 1866. He studied art in Canada, London, and Paris and educated himself as a naturalist, subsequently combining his two interests as a writer and illustrator of books about birds and animals. Throughout his life he published serious naturalist studies, but he is best known for his animal stories, the first colle…

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