Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
a magazine founded in November 1916 by James Oppenheim, with Waldo Frank and Van Wyck Brooks as associate editors; their enthusiastic commitment to the idea of an American cultural renaissance was shared by Robert Frost, Louis Untermeyer, Robert Edmond Jones, and others who lent their support to the venture from the outset. Oppenheim's first editorial made clear his sense of national purpose and a…
T. E. Lawrence's largely autobiographical account of the Arab Revolt against the Turks during the First World War, upon which his reputation as a writer chiefly rests. A lavishly produced limited edition of the book appeared at Lawrence's expense in 1926, leaving him with substantial debts. He rapidly completed a severe abridgement, excising much moral speculation and troubled examination of his m…
the book which established William Empson's reputation upon its appearance in 1930. It formed the first major product of the mode of close textual analysis initiated in the mid-1920s at Cambridge University by I. A. Richards, under whose supervision Empson originally drafted the work as a student. At the time, the Cambridge journal Experiment promoted a scientifically rational view of literature i…
a quarterly journal of literature and criticism founded in 1892 at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, with Telfair Hodgson as editor. In its earlier years it was largely devoted to descriptive criticism and essays on history and biography. George Herbert Clarke, the editor from 1920 to 1925, introduced the publication of poetry, for which the magazine subsequently became an important…
American poet, born in Newton, Massachusetts. She worked as a fashion model in the 1950s and, after establishing herself as a poet, held various visiting appointments at American universities. She was encouraged to write poetry by the psychoanalyst who treated her for depressive illness. She also acknowledged W. D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle (1959), widely regarded as one of the first works of ?co…
Australian playwright and film and theatre critic, born in Perth. Seymour achieved recognition with his surreal play Swamp Creatures (1957), which is set in a Gothic mansion and concerns two sisters, one of whom experiments in the creation of monster insects. More naturalistic, and less characteristic, is his best-known play, The One Day of the Year (1960), which takes place on Anzac Day and explo…
Guyanese poet and civil servant, born in British Guiana (now Guyana), educated at Queen's College. He was deputy chairman of the Department of Culture, editor of the influential literary journal Kyk-over-al from 1945 to 1961, among other posts, and launched the pamphlet series of ?Miniature Poets? (1951?3), two of whose prominent authors were Wilson Harris and Martin Carter. Seymour was a prolific…
New Zealand novelist and short-story writer, born in Auckland, educated at the University of Auckland. The sequence of stories in The New Zealanders (1959) reflected his closeness to New Zealand society; a further collection, Summer Fires and Winter Country (1963), traced mostly the response of urban dwellers to the imaginative pull of the country, and to tensions rooted in their own pasts. The Pr…
a novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1917 (serialized in English Review, and Metropolitan Magazine 1916?17). Commonly regarded as the masterpiece of his final years, the novel draws, like Lord Jim and ?The Secret Sharer?, on Conrad's maritime experiences in the Far East in the late 1880s. It treats of the themes of isolation and community, of youthfulness and maturity gained through the testing …
a play by Sean O'Casey, first performed in 1923. It is set in a Dublin slum three years earlier, at a time when conflict between the Irish Republican Army and the British ?Black and Tans? was tearing apart the populace. The self-professed poet Donal Davoren, harassed by his landlord for his rent, allows himself to be mistaken for an IRA gunman on the run both by a pretty young neighbour, Minnie Po…
British playwright, born in Liverpool, educated at Cambridge University. He made his name with Five Finger Exercise (1958), a drama about growing up in oppressive family circumstances. His other plays include The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), an epic drama about the conquest of Peru and, more specifically, the curious meeting of minds between the rough yet inquisitive Pizarro and the Inca god-king…
Afghani Oriental scholar and novelist, born in India. In 1966 Shah became Director of Studies at the Institute for Cultural Research, London. An authority on Sufi thought, his works have helped introduce Islamic philosophy to the West, and had an influence on the speculative fictions of Doris Lessing. They include Oriental Magic (1956), Destination Mecca (1957), The Way of the Sufi (1968), The Suf…
a novel by Salman Rushdie, published in 1983. Like its precursor, Midnight's Children, it deals with contemporary realities in the turbulent subcontinent but is even more directly linked to documentary realism since the events it chronicles?the imprisonment and hanging of Pakistan's prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (caricatured here as Iskandar Harappa), and the takeover of power by the militar…
African-American experimental dramatist and poet, born in Trenton, New Jersey, educated at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. In 1983 she became Associate Professor of Drama at the University of Houston. She achieved wide recognition for her innovative fusion of poetry, theatre, and dance when For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1976) was produc…
Australian poet and writer, born near Brisbane, educated at the University of Queensland. From 1983 to 1990 he was Director of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, of which he wrote a history in 1988. Early poetry collections such as Time on Fire (1961), A Taste of Salt Water (1967), and Inwards Towards the Sun (1969) established Shapcott's poetic gift for blending traditional forms and …
American poet, born in Baltimore, educated at the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins University, and the Pratt Library School, Baltimore. He held a succession of appointments at American universities until his retirement as Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, in 1984. From 1950 to 1956 he was the editor of Poetry. His early publications as a poet include Person, Place a…
British novelist, born in London, educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was a lecturer in Cambridge and a photographer in South Africa prior to becoming a novelist. Sharpe's savage farces often feature grotesque characters and incidents, and deal with a wide range of political and cultural assumptions. Riotous Assembly (1971) and Indecent Exposure (1973), his first two novels, had South Afri…
Irish dramatist, born in Dublin, the youngest child of an alcoholic corn merchant; he did poorly at school. The best account of his parents' troubled marriage and his own unhappy upbringing and self-education, as of his later life, is to be found in Michael Holroyd's massive biography (Bernard Shaw, 4 volumes, 1988?92). In 1876 he followed his mother to London, where he struggled to make a living.…
American novelist, playwright, and short-story writer, born in Brooklyn, New York, educated at Brooklyn College. Shaw enjoyed his greatest commercial success with The Young Lions (1948), a long and ambitious novel (subsequently filmed) about the Second World War which seeks to dramatize the military and moral experience of both American and German combatants. From the mid-1930s Shaw began to estab…
a novel by Ellen Glasgow, published in 1932. Set in Queensborough (a fictional version of Glasgow's native Richmond, Virginia), this novel represents its author's profoundest speculations on the interrelationship of sexuality and society. Its all-pervasive central figure is a former Southern beauty, Eva Birdsong, married to the weak, amoral George, of whose relationships with others she is obsessi…
American dramatist, born in Illinois. Shepard is a prolific and hugely successful playwright as well as film actor, screenwriter, and film director. His first play, Cowboys (1964), was followed by a stream of plays most of which were produced in New York in off-Broadway theatres. Widely regarded as the leading American avant-garde playwright of the late twentieth century, Shepard's work has inspir…
American dramatist, born in New Rochelle, New York State, educated at Harvard, where he followed George Pierce Baker's course in the history of the theatre. His successful first play, The Road to Rome (1927), shows Hannibal turning away from his march on Rome, an anti-war gesture designed to express Sherwood's disillusion with the international politics which had led to the First World War. Sherwo…
British novelist, son of an Irish Methodist minister, born in Montserrat in the West Indies; on his fifteenth birthday he was crowned by his father as king of Redonda, a small neighbouring island. He was educated at Harrison College, Barbados, and King's College, London; he studied medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, but then turned to literature, publishing novels and short stories in …
a collection of poetry by W. H. Auden, published in 1955. The title poem is among his finest, its bitterly elegiac view of the modern human condition tempered by its depth of imaginative compassion and the resonant accomplishment of its form. The volume also includes two of Auden's major poetic sequences, ?Bucolics? and ?Horae Canonicae?. The former consists of seven vividly illustrated and techni…
Canadian-based novelist, born in Oak Park, Illinois, educated at Hanover College and the University of Ottawa. She settled in Canada in 1957. Though none of her novels had previously appeared in Britain, the publication of Mary Swann in 1990 gained her a reputation as one of the decade's significant novelists. With its intricate exploration of a poet's life, her death at her husband's hand, her su…
Northern Irish playwright, born in Ballymoney, Co. Antrim. After being educated locally, he emigrated to Canada where he was permanently crippled in a railway accident. He returned to Ireland and began to write, initially using George Morshiel as a pseudonym. His first plays, Bedmates and Insurance Money, were produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1921, but it was with Paul Twyning in 1922 that Shiels …
British writer on mountaineering, born in Ceylon; he received an irregular education in the course of a highly mobile childhood. Having made the first ascent of Kamet, at that time the highest mountain ever climbed, in 1931, his four attempts on Mount Everest (1933, 1935, 1936, 1938) established him as the foremost Himalayan climber of the day. His distaste for large expeditions is said to have co…
American cultural and feminist critic, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, educated at Bryn Mawr College and the University of California. She became Professor of English at Princeton University. Showalter is best known for A Literature of Their Own (1977; revised edition 1982), an examination of women novelists from Charlotte Bront? to Doris Lessing in which many critically neglected writers of the…
A. E. Housman's first collection of verse, published in 1896, consisting of sixty-three poems united by their profound lyrical melancholy and the Shropshire setting suggested by the recurrence of various place-names. The poems also have in common their consummate fluency of versification in traditional forms; Housman's virtuosity as a metricist produces results of remarkable elegance within the na…
British poet and novelist, born in Staines, Middlesex, where she was educated at Matthew Arnold County Secondary School. She is the wife of Peter Redgrove, with whom she has collaborated on several works, among them the novel The Terrors of Dr Treviles (1974); a study of the cultural significances of menstruation entitled The Wise Wound (1978); and Alchemy for Women (1995). Her collections include…
British poet, editor, and critic, born in London, educated at Dulwich College. In 1952 he founded Stand, the literary magazine he has continued to edit with his wife Lorna Tracy. He has held a succession of posts as a writer-in-residence at universities in Britain, Israel, and the USA. His numerous collections of poetry include The Peaceable Kingdom (1954), The Re-Ordering of the Stones (1961), Na…
American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter, born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, educated at the University of New Mexico. Silko's writing is rooted in her complex heritage, part Mexican, part Pueblo Indian, part white; she has said of her work that ?at the core of my writing is the attempt to identify what it is to be a half-breed or mixed blooded person; what it is to grow up neither wh…
American poet, born in Pasco, Washington. Residing in the San Francisco area, he has worked as a political organizer, an editor of Socialist Review, a teacher and college administrator, and in the computer industry. His influential essays (collected in The New Sentence, 1987) on the economic and political conditions of poetry argue that language has been commodified in the West. Referentiality hel…
British novelist and poet, born in Nottingham, the son of a labourer in a cycle factory. He left school at 14 to become a factory worker and then an air-control assistant. He was a wireless operator with the RAF in Malaya (1946?9), and began to write during an eighteen-month convalescence from TB. He lived in France and Spain during the 1950s, and has continued to travel widely, although his work …
American writer, born in New York, educated at Columbia University. Silverberg is best known for his science fiction. His early work includes Revolt on Alpha C (1955), his first novel, and The 13th Immortal (1957), the first of a long series of space operas. During much of the 1960s he concentrated mainly on non-fiction but with Thorns (1967), Hawksbill Station (1968), The Masks of Time (1968), an…
a play by Sean O'Casey, published in 1920 and performed in 1929. This principally involves Harry Heagan, a Dublin footballer whose skill wins his club the ?silver tassie?, or cup, three years running. But he is seriously wounded in the Great War, losing both the use of the lower half of his body and his fianc?e, Jessie. He ends up in a wheelchair at the football club dance. At first, he bitterly c…
American poet, born in Yugoslavia; he went to the USA in 1949, and was educated at the University of Chicago and New York University. Simic became professor of English and director of the creative writing programme at the University of New Hampshire. His first book of poems was What the Grass Says (1967); his other books include White (1970), Dismantling the Silence (1971), Return to a Place Lit b…
Northern Irish poet, born in Londonderry, educated at the University of Leeds. After teaching at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, in 1968 he became a lecturer at the New University of Ulster, Coleraine. In 1968 he founded the poetry magazine The Honest Ulsterman. Simmons's Ballad of a Marriage was published along with pamphlets by Seamus Heaney and others to mark the Belfast Festival of 1965, i…
American dramatist, born in the Bronx, New York, of Jewish parentage, educated at New York University. Simon began his career as a radio and television script writer and it is often held that the mark of writing for these media persists in his plays where his use of the one-line joke is a frequent device. His first play, Come Blow Your Horn (1961), was the first of a long line of major popular suc…
American poet, born in Kingston, Jamaica; from 1940 onward he lived in the USA where he was educated at Columbia University. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1959 to 1967, when he became Professor of English at the State University of New York. His early collections of verse, which include The Arrivistes (1949) and A Dream of Governors (1959), made accomplished use of conv…
American writer, born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, educated at Berkeley and Columbia Universities. She has published stories in Harper's, the Paris Review, and literary journals like the Iowa Review and Ploughshares; one story, ?Approximations?, was included in the anthology Twenty under Thirty (1985). She received wide acclaim for her first novel, Anywhere but Here (1986), which concerned an eccentri…
British novelist, biographer, and cultural historian, born in Oxford, educated at Eton, at Harvard, and at Cambridge, where he became a don. His first novel, The Breaking of Bumbo (1959), based on his experiences in the army, was made into a film. My Friend Judas (1959), a comic novel set in Cambridge, describes the anarchic activities of its hero, Ben Birt; The Hallelujah Bum (1963; US title The …
British writer, born in London, educated at the Universities of East Anglia and California. The stories collected in Hearts of Gold (1979) and Bedbugs (1982), like much of his subsequent fiction, are characterized by an acerbic humour and a fascination with the nature of Jewish identity. For Good and Evil (1991) is a selection of stories from his previous volumes. His novel Blood Libels (1985) foc…
British poet and novelist, born in Cardiff, educated at the London School of Film Technique and at Trinity College, Dublin. From the late 1960s onward he lived in London, the topography, history, and legends of which inform much of his writing. Since 1970 his work has been published chiefly by various British small presses; collections include Back Garden Poems (1970), The Penances (1977), Fluxion…
British novelist, born in Cheshire, and educated mainly at home. She was the youngest child and only daughter of a shipping magnate whose business went bankrupt and who became an alcoholic. Sinclair lived with her mother after her parents separated and looked after her brothers while pursuing a formidable private course of study. After the publication of her first novel, Audrey Craven (1897), she …
American novelist, born in Baltimore; he paid his way through the City College of New York by writing novels, an activity which also financed his graduate work at Columbia. His first major work was The Jungle (1906) in which he exposed the appalling conditions prevalent in the meat-packing industry and which resulted in legislation for reform. The novel also marked his first open and avowed commit…
Scottish poet, born in New York of Scottish parents; he grew up in Glasgow, where he attended the University. He travelled widely in the late 1940s and sought out W. S. Graham in Cornwall for guidance in the development of his writing. After working as a research assistant in a marine laboratory, he became a highly regarded literary journalist and broadcaster in London. He resumed his work in mari…
American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, born in Leoncin, Poland, educated at Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary, Warsaw. Singer (the surname is anglicized from Zynger and the middle name is a pseudonym taken from his mother's name, Bathsheba) emigrated to the USA in 1935 and took American citizenship in 1943; apart from some early works written and published whilst he was studying in Wa…
Indian writer, critic, journalist, and translator, born in Hadali in the Punjab (now in Pakistan), educated in Delhi and Lahore, before attending King's College, University of London. Called to the Bar in 1938, Singh practised at the Lahore High Court in the 1940s. After a career in public service, including a period with the Ministry of External Affairs, he became a journalist and editor, establi…