Encyclopedia of Literature: Lemn Sissay Biography to Southwold Suffolk

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

C. H. Sisson (Charles Hubert Sisson) Biography - (1914– ), (Charles Hubert Sisson), PN Review, The Spirit of British Administration, The London Zoo, Numbers

British poet and translator, born in Bristol, where he read Philosophy and English at the University. He began his career in the Civil Service in 1936 and retired as Assistant Under-Secretary of State in 1973. He co-edited PN Review from 1976 to 1983. He first gained wide notice with The Spirit of British Administration (1959), a study of administrative and constitutional issues. The title poem of…

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Sister Carrie - Jennie Gerhardt

a novel by Theodore Dreiser. It was first published in 1900 but not promoted by Double-day, on the grounds of its alleged immorality. It was reissued in 1912, the year after the publication of Jennie Gerhardt, although the unexpurgated edition of the novel did not appear until 1981. Caroline Meeber, the eponymous heroine, is a na?ve girl from a country town who arrives in Chicago to stay with her …

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Dame Edith Sitwell (Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell) Biography - (1887–1964), (Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell), The Mother and Other Poems, Twentieth Century Harlequinade, Clowns' Houses

British poet, born in Scarborough, the sister of Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell; she grew up at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, the seat of her aristocratic family. Her early collections of poetry include The Mother and Other Poems (1915), notable for its unusually violent title piece; Twentieth Century Harlequinade (1916), one of several collaborations with Osbert; and Clowns' Houses (1918), which e…

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Sir Osbert Sitwell (Sir Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell) Biography - (1892–1969), (Sir Francis Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell), The Man Who Lost Himself, The Winstonburg Line

British poet, novelist, and autobiographer, born in London, the brother of Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell; he grew up at Renishaw Hall, his family's seat in Derbyshire. He was educated at Eton, which he described in the novel The Man Who Lost Himself (1923) as ?that wasteful, antiquated, rather beautiful machine?. His early collections of poetry, which include The Winstonburg Line (1919) and Argona…

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Sir Sacheverell Sitwell Biography - (1897–1988), The People's Palace, Exalt the Eglantine, Dr Donne and Gargantua, An Indian Summer

British poet and art historian, born in Scarborough, the brother of Edith and Osbert Sitwell; he grew up at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire and was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. His collections of poetry, notable for their delicate musicality and precise yet often mysterious imagery, include The People's Palace (1918), Exalt the Eglantine (1926), Dr Donne and Gargantua (1930), and An Indian Sum…

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Sizwe Bansi Is Dead - Statements: 3 Plays

a play by Athol Fugard, performed in 1972, published in Statements: 3 Plays (1974). Styles, a photographer in the South African town of New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, sees the studio of which he is the proprietor as a ?strong room of dreamers?, and his vocation as the immortalization of the simple people who are never mentioned in the history books and who ?never get statues erected to them?. One s…

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John T. Sladek (John Thomas Sladek) Biography - (1937– ), (John Thomas Sladek), The Muller-Fokker Effect, Roderick, Roderick at Random, Tik-Tok

American novelist and short-story writer, born in Waverley, Iowa, educated at the University of Minnesota. Most of his work can be described as science fiction. After The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970), which features the deconstruction of a human personality into separate computer tapes, his science fiction novels Roderick (1980) and its continuation Roderick at Random (1983), Tik-Tok (1983), and Bu…

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Carolyn Slaughter Biography - (1946– ), The Story of the Weasel, Columba, Magdalene, Dreams of the Kalahari, The Banquet

British novelist, born in India, educated in South Africa and in England; she worked as a copywriter in London until 1976. Her first novel, The Story of the Weasel (1976), was praised for its sensitive treatment of fraternal incest in Victorian England and for its subtle poetic prose. Columba (1977) again displayed a preoccupation with pathological mental states, impossible love, and loneliness, w…

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Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade - Slaughterhouse-Five, City of Words

a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, published in 1969. Slaughterhouse-Five is perhaps the most successful of Vonnegut's novels. Its hero, Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain's assistant in the American army during the Second World War, is captured and imprisoned in Dresden (in the ?slaughterhouse-five? of the title) where he witnesses the infamous Allied fire-bombing of the German city. After the war he becomes a…

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Kenneth Slessor Biography - (1901–71), Vision, The Thief of the Moon, Earth Visitors, Cuckooz Contrey, Trio, Five Bells

Australian poet, born in New South Wales. He was a journalist and became joint editor with Norman Lindsay of Vision, in which his earliest poems appeared. His experience as official war correspondent in 1940?4 resulted in ?Beach Burial?, one of his finest war poems. Early poems, such as those contained in The Thief of the Moon (1924) and Earth Visitors (1926), made effective use of imagery and wer…

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Joshua Slocum Biography - (1844–?1909), The Voyage of the Liberdade, The Voyage of the Destroyer

American travel writer, born in Wilmot Township, Nova Scotia; he received an irregular education before going to sea as a cook at the age of 12. A naturalized American citizen, from 1869 onward he was captain of a succession of vessels sailing out of San Francisco. The Voyage of the Liberdade (1890), his first book, describes a shipwreck and the voyage to safety in a boat constructed from salvage.…

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Gillian Slovo Biography - (1952– ), Morbid Symptoms, Death by Analysis, Death Comes Staccato, Catnap, Close Call, Ties of Blood

South African novelist, born in Johannesburg, the daughter of the ANC leaders Joe Slovo and Ruth First; she grew up in Britain from 1964, following her parents' departure from South Africa as political fugitives. She has worked as a journalist and film producer. Her detective novel Morbid Symptoms (1984) introduced Kate Baeier, virtuoso saxophonist and private investigator, whose adventures contin…

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Small Presses - Ulysses, The Less Deceived, A-22/23, The New British Poetry, A Various Art

fulfil an astonishing variety of functions, some of them marginal, others as crucial as Sylvia Beach's publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, the Gaberbocchus Press's editions of Alfred Jarry's work, or the Marvell Press's publication of Philip Larkin's The Less Deceived. The present significance of small presses as outlets for work of value neglected by established publishing houses began as a phe…

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Elizabeth Smart Biography - (1913–86), Ottawa Journal, Vogue, Queen, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, A Bonus

Canadian novelist and poet, born in Ottawa, Ontario, educated at private schools in Canada and at King's College, University of London. During the 1930s she wrote for the Ottawa Journal. Most of her later life was spent in Britain. She worked as a journalist for Vogue and Queen and as an advertising copywriter. She is best known for the novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), a …

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Agnes Smedley Biography - (1892–1950), Daughter of Earth, Battle Hymn of China, Chinese Destinies, China Fights Back, The Great Road

American writer and reporter, born in North-West Mississippi; she grew up in circumstances of rural poverty. Her autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1929)?recognized as a feminist-proletarian classic?recounts, with power and depth, her struggle to liberate herself from the confines of her background, her self-education, her escape to Europe, and her encounter with the politics of Indian nati…

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A. J. M. Smith (Arthur James Marshall Smith) Biography - (1902–80), (Arthur James Marshall Smith), New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors

Canadian editor, critic, and poet, born in Montreal, educated at McGill and Edinburgh Universities. He played an important role in what became known as ?the Montreal Group?, the most significant avantgarde Canadian literary movement of its day. In association with F. R. Scott, A. M. Klein, and E. J. Pratt he produced New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors (1936) and went on to become extremely in…

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Bernard Smith Biography - (1916– )

Australian art historian and cultural critic, born in Sydney where for many years he was Power Professor of Fine Art at Sydney University. He retired to Melbourne in 1977. Best known for his complementary pioneering studies European Vision and the South Pacific: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (1960) and Australian Painting 1788?1960 (1962), he has also completed outstanding editorial work…

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Dave Smith (Dave Jeddie Smith) Biography - (1942– ), (Dave Jeddie Smith), Rocky Mountain Review, Southern Review, Bull Island, The Fisherman's Whore

American poet, born in Portsmouth, Virginia, educated at the University of Virginia, Southern Illinois, and Ohio University. Among several distinguished academic and editorial posts, Smith has served as literary editor of the Rocky Mountain Review, editor of Southern Review, and in 1982 became Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. His work is characterized by his Virginian iden…

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Dodie Smith Biography - (1896–1990), Autumn Crocus, Service, Touch Wood, Call It a Day, Bonnet over the Windmill

British dramatist and novelist, born in Whitefield, Lancashire, educated at St Paul's School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Until 1935 she wrote under the name C. L. Anthony. Her first play, Autumn Crocus (1931), was followed by several others, including Service (1932), Touch Wood (1933), Call It a Day (1935), Bonnet over the Windmill (1937), Lovers and Friends (1942), Letter from Paris (1…

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E. E. Smith (Edward Elmer Smith) Biography - (1890–1965), (Edward Elmer Smith), Skylark, Lensman, Triplanetary, First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, Second Stage Lensman

American science fictionwriter and chemist, born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, educated at George Washington University. He is known as Doc Smith, a central figure in the creation of modern American space opera. As created by Smith (with E. Hamilton), space operas are morally simplified dramas of conflict (usually military) with dynamic plots which take place in vast galaxy-spanning venues. In Smith's …

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Iain Crichton Smith Biography - (1928–1998), The Long River, The Law and the Grace, From Bourgeois Land, Love Poems and Elegies

Scottish poet and novelist, born in Glasgow, educated at the University of Aberdeen. He was a schoolteacher in Glasgow and Oban from 1952 to 1977. A prolific author in both English and Gaelic, The Long River (1955) was his first collection of verse; among his subsequent volumes in English are The Law and the Grace (1965), From Bourgeois Land (1969), Love Poems and Elegies (1972), The Exiles (1984)…

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Ken Smith (Kenneth John Smith) Biography - (1938–2003), (Kenneth John Smith), Stand, Inside Time, The Pity, The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962–1980

British poet, born in Rudston, Yorkshire, educated at the University of Leeds. In 1963 he became a co-editor of Stand magazine. He has worked widely as a teacher of creative writing in Britain and the USA; his experiences as writer-in-residence at Wormwood Scrubs prison from 1985 to 1987 resulted in the prose account of prison life in Inside Time (1989). The Pity (1967), his first collection of po…

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Logan Pearsall Smith (Lloyd Logan Pearsall Smith) Biography - (1865–1946), (Lloyd Logan Pearsall Smith), Youth of Parnassus, The Golden Urn, Trivia, More Trivia, Afterthoughts

American essayist, born in Millville, New Jersey, educated at Harvard and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he set the stories in his first book, Youth of Parnassus (1895). With his sister Mary and Bernard Berenson, whom she later married, he produced a periodical entitled The Golden Urn in 1897?8, contributing short prose sketches of a wittily aphoristic character. These formed the beginnings of …

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Pauline Smith (Pauline Janet Smith) Biography - (1882–1959), (Pauline Janet Smith), The Beadle, The Little Karoo, The Adelphi, A. B, Pauline Smith

South African novelist and short-story writer, born in Oudtshoorn, Cape Province, educated in Britain from the age of 13. She wrote only one novel, The Beadle (1926), and a collection of short stories, The Little Karoo (1925; expanded edition 1930). Her work is generally acknowledged to be a sensitive and accurate depiction of the harsh, acquisitive, and oppressively patriarchal life of Calvinisti…

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Stevie Smith (Stevie Florence Margaret Smith) Biography - (1902–71), (Stevie Florence Margaret Smith), Novel on Yellow Paper, Over the Frontier, The Holiday

British poet and novelist, born in Hull, the daughter of a shipping agent. From the age of three she grew up with her mother and her aunt in Palmers Green, London, where she remained for most of her life. After attending the North London Collegiate School for Girls, she worked as a secretary for the magazine publishers Newnes-Pearson until 1953, when she became a freelance writer and broadcaster. …

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Sydney Goodsir Smith Biography - (1915–75), Skail Wind, The Deevil's Waltz, Cokkils, Girl with a Violin

Scottish poet, born in Wellington, New Zealand, the son of an emigrant Scottish academic, educated at the University of Edinburgh, after which he pursued a career as a journalist, broadcaster, and teacher. Smith and Robert Garioch are generally considered MacDiarmid's most distinguished successors as modern poets writing in Scots. His reputation as a poet was established with Skail Wind (1941), wh…

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W. D. Snodgrass (William De Witt Snodgrass Biography - (1926– ), (William De Witt Snodgrass, Heart's Needle, After Experience: Poems and Translations

American poet, born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, educated at the University of Iowa, where he studied with Robert Lowell in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Snodgrass achieved immense success with his first book of poems, Heart's Needle (1959; Pulitzer Prize), which established his reputation as a leading Confessional poet. The poems in the sequence entitled ?Heart's Needle? were addressed to and are …

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C. P. Baron Snow of Leicester Snow (Charles Percy, Baron Snow of Leicester Snow) Biography - (1905–80), (Charles Percy, Baron Snow of Leicester Snow), Strangers and Brothers, George Passant

British novelist and essayist, born in Leicester, educated at University College, Leicester, and Christ's College, Cambridge. In the early stages of his career he was committed to science. He held many important public and academic posts, and was created Baron in 1964. Most of Snow's novels form part of an eleven-volume sequence entitled Strangers and Brothers, narrated by Lewis Eliot, a character…

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Gary Snyder (Gary Sherman Snyder) Biography - (1930– ), (Gary Sherman Snyder), The Dharma Bums, Riprap, and Cold Mountain Poems

American poet, born in San Francisco, educated at Reed College, Portland, and the University of California, Berkeley, from 1953 to 1956, the period of his association with various writers of the Best Generation; Jack Kerouac's portrayal of him as ?Japhy Ryder? in The Dharma Bums (1958) makes clear the central importance of Zen Buddhism to Snyder, who spent eight years in Japan as a student of Zen …

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Soap Opera - Pamela, Dynasty, Dallas, The Guiding Light, East Enders, A Country Practice, Twin Peaks, Peyton Place

a form of popular television entertainment that has its origins in the 1930s' serialized radio dramas. It was initially aimed at women audiences who were targeted as potential buyers of the advertised products. Some scholars can see predecessors of the soap opera in eighteenth-century sentimental novels like Pamela (1740) by Samuel Richardson, which were also aimed at female audiences and employed…

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Socialist Realism

a term used to describe the official artistic doctrine adopted at the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, and approved by Stalin, Gorky, Bukharin, and Zhdanov. It required that the creative artist should serve the Revolution by presenting positive images of socialist possibility; it denigrated the bourgeois artist and all forms of experimentalism and formalism as degenerate, subjective, and pessim…

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Somerville and Ross - An Irish Cousin, Naboth's Vineyard, The Real Charlotte, Some Experiences of an Irish RM

joint pseudonym of Anglo-Irish novelists Edith Oenone Somerville (1858?1949), born in Corfu and brought up at Castle-townshend, Co. Cork, and Violet Florence Martin (1862?1915), born at Ross House, Co. Galway. They collaborated on around thirty books, most of which were set in Ireland; which of them held the pen was ?wholly fortuitious?, Edith later wrote. Their first novel, An Irish Cousin (1889)…

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Cathy Song Biography - (1955– ), Picture Bride, Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, School Figures, Sister Stew

Hawaiian poet, born in Honolulu, Hawaii; she grew up in the small sugar town of Wahaiwa, and was educated at the University of Hawaii, Wellesley College, and Boston University. She has taught creative writing in many institutions. Her first book, Picture Bride (1983), was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets Prize by the poet Richard Hugo. Two later collections, Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (1…

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Sons and Lovers - Sons and Lovers, Bildungsroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

a novel by D. H. Lawrence, published in 1913. Freely based upon events in his own life, Lawrence's third novel Sons and Lovers was his first clear success. It adapts the popular nineteenth-century form of the Bildungsroman to recount the early life of Paul Morel. The novel is set in a small Nottinghamshire mining community where Paul's mother's social and cultural aspirations separate her from her…

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Susan Sontag Biography - (1933–2004), The Benefactor, Death Kit, nouveau roman, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will

American novelist, critic, and film-maker, born in New York City, educated at the Universities of California, Chicago, and Harvard. She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles, California. Though Sontag is best known for her prolific and influential cultural criticism, she sees herself primarily as a writer of fiction. Her first novel, The Benefactor (1963), is an ambitious work in which a mal…

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Charles Hamilton Sorley Biography - (1895–1915), Malburian, 1914, Marlborough and Other Poems, The Ungirt Runner, Collected Poems, Collected Letters

Scottish poet, born in Aberdeen, where his father was Professor of Moral Philosophy, educated at Marlborough College. He was noted for the confidence and critical maturity of his addresses to the college's literary society; its magazine, the Malburian, published twelve of his poems in 1913. His experiences of the Wiltshire Downs, where he was fond of running, inform much of his work, most notably …

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Gilbert Sorrentino Biography - (1929–2006), The Darkness Surrounds Us, Black and White, The Sky Changes, Steelwork

American novelist and poet, born in Brooklyn, educated at Brooklyn College. Sorrentino lived in New York City all his life and his prose and poetry are saturated with the idioms and rhythms of urban life. His first volume of poetry, The Darkness Surrounds Us (1960), which shows the influence of Black Mountain poets, was followed by a second volume, Black and White (1964). Sorrentino's first novel,…

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Gary Soto Biography - (1952– ), Living up the Street: Narrative Recollections, The Tale of Sunlight, New and Selected Poems

Chicano poet and prose writer, born in Fresno, California, educated at California State University, Fresno, and the University of California, Irvine. During his childhood he worked as a migrant farm labourer. Soto's social concerns and poetic style have led to comparisons with Philip Levine, his former teacher at Fresno, who also deals with the plight of the American worker. Others have noted that…

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Sound and the Fury, The - The Sound and the Fury

a novel by William Faulkner, published in 1929. Many critics consider it Faulkner's finest novel and it is generally thought to be among the greatest works of twentieth-century American literature. The story of the decaying Compson family in the early years of the twentieth century is told in the interior monologues of three Compson brothers, Benjy, Quentin, and Jason; only the fourth section of t…

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Raymond Souster (Holmes Raymond Souster) Biography - (1921– ), (Holmes Raymond Souster), Direction, Contact, Combustion, Shake Hands with the Hangman: Poems 1940–1952

Canadian poet, born in Toronto, where he was educated at the Humberside Collegiate Institute; he worked in a Toronto bank from 1939 until his retirement in 1984. While serving in Nova Scotia with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, he began the magazine Direction (1943?6), which was succeeded by Contact (1952?4) and Combustion (1957?60). Shake Hands with the Hangman: Poems 19…

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William Soutar Biography - (1898–1943), Gleanings of an Undergraduate, Conflict, The Solitary Way, The Expectant Silence, Seeds in the Wind

Scottish poet, born in Perth, educated at Perth Academy and the University of Edinburgh. The spinal disease he contracted on naval service during the First World War left him bedridden from 1930 onwards. Although he had published a collection of verse entitled Gleanings of an Undergraduate (1923) in his final year at University, it was not until his illness disabled him that he began his sustained…

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South Wind - sirocco

Norman Douglas's most widely read work and sole success as a novelist, published in 1917. Nepenthe, the island setting, is a fictional equivalent to Capri, though, in accordance with Douglas's remark that ?I have taken what liberties I pleased with the place?, much natural detail is taken from other Mediterranean locations he knew well. The narrative concerns twelve days spent on the island by Tho…

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