Encyclopedia of Literature: St Juliot Cornwall to Rabindranath Tagore Biography

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

Bram Stoker (Bram Abraham Stoker) Biography - (1847–1912), (Bram Abraham Stoker), The Duties of the Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, Dublin Mail

Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer, born in Clontarf, near Dublin, educated at Trinity College, Dublin. His experiences as a civil servant in Dublin resulted in The Duties of the Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879). He was also drama critic for the Dublin Mail, and contributed to other Irish newspapers. In 1878 he left for England, where he became manager of Henry Irving's Royal Ly…

1 minute read

Adrian Stokes (Adrian Durham Stokes) Biography - (1902–72), (Adrian Durham Stokes), Criterion, The Quattro Cento, Stones of Rimini, Colour and Form

British art critic and poet, born in London, educated at Rugby and Magdalen College, Oxford. During the 1920s he visited Rapallo in Italy, where he came to know Ezra Pound, who was instrumental in shaping his thought and who introduced his work to the Criterion. From his studies of fifteenth-century Italian sculpture and architecture in The Quattro Cento (1932) and Stones of Rimini (1934), Stokes …

1 minute read

Robert Stone (Robert Anthony Stone) Biography - (1937– ), (Robert Anthony Stone), New York Daily News, A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers

American novelist, born in Brooklyn; he worked for the New York Daily News while attending New York University. At Stanford he met Ken Kesey, becoming an associate of his during the mid-1960s. Drugs and alcohol are prominent in Stone's novels, sometimes represented by hallucinatory passages, as in A Hall of Mirrors (1967) in which three drifters come to New Orleans and are involved in violence fol…

1 minute read

Tom Stoppard Biography - (1937– ), A Walk on the Water, Enter a Free Man, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon

British dramatist, born in Czechoslovakia, the son of a company doctor who was killed when the Japanese invaded Singapore; he came to England after the war, and took his British stepfather's name. Stoppard left school at 17 to become a journalist, seeing his first play, A Walk on the Water (later, the stage play Enter a Free Man), televised in 1963, and a novel, Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, publishe…

2 minute read

David Storey Biography - (1933– ), This Sporting Life, Flight into Camden, Radcliffe, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, In Celebration

English novelist and dramatist, born in Wakefield, the son of a miner, educated at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. His early novels reflect the working-class background of his Yorkshire upbringing, and his displacement to the intellectual milieu of the South. His experience as a professional rugby player for Leeds formed the background to his first novel, This Sporting Life (1960), in which …

2 minute read

Randolph Stow Biography - (1935– ), Act One, Outrider: Poems 1956–1962, A Counterfeit Silence, A Haunted Land, The Bystander

Australian poet and novelist, born in Geraldton, Western Australia, educated at the University of Western Australia. In 1966 he settled in England. Stow's early poetry, Act One (1957), Outrider: Poems 1956?1962 (1962), illustrated by Sydney Nolan, and A Counterfeit Silence (1969), mainly private letters, received wide acclaim as did his spiritually challenging and strongly atmospheric novels A Hau…

1 minute read

Lytton Strachey (Giles Lytton Strachey) Biography - (1880–1932), (Giles Lytton Strachey), Prolusiones Academicae, Euphrosyne, Spectator, Spectatorial Essays, Landmarks in French Literature, Eminent Victorians

British biographer, essayist, and critic, born in London, educated at Leamington College, Liverpool University, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to the Apostles and established lasting friendships with J. M. Keynes, E. M. Forster, and others with whom he was later identified as a member of the Bloomsbury Group. His first publications were the volumes of poetry Prolusiones Acade…

1 minute read

Mark Strand Biography - (1934– ), Sleeping with One Eye Open, Reasons for Moving, Darker, The Story of Our Lives

American poet, born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, educated at Antioch College, Ohio, and Yale Art School. He has taught at Iowa, Yale, Brandeis, and Columbia Universities and became a writer-in-residence at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His poetry collections include Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), Reasons for Moving (1968), Darker (1970), The Story of Our Lives (1973), The Late …

1 minute read

Strange Interlude - Strange Interlude

a play by Eugene O'Neill, produced in 1928. A highly successful play which earned O'Neill a sizeable fortune and a Pulitzer Prize, it was immediately popular for its frank airing of sexual issues presented through a Freudian investigation of its characters' psychology. It tells the story of Nina Leeds and the men in her life, including her possessive father who persuaded her fianc?, Gordon Shaw, n…

1 minute read

Sir P. F. Strawson (Sir Peter Frederick) Biography - (1919– ), (Sir Peter Frederick), Introduction to Logical Theory, Individuals, an Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics

British philosopher, born in London, the son of a schoolmaster, educated at St John's College, Oxford. After military service between 1940 and 1946, he began teaching philosophy at University College of North Wales, Bangor; from 1947 onward he lectured at Oxford, becoming Wayneflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in 1968. He was knighted in 1977 for his contributions to philosophy, which hav…

1 minute read

Stream of Consciousness - Principles of Psychology, Les Lauriers sont coupés, Ulysses, Pilgrimage, The Waves, The Sound and the Fury

the literary technique whereby an author attempts to render the internal verbal, imaginative, and perceptual activities of a character. William James coined the term in Principles of Psychology (1890) to designate the continual succession of cognitive events that take place in the mind. Increasing use of lengthy passages of introspection in the novels of Henry James, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and others …

1 minute read

Streetcar Named Desire, A - Belle Reve

a play by Tennessee Williams, produced and published in 1948. Blanche DuBois, her life in ruins and her family home, Belle Reve, compulsorily sold and the proceeds frittered away, arrives in the Elysian Fields district of New Orleans, a virtual slum, to stay with her sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski. Blanche finds the coarseness of Stanley and his pals, most of them ?Polacks? (of …

less than 1 minute read

Structuralism - Structural Anthropology, The Savage Mind, Totemism, Writing Degree Zero, Mythologies, On Racine

a movement of thought which developed from the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857?1913) and the practice of the Russian Formalists (see formalism). It was chiefly a French phenomenon, although it had far-reaching effects elsewhere, and rose to international prominence with the anthropological work of Claude L?vi-Strauss (1908??): Structural Anthropology (1958), The Savage Mind (1962)…

1 minute read

Francis Stuart Biography - (1902–2000), We Have Kept the Faith, The Coloured Dome, Pigeon Irish, Try the Sky

Irish novelist, born in Queensland, Australia, brought up in Ireland, and educated in England. He married Iseult Gonne (Maud Gonne's daughter) in 1920, and his early poetry, which appeared in We Have Kept the Faith (1923), was praised by W. B. Yeats. Stuart was a man of action, keen on sports, and his early novels The Coloured Dome (1932), Pigeon Irish (1932), and Try the Sky (1933) reflect an int…

1 minute read

William Styron Biography - (1925–2006), Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire

American novelist, born in Newport News, Virginia, educated at Duke University. He has served in the US Marine Corps. His first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), the story of a young Southern woman's madness and eventual suicide, is indebted to Faulkner. The relatively brief The Long March (1956), set against the backdrop of the Korean War in which he served, is considered by some critics to be …

1 minute read

Ronald Sukenick Biography - (1932–2004), Out, Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues, Blown Away

American novelist and critic, born in Brooklyn, New York City, educated at Brandeis University. Ever since his involvement with the Fiction Collective, which he helped to establish in 1970, Sukenick has come to be regarded as one of the central figures in contemporary American post-modernist fiction. Like Raymond Federman, Sukenick is as much interested in the iconic or visual character of fiction…

1 minute read

Summoned by Bells - The Illustrated Summoned by Bells, Summoned by Bells

an autobiographical poem in blank verse by John Betjeman, first published in 1960; The Illustrated Summoned by Bells, with paintings and drawings by the author's friend Sir Hugh Casson, appeared in 1990. The text is in nine parts occupying more than 100 pages, and its sales exceed those of any poem of comparable length in the twentieth century. Betjeman used blank verse for the work, his most exte…

1 minute read

Sun Also Rises, The - Fiesta

a novel by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1926; published in Britain as Fiesta in 1927. The original title derives from a passage in Ecclesiastes, which concludes that ?the earth abideth forever?. Its epigraph, ?you are all a lost generation? (see Lost Generation), comes from a story told to the author by Gertrude Stein, but was later described by Hemingway as laughable after a disagreement with S…

1 minute read

Surfacing

a novel by Margaret Atwood, published in 1973. A young Canadian divorcee travels with three friends?one of them her lover?to her childhood home, in search of clues to the disappearance of her father from a remote island in a large lake in Northern Quebec. This outward search takes her back to her childhood and her past, inducing her to face the unresolved questions of her life as a woman. Motherho…

1 minute read

Surrealism - Surrealist Manifesto, Un Chien andalou, L'Age d'or, Nadja, Le Paysan de Paris

was a European movement in the arts, centred on the proclamations and activities of Andr? Breton (1896?1966) in Paris. It included work in film, painting, and literature, although it was opposed to the very notion of art as irredeemably bourgeois. The Surrealists sought immediate, uncensored contact with the unconscious and the unintelligible, and the principle of automatic writing was at the hear…

1 minute read

May Swenson Biography - (1919–1989), Another Animal, A Cage of Spines, To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems

American poet, born in Logan, Utah, educated at Utah State University. Swenson's first volume of poetry, Another Animal, was published in 1954 but it was several decades later that she secured her standing as one of the most significant of post-war American women poets. Despite the semantic simplicity of her verse her poems are often abstruse and elliptical. Like many of her contemporaries she saw…

1 minute read

Graham Swift Biography - (1949– ), The Sweetshop Owner, Shuttlecock, Learning to Swim, Waterland, Out of This World, Ever After

British novelist, born in London, educated at the University of East Anglia. His first novel, The Sweetshop Owner (1980), was followed by the psychological thriller Shuttlecock (1981; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, 1983), which traces the narrator's gradual discovery of the truth about his father's wartime past; and by a collection of short stories, many of them with a London setting, Learning to …

1 minute read

Sword of Honour - Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender, Hazardous Offensive Operations Headquarters

a trilogy of novels by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1965; originally published as Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961). Men at Arms concerns the attempts of its hero, Guy Crouchback, to get a commission at the outbreak of the Second World War, partly to distract himself from the memory of his ex-wife, Virginia Troy, whom he still loves. He enlists in …

1 minute read

Symbolism - The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Axel's Castle, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France

is present wherever an object or gesture stands for or suggests something beyond itself, and in this sense is littered about ordinary life, something we engage in all the time. In literature it refers to the technique of relying heavily on master images, as in the drama of Ibsen or Maeterlinck, and more importantly, to a movement in poetry and aesthetics in France at the end of the nineteenth cent…

1 minute read

A. J. A. Symons (Alphonse James Albert Symons) Biography - (1900–41), (Alphonse James Albert Symons), Anthology of ‘Nineties’ Verse

British biographer and bibliophile, born in London; he left school at the age of 14. His involvements in book-dealing led him to establish the First Editions Club in 1922, which he ran until his death. An authority on the literature and bibliography of the 1890s, he produced his widely read Anthology of ?Nineties? Verse in 1928. Through his bibliographical activities he developed a compelling inte…

1 minute read

Julian Symons (Julian Gustave Symons) Biography - (1912–94), (Julian Gustave Symons), Twentieth Century Verse, Confessions about X, The Second Man

British poet, biographer, social historian, crime novelist, and critic, born in London, the brother of A. J. A. Symons; he worked as an advertising copywriter before the Second World War, but in 1945 became a freelance writer and critic. He founded and edited Twentieth Century Verse (1937?9), an important magazine which published most of the young poets outside the immediate Auden circle. He publi…

2 minute read

John Millington Synge Biography - (1871–1909), The Aran Islands, The Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea

Irish play-wright, born in a Dublin suburb, the son of a barrister. After graduating in languages, including Celtic, from Trinity College, Dublin, he travelled in Europe and settled for some years in Paris. There, W. B. Yeats advised the aspiring writer to go to the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, in search of ?a life that has never found expression?. Accordingly, he stayed there annu…

2 minute read

George Szirtes Biography - (1948– ), The Slant Door, November and May, Short Wave, The Photographer in Winter, Metro, Bridge Passages

British poet, born in Budapest, Hungary; his family came to London after the uprising of 1956. He studied fine art at Leeds College of Art, where Martin Bell encouraged him in his early work as a poet. After working as an art teacher in various schools and colleges, he became a freelance writer in 1987. In addition to his considerable reputation as a poet, he is highly regarded as a graphic artist…

1 minute read