Encyclopedia of Literature: Sir Rabindranath Tagore Biography to James Thomson Biography

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

Rabindranath Tagore Biography - (1861–1941), The Home and the World, Geetanjali, The Gardener, Lover's Gift, and Crossing

Bengali poet, novelist, and playwright, born in Calcutta, educated privately and at University College, London, from 1878 to 1880. In India, Tagore is highly regarded as one of the great figures of modern literature for his innovations in poetry, prose fiction, and drama in his own language, Bengali. The current reassessment of his work depends entirely on recent translations of his work and the r…

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Tamarack Review - Northern Review, Tamarack Review, The First Five Years

a quarterly journal of poetry, prose fiction, essays, and criticism established in 1956 in Toronto by Robert Weaver in association with Kildare Dobbs, Anne Wilkinson, William Toye, and others. Weaver and Toye remained as editors of the magazine throughout its career. The discontinuation of Northern Review (see First Statement and Preview) in 1956 was a motivating factor in the founding of Tamarack…

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Tambimuttu, (Meary James Thurairajah) Biography - (1915–83), (Meary James Thurairajah), Poetry London, Poetry London–New York, India Love Poems, Poetry in Wartime, Natarajah

Ceylonese editor and poet, generally known by his surname alone, born of an aristocratic English-speaking family in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He left Ceylon for Britain in 1937. Once in London, he rapidly established himself as a significant member of the literary and artistic circles of Soho and Fitzrovia, and was among the founders of Poetry London in 1939. He edited the magazine until his departu…

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Amy Tan Biography - (1952– ), The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses

Chinese-American novelist, born in Oakland, California, educated in California and Switzerland, and at the San Jos? State University. Tan's parents were immigrants from mainland China and her fictions are inspired, in part, by the history of her own family. In her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), her mother's experiences of semi-feudal China, of the Civil War, and of the advent of the Commun…

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Tony Tanner Biography - (1935– ), The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Piety in American Literature

British critic, born at Richmond in Surrey, educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1964 he became Director of English Studies at King's College, Cambridge, and was appointed Professor of English and American Literature at Cambridge in 1989. The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Piety in American Literature (1965), his first major critical work, investigates the quality of wonderment as an essential c…

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Booth Tarkington (Newton Booth Tarkington) Biography - (1869–1946), (Newton Booth Tarkington), The Gentleman from Indiana, Monsieur Beaucaire, The Magnificent Ambersons, Alice Adams, Growth

American novelist, born in Indianapolis, Indiana, educated at Purdue and Princeton Universities. He was a popular and prolific author, writing over forty novels, over thirty plays and screenplays, and several collections of short stories in a career that began with his first novel, The Gentleman from Indiana (1899). Popular success was secured with his second novel, Monsieur Beaucaire (1900), an e…

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Tarr - Übermensch

a novel by Wyndham Lewis, published in 1918, revised in 1928. Set in Paris in the early 1900s, the novel describes the relationships within a group of ?bourgeois-bohemians? in the caf? society of Montmartre. The opening conversation between Frederick Tarr, a talented young English painter, and Alan Hobson (a satirical portrait of Roger Fry), about Tarr's intentions towards his fianc?e Bertha Lunke…

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Allen Tate (John Orley) Biography - (1899–1979), (John Orley), The Fugitive, I'll Take My Stand, Mr Pope and Other Poems

American poet, novelist, and critic, born in Kentucky, educated at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he associated with the Agrarians. With John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Andrew Lytle, he believed that the South should reject the materialistic, industrially based modern world and turn to its own roots; Tate edited the magazine The Fugitive (1922?5), contributed to th…

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R. H. Tawney (Richard Henry Tawney) Biography - (1880–1962), (Richard Henry Tawney), Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

British economic historian and political philosopher, born in Calcutta, educated at Balliol College, Oxford; he became Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics (1931). He was also a long-time supporter of the Workers' Educational Association in Lancashire and North Staffordshire, and was for sixteen years President of the Association. His best-known book, Religion and the Ri…

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A. J. P. Taylor (Alan John Percivale Taylor) Biography - (1906–90), (Alan John Percivale Taylor), The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy 1847–1849

British historian, born in Birkdale, Lancashire, educated at Oriel College, Oxford. From 1928 to 1930 he worked with the Austrian historian A. F. Pibram in Vienna, gathering material for his book The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy 1847?1849 (1934). After lecturing at Manchester University for eight years, he became a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1938, where he taught till 1963. Hi…

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C. P. Taylor (Cecil Philip Taylor) Biography - (1927–82), (Cecil Philip Taylor), Allergy, Bread and Butter, The Black and White Minstrels

British dramatist, born in Glasgow of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, educated in the same city. He worked as an electrician, a television engineer, and a salesman before writing a series of plays which, though written from a broadly socialist stance, were notable for their gentle mockery of moral and political attitudinizing, as well as their warmth of characterization. Among them were Allergy …

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Elizabeth Taylor Biography - (1912–75), At Mrs Lippincote's, Palladian, A View of the Harbour, A Wreath of Roses

British novelist and short-story writer, born and educated in Reading, Berkshire, where she worked as a governess and librarian. In 1936 she married John Kendall Taylor, with whom she spent the rest of her life, mostly in the Buckinghamshire village of Penn, the kind of prosperous rural setting which was to provide the back-ground for many of her novels. Her first novel, At Mrs Lippincote's (1945)…

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Peter Taylor Biography - (1917–1994), Collected Stories, In the Miro District and Other Stories, The Old Forest and Other Stories

American short-story writer and novelist, born in Trenton, Tennessee, educated at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Southwestern College, Memphis, and Kenyon College, Ohio. Taylor has explored the tensions and nuances of Tennessee life, particularly in its upper and middle classes. He had published several volumes of short stories prior to Collected Stories (1969). The title stories of In the Miro…

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Tender Is the Night - haute bourgeoisie, The Composition of ‘Tender Is the Night’

a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1934 and, in a revised version by Malcolm Cowley, in 1948. Set, predominantly, on the French Riviera during the 1920s, the novel is both a social history of American expatriate life in France after the First World War and a study of the decline of an individual, Dick Diver, a gifted psychiatrist, whose marriage to the wealthy Nicole Warren (who is broug…

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Emma Tennant Biography - (1937– ), Bananas, The Time of the Crack, The Crack, The Last of the Country House Murders

British novelist, born in London, educated at St Paul's Girls' School. In 1975 she founded and edited the experimental literary magazine Bananas. Her novels include The Time of the Crack (1973; republished as The Crack, 1978), an apocalyptic fantasy; The Last of the Country House Murders (1974), a surreal detective story; Hotel de Dream (1976), in which the waking lives of the lodgers at a seedy b…

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Studs Terkel (Studs Louis Terkel) Biography - (1912– ), (Studs Louis Terkel), Division Street America

American social historian, interviewer, critic, and radio and television broadcaster, born in New York, educated at the University of Chicago and Chicago Law School. In what remains his best known work, Division Street America (1966), Terkel says that ?I was out to swallow the world? ? ?The world was my city?, and in over sixty interviews with residents of Chicago he sought to represent the freque…

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John Terraine (John Alfred Terraine) Biography - (1921–2004), (John Alfred Terraine), The Great War, Mons: The Retreat to Victory

British historian, born in London, educated at Keble College, Oxford. In 1944 he began working at the BBC, becoming associate producer and chief scriptwriter for the television series The Great War in 1963. In 1964 he became a freelance author. His reputation as a historian of the First World War was established with Mons: The Retreat to Victory (1960), the first of numerous studies of the conflic…

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Megan Terry Biography - (1932– ), Eat at Joe's, Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place

American dramatist, born in Seattle, educated at the University of Washington. She is a central figure in contemporary American alternative theatre, and has been hailed as the mother of American feminist drama. She was a founding member of the Open Theatre with Joseph Chaikin, the New York Theatre Strategy, and the Women's Theatre Council, and in 1974 was made playwright-in-residence of the Omaha …

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Peter Terson, pseudonym of Peter Patterson Biography - (1932– ), pseudonym of Peter Patterson, A Night to Make the Angels Weep, The Mighty Reservoy

British dramatist, born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; he started writing plays while working as a games and physical education teacher in the West Midlands, and took his pseudonym when he was resident dramatist at the pioneering theatre-in-the-round at Stoke-on-Trent in the 1960s. There, he composed several works notable for their lively observation of rural people, notably A Night to Make the Angels We…

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A. S. J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John Tessimond) Biography - (1902–62), (Arthur Seymour John Tessimond), The Walls of Glass, Voices in a Giant City, Selection

British poet, born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, educated at Charterhouse, to which he refused to return at the age of 16. After a period in London, he entered the University of Liverpool. By the age of 25 he had begun to distinguish himself as a poet; The Walls of Glass, his first collection of verse, appeared in 1934. Voices in a Giant City (1947) contained much of his finest work. The sombrely ironi…

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Josephine Tey, pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh Biography - (1897–1952), pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh, The Man in the Queue, Killer in the Crowd

British crime writer and dramatist, born in Inverness. During the 1920s she worked as a school physical education teacher. She wrote eight excellent detective stories most of which feature Inspector Alan Grant, on whom Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn appears to be modelled. The first, originally published under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot, is The Man in the Queue (1929; alternative US title Killer i…

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Their Eyes Were Watching God - Their Eyes Were Watching God

a novel by Zora Neale Hurston, published in 1937; it tells the story of an independently minded black woman. As a girl the heroine Janie Crawford is taught by her grandmother to seek more than the life of drudgery that is the usual fate of women in her society. As an adult Janie leaves a loveless marriage to a husband who owns land and joins up with Joe Starks, a confident smooth-talking man who t…

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Paul Theroux (Paul Edward Theroux) Biography - (1941– ), (Paul Edward Theroux), Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play, Jungle Lovers, Saint Jack

American novelist and travel writer, born in Medford, Massachusetts, educated at the University of Massachusetts. He lectured in English in Malawi, Uganda, and Singapore. Africa provides the background for three of his early novels, Fong and the Indians (1968), Girls at Play (1969), and Jungle Lovers (1971), which display a common concern with the morally deforming tensions between Western and Afr…

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Wilfred Thesiger (Wilfred Patrick Thesiger) Biography - (1910–2003), (Wilfred Patrick Thesiger), Arabian Sands, The Marsh Arabs, Desert, Marsh and Mountain

British travel writer, born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where his father was British Minister, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1933 he travelled to the interior of the Danakil Desert in Ethiopia, becoming the first European to gain the confidence of the region's inhabitants. He was attached to the Sudan Political Service till 1940, when he began his distinguished military career, winning th…

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Third Man, The - The Third Man, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American

a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1950. Much of Greene's fiction has been filmed, but none so successfully as The Third Man, directed in 1949 by Carol Reed, with haunting zither music by Anton Karas, and Orson Welles as the cynical racketeer Harry Lime. The film is able to exploit more fully than Greene's text the darkly atmospheric background of the city of Vienna, ruined by the Second World…

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Third Policeman, The - tour de force

a novel by Flann O'Brien, first published posthumously in 1967. The work, a disquieting and richly comic imaginative and stylistic tour de force, is recounted by an anonymous narrator, who describes events leading up to and following his killing of an elderly farmer. His self-possession is gradually eroded by the intensely strange phenomena he witnesses after entering the world of police sergeants…

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This Side of Paradise - The Romantic Egoist

a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1920. Initially called The Romantic Egoist, it appeared at the outset of the ?roaring Twenties? and immediately became a bestseller and a cult work for the younger generation of the jazz age, in a society increasingly attracted to the ideal of youth. The young protagonist, Amory Blaine, exemplifying the post-war dandy, makes his life the egotistical pur…

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Audrey Thomas Biography - (1935– ), Ten Green Bottles, Ladies and Escorts, Real Mothers, Goodbye, Harold, Good Luck

Canadian-based novelist and short-story writer, born in Binghamton, New York, educated at Smith College and the University of British Columbia. From 1964 to 1966 she lived in Ghana, a source for some of her subsequent fiction, before settling in British Columbia. Her first collection of short stories was Ten Green Bottles (1967); others include Ladies and Escorts (1977), Real Mothers (1981), and G…

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D. M. Thomas (Donald Michael Thomas) Biography - (1935– ), (Donald Michael Thomas), Symphony in Moscow, Love and Other Deaths, The Honeymoon Voyage

British poet, novelist, and translator, born in Redruth, Cornwall; he spent much of his childhood in Australia. He was educated at New College, Oxford. His collections of poetry include Symphony in Moscow (1974), Love and Other Deaths (1975), The Honeymoon Voyage (1978), Dreaming in Bronze (1981), and Selected Poems (1983). Much of his earlier verse combined elements of science fiction and erotici…

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Dylan Thomas (Dylan Marlais Thomas) Biography - (1914–53), (Dylan Marlais Thomas), Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas

Welsh poet, born in Swansea, Glamorgan, educated at Swansea Grammar School. Much of his verse originates in a series of notebooks dating from his schooldays, which have been published as Poet in the Making: The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas (edited by Ralph Maud, 1968; revised 1989). In 1931 he became a reporter with the South Wales Daily Post. 18 Poems (1934) was published in the year of his move to …

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Edward Thomas (Philip Edward Thomas) Biography - (1878–1917), (Philip Edward Thomas), The Woodland Life, George Borrow: The Man and His Books

British poet, critic, and topographical writer, born in Lambeth, London, educated at Lincoln College, Oxford. His earliest publication of note was The Woodland Life (1897), a peripatetic account of rural locations in the manner of Borrow and Jefferies; his enthusiasm for these writers is clear in the biographical studies George Borrow: The Man and His Books (1912) and Richard Jefferies: His Life a…

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R. S. Thomas (Ronald Stuart Thomas) Biography - (1913–2000), (Ronald Stuart Thomas), The Stones of the Field, An Acre of Land, The Minister

Welsh poet, born in Cardiff; he read Classics at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and received his theological training at St Michael's College, Llandaff. He ministered in a succession of Welsh parishes from 1937 until his retirement in 1978. His first three volumes of poetry, The Stones of the Field (1946), An Acre of Land (1952), and The Minister (1953), a verse-drama for radio, es…

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Ross Thomas (Ross Elmore Thomas) Biography - (1926–1995), (Ross Elmore Thomas), Cast a Yellow Shadow, The Seersucker Whipsaw

American novelist, born in Oklahoma City, educated at the University of Oklahoma. He worked as a journalist, public relations director, and consultant to the US government until 1966, when he became a full-time writer. Much of his writing is informed by his professional experience of managing political campaigns. His suspense novels dealing with political corruption include Cast a Yellow Shadow (1…

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Edward Thompson (Edward John Thompson) Biography - (1886–1946), (Edward John Thompson), The Knight Mystic, Mesopotamian Verses, John in Prison, Collected Poems

British poet, translator, historian, and novelist, born in Bath, educated at Oxford University and the University of London. The Knight Mystic (1907) was his first collection of verse. In 1909 he became a Methodist minister and worked as an educational missionary in Bengal. His experiences as an army chaplain from 1916 to 1918 are reflected in the vivid and moving poems of the Palestinian and Meso…

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E. P. Thompson (Edward Palmer Thompson) Biography - (1924–93), (Edward Palmer Thompson), William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary

British historian, born in Oxford, educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. After a period at Leeds and Warwick Universities he became Professor of the Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities at Birmingham University. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955), his first major publication, considered the interactions between its subject's artistic and political careers. His m…

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Flora Thompson Biography - (1876–1947), Daily News, Catholic Fireside, The Peverel Papers, Bog-Myrtle and Peat, Lady

British autobiographical novelist, born in Juniper Hill, Oxfordshire, faithfully described in her major novels as ?Lark Rise?. The eldest of ten children of a stonemason and a former housemaid, she left school at the age of 12 to become a clerk at the post office in the village of Fringford, then at Greyshott in Surrey. In 1900 she married John Thompson, also a post office clerk, and moved first t…

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Hunter Thompson Hunter Stockton Thompson) Biography - (1939–2005), Hunter Stockton Thompson), The Reporter, The National Observer, The Nation

American journalist, writer, and novelist, exponent of the New Journalism, born in Louisville, Kentucky. Thompson began as a sportswriter and freelance reporter with The Reporter and The National Observer. He made his mark in the mid-1960s with an assignment for The Nation, covering a Hell's Angel motorcycle group, later published as Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1967), in which he d…

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Sam Thompson Biography - (1916–65), Over the Bridge, Mixed Marriage, The Evangelist, Cemented with Love

, Irish playwright, born in Belfast; he was a tradesman and trade unionist who turned to writing during the 1950s. His first plays were written for radio and originate in his concern for the poverty and violence of the society to which he belonged. Thompson's significance is assured by his play Over the Bridge (1960), portraying sectarian prejudice in Belfast and the inevitability of its violent …

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