Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
V. Woolf's second feminist essay, published in 1938 (cf. A Room of One's Own); it grew from a lecture, ?Professions for Women? (1931), and from the early version of The Years. Writing a response to three requests for a guinea?one for preserving peace, one for helping women's education, and one for enhancing their professional opportunities?she evolves a startling comparison between Victorian patri…
British travel writer and novelist, born in London, a descendant of John Dryden (1631?1700), educated at Eton College. He worked in publishing and travelled widely as a film-maker for the BBC from 1959 to 1965, when he became a freelance author. A Mirror to Damascus (1967), his first work as a travel writer, was followed by The Hills of Adonis (1968), an account of Lebanon, Jerusalem (1969), and J…
American humorist, born in Columbus, Ohio, educated at Ohio State University. Thurber initially became well known through the pages of the New Yorker. The combination of mordant prose with understated illustration was the dominant feature of his work. His first publication, Is Sex Necessary? (1929), in collaboration with E. B. White, was a satirical attack on the 1920s vogue for sex manuals. After…
British poet, born in Chester, educated at Christ Church, Oxford. After lecturing in Tokyo for two years, he became a producer for BBC radio in 1957, working under Louis MacNeice, a period alluded to in his poem ?For Louis MacNeice?. He subsequently held a succession of editorial positions with The Listener, New Statesman, and Encounter and became editorial director with Andr? Deutsch publishers i…
British poet, born at Truro in Cornwall, educated at Jesus College, Cambridge. After lecturing at Cambridge he held an appointment at Fuad University in Cairo from 1939 to 1946. He subsequently became a highly regarded and prolific writer and producer for BBC radio; his more notable achievements included an adaptation of The Vision of Piers Ploughman (broadcast 1980; published 1981). Poems (1941),…
the most notable of the British literary journals of the twentieth century. It originated in the introduction of additional book-reviewing to The Times in 1902 as a means of filling space created by the absence of parliamentary reports during the summer recess. The literary supplement thus created was distributed as part of the newspaper until 1914, when the Times Literary Supplement became an ind…
British novelist and freelance writer, born in London, educated at Oxford University. Tindall's wide-ranging output has included journalism, translation, history, literary criticism, and biography. Her first novel, No Name in the Street, appeared in 1959. The Youngest (1967), Someone Else (1969), and Fly Away Home (1971) deal with the educated woman's journey towards self-knowledge. Violent, sudde…
American sciencefiction author, born in Chicago, educated at the University of California and George Washington University. After working in photo-intelligence for the CIA, from 1955 to 1968 she taught experimental psychology in Washington DC at the American University and George Washington University. She killed herself after shooting her husband, who was suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. Her r…
South African novelist, born in Doornfontein, Transvaal. She spent two years at Witwatersrand University; when it was closed to black students, she completed her studies at the National University of Roma, Lesotho. Her experiences as a clerk in a hire-purchase business formed the basis for her first novel, Muriel at Metropolitan (1976), which is regarded as the first treatment in English of the cu…
Irish novelist, born in Wexford, educated at University College, Dublin. He has worked as a journalist and columnist for The Dublin Sunday Independent, Esquire, and the London Review of Books. His first novel, The South (1990), deals with the encounter of Katherine Proctor, an Irish Protestant, with the Spanish Civil War activist Miguel in the aftermath of the events of 1939. Praised for its restr…
British writer and academic, born in South Africa; he came to England at the age of three and was educated at Exeter College, Oxford. From 1945 he was Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford. Among his early works are A Middle-English Vocabulary (1922), an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925; with E. V. Gordon), and Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936). W…
British biographer, born in London, educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. After working as a publisher's editor, in 1968 she joined the staff of the New Statesman, becoming literary editor in 1974, and was subsequently literary editor of the Sunday Times until 1986. Her reputation as a distinguished biographer was established with The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974; Whitbread Prize)…
British poet and graphic artist, born in Stoke-on-Trent, educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, and the University of London. In 1957 he became a lecturer at the University of Bristol, where he was appointed Professor of English in 1982. The Necklace (1955), his first substantial collection of verse, was more favourably received in the USA than in Britain. His numerous subsequent volumes include …
British travel writer and novelist, born in East London; he left school at the age of 12 and worked as a shipping clerk till 1904, when he began his career as a journalist. His assignments included a series of voyages to remote locations; the journey up the Amazon he made in 1909 was recorded in his first and most celebrated book, The Sea and the Jungle (1912). After three years as a war correspon…
a novel by H. G. Wells, published in 1909. Described by its author as a Balzacian ?social panorama?, this is Wells's most ambitious and sweeping indictment of Edwardian England. Its form is that of a Bildungsroman narrated by George Ponderevo, the son of the housekeeper at Bladesover House in Kent. George studies science in London, but his prospects are transformed when he joins his uncle Edward i…
American novelist, born in New Orleans, educated at Columbia University, New York City. His reputation rests almost entirely on one novel, the posthumously published A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981. The novel was written in the early 1960s and Toole's failure to place it with a publisher is generally thought to be one of the reasons behind his suicid…
American novelist, born in Washington, DC to parents of Louisiana Creole stock, educated at the University of Wisconsin and at City College, New York. Toomer began publishing poems and sketches in 1918 and in 1922 went to Georgia, where he worked in schools, an experience which provided material for the first part of Cane (1923), the book on which his reputation rests. Around 1923 his interest in …
a mode of verse which in its essential form is an eighteenth-century phenomenon, typified by works like John Dyer's Grongar Hill (1726) and James Thomson's The Seasons (1726?30); much of its character survives, however, in the prevalence of local description and landscape imagery in a substantial body of twentieth-century poetry. Dr Johnson defined topographical poetry as ?a species of composition…
a novel by V. Woolf, published in 1927, frequently judged to be her best work, and one of the finest achievements of English Modernism. Family comedy, elegy, symbolic prose poem, and meditation on the artist's responsibility all in one, it was planned (in 1925) ?to have father's character complete in it; & mother's; & St Ives; & childhood?, and was felt by her sister Vanessa Bell to have ?given a …
a collection of verse by W. B. Yeats, published in 1928, which contains a number of his best-known poems and marks the beginning of the final and most masterly phase of his work. The volume also exemplifies the fineness of production characteristic of many of his books; the green cover, designed by T. Sturge Moore, is inlaid with a stylized illustration in gold of Thoor Ballylee, the tower near Co…
British historian, born in London, educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a tutor until 1915. He became a professor at London University in 1919 and was Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1925 until he retired in 1955. A Study of History (10 volumes, 1934 and 1954) took some twenty major civilizations as examples upon which Toynbee based his argument that a cy…
British novelist, poet, critic, and diarist, born in Oxford, educated at Christ Church College, Oxford. His early novels reflected his leftist political sympathies, but with Tea with Mrs Goodman (1947; US title Prothalamium) and The Garden to the Sea (1953) his novels became both experimental and psychologically subtle, the latter exploring the collapse of a marriage partly due to the strains of w…
1 a literary journal begun in Paris in 1923 by Ford Madox Ford. James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway were closely associated with the magazine and supported it as both contributors and editorial advisers. Basil Bunting was Ford's assistant editor. Hilda Doolittle, E. E. Cummings, F. S. Flint, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Djuna Barnes were among the noted Modernist authors …
an international literary journal begun in Paris in 1927 by Eugene Jolas as a ?laboratory of the word?. Assisted by his wife Maria, who translated contributions, Jolas remained editor until the last issue in 1938. Manifestos affirming ?The Revolution of the Word? and the advent of ?Vertigralism?, Jolas's quasimystical aesthetic of ?primitive grammar?, were characteristic of transition's radical to…
Australian poet, born in New South Wales, educated at the University of Sydney. He has worked as a publisher's editor and a producer for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. He was one of a generation of poets, during the late 1960s, whose aims were to introduce Modernism into Australian poetics; according to one critic, Tranter is ?contemptuous of gum-tree-laden poetry, poetry of assertion and…
Scottish writer of historical novels, born in Glasgow. Tranter wrote mainly on Scottish themes; his books are rich in character and action. His trilogies include ?The Master of Gray? (The Master of Gray, 1961; The Courtesan, 1963; Past Master, 1965), ?The Bruce Trilogy? on Robert the Bruce, ?The Stewart Trilogy?, and ?The MacGregor Trilogy?. Other works include two novels on Montrose (The Young Mo…
British novelist, born in Cape Town, South Africa, educated at the University of Natal and the University of London. After working as a schoolteacher in London, she published Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982), her first novel, a highly polished satirical romance whose complex plot ranges over fifteen years in the life of a well-educated but na?ve young woman. Strongly informed by Trapido's So…
British playwright, born in Hendon, London, educated at Charterhouse School. He joined the family sugar business and worked for a time in Malaya, then turned to publishing, and began to write novels. One of these he adapted into A Cuckoo in the Nest (1925), the first of a long series of ?Aldwych farces?, so-called after the London theatre in which they were staged. Others included Rookery Nook (19…
British poet and novelist, born in Wednesbury, Staffordshire, educated at the University of Birmingham. He was a schoolteacher until 1959, when he became a full-time writer. In 1938 he met J. F. Hendry, with whom he became co-founder of the New Apocalypse and co-editor of two of its anthologies, The White Horseman (1941) and The Crown and the Sickle (1943). Treece's How I See Apocalypse (1946) for…
a novel by Patrick White, published in 1956. Beginning in the 1880s and ending in the 1930s, this is the epic story of a New South Wales farmer, Stan Parker, and his wife, Amy. Their lives and destinies are shaped by their hazardous relationship with the land and the forces and disasters of nature. Their neighbours, too, influence the course of their eventual emotional separation. Amy finds solace…
British novelist and playwright, born in London, educated at the Sorbonne, and the University of East Anglia where she became a lecturer in creative writing. Her first novel, Sadler's Birthday (1977), looks back on the life of an ageing butler and dealt with themes of old age and death to which the writer was to return. Letter to Sister Benedicta (1979), in which a middle-aged woman writes a lette…
British poet and dramatist, born at Avoncore, Co. Cork, educated at Keble College, Oxford. He entered the Civil Service in 1891. His early publications as a poet, which include Deirdre Wed (1900) and New Poems (1907), gained him a considerable reputation. He was director of the Hay-market Theatre from 1911 to 1913. He subsequently lived mainly at Settignano, near Florence, which is vividly evoked …
Irish novelist, born in Dublin into a middle-class family. He emigrated to South Africa in the early 1890s, where he married and had a daughter. After the death of his wife, he sailed to England and settled in Hastings. He had been politically active in Africa, and once in Britain he joined the Social Democratic Foundation, a Marxist forerunner of the Independent Labour Party. In 1904, while worki…
British historian, born in Stratford-on-Avon, the son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan (1838?1928), educated at Trinity College, Cambridge; he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1927 and was Master of Trinity College from 1940 to 1951, when he became Chancellor of Durham University. Following the appearance of numerous studies, notably England under the Stuarts (1904), he…
British author, born in Port Blair in the Andaman Islands; he spent his early years in India and Kashmir and was educated at Winchester College. From 1942 to 1946 he was on active service and drew on his experiences of combat in Italy for The Fortress: Anzio and After (1956) and Rome '44: The Battle for the Eternal City (1981); both were widely acclaimed for combining authoritative military histor…
Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer, born in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, educated at Trinity College, Dublin. His early novels were a combination of allegory, farce, and acute social observation, and displayed a singular sensitivity to the plight of the old, the lonely, and the ill-adjusted, particularly women. In novels such as The Old Boys (1964), The Boarding House (1965), The Love Departme…