Encyclopedia of Literature: Tre‐Taliesin Cardiganshire to Hilda Vaughan Biography

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

Lionel Trilling Biography - (1905–75), Sincerity and Authenticity, The Partisan Review, The Opposing Self, Beyond Culture, The Liberal Imagination

American critic, born in New York, educated at Columbia University. Among other academic posts, he taught at the University of Wisconsin and Hunter College, and rose to Professor of English at Columbia. One of the most subtle and reflective of American critics, his continuing concern was the fate of culture in troubled times, and the possibilities of contestation and rejuvenation represented by di…

1 minute read

John Tripp Biography - (1927–86), Diesel to Yesterday, The Loss of Ancestry, The Province of Belief, Bute Park

Welsh poet, born in Bargoed, Glamorgan; he spent most of his childhood in Cardiff. He worked for the BBC from 1943 to 1957 and was subsequently a press assistant at the Indonesian Embassy. In 1969 he returned to Cardiff to become a full-time writer. His first collection, Diesel to Yesterday, appeared in 1966, followed by The Loss of Ancestry (1969) and The Province of Belief (1971). These volumes …

1 minute read

Joanna Trollope Biography - (1943– ), Eliza Stanhope, Parson Harding's Daughter, Leaves from the Valley, The City of Gems

British novelist, born in Gloucestershire, educated at St Hugh's College, Oxford, a descendant of the Trollope family. Trollope worked in the Foreign Office and then taught English. Her first historical novel, Eliza Stanhope (1978), covered the Regency period. Several others have followed, with a variety of settings; eighteenth-century India for Parson Harding's Daughter (1979), the Crimean War fo…

1 minute read

Barbara Tuchman Biography - (1912–89), The Lost British Policy, The Bible and the Sword, The Zimmermann Telegram

American historian, born in New York, educated at Radcliffe College, Harvard. Before 1962 she published under her maiden name of Barbara Wertheim. Her earlier works include The Lost British Policy (1938), on relations between Britain and Spain since 1700, and The Bible and the Sword (1956), a study of British involvement in the formation of the state of Israel. She attracted a wide readership with…

1 minute read

Frank Tuohy (John Frank Tuohy) Biography - (1925– ), (John Frank Tuohy), The Animal Game, The Warm Nights of January, émigrée, The Ice Saints

British novelist and short-story writer, born in Uckfield, Sussex, educated at King's College, Cambridge. He has lectured in Finland, Sweden, Brazil, Poland, and Japan and his work is distinguished by his depth of knowledge of different societies. Set in Brazil, his first novel, The Animal Game (1957), gives a harrowing description of pigs imprisoned in a truck during a bitter railway strike and t…

less than 1 minute read

W. J. Turner (Walter James Redfern Turner) Biography - (1889–1946), (Walter James Redfern Turner), The Hunter, The Dark Fire, Spectator

British poet, born in Melbourne, Australia, where he was educated at Scotch College before emigrating to London in 1907. His subsequent travels in Europe and South Africa inform much of his poetry. The Hunter (1916) and The Dark Fire (1918) reflect his experiences on the Western Front. In 1918 he joined the staff of the Spectator and became its literary editor in 1942. He enjoyed a brief success a…

1 minute read

Amos Tutuola Biography - (1920–1999), The Palm-Wine Drinkard, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Nigerian novelist, born in Abeokuta, educated at the Anglican Central School in that town; he was a founder member of the Mbari Club, a group of influential writers and publishers including Wole Soyinka in their membership. Tutuola's novels are written in highly idiosyncratic English which initially caused much controversy, particularly on the first publication of The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952); th…

less than 1 minute read

Hone Tuwhare Biography - (1922–2008), No Ordinary Sun, Sap-Wood and Milk, Something Nothing, Making a Fist of It

New Zealand Maori poet, born in Kaikohe, educated at technical colleges in Otahuhu, near Wellington. After army service he was a boilermaker and was active in union affairs and in politics. The title poem of his successful initial collection, No Ordinary Sun (1964), referred to atomic testing in the Pacific. Later collections include Sap-Wood and Milk (1972, illustrated by the Maori artist Ralph H…

1 minute read

Two Cultures, The - The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, The Two Cultures and a Second Look

a phrase supplied by the title of C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) which became widely current in describing the separation of science and literature. The essay, originally Snow's Rede Lecture at Cambridge in 1959, lamented the ?gulf of mutual incomprehension? between scientists and writers, contrasting the formers' sometimes arrogant self-confidence with the diff…

1 minute read

Anne Tyler Biography - (1941– ), If Morning Ever Comes, The Tin Can Tree, A Slipping-Down Life

American novelist, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina; she graduated from Duke University and undertook post-graduate research in Russian studies at the University of North Carolina. Tyler rejected her early novels, If Morning Ever Comes (1964) and The Tin Can Tree (1965), written in her early twenties, but with A Slipping-Down Life (1970) and The Clock Winder (…

2 minute read

Katharine Tynan Biography - (1861–1931), Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems, Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland

Irish poet and novelist, born in Clondalkin, Co. Dublin, educated at the convent school of St Catherine of Drogheda. She gained a reputation as a poet with her first volume, Louise de la Valli?re and Other Poems (1885). Like Yeats, who was her close friend for many years, she was a disciple of John O'Leary's in matters of literary nationalism, and was represented in Poems and Ballads of Young Irel…

1 minute read

Kenneth Tynan (Kenneth Peacock Tynan) Biography - (1927–80), (Kenneth Peacock Tynan), Observer, Oh! Calcutta!, Curtains, Tynan Right and Left

English drama critic and theatre producer, born in Birmingham, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. As one of the most influential drama critics of his time, his reviews for the Observer were notable for their wit and stylistic brilliance. He promoted the early plays of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and, most notably, Tom Stoppard. In 1963 Sir Laurence Olivier appointed Tynan literary manager of t…

1 minute read

Ulster Literary Theatre, The - Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Deirdre, Brian of Banba, The Reformers

was founded by Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill in Belfast in 1902. Although Hobson and Parkhill had been strongly influenced by the Irish Literary Theatre, later the Abbey Theatre, which had been founded by Yeats, Moore, Martyn, and Lady Gregory, Yeats gave little support to its Ulster equivalent. In reaction, Hobson is said to have exclaimed: ?Damn Yeats, we'll write our own plays!?, which they …

1 minute read

Ulster poetry - Death of a Naturalist, Late but in Earnest, Night Crossing, No Continuing City, Preoccupations

the corporate designation for the work of a number of distinguished poets of Northern Irish birth who came to prominence from the mid-1960s onward. Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Frank Ormsby, Tom Paulin, and James Simmons are the principal writers classifiable as Ulster poets. The oldest among them, James Simmons, was born in 1933 and the youngest, Paul Muldoon, in 195…

1 minute read

Ulysses - The Egoist, The Little Review, Dubliners, Ulysses

a novel by James Joyce, one of the most notorious, celebrated, and influential works of the twentieth century. Early chapters appeared in The Egoist in 1919 and then, in 1920, in The Little Review which was prosecuted by a New York court for publishing obscene matter. It was eventually published in full by Shakespeare and Co., a Paris bookshop, on 2 February 1922. After a long and now legendary sa…

2 minute read

Underground Poetry - Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain, Bomb Culture

the term for the work of poets identified with the radical cultural attitudes of the 1960s. The American Beat poets were the immediate predecessors of underground poetry in the USA and Britain, which was characterized by rejection of conventional forms in favour of conversational and rhetorical modes immediately accessible in performance. William Blake was frequently invoked as the visionary proge…

1 minute read

Under Milk Wood - Under Milk Wood, Botteghe Oscure, Llareggub: A Piece for Radio perhaps

Dylan Thomas's ?play for voices?, evoking the passage of a single spring day in the village of Llareggub through the accounts given by some sixty characters of their daily activities, dreams, memories, and relationships. Thomas's involvement with radio and film from 1940 onwards led him to begin the work in 1945, when he wrote ?Quite Early One Morning?, which anticipates Under Milk Wood in the use…

1 minute read

Under the Volcano

a novel by Malcolm Lowry, published in 1947. The opening sequence takes place on the Day of the Dead in November 1939, in the Mexican city of Quauhnahuac. Jacques Laruelle, a French expatriate film-maker, reflects on the tragic events which occurred exactly a year before, in the same place, in which the main protagonists were Geoffrey Firmin, former British Consul in Quauhnahuac, his estranged wif…

1 minute read

Under Western Eyes - English Review, North American Review, Crime and Punishment

a novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1911 (serialized in the English Review and the North American Review, 1910?11). The novel is narrated by an unnamed English Teacher of Languages living in Geneva, who is privy to the private diaries of Razumov, a student of philosophy in St Petersburg. Haldin, a revolutionary fellow-student and self-confessed political assassin, seeks help from Razumov. Quest…

2 minute read

Barry Unsworth Biography - (1930– ), The Partnership, The Greeks Have a Word For It, The Hide, Mooncranker's Gift

British novelist, born in Durham, educated at Manchester University. Since the early 1960s he has lived in Greece, Turkey, Finland, and Italy, dividing his time between university lecturing and writing. His first novel, The Partnership (1966), deals with the pretensions of an artists' colony in Cornwall; subsequent earlier works include The Greeks Have a Word For It (1967), which reflects his expe…

1 minute read

John Updike (John Hoyer Updike) Biography - (1932– ), (John Hoyer Updike), New Yorker, The Same Door, Pigeon Feathers, Too Far To Go

American novelist, born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard. Updike worked for the New Yorker, where many of his short stories appeared before their collection and publication in such volumes as The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), Too Far To Go (1979), The Beloved (1982), Trust Me (1987), and, more recently, The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994). His first novel, Poorhouse…

2 minute read

Edward Upward (Edward Falaise Upward) Biography - (1903– ), (Edward Falaise Upward), Journey to the Border, The Railway Accident and Other Stories

English novelist and short-story writer, born in Romford, educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. A schoolmaster in London from 1928 to 1962, during the 1930s he was a member of the Communist Party and closely associated with Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and W. H. Auden. His novel Journey to the Border (1938) examines Marxism through the interior monologues of a middle-class youn…

1 minute read

U.S.A. - U.S.A., The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, The Big Money, Manhattan Transfer

a trilogy of novels by John Dos Passos, first published in a single volume in 1938. U.S.A. comprises three novels that were separately published: The 42nd Parallel (1930); Nineteen Nineteen (1932); and The Big Money (1936). Dos Passos had as his objective a panoramic depiction of American life in the first thirty years of the twentieth century and the scale of his endeavour forced him to refine an…

1 minute read

Utopia and Anti-Utopia - Looking Backward, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, News from Nowhere, A Modern Utopia

Modern literary utopianism emerges out of the divided heritage of the nineteenth-century socialist utopia, with its antithetical images of the future represented, in the English-speaking world, by Edward Bellamy and William Morris. Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) portrays a scientific-industrial state of the collectivist or ?totalitarian? type that would be satirized in the two most influential …

3 minute read

v.

a long poem by Tony Harrison, first published in 1985. The title is the abbreviation for ?versus?, indicating the work's thematic concern with ?all the versuses of life?, the political, cultural, and personal conflicts characterizing the society of the mid-1980s on which the urgently topical work reflects. Its opening describes Harrison's visit to his parents' grave in a Leeds cemetery where many …

1 minute read

Sir Laurens van der Post (Sir Laurens Jan van der Post) Biography - (1906–1996), (Sir Laurens Jan van der Post), Voorslag, Venture to the Interior

South African writer, born in Philippolis, South Africa, educated at Grey College, Bloemfontein. Together with Roy Campbell and William Plomer, he founded in 1926 the short-lived anti-racialist magazine Voorslag. He served in the British Army with distinction during and after the Second World War. Van der Post is best known for his vivid accounts of expeditions into remote parts of Africa in trave…

1 minute read

Mona van Duyn Biography - (1921–1996), Valentines to the Wide World, A Time of Bees, To See, To Take

American poet, born in Waterloo, Iowa, educated at the University of Iowa. She has been characterized as both a Midwesterner and ?a poet of the suburbs?. From her initial collections onwards, Valentines to the Wide World (1959) and A Time of Bees (1964), her work has been popular and widely published. To influential admirers such as Richard Howard and the critic Robert von Hallberg, her ?simple, h…

1 minute read

Aritha van Herk Biography - (1954– ), Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address, Places Far From Ellesmere, A Frozen Tongue

Canadian novelist, born in Wetaskiwin, Alberta, educated at the University of Alberta; she teaches at the University of Calgary. The geography and landscapes of northern and western Canada from the background of her uncompromisingly feminist narratives of women's quests for autonomous identities. In her first novel Judith (1978), the protagonist leaves her urban background to re-define herself on …

less than 1 minute read

Peter Vansittart Biography - (1920– ), I Am the World, The Friends of God, The Lost Lands

British novelist, born in Bedford, educated at Worcester College, Oxford. He worked as a schoolteacher for twenty-five years before becoming a full-time writer. His first work, I Am the World (1942), is a metaphysical fiction on utopian themes in the manner of R. Warner. Several of his novels, such as The Friends of God (1963), The Lost Lands (1964), Pastimes of a Red Summer (1969), and The Wall (…

1 minute read

Carl van Vechten Biography - (1880–1964), The New York Times, Interpreters and Interpretations, Excavations: A Book of Advocacies

American novelist, music critic, and reviewer, born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, educated at the University of Chicago. Van Vechten was one of the most influential and visible literary figures of the 1910s and 1920s. He began his career in journalism as a reporter, then in 1906 joined The New York Times as assistant music critic and later worked as its Paris correspondent. His early reviews are collecte…

1 minute read

A. E. van Vogt (Alfred Elton van Vogt) Biography - (1912–2000), (Alfred Elton van Vogt), Slan, Astounding Science Fiction, The Weapon Shops of Isher

Canadian-born science fiction writer, born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, resident in the USA from 1944. Together with I. Asimov and R. A. Heinlein, he dominated American science fiction for a decade from 1939. His first novel, Slan (1940, in Astounding Science Fiction; final revised edition 1951), adopted for young magazine readers the idea of the solitary superman. More ambitious were two sets of linked…

1 minute read

Moyez G. Vassanji (Moyez Gulamhussein Vassanji) Biography - (1950– ), (Moyez Gulamhussein Vassanji), The Gunny Sack, No New Land, The Book of Secrets, Uhuru Street

Kenyan novelist, born in Nairobi, a member of Kenya's long-established Indian community; he emigrated to the USA in 1970, where he was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1978 he began working as a nuclear physicist with Atomic Energy of Canada, then taught at the University of Toronto until 1989. The Gunny Sack (1989), his highly acclaimed …

1 minute read