Encyclopedia of Literature: Robert Penn Warren Biography to Kenneth White Biography

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

Robert Penn Warren Biography - (1905–89), Thirty Six Poems, Eleven Poems on the Same Theme, Promises

American poet and novelist, born in Guthrie, Kentucky, educated at Vanderbilt University, where he was a student of John Crowe Ransom's, the University of California, and Oxford University. After holding a succession of posts at American universities, he became Professor of English at Yale in 1962. His metaphorically elaborate early verse in Thirty Six Poems (1936) and Eleven Poems on the Same The…

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Booker T. Washington (Booker Taliaferro Washington) Biography - (1856–1915), (Booker Taliaferro Washington), Up from Slavery, Outlook, Frederick Douglass, The Story of the Negro

African-American leader and writer, born in Hale's Ford, Franklin County, Virginia, educated at Hampton Institute, Virginia, and Wayland Seminary, Washington, DC. Washington was born on a Virginia plantation, the son of a slave woman and an unidentified white slave-owner; in his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), he recalls in the first chapter the years of his childhood and, in particular, th…

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Wendy Wasserstein Biography - (1950–2006), Uncommon Women and Others, The Heidi Chronicles, When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth

American playwright, born and raised in New York City, educated at the City College of New York, and Yale School of Drama. During the late 1970s and 1980s Wasserstein produced her plays in off- and off-off-Broadway venues. Her early work, in which she experimented with chronology, language, and form, showed her at her most innovative. Uncommon Women and Others (1975) is a compelling work about a r…

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Waste Land, The - Criterion, From Ritual to Romance, Letters, The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot's most celebrated work, first published in the Criterion in 1922; later that year an edition was produced in New York, to which notes were added to clarify allusions to or quotations from the works of some thirty-five authors, among them Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Baudelaire. The notes indicate the importance to Eliot's conception of J. L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1…

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Keith Waterhouse (Keith Spencer Waterhouse) Biography - (1929– ), (Keith Spencer Waterhouse), métier, There Is a Happy Land, Billy Liar

British novelist, playwright, and journalist, born in Leeds, educated at Osmondthorpe Council School. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Air Force. A prolific and seemingly effortless craftsman, mordant farce is his m?tier. His first novel, There Is a Happy Land (1957), typifies his irreverent response to life; a boy plays at being blind, drunk, or maimed, mimics all elders, and de…

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Vernon Watkins (Vernon Phillips Watkins) Biography - (1906–67), (Vernon Phillips Watkins), œuvre, The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd, The Lady with the Unicorn

Welsh poet, born in Maesteg, Glamorgan, educated at Repton School. He left Cambridge after one year at Magdalene College and worked at a bank in Cardiff until he underwent a severe breakdown. He described this interlude as a ?revolution of sensibility? and determined to devote himself as a poet to ?the conquest of time?. From this intention stems the cohesiveness of his ?uvre as a sustained celebr…

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David Watmough Biography - (1926– ), Love and the Waiting Game, From a Cornish Landscape, The Time of the Kingfishers

Canadian novelist, born in London, educated at King's College, University of London. He grew up on a farm in Cornwall, leaving Britain in the late 1940s for Paris, New York, San Francisco, and finally Vancouver. He writes that his ?persistent literary impulse probably derives from a Cornish/Celtic youthful pre-occupation with familial unity, plus the further impetus coming from a sexually marginal…

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Sheila Watson Biography - (1909–1998), The Double Hook, Four Stories

Canadian novelist, born in New Westminster near Vancouver, educated at the Universities of British Columbia and Toronto. Her doctorate, on Wyndham Lewis, was supervised by Marshall McLuhan. Watson's experience teaching in the Cariboo region of the British Columbia interior provided the basis for her highly acclaimed novel The Double Hook (1959), sometimes described as the first modern Canadian nov…

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Sir William Watson (Sir John William Watson) Biography - (1858–1935), (Sir John William Watson), Prince's Quest

British poet, born at Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire; he grew up near Liverpool. Two volumes of verse, Prince's Quest (1880) and Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature (1884), preceded his move to London, where he established himself as a literary journalist. Wordsworth's Grave (1891), the title piece of which is arguably his best poem, gained him wide notice, and Lachrymae Musarum (1892), his elegies…

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Barrett Watten Biography - (1948– ), This, Poetics Journal, Total Syntax, 1–10, Progress, Conduit, Under Erasure, Representations

American poet, born in Berkeley, educated at M.I.T., Iowa Writers' Workshop, and at Berkeley. He became editor of This press, which produced a magazine and books that helped shape the development of Language Poetry in the 1970s and early 1980s, and of Poetics Journal with Lyn Hejinian, a key opportunity for theoretical and critical writing on the aesthetics and politics of the new poetry. His coll…

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Auberon Waugh (Auberon Alexander Waugh) Biography - (1939–2001), (Auberon Alexander Waugh), The Foxglove Saga, Path of Dalliance, Who Are the Violets Now?

British journalist, critic, and novelist, born in Somerset, the eldest son of Evelyn Waugh, educated at Downside School and Oxford University. His lasting antagonism towards the British public school system is expressed in his amusing first novel, The Foxglove Saga (1960). He wrote three further satirical novels, Path of Dalliance (1963), about Oxford in the 1950s; Who Are the Violets Now? (1965),…

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Evelyn Waugh (Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh) Biography - (1903–66), (Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh), Put Out More Flags, Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall

English novelist, born in Hampstead, London, the second son of the publisher and literary critic Arthur Waugh, and brother of Alec Waugh. He was educated at Lancing and at Hertford College, Oxford, where he read Modern History and cultivated an outrageous persona; through his friendship with H. Acton, he was drawn into a literary and artistic circle which included C. Connolly, A. Powell, H. Yorke …

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Waves, The

a novel by V. Woolf, published in 1931. It takes as far as possible her method of expressing character and states of mind through a poetic language of recurrent images and rhythmical repetitions. It traces the lives of a group of friends (Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis) from childhood to late middle age. Each character speaks his or her thoughts in a formalized direct speech, sty…

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Way of All Flesh, The - The Way of All Flesh

Samuel Butler's semi-autobiographical novel, published posthumously in 1903. Butler began the work in 1873 and had completed his last revisions by 1884. He chose to leave it unpublished during his lifetime, chiefly because it displays what Robert Bridges termed ?his bitter onesided almost venomous regard for his own family?; in doing so, it functions on a more general level as a revelation of the …

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Beatrice Webb (Beatrice Martha Webb) (1858–1943), and Sidney Webb (Sidney James Webb) Biography - (1859–1947), (Beatrice Martha Webb), (Sidney James Webb), Life and Labour of the People of London

British writers on sociology and political reform. Beatrice, n?e Potter, born in Standish, Gloucester, was encouraged in her intellectual development by Herbert Spencer (1820?1903), a friend of her wealthy family. She witnessed conditions among the poor while collecting rents on family properties in London and assisted Charles Booth (1840?1916) with research for Life and Labour of the People of Lo…

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Francis Webb Biography - (1925–73), A Drum for Ben Boyd, Leichardt in Theatre, Birthday, Socrates and Other Poems

Australian poet, born in Adelaide, educated at Sydney University. Webb later moved to Canada, then to England where he suffered his first mental breakdown. His subsequent attempts to overcome schizophrenia and to resolve questions of identity are reflected in many of his poems in which, with his combination of surrealist imagery and religious intensity, he created powerful lyrical effects. A Drum …

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Mary Webb, née Meredith Biography - (1881–1927), née Meredith, The Golden Arrow, Gone to Earth, The House in Dormer Forest

British novelist and poet, born in Shropshire, where she spent most of her life and which she celebrated in her novels; she was educated mainly at home. Her novels include The Golden Arrow (1916), Gone to Earth (1917), The House in Dormer Forest (1920), Seven for a Secret (1922), and Amour wherein He Trusted (1929). Her most famous novel, Precious Bane (1924), set in North Shropshire after the Nap…

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Ian Wedde Biography - (1946– ), Homage to Matisse, Made Over, Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos, Pathway to the Sea, Castaly

New Zealand poet, novelist, critic, and editor, born in Blenheim, New Zealand, educated mainly in England and at the University of Auckland. Wedde's evocative clarity of image and lyricism were already evident in his early poem sequence Homage to Matisse (1971), published while he was briefly resident in London. Made Over (1974) showed the influence of William Carlos Williams's poetics. Wedde's pu…

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Theodore Weiss (Theodore Russell Weiss) Biography - (1916–2003), (Theodore Russell Weiss), The Catch, Outlanders, Gunsight, The Medium

American poet, born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Columbia University, New York. He began his academic career in 1941 at the University of Maryland. After holding a succession of posts at American universities, he was a Professor of English at Princeton from 1967 to 1987. The Catch (1951), his first collection of poetry, was followed by Outl…

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Denton Welch (Maurice Denton Welch) Biography - (1915–48), (Maurice Denton Welch), Maiden Voyage, In Youth Is Pleasure

British novelist and essayist, born in Shanghai, educated at Repton School and Goldsmith's School of Art, London. As a consequence of a serious bicycle accident in 1935 he became a partial invalid. All Welch's books, some of them illustrated by himself, are strongly autobiographical. Maiden Voyage (1943) recaptures with sensory richness his running away from school and going to China to join his f…

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James Welch Biography - (1940– ), Winter in the Blood, The Death of Jim Loney, Fools Crow, Riding the Earthboy 40

Native American writer of mixed Blackfoot and Gros Ventre descent, born in Montana, educated at the University of Montana; he has taught Native American literature at the University of Washington and Cornell University. Welch describes himself less as a traditional story-teller and more as a novelist within the Western, European-American tradition, dealing with characters in a situation of psychol…

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Fay Weldon Biography - (1933– ), The Fat Woman's Joke, Down among the Women, Female Friends, Remember Me, Praxis

British novelist, dramatist, and television screenwriter, born in Alvechurch, Worcestershire, educated at the University of St Andrews. She began her career as a copywriter in an advertising agency and wrote several plays for radio and television. Her novels, which frequently deal with aspects of women's experience, including the demands made upon them by marriage and motherhood and the unreasonab…

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Dorothy Wellesley (Dorothy Violet Wellesley) Biography - (1889–1956), (Dorothy Violet Wellesley), Early Poems, Lost Lane, Matrix, Lost Planet, Desert Wells, Letters on Poetry

British poet, born at Heywood Lodge, White Waltham, Berkshire; she was privately educated. Her numerous collections of verse include Early Poems (1913), Lost Lane (1925), Matrix (1928), Lost Planet (1942), and Desert Wells (1946). From 1934 onwards she was W. B. Yeats's close friend; some of his letters to her were published as Letters on Poetry in 1940. He valued her work highly for the ?passiona…

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H. G. Wells (Herbert George Wells) Biography - (1866–1946), (Herbert George Wells), The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man

English novelist, social critic, and educator, born in Bromley, Kent, the third son of Joseph Wells, an unsuccessful small shopkeeper, and his wife Sarah, a former lady's maid. In 1880 Wells's mother left home to become resident housekeeper at Uppark, a large country house in Sussex, while her son began a series of apprenticeships, including two years at a drapery emporium. He had to work a thirte…

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Irvine Welsh Biography - (1958– ), Trainspotting, The Acid House, Marabou Stork Nightmares, Ecstasy

Scottish novelist, born in Edinburgh where he was brought up on a housing estate in Muirhead. He left school at sixteen, lived in London in the 1980s, then became a training officer in Edinburgh Council's housing department, gaining an MBA at Heriot Watt University. His first novel, Trainspotting (1993; filmed with screenplay by John Hodge, 1996), swiftly became a cult for its uncompromising portr…

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Eudora Welty Biography - (1909–2001), One Time, One Place, Photographs by Eudora Welty, A Curtain of Green

American short-story writer and novelist, born in Jackson, Mississippi, educated at the University of Wisconsin. She worked with the Works Progress Administration, travelling throughout Mississippi and taking photographs later collected in One Time, One Place (1971) and Photographs by Eudora Welty (1989). Her first short stories, championed by Katherine Anne Porter, appeared in A Curtain of Green …

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Albert Wendt Biography - (1939– ), Sons for the Return Home, Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree

Western Samoan writer, born in Western Samoa, educated at Victoria University, Auckland. He returned to Auckland in 1987 as the first Professor of New Zealand Literature at Auckland University. His novel Sons for the Return Home (1973) was the first by a Western Samoan and, like all his work, explores the complexities of Pacific culture in the present day. Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree (1974) consi…

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Wertenbaker - New Anatomies, The Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country's Good, The Playmaker

Timberlake, British dramatist born of Anglo-American parents; she was educated in France and America. Her first significant play was New Anatomies (1981), about the life of the nineteenth-century explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, who managed to travel in Islamic countries by adopting male Arab dress. Her subsequent work has been variously marked by a concern for women in a male-dominated society, a bel…

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Glenway Wescott Biography - (1901–87), Poetry, The Apple of the Eye, The Grandmothers: A Family Portrait

American novelist and poet, born in Kewaskum, Wisconsin, educated at the University of Chicago. Wescott left the University of Chicago (from where he had contributed Imagist verse to Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine) in 1919 and spent several years wandering, rather aimlessly, from country to country, including England and Germany, before settling down to a career as a full-time writer. His first …

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Arnold Wesker Biography - (1932– ), Chicken Soup with Barley, Roots, I'm Talking about Jerusalem, Look Back in Anger

British dramatist, born in Stepney, London, educated in Hackney; he worked as a furniture-maker's apprentice, a farm labourer's seed-sorter, a chef, and in many other capacities before writing Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959), and I'm Talking about Jerusalem (1960). These plays, collectively known as the Wesker Trilogy, established him as one of the more important of the socially cons…

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Nathanael West Biography - (1903–40), Contact, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts

American novelist and screenwriter, born Nathan Wallenstein WEINSTEIN in New York, educated at Brown University. West lived in Paris before returning home to work as the manager of a New York hotel where he befriended several other writers, and also worked as an associate of William Carlos Williams in editing the magazine Contact. During this time he wrote three short novels: The Dream Life of Bal…

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Paul West Biography - (1930– ), I, Said the Sparrow, Colonel Mint, Gala, Words for a Deaf Daughter

American critic, theoretician, poet, and novelist, born in Eckington, Derbyshire, educated at the University of Birmingham and Oxford University. While his autobiography, I, Said the Sparrow (1963), offers an affectionate portrait of his early life in England, he has a particular affection for the USA where he became a resident and held academic posts at several universities including Penn State. …

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Dame Rebecca West (Dame Rebecca Cicily Isabel Fairfield, later Andrews) Biography - (1892–1983), (Dame Rebecca Cicily Isabel Fairfield, later Andrews), Rosmersholm, Freewoman, New Freewoman, Clarion

, British novelist and political essayist, born in London of Anglo-Irish parents, educated in Edinburgh. She borrowed her pen-name from the passionate heroine of Ibsen's Rosmersholm. After a brief stage career, West became a journalist and political commentator, inspired by feminism and the ideas of the Pankhursts. From 1911 she wrote for the Freewoman, the New Freewoman, and the Clarion; some of…

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Westerns - The Virginian, Hopalong Cassidy, Riders of the Purple Sage, Shane, Western Story Magazine

a genre of popular American fiction characteristically set in the late nineteenth century in the Western and Southwestern states and featuring cattle-ranchers, cowboys, sheriffs, and outlaws as principal protagonists. Emerson Hough was among the first exponents of the mode; its first classic is Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), which established numerous enduring features in its narrative of Wyo…

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Donald E. Westlake (Donald Edwin Westlake) Biography - (1933– ), (Donald Edwin Westlake), The Mercenaries, The Man with the Getaway Face, The Green Eagle Score

American crime novelist, who also writes as Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Curt Clark, and Timothy J. Culver; born in Brooklyn, educated at the University of New York at Binghamton, he became a full-time author in 1959. The Mercenaries (1960) placed him initially within the Hammett tradition, but in 1962 he took the pseudonym Richard Stark to write the first of sixteen novels featuring Parker, a metic…

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Philip Whalen Biography - (1923– ), On Bear's Head, Like I Say, Memoirs of an Interglacial Age

American poet, born in Oregon, educated at Reed College. Whalen is associated both with the Beats and with the San Francisco Renaissance. In terms of tone and conviction, his poetry most resembles that of Lew Welch; it is clear and witty, possessing a kind of classical poise which comports well with its jazz-derived flexibility. Increasingly absorbed in Buddhism, Whalen spent several years in Japa…

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Edith Wharton (Edith Newbold Wharton) (née Jones) Biography - (1862–1937), (Edith Newbold Wharton) (née Jones), Scribner's Magazine, The Greater Inclination

American novelist, born in New York to an aristocratic family and educated privately. In the 1890s she contributed short stories and poems to Scribner's Magazine, a collection entitled The Greater Inclination appearing in 1899, before writing a first historical novel, set in eighteenth-century Italy, The Valley of Decision (1902). She then turned to social satire in The House of Mirth (1905), her …

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Wheels - Wheels, Georgian Poetry

a series of poetry anthologies edited by Edith Sitwell which appeared annually from 1916 to 1921. The narrowness of range evident in Wheels resulted largely from the marked preponderance of work by the three Sitwells and members of their immediate circle. The prevailing tone of the early editions was compounded of fatalistic gloom in response to the First World War and bitter rejection of the soci…

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John Wheelwright (John Brooks Wheelwright) Biography - (1897–1940), (John Brooks Wheelwright), Secession, Rock and Shells, Mirrors of Venus, Political Self-Portrait

American poet, born in Boston, educated at Harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he trained for his career as an architect. In 1923 he travelled to Florence to oversee the printing there of an issue of Secession, one of the notable American little magazines of the early 1920s; among the contributions for publication was Hart Crane's ?For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen?…

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Where Angels Fear to Tread

the first novel by E. M. Forster, published in 1905. Set in Italy, it concerns the relationships of a group of English people who become embroiled in a disastrous and misguided plan to ?rescue? one of their number, Lilia Herriton, from what the others regard as an unsuitable marriage to a young Italian she has met on holiday in Tuscany. The novel opens as Lilia, an attractive and still youthful wi…

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Antonia White, pseudonym of Eirene Botting Biography - (1899–1980), pseudonym of Eirene Botting, Life and Letters, Time and Tide, Daily Mirror, Sunday Pictorial

British novelist, born in London. Following her father's conversion to Catholicism, she was sent to a convent boarding school but later left in disgrace. She trained as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and afterwards toured the provinces. White began her journalistic career as Assistant Editor of Desmond McCarthy's Life and Letters and also worked as theatre critic of Time and Tide,…

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Edmund White Biography - (1940– ), Forgetting Elena, nouveau roman, Nocturnes for the King of Naples

American novelist, essayist, and critic, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, educated at the University of Michigan. His first novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), the account of an amnesiac who regains consciousness in the midst of strangers, demonstrated White's familiarity with such diverse genres as the nouveau roman, the traditional comedy of manners, and science fiction; White himself admitted the influenc…

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Kenneth White Biography - (1936– ), Wild Coal, The Cold Wind of Dawn, The Most Difficult Area

British poet, born in Glasgow, educated at the University of Glasgow, and the Universities of Munich and Paris. After periods teaching at the University of Glasgow, he became Professor of twentieth-century poetics at the Sorbonne in 1983. White writes both poetry and prose in French as well as English. Wild Coal (1963), The Cold Wind of Dawn (1966), The Most Difficult Area (1968), and A Walk Along…

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