Encyclopedia of Literature: Patrick White (Patrick Victor Martindale White) Biography to David Wojahn Biography

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

Patrick White (Patrick Victor Martindale White) Biography - (1912–90), (Patrick Victor Martindale White), Happy Valley, The Living and the Dead

Australian novelist and short-story writer, born in England, but taken to Australia when he was six months old, educated at King's College, Cambridge. White visited Germany during 1932 and 1935, and German Romanticism was a major influence on his writing. His first two published novels, both of which he was to turn against, were Happy Valley (1939), an experimental work with a New South Wales sett…

2 minute read

Terence de Vere White (Herbert Terence de Vere White) Biography - (1912–94), (Herbert Terence de Vere White), The Irish Times, The Parents of Oscar Wilde, Tom Moore

Irish novelist, journalist, and man of letters, born in Dublin of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother, educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He was literary editor of The Irish Times from 1962 to 1977, to which he also contributed reviews regularly over many years. He wrote several works of Irish biography (including The Parents of Oscar Wilde, 1967; Tom Moore, 1977) and social history, inclu…

1 minute read

T. H. White (Terence Hanbury White) Biography - (1906–64), (Terence Hanbury White), The Sword in the Stone, The Witch in the Wood

British novelist, born in India, educated at Cheltenham College and Queens' College, Cambridge. He is chiefly remembered for his novels founded on the Arthurian legend, beginning with The Sword in the Stone (1938) which, together with The Witch in the Wood (1939) and The Ill-Made Knight (1940), was incorporated into The Once and Future King (1958), a tragi-comic fantasia on Malory's Le Morte d'Art…

1 minute read

White Goddess, The - The White Goddess, Selected Letters

a ?historical grammar of poetic myth?, by Robert Graves, published in 1948. The work propounds his beliefs concerning ?true? poetry, or lyrical and imaginative as opposed to rationally discursive and satirical verse; Graves maintains that work of this kind results from the interaction of the writer's masculine energies with the primeval and magical power of the matriarchal Moon Goddess, who is syn…

1 minute read

A. N. Whitehead (Alfred North Whitehead) Biography - (1861–1947), (Alfred North Whitehead), A Treatise of Universal Algebra, Principia Mathematica, The Principles of Natural Knowledge

British mathematician and philosopher, born at Ramsgate, Kent, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in 1884. A Treatise of Universal Algebra (1898) established his reputation as a mathematician. His most distinguished pupil was Bertrand Russell, with whom he wrote Principia Mathematica (3 volumes, 1910?13), widely regarded as the greatest contribution to mathematical…

1 minute read

E. A. Whitehead (Edward Anthony Whitehead) Biography - (1933– ), (Edward Anthony Whitehead), The Foursome, Alpha Beta, The Sea Anchor, Old Flames, Mecca, Spectator

British dramatist, born in Liverpool, educated at Cambridge University. He worked as a postman, milkman, bus conductor, teacher, drug salesman, and, from 1966 to 1971, an advertising account executive before turning to the theatre. His first play, The Foursome (1971), is about two courting couples picnicking near Liverpool; Alpha Beta (1972) is about a marriage in terminal decline; and The Sea Anc…

1 minute read

White Hotel, The

a novel by D. M. Thomas, published in 1981. This ambitious, intricate novel attempts to combine reflections on the Holocaust, a deconstruction of psychoanalytic insights, and speculations on telepathy and precognition. In the prologue, Freud introduces the reader to the case of his (fictitious) patient Anna G., whose pornographic fantasies in verse and prose form the first two chapters of the nove…

1 minute read

Hugh Whitemore Biography - (1936– ), Stevie, Pack of Lies, Breaking the Code, The Best of Friends, It's Ralph

British dramatist, born in Tunbridge Wells, educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He is the author of several stage plays, most of them involving real people or true stories. These include Stevie (1977), about the poet Stevie Smith; Pack of Lies (1983), based on the case of Helen and Peter Kroger, about the impact on an ordinary suburban family of the discovery that their neighbours and c…

1 minute read

John Whiting Biography - (1917–63), A Penny for a Song, Saint's Day, Look Back in Anger, Marching Song

British playwright, born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, the son of an army captain, educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London; he worked as an actor in London and the regions before becoming a dramatist. His first play, A Penny for a Song (1951), is a slight comedy about English eccentrics awaiting a Napoleonic invasion; his next play, Saint's Day, was more substantial and proved more contro…

less than 1 minute read

Whitsun Weddings, The - The Less Deceived

Philip Larkin's third collection of poems, published to widespread critical acclaim in 1964. The book contains many demonstrations of his remarkable technical accomplishment in accommodating an essentially conversational mode of expression within elaborately constructed rhymed stanzas. Much of the poetry extends the sceptical clarity of vision established in The Less Deceived, although a more spec…

1 minute read

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - (1962)

a play by Edward Albee, his first major success. It examines the marriage of George, a middle-aged history lecturer, and the older Martha, the wealthy college president's daughter. They spend the night in a sexually fraught drinking bout with a young biologist, Nick, and his ?slim-hipped? wife Honey who are drawn into the marital crisis. George and Martha, childless, have compensated for that lack…

1 minute read

John Edgar Wideman Biography - (1941– ), A Glance Away, Hurry Home, The Lynchers, Damballah, Hiding Place, Sent for You Yesterday, Reuben

African-American writer, born in Washington, DC, educated at the University of Pennsylvania, and at New College, Oxford. He was Professor of English at the University of Wyoming, then taught at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Among his best-known works are his novels set in Homewood, the African-American area of Pittsburgh where he grew up. His novels include A Glance Away (1967), Hurr…

less than 1 minute read

Wide Sargasso Sea - Jane Eyre

a novel by Jean Rhys, published in 1966. Inspired by C. Bront?'s Jane Eyre, this novel radically reinterprets events from its predecessor in the light of Rhys's Caribbean background and experience; the central character, minor though crucial in Bront?'s narrative, is Bertha Mason, or Antoinette Cosway as she is renamed here. The first section of the novel is narrated by Antoinette: it is an accoun…

2 minute read

Rudy Wiebe (Rudy Henry Wiebe) Biography - (1934– ), (Rudy Henry Wiebe), Peace Shall Destroy Many, The Blue Mountains of China

Canadian novelist, born in Northern Saskatchewan, educated at the Universities of Alberta and T?bingen. Raised in a tightly knit Mennonite community, Wiebe has remained a staunch Christian throughout his adult life, teaching at the Mennonite Brethren Bible College, Goshen College, Indiana, and at the University of Alberta, while also pursuing a career as a writer of post-modernist fictions. Most o…

1 minute read

John Wieners Biography - (1934–2002), The Hotel Wentley Poems, Ace of Pentacles, Nerves, Woman, Hotels

American poet, born in Boston, educated at Boston College. After meeting Charles Olson in 1954, Wieners extended his education at Black Mountain College, under the tutelage of both Olson and Robert Duncan. Like Duncan, Wieners brings the Romantic tradition into modernist and post-modernist verse; his stress on lost love and yearning makes him the most directly lyrical poet of the Black Mountain tr…

1 minute read

Richard Wilbur (Richard Purdy Wilbur) Biography - (1921– ), (Richard Purdy Wilbur), The Beautiful Changes, Ceremony, Things of This World, Advice to a Prophet

American poet and translator; born in New York, educated at Amherst College and at Harvard, where he became an assistant professor in 1950. He was Poet Laureate of the United States in 1987?8. His first two collections of poetry, The Beautiful Changes (1947) and Ceremony (1950), gained him wide acclaim for the elegance and accomplishment with which his work reflected the post-war atmosphere of cau…

1 minute read

Thornton Wilder (Thornton Niven Wilder) Biography - (1897–1975), (Thornton Niven Wilder), The Cabala, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Woman of Andros

American playwright and novelist, born in Madison, Wisconsin, educated at Yale and Princeton, before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago. He made a considerable impact with his first three novels: The Cabala (1926), set in twentieth-century Rome and essentially a fantasy about the death of the pagan gods; The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927; Pulitzer Prize); and The Woman of Andros (1930…

1 minute read

Michael Wilding Biography - (1942– ), Political Fictions, We Took Their Orders and Are Dead, Tabloid Story

Australian-based fiction writer, critic, and editor, born in Worcester, England, educated at Oxford University. He taught at the University of Sydney in 1967?8; he settled permanently in Australia in 1969, becoming Reader in English at the University of Sydney in 1972. Wilding has continued his work in English literature and in political culture, publishing Political Fictions (1980), and has also …

1 minute read

Charles Willeford (Charles Ray Willeford) Biography - (1919–88), (Charles Ray Willeford), Proletarian Laughter, High Priest of California, Until I Am Dead, Wild Wives

American writer, born in Little Rock, Arkansas; he enlisted in the US Army at the age of 16, fought as a tank commander with the 10th Armoured Division during the Second World War, and was awarded the Silver Star and Luxembourg Croix de Guerre. Later, while stationed in California, he published a volume of verse, Proletarian Laughter (1948), and a San Francisco novel trilogy: High Priest of Califo…

1 minute read

John Hartley Williams Biography - (1942– ), Hidden Identities, Bright River Yonder, Cornerless People, Double

British poet, born in Cheshire, educated at the universities of Nottingham and London. He taught English at universities in France, Yugoslavia, and Cameroon before becoming a lecturer in Modern English at the Free University of Berlin in 1976. In Hidden Identities (1982), his first collection of poetry, the imaginative and emotional seriousness of much of the verse is inseparable from his quirkily…

less than 1 minute read

Jonathan Williams (Jonathan Chamberlain Williams) Biography - (1929–2008), (Jonathan Chamberlain Williams), Review, Sixmas, Lullabies Twisters Gibbers Drags

American poet, born in Asheville, North Carolina, educated at Princeton. From 1951 to 1956 he was closely associated with Black Mountain College and contributed poems to its Review. From 1962 he held posts as poet-in-residence at numerous American universities. In 1951 he founded the Jargon Society Inc., one of the most valuable of the American small presses, which has published verse by Charles O…

1 minute read

Nigel Williams Biography - (1948– ), My Life Closed Twice, Jack Be Nimble, Star Turn, The Wimbledon Poisoner

English novelist and playwright, born in Cheshire, educated at Oriel College, Oxford. The comic vein of his writing was already evident in his first novel, My Life Closed Twice (1977), which focuses on a would-be novelist, and continued in subsequent novels such as Jack Be Nimble (1980) and Star Turn (1985). Perhaps his best-known novel is the blackly comic The Wimbledon Poisoner (1990), which del…

less than 1 minute read

Raymond Williams (Raymond Henry Williams) Biography - (1921–88), (Raymond Henry Williams), are, The Long Revolution, The Country and the City, Border Country

Welsh critic, scholar, and novelist, born in Pandy, on the Welsh border, the son of a railway signalman, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1974 to 1983 he was Professor of Drama at Cambridge. His continuing concern was culture and society, the title of his highly regarded book published in 1958, where culture was often, though not exclusively, literature, and society was both a determin…

2 minute read

Tennessee Williams (Tennessee Thomas Lanier Williams) Biography - (1911–83), (Tennessee Thomas Lanier Williams), Battle of Angels, Orpheus Descending, The Glass Menagerie

American playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, born in Mississippi, where his grandfather was an Episcopal clergyman; the family moved, when Williams was still a boy, to St Louis. After college education and a series of unsatisfactory jobs, he entered the University of Iowa and embarked on his writing career. His first full-length play, Battle of Angels (1940; published 1945; later revised…

2 minute read

William Carlos Williams Biography - (1883–1963), Poems, The Tempers, Al Que Quiere!, Spring and All, The Cod Head

American poet, born in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he practised as a paediatrician after studying at the universities of Pennsylvania and Leipzig. As a student he began a long friendship with Ezra Pound, whose innovative concepts had a profound effect on his development as a poet. Poems (1909), his first collection, reflected his admiration for Keats. The Tempers (1913) shows his response to the…

2 minute read

Bernard Williams Biography - (1929–2003), Imagination and the Self, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics

British philosopher, born at Westcliffe, Essex, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He became Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in 1967. He was Provost of King's College, Cambridge, from 1979 to 1987, when he was appointed Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1990 he became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. Williams i…

1 minute read

C. K. Williams (Charles Kenneth Williams) Biography - (1936– ), (Charles Kenneth Williams), Lies, I Am the Bitter Name, With Ignorance, Tar, Flesh and Blood

American poet, born in Newark, New Jersey, educated at the University of Pennsylvania; he divides his time between living in Paris and teaching at George Mason University, Virginia. Lies (1969) and I Am the Bitter Name (1971) contain poems reflecting an anguished masculinity and sense of existential panic, together with the protest politics of the 1960s. More memorable are the long poems ?A Day fo…

1 minute read

Charles Williams (Charles Walter Stansby Williams) Biography - (1886–1945), (Charles Walter Stansby Williams), War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, The Place of the Lion

British novelist, poet, and man of letters, born in London. With C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, with whom he formed the Inklings group, he was the major author of fantasy in the twentieth century. His novels, which often reflected a Christian ideology, have been described as supernatural thrillers. Each of the seven tales?War in Heaven (1930), Many Dimensions (1931), The Place of the Lion (1931…

1 minute read

Hugo Williams (Hugo Mordaunt Williams) Biography - (1942– ), (Hugo Mordaunt Williams), London Magazine, Symptoms of Loss, Sugar Daddy, Some Sweet Day

British poet, born in Windsor, educated at Eton; he was on the staff of London Magazine from 1960 to 1970, when he became a freelance writer. Symptoms of Loss (1965), his first collection of verse, displayed the combination of restraint and candour that have remained essential aspects of his highly individual tone. Sugar Daddy (1970) and Some Sweet Day (1975) contained many short and acutely obser…

1 minute read

John A. Williams (John Alfred Williams) Biography - (1925– ), (John Alfred Williams), The Angry Ones, Night Song, Sissie, Journey out of Anger

American novelist, born in Jackson, Mississippi, educated at Syracuse University, New York. Williams's novels are notable for their political dissection of American society in terms of the African-American experience; their dominant tone is suggested by the title of his first novel, The Angry Ones (1960). In Night Song (1961), a jazz musician employs his art to combat racial injustice. In Sissie (…

1 minute read

David Williamson Biography - (1942– ), The Coming of the Stork, The Removalists, Don's Party, Gallipoli, Phar Lap

Australian playwright, born in Melbourne, educated at Monash University. His first play, The Coming of the Stork (1970), was performed in Melbourne; other early work, including The Removalists (1971) and Don's Party (1971), was staged in London as well as Australia; both plays were later filmed. Williamson has also written several important screenplays, for Gallipoli, Phar Lap, and The Year of Liv…

1 minute read

Henry Williamson Biography - (1895–1977), The Flax of Dream, The Beautiful Years, Dandelion Days, The Dream of Fair Women

English author, born in south London, the son of a bank clerk. He served in the army during the First World War, an experience which made him antipathetic towards his fellow men. At the war's close he was a journalist for a short time, and published the first volume of his quartet The Flax of Dream (The Beautiful Years, 1921; Dandelion Days, 1922; The Dream of Fair Women, 1924; The Pathway, 1928).…

1 minute read

A. N. Wilson (Andrew Norman Wilson) Biography - (1950– ), (Andrew Norman Wilson), Spectator, The Sweets of Pimlico, Unguarded Hours, Kindly Light, The Healing Art

British novelist and biographer, born in Staffordshire, educated at New College, Oxford. He has been a lecturer at St Hugh's College and New College, Oxford, and literary editor of the Spectator. His first novel, The Sweets of Pimlico (1977), a comedy of manners about the relationship between an ageing hedonist and a Cambridge graduate with a passion for natural history, was followed by Unguarded …

2 minute read

Sir Angus Wilson (Sir Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson) Biography - (1913–91), (Sir Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson), The Wrong Set, Such Darling Dodos, Hemlock and After

British novelist, born in Bexhill, East Sussex, educated at Westminster School and at Merton College, Oxford. He served in Intelligence during the Second World War; from 1949 to 1955 he was Deputy Superintendent of the Reading Room at the British Museum; from 1966 he was Professor of English Literature at East Anglia University. A nervous crisis brought about Wilson's earlier writing; a major them…

3 minute read

August Wilson Biography - (1945–2005), Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone

African-American playwright, born and educated at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A founder of Black Horizons Theatre Company in St Paul in 1968, he had a meteoric rise to prominence with the Broadway premi?re of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1985), the first of a projected cycle of plays. Set in a recording studio in the 1920s, it deals with an imperious blues singer and the conflicts between the band play…

1 minute read

Barbara Wilson Biography - (1950– ), Murder in the Collective, Sisters of the Road, The Dog Collar Murders, Gaudi Afternoon

American crime writer, born in Long Beach, California. She has a background in feminist publishing and the women's movement. Working within the conventions of a popular form, Wilson's crime novels are predominantly concerned with progressive and feminist social issues. Her first three novels, Murder in the Collective (1984), Sisters of the Road (1986), and The Dog Collar Murders (1989), all featur…

less than 1 minute read

Colin Wilson (Colin Henry Wilson) Biography - (1931– ), (Colin Henry Wilson), The Outsider, Look Back in Anger, The Mind Parasites

British writer, born in Leicester, where he attended Gateway Secondary Technical School until the age of sixteen. His first and best-known work, The Outsider (1956), characterized his approach and his abiding themes in its treatment of the existential alienation of creative intellectuals, which refers to Nietzsche, Kafka, Camus, Sartre, T. E. Lawrence, and others. Wilson's identification as an Ang…

1 minute read

Edmund Wilson Biography - (1895–1972), Vanity Fair, New Republic, Axel's Castle, The Wound and the Bow

American critic, born in Red Bank, New Jersey, educated at Princeton, where his contemporaries included F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose posthumous publications Wilson edited. In 1920 he joined the staff of Vanity Fair, of which he became managing editor, and was associate editor of the New Republic from 1926 to 1931. Wilson was a distinguished and forceful American man of letters, one of the last of th…

2 minute read

Ethel Wilson Biography - (1888–1980), New Statesman, Hetty Dorval, œuvre, The Innocent Traveller, Swamp Angel, Love and Salt Water

Canadian novelist, born in South Africa, brought to Vancouver as an orphan in 1898. Wilson began to publish fiction only in the 1930s, when her stories first appeared in the New Statesman; she was nearly 60 when her first novel, Hetty Dorval, appeared in 1947. The next few years saw the publication of virtually all the remainder of her slim ?uvre: three further novels?The Innocent Traveller (1949)…

1 minute read

F. P. Wilson (Frank Percy Wilson) Biography - (1889–1963), (Frank Percy Wilson), Plague Pamphlets, Foure Birds from Noahs Arke, Oxford History of English Literature

British scholar, born in Birmingham, educated at Birmingham University and Lincoln College, Oxford. He began lecturing at Oxford in 1921 and was appointed Merton Professor of English Literature in 1947. His early works include editions of Dekker's Plague Pamphlets (1925) and Foure Birds from Noahs Arke (1925). W. W. Greg, his fellow member of the Malone Society, had a formative influence on Wilson…

1 minute read

J. Dover Wilson (John Dover Wilson) Biography - (1881–1969), (John Dover Wilson), The Cambridge History of English Literature, New Cambridge Shakespeare, The Essential Shakespeare

British Shakespearian editor and scholar, born at Mortlake in Surrey, educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His early works included the contribution of two chapters to The Cambridge History of English Literature (edited by A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, 13 volumes, 1907?16). After a period with the Board of Education, he was Professor of Education at King's College, London, from 1924 t…

1 minute read

Lanford Wilson Biography - (1937– ), The Gingham Dog, The Hotel Baltimore, The Mound Builders, Talley's Folly

American dramatist, born in Lebanon, Missouri, educated at the University of Chicago. One of the most successful and durable of off-off-Broadway dramatists, Wilson made his name with The Gingham Dog (1968), the story of a failed interracial marriage. He co-founded the Circle Repertory Company in New York in 1969, where most of his plays have been premi?red. The Hotel Baltimore (1973), about life i…

1 minute read

Wings of a Dove, The

a novel by Henry James, published in 1902. This novel marks the peak of James's writing career. The central protagonist is Milly Theale, a rich young woman, beautiful in person and character, who recognizes that she is suffering from an incurable disease and that she must soon prepare to die. The influence of her fading life upon all those around her?those who envy her wealth, those who seek to ma…

1 minute read

Winslow Boy, The

a play by Terence Rattigan, first performed in 1946; it is based on the Archer-Shee case of 1908, which resulted from the expulsion from the Royal Naval Academy of a cadet accused of theft. Here, Ronnie Winslow is the naval cadet expelled from Osborne, on the grounds that he stole a five-shilling postal order. His father, Arthur, seeks the help of Sir Robert Morton, an eminent advocate and politic…

1 minute read

Yvor Winters (Arthur Yvor Winters) Biography - (1900–68), (Arthur Yvor Winters), The Immobile Wind, The Magpie's Shadow, The Bare Hills

American poet and critic, born in Chicago, educated at the Universities of Chicago and Colorado. In 1928 he began his career at Stanford University, where he became Professor of English in 1949. His early work as a poet, collected in The Immobile Wind (1921), The Magpie's Shadow (1922), and The Bare Hills (1927), formed a highly disciplined extension of Imagism; poems of as few as five words made …

1 minute read

Jeanette Winterson Biography - (1959– ), Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Boating for Beginners, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry

British novelist, born in Lancashire, educated at Oxford University. Her upbringing as a Pentecostal Evangelist was the subject of her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985; later adapted for BBC television) which also dealt with the narrator's growing awareness of her lesbianism with a certain wry humour. Boating for Beginners (1985), a feminist reworking of the biblical story of the …

1 minute read

Tim Winton Biography - (1960– ), An Open Swimmer, Shallows, That Eye, the Sky, In the Winter Dark, Cloudstreet

Australian writer, born in Perth, educated at Curtin University; he studied creative writing at the Western Institute of Technology under Elizabeth Jolley. He won immediate fame with his first two novels. An Open Swimmer (1982) is a lyrical account of a boy's emergence into manhood, set against vivid descriptions of the sea and landscapes of Western Australia. Shallows (1984) describes the death t…

1 minute read

Wise Blood

a novel by Flannery O'Connor, published in 1952. In this novel O'Connor powerfully presents the case for (Catholic) Christianity's ultimate strength by telling a story whose events and characters seem far away from it. Hazel Motes, a young soldier, returns home after being released from the army, to found a Church Without Christ. He is animated in his intentions by his revolt from his preacher gra…

less than 1 minute read

Wise Children - tour de force

a novel by Angela Carter, published in 1991. This novel departs almost entirely in narrative technique from the territory of fable and fantasy to which Carter had laid claim, though it does retain her characteristic element of carnival that removes it from the domestic realism with which it (ironically) engages. Set, over several decades, in a vividly evoked twentieth-century London, against a the…

less than 1 minute read

Adele Wiseman Biography - (1928–1992), The Sacrifice, Crackpot, Testimonial Dinner, Old Woman at Play

Canadian novelist, born in Winnipeg of Jewish parents who had migrated from the Ukraine, educated at the University of Manitoba. Among other occupations she worked as a university teacher. She lived in Winnipeg, London, Rome, New York, Montreal, and Toronto. Her best-known novel, The Sacrifice (1956), tells the tragic story of a modern-day Abraham who suffers the hardships of immigrant life and ev…

less than 1 minute read

Owen Wister Biography - (1860–1938), The Virginian, Lin McLean, The Jimmy-john Boss, Philosophy Four, Lady Baltimore

American Westernnovelist, born in Philadelphia, educated at Harvard, where he studied music. After two years furthering his musical studies in Europe, he worked in a New York bank, before illness took him to Wyoming in 1885. Wister later returned to Harvard to study law; he subsequently practised as a lawyer in Philadelphia. His Wyoming experiences continued to exert a powerful hold on his imagina…

1 minute read

Ludwig Wittgenstein (Ludwig Joseph Johann Wittgenstein) Biography - (1889–1951), (Ludwig Joseph Johann Wittgenstein), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a priori, Tractatus, Philosophical Investigations

Austrian (later British) philosopher, born in Vienna; he studied engineering at Linz, Berlin, and Manchester. After becoming interested in mathematical theory he studied under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge where he later became professor of philosophy (1939?47). His first major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), was the only book published in his lifetime and set the terms of reference f…

2 minute read

Sir P. G. Wodehouse (Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse) Biography - (1881–1975), (Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse), Strand Magazine, Punch, The Parrot and Other Poems, The Pothunters, Mike

British novelist and playwright, born in Guildford, Surrey, educated at Dulwich College. He began work as a bank clerk, but he soon began publishing stories in boys' magazines and other journals such as Strand Magazine and Punch. Much of his work from this period remains uncollected, though The Parrot and Other Poems (1988) contained some early light verse, whose ingenuity prefigured his later suc…

2 minute read

Wodwo - Wodwo, Crow

a collection of poems and prose by Ted Hughes, published in 1967. Parts I and III of the book contain a substantial body of previously uncollected poems, while Part II is made up of five short stories and a play; Hughes's prefatory note informs the reader that ?the verse and the prose are intended to be read together, as parts of a single work?. Much of the writing in the volume has in common an e…

1 minute read