Gene Wolfe (Gene Rodman Wolfe) Biography - (1931– ), (Gene Rodman Wolfe), The Fifth Head of Cerberus, The Devil in a Forest

American writer of science fiction and fantasy, born in Brooklyn, educated in Texas. Wolfe's vision of life is eccentrically conservative, hierarchical, and grave. He began to attract critical attention with The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), whose three intricately linked novellas comprised a profound analysis of the colonial mentality within an orthodox science fiction framework. The Devil in a …

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Thomas Wolfe (Thomas Clayton Wolfe) Biography - (1900–38), (Thomas Clayton Wolfe), Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River

American novelist, born in Asheville, educated at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard. Wolfe then settled in New York where he taught and wrote several small plays which attracted the attention of Aline Bernstein, the stage designer and actress, who subsequently became a significant influence on his life. Look Homeward, Angel (1929), a moving semi-autobiographical work representing the…

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Tom Wolfe (Tom Thomas Kennerly Wolfe) Biography - (1931– ), (Tom Thomas Kennerly Wolfe), The Washington Post, New York Herald Tribune

American journalist and novelist, born in Virginia, educated at Washington and Lee Universities and subsequently at Yale. He established a reputation, through his writing for The Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune, as a satirist of contemporary American mores, and as an exponent of the ?New Journalism?, which combined a relish for the absurdities of modern life with a vigorous, noveli…

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Tobias Wolff Biography - (1945– ), Washington Post, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Hunters in the Snow

American short-story writer, born in Birmingham, Alabama; following service with the US Army in Vietnam (1964?8) he was educated at Oxford and Stanford Universities, then joined the Washington Post. Subsequently he became a lecturer at Stanford, prior to becoming Professor of English at Syracuse University, New York, in 1980. His two widely acclaimed collections, In the Garden of the North America…

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Women in Love - Women in Love, The Rainbow

a novel by D. H. Lawrence, published in the USA in 1920. Often acclaimed as his finest work, Women in Love had a difficult beginning. It was first conceived as a single novel with The Rainbow, but Lawrence split the material in early 1915 as his original plan became too unwieldy. After the controversial reception of The Rainbow he revised the new book completely, but no British publisher would tou…

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Women of Brewster Place, The

Women's Room, The

B. Wongar (Banumbir Wongar) Biography - (1932– ), (Banumbir Wongar), The Sinners, The Track to Bralgu, Balang an Village, Walg, Karan, Gabo Djara

Australian novelist and short-story writer, born Sreten Bozic in Gorna Tresnevica, Serbia, where he was educated at the local school; he emigrated to Australia in 1960. He adopted his Aboriginal name (meaning ?messenger from the spirit world?) after he began living with tribal Aborigines in the Northern Territory. Several collections of his short stories, including The Sinners (1972) and The Track…

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Charles Wood Biography - (1932– ), Prisoner and Escort, Cockade, Dingo, H: Being Monologues at Front of Burning Cities, Jingo

British dramatist, born in Guernsey, the son of professional actors, educated at Birmingham College of Art. He became a trooper in the 17/21st Lancers and drew on this background for the work that first won him attention in 1963, Prisoner and Escort, part of a trio of plays called Cockade. His scepticism about things military is also reflected in Dingo (1967), which angrily suggests that the Secon…

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Cecil Woodham-Smith (Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith) Biography - (1896–1977), (Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith), April Sky, Just off Bond Street, Florence Nightingale, Eminent Victorians

British historian and biographer, born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford; she subsequently worked as a secretary and advertising copywriter till her marriage in 1928. She began writing under the pseudonym ?Janet Gordon?, producing a number of romantic novels which include April Sky (1938) and Just off Bond Street (1940). Florence Nightingale (1950), which displayed he…

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Sarah Woodhouse Biography - (1950– ), A Season of Mists, A Peacock's Feather, The Native Air, The Indian Widow

Douglas Woolf Biography - (1922–1992), Fade Out, Huckleberry Finn, Wall to Wall, Ya! and John-Juan, On Us

American novelist and short-story writer, born in New York, educated at Harvard. He served in North Africa during the Second World War, worked briefly as a screenwriter, then became an itinerant worker, taking time off to write, often in ghost towns or foreign countries. His understanding of the world was far in advance of his society's, which perhaps explains his relative obscurity: long before D…

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Leonard Woolf (Leonard Sidney Woolf) Biography - (1880–1969), (Leonard Sidney Woolf), The Village and the Jungle, The Wise Virgins, Stories of the East

British author and publisher, born in Kensington, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he formed lasting friendship with Lytton Strachey, J. M. Keynes, and others with whom he was later eminent in the Bloomsbury Group. He held postings in Ceylon with the Colonial Service from 1904 to 1912, when, already out of sympathy with colonialism, he resigned in order to marry Virginia Stephen (see …

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Virginia Woolf (Adeline Virginia Woolf) Biography - (1882–1941), (Adeline Virginia Woolf), The Voyage Out, Times Literary Supplement, Two Stories, The Waste Land

British novelist and critic, daughter of the agnostic Victorian biographer, editor, and critic Sir Leslie Stephen (1832?1904) and the beautiful philanthropic Julia Duckworth, n?e Jackson, wife, mother, and nurse (1846?95). She described herself as ?born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world?. She grew up, and was educated at home, …

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Cornell Woolrich (Cornell George Hopley Woolrich) Biography - (1903–68), (Cornell George Hopley Woolrich), Cover Charge, Children of the Ritz, The Bride Wore Black

American crime and mystery writer, son of a mining engineer, born in New York, but spent much of his childhood in Latin America; educated at Columbia University. He published Cover Charge (1926), a novel in the manner of Scott Fitzgerald, while a student. After a short-lived marriage to the daughter of a Hollywood film producer, whom he met while working on the film producer, whom he met while wor…

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Herman Wouk Biography - (1915– ), Aurora Dawn; or the True History of Andrew Reale

American bestselling novelist and screenwriter, born in New York, brought up in the Bronx and educated at Columbia University; his father was a first generation Russian Jewish industrialist. After working in radio and as a gag writer for the comedian Fred Allen (1936?41), Wouk served with the US Naval Reserve on destroyer-minesweepers (1942?6). His first published novel, Aurora Dawn; or the True H…

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P. C. Wren (Percival Christopher Wren) Biography - (1885–1941), (Percival Christopher Wren), Smoke and Sword, Beau Geste, Beau Sabreur, Beau Ideal

Charles Wright Biography - (1935– ), Dream Animal, Bloodlines, Country Music: Selected Early Poems, China Trace, The Southern Cross

American poet, born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, educated at Davidson College in North Carolina and the University of Iowa. From 1957 to 1963 Wright served in United States Army intelligence in Verona and then studied at the University of Rome under a Fulbright Scholarship before returning to the USA to take up an academic appointment at the University of California at Irvine. In 1983 he became a P…

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David Wright (David John Murray Wright) Biography - (1920–94), (David John Murray Wright), Sunday Times, An Anthology from X, Moral Stories

British poet, born in Johannesburg, South Africa; he grew up in England and was educated at Northampton School for the Deaf and at Oriel College, Oxford. Between 1942 and 1947 he was on the staff of the Sunday Times, after which he became a freelance writer. With the painter Patrick Swift, he founded and edited X, a highly regarded review of literature and the arts which appeared from 1959 to 1962…

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James Wright Biography - (1928–80), The Green Wall, Saint Judas, The Branch Will Not Break

American poet, born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, educated at Kenyon College, where he studied with John Crowe Ransom, and the University of Washington where Theodore Roethke was his teacher and friend. Wright taught at Hunter College, New York City, from 1966 until his death. His books are The Green Wall (1957), Saint Judas (1959), The Branch Will Not Break (1963), Shall We Gather at the River? (1968),…

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Judith Wright Biography - (1915–2000), The Moving Image, The Generations of Men, A Cry for the Dead

Australian poet, writer, and critic, born at Armidale, New South Wales, educated at Sydney University. Her deeply felt attachment to the land, and her growing anger at mankind's exploitative abuse of both the land and Australia's indigenous people, inform much of her best poetry and prose. The complexities of personal relationships are also central to her work. Wright's first poetry collection, Th…

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Kit Wright Biography - (1944– ), The Bear Looked over the Mountain, Bump-Starting the Hearse, From the Day Room

British poet, born in Kent, educated at New College, Oxford. After teaching in a London comprehensive school, he lectured in English at Brock University, St Catherine's, Ontario, for three years. He became Fellow-Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1977. The Bear Looked over the Mountain (1977), his first collection of verse, was followed by subsequent volumes including Bum…

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Nicholas Wright Biography - (1940– ), Treetops, The Crimes of Vautrin, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, The Custom of the Country

British dramatist, born in Cape Town. He trained as an actor in London and subsequently held posts as Director of the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs (1970?5), Joint Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre (1976?7), and Associate Director of new writing at the National Theatre (1984?9). Treetops (1978), his first full-length play, looked back on his South African childhood in Cape Town. The Crim…

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Richard Wright (Richard Nathaniel Wright) Biography - (1908–60), (Richard Nathaniel Wright), The God that Failed, Story, Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son

African-American short-story writer, novelist, poet, and essayist, born near Natchez, Missouri, and brought up in Memphis; he was self-educated and at the age of 19 went to Chicago, where he held a number of menial jobs. In the 1930s he joined the Communist Party, but left in the 1940s after disillusionment with its procedures, as recorded in the anthology The God that Failed (1950). He worked for…

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Elinor Wylie (Elinor Morton Hoyt Wylie) Biography - (1885–1928), (Elinor Morton Hoyt Wylie), Incidental Numbers, Nets To Catch the Wind, Black Armour, Trivial Breath

American poet and novelist, born in Somerville, New Jersey; she grew up in Washington, where her father held office as Solicitor-General of the United States. From 1912 to 1915 she lived in England, where Incidental Numbers (1912), her first collection of verse, was privately published. She discounted it following the publication of Nets To Catch the Wind (1921), which, with its precise imagery an…

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Philip Wylie (Philip Gordon Wylie) Biography - (1902–71), (Philip Gordon Wylie), Salt Water Daffy, Crunch and Des, Generation of Vipers

American writer, born in Beverly, Massachusetts, educated at Princeton. His collections of Florida fishing tales such as Salt Water Daffy (1941) and Crunch and Des (1948) are among his more amiable works. More savage, and more typical, are Generation of Vipers (1942), an attack on ?momism?; An Essay on Morals (1947), a dyspeptic analysis of conventional religion; and Opus 21 (1949), a discourse on…

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Francis Wyndham Biography - (1924– ), Out of the War, The Theatre of Embarrassment. Mrs Henderson and Other Stories

British novelist, short-story writer, and critic, born in London. He wrote his first stories between the ages of 17 and 20, before being called up and after being invalided out of the army. Not published until 1974, as Out of the War, they recreate the conditions of aimless expectancy known to those left behind whilst a war was being waged elsewhere. Abandoning fiction, Wyndham worked as a reviewe…

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John Wyndham, the best-known pseudonym of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris Biography - (1903–69), the best-known pseudonym of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, The Secret People

British writer, born in Knowle, Warwickshire. He followed various occupations before embarking on writing as a career. Before the Second World War he wrote under variations of his full name in a variety of genres. His first science fiction story, ?Worlds to Barter? (1931), was by ?John Beynon Harris?; his first novel, The Secret People (1935), by ?John Beynon?; and a later work, The Outward Urge (…

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Sylvia Wynter Biography - (1928– ), The Hills of Hebron, Shh…It's a Wedding, 1865, Ballad of a Rebellion

Caribbean novelist and playwright, born of Jamaican parents in the Holguin Oriente Province of Cuba, educated at King's College, University of London, gaining her MA in 1953 for a thesis on Spanish drama. After a period in London writing plays for radio, she became a lecturer at the University of the West Indies and later taught at the universities of Michigan and California. In 1977 she became Pr…

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Dornford Yates, pseudonym of Cecil William Mercer Biography - (1885–1960), pseudonym of Cecil William Mercer, The Brother of Daphne, Berry and Co

Dame Frances Yates (Dame Frances Amelia Yates) Biography - (1899–1981), (Dame Frances Amelia Yates)

, British cultural historian, born at Southsea, educated at University College, London. She joined the staff of the Warburg Institute in 1941. Following the Institute's absorption into University College, London, in 1944 she became a Reader in the history of the Renaissance in 1956. John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare's England (1934), her first work of importance, anticipated the …

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Years, The - Night and Day, The Pargiters, Three Guineas, The Years, Antigone, To the Lighthouse

a novel by V. Woolf, published in 1938. Woolf's longest and most arduously written novel, it appears to be a return to the more traditional narrative methods of Night and Day (1919). It is, however, a complex attempt, made with great difficulty, to analyse the political life of the English middle classes in the early twentieth century, without allowing the politics to dominate. It grew out of a ?n…

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Jack B. Yeats (Jack Butler Yeats) Biography - (1871–1957), (Jack Butler Yeats), The Aran Islands, Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara

, Irish painter, illustrator, novelist, and playwright, born in London, the brother of W. B. Yeats; he was brought up in Sligo, where he developed the imaginative interest in Irish rural life which informs much of his graphic and literary work. After studying art in London he began his career as an illustrator; his illustrations for The Aran Islands (1907) and Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara (1…

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W. B. Yeats (William Butler Yeats) Biography - (1865–1939), (William Butler Yeats), Mosada, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, The Celtic Twilight

, Irish poet and dramatist, born in Dublin; he spent much of his childhood in Sligo, where his mother's family lived. After a period in London, when he attended the Godolphin School, Hammersmith, he returned to Dublin in 1880 and completed his schooling at the city's Erasmus Smith High School. In 1884 he became a student at Dublin's Metropolitan School of Art, with the intention of making his liv…

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Frank Yerby (Frank Garvin Yerby) Biography - (1916–91), (Frank Garvin Yerby), The Foxes of Harrow, The Vixens, Pride's Castle

American novelist, born in Augusta, Georgia, educated at Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee. His short story ?Health Card? (1944) indicts a white congressman for demanding the eponymous document from a black GI's sweetheart. Yerby became a prolific popular novelist, writing mainly in the historical, or ?costume novel?, mode. Among his most ambitious and best-known works are The Foxes of Harrow …

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Anzia Yezierska Biography - (c.1885–1970), Hungry Hearts, Bread Givers, David Levinksy, Red Ribbon on a White Horse

Jewish-American novelist, born in Russian Poland to an impoverished family who migrated to the Lower East Side ghetto of Manhattan in the 1890s. Ambitious and fiercely independent, she rejected the gender constraints of her orthodox background and set out, on the meagre wages of sweatshop and laundry work, to learn English. A prolonged struggle to develop her writing skills was finally rewarded wi…

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Andrew Young (Andrew John Young) Biography - (1885–1971), (Andrew John Young), Songs of Night, Memorial Verses, Winter Harvest, Speak to the Earth

British poet, born in Elgin, Moray; he grew up in Edinburgh, where he was educated at the University. In 1912 he was ordained in the Free Church of Scotland and became an Anglican minister in 1939. He was made a Canon of Chichester Cathedral in 1948. Songs of Night (1910), his first collection of verse, was succeeded by numerous volumes, including Memorial Verses (1918), a long elegy of great acco…

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E. H. Young (Emily Hilda Young) Biography - (1880–1949), (Emily Hilda Young), A Corn of Wheat, Yonder, Moor Fires, The Misses Mallett

British novelist, born in Northumberland, educated at Penrhos College in Wales. In 1902 she married a solicitor and moved to Bristol, the setting for most of her books. After her husband was killed at Ypres in 1917, she lived the rest of her life with the married Headmaster of Alleyn's School in Dulwich, a relationship which she concealed from the public. Most of her novels, witty commentaries on …

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Francis Brett Young Biography - (1884–1954), Deep Sea, The Dark Tower, The Iron Age, The Young Physician, Marching on Tanga

British novelist and poet, born in Worcestershire, educated at Birmingham University. Young's early novels include Deep Sea (1914), The Dark Tower (1915), The Iron Age (1916), and The Young Physician (1919). During the First World War he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in East Africa, as a result of which his health was seriously impaired; during convalescence he wrote Marching on Tanga (…

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Gavin Young (Gavin David Young) Biography - (1928–2001), (Gavin David Young), Return to the Marshes, Iraq: Land of Two Rivers, Observer

British travel writer, brought up in Cornwall and South Wales, educated at Rugby and Trinity College, Oxford. After a period of National Service in Palestine, he worked for a shipping company in Basra, Iraq; in 1952 he travelled with Wilfred Thesiger to the marshlands of southern Iraq, where he remained for two years, a period reflected in Return to the Marshes (1977) and Iraq: Land of Two Rivers …

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Young Visiters, The

‘Youth’ - Blackwood's Magazine, Youth, A Narrative; and Two Other Stories, Palestine

a story by Joseph Conrad, first published in Blackwood's Magazine (1898), and collected in Youth, A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (1902). The story was based on Conrad's 1881?2 voyage as second mate on the Palestine, and it introduced Marlow as story-teller. To the same audience as in Heart of Darkness (which Conrad began writing in December 1898), Marlow tells of his first voyage to the East a…

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Israel Zangwill Biography - (1864–1926), Ariel, The Bachelors' Club, The Old Maids' Club, Children of the Ghetto

British writer of Russian-Jewish descent, born in Whitechapel, London; he was educated at the Jews' Free School and London University. After working as a schoolteacher, from 1890 to 1892 he was founding editor of the magazine Ariel, collecting his humorous stories in The Bachelors' Club (1891) and The Old Maids' Club (1892). He gained wide notice with the novel Children of the Ghetto (1892), a gra…

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Marya Zaturenska Biography - (1902–82), A History of American Poetry, Threshold and Hearth, Cold Morning Sky, The Listening Landscape

American poet, born in Kiev, Ukraine; she went to America with her family in 1909 and was naturalized in 1912. She was educated at Valparaiso University and the University of Wisconsin and subsequently worked as a newspaper feature writer. In 1925 she married the poet Horace Gregory, with whom she wrote the highly regarded critical survey A History of American Poetry, 1900?1940 (1969). Her first c…

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Roger Zelazny (Roger Joseph Zelazny) Biography - (1937–1995), (Roger Joseph Zelazny), This Immortal, picaro, The Dream Master, Four for Tomorrow, Lord of Light

American science fiction writer, born in Ohio, educated at Columbia University. He is best known for the four books which established his highly figured baroque romanticism as a mode of exploration. This Immortal (1966) depicts with great vigour a declining Earth, enigmatic aliens, and an immortal picaro protagonist; The Dream Master (1966) links psychosis to myth; the tales in Four for Tomorrow (…

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Benjamin Zephaniah Biography - (1958– ), Us An Dem, Pen Rhythm, The Dread Affair, City Psalms, Inna Liverpool, Hurricane Dub

British poet and playwright, born in Birmingham, but brought up in Jamaica. As a teenager he had many spells in prison and reform school, but a serious illness changed his perspective on life. Like Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Agard he became a dub poet. He also embraced Rastafarianism, whose values provide a strong substratum to his poetry. His poems are best in performance, and are more readily…

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Philip Ziegler (Philip Sandeman Ziegler) Biography - (1929– ), (Philip Sandeman Ziegler), The Black Death, William IV, Melbourne, Diana Cooper, Mountbatten, Wilson

British biographer, born in Ringwood, Hampshire, educated at New College, Oxford; he subsequently held diplomatic postings in Europe, Africa, and South America before entering publishing in 1967. His earlier works include The Black Death (1968), a historical study surveying the extent of the epidemic's social and cultural impact, and the biography William IV (1971). Among his further publications …

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Muysaemura Zimunya (Muysaemura Bonas Zimunya) Biography - (1949– ), (Muysaemura Bonas Zimunya), Zimbabwe Ruins, Thought Tracks, Country Dawns and City Lights, Perfect Poise

Zimbabwean poet, born in Mutare; he attended Goromonzi High School and the University of Rhodesia, from which he was expelled, and was subsequently subjected to detention for his political activities. After completing undergraduate and postgraduate work at the University of Kent, he returned to Zimbabwe and began lecturing at the University of Zimbabwe in 1980. Widely regarded as pre-eminent among…

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Zitkala-SĂ (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) Biography - (1876–1938), (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), Impressions of an Indian Childhood, Old Indian Stories, American Indian Stories

Native American Sioux writer and reformer, born on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota, educated at a Quaker missionary school for American Indians in Wabash, Indiana. She is best known for her powerful autobiography, Impressions of an Indian Childhood (1900), which represents in a richly symbolic style the suffering and alienation of Native Americans who abandoned their tribal culture f…

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Zoo Story, The

a one-act play by Edward Albee, first performed in 1959 in Berlin. This two-handed drama presents Jerry, a man of ?great weariness?, who accosts Peter, a family man who works in textbook publishing, on a Central Park bench. Peter listens reluctantly as Jerry promises to recount his visit to the zoo. That story remains untold, but Jerry caricatures Peter's middle-class family as a menagerie, and te…

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Louis Zukofsky Biography - (1904–78), Poetry, An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, All: The Collected Shorter Poems, ‘A’, A Test of Poetry

American poet and critic, born in Brooklyn; he taught at the Polytechnic in Brooklyn for most of his working life. His editorship of the February 1931 issue of Poetry magazine, and the publication of the influential An ?Objectivists? Anthology (1932), marked the advent of Objectivist poetry, a major new development in American poetry. He was a friend of many avant-garde writers in the 1930s, among…

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Zuleika Dobson

Fay Zwicky Biography - (1933– ), Isaac Babel's Fiddle, Kaddish and Other Poems, Kaddish, Hostages and Other Stories

Australian writer, born in Melbourne, educated at Melbourne University. She was a concert pianist before teaching English at the University of Western Australia, Perth. Her two collections of poetry, Isaac Babel's Fiddle (1975) and Kaddish and Other Poems (1982), reflect her delicate and complex vision of the vicissitudes of life and of the possibilities and limitations of art, a vision in which h…

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