Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
(British, 1838–1926) A leading theologian of the Victorian era and eminent Shakespearian scholar, Abbott published many learned works, yet is best remembered as the author of Flatland (1884), subtitled A Romance of Many Dimensions. This is an amusing and thought-provoking little book, part social satire, part speculation into the rarefied realms of theoretical science. The author—a S…
(Nigerian, 1930– ) Considered by many to be the finest Nigerian novelist, Achebe's writing career has won him international acclaim. Heavily indebted to the oral tradition, Achebe's novels are about colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. His first, Things Fall Apart (1958), is an elegantly written and informative depiction of Ibo society at the end of the nineteenth century. It fo…
(US, 1947–97) A native New Yorker, Acker was initially seen as part of the punk movement; she came to prominence as a serious writer while living in London, and later moved to San Francisco. Her writing reflects an extreme response both to literary tradition and to the expectations of readers, often incorporating classic male texts, with graphic sexual language, and disrupting usual notions…
(British, 1896–1967) Ackerley was the influential literary editor of the Listener magazine, working for the BBC from 1928 to 1959. His books span autobiography and fiction, and were controversial for their portrayal of homosexual lifestyles and implicit advocacy of animal rights. They are highly engaging, cast as voyages of discovery in which the author's expectations are increasingl…
(British, 1949– ) Alasdair Gray, John Fowles, John Banville JS …
(British, 1952–2001) Adams came to prominence with the airing of his absurd and hilarious radio comedy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978–80), the first half of which was converted to a television series and expanded as a novel (1979). It follows Arthur Dent, the last surviving human when Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, on a bewildered pilgrim…
(British, 1924–2004) Joan Aiken, born in Rye, Sussex, wrote children's books which can be read with equal pleasure by adults who still have an imagination. Her best known is probably The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), in which she imagines a strange, dark Victorian England, like a Dickensian fairytale, where wolves prowl the countryside and it seems to be perpetual winter. Three …
(French, 1886–1914) Alain-Fournier (real name Henri Alban Fournier) wrote his enduringly popular novel Le Grand Meaulnes when he was 26; he was killed in action in 1914. Le Grand Meaulnes is a magical, haunting novel about adolescence, narrated by François, the son of a schoolmaster. A charismatic older lad, Augustin Meaulnes, comes to board at the school and takes François un…
(US, 1832–88) Although she is best known for her series of books about the March family, Little Women (1868) and its second part, Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), and Jo's Boys (1886), Louisa May Alcott wrote prolifically in most genres, from Gothic thrillers to first-hand accounts of working as a servant and a nurse. Alcott's father was an unsuccessful travelling salesma…
(British, 1925– ) Aldiss served during the war in Burma and the Far East, before becoming a bookseller and eventually starting to write in the mid-1950s. He is a prolific exponent and defender of science fiction. Many of his novels and short stories verge on pastiche whilst simultaneously pushing the limits of the genre. The short story ‘Better Morphosis’ (1967) is narrated by…
(US, 1966– ) Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Native American, grew up on an Indian reservation. Typically his work investigates the intersection points between white America and Native-American culture. In Reservation Blues (1994), legendary blues musician, Robert Johnson, arrives at a Spokane reservation, giving his guitar to Native American Thomas-Builds-a-Fire, whose rock&#…
(British, 1967– ) Monica Ali was born in former E.Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and grew up in Bolton. Brick Lane (2003, Booker shortlisted) tells the story of Muslim Nanzeen, who arrives in London in 1985 via an arranged marriage to an older man who has a low-grade clerical job. Nanzeen uncomplainingly meets her husband's demands and makes the best of her isolation in Britain. Graduall…
(Chilean, 1942– ) Isabel Allende was forced to leave Chile after the 1973 military coup that overthrew her uncle's government, and she began her first novel while in exile. The House of the Spirits (1985) traces the history of twentieth-century Chile through four generations of women of the Valle/Trueba family: Nivea, an early feminist; her daughter Clara, a clairvoyant; Clara…
(British, 1904–66) Allingham published the first of her Albert Campion detective novels at the age of 23. Campion has his roots in the tradition of gentlemen detectives—modest, frighteningly intelligent, and with impeccable aristocratic connections which are never fully revealed. However, he develops in stature, and there is a tone of ironic humour and a fondness for eccentricity in …
(British, 1951– ) David Almond worked for many years as a teacher and had several books for adults published before receiving great acclaim for his first children's novel, Skellig (1998), which won the Carnegie Medal. Almond's writing has tremendous power: it is at once lyrical and completely accessible, and every word rings clear and true. His books are as enjoyable for adult…
(British, 1909–1998) Born in London and educated at the University of London, Ambler became a full-time thriller writer in 1937. His downbeat realism and emphasis on the amoral expediencies of power have won him acknowledgement as a major influence on the modern spy story. Begin with The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), considered his masterpiece, in which an academic visiting Istanbul investigate…
(British, 1922–95) Kingsley Amis is one of the very few novelists who can make you hoot out loud. Long before the phrase was invented, he was, and remained, politically incorrect; if there was a balloon of pomposity or pretentiousness around, Amis would puncture it to wicked, gleeful effect. Born in London and educated at Oxford, he spent several years as a lecturer in English literature at…
(British, 1949– ) Amis is one of those names that a lot of people shy away from. The press dubbed him ‘the Mick Jagger of fiction’, accusing him of arrogance and misogyny—which is probably true, but he's still a great writer. Don't read Amis for the plots, read him for the riffs on contemporary culture. Start with Money (1984), quintessential Amis; John Se…
(US, 1928– ) Growing up as a black woman in America is the subject of Angelou's fascinating six-volume autobiography. Drawing on family, politics, and the arts, she has produced a moving narrative which is much more than a personal testimony. The first volume, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) is about Angelou's early life in Arkansas and California. She tells how she was…
(British, 1928– ) Anthony was born in London and became a professional author in 1949. Imperial Highness (1953), an account of Catherine the Great, and Victoria (1959) are the best of her early historical novels, which have straightforwardly factual narratives. Her subsequent fictional adaptations of history include Anne of Austria (1968), recounting the marriage of a Hapsburg princess to F…
(British, 1930– ) Robert Graves, Anthony Burgess FS …
(British, 1953– ) Currently living and teaching in Manchester, Ashworth writes novels that strive to liberate their female characters from specific anxieties and insecurities. Her witty, fast-moving dramas empower women to cast off self-made chains as well as man-made ones. Her first book, A Matter of Fat (1991) follows the fortunes of Stella, the leader of a commercial slimming club, and i…
(British, 1951– ) Kate Atkinson was born in York. Her writing career began with commercial magazine fiction. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), enjoyed great literary and commercial success, and was Whitbread Book of the Year. The novel moves between the lives of the women of the Lennox family, spanning four generations, but is mostly concerned with Ruby, born in the 1…
(Canadian, 1939– ) Margaret Atwood is Canada's most internationally celebrated contemporary novelist and poet. She has twice won the Governor General's award for poetry and her novels have been shortlisted several times for the Booker Prize. She is one of the sharpest political thinkers in fiction, and her books are both compulsively readable and elegantly written. In The Hand…
(British, 1775–1817) Jane Austen is one of the greatest and most entertaining of English novelists. She was born in Steventon in rural Hampshire where her father was village rector. She lived there for most of her life, with occasional trips to Bath, Lyme Regis, and London, and died in Winchester at the age of 42. The settings for her novels are similar to her own life, reflecting the lifes…
(US, 1947– ) After graduating from Columbia University in New York, Auster spent several years in France working as a translator. His career as a novelist did not take off until the release of City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, known together as The New York Trilogy (1987). These were written partly in the manner of the detective story, with a typical emphasis on narrative. But the…
(Soviet, 1894–1940) A short-story writer, born to assimilated, middle-class Jewish parents in Odessa, Babel wrote erotic fiction whilst translating for Lenin's secret police. His most famous work, Red Cavalry (1923–5), came from his experience as a war correspondent. It's a series of brief prose snapshots of the Russo-Polish conflict of 1920. Babel was attached to the n…
(Australian, 1941–) Bail has published three novels, of which Eucalyptus (1998), is the most interesting and rewarding. The plot is fairy-tale: a widower has a beautiful daughter, and sets a test for her suitors. The man to win her hand must be able to name the species of each of the hundreds of gum trees planted on the father's property. Suitors try and fail, until eventually a stor…
(British, 1937–) Paul Bailey is a Londoner who is fascinated by his city and has edited an anthology about it. His novel Kitty and Virgil (1998) starts off with a meeting between two of its central characters in Green Park. One of them, though, Virgil Florescu, is actually in exile from his native Romania. What then follows is a cross-cultural romance. On the surface we have a comedy of man…
(British, 1934–) Beryl Bainbridge was born in Liverpool, and began her career there as an actress in a repertory company. Her early novels are often set in the area. Bainbridge's characteristic vein is black comedy; she tells tales of dark deeds and the unexpected with economy and humour. She is a prolific novelist, held in high esteem by both critics and the reading public. Typical …
(US, 1924–87) Baldwin was born in Harlem, the eldest of a family of nine children. His stepfather was a Pentecostal preacher, and Baldwin himself served as junior minister at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly as a teenager. After the death of his stepfather in 1943 Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village, determined to become a writer. Five years later he moved to Paris, in order to write more f…
(British, 1930– ) As a schoolboy, Jim Ballard was interned with his family in a civilian prison camp when the Japanese invaded Shanghai, China, in 1942. Forty years later this formed the basis for his awardwinning novel Empire of the Sun (1984), filmed by Steven Spielberg, which tells how 12-year-old Jim learns to survive the harsh conditions, and of his fascination with the kamikaze suicid…
(French, 1799–1850) Balzac's great achievement was La Comédie humaine, the collective title of ninety-one novels intended to present a complete social history of the France he knew. Probably the most famous are Eugénie Grandet (1833), Old Goriot (1834), and Cousin Bette (1846). Start with Old Goriot, which studies the intersecting lives of characters in a Paris boarding…
(US, 1931–95) A black feminist and civil rights activist, Bambara is a story-teller who believes that stories can save lives, snatching us back from the edge to hear what happens next. Her two main collections, with their gospel, blues, bebop, and jazz idioms, are deeply influenced by the musicians and orators she heard as a child in Harlem. Begin with Gorilla My Love (1972), which introduc…
(British, 1954– ) Iain Banks writes both conventional literary novels and also genre science fiction under the name Iain M. Banks. He burst onto the contemporary scene with his first novel, The Wasp Factory (1984). The book soon gathered a reputation—and a cult following—for its Gothic, and graphic, scenes of horror. In a more recent novel, Complicity (1993), corrupt politicia…
(US, 1940– ) Banks's novels are searing examinations of American life; they are also pacey, well-plotted, and psychologically engaging. Begin with Continental Drift (1985), a devastating exploration of the American Dream gone wrong, which follows Bob Dubois, a central heating engineer who wants to be richer and more famous, into free fall when he takes his family to live in a trailer…
(Irish, 1945– ) Banville, who is literary editor of the Irish Times, writes fiction in which sensuous prose is infused with a deeply serious but playful imagination and a bracing intellect. His early novels, including Doctor Copernicus (1976) and Kepler (1981), had as central characters key figures in the history of European ideas. He found a wider audience with The Book of Evidence (1989),…
(British, 1918–2002) Barker's novels and stories habitually strike a note of psychological unease, scepticism, and doubt, or concern the difficulties of interpretation; they are distinguished by a rare precision of language. Her collections are often organized thematically. Her debut was Innocents: Variations on a Theme (1947), in which most stories concern a child's perspecti…
(British, 1952– ) Clive Barker was born in Liverpool, and made an immediate impact with the stories collected in the six volumes of The Books of Blood (1984–5). Concentrating on the closely described details of anatomy and violence that he later translated to films like Hellraiser and Candyman, Barker's early work created a new kind of horror that owed as much to a knowing sen…
(British, 1966– ) Barker writes surreal comic novels and stories, often about people on the fringes of society. Small Holdings (1995) deals with a group of gardeners in a London park, including a chronically shy narrator and a one-legged woman ex-museum curator who torments him. Wide Open (1988, Impac Award 2000), is set in an out of season nudist colony, a boar farm, a bat cave, and the Lo…
(British, 1943– ) Pat Barker's early novels, Union Street (1982) and Blow Your House Down (1984), earned her the reputation of being a searing commentator on the lives of women blighted by economic deprivation; yet she emphasizes the vitality and energy of her characters more than their oppression. But Barker gained fame, and the Booker Prize, for her trilogy about the First World Wa…
(British, 1946– ) After graduating in modern languages from Oxford University, Barnes worked for three years as a lexicographer on the supplement to The Oxford English Dictionary before becoming a journalist and critic. Metroland (1980) is a witty coming-of-age story charting the narrator's youth in west London and his experiences in Paris at the time of the student revolts in 1968. …
(British, 1928– ) Barstow was working in the drawing office of a Yorkshire engineering firm when the critical acclaim and popular success of his first novel, A Kind of Loving (1960), enabled him to become a full-time writer. The straightforward story—working-class Vic Brown gets his girlfriend pregnant and is forced into marriage—is given genuine warmth and immediacy through t…
(US, 1930– ) Barth's extravagant fiction has been much influenced by his career as a teacher of English and creative writing, mostly at Johns Hopkins University, and by oriental and medieval tale cycles. His works are usually lengthy and elaborate exercises in story-telling or pastiches of genres—the historical novel, science fiction, the novel in letters. Easily his best-know…
(US, 1931–89) Barthelme was born in Houston, Texas, the son of a modernist architect. He moved to New York City in 1962, where he lived for most of his life, becoming best known for his frequent contributions to The New Yorker magazine. An especially inventive manipulator of forms, Barthelme introduced all sorts of material and subject matter into the short story, and at the same time he wr…
(British, 1905–74) Bates published novels, plays, short stories, critical essays, and autobiographical works. He frequently writes about the misfortunes and fortunes of love. In Bates's first novel, The Two Sisters (1926), sisters Jenny and Tessa realize they are in love with the same man. Recently adapted for cinema, The Feast of July (1954) is set amid the countryside of nineteenth…
(British, 1925– ) Nina Bawden is a highly successful writer of both children's and adult fiction. She has stated that children are ‘a kind of subject race; always at the mercy of the adults who mostly run their lives for them’, and she is also an acute observer of the tension between wishes and fulfilment. A good example of this is Carrie's War (1973). Carrie and…
(French, 1908–86) De Beauvoir read philosophy at the Sorbonne and was placed second to Jean-Paul Sartre, whose life-long partner she became. She wrote novels, plays, and essays, and is best known for her ground-breaking feminist study, The Second Sex (1949), and for her fascinating and detailed three-volume autobiography, opening with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958). Her novels explore…
(Irish 1906–89) Born near Dublin, and educated at Trinity College, Beckett spent several years lecturing at Belfast, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (1928–30), and Trinity, before permanently settling in Paris. Though his greatest achievements were in drama, it was through his early novels that Beckett was able to adapt the ‘stream of consciousness’ …
(British, 1872–1956) A cartoonist, essayist, and critic, the title ‘man of letters’ fits Max Beerbohm perfectly. He first made his name as a member of the ‘decadent’ group surrounding the magazine The Yellow Book, alongside writers like George Egerton and artists such as Aubrey Beardsley and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Zuleika Dobson (1911) is Beerbohm'…
(US, 1915–2005) Saul Bellow, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, is one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. His characters struggle with questions of meaning and self against a backdrop of moral and social unease. Many of his books are set in Chicago, and the theme of Jewish identity pervades. In Herzog (1964), we see the life of the eponymou…
(British, 1867–1931) Born in the Potteries, son of a self-educated solicitor, Bennett began by working for his father, then escaped to a London firm. In London he began to write fiction, and when he was 35 he moved to Paris to write full-time. In his lifetime he wrote forty-two fiction books, plus plays, journalism, literary criticism, and a journal. By the time he died Bennett was one of t…
(British, 1867–1940) E. F. Benson, born in Berkshire, was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Cambridge-educated, he went on to become a prolific and varied novelist. Benson is most famous for his series of light social satires of 1920s' middle-class England. These centre around two queens of provincial society, Mapp and Lucia. The first novel, Queen Lucia (1920), introduces Luc…
(Irish, 1940– ) Maeve Binchy was born and educated in Dublin, subsequently becoming a journalist. Her first attempts at fiction were in the form of short stories, but she became widely known for her first novel, Light a Penny Candle (1982). This deservedly popular romance tells the stories of the interwoven lives of two friends, Elizabeth and Aisling, who meet when Elizabeth is evacuated fr…
(British, 1942– ) Charlotte Bingham, who has also written for television, writes big novels; they are often historical romances like Debutantes (1995), in which three young ladies from different backgrounds discover what it is to be part of a London ‘season’ in the 1890s, in the atmosphere of snobbery and ambition surrounding the Prince of Wales and his circle. Details of the …
(Trinidadian/Canadian, 1955– ) Bissoondath's books of short stories, Digging Up the Mountains (1985), and On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows (1990), display his ability to empathize with characters—for example, a young Japanese girl in Toronto trying to liberate herself from traditional cultural constraints—far from home. He is also able to enter imaginatively int…
(British, 1825–1900) Blackmore's most famous novel is Lorna Doone (1869), a historical romance set in the 1680s on Exmoor. As a boy John Ridd is saved from death by the beautiful child Lorna Doone, and as an adult he is in love with her. But the Doones (who are a clan of aristocratic outlaws, terrorizing the neighbourhood) have murdered his farmer father, and he has to avenge this. E…
(Anglo-Irish, 1931–96) Born in Ulster into an aristocratic family, Blackwood worked as a journalist, producing notable studies of the Duchess of Windsor and the Greenham Common women's peace camp. Her fiction is characterized by her dark studies of women, often trapped by guilt, bitterness, and uncertainty; these are unsettling books but blackly humorous. Her first novel, The Stepdau…
(US, 1921–75) Blish made good use of his specialism in biology in some of the earliest science fiction novels to deal with genetic engineering. In his classic short story, ‘A Case of Conscience’, a Jesuit priest, confronted with the discovery of an apparently sinless alien world, is forced to conclude that it has been created by the Devil to delude mankind into a loss of faith…
(Danish, 1885–1962) Born into an upper-class family, Blixen's imagination was fired by the adventures of her father, a respected colonel, writer, and politician. Her famous autobiography, Out of Africa (1937), describes the years she spent in Kenya working as a coffee farmer. Blixen made her literary debut, however, with the publication of Seven Gothic Tales (1934), written under her…
(US, 1938– ) Lawrence Block is a prolific writer, creator of three very different crime series: the Matt Scudder novels whose hero is an ex-cop and struggling alcoholic stalking the mean streets of New York; the ‘Burglar’ Bernie Rhodenbarr books, witty with a much lighter touch, and the Evan Tanner series (the man who never sleeps). Eight Million Ways to Die (1983) shows us Sc…
(US, 1953– ) Amy Bloom is a psychotherapist who lives in Connecticut and divides her time between writing and her practice. Her collection of stories Come to Me (1993) explores the experiences of bereavement, mental breakdown, and sexual non-conformity. Bloom's understated, almost minimalist style encourages the reader to understand rather than judge her characters. In ‘Love i…
(US 1938– ) At the height of her popularity Judy Blume was a publishing phenomenon, receiving over a thousand letters a week from teenagers who felt that she understood their problems, and that her books helped them to make sense of the world. She has written with humour and sensitivity for younger readers, too, as in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972) but is at her best when addressing…
(British, 1921–99) Born in Hampstead, London, from the late 1940s Bogarde was one of the most distinguished film actors of his day. His novels often spring from events in his life. Begin with A Gentle Occupation (1980), which draws on his military experiences of political upheaval in South-east Asia at the end of the Second World War. The book displays his stylish accessibility, vivid descr…
(German, 1917–85) Böll spent six years in the German army (1939–45). When Germany began to suffer outbreaks of urban terrorism in the early 1970s in protest against the return of the right, the government took emergency powers which alarmed Böll, among others. When Ulrike Meinhof was arrested in 1974 he wrote his most famous book, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. Arre…
(Argentinian, 1899–1986) Born in Buenos Aires and educated in Geneva, Borges is often cited as the father of magic realism and his spectacularly idiosyncratic short stories, collected in Fictions (1945), The Aleph and Other Stories (1949), and Labyrinths (1953), explore, among other things, violence, the puzzles of detective fiction, the relationship between fiction, truth, and identity, an…
(Irish, 1899–1973) Bowen's reputation as one of the greatest Anglo-Irish novelists and short-story writers has been growing hugely in recent years. She has always been admired for her treatment of women's lives and middle-class society, and for her evocative moody descriptions of houses and places, but more recently her diagnosis of the Anglo-Irish condition—semi-strang…
(Canadian, 1924– ) Born in the former Czechoslovakia, Josef Škvorecký is a highly respected novelist, translator, and screenplay writer. His work covers several genres ranging from crime/thriller fiction to novels about jazz and classical music. His writing reveals a refined political consciousness. His Danny Smiricky cycle parallels much of his own life. This includes …