Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
(US, 1925–2000) Robert Cormier was a moralist. He was also a stylist, the master of pared-down, direct, and muscular prose, which packs a tremendous narrative punch. His protagonists often find themselves on the horns of extremely painful dilemmas, and the different ways they resolve these problems make for novels which are hard to put down. Start with The Chocolate War (1974) and I am the …
(British, 1944– ) Born in London, after a successful career in television Cornwell moved to the United States in 1980 and became a full-time writer. Begin with Sharpe's Eagle (1981), the first of his numerous treatments of the Napoleonic wars, which takes place in Spain during the Talavera Campaign of 1809. Richard Sharpe, Cornwell's pugnaciously capable and courageous working…
(US, 1957– ) Patricia Cornwell worked as a crime reporter and morgue computer analyst before introducing Dr Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner, in Post-Mortem (1990). The series of psychological thrillers has been extremely successful, not least because of Scarpetta's well-drawn character; she is ambitious, dedicated, intelligent, but vulnerable as well. A cast of supporting chara…
(Canadian, 1961– ) Born on a Canadian Nato base in Germany, Coupland grew up and lives in Vancouver. He has been described an ‘anatomist of the sound-bite era, a taxonomist of moods, icons, jargons and styles’, being the most style-conscious chronicler of the 1990s. Polaroids from the Dead (1996) offers a huddle of snapshots, literary and literal (black-and-white reproductions…
(British, 1946– ) Jim Crace has worked in Sudan and Botswana, and wrote radio plays and journalism before moving on to fiction. His writing is distinguished by its wide-ranging and intellectually exciting subject matter. Begin with his first book, Continent (1986, winner of the Whitbread and Guardian Fiction prizes), seven linked stories about an imaginary Third World, a rich mixture of myt…
(US, 1871–1900) The son of a preacher, Stephen Crane quickly rejected middle-class life in favour of baseball, pool, poker, and ‘unsuitable’ relationships. After a turbulent spell at college he became a journalist, chronicling both the poverty-stricken underside of America's expanding cities and the Spanish-American and Graeco-Turkish wars. Poverty and war dominated his…
(British, 1908–73) Creasey produced more books than any other twentieth-century writer, publishing over 600 under pseudonyms too numerous to list. Among many others, he wrote police procedurals as J. J. Marric, light adventures featuring The Baron as Anthony Morton, psychological crime stories as Michael Halliday and the thriller-style Inspector West novels as John Creasey. However, the wri…
(US, 1935– ) Born in Bacon County, Georgia, Harry Crews served with the US Marines in the 1950s and graduated from the University of Florida in 1960, though his career has also included spells working as a carnival barker and light heavyweight boxer. His novels are often set among the drifting communities of vagrants, carnival acts, and itinerant preachers of the American South, and The Gos…
(US, 1942– ) After training as a doctor, Crichton became a prolific writer of heavily researched yet thoroughly engaging science fiction thrillers. These are generally set in the near future and concentrate on single areas of technological advance. Crichton's first major success was Westworld (1974), which he himself adapted as a film starring Yul Brynner. This deals with a robot-man…
(British, 1921–78) Crispin was the pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery, a composer of film and orchestral music. He wrote his first crime novel, featuring the eccentric Oxford don Gervase Fen, while still an undergraduate at the university. His books fizz with wit and energy, revealing Crispin's verbal flair and detestation of pomposity. Begin with The Moving Toyshop (1946), an excursion o…
(Guyanese, 1960– ) D'Aguiar won several awards with The Longest Memory (1994). Set on an eighteenth-century Virginia slave plantation, the brutality—as when the recaptured slave is beaten while others are ordered to watch—seems muted by the author's literary finesse: the many, very accomplished narrative techniques almost giving an unnatural beauty to the barbari…
(Canadian, 1913–95) Robertson Davies was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1913, and educated at Oxford. Back in Canada he worked in theatre, journalism, academia, and above all as a novelist. The rich, sprawling, extrovert novels of Robertson Davies can make other writers seem rather anaemic. He throws in everything—the occult, university life, sexual and financial shenanigans, astrology,…
(British, 1962– ) A mother and her young child are at the centre of Dawson's first two novels. In Trick of the Light (1996), Rita and Mick move from inner London to a remote, forested area of Washington State, and Rita struggles to protect their daughter as Mick becomes increasingly violent. Here, the dangers and attraction of wilderness are beautifully evoked. In Magpie (1998), Lily…
(British, 1660–1731) Defoe, often considered to be the first English novelist, travelled extensively as a merchant, a secret agent and a journalist before turning to fiction. His ground-breaking first-person narratives merged popular genres such as travel journals, romances, picaresque tales, political writing, histories, and social reportage for what was probably the first time. Defoe was …
(British, 1890–1943) E. M. Delafield wrote over thirty novels, of which the best known are the series beginning with The Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930). These wonderfully funny books are written as a journal, and describe the daily life of the narrator, her gloomily taciturn husband, her exuberant children and histrionic French governess, and a range of comically unsatisfactory servants.…
(US, 1936– ) DeLillo grew up in the Bronx, the son of working-class Italian immigrants. After a spell on Madison Avenue as an advertising executive, he took to writing fiction. His debut novel, Americana, was published in 1971. Although highly acclaimed in literary circles, it was not until the mid-1980s that DeLillo's work reached a wider audience, when White Noise (1984) won the Na…
(Indian, 1937– ) Desai was born in Mussorie, of German and Indian parentage, and has been shortlisted several times for the Booker Prize, most recently in 1999, with Fasting, Feasting. Like many of her novels this story inhabits the meeting-point between two traditions and explores Uma's efforts to carve out a psychic space between herself and her superficially westernized parents. T…
(British, 1930– ) Colin Dexter taught classics before turning to writing. He is also a former crossword champion. His Inspector Morse novels have been adapted for television to great acclaim. Set in Oxford they involve Morse and his sergeant, Lewis, in homicide investigations. The clever, careful plots are laden with puzzles and clues which the reader can try to solve. A great appeal of the…
(US, 1968– ) Diaz was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, moving with his family when he was 7 to rejoin his father, who was working in New York. He draws heavily on his own experiences in his short stories, Drown (1996). The narrators of the stories live in the barrios of Santo Domingo and the immigrant neighbourhoods of New Jersey, and speak with voices that are pungent and tough, …
(British, 1947– ) Dibdin has not only written accomplished pastiches of classic detective fiction writers, notably of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, but has also developed the genre to include social and historical perspectives. The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978) takes the form of a discovered manuscript written by Dr Watson, telling of Holmes being brought in to solve the Jack the Rip…
(British, 1812–1870) The impact of Dickens is such that the terms ‘Dickensian’ and ‘Victorian’ are sometimes used interchangeably. His works teem with characters who have entered the popular imagination—Fagin, Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Little Nell. High farce coexists with tragedy, exaggeration with stark realism, mawkishness with bitter sarcasm. To criticize D…
(US, 1940– ) Born to the family of a travelling salesman, Thomas M. Disch encompasses poetry, criticism, and fiction in his work. He is a winner of two O. Henry Prizes for short stories, the W. Campbell Memorial award and the British Science Fiction award. He started his writing career with a short story, ‘The Double Timer’—bought for $112 by the editor of Fantas…
(British, 1947– ) Of Russian and Polish Jewish descent, Diski has published short stories and novels which explore the compulsions and neuroses of contemporary life, and the psychology of the outsider. In Rainforest (1987) Mo, a successful anthropologist, bases her life on predictability and order. A research trip to a rainforest in Borneo forces her to confront the illogical and unpredicta…
(British) Doherty was born in Middlesbrough. He read medieval history at Oxford and combines his careers as a London headmaster and author of medieval murder mysteries. The Assassin in the Greenwood (1993) is a good introduction to Hugh Corbett, Edward I's chief clerk and investigator-protagonist of a growing number of Doherty's books. Corbett's hands are full, with espionage …
(US, 1926– ) Donleavy was born in Brooklyn but educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and his writing reflects the dual influences of Irish and American literature. The Ginger Man (1955) was originally banned in the United States for obscenity and published first in an abridged version in Britain. The Ginger Man was instrumental in helping to change the censorship laws and is a raucous picare…
(US, 1896–1970) U.S.A., first published as three books then in one volume in 1938, is on an epic scale. It includes contemporary newspaper extracts, and ‘stream-of-consciousness’ sections which reveal glimpses of the author's autobiography, interwoven with conventional narrative, making a collage of early twentieth-century America. The stories of hundreds of characters …
(Russian, 1821–81) Dostoevsky published his first novel, Poor Folk, in 1846. Three years later he was sentenced to death for membership of a group planning to publish revolutionary pamphlets. He was told that his sentence had been commuted whilst facing the firing squad—an experience recounted in The Idiot (1868). He served ten years in Siberian labour camps, before returning to St P…
(British, 1859–1930) Although Arthur Conan Doyle himself thought his historical and adventure novels were his finest work, he will be remembered as the creator of two of the most famous characters in all fiction, the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his chronicler, Dr Watson. Modelled on Doyle's own mentor and teacher, Dr Joseph Bell, Holmes was a master of deduction and dete…
(Irish, 1958– ) Doyle worked as a teacher in the working-class areas of north Dublin that he depicts so successfully in his novels. His Barrytown trilogy, The Commitments (1988), The Snapper (1990), and The Van (1991) describes the attempts of the Rabbitte family to gain fame, fortune, and an escape from the poverty which surrounds them. In The Commitments, turned into a popular film by Ala…
(British, 1939– ) Born in Sheffield, Margaret Drabble was educated at Cambridge. She is best known as a novelist for her interest in questions of social responsibility. Early work like The Millstone (1965), in which an independent girl with a bright academic future finds herself pregnant, sealed Drabble's position as her generation's definitive chronicler of educated women�…
(British, 1933– ) Duffy draws on her childhood for That's How it Was (1962), the semi-autobiographical story of the intense relationship between a working-class mother and her grammarschool-educated daughter. Duffy has spent most of her adult life in London, where she is active on behalf of fellow writers, and has successfully campaigned for public lending rights. Her strong, well-pl…
(French, 1802–70) After early success as a dramatist, Dumas turned to writing historical novels, the most famous of which is The Three Musketeers (1844). Although Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are the Musketeers of the title, the novel is really the story of the young D'Artagnan's ambition to join their ranks. The novel provides an exuberant display of swashbuckling heroism as th…
(British, 1950– ) Sarah Dunant has worked in radio, journalism, and as a television presenter. In addition to creating the Hannah Wolfe novels she has written a psychological thriller, Transgressions (1997), and has written for television. Hannah Wolfe is a private eye, cynical and independent with a shrewd view of the world and a witty turn of phrase. Hannah is based in London and works fo…
(British, 1952– ) Helen Dunmore has published poetry, short stories, children's fiction, and novels. In Burning Bright (1994), a young runaway, Nadine, is unknowingly set up for sexual exploitation by her older Finnish lover, Kai, in a decaying Georgian house. Nadine's story is interwoven with that of Enid, an elderly sitting tenant in the house, whose own love-affair years be…
(French, 1914–96) Marguerite Duras was born in Saigon. She returned to France in 1932, studied at the Sorbonne, joined the Resistance during the war, and was deported to Germany. She joined the Communist party but was expelled in 1950. Her novels are experimental, part of the French movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. They have a certain vagueness of plot, while atmosphere is all-importa…
(British, 1912–90) Durrell was born in India and spent the first ten years of his life there before his family returned to England. His prolific output includes poetry, plays, and travel writing, though he is best known for The Alexandria Quartet, comprising Justine (1957), Balthazar and Mountolive (both 1958), and Clea (1960) which combine literary experiment with lush, lyrical prose. Set …
(Italian, 1932– ) Born in Alessandria, Italy, Eco was educated at the University of Turin and has held numerous distinguished appointments at universities in Europe and America. His academic expertise in semiotics, or the science of signs, strongly informs his fiction, in which systems of meaning and interpretation are central features. Begin with the best-selling The Name of the Rose (1980…
(US, 1970– ) Eggers calls his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), fiction, but acknowledges from the start that it is based on real characters and events. It tells of the death of both his parents, within a month of each other, while he was 21 and his younger brother Toph was 7, and of his and Toph's life afterwards. From this tragic subject matter Eggers sp…
(US 1930–95) Elkin was born in the Bronx, in New York City. He spent thirty-five years as a professor of creative writing at Washington University, in St. Louis. In 1972 he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and spent his last two decades in a wheelchair. His fiction focuses on illness and obsessive behaviour, and his stories are typically about losers and near-madmen. The best place to…
(British, 1819–80) George Eliot, whose real name was Marian Evans, broke with her conventional background, both by rejecting the Church and by living with a married man; and issues of morality and hypocrisy are central to her work. She is one of the greatest English novelists. Virginia Woolf described her masterpiece Middlemarch as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up …
(British, 1932–2005) Ellis is best known for witty, compact novels satirizing middle-class ideals and family life, as in The Sineater (1977) which explores a family's hypocrisies and conflicts as it gathers to await the death of the father. Ellis grew up in Wales as a Roman Catholic, and Christian and Celtic myth is an important undercurrent in her novels, which are otherwise contemp…
(US, 1964– ) Ellis's debut novel, Less than Zero (1985) is written from the perspective of Clay, an 18-year-old student returning from college to spend the Christmas vacation at home in Los Angeles. Like the characters in Ellis's campus novel, The Rules of Attraction (1987), Clay is both naïve and jaded: in spite of endless supplies of money, cocaine, and consumer goods…
(US, 1948– ) Perhaps no other crime writer suffered such a traumatic childhood as James Ellroy, and certainly none have explored the horrors of their past history in such an explicit and sometimes shocking manner. When Ellroy was 10 years old, his mother was brutally murdered; no one was ever charged with the crime. Elements deriving from this defining event in his life are to be found in n…
(Nigerian, 1944– ) Emecheta left Nigeria for London in 1962. After leaving her abusive husband she took a sociology degree and began writing. In the Ditch (1972) and Second Class Citizen (1974) are thinly veiled autobiographical novels which bluntly depict her early years in North London, focusing specifically on the political realities of being a single black mother in 1960s' Britai…
(US, 1954– ) Erdrich writes poetry, short stories and novels, drawing upon her Native American Chippewa and German-immigrant descent. Love Medicine (1984, revised and expanded 1993), utilizes Chippewa story-telling traditions, which engage with the spiritual world of the culture and its strong connection to the land. Fourteen interwoven stories span the years 1934–84 through the expe…
(British, 1878–1945) Born in Llanfihangel-ar-Arth, Carmarthenshire, Evans left school at 14 to work as a draper's assistant and subsequently became a periodicals' editor in London. Begin with the stories in My People (1915), which gained him notoriety in Wales for their fiercely satirical treatments of the greed, hypocrisy, and religious oppression he saw behind the pieties of…
(US, 1960– ) Eugenides lives in Berlin. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993) is set in suburban Detroit and tells of the five Lisbon sisters, who kill themselves in their adolescence. It is blackly humorous and written in hypnotically rhythmic prose, investing the everyday with magical, mythical elements. It was successfully adapted to film. Middlesex (2002, Pulitzer 2003) is related…
(British, 1931–99) Everett was perhaps best known for his television and radio plays, but his most distinctive achievement lay in novels depicting the lives of artists, exploring their times and the nature of their creativity. His first, Negatives (1964), won the Somerset Maugham award and Matisse's War (1996) received critical acclaim. The novel is an account of Henri Matisse betwee…
(Anglo-Irish, 1935–79) Born in Liverpool, Farrell was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and travelled widely before becoming a writer in the early 1960s. Start with The Lung (1965), which draws on his experiences of polio in its blackly comic narrative of Martin Sands. Formerly a well-to-do hedonist, his confinement to an iron lung because of polio allows him to take stock of his life.…
(US 1897–1962) Unarguably one of the greats of twentieth-century American literature, credited with writing no fewer than eighteen masterpieces. Faulkner briefly attended university and spent some time with writers and artists in Paris. However, he chose to write most often about the rural communities of Mississippi where he grew up and lived for most of his life, redefining this territory …
(British, 1953– ) Much of Faulks's writing explores the impact of war upon relationships between individuals. Birdsong (1993) spans three generations from the First World War to the 1990s. A young Englishman, Stephen Wraysford, falls in love with Isabelle Azaire while serving in France. The descriptions of Stephen's experiences in the dark, surreal world of the trenches are vi…
(British, 1944– ) Born in Dumfries, Fell moved to London in 1970 and became active in feminist publishing, particularly with Spare Rib. Her fiction has evolved away from realism towards a style that incorporates theory, politics, desire, and dreams, within a poetic, sometimes fragmentary prose. The Bad Box (1987) signalled this change, with its use of myth and fantasy in its account of a yo…
(British, 1960– ) Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) began as a column in the Independent newspaper. A single, thirty-something woman confides her hopes, dreams, her embarrassing drunken moments, her obsession with her weight, and her consumption of 5,277 cigarettes. Her New Year's resolution is the quest for the right man, leading to a disastrous affair with her boss. Her relations…
(British, 1707–54) Born in Somerset of aristocratic parents, Fielding was educated at Eton and moved to London in his late teens. There he wrote some twenty-five plays whose dense political allusions (with particular attacks on Robert Walpole's government) ensure they are rarely revived. After the Licensing Act of 1737 London theatre was politically censored and Fielding turned his a…
(British, 1886–1926) Ronald Firbank inherited an income that allowed him to travel widely and to publish his own books. He was received into the Catholic Church while studying at Cambridge in 1907, and alongside his homosexuality, the theatrical and exotic elements of Catholicism helped to shape the sensibility of Firbank's novels. He is best known for Valmouth (1919), a comic novel …
(US, 1896–1940) Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota, and educated at Princeton. He worked briefly as an advertising copywriter, then fell in love with a Southern belle, Zelda Sayre, and the tremendous success of his first novel (This Side of Paradise, 1920) gave him the money and status he craved in order to marry her. The pair lived extravagantly, darlings of smart society in New Yor…
(British, 1916–2000) Fitzgerald started writing fiction in her sixties, and her first four novels are loosely based on experiences from her own life: of wartime journalism for the BBC; of teaching in a theatrical school; of working in a bookshop; and of living on a Thames barge. Her later novels have historical (and often foreign) settings. Her characters are depicted with a rare warmth and…