Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
(British, 1953– ) St Aubin de Teran's life has provided the material for much of her fiction; at 16 she left school to marry an exiled Venezuelan landowner; after two years in Italy they returned to his family estates in the Andes, where she managed his sugar plantation and avocado farm for seven years, while his mental health deteriorated. She escaped to Norfolk, and now lives in It…
(British, 1771–1832) Scott was born in Edinburgh, where he studied law at the University and became a barrister in 1792. From his early years he acquired the deep familiarity with the ballad and folk-tale traditions of the border regions which strongly informs his work in both verse and prose. Initially famous for his narrative poems, after 1814 Scott devoted himself to the historical novel…
(German, 1944–2001) Sebald lived and worked in Britain for more than thirty years, but wrote in German and is published in his adopted homeland in translation. His writing interweaves bizarre and moving incidents from Sebald's life with even stranger stories from the lives of the famous, and the histories of places in Germany, Britain, Italy, and elsewhere. Start with Vertigo (1990) …
(US, 1928– ) Born in Brooklyn, Selby saw war service with the Merchant Marine and was hospitalized with tuberculosis, during which time he became addicted to morphine. His fiction is both extreme and morally serious, and includes detailed descriptions of drug dependency, paranoid states of mind, rape, and sado-masochistic sexual fantasies. Though his intention is to put readers through a wr…
(Jamaican, 1941– ) Senior's Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Here she re-creates the life of rural Jamaica in all its colour- and class-conscious complexity, employing the full range of West Indian idiom and humour. One memorable aspect of the stories is the portrait of the child trying to make sense of the adult world. Not that th…
(Indian, 1952– ) Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta and educated in India and the universities of Oxford and Stanford. He established himself as a poet, and author of a verse novel, The Golden Gate (1986), before writing the novel that has brought him mass readership, A Suitable Boy (1993). It is a long, sprawling, fascinating family saga set in post-independence India. It concerns four famil…
(NZ, 1932– ) Shadbolt's novels and stories typically engage with relations between whites and the native Maori culture in New Zealand, and depict the natural world in vivid, painterly prose. In his first collection of stories, The New Zealanders (1959), young people travelling abroad redefine their feelings about home and discover themselves. Among the Cinders (1965) is an engaging n…
(US, 1948– ) Born in Trenton, New Jersey, Shange was educated at the University of Southern California. Begin with Betsey Brown (1985), which draws on her experience as a black teenager during the turmoil surrounding the ending of segregation in 1960s' America. The novel graphically depicts the struggles of the civil rights movement in the South as its young heroine is thrust into he…
(British, 1928– ) Tom Sharpe studied at Cambridge University and did National Service with the Marines, later emigrating to South Africa, where he was employed as a social worker and teacher before setting up his own photographic studio. He was deported in 1961, and took up a post as a lecturer in history on his return to Britain. Early novels like Riotous Assembly (1971) were set in South …
(British, 1797–1851) Daughter of political philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and second wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley is regarded by many as the founder of science fiction. Inspired by a late-night session of ghost-story telling with her husband-to-be and Lord Byron, Frankenstein (1818) tells of a young surgeon's successful re-creation of …
(US, 1935–2003) Carol Shields lived in Canada from 1957 until her death. Her work looks mainly at the lives of women, and reveals them in fascinating detail. Two early novels tell of one weekend in the life of a married couple, first from the husband's point of view and then from the wife's. These appeared together as Happenstance (1991) and readers can begin the book at eithe…
(Soviet, 1905–84) Sholokhov fought for the Reds during the Russian Civil War and Quiet Flows the Don (1928–40) was written out of that experience. It's a massive, compelling epic of the Don Cossack uprising against Bolshevik power, but at heart it's a love triangle between the peasant-warrior Gregory Melekhov, his devoted wife Natalya, and his village mistress Aksinya. …
(British, 1899–1960) A highly skilled aeronautical engineer, Shute was co-opted onto the team working on the famous airship R101 in the 1930s, an aspect of his life which is related in his fascinating autobiography, Slide Rule (1954). He was an imaginative and naturally gifted story-teller. Some of Shute's most interesting fiction, such as No Highway (1948) and Trustee from the Toolr…
(US, 1948– ) Born of mixed ancestry—Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white—Silko grew up in the Laguna Pueblo Reservation near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her novels and poetry record the history of European imperialism from a Native American perspective, examining unflinchingly the devastation of indigenous populations and the natural environment that resulted from America's M…
(British, 1928– ) Born in a Nottingham council house, Sillitoe left school at 14, and after various factory jobs joined the RAF as a wireless operator. While living in Majorca and struggling to be published, it was the poet Robert Graves who suggested he write something set in Nottingham, as the place he knew best. The result was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), which dropped like …
(US, 1935– ) Silverberg was born in New York, published his first novel while a student at Columbia University, and has since written over 300 science fiction and fantasy books, both under his own name and using pseudonyms. Begin with Hawksbill Station (1968), set in a bleakly imagined future. Time travel is used to banish political prisoners to a camp located in the Cambrian era where much…
(Belgian, 1903–89) Born in Liège, Simenon lived in Paris from 1923 to 1939, working initially as a journalist before becoming a prodigious writer of crime fiction. Far more than a pulp author, he invested the genre with psychological, even existential depths, conveyed in his trademark unemotional prose. Simenon's great fictional detective is Maigret, hero of seventy-six short …
(British, 1943– ) Sinclair was born in Cardiff and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. From the 1960s onwards he has lived in London, the legends, history, and topography of which pervade much of his writing. Sinclair describes his work as ‘baroque realism’ for its complex and suggestive interplay between the past and the present. Lud Heat (1975) explores the history of the e…
(US, 1878–1968) Throughout his life, Sinclair wrote at least ninety novels. His series of socialist pamphlets discussing aspects of American political society contributed to the genre of journalism known as ‘muckraking’. Seen by many as a prophet of social justice, Sinclair is best known for his novel The Jungle (1906), an exposé of the meatpacking industry. Dealing wit…
(Polish/US, 1904–91) Educated at a rabbinical seminary in Warsaw, Singer emigrated to the United States in 1935 and joined the staff of New York's Jewish Daily Forward, which published his fiction in its original Yiddish. In 1978 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Begin with some of the short stories, often considered to be his finest work. These entertaining tales of…
(South African, 1952– ) Slovo was born in South Africa, daughter of anti-apartheid activists Ruth First and Joe Slovo. She has written a painfully honest and illuminating autobiographical memoir of her childhood with her journalist mother (later assassinated for her political beliefs) and her Communist Party leader father, Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country (1997). A family saga, Tie…
(US 1951– ) After A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 Smiley came rather belatedly to the attention of British readers. This inspired recasting of the King Lear story is set in the farmlands of Iowa, and adds an extra and very modern dimension to the tale, explaining why the Goneril and Regan characters feel as they do towards their father. It has recently been made into a film.…
(British, 1962– ) Although Inverness-born Smith has been publishing fiction since the mid-1990s, she came most widely to public notice with the appearance in 2001 of Hotel World, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. This is a beautifully written collection of fragments, thrillingly vibrant and often terribly moving. A 19-year-old girl has died after climbing into a dumb waiter for a …
(British, 1896–1990) ‘Shopgirl Writes Play’ ran the headline. A one-time actress (trained at RADA), at 35 Dodie Smith was hardly a girl when her first play was staged, and in fact was in charge of a department at Heal's, the fashionable furniture store. Exiled in America during the war, desperately homesick for England, she wrote I Capture the Castle (1949). From its me…
(British, 1902–71) Stevie Smith grew up in Palmers Green, London, and lived there with her beloved aunt for most of her life. She worked as a secretary and freelance writer and broadcaster, and is known for her poetry, of which she published eight volumes, many illustrated by her own drawings. Her novels are all autobiographical, and the first, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) is by far the bes…
(British, 1721–71) Born near Dunbarton, Smollett studied medicine in Glasgow before moving to London, where he practised as a surgeon. He is among the great novelists of the eighteenth century. The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) is a good introduction to his fiction; the novel's energetic action sees the young Scot winning his beloved's hand after trials at sea, in the F…
(Soviet/Russian, 1918– ) Born in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus and educated at the University of Rostov, in 1945 Solzhenitsyn began eleven years as a political prisoner. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. After living in the United States, he was invited back to Russia in 1994. Begin with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic…
(Edith Oenone Somerville, Irish, 1858–1949, and Violet Florence Martin, Irish, 1852–1915) Somerville and Ross were second cousins; Edith was actually born in Corfu, moving with her parents to Ireland as a young child. The two met in Co. Cork, where they formed a lifelong writing partnership. Probably their most famous works are Some Experiences of an Irish RM (1899), short stories wh…
(British, 1918– ) Spark was born in Edinburgh and her best-known book, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), is drawn from memories of her schooldays there in the 1930s. This is a good place to start; a charismatic teacher encourages her girls to high achievements, but her charisma is dangerous as well as inspiring. An excellent film of the book starred Maggie Smith as Miss Brodie. Spark is…
(NZ, 1932– ) This Emeritus Professor of English from the University of Auckland has been a controversial figure in New Zealand literature since the 1950s. Initially known as an academic and then as a poet, his first novel, Smith's Dream (1971), grew out of his own opposition to New Zealand's participation in the Vietnam War, and imagines a guerrilla resistance movement attacki…
(Australian, 1902–83) Stead led a wandering life, moving from Australia to London, to Paris, to various places in the United States, back to different homes in Europe, and then to Australia again. She worked as a teacher and secretary before writing full-time (including a stint in Hollywood, which she disliked). Left-wing politics were central in her own life and that of her partner, Willia…
(US, 1947– ) Steel is mother of nine, and a bride four times over. Her lifestyle is reflected in her novels which are glamorous and feature women who juggle many different roles. Steel appeals to massive audiences and often covers more than one generation, following the lives of her strong female characters. Full Circle (1985) follows Tana Roberts on her travels from New York to the South t…
(US, 1909–93) Stegner was prolific as both historian and fictional chronicler of the American West, particularly its harsh migration and settlement experience. In Wolf Willow: A Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1962), Stegner combines autobiography with a history of the town he grew up in. His novels are mostly large realist family sagas, carefully detailed yet emotionally turbulent. The…
(US, 1874–1946) For most of her adult life Stein lived in Paris, where she was friends with avant-garde writers and painters, including Picasso and Matisse. Stein wrote poetry, short stories, essays, novels, plays, and autobiographies. Her experimental writing is difficult and has been compared to Cubist painting, as if Stein were rearranging the very building-blocks of language. However, s…
(US, 1902–68) Born in Salinas, California, Steinbeck worked at various jobs while studying at Stanford University, and saw at first hand the often appalling conditions endured by migrant workers and their families during the Depression. His fiction, from early realist novels to later parables, always observes working-people with great sympathy, using spare and simple language. He won the No…
(French, 1783–1842) Stendhal, the pseudonym of Henri Beyle, is known for two long novels, the first of which is Scarlet and Black (1830). This is set during the Restoration in France, when suspicion and intrigue were widespread and people were seeking a satisfactory replacement for the monarchy. The narrative follows the fortunes of Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son who becomes tutor t…
(US, 1959– ) Stephenson injects old-fashioned ‘sci-fi’ with mind-expanding drugs, magic realism, dodgy sex, paranoia, cutting-edge technologies, and turns it into ‘cy-fi’. Start with Snowcrash (1992). In Reality Hiro Protagonist delivers pizzas for the Mafia but in the (virtual) Metaverse, he's a hack-'em-up warrior prince fighting a virus from anci…
(US, 1954– ) Born in Brownsville, Texas, Sterling was educated at the University of Texas and, with William Gibson, is regarded as an originator of ‘cy-fi’. Begin with Islands in the Net (1988), the story of a world free of ecological or political crises in which computer telecommunications generate a global sense of community. Data piracy takes the heroine into remote corners…
(Irish, 1713–68) Born at Clonmel, Ireland, Sterne spent most of his life as a minor clergyman in North Yorkshire, writing only sermons and journalism. The suppression by church authorities of his Swiftian satire A Political Romance (1759) provided the impetus for Sterne's masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760–7), which greatly expanded the poss…
(British, 1850–94) Stevenson was brought up in Edinburgh, son of a lighthouse engineer. Unsuited to the Scottish climate because of poor health, he travelled widely, finally settling in Samoa. His finest book was Weir of Hermiston (1896), on which he was working at the time of his death. It was, he said, ‘an attempt at a real historical novel, to present a whole field of time’…
(British, 1935– ) Hugh Crawford Rae has written under several names, but as Jessica Stirling he writes very popular historical family stories. Begin with the Stalker trilogy, of which the first is The Spoiled Earth (1974), set in a Lanarkshire pit village in 1875. An underground explosion kills a shift of 118 men, and the story traces the subsequent lives of their families (in particular, t…
(US, 1886–1975) Choose whichever of Stout's many Nero Wolfe books you come across, since (to the joy of his fans) they are all very similar to each other, but here are two to look out for: Some Buried Caesar (1938) and Before Midnight (1955). Nero Wolfe is one of literature's great detectives. He is hugely fat (and sits in a specially constructed chair), has his own gourmet co…
(US 1811–90) The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1851–2) catapulted Stowe to fame. Undoubtedly the most famous anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin became the best-seller of the nineteenth century and was a catalyst in dividing North and South in the American Civil War. Stowe made three tours of Europe where she developed important friendshi…
(US, 1950– ) Michael Swanwick is one of several authors who have moved steadily from traditional science fiction towards innovative forms of fantasy. His first novel, In the Drift (1984), is set in an alternate world in which the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant did in fact explode, leading to the familiar scenario of a radiation-blighted and quasi-feudal future United States. Stations…
(British, 1949– ) Swift was born in south London. He studied at Cambridge and York universities, and taught English until 1983, the year that saw publication of his most celebrated novel, Waterland. Like all his fiction, Waterland is concerned with the impact of the past on the present. Tom Crick, the narrator, is a history teacher, about to be pensioned off; the novel consists of his addre…
(Irish, 1667–1745) Born in Dublin, and a cousin of the poet John Dryden, Swift was educated at Trinity College. After working in various positions for the household of Sir William Temple in England and Ireland, he was ordained and given the prebend of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, where he later became dean. The author of numerous political pamphlets, he is best remembered for Gull…
(US, 1952– ) Amy Tan was born and educated in California and Switzerland, but her parents were immigrants from mainland China. Her interest in her own roots and identity forms the inspiration for her fiction, and has made Amy Tan one of the foremost of Chinese-American novelists. Her first novel was The Joy Luck Club (1989), a collection of interlocking narratives told by four Chinese mothe…
(Japanese, 1886–1965) Tanizaki combines in his work a nineteenth-century love of Romanticism with the utmost modernity. In his youth, he was much influenced by such writers as Baudelaire, Poe, and Wilde, and interested in stories about corruption and decadence. A novel such as Quicksand deals frankly with sexual matters. It was first published in serial form 1928–30, and in book form…
(US, 1963– ) Donna Tartt's first novel, The Secret History (1992), was both a commercial and literary success. It has been described appropriately as a ‘highbrow chiller’. The novel is set in a small college in Vermont, based on Tartt's own Bennington College. An élite group of Greek classics students murder a farmer for reasons both erudite and fantastica…
(British, 1912–75) Elizabeth Taylor described herself as someone to whom nothing sensational had ever happened, who appreciated routine. This perhaps accounts for the quiet brilliance of her writing. The ironically titled The Soul of Kindness (1964) is a study of emotional blindness in which Taylor displays a devastating ability to illuminate the secret interstices between image, self-image…
(British, 1897–1952) Elizabeth Macintosh wrote plays as Gordon Daviot and mysteries as Josephine Tey. She is generally regarded as one of the most interesting crime writers of her generation. In her explorations of unconventional relationships and sexuality, she is a clear predecessor of Ruth Rendell. Begin with To Love and Be Wise (1950), featuring the hero of five of her books, Inspector …
(British, 1811–63) Thackeray was born in India where his father was a senior civil servant. He was sent to England to be educated at Charterhouse, which he hated, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he lived dissolutely. As a young man he suffered from bad luck as well as bad management. He lost most of his inheritance. His wife suffered an incurable mental breakdown after the birth of th…
(British, 1890–1961) Thirkell was born in London, educated at St Paul's School, and began writing during the 1920s when she lived in Australia. Begin with her memoir of Victorian childhood, Three Houses (1931), which entertainingly sets the upper-class rural tone of much of her fiction. She is best known for her long series of novels depicting the lives and times of the gentry of Bar…
(British, 1914–53) Born in Swansea, Thomas worked as a journalist and broadcaster, earning a reputation as much for his flamboyant personality as his exuberant writing. Best known for his poetry and his verse play, Under Milk Wood, he was also an entertaining and affirmative story-teller. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) is a collection of largely autobiographical stories, recal…
(US, 1939–2005) Thompson worked for magazines and newspapers from the late 1950s onwards, becoming a seminal figure in the ‘New Journalism’ along with Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, introducing subjectivity and fictional techniques into reportage. Thompson's so-called ‘Gonzo’ writing used unrestrained language and deadpan commentary to capture an increasingl…
(US, 1906–77) Jim Thompson, often cited as a dime-store Dostoevsky, is the archetypal poet of modern noir writing. A hack of the original heyday of American paperback publishing, and an alcoholic, Thompson managed to imbue even his lesser commercial efforts with a deep sense of fatalism reminiscent of Greek tragedies, and, unsung in his lifetime, is now recognized as a major voice in Americ…
(British, 1956– ) Thorpe was brought up in India, Cameroon, and England, and now lives in France. A strong sense of place pervades his writing, particularly his brilliant first novel—and the one to start with—Ulverton (1992). The novel consists of twelve stories connected by their setting—the fictional, archetypal English village of Ulverton. The first story is set in 1…
(US, 1894–1961) Thurber was a diplomat in Paris before turning to journalism and becoming a regular contributor to the New Yorker. His collection of humorous sketches, My Life and Hard Times (1933) depicts a moneyed middle-class world of problems with servants and old college friends. The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) found Thurber's authentic manner, escapist fantasy,…
(British, 1936– ) Born in Liverpool and educated at Manchester University, Peter Tinniswood became a full-time writer in 1967. Begin with Uncle Mort's North Country (1986), a collection of bizarrely entertaining stories demonstrating his talent for black humour in northern English settings. The stories follow outings taken by the henpecked Carter Brandon and his misanthropically blun…
(Irish, 1955– ) Novelist and journalist, Tóibín has edited a collection of Irish fiction and written a travel book about Europe's Catholics. His writing deals with universal themes of death, loss, and the family but the rapid changes in Irish mores over the last fifty years inevitably influence his writing. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999, The Blackwater Lights…
(British, 1892–1973) Born in South Africa, Tolkien came to Britain at the age of 3 and was educated in Birmingham and then at Oxford, where he later enjoyed a long and distinguished career as Professor of Anglo-Saxon (1925–45) and Merton Professor of English (1945–59). During the 1930s Tolkien was a member of the literary society ‘The Inklings’ whose other member…
(Russian, 1828–1910) Tolstoy is arguably the greatest novelist of the nineteenth (or any other) century but his most famous work, War and Peace (1863–9), is a byword for that heavy to me you know you ought to read but never get round to. Which is unfair because Tolstoy's prose is crystal clear, the compulsive agonizings of his characters are superior soap opera, and his narra…
(US, 1937–69) John Kennedy Toole's second novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, was published posthumously. His mother fought to bring out the book, without success until she found Walker Percy, another Southern writer, who championed it and published excerpts in the New Orleans Review. It was finally published in 1979 to critical acclaim, and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981. To…
(French, 1924– ) Tournier has won international acclaim, and literary prizes within France for his novels and stories. In his fictional world myths, legends, religious and philosophical beliefs, and bizarre coincidences of plot are employed to reveal unexpected insights into events in the real world. Begin with The Erl King (1970) which traces the life of Abel Tiffauges, a huge French garag…
(British, 1946– ) Townsend lives in Leicester, and writes plays and novels; since she created her comic hero Adrian Mole in 1982, she has written a number of best-sellers. Begin with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾, a wonderfully funny teenage diary. Adrian Mole is anxious and self-conscious but hilariously lacking in self-knowledge; his reports on his parents' marria…
(British, 1941– ) Trapido was born in South Africa and has lived in England since 1963. In her first novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982), Katherine finds herself living in the bohemian family home of Jacob Goldman, her philosophy professor, and in love with his son. The affair ends badly and she flees to Rome, returning ten years later to discover that her life is still inextricab…