Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
(British, 1954– ) Born in London, de Bernières taught for a while in Columbia before turning his hand to fiction. After several moderately successful novels, Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994) was published, and the reading public fell in love with it, ensuring it was rarely out of the best-seller charts. Set in the isle of Cephalonia during the Second World War, it tells the s…
(US, 1907–2000) Over a long career, Sprague de Camp created some of the basic motifs and scenarios of modern fantasy and science fiction. In 1940, in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt, he began the Incomplete Enchanter series, in which modern scientists find themselves transported to the worlds of Norse, Irish, Finnish, or Renaissance myth, and have to survive by learning the underlying and…
(British, 1907–89) Daphne du Maurier must be counted one of the best and most prolific Gothic novelists in the twentieth-century British tradition. The stock elements of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction—haunted mansions, brooding landscapes, and mad women—are used with huge success in her fiction. Her most famous novel is Rebecca (1938), in which the heroine marries the hands…
(Irish, 1870–1911) Robert Tressell (pseudonym of Robert Noonan) was born in Dublin, but settled in Hastings, England, after a brief time in South Africa where he married and had a daughter. He was a member of the Social Democratic Foundation, a Marxist group, and made a living from housepainting and signwriting. His political beliefs and his experiences on the breadline were the inspiration…
(Irish, 1928– ) A highly respected short-story writer, novelist, and editor, Trevor has received numerous literary prizes and is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. His work features the seemingly ordinary, explored from an off-beat angle. His characters are often eccentric or borderline psychopaths. In his novel Felicia's Journey (1994), now a film, Hilditch preys on the pregn…
(British, 1815–82) Trollope was a prolific writer who enjoyed outstanding popularity in his own time. He worked for the Post Office and travelled extensively in the course of his work; he also introduced the pillar box to Britain. He published forty-seven novels and several works of non-fiction. Trollope was a realist who addressed the tensions and difficulties of nineteenth-century society…
(British, 1943– ) Joanna Trollope was born in Gloucestershire, educated at Oxford, and is a descendant of Anthony Trollope. Initially, she began writing historical romances such as Parson Harding's Daughter (1979), set in eighteenth-century India. However, she only began to achieve mass popularity when she moved to contemporary novels. Her first, The Choir (1988), is set in a sociali…
(Russian, 1818–83) After the radical press criticized him for his unflattering portrayal of the nihilist student Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (1862), and the right wing accused him of glorifying nihilism, Turgenev exiled himself to Europe, spending most of the rest of his life in Paris. Abroad, he longed for reform, for the ‘westernization’ of Russia. He was the first great Rus…
(US, 1949– ) Turow's work is several cuts above your usual legal thriller. If you like lots of plot twists dependent on legal niceties, you won't be disappointed in Presumed Innocent (1987) and The Burden of Proof (1990), as Turow draws on his experience as a partner in a Chicago law firm. But it's the moral and political intricacies which will really hook you. These ar…
(US, 1835–1910) ‘Mark Twain’ was the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, taken from the call of Mississippi river pilots. His two most famous books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), are both based upon Clemens's own boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, before the Civil War. Tom Sawyer is a children's classic, detailing a…
(US, 1941– ) Tyler is a popular writer, hose novels about ordinary American families are fresh, funny, and sad. There is often a misfit in the family, whose point of view is explored and validated; Tyler has sympathy for a wide range of characters. A Slipping Down Life (1969) shows a teenage girl becoming obsessed with a local rock singer, and marrying him; the fatalism here, the sense of i…
(Norwegian, 1882–1949) Undset had to relinquish her ambitions to be a painter after her father's death left her having to support herself from the age of 16. Her early novels, of which the most successful was Jenny, caused controversy through their frank portrayal of sexual love and infidelity. She is best known for her historical trilogy Kristin Lavran's Daughter (1920–…
(British, 1930– ) Unsworth was born into a mining family in Durham, and travelled and taught English as a foreign language before and during his early writing career. He currently lives in Italy. His novels are set in a wide range of historical and geographical locations, although they always grapple with current issues and ideas. He chooses the past because, he says, ‘You can shed a…
(US, 1932– ) Updike is a great American novelist; he's written over forty books, including stories, poems, essays, and autobiography, but his reputation rests chiefly on the Rabbit sequence. This quartet of novels is about Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, teenage basketball star of little education and no vocation, tracing his life from his early twenties through four decades to his death. U…
(US, 1916– ) Jack Vance is the most consistently successful of fantasy writers in the American or non-Tolkienian tradition, and has also written many works of ‘space opera’, adventurous science fiction often set in quasi-medieval worlds. Vance's fantasy career began with The Dying Earth (1950), a collection of stories set in a very distant future where science has becom…
(Peruvian, 1936– ) Mario Vargas Llosa is a journalist, essayist, and politician as well as a novelist, and ran as a Conservative candidate for the office of the Peruvian presidency. He began his career as a leftist, and early books like Time of the Hero (1962), a novel about the indoctrination process endured by military students in Lima, reflect these political concerns. He is best known f…
(French, 1828–1905) Jules Verne refused to take over his father's business, at one stage running off to sea and only being prevented after the boat had set sail. In the end, his father was indulgent enough to let him go to Paris where he wrote drama and poetry. Under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, Verne turned his attention to escapist adventures in prose. His characteristic techn…
(US, 1925– ) Born in Washington to a distinguished political family, Vidal has made great play with history and politics in his fiction. His major achievement is the quintet of historical novels tracing the United States from the War of Independence to the McCarthy era, mixing real and invented characters. Outstanding amongst them are Burr (1973), which re-creates the flamboyant life and ti…
(US, 1959– ) Born and educated in California, William T. Vollmann became known for an obsessive attraction to violence and danger, and his research has involved seeking out drug barons, torturers, and terrorists in war zones like Afghanistan and Bosnia. His first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), was a sprawling portrait of contemporary American life held together by a voice that r…
(US, 1922– ) Vonnegut's writing has been much influenced by science fiction. His work repeatedly attacks the way the human race is desecrating the planet. However, he refuses to create scapegoats and he uses an ironic humour which both allows the reader to pity the human condition and to acknowledge the absurd and the irrational. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) captures the flavour. The h…
(British, 1925–94) Born in Stoke-on-Trent, Wain studied at Oxford and lectured in English literature before writing full-time. His first novel, Hurry on Down (1953), was a significant landmark in post-war British fiction, being the first appearance of the irreverent, anti-establishment hero-as-clown figure, a precursor of the Angry Young Men. The picaresque, low-life adventures of Charles L…
(US, 1944– ) Walker's subject is the racial repression and segregation of black women. She was born into a sharecropper family in Georgia and uses that as a background to many of her more important works. In Meridian (1976) Walker first developed her strategy of ‘writing as quilt-making’. The novel is not a straightforward narrative but a series of short episodes told b…
(British, 1884–1941) Walpole was socially well-connected, a prolific and highly popular author of historical fiction, school stories, and comical Gothic tales. Many of his works now appear contrived and sentimental, but his best draw on personal experience and remain readable and moving. The Dark Forest (1916) has documentary detail from Walpole's own wartime Red Cross service in Rus…
(British, 1949– ) Each of Minette Walters's books is an intricate and compelling psychological thriller which leaves the reader guessing right to the end. She creates credible and fascinating characters and although her novels are often situated in the English village they explore disturbing territory far removed from that of traditional crime novels. The central character of The Scu…
(British, 1964– ) Born and raised in the Scottish Highlands, Warner now lives in Ireland. His first four novels are bizarre and strongly flavoured, set in a surreal Scotland where portentously named characters (the Devil's Advocate, the Knifegrinder) follow illogical plot-lines with fatalistic conviction. His language is colloquial Scots peppered with poetic inversions, invented word…
(British, 1946– ) As a historian and critic Warner is largely concerned with the power of myth and fantasy in shaping women's identities. These concerns are extended into her novels. The Lost Father (1988) is a semi-autobiographical account of a woman living in England who sets out to discover her family roots in southern Italy. Warner's prose has a slow, dreamy quality and sh…
(British, 1893–1978) Warner was born in Harrow, the daughter of a master at a public school. With her lifelong companion, Valentine Ackland, she went to Spain during the Civil War, then returned to Dorset where she spent most of the rest of her life. Original and ironic, Warner is an inventive story-teller with wide-ranging subject matter and a brilliant style. Begin with Lolly Willowes (19…
(US, 1905–89) Penn Warren was a distinguished man of letters, one of the pioneers of the New Criticism, who also became the United States’ first Poet Laureate. He was born in Kentucky, and his fiction reflects upon the history and psychology of the South; it tends towards the melodramatic, and often employs richly poetic prose. Night Rider (1939) is set at the turn of the century, an…
(British, 1929– ) As a young man Waterhouse left his native Leeds to work in Fleet Street, and has since combined journalism with novels, stage and television plays, and film-scripts (many of these in collaboration with Willis Hall). In Waterhouse's first novel, There is a Happy Land (1957), he captures the giddy joys and shuddering terrors of working-class childhood in a northern to…
(British, 1966– ) Sarah Waters writes well-plotted historical fiction which is full of convincing detail. Her central characters are women, and lesbian love affairs play an important role in the stories. Start with Fingersmith (2002, Booker shortlisted). In London in 1862, Susan Trinder is a young orphan raised by thieves and set up to con an heiress out of her fortune. Two very different f…
(British, 1903–66) Evelyn Waugh's first wife was also called Evelyn. To distinguish between them, they were known to their friends as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn: this risible situation, so ripe for muddle and farcical misunderstanding, might have been taken straight out of a Waugh novel—or put straight into one. Born in Hampstead to a middle-class literary family, Waugh read mod…
(US 1913–98) Of Jewish descent, Weidman was born in New York, where he graduated in law and worked in the garment industry in the 1930s. Begin with the slangy realism and hard-hitting dialogue of I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1937), arguably his best novel. Set like most of his fiction in New York, it concerns aruthlessly ambitious clothing manufacturer. The Enemy Camp (1958) tells of a J…
(British, 1933– ) Fay Weldon has been for nearly thirty years a prolific novelist, playwright, and polemicist. She used to work in an advertising agency, and is credited with inventing the slogan ‘Go to work on an egg’. She turns her gaze on women: their lives, emotions, and problems; their search for happiness. This chimed well with the rise of feminism and the foundation of …
(British, 1866–1946) Known as the father figure of British science fiction, Wells foresaw many of the technological advances that we have now made. As a result he mapped out much of the territory which science fiction has now made its own; time and space travel, alien invasions, and the desecration of the world and its resources. Begin with The Time Machine (1895) in which Wells foresees a …
(British, 1958– ) Raised in Edinburgh, Welsh left school at 16 to become a television repairman and then a housing officer, moving eventually to Amsterdam. Himself a former user, he authentically depicted heroin abuse in Trainspotting (1993), which explores the experiences, both blissful and devastating, of a group of unemployed Edinburgh youths as they veer in and out of addiction. Packed …
(US, 1909–2001) Eudora Welty won the Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist's Daughter (1972). A young woman, Laurel, returns to the Mississippi town where she grew up after her father's death, and gains some perspective on her father's remarriage, soon after her mother's death, to a much younger woman; and also on her own past. Many of Welty's books are centred …
(British, 1912–2002) Born in Englefield Green, Surrey, Mary Wesley was educated at the London School of Economics and worked at Bletchley Park during the war. She was 70 when she published her first novel, Jumping the Queue (1983). Begin with this blackly comic account of a well-to-do widow's obsession with suicide. She postpones the act after meeting a fugitive who is also on the po…
(US, 1907–98) West is a born-and-bred Boston lady. She began to write at a young age and went on to become one of a group of influential black writers and artists of the 1930s known as the Harlem Renaissance. Her most famous novel, The Living is Easy (1948), set at the turn of the century, deals with Cleo Jericho and her aspirations to become one of the Boston black social élite. The…
(Australian, 1916–99) West is famous especially for three books which became films, The Devil's Advocate (1959), filmed with John Mills in 1977, The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), the first of his Papal trilogy, and Vanishing Point (1996), a psychological thriller. His novels tackle ethical and moral questions in the well-researched international fields of finance, corrupt government…
(US 1903–40) Born in New York (real name, Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein), West was the original loner of contemporary American fiction, his work too savage and bleakly despondent—and too fantastical—to gain wide appeal during the Depression. His most accomplished novel, The Day of the Locust (1939), focuses on the lonely misfits drawn by the golden glitter of Hollywood, whose u…
(British, 1892–1983) Born in Ireland and educated in Edinburgh, Rebecca West (real name Cicily Isobel Fairfield) first wrote witty, irreverent journalism. Her novels explore women's lives from a psychological perspective. Begin with The Fountain Overflows (1957), an autobiographical novel telling the story of her journalist father's abandonment of his family and the subsequent…
(US, 1862–1937) Wharton is one of America's greatest novelists. She got off to a late start (like many women writers), for personal reasons; she was 38 when she published her first short novel. But by her death she'd published over forty books, novels, collections of stories (including some terrific ghost stories), poems, and books on travel, fiction, gardens, and architecture…
(British, 1899–1980) Antonia White (real name, Eirene Botting) was born in London and educated in a convent school, from which she was expelled. Later she worked as a journalist. Her first novel, Frost in May (1933), is strongly autobiographical, telling the story of 9-year-old Nanda, who is sent to a convent school and begins to write a novel about some spectacular sinners who will repent …
(Australian, 1912–90) Patrick White's style is slow-moving and repetitive, heavy with detail; but once a reader is submerged in the vast world of one of his novels, any sense of effort is forgotten. Start with The Tree of Man (1956); Stan and Amy Parker clear the native bush and build their own farm, have children, grow old. Each hopes for revelation and meaning; around them the dail…
(British, 1906–64) White, by profession a history teacher, achieved major success with his Arthurian tetralogy, The Once and Future King (1958). The first volume, The Sword in the Stone (1939), is an enchanting account of Arthur's boyhood education by Merlyn. The Queen of Air and Darkness (1940; originally The Witch in the Wood) moves into a more haunted world where Arthur unwittingl…
(US, 1941– ) Only the second African-American male to win the prestigious Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, Wideman has worked as a professor of English at various American universities, and currently holds this post at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has written novels, short stories, essays and a collection of memoirs, Brothers and Keepers (1984). The Homewood Books (198…
(Fingal O'Flahertie Wills) (Irish, 1854–1900) The son of an Irish surgeon and a political writer and journalist with literary connections, Wilde studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he first established his reputation for flamboyance. He travelled on a successful lecture-tour of America in 1882, and edited women's magazines in London. His onl…
(US, 1919–88) Charles Willeford, who served and was decorated in the Second World War, and who also wrote two volumes of military memoirs, was one of the most original of the American crime writers to emerge in the 1970s. His earlier books were gritty, hard-boiled noir tales full of femmes fatales and assorted grifters set amongst the dregs of America's subculture (High Priest of Cal…
(British, 1948– ) Williams has worked in television arts journalism and has written travel books as well as a series of comic novels. Begin with The Wimbledon Poisoner (1990), in which suburban husband Henry Farr makes increasingly desperate attempts to get rid of his feminist wife. The Wimbledon setting is common to a number of Williams's novels including the delightful They Came fr…
(British, 1895–1977) Born and educated in south London, Henry Williamson joined the army during the First World War, an experience vividly described in his novel A Patriot's Progress (1930), in which a City clerk named John Bullock suffers the hardships of trench warfare. Williamson's hatred of war led to him supporting Oswald Mosley and Hitler in the 1930s, for which he was i…
(British, 1913–91) Born in Bexhill, Sussex, Angus Wilson was educated at Oxford and served in intelligence during the war. In addition to his career as a leading post-war novelist, he worked in the reading room of the British Library and from 1966 was Professor of Literature at East Anglia University. Begin with Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), which brilliantly displays Wilson's sharpl…
(British, 1959– ) Winterson's first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (1985, Whitbread award), which was later adapted for television, draws on her own upbringing by Pentecostal Evangelists in Lancashire. The central character, Jess, is raised to become a successful preacher but in her teens falls in love with a young woman from the church community. The discovery of their sexual…
(Australian, 1960– ) Born in Perth, Winton has lived in France, Ireland, and Greece as well as Australia. Family, and relations between children and parents are central to his writing. Start with The Riders (1995, Booker Prize shortlisted). Scully's wife disappears, and he drags his daughter Billie from Ireland across Europe in a desperate search for her, feeling himself bereft and i…
(British, 1881–1975) Wodehouse is the greatest English comic writer of the twentieth century. Starting with The Pothunters in 1902, he wrote more than ninety novels and collections of short stories, as well as journalism, plays, and musicals. All his work shows an exuberant capacity for humorous invention, and a brilliant command of language—fans enjoy swapping examples of Wodehouse&…
(German, 1929– ) Born in Poland, Wolf moved to East Germany in 1945 where she joined the Communist Party. She spent three years working in a factory, believing that the experience would ground her fiction in contemporary society. Her first novel, Divided Heaven (1963), is a Marxist exploration of the working class in a divided Germany. Wolf received huge international success with her mytho…
(British, 1882–1941) Born and brought up in Kensington, the daughter of Leslie Stephen (later knighted), Virginia Stephen suffered her first nervous breakdown at the age of 13, following the death of her mother. She was to be plagued by debilitating depressions the rest of her life, perpetually in dread of what she called the old devil. Her marriage to Leonard Woolf was long and happy. Toge…
(US, 1915– ) Wouk is a best-selling author whose works have been adapted for film and television, notably the huge novels recapitulating events of the Second World War, The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978). They use traditional, panoramic fictional techniques, switching locations in the portrayal of battles, personal conflicts, and the Holocaust, but also freely mix real a…
(British, 1885–1941) Wren was born in Devon, and after graduating from Oxford his varied life included periods in the French Foreign Legion and the Indian Educational Service. Begin with his best-known book, Beau Geste (1924), in which Michael ‘Beau’ Geste enlists in the French Foreign Legion after being wrongfully suspected of a jewel theft. He is joined by his brothers Digby…
(US, 1908–60) Wright was born in Mississippi but brought up in an orphanage in Memphis, Tennessee. His work is strongly autobiographical and was a powerful influence on black writing in the 1930s. Uncle Tom's Children (1938) won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was followed by the best-selling Native Son (1940) in which a black youth is executed for the murder of a white girl. The no…
(British, 1903–69) Wyndham tried a variety of careers—farming, law, commercial art, advertising—while trying to make headway as a writer. He learnt his craft by contributing, under different names, pulp fiction to American magazines. His first novel, The Day of the Triffids (1951), had an immediate impact, and established him as the most skilful and imaginative English writer …
(Soviet/Russian, 1884–1937) Zamyatin was born in Lebedyan, and studied naval architecture in St Petersburg. He began writing following his imprisonment and subsequent deportation for taking part in the unsuccessful Revolution of 1905. A senior literary figure after the 1917 Revolution, his writing made him suspect and he emigrated to Paris around 1930. Begin with his only novel, We (…
(French, 1840–1902) The son of a French-Italian engineer, Zola is widely regarded as one of the founders of the modern ‘naturalistic’ novel. His output is dominated by twenty novels known as the Rougon-Macquart series, which follow the various members of a single family through all the different levels of nineteenth-century French society. Germinal (1885) is an account of a mi…
(Austrian, 1881–1942) Zweig is probably better known for his biographies than for his fiction; indeed he wrote a great deal of the former and relatively little of the latter. There is just one novel, Beware of Pity (1938; Engl. tr. 1982), a powerful psychological study of an officer's disastrous engagement to the crippled daughter of a wealthy friend, set in the dying years of the Au…