English language literature guide

This blog lists more than 450  

 

British (232),

American (177),

Australian (10),

New Zealand (8),

Canadian (24) and

South African (3)

 

literary authors and gives the title(s) of
their main writings. The objective is to stimulate reading of English language literature which is so wealthy and diverse due to its widespread geography and centuries-old history.  It aims at providing a short summary of the authors’  personal
history, literary style or orientation, as well as at least one title of their production.  It is based on Wikipedia information which was sorted out to provide a few essentials on each writer. The information on the writers is of varying length depending on the amount available in the research conducted. For additional information go to Wikipedia or other sources.

 

I. British literature

The XVth century

William Caxton (ca. 1415~1422 – ca. March 1492) was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. As far as is known, he was the first
English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England. He was also the first English retailer of printed books. He wasted no time in setting up a printing press in Bruges in collaboration with a Fleming, Colard Mansion, on which the first book to be printed in English was produced in 1473: Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a translation by Caxton himself. Caxton’s translation of the Golden Legend,
published in 1483, and The Book of the Knight in the Tower, published in 1484, contain perhaps the earliest verses of the Bible to be printed in English.

Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1405 – 14 March 1471) was an English writer, the author or compiler of Le Morte d’Arthur.

John Bourchier, 2nd Baron Berners (1467–1533) was a statesman and translator, born at Sherfield, Hertfordshire, England, to Si Humphrey
Bourchier and Elizabeth Tilney, and educated at Oxford University. He held various Offices of State, including that of Chancellor of the Exchequer to King Henry VIII, and Lieutenant of Calais. He translated, at the King’s desire, Froissart’s Chronicles (1523–1525), in such a manner as to make distinct advance in English historical writing, and the Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius (1534); also The History of Arthur of Lytell Brytain(Brittany), and the romance of Huon of Bordeaux.^[1]

XVIth century

The Humanists  

Thomas Linacre (or Lynaker) (c. 1460 – 20 October 1524) was an English humanist and physician, after whom Linacre College, Oxford and Linacre House The King’s School, Canterbury are named. He was one of the first Englishmen to study Greek in Italy, and brought back to his native country and his own university the lessons of the “New Learning“. Among his pupils was one—Erasmus—whose name alone would suffice to preserve the memory of his instructor in Greek. He was esteemed by a still wider circle of literary correspondents in all parts of Europe.
Linacre’s literary activity was displayed both in pure scholarship and in translation from Greek. In the domain of scholarship he was known by the rudiments of (Latin) grammar (Progymnasmata Grammatices vulgaria), composed in English, a revised version of which was made for the use of the Princess Mary, and afterwards translated into Latin by George Buchanan. He also wrote a work on Latin composition, De  emendata structura, Latini sermonis (“On the Pure and Correct Structure of Latin Prose”), which was published in London in 1524 and many times reprinted on the continent ofEurope.

William
Grocyn
(1446? – 1519) was an English scholar, a friend of Erasmus. He also counted Thomas Linacre, William Lilye, William Latimer and Thomas More among his friends, and Erasmus writing in 1514 says that he was supported by Grocyn in London, and calls him”the friend and preceptor of us all.” With the exception of a few lines of Latin verse on a lady who snowballed him, and a letter to Aldus Manutius at the head of Linacre’s translation of Proclus‘s  Sphaera (Venice, 1499), Grocyn left no literary proof of his scholarship.

John Colet (January 1467 – 10 September 1519) was an English churchman and educational pioneer. Colet was an English scholar, Renaissance humanist, theologian, and Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Colet wanted people to see the scripture as their guide through life. Furthermore, he wanted to restore theology and rejuvenate Christianity. He is an important early leader of Christian humanism as he linked humanism and reform. He influenced Erasmus, a key figure in Christian humanism. The Convocation sermon is one of the most well known of his sermons. Many opinions regarding Colet emerged due to this sermon, in addition to the biographical information described by Erasmus. Colet has been called a pseudo-Protestant that welcomed the Reformation back to a traditional Catholic based upon this sermon. While Colet is not as well known a Christian humanist as Erasmus, his writings are reflective of Christian humanism. In his writings, Colet refers to Italian humanists and Platonists Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. In addition to his sermons Colet’s works include some scriptural commentary and works entitled Daily
Devotions and Monition to a Godly Life. Together with Lily, Erasums, and Wolsey, Colet produced materials forming the basis of the authorized Latin Grammar, used for centuries in the English schools. A number of letters from Colet to Erasmus also survive.

Sir Thomas More (February 7, 1478 – July 6, 1535), also known by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important counsellor to Henry VIII of England and for three years toward the end of his life he was Lord Chancellor. He is recognised as a saint within the Catholic Church and is commemorated by the Church of England as a ‘Reformation martyr’. He was an opponent of the Protestant Reformation and in particular of Martin Luther and William Tyndale. More coined the word “utopia” – a name he gave to the ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in Utopia, published in 1516. The History of King Richard III is a Renaissance history, remarkable more for its literary skill and adherence to classical precepts than
for its historical accuracy. In 1528, More produced another religious polemic, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies that asserted that the Catholic Church was the one true Church, whose authority had been established by Christ and the Apostles, and that its traditions and practices were valid.
In 1529, the circulation of Simon Fish’s supplication for the Beggars provoked a response from More entitled, The Supplication of Souls. In 1531, William Tyndale published An Answer unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue in response to More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies. After having read Tyndale’s work, More wrote his half-a-million-word-long Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer over the next several months. The Confutation is
written as a dialogue between More and Tyndale in which More responds to each of Tyndale’s criticisms of Catholic rites and doctrines. These literary battles convinced More, who valued structure, tradition, and order in society above all else, that Lutheranism and the Protestant
Reformation in general were dangerous, not only to the Catholic faith but to the stability of society as a whole.

Sir Thomas Elyot (c. 1490 – 26 March 1546) was an English
diplomat and scholar. He
supplies, in the introduction to his Castell of Helth, a list of the
authors he had read in philosophy
and medicine, adding that a
“worshipful physician” (Thomas Linacre) read to
him from Galen and some other authors. Thomas Elyot was
a supporter of the humanists ideas concerning the education of women, writing
in support of learned women, he published the “Defence of Good Women.” In
this writing he supported Thomas More and other humanist authors’ ideals of
educated wives who would be able to provide intellectual companionship for
their husbands and educated moral training for their children. In 1531 he
produced The Boke named the
Governour, dedicated to King Henry VIII. It is a treatise on moral philosophy,
intended to direct the education of those destined to fill high positions, and
to inculcate those moral principles which alone could fit them for the
performance of their duties. The subject was a favourite one in the 16th
century, and the book, which contained many citations from classical authors,
was very popular. Elyot expressly acknowledges his obligations to Erasmus‘s
Institutio Principis Christiani but he makes no reference to the De
regno et regis institutione of Francesco Patrizzi (d. 1494), bishop of Gaeta,
on which his work was undoubtedly modelled. As a prose writer, Elyot enriched
the English language
with many new words. In 1536 he published The Castell of Helth, a popular
treatise on medicine, intended to place a scientific knowledge of the art
within the reach of those unacquainted with Greek.
This work, though scoffed at by the faculty, was appreciated by the general
public, and speedily went through seventeen editions. His Latin
Dictionary, the earliest comprehensive dictionary of the language,
was completed in 1538. His Image of Governance, compiled of the Actes and
Sentences notable of the most noble Emperor Alexander Severus (1540)
professed to be a translation from a Greek manuscript of the
emperor’s secretary Encolpius (or Eucolpius, as Elyot calls
him), which had been lent him by a gentleman of Naples, called Pudericus, who
asked to have it back before the translation was complete. In these
circumstances Elyot, as he asserts in his preface, supplied the other maxims
from different sources.

Sir John Cheke (16 June 1514 – 13 September 1557) was
an English
classical scholar and statesman, notable as the
first Regius Professor
of Greek
at Cambridge University. Many of Cheke’s works are
still in manuscript, some have been altogether lost. One of the most
interesting from a historical point of view is the Hurt of Sedition how
greneous it is to a Communeweith (1549), written on the occasion of Ket’s rebellion,
republished in 1569, 1576 and 1641, on the last occasion with a life of the
author by Gerard Langbaine. Others are D. Joannis Chrysostomi
homiliae duae (1543, the first entire Greek book known to have been
printed in England), D. Joannis Chrysostomi de providentia Dei (1545), The Gospel
according to St Matthew translated (c. 1550; ed. James Goodwin, 1843), De
obitu Martini Buceri (1551), (Pope Leo VI‘s) de Apparatu
bellico (Basel, 1554; but dedicated to Henry VIII, 1544), Carmen Heroicum, aut
epithium in Antonium Dencium (1551), De pronuntiatione
Graecae … linguae (Basel, 1555). He also translated several Greek works,
and lectured admirably upon Demosthenes.

Roger Ascham (c. 1515 – 23 December 1568) was an English
scholar and didactic writer, famous for his prose style, his promotion of the
vernacular, and his theories of education. He acted as Princess Elizabeth‘s
tutor in Greek and Latin between 1548–50, and served in the administrations of Edward VI, Mary I,
and Elizabeth I. Ascham’s first published work, Toxophilus (“Lover
of the Bow”) in 1545, was dedicated to Henry VIII. The objects of the book are
twofold, to commend the practice of shooting with the long bow as a manly sport
and an aid to national defence, and to set the example of a higher style of
composition than had yet been attempted in English. In 1563 Ascham began the
work The Scholemaster, published posthumously in 1570, which has
made him famous.

The Reform

William Tyndale (sometimes spelled Tindall, Tindill,
Tyndall; c. 1494 – 1536) was a 16th century scholar and translator who
became a leading figure in Protestant reformism towards the end of his life. He was
influenced by the work of Desiderius Erasmus, who
made the Greek New Testament available in Europe,
and Martin Luther.^[1]
Tyndale was the first to translate considerable parts of the Bible into English, for a public, lay readership. the first
to take advantage of the new medium of print,
which allowed for its wide distribution. Tyndale also wrote, in 1530, The Practyse of
Prelates, opposing Henry VIII‘s divorce on the grounds that it
contravened scriptural law.

Hugh Latimer (c. 1487 – 16 October 1555) was a Fellow of Clare College,
Cambridge, Bishop of
Worcester before the Reformation, and later Church of England chaplain
to King Edward VI. In 1555, under Queen Mary,
he was burnt at the stake, becoming one of the three Oxford Martyrs of Anglicanism.

John Foxe (1517^[1]
– 18 April 1587) was an English historian and martyrologist, the author of what
is popularly known as Foxe’s Book of
Martyrs, an account of Christian martyrs
throughout Western history but emphasizing the sufferings of English Protestants
and proto-Protestants from the fourteenth century through the reign of Mary I.
Widely owned and read by English Puritans, the book helped mould British popular opinion
about the Catholic Church
for several centuries.^[2]
July 1554. In
Strasbourg Foxe published a Latin history of the Christian persecutions, the
draft of which he had brought from England and “which became the
first shadowy draft of his Acts and Monuments.”^[21Foxe
also completed and had printed a religious drama, Christus Triumphans (1556), in
Latin verse. When his friend Knox attacked Mary Stuart in his now famous The First Blast of
the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, Foxe
apparently criticized Knox’s “rude vehemency,” although their
friendship seems to have remained unimpaired.^[27]
Foxe quickly became associated with John Day the printer and published works of
religious controversy while working on a new martyrology that would eventually
become the Actes and Monuments. On 20 March 1563, Foxe
published the first English edition of the Actes and Monuments from the press of John Day.^[34]
It was a “gigantic folio volume” of about 1800 pages, about
three times the length of the 1559 Latin book.^[35]
As is typical for the period, the full title was a paragraph long and is
abbreviated by scholars as Acts and Monuments,^[36]
although the book was popularly known then, as it is now, as Foxe’s Book of
Martyrs. Publication of the book made Foxe instantly
famous—-“England’s
first literary celebrity”-— . Nearly four times the length of the Bible,
the fourth edition was “the most physically imposing, complicated, and
technically demanding English book of its era. It seems safe to say that it is
the largest and most complicated book to appear during the first two or three
centuries of English printing history.

John Lyly (Lilly or Lylie) (c. 1553 or 1554 –
November 1606) was an English writer, best known for his books Euphues,The Anatomy of Wit
and Euphues and His England.
Lyly’s linguistic style, originating in his first books, is known as Euphuism. Euphues and
his England appeared in 1580, and, like the first part of the book, won
immediate popularity. For a time Lyly was the most successful and fashionable
of English writers, hailed as the author of “a new English,” as a
“raffineur de l’Anglois”; and, as Edward Blount, the editor
of his plays, tells us in 1632, “that beautie in court which could not
parley Euphuism was as little regarded as she which nowe there speakes not
French.” In 1632 Blount published Six Court Comedies, the first
printed collection of Lyly’s plays. Lyly’s other plays include Love’s Metamorphosis
(though printed in 1601, possibly Lyly’s earliest play — the surviving version
is likely a revision of the original), and The Woman in the Moon, first printed in 1597. Lyly’s dialogue is still a
long way removed from the dialogue of Shakespeare.
But at the same time it is a great advance in rapidity and resource upon
anything which had gone before it; it represents an important step in English dramatic
art. Lyly must also be considered and remembered as a primary influence on the
plays of William
Shakespeare, and in particular the romantic comedies. Love’s
Metamorphosis is a large influence on Love’s Labour’s
Lost, and Gallathea is a
major source for A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. In 2007, Primavera
Productions in London
are staging a reading of Gallathea, directed by Tom Littler, consciously
linking it to Shakespeare’s plays. They also claim an influence on Twelfth Night and As You Like It.

Sir Philip Sidney (30 November 1554 – 17 October 1586) was an
English poet, courtier and soldier, and is remembered as one of the most
prominent figures of the Elizabethan Age. His works include Astrophel and Stella, The Defence of Poetry (also known as The
Defence of Poesy or An Apology for
Poetry), and The Countess of
Pembroke’s Arcadia.

Robert Greene (11 July 1558 – 3 September 1592) was an English
author best known today for a posthumously published pamphlet attributed to
him, Greene’s
Groats-Worth of Wit, which may contain a polemic attack
on William
Shakespeare. He arguably became the first professional author in England. Greene
published in many genres including autobiography, plays, and romances,
while capitalizing on a scandalous reputation. By 1583 Greene had begun his
literary career with the publication of a long romance, Mamillia, licensed in 1580. He continued to produce romances
written in a highly wrought style, reaching his highest level in Pandosto (1588) and
Menaphon (1589). Short poems and songs incorporated in some of the romances
gave him high rank as a lyrical poet also. By rapid production of such works
Greene became one of the first authors in England to support himself with his
pen. Greene’s plays include The Scottish History
of James IV, Alphonsus, and
his greatest popular success, Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungay (c. 1589), as well as Orlando Furioso, based on Ludovico Ariosto‘s epic poem

Thomas Lodge (c. 1558 – September 1625) was an English
dramatist
and writer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
periods. Lodge in 1591 made a voyage with Thomas Cavendish to Brazil and the Straits of Magellan, returning home by 1593.
During the Canaries expedition, to beguile the tedium of his voyage, he
composed his prose tale of Rosalynde, Euphues Golden
Legacie, which, printed in 1590, afterwards furnished the story of Shakespeare‘s As You Like It. Before
starting on his second expedition he had published a historical romance, The History of Robert, Second Duke of Normandy,
surnamed Robert the Devil;
and he left behind him for publication Catharos Diogenes in his Singularity,
a discourse on the immorality of Athens
(London). Both
appeared in 1591. Another romance in the manner of Lyly, Euphues Shadow, the Battaile of the Sences (1592),
appeared while Lodge was still on his travels. He had already written The Wounds of Civil
War (produced perhaps as early as 1587, and published in 1594. In the latter part
of his life—possibly about 1596, when he published his Wits Miserie and the World’s Madnesse, which is
dated from Low Leyton in Essex, and the religious tract Prosopopeia (if,
as seems probable, it was his), in which he repents him of his “lewd
lines” of other days—he became a Catholic. His second
historical romance, the Life and Death of William
Longbeard (1593), was more successful than the first. Lodge also
brought back with him from the new world A Margarite
of America (published 1596), a romance of the same description
interspersed with many lyrics.

Thomas Nashe (November 1567 – c. 1601) was an English
Elizabethan
pamphleteer, playwright,
poet and satirist. He arrived in London
with his one exercise in euphuism,
The Anatomy of Absurdity. His first appearance in print was, however,
his preface to Robert Greene‘s Menaphon, which
offers a brief definition of art and overview of contemporary literature. The
anti-Martinist An Almond for a Parrot (1590), ostensibly
credited to one “Cutbert Curry-knave,” is now universally recognized
as Nashe’s work. In October 1592 he wrote an entertainment called Summer’s Last Will
and Testament. He was alive in 1599, when his last known
work, Nashes Lenten Stuffe, was published.

Thomas Deloney (1543 – April 1600) was an English
novelist
and balladist.
Of his novels, Thomas of Reading
is in honour of clothiers,^[1]
Jack of Newbury
celebrates weaving, and The Gentle Craft
is dedicated to the praise of shoemakers.

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616)^{[nb 1]}
was an English poet and playwright, widely
regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the
world’s pre-eminent dramatist.^[1]
He is often called England’s
national poet
and the “Bard of Avon”.^{[2][nb 2]}
His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays,^{[nb 3]}
154 sonnets, two long narrative poems,
and several other poems. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between
1589 and 1613.^{[5][nb 4]}
His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication
and artistry by the end of the 16th century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear,
and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English
language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and
collaborated with other playwrights. His plays remain highly popular today and
are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and
political contexts throughout the world. The first recorded works of
Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI,
written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Titus Andronicus,

The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the
Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of
Verona may also belong to Shakespeare’s earliest period.^[72[79]
A Midsummer Night’s
Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and
comic lowlife scenes.^[80]
Shakespeare’s next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a
portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects
Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.^[81]
The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About
Nothing,^[82]
the charming rural setting of As You Like It,
and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare’s sequence of great comedies.^[
Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s: This
period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet,
the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death;^[85]
and Julius Caesar. In the early 17th
century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called “problem plays” Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida,
and All’s Well That Ends
Well and a number of his best known tragedies.^[88]
Many critics believe that Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies represent the peak
of his art: Hamlet,
Othello and King Lear, Macbeth.
His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra
and Coriolanus,
contain some of Shakespeare’s finest poetry and were considered his most
successful tragedies. In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed
three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale
and The Tempest,
as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of
Tyre. Shakespeare
collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble
Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.^[99]
Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of
Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works to be printed.

Thomas Dekker (c. 1572 – 25 August 1632) was an English Elizabethan
dramatist
and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer whose career spanned several
decades and brought him into contact with many of the period’s most famous
dramatists. Most of Dekker’s work is lost. His apparently disordered life, and
his lack of a firm connection (such as Shakespeare
or Fletcher had) with a single company may
have militated against the preservation or publication of manuscripts. Close to
twenty of his plays were published during his lifetime; of these, more than
half are comedies, with three significant tragedies, Lust’s Dominion
(presumably identical to The Spanish Moor’s Tragedy, written with Day,
Marston, and William Haughton,
1600) The Witch of
Edmonton (with Ford and
Rowley, 1621), and The Virgin Martyr
(with Massinger, 1620). 1599 also saw the production of three plays that have
survived. It was during this year that he produced his most famous work, The Shoemaker’s
Holiday, or the Gentle Craft,
categorised by modern critics as citizen comedy. After 1608, Dekker produced
his most popular pamphlets: The Bellman of London), Lanthorne and
Candle-light, Villainies Discovered by Candlelight, and English
Villainies. They owe their form and many of their incidents to similar
pamphlets by Robert Greene.

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount
Saint Alban,^[1](22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English
philosopher,
statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and father of the scientific
method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of
England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely
influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and
practitioner of the scientific method
and pioneer in the scientific
revolution.

Bacon
has been called the father of empiricism.
In his magnum opus,
Novum Organum, or
“new instrument”, Francis Bacon argued that although philosophy at
the time mainly used deductive syllogisms to interpret nature, mainly owing to Aristotle’s
logic (or Organon),
the philosopher
should instead proceed through inductive reasoning
from fact to axiom to physical law. Derived
through use of his methods, Bacon explicated his somewhat fragmentary ethical
system in the seventh and eighth books of his De augmentis scientiarum
(1623) – where he distinguished between duty to the community, an ethical
matter, and duty to God, a
religious matter. Later under King James, Bacon wrote The Advancement of
Learning. Bacon’s works include his Essays, as well as the Colours of Good
and Evil and the Meditationes Sacrae, all published in
1597. His famous aphorism,
“knowledge is power“, is found in the Meditations. He
published Of the Proficience
and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human in 1605.
Bacon also wrote In felicem memoriam Elizabethae, a eulogy for the queen written in 1609; and
various philosophical works which constitute the fragmentary and incomplete Instauratio
magna (Great Renewal), the most important part of which is the Novum Organum (New
Instrument, published 1620); in this work he cites three world-changing
inventions:

“Printing,
gunpowder and the compass. A year prior
to the release of New Atlantis, Bacon
published an essay that reveals a version of himself not often seen in history.
This essay, a lesser-known work entitled, An Advertisement
Touching a Holy War, advocated the elimination of detrimental societal
elements by the English and compared this to the endeavors of Hercules while
establishing civilized society in ancient Greece. In 1623 Bacon expressed his
aspirations and ideals in New Atlantis. Released in 1627, this was his
creation of an ideal land where “generosity and enlightenment, dignity and
splendor, piety and public spirit” were the commonly held qualities of the
inhabitants of Bensalem. In this work, he portrayed a vision of the future of
human discovery and knowledge.

Robert Burton (8 February 1577 – 25 January 1640)
was an English
scholar
at Oxford University, best known for the classic The Anatomy of
Melancholy. Burton’s Melancholy
focuses sharply on the self; unlike Bacon, Burton assumes that knowledge of psychology,
not natural science, is humankind’s greatest need. His enormous treatise is
considered “delightful” by critics; it examines in encyclopedic
detail the ubiquitous Jacobean malady, melancholy, supposedly caused by an
excess of “black bile,” according to the humor theory fashionable
at the time.^[2]

The  XVIIth century

Sir Thomas Browne (19 October 1605 – 19 October 1682) was an English
author of varied works who revealed his wide learning in diverse fields
including medicine,
religion, science and the esoteric.
Browne’s writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world,
influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian
enquiry, while his Christian faith exuded tolerance and goodwill towards humanity
in an often intolerant era. A consummate literary craftsman, Browne’s works are
permeated by frequent reference to Classical
and Biblical
sources and to his own highly idiosyncratic personality. His literary style
varies according to genre resulting in a rich, unusual prose that ranges from rough notebook
observations to the highest baroque eloquence. Although he was described as
suffering from melancholia,
Browne’s writings are also characterised by wit and subtle humour. His first
well-known work bore the Latin title Religio Medici (The
Religion of a Physician). In 1646, Browne published the encyclopaedia,
Pseudodoxia
Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very many Received Tenets, and
commonly Presumed Truths, whose title refers to the prevalence of
false beliefs and “vulgar errors.” A sceptical work that debunks a
number of legends circulating at the time in a paradoxical
and witty manner; it displays the Baconian
side of Browne—the side that was unafraid of what at the time was still called
“the new learning“. The book is significant
in the history of science, because its arguments were some of the first to cast
doubt on the widely-believed hypothesis of spontaneous
generation or abiogenesis.
Browne’s last publication during his life-time (1658) was two philosophical
Discourses which are intrinsically related to each other; the first Hydriotaphia, Urn
Burial or a Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in
Norfolk, occasioned by the discovery of some Bronze Age burials in
earthenware vessels found in Norfolk
inspired Browne to meditate upon the funerary
customs of the world and the fleetingness of earthly fame and reputation.
Browne is widely considered one of the most original writers in the English
language.

Jeremy Taylor (15 August 1613 – 13 August 1667) was
a clergyman
in the Church of England
who achieved fame as an author during the Protectorate
of Oliver Cromwell.
He is sometimes known as the “Shakespeare of Divines” for his poetic
style of expression and was often presented as a model of prose writing.
serious consequences followed his attachment to the Royalist cause. The author
of The Sacred Order and Offices of Episcopacy or Episcopacy Asserted against
the Arians and Acephali New and Old (1642), could scarcely hope to retain
his parish, which was not, however, sequestrated until 1644. The Rule and
Exercises of Holy Living provided a manual of Christian practice,
which has retained its place with devout readers. Holy Dying was perhaps
even more popular. A very charming piece of work of a lighter kind was inspired
by a question from his friend, Mrs Katherine Phillips (the matchless Orinda),
asking How far is a dear and perfect friendship authorized by the principles
of Christianity? In answer to this he dedicated to the most ingenious and
excellent Mrs Katherine Phillips his Discourse of the Nature, Offices and
Measures of Friendship (1657). His Ductor Dubitantium, or the
Rule of Conscience . . . (1660) was intended to be the standard manual of casuistry and ethics for
the Christian people.^[3]
Jeremy Taylor is best known as a prose stylist; his chief fame is the result of
his twin devotional manual, Holy Living and Holy
Dying. (The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living, 1650
and The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying, 1651).

Richard Baxter (12 November 1615 – 8 December 1691)
was an English Puritan church leader,
poet, hymn-writer,^[1]
theologian,
and controversialist.
Dean Stanley called him “the chief of
English Protestant Schoolmen”. After some false starts, he made his
reputation by his ministry at Kidderminster, and at
around the same time began a long and prolific career as theological writer. In
1647, Baxter was staying at the home of Lady Rouse, wife of Sir Thomas Rouse,
1st Baronet, of Rouse Lench in Warwickshire. There, though debilated
by illness, he wrote the most of a major work, The Saints’ Everlasting
Rest (1650).^[3]
Baxter’s health had grown even worse, yet this was the period of his greatest
activity as a writer. He wrote 168 or so separate works, including major
treatises such as the Christian Directory, the Methodus
Theologiae Christianae, and the Catholic Theology. His Breviate of the
Life of Mrs Margaret Baxter records the virtues of his wife. A slim
devotional work published in 1658 under the title Call to the
Unconverted to Turn and Live formed one of the
core extra-biblical texts of evangelicalism until at
least the middle of the nineteenth century.

John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English
poet, polemicist,
and civil servant for the Commonwealth of
England. He is best known for his epic poem
Paradise Lost. He was a scholarly man of letters,
a polemical writer, and an official serving under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote
at a time of religious flux and political upheaval in England, and his poetry
and prose reflect deep convictions and deal with contemporary issues, such as
his treatise condemning licensing, Areopagitica. As well
as English, he wrote in Latin and Italian, and had an international reputation
during his lifetime. He remains generally regarded “as one of the
preeminent writers in the English language and as a thinker of world
importance.”^[2]

Thomas Fuller (1608 – 16 August 1661) was an English
churchman and historian. He is now remembered for his writings, particularly
his Worthies of England, published after his death. He was a
prolific author, and one of the first English writers able to live by his pen
(and his many patrons). In 1631, he published a poem on the subject of David
and Bathsheba, entitled David’s
Heinous Sinne, Heartie Repentance, Heavie Punishment. At Broadwindsor he
compiled The Historie of the Holy Warre (1639), a history of the crusades, and The Holy State
and the Prophane State (1642). This work describes the holy state as
existing in the family and in public life, gives rules of conduct, model
“characters” for the various professions and profane biographies. It
was perhaps the most popular of all his writings. His first published volume of
sermons appeared in 1640 under the title of Joseph’s party-coloured
Coat. Fuller was thus able to prosecute his literary labours, producing
successively his descriptive geography of the Holy Land,
called A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650), and his Church-History of
Britain (1655), from the birth of Jesus Christ until the year 1648.

With
the Church-History was printed The History of the University of
Cambridge since the Conquest and The History of Waltham Abbey

Izaak Walton (9 August 1593 – 15 December 1683) was
an English writer.
Best known as the author of The Compleat Angler, he also
wrote a number of short biographies which have been collected under the title
of Walton’s Lives. The first edition of his famous book The Compleat
Angler was published in 1653. The full title of Walton’s book of short
biographies is, Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich’d Hooker, George
Herbert, &C. Walton also rendered affectionate service to the memory of
his friends Sir John Skeffington and John Chalkhill, editing
with prefatory notices Skeffington’s Hero of Lorenzo in 1652 and
Chalkhill’s Thealma and Clearchus a few months before his own death in
1683. His poems and prose fragments were collected in 1878 under the title of Waltoniana.

Sir Kenelm Digby (July 11, 1603 – June 11, 1665) was an
English
courtier and diplomat. He was also a
highly reputed natural philosopher, and known as a leading Roman Catholic
intellectual and Blackloist. For his versatility, Anthony à Wood
called him the “magazine of all arts”.^[1]
Digby published a work of apologetics
in 1638, A
Conference with a Lady about choice of a Religion. In it he argued that the
Catholic Church, possessing alone the qualifications of universality, unity of
doctrine and uninterrupted apostolic
succession, is the only true church, and that the intrusion of error
into it is impossible. In 1644 he published together two major philosophical
treatises, The Nature of Bodies and On the
Immortality of Reasonable Souls. The latter was translated into Latin in
1661 by John Leyburn.
These Two Treatises were his major natural-philosophical works, and
showed a combination of Aristotelianism
and atomism.^[14]
Digby is known for the publication of a cookbook, The Closet of the
Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Knight Opened

James Harrington (or Harington) (3 January
1611 – 11 September 1677) was an English political theorist of classical
republicanism,^[1]
best known for his controversial work, The Commonwealth of
Oceana (1656).

William
Temple (Born: 1628- Died : 1699)

An English diplomat and essay writer. William Temple
negotiated the Triple Alliance (1688) of England,
Holland and Sweden
against France.
He was an outstanding essay writer and retired to Moor Park
to write his memoirs. His wife (1627-1694) was a notable letter-writer and 42
of her letters were published in T P Courtney’s Life of William Temple. Lord
Macaulay wrote an essay about them in the Edinburgh Review. ﾠWilliam Temple’s famous essay Upon the
Gardens of Epicurus: or Of Gardening, in the Year 1685

Abraham Cowley (1618 – 28 July 1667) was an English
poet born in the City of London late in
1618. He was one of the leading English poets of the 17th century, with 14
printings of his Works published between 1668 and 1721.^[1]
As early as 1628, that is, in his tenth year, he composed his Tragicall
History of Piramus and Thisbe, an epic romance written in a six-line
stanza, a style of his own invention. It is not too much to say that this work
is the most astonishing feat of imaginative precocity on record; it is marked
by no great faults of immaturity, and possesses constructive merits of a very
high order. Two years later the child wrote another and still more ambitious
poem, Constantia and Philetus, being sent about the same time to Westminster School. Here
he displayed extraordinary mental precocity and versatility, and wrote in his
thirteenth year the Elegy on the Death of Dudley, Lord Carlton. These three
poems of considerable size, and some smaller ones, were collected in 1633, and
published in a volume entitled Poetical Blossoms, dedicated to the
head master of the school, and prefaced by many laudatory verses by schoolfellows.
The author at once became famous, although he had not, even yet, completed his
fifteenth year. His next composition was a pastoral comedy, entitled Love’s Riddle. In 1637
Cowley was elected into Trinity College,
Cambridge. It was about this time that he composed his scriptural
epic on the history of King David, one book of which still exists in the Latin original,
the rest being superseded in favour of an English version in four books, called
the Davideis, which were published after his death. The epic, written in
a very dreary and turgid manner, but in good rhymed heroic verse, deals with
the adventures of King David from his boyhood to the smiting of Amalek by Saul,
where it abruptly closes. In 1638 Love’s Riddle and a Latin comedy, the Naufragium
Joculare, were printed, and in 1641 the passage of Prince Charles through Cambridge gave occasion
to the production of another dramatic work, The Guardian, which was
acted before the royal visitor with much success.

John Evelyn (31 October 1620 – 27 February 1706)
was an English
writer, gardener and diarist. Evelyn’s diaries or Memoirs
are largely contemporaneous with those of the other noted diarist of the time, Samuel Pepys, and cast
considerable light on the art, culture and politics of the time (he witnessed
the deaths of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, the last Great Plague of
London, and the Great Fire of
London in 1666). It was after the Restoration that Evelyn’s career really took
off. In 1660, Evelyn was a member of the group that founded the Royal Society. The
following year, he wrote the Fumifugium (or The
Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated), the first
book written on the growing air pollution problem in London. Evelyn was a prolific author and
produced books on subjects as diverse as theology, numismatics, politics,
horticulture, architecture and vegetarianism, and he cultivated links with
contemporaries across the spectrum of Stuart political and cultural life. His
daughter Maria Evelyn (1665–1685) is sometimes acknowledged as the
pseudonymous author of the book Mundus Muliebris of 1690. Mundus
Muliebris: or, The Ladies Dressing Room Unlock’d and Her Toilette Spread. In
Burlesque. Together with the Fop-Dictionary, Compiled for the Use of the Fair
Sex is a satirical guide in verse to Francophile fashion and terminology,
and its authorship is often jointly credited to John Evelyn, who seems to have
edited the work for press after his daughter’s death.

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of
Clarendon (18 February
1609 – 9 December 1674) was an English historian
and statesman, and grandfather of two English monarchs, Mary II and Queen Anne. in 1649 to 1651. It was during this
period that Hyde began to write his great history of the Civil War. As Lord
Chancellor, it is commonly thought that Clarendon was the author of the “Clarendon Code“,
designed to preserve the supremacy of the Church of England. Forced
to flee to France
in November, 1667. He spent the rest of his life in exile, working on the History of the
Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, his classic account of the English Civil War.

Gilbert Burnet (18 September 1643 – 17 March 1715)
was a Scottish theologian and historian, and Bishop of Salisbury.
He was fluent in Dutch, French,
Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew. Burnet was respected as a cleric, a
preacher, and an academic, as well as a writer and historian. He was associated
with the Whig party.In 1679 his first
volume of The History of the Reformation of the Church of England was
published. This covered the reign of Henry VIII; the second volume (1681)
covered the reign of Elizabeth and the Elizabethan Religious Settlement (the
third volume (1714) consisted of corrections and additional material).
For over a century this was the standard reference work in the field,
although Catholics
disputed some of its content. Burnet began his History of My Own Time in 1683,
covering the English Civil War
and the Commonwealth of
England to the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713.
The first volume was published in 1724, ending before the Glorious Revolution.
In 1734 the second volume was published, taking the History to the
Treaty of Utrecht.^[1]
A critical edition in six volumes with numerous footnotes was edited by Martin Routh and published
by Oxford University Press in 1823 (updated 1833).

Isaac Barrow (October 1630 – 4 May 1677) was an English Christian theologian, and mathematician who is
generally given credit for his early role in the development of infinitesimal
calculus; in particular, for the discovery of the fundamental
theorem of calculus. His work centered on the properties of the tangent; Barrow was the first to calculate
the tangents of the kappa curve.
Isaac Newton was a student
of Barrow’s, and Newton
went on to develop calculus
in a modern form. In 1669 he resigned his professorship in favour of Isaac Newton.^[3]
About this time, Barrow composed his Expositions of the Creed, The Lord’s
Prayer, Decalogue, and Sacraments. For the remainder of his life he
devoted himself to the study of divinity.
Besides the works above mentioned, he wrote other important treatises on
mathematics, but in literature his place is chiefly supported by his sermons,
which are masterpieces of argumentative eloquence, while his treatise on the Pope’s Supremacy is regarded
as one of the most perfect specimens of controversy in existence.

John
Tillotson (1630 – 1694) In 1664 he became
preacher at Lincoln’s Inn.
The same year he married Elizabeth French, a niece of Oliver Cromwell. In 1663
he published a characteristic sermon on “The Wisdom of being
Religious,” and in 1666 replied to John Sergeant‘s Sure Footing in
Christianity by a pamphlet on the “Rule of Faith.” The same year
he received the degree of D.D. In 1675 he edited John Wilkins‘s Principles of
Natural Religion, completing what was left unfinished of it, and in 1682
his Sermons. Along with Burnet, Tillotson attended William Russell,
Lord Russell on the scaffold in 1683. In 1684, he wrote a Discourse
against Transubstantiation.

Robert South (1634 – 1716) He was the son of
Robert South, a London
merchant, and Elizabeth Berry. He was born at Hackney, Middlesex, and was
educated at Westminster School
and at Christ Church,
Oxford. Before taking orders in 1658 he was a champion of Calvinism against Socinianism and Arminianism. He also
showed a leaning to Presbyterianism,
but on the approach of the Restoration his views on church government
underwent a change; he was regarded by many as a time-server, though not
necessarily a self-seeker. A zealous advocate of the doctrine of passive
obedience, he strongly opposed the Toleration Act, declaiming in unmeasured terms
against the various Nonconformist sects. In 1676 he was appointed chaplain to Lawrence Hyde, Earl of Rochester,
ambassador-extraordinary to the king of Poland,
and he sent an account of his visit to Edward Pococke in a
letter, dated Dantzic,
16 December 1677, which was printed along with South’s Posthumous Works in 1717.

John Bunyan (28 November 1628 – 31 August 1688) was an
English Christian writer and preacher, famous for writing Pilgrim’s Progress.

Thomas Ellwood (1639–1713) was an English
religious writer. His best-known work, Davideis (1712), is a
poem about the life of King David. His autobiography, The History of
the Life of Thomas Ellwood, published posthumously, is a valuable
historical document.

In
the XVIIIe century

Bourgeois literature

Daniel Defoe (ca. 1659-1661 – 24 April
1731^[1]), born Daniel Foe,
was an English writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained
fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest
proponents of the novel,
as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and is among the founders
of the English novel.^[2]
A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than 500 books, pamphlets and
journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage,
psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism.
Defoe’s next novel was Captain Singleton
(1720), a bipartite adventure story whose first half covers a traversal of Africa and whose second half taps into the contemporary
fascination with piracy. Colonel Jack (1722) follows an orphaned boy
from a life of poverty and crime to colonial prosperity, military and marital
imbroglios and religious conversion, always driven by a quaint and misguided
notion of becoming a gentleman. Also in 1722, Defoe wrote Moll Flanders, another
first-person picaresque novel
of the fall and eventual redemption of a lone woman in seventeenth-century England.
Defoe’s final novel Roxana: The
Fortunate Mistress (1724) are examples of the remarkable way in
which Defoe seems to inhabit his fictional (yet “drawn from life”)
characters, not least in that they are women. The latter narrates the moral and
spiritual decline of a high society courtesan.

Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English
essayist,
poet, playwright
and politician. He was a man of letters, eldest son of Lancelot Addison.
His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele,
with whom he founded The Spectator magazine. In 1713 Addison’s tragedy Cato
was produced, and was received with acclamation by both Whigs and Tories. He
followed this effort with a comedic play, The Drummer. His last
undertaking was The Freeholder, a party paper (1715–16). In 1712, Addison wrote his most famous work of fiction, Cato, a Tragedy. Based on the last days of Marcus Porcius
Cato Uticensis, it deals with, inter alia, such themes as
individual liberty versus government tyranny, Republicanism
versus Monarchism,
logic versus emotion and Cato’s personal struggle to cleave to his beliefs in
the face of death. It has a prologue written by Alexander Pope
and an epilogue by Dr. Garth.

Sir Richard Steele (bap. 12 March 1672 – 1 September
1729) was an Irish writer and politician, remembered as
co-founder, with his friend Joseph Addison, of the magazine The Spectator.
in 1701,
Steele published his first booklet entitled “The Christian Hero,”
which was written while Steele was serving in the army, and was his idea of a
pamphlet of moral instruction. “The Christian Hero” was ultimately
ridiculed for what some thought was hypocrisy because he did not necessarily
follow his own preaching. He was criticized for publishing a booklet about
morals when he, himself, enjoyed drinking, occasional dueling, and debauchery
around town. Steele wrote a comedy that same year titled The Funeral. This
play was met with wide success and was performed at Drury Lane, bringing him to the attention
of the King and the Whig party. Next, Steele wrote The Lying Lover, which was
one of the first sentimental comedies, but was a failure on stage. In 1705,
Steele wrote The Tender Husband with Addison’s
contributions, and later that year wrote the prologue to The Mistake, by John
Vanbrugh, also an important member of the Whig Kit-Kat Club with Addison and
Steele.

Classicism

Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745)
was an Anglo-Irish^[1]
satirist,
essayist,
political pamphleteer
(first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He is
remembered for works such as Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal,
A Journal to Stella, Drapier’s Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing
Christianity, and A Tale of a Tub.
Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language,
and is less well known for his poetry.
Swift originally published all of his works under pseudonyms—such
as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff,
M.B. Drapier—or anonymously. He is also known
for being a master of two styles of satire: the Horatian
and Juvenalian styles. During his visits to England in
these years Swift published A Tale of a Tub
and The Battle of the Books (1704) and began to
gain a reputation as a writer. This led to close, lifelong friendships with Alexander Pope,
John Gay,
and John Arbuthnot,
forming the core of the Martinus Scriblerus Club
(founded in 1713). Swift was part of the inner circle of the Tory government
and recorded his experiences and thoughts during this difficult time in a long
series of letters to Esther Johnson, later collected and published as The
Journal to Stella. Once in Ireland,
however, Swift began to turn his pamphleteering skills in support of Irish
causes, producing some of his most memorable works: Proposal for Universal
Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), Drapier’s Letters (1724), and A
Modest Proposal (1729), earning him the status of an Irish patriot. Also
during these years, he began writing his masterpiece, Travels into Several
Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a
surgeon, and then a captain of several ships, better known as Gulliver’s Travels. Much of the material
reflects his political experiences of the preceding decade

Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 [O.S. 7 September] – 13 December
1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson, was a British author who made
lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist,
moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer
and has been described as “arguably the most distinguished man of letters
in English history”. After
nine years of work, Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language
was published in 1755; it had a far-reaching effect on Modern English
and has been described as “one of the greatest single achievements of
scholarship.” In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later
travelled to Scotland;
Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive
and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English
Poets, a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th- and
18th-century poets.

Sentimental literature

Samuel Richardson (19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761) was an
18th-century English
writer
and printer. He is best known for his three epistolary novels:
Pamela: Or, Virtue
Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the
History of a Young Lady (1748) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison
(1753). Richardson made the
transition from master printer to novelist on 6 November 1740 with the
publication of Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded.[30]
Pamela was sometimes regarded as “the first English novel”. In
September 1741, a
sequel of Pamela called Pamela’s Conduct in High Life was
published by Ward and Chandler.^[37]
Although the work lacks the literary merits of the original, Richardson was compelled to publish two more
volumes in December 1741 to tell of further exploits of Pamela, the title
heroine, while “in her Exalted Condition”.^[38]
The public’s interest in the characters was waning, and this was only furthered
by Richardson’s
focusing on Pamela discussing morality, literature, and philosophy.^[38]
By 1748 his novel Clarissa was published in full: two volumes appeared
in November 1747, two in April 1748, and three in December 1748.^[
was soon considered Richardson’s “masterpiece”, his greatest work,^[54]
and was rapidly translated into French^[55]
in part or in full, for instance by the abbé Antoine François Prévost, as well as into
German.^[56]
In England there was
particular emphasis on Richardson’s
“natural creativity” and his ability to incorporate daily life
experience into the novel.^[57Near
the end of 1751, Richardson
sent a draft of the novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison.

Robert Paltock (1697–1767) was a novelist and attorney. His most
famous work is The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, a Cornish Man (1751), somewhat
on the same plan as Robinson Crusoe, the special feature being
the gawry, or flying woman.

Sarah Fielding (8 November 1710 – 9 April 1768) was a
British
author and sister of the novelist Henry Fielding.
She was the author of The Governess, or The Little Female
Academy (1749), which was the first novel in English written
especially for children (children’s literature), and had earlier
achieved success with her novel The Adventures of
David Simple (1744).^[1]
In 1744, Sarah published a novel, The Adventures of
David Simple. As was the habit, it was published anonymously.
The novel was quite successful and gathered praise from contemporaries,
including the publisher and novelist Samuel Richardson.
David Simple was one of the earliest sentimental novels,
featuring a wayfaring hero in search of true friendship who triumphs by good
nature and moral strength. He finds happiness in marriage and a rural, bucolic
life, away from the corruptions of the city. David Simple is an analog, in a
sense, to the figure of Heartsfree, in Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild
and Squire Allworthy in his Tom Jones. However, he
also shares characteristics with other sentimental figures who find their peace
only with escape from corruption and the harmony of a new Utopia. In her Volume
the Last, however, Sarah’s fiction, like Henry’s, is darker and shows less
of a faith in the triumph of goodness in the face of a corrosive, immoral
world. Fielding also wrote three other novels with original stories. The most
significant of these was The Governess, or The Little Female
Academy in 1749.
In addition, she wrote The History of the Countess of
Dellwyn in 1759, and The History of Ophelia in 1760.

Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768) was an
Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France
and Italy It was while living in the countryside, having failed
in his attempts to supplement his income as a farmer and struggling with
tuberculosis, that Sterne began work on his most famous novel, The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the first volumes of
which were published in 1759.

Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1730 – 4 April 1774) was an Anglo-Irish
writer, poet, and physician known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield
(1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770) (written in memory of his
brother), and his plays The Good-Natur’d Man (1768)
and She Stoops to Conquer (1771,
first performed in 1773). He
also wrote An History of the
Earth and Animated Nature. He is thought to have written the classic
children’s tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes,
the source of the phrase “goody two-shoes”.

Realism

Henry Fielding (Sharpham,
22 April 1707 – near Lisbon,
8 October 1754) was an English novelist and dramatist known for his
rich earthy humour and satirical
prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones. Fielding took
to writing novels in 1741 and his first major success was Shamela, an
anonymous parody
of Samuel Richardson‘s melodramatic novel. It is a
satire that follows the model of the famous Tory satirists of the previous
generation (Jonathan Swift and John Gay,
in particular). He followed this up with Joseph Andrews
(1742), an original work supposedly dealing with Pamela’s brother, Joseph.^[2]
Although also begun as a parody, this work developed into an accomplished novel
in its own right and is considered to mark Fielding’s debut as a serious
novelist. In 1743, he published a novel in the Miscellanies volume III
(which was the first volume of the Miscellanies). This was The History of
the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great. His greatest work was Tom Jones (1749), a
meticulously constructed picaresque novel telling the convoluted and
hilarious tale of how a foundling came into a fortune.

Tobias George Smollett (19 March 1721 – 17 September 1771)
was a Scottish
poet and author. He was
best known for his picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random
(1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
(1751), which influenced later novelists such as Charles Dickens.
His first published work was a poem about the Battle of Culloden entitled “The Tears of
Scotland”, but it was The Adventures of Roderick Random which made
his name. It was modelled on Le Sage‘s Gil Blas,
and was published in 1748. Smollett followed it up by finally getting his tragedy,
The Regicide, published, though it was never performed. In 1750,
Smollett took his MD degree in Aberdeen, and also travelled to France, where he
obtained material for his second novel, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, another big
success. Having lived for a short time in Bath,
he returned to London
and published The Adventures of Ferdinand Count
Fathom in 1753. He was now recognised as a leading literary
figure. Smollett then began what he regarded as his major work, A Complete History
of England, from 1757 to 1765 and produced another
novel, The Life and
Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760). He also visited Scotland,
and this visit helped inspire his last novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
(1771), published in the year of his death

Pre-romanticism

Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of
Orford (24 September
1717 – 2 March 1797), was an English
art historian,
man of letters,
antiquarian
and politician. He is now largely remembered for for his Gothic novel,
The Castle of Otranto. Along with
the book, his literary reputation rests on his Letters, which are of
significant social and political interest. He was the son of Sir Robert Walpole, and cousin^[1]
of the 1st Viscount Nelson. From
1762 on, Walpole
published his Anecdotes of Painting in England, based on George Vertue‘s
manuscript notes. His memoirs of the Georgian social and political scene,
though heavily biased, are a useful primary source for historians. Walpole’s numerous letters
are similarly useful as a historical resource.

Clara Reeve (1729–1807) was an English
novelist,
best known for her Gothic fiction work The Old English Baron (1777). She was the
author of several novels, of which only one is remembered: The Champion of
Virtue, later known as The Old English Baron (1777), written in
imitation of, or rivalry with, the Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, with
which it has often been printed. Her novel noticeably influenced Mary Shelley‘s
Frankenstein.
She also wrote the epistolatory novel The School for Widows
(1791). Her innovative history of prose fiction, The Progress of Romance
(1785), can be regarded generally as a precursor to modern histories of the
novel and specifically as upholding the tradition of female literary history
heralded by Elizabeth Rowe (1674–1737) and Susannah Dobson, d. 1795.

Ann Radcliffe (9 July 1764 – 7 February 1823) was an
English author,
and considered the pioneer of the gothic novel
(although she was not the first to publish a book of this style). Her style is romantic
in its vivid descriptions of landscapes, and long travel scenes, yet the Gothic
element is obvious through her use of the supernatural. It was her triumph of
reason, and explanation of the seemingly inexplicable supernatural that helped
the Gothic novel to become culturally acceptable. Ann’s fiction is
characterized by seemingly supernatural events being explained through reason.
Throughout her work traditional morals are asserted, women’s rights are
advocated for, and reason prevails. Ann published 6 novels in all. These are
(listed alphabetically): The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, Gaston de Blondeville, The Italian,
The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Romance of the Forest and A Sicilian Romance. She also published a
book of poetry, but her talent for prose far exceeded her poetic ability. Radcliffe
is considered to be the founder of Gothic Literature. Her final novel, The Italian,
was written in response to Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk.
Ann Radcliffe had a profound influence on many later authors. These
include: The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) and Sir
Walter Scott (1771-1832).

Matthew Gregory Lewis (9 July 1775 – 14 May 1818) was an English
novelist
and dramatist,
often referred to as “Monk” Lewis, because of the success of
his classic Gothic novel, The Monk.
As a writer, Lewis is typically classified as writing in the horror-gothic
genre along with authors Charles Robert Maturin and Mary Shelley.^[7]
Though he was most assuredly influenced by Ann Radcliffe’s
The Mysteries of Udolpho and William Godwin’s
Caleb Williams,
taking Radcliffe’s obsession with the supernatural and Godwin’s narrative drive
and interest in crime and punishment, Lewis differed with his literary
approach. Whereas Radcliffe would allude to the imagined horrors under the
genre of terror-gothic, Lewis defined himself by disclosing the details of the
gruesome scenes, earning him the title of horror-gothic novelist

William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was a British
journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered
one of the first exponents of utilitarianism,
and the first modern proponent of anarchism.^[1]
Godwin is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a
year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an
attack on political institutions, and Things as They
Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, which attacks aristocratic privilege, but also is virtually
the first mystery novel. Based on the success of both, Godwin featured
prominently in the radical circles of London in the 1790s.
In the ensuing conservative reaction to British radicalism, Godwin was attacked, in
part because of his marriage to the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and his candid
biography of her after her death; their child, Mary Godwin
(later Mary Shelley) would go on to author Frankenstein
and marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Godwin wrote prolifically
in the genres of novels, history and demography throughout his lifetime. In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of
Population in response to Godwin’s views on the
“perfectibility of society.” Malthus wrote that populations inclined
to increase in times of plenty, and that only distress, from causes such as
food shortages, disease, or war, served to stem population growth. Populations
were therefore always doomed to grow until distress was felt, at least by the
poorer segment of the society. Consequently, poverty was an inevitable
phenomenon of society. In Political Justice Godwin acknowledged that an
increase in the standard of living via his proposals could cause population
pressures, but he saw an obvious solution to avoiding distress: “project a
change in the structure of human action, if not of human nature, specifically
the eclipsing of the desire for sex by the development of intellectual
pleasures”.

Classical temperaments  

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was
an English novelist
whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry,
earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English
literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing
her historical importance among scholars and critics.^[1] From
1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park
(1814) and Emma
(1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional
novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in
1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon,
but died before completing it. Her work brought her little personal fame and
only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of
her nephew’s A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a
wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a
great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation
of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite
fan culture.

Frances Burney (13 June 1752 – 6 January 1840), also
known as Fanny Burney and, after her marriage, as Madame d’Arblay,
was an English novelist, diarist and playwright. In total, she wrote four
novels, eight plays, one biography and twenty volumes of journals and letters.
In addition to the critical respect she receives for her own writing, she is
recognised as a literary precursor to prominent authors who came after her,
including Jane Austen
and William Makepeace Thackeray. She published
her first novel, Evelina, anonymously in 1778. When the book’s authorship
was revealed, it brought her almost immediate fame due to its unique narrative
and comic strengths. She followed with Cecilia
in 1782, Camilla in 1796 and The Wanderer in 1814. All of Burney’s
novels explore the lives of English aristocrats, and satirise their social
pretensions and personal foibles, with an eye to larger questions such as the
politics of female identity. With one exception, Burney never succeeded in
having her plays performed, largely due to objections from her father, who
thought that publicity from such an effort would be damaging to her reputation.
The exception was Edwy and Elgiva, which unfortunately was not well
received by the public and closed after the first night’s performance.

The XIXth century

Romanticism

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832)
was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout
much of the world during his time. Scott was the first English-language author
to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary
readers in Europe, Australia,
and North America. His novels and poetry are
still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of The Lake, Waverley,
The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor.

Catherine Grace Frances Gore (Moody) (1799 – January 29, 1861)
was a British novelist
and dramatist.
She is amongst the well-known of the silver fork writers – authors of the Victorian era
depicting the gentility and etiquette of high society.^[  Her first novel Theresa Marchment,
or The Maid of Honour was published in 1824. Her first major was success
was Pin Money, published in 1831, but her most popular and well-known
novel was to be Cecil, or Adventures of a Coxcomb published in 1841.
Gore also found success as a playwright, writing eleven plays that made their
way to the London
stage, though her plays never quite became as famous as her witty novels.
Between 1824 and 1862 she produced about 70 works, the most successful of which
were novels of fashionable English life. Among these may be mentioned Manners of the Day
(1830), Cecil, or the
Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841), and The Banker’s Wife
(1843)

Mary Russell Mitford (16 December 1787 – 10 January 1855),
was an English
novelist
and dramatist.
Her place in English literature is as the author of Our Village.
This series of sketches of village scenes and vividly drawn characters was
based upon life in Three Mile Cross, a hamlet in the parish of Shinfield,
near Reading in Berkshire,
where she lived. Her writing has all the charm of unaffected spontaneous
humour, combined with quick wit and literary skill

Charles Robert Maturin, also known as C.R. Maturin (25
September 1782 – 30 October 1824) was an Irish Protestant
clergyman (ordained by the Church of Ireland)
and a writer of gothic plays and novels. . Honoré de Balzac and Charles Baudelaire later expressed fondness for
Maturin’s work,
particularly his most famous novel, Melmoth the Wanderer. .

Mary Shelley (née Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was a British
novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer,
best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern
Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her
husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Until the 1970s, Mary
Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish Percy Shelley’s works and
for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired
many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more
comprehensive view of Mary Shelley’s achievements. Scholars have shown
increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which
include the historical novels Valperga
(1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic
novel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835)
and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known
works such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844)
and the biographical articles for Dionysius
Lardner’s Cabinet
Cyclopaedia (1829–46) support the growing view that Mary Shelley
remained a political radical throughout her life.

Theodore Edward Hook (22 September 1788 – 24 August 1841),
English author, was born in London.
In a sponging-house, where he was confined for two years, he wrote
the nine volumes of stories afterwards collected under the title of Sayings
and Doings (1824–1828). The best of his works are Maxwell (1830), Love
and Pride (1833), the autobiographic Gilbert Gurney (1836), Jack
Brag (1837), Gurney Married (1838) and Peregrine Bunce
(1842). Putting aside, however, his claim to literary greatness, Hook will be
remembered as one of the most brilliant, genial and original figures of Georgian times.

Captain Frederick Marryat (July 10, 1792 – August 9, 1848) was
an English
Royal Navy
officer, novelist,
and a contemporary and acquaintance of Charles Dickens,
noted today as an early pioneer of the sea story.
He is now known particularly for the semi-autobiographical novel Mr Midshipman Easy and his children’s novel
The Children of the New Forest. He
kept producing novels, with his biggest success, Mr Midshipman Easy,
coming in 1836. His son Francis Samuel Marryat
completed his late novel The Little Savage.^[3] Marryat’s
novels are characteristic of their time, with the concerns of family
connections and social status often overshadowing the naval action, but they
are interesting as fictional renditions of the author’s 25 years of real-life
experience at sea. These novels, much admired by Joseph Conrad
and Ernest Hemingway, were among the first sea
novels. His later novels were generally for the children’s market, including
his most famous novel for contemporary readers, The Children of the New Forest, which was
published in 1847 and set in the countryside surrounding the village of Sway, Hampshire.

James Henry Leigh Hunt (19 October 1784 – 28 August 1859),
best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English
critic, essayist, poet and writer. In 1832 a collected edition of his poems was
published by subscription, the list of subscribers including many of his
opponents. In the same year was printed for private circulation Christianism,
the work afterwards published (1853) as The Religion of the Heart. Hunt
published the companion books, Imagination and Fancy (1844), and Wit
and Humour (1846), two volumes of selections from the English poets, which
displayed his refined, discriminating critical tastes. His book on the pastoral
poetry of Sicily,
A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla (1848), is also delightful. The Town
(2 vols., 1848) and Men, Women and Books (2 vols., 1847) are partly made
up from former material. The Old Court Suburb (2 vols., 1855; ed. A
Dobson, 2002) is a sketch of Kensington, where he long resided. In 1850 he published his Autobiography
(3 vols.), a naive and affected, but accurate, piece of self-portraiture. A
Book for a Corner (2 vols.) was published in 1849, and his Table Talk
appeared in 1851. In
1855 his narrative poems, original and translated, were collected under the
title Stories in Verse.

Thomas Love Peacock (18 October 1785 – 23 January 1866) was an English
satirist
and author. He wrote satirical novels,
each with the same basic setting — characters at a table discussing and
criticising the philosophical opinions of the day. Peacock’s own place in
literature is pre-eminently that of a satirist. That he has nevertheless been
the favourite only of the few is owing partly to the highly intellectual
quality of his work, but mainly to his lack of ordinary qualifications of the
novelist, all pretension to which he entirely disclaims. He has no plot, little
human interest, and no consistent delineation of character. His personages are
mere puppets, or, at best, incarnations of abstract qualities such as grace or
beauty, but beautifully depicted : Headlong Hall
(published 1815 but dated 1816) [lightly revised, 1837]; Melincourt
(1817); Nightmare Abbey (1818) [lightly revised,
1837]; Maid Marian (1822);  The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829); Crotchet Castle
(1831) [lightly revised, 1837]; Gryll Grange
(1861) [serialised first in 1860].

Social literature

Charles John Huffam Dickens ( 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was
the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era,
and he remains popular, responsible for some of English literature’s most
iconic characters.^[1]  His most celebrated novels are The Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club (Monthly serial, April 1836 to November
1837), The Adventures of Oliver Twist
(Monthly serial in Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839), The Old Curiosity Shop
(Weekly serial in Master Humphrey’s Clock, 25 April 1840, to 6 February
1841), A Christmas Carol (1843), The Chimes (1844), David Copperfield (Monthly
serial, May 1849 to November 1850), Little Dorrit
(Monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857), A Tale of Two Cities
(Weekly serial in All the Year Round, 30 April 1859, to 26 November
1859), Great Expectations
(Weekly serial in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861),

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of
Beaconsfield, KG, PC, FRS, (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881)
was a British Prime Minister,
parliamentarian, Conservative statesman and literary figure.
Before and during his political career, Disraeli was well-known as a literary
and social figure, although his novels are not generally regarded as a part of
the Victorian literary canon. He mainly wrote romances, of which Sybil
and Vivian Grey are perhaps
the best-known today. Disraeli turned towards literature after his financial
disaster, motivated in part by a desperate need for money, and brought out his
first novel, Vivian Grey, in 1826. Disraeli’s biographers agree that Vivian
Grey was a thinly veiled re-telling of the affair of The Representative,
and it proved very popular on its release, although it also caused much offence
within the Tory
literary world when Disraeli’s authorship was discovered. The book, initially
anonymous, was purportedly written by a “man of fashion” – someone
who moved in high society. Disraeli, then just twenty-three, did not move in
high society, and the numerous solecisms present in his otherwise brilliant and daring work
made this painfully obvious. Reviewers were sharply critical on these grounds
of both the author and the book. Furthermore, John Murray believed that
Disraeli had caricatured him and abused his confidence–an accusation denied at
the time, and by the official biography, although subsequent biographers
(notably Blake) have sided with Murray.^[13]After
producing a Vindication of the
English Constitution, and some political pamphlets, Disraeli
followed up Vivian Grey with a series of novels, The Young Duke (1831),
Contarini Fleming
(1832), Alroy (1833), Venetia and Henrietta Temple
(1837). During the same period he had also written The Revolutionary Epick
and three burlesques,
Ixion, The Infernal Marriage,
and Popanilla. Of these only Henrietta
Temple (based on his affair with Henrietta Sykes,
wife of Sir Francis William Sykes, 3rd Bt) was a true
success.^[14]
During the 1840s Disraeli wrote three political novels collectively known as
“the Trilogy”–Sybil, Coningsby,
and Tancred.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, née Stevenson (29 September
1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to simply as Mrs Gaskell, was a
British novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era.
Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society,
including the very poor, and as such are of interest to social historians
as well as lovers of literature.^[1]
Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. The best
known of her remaining novels are Cranford
(1853), North and South (1854), and Wives and Daughters (1865). She became
popular for her writing, especially her ghost stories, aided by Charles Dickens.
Even though her writing conforms to Victorian conventions (including signing
her name “Mrs. Gaskell”), Gaskell usually frames her stories as
critiques of contemporary attitudes: her early works focused on factory work in
the Midlands. She always emphasized the role
of women, with complex narratives and dynamic female characters.  In addition to her fiction, Gaskell also wrote
the first biography of Charlotte Brontë, which played a significant
role in developing her fellow writer’s reputation

Charles Kingsley (12 June 1819 – 23 January 1875) was
an English
clergyman, university professor, historian and novelist. Kingsley’s interest in history is shown in several
of his writings, including The Heroes (1856), a children’s book about Greek mythology,
and several historical novels, of which the best known are Hypatia
(1853), Hereward the Wake (1865), and Westward Ho! (1855). His concern for social
reform is illustrated in his great classic, The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a
Land Baby. As a novelist his chief power lay in his descriptive
faculties. The descriptions of South American
scenery in Westward Ho!, of the Egyptian desert
in Hypatia, of the North Devon scenery in Two Years Ago, are brilliant;
and the American scenery is even more vividly and more truthfully described
when he had seen it only by the eye of his imagination than in his work At
Last, which was written after he had visited the tropics

John Henry Newman, C.O. (21 February 1801 – 11 August
1890),^[2][3]
also referred to as Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman,
was an important figure in the religious history of England in the 19th
century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s.^[4]
Originally an evangelical Oxford
academic and clergyman in the Church of England,
Newman was a leader in the Oxford Movement.
This influential grouping of Anglicans wished to return the Church of England to many
Catholic beliefs and forms of worship. He left the Anglican church and
converted to Roman Catholicism (1845), eventually being
granted the rank of Cardinal by Pope Leo XIII.
His beatification
was officially proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI
on 19 September 2010 during his visit to the
United Kingdom.^[1]
Newman was also a literary figure of note, his major writings including his
autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865–66), the Grammar of Assent (1870), and
the poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865), set to music
in 1900 by Edward Elgar as an oratorio.^[3]
He wrote the popular hymns Lead, Kindly Light and Praise to the
Holiest in the Height (taken from Gerontius). Newman published in
bi-monthly parts his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a religious
autobiography of abiding interest. In 1870, Newman published his Grammar of Assent,
a closely reasoned work in which the case for religious belief is maintained by
arguments somewhat different from those commonly used by Roman Catholic
theologians of the time. In 1877,
in the republication of his Anglican works, he added to
the two volumes containing his defence of the via media,
a long preface in which he criticised and replied to anti-Catholic arguments of
his own which were contained in the original works.  Pope Pius IX
had mistrusted Newman, but Pope Leo XIII was encouraged by the Duke of Norfolk and other
English Catholic laymen to make Newman a cardinal, despite the fact that he was neither
a bishop nor resident inRome.

Charlotte Brontë ( 21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855) was
an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë
sisters, whose novels are English literature standards. She wrote Jane Eyre under the
pen name Currer Bell. Her book had sparked a movement in regards to feminism
in literature. The main character, Jane Eyre, in her novel Jane Eyre, was a
parallel to herself, a woman who was strong. However, she never left Haworth for more than a few weeks at a time as she did
not want to leave her aging father’s side.

Emily Jane Brontë ( July 30,
1818 — December 19,
1848) was an English
novelist and poet, now best remembered for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, a classic
of English literature. Emily was the second eldest of the three surviving Brontë sisters,
between Charlotte and Anne.
She published under the pen name Ellis Bell. In 1847, Emily published
her only novel, Wuthering Heights, as two volumes of a
three-volume set (the last volume being Agnes Grey
by her sister Anne). Its innovative structure somewhat puzzled critics.
Although it received mixed reviews when it first came out, and was often
condemned for its portrayal of amoral passion, the book subsequently became an
English literary classic. In 1850, Charlotte
edited and published Wuthering
Heights as a
stand-alone novel and under Emily’s real name.

Anne Brontë (17 January 1820 – 28 May 1849) was a
British novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë
literary family. she wrote two novels. Agnes Grey, based upon
her experiences as a governess, was published in 1847. Her second and last
novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall appeared
in 1848. Anne’s life was cut short with her death of pulmonary tuberculosis when she was
29 years old. Anne’s two novels, written in a sharp and ironic style, are
completely different from the romanticism followed by her sisters. She wrote in
a realistic, rather than a romantic style. Her novels, like those of her
sisters, have become classics of English literature.

Realism

William Makepeace Thackeray ( 18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) was
an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works,
particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic
portrait of English society. In the early 1840s, Thackeray had
some success with two travel books, The Paris Sketch Book
and The Irish Sketch Book.
Later in the decade, he achieved some notoriety with his Snob Papers,
but the work that really established his fame was the novel Vanity Fair,
which first appeared in serialized instalments beginning in January 1847. Even
before Vanity Fair completed its serial run, Thackeray had become a
celebrity, sought after by the very lords and ladies he satirized; they hailed
him as the equal of Dickens. Between May 1839 and February 1840, Fraser’s
published the work sometimes considered Thackeray’s first novel, Catherine,
originally intended as a satire of the Newgate
school of crime fiction but ending up more as a rollicking picaresque tale in
its own right. In The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a novel
serialized in Fraser’s in 1844, Thackeray explored the situation of an
outsider trying to achieve status in high society. The later works include Pendennis,
The Newcomes
and The Adventures of Philip as well as The Virginians,
which takes place in America and includes George Washington as a character who
nearly kills one of the protagonists in a duel.

.Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was one of the
most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era.
Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around
the imaginary county
of Barsetshire.
He also wrote penetrating novels on political, social, and gender issues, and
on other topical conflicts of his day. Trollope wrote four novels about Ireland. Two
were written during the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, while
the third deals with the famine as a theme (The Macdermots of Ballycloran,
The Landleaguers, and Castle Richmond, respectively).^[12]
The Macdermots of Ballycloran was written while he was staying in the village of Drumsna,
County Leitrim.^[13]
A fourth, The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848) is a humorous comparison
of the romantic pursuits of the landed gentry (Francis O’Kelly, Lord
Ballindine) and his Catholic tenant (Martin Kelly). Two short stories deal
with Ireland (“The O’Conors of Castle Conor, County Mayo”^[14]
and “Father Giles of Ballymoy”.In 1851, Trollope was sent to
England, charged with investigating and reorganizing rural mail delivery in a
portion of the country and he conceived the plot of The Warden,
which became the first of the six Barsetshire novels. critics generally
acknowledge the sweeping satire The Way We Live Now (1875) as his masterpiece.

Charles Reade (June 8, 1814 – April 11, 1884) was an
English
novelist
and dramatist,
best known for The Cloister and the Hearth. The story
relates the adventures of the father of Erasmus,
a subject he had dealt with two years before in a short story in Once a Week.
It became recognised as one of the most successful historical novels.
Reade began his literary career as a dramatist. His first comedy, The
Ladies’ Battle, appeared at the Olympic Theatre
in May 1851. It was followed by Angela (1851), A Village Tale
(1852), The Lost Husband (1852), and Gold (1853). He made his
name as a novelist in 1856, when he produced It Is Never Too Late to Mend,
a novel written with the purpose of reforming abuses in prison discipline and
the treatment of criminals. Five more novels followed in quick succession: The
Course of True Love never did run Smooth (1857), White Lies (1857), Jack
of all Trades (1858), The Autobiography of a Thief (1858), and Love
Me Little, Love Me Long (1859). he next produced Hard Cash
(originally published as Very Hard Cash^[2])(1863),
in which he drew attention to the abuses of private lunatic asylums.
Three more such novels followed: Foul Play (1869), in which he exposed
the iniquities of ship-knackers, and paved the way for the labours of Samuel Plimsoll;
Put Yourself in his Place (1870), in which he dealt with trade unions;
and A Woman-Hater (1877), in which he continued his commentary on trade
unions while also tackling the topic of women doctors.

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889)
was an English novelist,
playwright,
and author
of short stories. He was hugely popular during the Victorian era
and wrote 30 novels, more than 60 short stories, 14 plays, and over 100 pieces
of non-fiction work. His best-known works are The Woman in White, The Moonstone,
Armadale and No Name.
it was with the release of his first published novel, Antonina, in 1850
that his career as a writer began in earnest. His novel The Moonstone
prominently features the effects of opium and opium addiction. The Moonstone,
published in 1868, and the last novel of what is generally regarded as the most
successful decade of its author’s career, was, despite a somewhat cool
reception from both Dickens and the critics, a significant return to form and
reestablished the market value of an author whose success in the competitive
Victorian literary marketplace had been gradually waning in the wake of his
first “masterpiece.” The Moonstone, being the most popular of
Collins’s novels, is known as a precursor for detective fiction such as Sherlock Holmes.
His works were classified at the time as ‘sensation novels‘,
a genre seen nowadays as the precursor to detective
and suspense fiction. He also wrote penetratingly on the plight of women and on
the social and domestic issues of his time. For example, his 1854 Hide and
Seek contained one of the first portrayals of a deaf character in English
literature. He enjoyed ten years of great success following publication of The
Woman in White in 1859. His next novel, No Name
combined social commentary – the absurdity of the law as it applied to children
of unmarried parents (see Illegitimacy in fiction) – with a
densely-plotted revenge thriller. Armadale,
the first and only of Collins’ major novels of the 1860s to be serialised in a
magazine other than All the Year Round, provoked strong criticism,
generally centered upon its transgressive villainess Lydia Gwilt; and provoked
in part by Collins’s typically confrontational preface.

Edward Robert Lytton
Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, GCB, GCSI, GCIE, PC (8 November 1831 – 24
November 1891) was an English statesman and poet. He served as Viceroy of India
during the Great Famine of 1876–78. His uncompromising
implementation of Britain’s
trading policy is blamed for the severity of the famine, which killed up to 10
million people.^[1]
He worked as a poet
under the pen name
of Owen Meredith. When Lytton was twenty-five years old, he published in
London
a volume of poems under the name of Owen Meredith. He went on to publish
several other volumes under the same name. The most popular one is “Lucile“,
a story in verse published in 1860.

Mary Anne (Mary Ann, Marian)
Evans (22 November
1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and
translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era.
She is the author of seven novels, including The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner
(1861), Middlemarch (1871–72),
and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in
provincial England and well known for their realism
and psychological insight. “George Eliot’s novels draw heavily on Greek
literature (only one of her books can be printed correctly without the use of a
Greek typeface), and her themes are often influenced by Greek tragedy”. While
continuing to contribute pieces to the Westminster Review, Evans had
resolved to become a novelist, and she set out a manifesto for herself in one
of her last essays for the Review, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists^[11]
(1856). The essay criticised the trivial and ridiculous plots of contemporary
fiction by women. In other essays she praised the realism
of novels written in Europe at the time, and
an emphasis placed on realistic storytelling would become clear throughout her
subsequent fiction. She also adopted a new nom-de-plume, the one for which she
would become best known: George Eliot. In 1858 (when she was 39) Amos Barton,
the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, was published in Blackwood’s Magazine and, along with the
other Scenes, was well received. Her first complete novel, published in 1859,
was Adam Bede and was an
instant success, but it prompted an intense interest in who this new author
might be. Within a year of completing Adam Bede, she finished The Mill on the Floss. Her last novel was Daniel Deronda,
published in 1876. Throughout her career, Eliot wrote with a politically astute
pen. From Adam Bede
to The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner,
Eliot presented the cases of social outsiders and small-town persecution. Felix Holt, the Radical and The Legend of Jubal
were overtly political, and political crisis is at the heart of Middlemarch,
in which she presents the stories of a number of denizens of a small English
town on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832; the novel is notable for
its deep psychological insight and sophisticated character portraits.

Idealism and pessimism

George Meredith, OM (12
February 1828 – 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet during the Victorian
era. The collection of “sonnets” entitled Modern Love (1862)
came of this experience as did The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his
first “major novel”.^[1] Some
of his writings, including The Egoist, also highlight the subjection
of women during the Victorian period. During most of his career, he had
difficulty achieving popular success. His first truly successful novel was Diana
of the Crossways published in 1885.^[2]
Oscar Wilde,
in his dialogue The Decay of Lying, implies that Meredith,
along with Balzac,
is his favourite novelist. Other novels include “The adventures of Harry
Richmond”, “The Egoist”, “The amazing marriage”.

Samuel Butler (4 or 5 December 1835 – 18 June 1902)
was an iconoclastic Victorian author who published a variety of works. Two of his
most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon
and the posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for
examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian
art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler also made prose translations of The Iliad
and The Odyssey
which remain in use to this day. Butler
belonged to no school, and spawned no followers during his lifetime. A serious
but amateur student of the subjects he undertook, especially religious
orthodoxy and evolutionary thought, his controversial
assertions effectively shut him out from both of the opposing factions of
Church and science which played such a large role in late Victorian
cultural life: “In those days one was either a religionist or a Darwinian,
but he was neither.”a
consistent theme runs through Butler’s work, stemming largely from his personal
struggle with the stifling of his own nature by his parents, which led him on
to seek more general principles of growth, development and purpose. “Satirist,
novelist, artist and critic that he was, he was primarily a philosopher,”. George Bernard Shaw (who also visited New
Zealand) and E.M. Forster (who got only as far as India) were great
admirers of the latter Samuel Butler who brought a new tone into Victorian
literature, and began the long tradition of New Zealand utopian/dystopian
literature that would culminate in works by Jack Ross (writer), William Direen
and Scott Hamilton. The English novelist Aldous Huxley
acknowledged the influence of Erewhon on his novel Brave New World.
Huxley’s utopian counterpart to Brave New World, Island,
also prominently refers to Erewhon.

Thomas Hardy, OM (2
June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. While his works
typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display
elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of
literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.

While
he regarded himself primarily as a poet who composed novels mainly for
financial gain, during his lifetime he was much better known for his novels,
such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, which earned
him a reputation as a great novelist. In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes, a novel drawing on
Hardy’s courtship of his first wife, was published under his own name. Hardy
said that he first introduced Wessex in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his
next novel. It was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work
and pursue a literary career. There he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders
(1887), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), the
last of which attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a
“fallen woman” and was initially refused publication. Its subtitle, A
Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented, was intended to raise the eyebrows of the
Victorian middle-classes. Jude the Obscure,
published in 1895, met with even stronger negative outcries from the Victorian
public for its frank treatment of sex, and was often referred to as “Jude
the Obscene”. Despite this criticism, Hardy had become a celebrity in
English literature by the 1900s, with several highly successful novels behind
him, yet he felt disgust at the public reception of two of his greatest works
and gave up writing fiction altogether. Considered a Victorian Realist writer,
Hardy examines the social constraints that are part of the Victorian status
quo, suggesting these rules hinder the lives of all involved and ultimately
lead to unhappiness.

George Robert Gissing ( the g in his surname is hard;
22 November 1857 – 28 December 1903) was an English novelist who wrote
twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. From his early naturalistic works, he developed into one of the
most accomplished realists of the late-Victorian era.
Between 1891 and 1897 Gissing produced his most notable works, which include New Grub Street,
Born in Exile,
The Odd Women, In the Year of Jubilee, and The Whirlpool.
In advance of their time, they variously deal with the growing commercialism of
the literary market, religious charlatanism,
and the situation of emancipated women in a male-dominated society. During this
period he also produced almost seventy short stories. In 1903 Gissing published
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, which brought him
much acclaim. This is his most autobiographical work.

William Hale White (December 22, 1831 – March 14, 1913), known by his
pseudonym Mark Rutherford,
was a British writer and civil servant. he was well
known as a doorkeeper of the House of Commons; he wrote sketches of
parliamentary life for the Illustrated Times, his
son collected the writings and later released them as The Inner Life of the
House of Commons in 1897. he became a clerk in the Admiralty.
He had already served an apprenticeship to journalism before he made his name
with three autobiographical novels, supposedly edited by one Reuben Shapcott: The Autobiography of
Mark Rutherford (1881), Mark Rutherford’s
Deliverance (1885), and The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane
(1887).Later
books are Miriam’s Schooling, and other Papers (1890), Catherine
Furze (2 vols., 1893), Clara Hopgood (1896), Pages from a
Journal, with other Papers (1900), and John Bunyan
(1905)

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known
by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English
author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon
and photographer.
His most famous writings are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its
sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as
the poems “The Hunting of the Snark” and “Jabberwocky“,
all examples of the genre of literary nonsense.
In 1856 he published his first piece of work under the name that would make him
famous. A romantic poem called “Solitude” appeared in The Train
under the authorship of “Lewis Carroll.” This pseudonym was a play on
his real name; Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which
was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar
to the Latin name Carolus, from which the name Charles comes.^[2]

Neo-romanticism

Algernon Charles Swinburne (London, April 5, 1837 – London, April
10, 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented
the roundel form, wrote several novels, and
contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. From 1903 to 1909 he
was constantly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He published only
one novel: Lesbia Brandon (published posthumously in
1952).^:

Alexander William Kinglake (5 August 1809 – 2 January 1891) was
an English
travel writer and historian. His first literary venture had been Eothen; or
Traces of travel brought home from the East, (London: J. Ollivier,
1844), a very popular work of Eastern travel, published anonymously, in which
he described a journey he made about ten years earlier in Syria, Palestine
and Egypt.
However, his magnum opus was his Invasion of the Crimea,
in 8 volumes, published from 1863 to 1887 by Blackwood, Edinburgh, one of the
most effective works of its class. It has been accused of being too favourable
to Lord Raglan, and unduly hostile to Napoleon III, for whom the author had an
extreme aversion.

George Henry Borrow (5 July 1803 – 26 July 1881) was an English
author who wrote novels and travelogues
based on his own experiences around Europe.
His best known book is The Bible in Spain; Lavengro
is autobiographical, and Romany Rye is about his time with the English Romanichal
(gypsies).

Richard Doddridge Blackmore (7 June 1825 – 20 January 1900), referred to most
commonly as R. D.
Blackmore, was one of
the most famous English
novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century. Blackmore, often
referred to as the “Last Victorian”, acted as a pioneer of the new
romantic movement in fiction that continued with Robert Louis Stevenson and others. Though very
popular in his time, Blackmore’s work has since been largely ignored. Save for
his novel Lorna Doone, which has enjoyed considerable ongoing
popularity, his entire body of work has gone out of publication.

Joseph Henry Shorthouse (September 9, 1834 – March 4, 1903), novelist,
born at Birmingham.
His first, and by far his best book, John Inglesant,
appeared in 1881, and at once made him famous. His other novels, The Little
Schoolmaster Mark, Sir Percival, The Countess Eve, and A
Teacher of the Violin, though with some of the same characteristics, had no
success comparable to his first. Shorthouse also wrote an essay, The Platonism
of Wordsworth.

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (27 June 1850 – 26 September 1904), also known as Koizumi Yakumo (小泉 八雲^?), was a
Japanese author, best known for his books about Japan. He is especially
well-known for his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories,
such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of
Strange Things. Hearn moved to Dublin, Ireland,
at the age of two. Hearn was born in Lefkada
(the origin of his middle name), one of the Greek Ionian Islands
during the British occupation of the islands. at 19 he was sent to live in the United States of
America. In the autumn of 1877, Hearn left Cincinnati
for New Orleans, Louisiana. His best-known Louisiana
works are Gombo Zhèbes, Little Dictionary of Creole
Proverbs in Six Dialects (1885); La Cuisine Créole
(1885), a collection of culinary recipes from leading chefs and noted Creole
housewives who helped make New Orleans famous for its cuisine; and Chita: A Memory of
Last Island, a novella based on the hurricane of 1856 first published in Harper’s
Monthly in 1888. He spent two years in Martinique
and produced two books: Two Years in the French West Indies and Youma,
The Story of a West-Indian Slave, both in 1890. In 1890, Hearn went
to Japan
where he found his home and his greatest inspiration. In the late 19th century Japan was still
largely unknown and exotic to the Western world.
Hearn became known to the world through the depth, originality, sincerity, and
charm of his writings. In later years, some critics would accuse Hearn of exoticizing
Japan,
but as the man who offered the West some of its first glimpses into
pre-industrial and Meiji Era Japan, his work still offers valuable insight today.

John Richard Jefferies (6 November 1848 – 14 August 1887) was
an English
nature writer, noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books
of natural history, and novels. Jefferies valued and cultivated an intensity of
feeling in his experience of the world around him, a cultivation that he
describes in detail in The Story of My Heart (1883). This work, an
introspective depiction of his thoughts and feelings on the world, gained him
the reputation of a nature mystic at the time. But it is his success in
conveying his awareness of nature and people within it, both in his fiction and
in essay collections such as The Amateur Poacher (1879) and Round
About a Great Estate (1880), that has drawn most admirers. Wood Magic: A
Fable (1881) introduces his child-hero, Bevis, a small child on a farm near
a small lake, called the “Longpond”, clearly Coate Farm and Coate
Reservoir. Bevis’s exploration of the garden and neighbouring fields brings him
into contact with the country’s birds and animals, who can speak to him, as can
even inanimate parts of nature, such as the stream and the wind. Part of the
book is a depiction of a small child’s interaction with the natural world, but
much is a cynical animal fable of a revolt against the magpie Capchack, the
local tyrant. In Bevis (1882), the boy is older, and the fantasy
element, by which animals can talk, is quite absent. Rather, we have
realistically related adventures of Bevis and his friend Mark, fighting a mock
battle with other local children, rigging a boat and sailing to an island on
the lake. Around 1883 he wrote his extraordinary autobiography, The Story of My Heart . Jefferies’ next
novel, After London (1885), can be seen as an early example of “post-apocalyptic fiction“.In
1887 Jefferies completed his most ambitious and most unusual novel, Amaryllis
at the Fair. Closely based on his own family at Coate, it describes a farm
and family imperceptibly approaching disaster.

Walter Horatio Pater (4 August 1839 – 30 July 1894) was an English
essayist,
critic
of art and
literature, and writer of fiction. ‘Conclusion’
was to be Pater’s most influential – and controversial – publication. It
asserts that our physical lives are made up of scientific processes and
elemental forces in perpetual motion, “renewed from moment to moment but
parting sooner or later on their ways”. The Renaissance, which
appeared to some to endorse “hedonism” and amorality, provoked
criticism from conservative quarters, including disapproval from Pater’s former
tutor at Queen’s, from the college chaplain at Brasenose and from the Bishop of
Oxford. Many
of Pater’s works focus on male beauty, friendship and love, either in a Platonic
way or, obliquely, in a more physical way.^[
In his philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), an extended
imaginary portrait set in the Rome of the Antonines,
which Pater believed had parallels with his own century, he examines the
“sensations and ideas” of a young Roman of integrity, who pursues an
ideal of the “aesthetic” life – a life based on αίσθησις, perception
– tempered by asceticism. From 1885 to 1887 Pater published four new
imaginary portraits in Macmillan’s Magazine, each set at a turning-point
in the history of ideas or art – ‘A Prince of Court Painters’ (1885) (on Watteau
and Jean-Baptiste Pater), ‘Sebastian van Storck’
(1886) (17th-century Dutch society and painting, and the philosophy of Spinoza),
‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ (1886) (the medieval cathedral-builders), and ‘Duke Carl of
Rosenmold’ (1887) (the German Renaissance). These were collected in the volume Imaginary
Portraits (1887). In 1889 Pater published Appreciations, with
an Essay on Style, a collection of previously-printed essays on literature.
In 1893 appeared his book Plato and Platonism. In 1896 Shadwell
edited and published Pater’s unfinished novel, Gaston de Latour, set in
16th-century France,
the product of the author’s growing interest in his later years in French
history, philosophy, literature, and architecture.

William Carleton (20 February 1794, Prillisk, Clogher,
Co. Tyrone
– 30 January, 1869, Sandford, Co. Dublin)
was an Irish novelist.
In 1830 appeared the first series of Traits and Stories of the Irish
Peasantry (2 vols.), which immediately placed Carleton in the first rank of
Irish novelists. A second series (3 vols.), containing, among other stories,
“Tubber Derg, or the Red Well,” appeared in 1833, and Tales of
Ireland in 1834. From that time till within a few years of his death he
wrote constantly. “Fardorougha the Miser, or the Convicts of Lisnamona”
appeared in 1837-1838. Other novels include Valentine McClutchy, the Irish
Agent, or Chronicles of the Castle Cumber Property (3 vols., 1845), The
Emigrants of Ahadarra (1847), The Tithe Proctor (1849). Carleton
wrote from intimate acquaintance with the scenes he described, and drew with a
sure hand a series of pictures of peasant life, unsurpassed for their
appreciation of the passionate tenderness of Irish home life, of the buoyant
humour and the domestic virtues which would, under better circumstances, bring
prosperity and happiness. He alienated the sympathies of many Irishmen, however,
by his unsparing criticism and occasional exaggeration of the darker side of
Irish character.

Samuel Lover (February 24, 1797 Dublin – July 6,
1868) was an Irish songwriter, novelist, as well as a painter of portraits, chiefly
miniatures. Lover produced a number of Irish songs, of which several —
including The Angel’s Whisper, Molly Bawn, and The Four-leaved Shamrock
— attained great popularity. He also wrote some novels, of which Rory O’More (in its first form a ballad),
and Handy Andy
are the best known, and short Irish sketches, which, with his songs, he
combined into a popular entertainment called Irish Nights. He joined with Dickens
in founding Bentley’s Magazine.

Charles James Lever (31 August 1806 – 1 June 1872) was an Irish novelist.
in February 1837 he began running The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer. His
next three books, Charles O’Malley (1841), Jack Hinton and Tom
Burke of Ours (1843), written under the spur of the writer’s chronic
extravagance, contain some splendid military writing and some of the most
animated battle-pieces on record. In the Knight of Gwynne, a story of the Union (1847), Con Cregan (1840), Roland Cashel
(1850) and Maurice Tiernay (1852) we still have traces of his old
manner; but he was beginning to lose his original joy in composition. His last
efforts were his best. They include The Fortunes of Glencore (1857), Tony
Butler (1865), Luthell of Arran (1865), Sir Brooke Fosbrooke
(1866), Lord Kilgobbin (1872) and the table-talk of Cornelius O’Dowd,
originally contributed to Blackwood.

George Augustus Moore (24 February 1852 – 21 January 1933)
was an Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist.
he is as often regarded as the first great modern Irish novelist. He met many
of the key artists and writers of the time, including Pissarro,
Degas, Renoir, Monet, Daudet,
Mallarmé, Turgenev
and, above all, Zola, who was to prove an influential figure in Moore’s
subsequent development as a writer. In 1886 Moore
published Confessions of a Young Man, a lively and
energetic memoir about his 20s spent in Paris
and London
among bohemian artists.^[17]
It contains a substantial amount of literary criticism for which it has
received a fair amount of praise. During the 1880s, Moore began work on a series of novels in a realist
style. His first novel, A Modern Lover (1883) was a three-volume work,
as preferred by the circulating libraries, and deals with the art
scene of the 1870s and 1880s in which many characters are identifiably real.
His next book, A Mummers Wife (1885) is widely recognised as the first
major English language novel in the realist style. Moore began to find success as an art critic
with the publication of books such as Impressions and Opinions (1891)
and Modern Painting (1893)—which was the first significant attempt to
introduce the Impressionists to an English audience. Other realist novels by
Moore from this
period include A Drama in Muslin (1886), a satiric story of the marriage
trade in Anglo-Irish society that hints at same-sex relationships among the
unmarried daughters of the gentry, and Esther Waters
(1894), the story of an unmarried housemaid who becomes pregnant and is
abandoned by her footman lover. His 1887 novel A Mere Accident is an
attempt to merge his symbolist and realist influences. He also published a
collection of short stories: Celibates (1895). In 1901, Moore
returned to Ireland
and became deeply involved in the Irish Literary
Theatre and in the broader Irish Literary
Revival. Moore published two books of
prose fiction set in Ireland
around this time; a second book of short stories, The Untilled Field
(1903) and a novel, The Lake (1905). The Untilled Field deal with
themes of clerical interference in the daily lives of the Irish peasantry, and
of the issue of emigration. The tales are recognised by some as representing
the birth of the Irish short story as a literary genre.^[3]
They can further be viewed as forerunners of Joyce’s Dubliners
collection. In 1913, he travelled to Jerusalem
to research for his next novel The Brook Kerith (1916). This book saw Moore once again embroiled
in controversy, as it was based on the supposition that a non-divine Christ
did not die on the cross but instead was nursed back to health. Moore’s last novel, Aphroditis
in Aulis, was published in 1930.

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills
Wilde (16 October
1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer,
poet,
and prominent aesthete. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s,
he became one of London’s
most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He became known for his
involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism.
Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde
had become one of the major personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s,
he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and
essays; and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity and beauty into his
only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The
opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, combined with larger
social themes, drew Wilde to writing drama. He wrote Salome (1891) in
French in Paris,
but it was refused a licence. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies
in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of
late Victorian London. At the height of his fame and success, whilst his
masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, was
still on stage in London,
Wilde sued his lover’s father for libel.
After a series of trials, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency with other men and imprisoned
for two years, held to hard labour. In prison he wrote De Profundis, a long letter which
discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint
to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. Upon his release he left immediately for
France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last
work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a long
poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st
Baronet, OM (9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937) was a Scottish
author
and dramatist,
best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan. He worked
for a year and a half as a staff journalist in Nottingham
following a job advertisement found by his sister in The Scotsman,^[7]
then returned to Kirriemuir, using his mother’s stories about the town (which
he called ‘Thrums’) for a piece submitted to the newspaper St. James’s
Gazette in London. The editor ‘liked that Scotch thing’,^[4]
so Barrie wrote
a series of them, which served as the basis for his first novels: Auld Licht
Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1890),^[8]
and The Little Minister (1891). The stories depicted the “Auld
Lichts”, a strict religious sect that his grandfather had once belonged
to.^[7]
Literary criticism of these early works has been unfavourable, tending to
disparage them as sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial Scotland far from the realities of the
industrialised nineteenth century, but they were popular enough to establish Barrie as a very
successful writer. After the success of the “Auld Lichts”, he printed
Better Dead (1888) privately and at his own expense, and it failed to
sell.^[7]
His two ‘Tommy’ novels, Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel
(1900), were about a boy and young man who clings to childish fantasy, with an
unhappy ending.

Socialism

Sir Walter Besant (August 14, 1836, Portsmouth
– June 9, 1901, London),
was a novelist
and historian
who lived largely in London.
He published during 1868 Studies in French Poetry.
Three years later he began his collaboration with writer James Rice. Among their joint productions are Ready-money Mortiboy
(1872), and the Golden Butterfly (1876), both, especially
the latter, very successful. This association was ended by the death of Rice
during 1882. Thereafter Besant continued to write voluminously by himself, his
main novels being All in a Garden Fair
(which Rudyard Kipling credited in Something of
Myself with inspiring him to leave India and make a career as a writer), Dorothy Forster (his
own favorite), Children of Gibeon,
and All Sorts and
Conditions of Men. The two latter belonged to a series in which
he endeavored to arouse the public conscience to the sadness of life among the
poorest classes of cities. Besant wrote largely on the history and topography
of London. His
plans for this topic were left unfinished: among his books on this subject is London in the 18th
Century.

XXth century

William Henry Hudson (4 August 1841 – 18 August 1922) was an author, naturalist,
and ornithologist.
Hudson was born in the Quilmes
Partido in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina,
son of settlers of U.S. origin. He spent his youth studying the
local flora and fauna
and observing both natural and human dramas on what was then a lawless
frontier, publishing his ornithological work in Proceedings of the Royal
Zoological Society, initially in an English mingled with Spanish idioms. Hudson settled in England
during 1869. He produced a series of ornithological studies, including Argentine
Ornithology (1888–1899) and British Birds (1895), and later achieved
fame with his books on the English countryside, including Hampshire Day
(1903), Afoot in England (1909) and A Shepherd’s Life (1910),
which helped foster the back-to-nature movement of the 1920s and 1930s. He was
a founding member of the Royal Society for the Protection of
Birds. Hudson’s
best known novel is Green Mansions (1904), and his best known non-fiction is Far Away
and Long Ago (1918). In Argentina,
Hudson is
considered to belong to the national literature as Guillermo Enrique Hudson,
the Spanish version of his name. A town in Berazategui Partido and several other public
places and institutions are named after him.

William Hurrell Mallock (7 February 1849 – 2 April 1923) was an English
author. Educated privately and then at Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate
prize in 1872 and took a second class in the final classical schools
in 1874, securing his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford
University. He attracted considerable attention by his satirical
novel The New Republic (1877),^[1]
in which he introduced characters easily recognized as such prominent
individuals as Matthew Arnold, Thomas
Carlyle, and Thomas Henry Huxley. His keen logic and gift
for acute exposition and criticism were displayed in later years both in
fiction and in controversial works. In a series of books dealing with religious
questions he insisted on dogma as the basis of religion and on the
impossibility of founding religion on purely scientific data. In Is Life
Worth Living? (1879)^[2]
and The New Paul and Virginia (1878) he
attacked Positivist theories, and in a volume on the intellectual position of
the Church of England, Doctrine and Doctrinal
Disruption (1900), he advocated the necessity of a strictly defined creed.
Later volumes on similar topics were Religion as a Credible Doctrine
(1903) and The Reconstruction of Belief (1905). He also authored
articles, one in particular directed against Huxley’s Agnosticism,
entitled “‘Cowardly Agnosticism’ A Word with Professor Huxley,” in
the April 1889 issue of The Fortnightly Review.^[3]
He published several brilliant works on economics, directed against radical and
socialist theories: Social Equality (1882), Property and Progress
(1884), Labor and the Popular Welfare (1893), Classes and Masses
(1896), Aristocracy and Evolution (1898), and A Critical Examination
of Socialism (1908).^[4]
Among his anti-socialist works should be classed his novel, The Old Order
Changes (1886). His other novels include A Romance of the Nineteenth
Century (1881), A Human Document (1892), The Heart of Life
(1895), and The Veil of the Temple (1904). He published a volume of Poems
in 1880. His 1883 book Lucretius included some verse translations from the Roman
poet,^[5]
which he followed with Lucretius on Life and Death in 1900,^[6]
a book of verse paraphrases in a style modeled after the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward
FitzGerald. (A second edition was issued in 1910).^[7]
Ironically, this latter work came to be highly regarded by freethinkers
and other religious skeptics. Corliss
Lamont includes portions of the third canto in his A Humanist
Funeral Service.

Mary Augusta Ward née Arnold;
(11 June 1851 – 24 March 1920), was a British novelist who wrote under her married
name as Mrs Humphry Ward. Mary Augusta Arnold was born in Hobart, Tasmania,
Australia,
into a prominent intellectual family of writers and educationalists. Mary was
the daughter of Tom Arnold, a professor of literature, and
Julia Sorrell. Her uncle was the poet Matthew
Arnold and her grandfather Thomas Arnold,
the famous headmaster of Rugby School. Her sister Julia married Leonard Huxley, the son of Thomas Huxley,
and their sons were Julian and Aldous Huxley.
The Arnolds and the Huxleys were an important influence on
British intellectual life. According to the New York
Times, her book Lady Rose’s
Daughter was the bestselling novel in
the United States in 1903, as was The
Marriage of William Ashe in 1905.
Ward’s most popular novel by far was the religious “novel with a
purpose” Robert Elsmere, which portrayed the emotional conflict between the
young pastor Elsmere and his wife, whose over-narrow orthodoxy brings her
religious faith and their mutual love to a terrible impasse.

Lucas Malet is the pseudonym
of Mary St Leger Kingsley (4 June 1852 – 1931), Victorian novelist.

She was the
daughter of Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies.
In 1876 she married William Harrison, Minor Canon of Westminster,
and Priest-in-Ordinary to the Queen.

• Mrs Lorimer: A Study in
  Black and White (1882)
• Colenel Enderby’s Wife (1885)
• Little Peter: A Christmas
  Morality for Children of Any Age (1888)
• A Counsel of Perfection (1888)
• The Wages of Sin (1890)
• The Carissima: A Modern
  Grotesque (1896)
• The Gateless Barrier (1900)
• The History of Sir Richard
  Calmady (1901), based on the life of Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh
• The Far Horizon (1907)
• Adrian Savage (1911)
• Deadham Hard (1919)
• The Tall Villa (1920)
• The Survivors (1923)
• The Pool (1930)

Sarah Grand (10 June 1854 – 12 May 1943) was a British feminist
writer active from 1873 to 1922. Her work revolved around the New Woman
ideal. Her work dealt with the New Woman in fiction and in fact, she wrote treatises
on the subject of the failure of marriage, and her novels may be considered
strongly anti-marriage polemics. In The Heavenly Twins Grand
demonstrates the dangers of the moral double standard which overlooked men’s
promiscuity while punishing women for the same acts. More importantly, however,
Grand argues in The Heavenly Twins that in order for the British nation
to grow stronger, middle-class women have the responsibility of choosing mates
with whom they might produce strong, well-educated children.

Olive Schreiner (24 March 1855 – 11 December 1920) was a South African
author,
anti-war campaigner and intellectual.
She is best remembered today for her novel The Story of an African Farm
which has been highly acclaimed ever since its first publication in 1883 for
the bold manner in which it dealt with some of the burning issues of the day,
including agnosticism,
existential independence, individualism and the professional aspirations of
women; as well as its portrayal of the elemental nature of life on the colonial
frontier. In more recent studies she has also been foregrounded as an apologist
for those sidelined by the forces of British Imperialism, such as the
Afrikaners, and later other South African groups like Blacks, Jews and Indians
– to name but a few. Although she showed interest in a large number of bohemian
notions and the passing fads of her time (i.e. socialism, pacifism,
vegetarianism, the New Woman phenomenon etc.) her true views escape restrictive
categorisations. Her published works and other surviving writings promote
implicit values like moderation, friendship and understanding amongst all
peoples, avoiding the pitfalls of political radicalism which she consciously
eschewed. Although she may be called a life-long freethinker in terms of her
Victorian background – as opposed to mainstream Christianity – she always
remained true to the spirit of the Christian Bible and developed a secular
version of the worldview of her missionary parents. Karel Schoeman, the South
African authority on Schreiner’s life, has written in one of his books about
her that she was an outstanding figure in a South African context, although
perhaps not quite the same abroad

Sir Henry Rider Haggard, KBE (22 June 1856 – 14 May 1925) was an
English writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations,
predominantly Africa, and a founder of the Lost World literary genre. His stories,
situated at the lighter end of Victorian literature, continue to be
popular and influential. It was at this Hammersmith address that he completed King Solomon’s Mines (published September 1885).^[7]
Heavily influenced by the larger-than-life adventurers he met in Colonial
Africa. Haggard created his Allan
Quatermain adventures.^[8][9]
Three of his books, The Wizard (1896), Elissa; the Doom of Zimbabwe
(1899), and Black Heart and White Heart; a Zulu Idyll (1900), are
dedicated to Burnham’s daughter, Nada, the first white
child born in Bulawayo; she had been named after Haggard’s 1892 book Nada the Lily.^[10]

Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski;^[1]
3 December
1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-born English novelist^[2].
Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English,^[3]
though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and
then always with a marked Polish accent). He wrote stories and novels,
predominantly with a nautical or seaboard setting, that depict trials of the
human spirit by the demands of duty and honour. Conrad was a master prose
stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English
literature.^[4]
While some of his works have a strain of romanticism,
he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style
and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors.^[5]
Films have been adapted from or inspired by Conrad’s Victory,
Lord Jim, The Secret
Agent, An Outcast of the Islands, The Rover,
The Shadow Line, The Duel,
Heart of Darkness,
Nostromo,
Almayer’s Folly. Writing in the heyday of
the British
Empire, Conrad drew upon his experiences in the French and later the
British Merchant Navy to create short
stories and novels that reflect aspects of a worldwide empire while also
plumbing the depths of the human soul. Conrad was left orphaned at the age of
eleven. His first novel, Almayer’s
Folly, set on the east coast of Borneo, was
published in 1895. Its appearance marked his first use of the pen name
“Joseph Conrad”; “Konrad” was, of course, the third of his
Polish given names,
but his use of it — in the anglicised version, “Conrad” — may also
have been an hommage
to the Polish Romantic poet Adam
Mickiewicz‘s patriotic narrative poem, Konrad
Wallenrod.^[12]
Almayer’s Folly, together with its successor, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), laid
the foundation for Conrad’s reputation as a romantic teller of exotic tales — a
misunderstanding of his purpose that was to frustrate him for the rest of his
career. Except for several vacations in France
and Italy, a 1914 vacation
in his native Poland, and a
visit to the United States
in 1923, Conrad lived out the rest of his life in England. Though his talent was
recognised by the English intellectual elite, popular success eluded him until
the 1913 publication of Chance—paradoxically so, as that novel is
not now regarded as one of his better ones. Thereafter, for the remaining years
of his life, Conrad was the subject of more discussion and praise than any
other English writer of the time. He enjoyed increasing wealth and status.
Conrad had a true genius for companionship, and his circle of friends included
talented authors such as Stephen Crane and Henry James.
In the early 1900s he composed a short series of novels in collaboration with Ford Madox
Ford.^[13]
In April 1924 Conrad, who possessed a hereditary Polish status of nobility and coat-of-arms
(Nałęcz),^[14]
declined a (non-hereditary) British knighthood
offered by Prime Minister Ramsay
MacDonald.

Jerome Klapka Jerome (Walsall, 1859 – Northampton, 1927) was a writer, journalist and British humourist.
Jerome portrayed his period in a comic style in his book Sul palco – e sotto, where he points out the
times when he had no money. In 1886 followed the novel Pensieri
oziosi di un ozioso, a collection of humouristic essays. Jerome started
a draft in 1898 telling about his short stay in Germany which inspired Tre uomini a zonzo, followed by Tre
uomini in barca and Tre uomini in barca (per tacere del cane) as
soon as he came back from his honeymoon. In 1902 he published the story of Paul Klever, which was largely
recognised as autobiographic. In 1926 Jerome published his autobiography, La mia vita ai miei tempi.

Maurice Henry Hewlett (1861–1923), was an English
historical novelist, poet and essayist. He gave up the law after the success of
Forest Lovers.

• The Life and Death of
  Richard Yea-and-Nay (1900) historical novel
• The New Canterbury Tales (1901)
• The Queen’s Quair or The Six
  Years’ Tragedy (1904) historical novel
• The Road in Tuscany (1904)
• Fond Adventures: Tales of
  the Youth of the World (1905) short stories
• The Fool Errant (1905) historical
  novel
• The Stooping Lady (1907) novel
• Halfway House (1908) novel
• Open Country (1909) novel
• Rest Harrow
  (1910)
  novel

Eden Phillpotts (4 November 1862 – 29
December 1960) was an English author, poet and dramatist. He was born in India, educated in Plymouth,
Devon,
and worked as an insurance officer for 10 years before studying for the stage
and eventually becoming a writer.^[1]
He was the author of many novels, plays and poems about Dartmoor.
His Dartmoor cycle of 18 novels and two
volumes of short stories still have many avid readers despite the fact that
many titles are out of print. Phillpotts also wrote many other books with a Dartmoor setting. One of his novels, Widecombe Fair,
inspired by an annual fair at the village of Widecombe-in-the-Moor, provided the
scenario for his comic play The Farmer’s Wife. It went on to become a
silent movie of the same name, directed by Alfred
Hitchcock and filmed in 1927. Phillpotts was a friend of Agatha
Christie, who was an admirer of his work and a regular visitor to
his home. Jorge Luis Borges was another admirer.^[2]
Some of his novels aboutDartmoor include:

• Children of the Mist (1898)
• Sons of the Morning (1900)^[3]
• The River (1902)
• The American Prisoner (1904)
• The Whirlwind (1907)
• The Mother (1908)
• The Virgin in Judgment (1908)
• The Three Brothers (1909)
• The Thief of Virtue (1910)
• The Beacon (1911)
• The Forest
  on the Hill (1912)
• Orphan Dinah (1920)

Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, better known as Anthony Hope (9 February
1863 – 8 July 1933),^[1]
was an English novelist and playwright. Although he was a prolific writer,
especially of adventure novels, he is remembered best for only two books: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and its
sequel Rupert of Hentzau
(1898). These works, “minor classics” of English literature,^[2]
are set in the contemporaneous fictional country of Ruritania
and spawned the genre known as Ruritanian romance. Zenda has inspired many adaptations, most notably the 1937 Hollywood movie of
the same name.

Arthur George Morrison (1 November 1863, Poplar,
London – 4 December 1945, Chalfont St
Peter, Buckinghamshire) was an English
author
and journalist
known for his realistic novels about London‘s East End and for his detective
stories. In 1891 he published a story entitled A Street which was subsequently
published in book form in Tales of Mean Streets.
Around this time Morrison was also producing detective short stories which
emulated those of Arthur Conan Doyle about Sherlock
Holmes. Morrison’s Martin Hewitt was an imitation of Sherlock
Holmes, but inverted: he was ordinary, short, and good tempered and gladly
cooperated with the police. the novel for which Morrison is most famous: A Child of the Jago (1896)

May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair (24 August 1863 – 14
November 1946), a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels,
short stories and poetry. She wrote early criticism on Imagism
and the poet H. D.
(1915 in
The Egoist); she was on social terms
with H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard
Aldington and Ezra Pound at the time. She also reviewed in a
positive light the poetry of T. S. Eliot (1917 in the Little Review) and the
fiction of Dorothy Richardson (1918 in The Egoist).
It was in connection with Richardson
that she introduced ‘stream of consciousness’ as a literary term, which was
very generally adopted. Some aspects of Sinclair’s subsequent novels have been
traced as influenced by modernist techniques, particularly in the
autobiographical Mary Olivier: A Life
(1919).

Arthur Machen  (3 March 1863 – 15
December 1947) was a Welsh
author and mystic
of the 1890s and early 20th century. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy,
and horror
fiction. His novella The Great God
Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of
horror. Machen next produced The Three Impostors, a novel composed of a
number of interwoven tales, in 1895. He would write some of his greatest works
over the next few years, some were published much later. These included The Hill of Dreams, Hieroglyphics, A
Fragment of Life, the story “The White
People“, and the stories which make up Ornaments in Jade.^[1]
[2]
In 1907, The Hill of Dreams, generally
considered Machen’s masterpiece, was finally published, though it was not
recognized much at the time.^[1]

Israel Zangwill, (1864 – 1926) Anglo-Jewish
writer and political activist, was probably the best known Jew in the
English-speaking world at the start of the twentieth century. Zangwill began
his career as a journalist and humor writer, contributing to Jerome K. Jerome’s
periodical The Idler as well as Jewish periodicals. His novel Children of the Ghetto, first published in 1892,
made him a literary celebrity. It was followed by the collections Ghetto
Tragedies (1893 and 1899), Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898), and Ghetto
Comedies (1907), and the comic novel The King of Schnorrers (1894),
as well as several novels and many stories not specifically on Jewish themes.
Of his many plays on social mores and the world situation, his most enduring
has been The Melting Pot, first performed in 1908. when Israel Zangwill
died on August 1, 1926, near his home in East Preston, Sussex, the Jewish world
mourned the loss of a prominent literary interpreter, defender, and public
figure. When Israel Zangwill died on August 1, 1926, near his home in East
Preston, Sussex, the Jewish world mourned the loss of a prominent literary interpreter,
defender, and public figure.

Leonard Merrick (21 February 1864^[1]
– 7 August 1939) was an English novelist. Although largely forgotten today, he was widely
admired by his peers, J. M. Barrie called Merrick
the “novelist’s novelist.” Merrick’s novels include Mr
Bazalgette’s Agent (1888), a detective story; Violet Moses (1891),
about a Jewish financier and his troubled wife; The Worldlings (1900), a
psychological investigation of a crime; Conrad in
Quest of His Youth (1903), the tale
of a disillusioned man who, at thirty- seven, sets out to pick up the romantic
threads of his younger life, it is “judged his most successful work”^[2]
according to John Sutherland. Merrick
was well regarded by other writers of his era. In 1918, in a perhaps
unprecedented venture, fifteen writers, including famous authors such as H. G. Wells,
J. M. Barrie,
G. K. Chesterton
and William Dean Howells, collaborated with
publisher E. P. Dutton to issue “The Works of
Leonard Merrick” in fifteen volumes, which were published between 1918 and
1922. Each volume in the series was selected and prefaced by one of the writers.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)^[1]
was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for
his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in
India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1907. He was born in Bombay, British India,
and was sent back to England
aged 5.^[2]
Kipling is best known for his works of fiction The Jungle Book (1894) (a collection of stories which includes “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi“),
Kim
(1901) (a tale of adventure), many short stories, including “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888);
and his poems, including Mandalay
(1890), Gunga Din
(1890), and If—
(1910). He is regarded as a major “innovator in the art of the short
story”;^[3]
his children’s books are enduring classics of children’s literature; and his
best works are said to exhibit “a versatile and luminous narrative
gift”.^[4][5]
In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the
first English language writer to receive the prize.

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946)^[1]
was an English author, now best known for his work in the science
fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres,
including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even
writing text books. Together with Jules Verne,
Wells has been referred to as “The Father of Science Fiction”.^[2]
Wells’s first non-fiction bestseller was Anticipations (1901).^[15]
When originally serialised in a magazine it was subtitled, “An Experiment
in Prophecy”, and is considered his most explicitly futuristic
work. Anticipating what the world would be like in the year 2000, the book is
interesting both for its hits (trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of
population from cities to suburbs; moral restrictions declining as men and
women seek greater sexual freedom; the defeat of German militarism,
and the existence of a European Union) and its misses (he did not expect
successful aircraft
before 1950, and averred that “my imagination refuses to see any sort of
submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea”). His
early novels, called “scientific romances“, invented a number of
themes now classic in science fiction in such works as The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible
Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, and The First Men in the Moon. He also
wrote other, non-fantastic novels that have received critical acclaim including
Kipps
and the satire on Edwardian advertising, Tono-Bungay.
Wells wrote several dozen short stories and novellas, the best known of which
is “The Country of the Blind” (1904). His
short story “The New Accelerator” was the inspiration for the Star Trek episode Wink of an
Eye.^[16]
Though Tono-Bungay
was not a science-fiction novel, radioactive
decay plays a small but consequential role in it. Radioactive decay
plays a much larger role in The World Set Free (1914). This book
contains what is surely his biggest prophetic “hit.” Wells also wrote
nonfiction. His bestselling three-volume work, The Outline of History (1920), began a
new era of popularised world history.

Enoch Arnold Bennett (27 May 1867 – 27 March 1931) was an English
novelist.
his first novel, A Man from the North, was published to critical acclaim.
From 1900 he devoted himself full time to writing, giving up the editorship and
writing much serious criticism, and also theatre
journalism, one of his special interests. He moved to Trinity Hall Farm, Hockliffe,
Bedfordshire, on Watling Street, which was the inspiration for
his novel Teresa of Watling Street, which was published in 1904. His
father died there in 1902 and is buried in Chalgrave churchyard. In 1902, Anna of the Five Towns, the first of a
succession of stories which detailed life in the Potteries,
appeared. In 1908 The Old Wives’ Tale was published and was an immediate
success throughout the English-speaking world. His most famous works are the Clayhanger
trilogy and The Old Wives’ Tale. These books draw on
his experience of life in the Potteries, as
did most of his best work.

John Galsworthy (14 August 1867 – 31 January 1933) was an English
novelist and playwright. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga
(1906—1921) and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. From
the Four Winds, a collection of short stories, was Galsworthy’s first
published work in 1897. These and several subsequent works were published under
the pen name John Sinjohn, and it would not be until The Island Pharisees
(1904) that he would begin publishing under his own name, probably owing to the
death of his father. His first play, The Silver Box (1906), became a
success, and he followed it up with The Man of Property (1906), the
first in the Forsyte trilogy. Although he continued writing both plays and
novels, it was as a playwright that he was mainly appreciated at the time.
Along with those of other writers of the time, such as George Bernard Shaw, his plays addressed the class
system and social issues, two of the best known being Strife (1909) and The
Skin Game (1920). He is now far better known for his novels, particularly The Forsyte
Saga, his trilogy about the eponymous family and connected
lives. These books, as with many of his other works, deal with social class,
upper-middle class lives in particular. Although sympathetic to his characters,
he highlights their insular, snobbish, and acquisitive attitudes and their
suffocating moral codes. He is viewed as one of the first writers of the Edwardian era
who challenged some of the ideals of society depicted in the preceding literature of Victorian England.

Joseph Hilaire Pierre René
Belloc (27 July 1870^[1]
– 16 July 1953) was an Anglo-French writer and historian
who became a naturalised British
subject in 1902. He was one of the most prolific writers in England
during the early twentieth century. Belloc wrote on myriad subjects, from
warfare to poetry to the many current topics of his day. He has been called one
of the Big Four of Edwardian Letters,^[8]
along with H.G.Wells,
George Bernard Shaw, and G. K.
Chesterton, all of whom debated each other into the 1930s. The Path to Rome
(1902), an account of a walking pilgrimage he made from central France across the Alps and down to Rome, has remained
continuously in print. His “cautionary
tales“, humorous poems with an implausible moral, beautifully
illustrated by Basil T. Blackwood
(signing as “B.T.B.”) and later by Edward Gorey,
are the most widely known of his writings. Three of his best-known non-fiction
works are The Servile State (1912), Europe and
Faith (1920) and The Jews (1922).

John Cowper Powys (8 October 1872 – 17 June 1963) was a British
novelist and lecturer. His first novel Wood and Stone, dedicated to
Thomas Hardy, was published in 1915. This was followed by a collection of
literary essays Visions and Revisions in 1915 and his first full length
work of popular philosophy, A Complex Vision, in 1920. It was not until
1929, with Wolf Solent, that Powys achieved any real critical, and
financial success. A Glastonbury Romance, one of Powys’s
most admired novels, published in 1932, also sold well. Another important work,
Autobiography, was published in 1934. Powys immersed himself in Welsh
literature, mythology and culture, including learning to read Welsh. The move
inspired two major novels with Welsh settings, Owen Glendower [1941] and Porius
(1951. it was not until he was in his early fifties, with the publication of Wolf Solent in 1929, that he achieved critical and
financial success as a novelist. This novel was reprinted several times in both
the USA and Britain.
In the same year The Meaning of Culture
was published and it too was frequently reprinted. In
Defence of Sensuality, published at the end of the following year,
was yet another best seller.

John Davys Beresford (17 March 1873 – 1 February 1947) was an English writer, now
remembered for his early science fiction and some short stories in the horror story
and ghost story
genres. His Hampdenshire Wonder was a major influence on Olaf
Stapledon. ^[1]
His other science-fiction novels include The Riddle of the Tower, about
a dystopian,
hive-like society. ^[2]
The Early History of Jacob Stahl (1911) trilogy of novels includes A
Candidate for Truth and The Invisible Event.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English
writer.^[1]
His prolific and diverse output included philosophy, ontology,
poetry, play writing, journalism, public lecturing and debating, literary and
art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction,
including fantasy and detective fiction. Chesterton has been called the
“prince of paradox”.^[The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel. Main works:

• The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) text
• Heretics (1905) ISBN
  978-0-766-17476-4
• Charles Dickens: A Critical
  Study (1906)
• The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) text
• Orthodoxy (1908) Doubleday, 1991. ISBN
  978-0-385-01536-3
• The Ballad Of The White Horse (1911) poetry
• Manalive (1912)
• Father
  Brown short stories (detective fiction)
• Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)
• Saint Francis of Assisi (1923), Doubleday, 1987. ISBN
  978-0-385-02900-1
• The Everlasting Man (1925)
• Saint Thomas Aquinas (1933), Doubleday, 1974.

Maurice Baring (27 April 1874 – 14
December 1945) was a versatile English man of
letters, known as a dramatist, poet, novelist, translator and
essayist, and also as a travel writer and war correspondent. After the war he
enjoyed a period of success as a dramatist, and began to write novels.

• Flying Corps Headquarters
  1914-1918 (1920)
• Passing By (1921) novel
• The Puppet Show of Memory (1922)
  autobiography
• Overlooked (1922) short story
• Poems 1914-1919 (1923)
• C (1924) novel
• Punch and Judy and Other
  Essays (1924)
• Half a Minute’s Silence and
  Other Stories (1925)
• Cat’s Cradle (1925) novel
• Daphne Adeane (1926) novel
• Tinker’s Leave (1927) novel
• Comfortless Memory (1928) novel
• The Coat Without Seam (1929) novel
• Robert Peckham (1930) historical
  novel
• In My End is My Beginning (1931) biographical
  novel about Mary Stuart

William Somerset Maugham, CH (25 January 1874 – 16
December 1965) was an English playwright, novelist and short story
writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and, reputedly, the
highest paid author during the 1930s.^[1]
Liza of Lambeth proved popular with both reviewers and the public, and the
first print run sold out in a matter of weeks. This was enough to convince
Maugham, who had qualified as a doctor, to drop medicine and embark on his
sixty-five year career as a man of letters. In 1916, Maugham travelled to the
Pacific to research his novel The Moon and Sixpence, based on the life of Paul Gauguin.
Maugham made his spying experiences into a collection of short stories about a
gentlemanly, sophisticated, aloof spy, Ashenden, a volume
that influenced the Ian Fleming James Bond
series.^[
Maugham’s masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, a semi-autobiographical novel that deals with the
life of the main character Philip Carey, who, like Maugham, was orphaned, and
brought up by his pious uncle. The Moon and Sixpence fictionalizes
the life of Paul Gauguin; and Cakes and Ale
contains thinly veiled characterizations of authors Thomas Hardy
and Hugh Walpole.
Maugham’s last major novel, The Razor’s Edge, published in 1944, was a departure for him in many
ways. Among his short stories his more outstanding works in this genre include
“Rain”, “Footprints in the Jungle”, and “The
Outstation”. “Rain”, in particular.

Theodore Francis Powys (1875–1953) was a British writer, a younger
brother of John Cowper Powys. Theodore was deeply, if
unconventionally, religious and was the author of several novels and many short stories.
One of his most noted books is the allegorical
fantasy story Mr Weston’s Good Wine
(1927).

Alfred Edgar Coppard (January 4, 1878–January 13, 1957) was an English
writer, noted for his influence on the short story
form, and poet. Some of Coppard’s collections, such as Adam and Eve and
Pinch Me and Fearful Pleasures, contain stories with fantastic
elements, either of supernatural horror
or allegorical
fantasy.

Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH (1 January 1879 – 7 June
1970), was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist.
He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class
difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His first
novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), was
adapted into a film by Charles Sturridge in 1991. Next, Forster
published The Longest Journey (1907), an
inverted bildungsroman. Forster’s third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. Howards End (1910) is an ambitious
“condition-of-England” novel concerned with different groups within
the Edwardian
middle classes represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the
Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class
aspirants). Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel
takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the
lens of India
in the later days of the British Raj. Maurice
(1971) was published posthumously.

Mary Webb (25 March 1881 – 8 October 1927), was an English
romantic novelist and poet of the early 20th century, whose work is set chiefly
in the Shropshire
countryside and among Shropshire characters
and people which she knew. In her own lifetime, she won the Prix Femina Vie
Heureuse for Precious Bane.

• The Golden Arrow (July 1916). London :
  Constable.
• Gone to Earth (September 1917). London :
  Constable.
• The Spring of Joy; a little
  book of healing (October 1917). London : J. M.
  Dent.
• The House in Dormer Forest (July 1920). London : Hutchinson.
• Seven For A Secret; a love
  story (October 1922).London :Hutchinson.
• Precious
  Bane (July 1924). London :
  Jonathan
  Cape.
• Poems and the Spring of Joy
  (Essays and Poems) (1928). London :
  JonathanCape.
• Armour Wherein He Trusted: A
  Novel and Some Stories (1929).

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975)
was an English writer of humour whose body of work includes novels, collections
of short stories, and musical theatre. Wodehouse enjoyed enormous
popular success during a career of more than seventy years and his prolific
writings continue to be widely read. Despite the political and social upheavals
that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse’s main
canvas remained that of pre-war English upper-class society, reflecting his birth,
education, and youthful writing career. Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings
Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a playwright and
lyricist who was part author and writer of 15 plays and of 250 lyrics for some
30 musical
comedies,. Wodehouse was a prolific author, writing 96 books in his
remarkable seventy-three year long career (1902 to 1975). His works include
novels, collections of short stories, and musical comedies. Many characters and
locations appear repeatedly throughout his short stories and novels, leading
readers to classify his work by “series”: The Blandings
Castle stories, The Drones Club
stories, The Golf and Oldest Member stories, The Jeeves and Wooster
stories, The Mr Mulliner stories, The School stories,The Psmith stories,
The Ukridge stories, The Uncle Fred
stories.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish
novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the
modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark novel which perfected
his stream of consciousness
technique and combined nearly every literary device available in a modern
re-telling of The Odyssey. Other major works are the
short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939),
and his complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional
journalism, and his published letters. Joyce’s Irish experiences constitute an
essential element of his writings, and provide all of the settings for his
fiction and much of its subject matter. His early volume of short stories, Dubliners,
is a penetrating analysis of the stagnation and paralysis of Dublin society. A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man is a nearly complete rewrite of the abandoned novel Stephen Hero,
Portrait is a heavily autobiographical^[30]
coming-of-age
novel depicting the childhood and adolescence of protagonist Stephen
Dedalus and his gradual growth into artistic self-consciousness.
Some hints of the techniques Joyce frequently employed in later works, such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and references to a
character’s psychic reality rather than to his external surroundings, are
evident throughout this novel.^[31As
he was completing work on Dubliners in 1906, Joyce considered adding
another story featuring a Jewish advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom
under the title Ulysses. The book explores various areas of Dublin life, dwelling on
its squalor and monotony. Nevertheless, the book is also an affectionately
detailed study of the city, and Joyce claimed that if Dublin were to be destroyed in some
catastrophe it could be rebuilt, brick by brick, using his work as a model. Finnegans
Wake was published in book form on 4 May 1939. Joyce’s work has been
subject to intense scrutiny by scholars of all types. He has also been an
important influence on writers and scholars as diverse as Samuel
Beckett,^[47]
Jorge Luis Borges,^[48]
Flann O’Brien,^[49]
Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Salman
Rushdie,^[50]
Robert Anton Wilson,^[51]
John Updike,^[52]
and Joseph Campbell.^[53]
Ulysses has been called “a demonstration and summation of the
entire [Modernist] movement”.^[54]

Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English
author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of
the foremost modernist literary figures of the
twentieth century. During the interwar
period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury
Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925),
To the Lighthouse
(1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length
essay A Room of One’s Own (1929). Her first
novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by
her half-brother’s imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd.
Her 1938 book Three Guineas was an indictment of fascism.^[18]
Mrs Dalloway
(1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society
woman, to organise a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of
Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First
World War bearing deep psychological scars.^[19]
To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days
ten years apart. The plot centres around the Ramsay family’s anticipation of
and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial
tensions. Orlando (1928) has a different quality from
all Virginia Woolf’s other novels suggested by its subtitle, “A
Biography”, as it attempts to represent the character of a real person and
is dedicated to Vita Sackville-West. The Waves
(1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to
recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere
that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centered novel. Her
last work, Between the Acts (1941) sums up and magnifies Woolf’s chief
preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and
meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as
corrosion and rejuvenation—all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic
narrative encompassing almost all of English history.

Ralph Hale Mottram (October 30, 1883 – April 16, 1971) was an English
writer, known as a novelist, particularly for the Spanish Farm books, and as a war poet
of World War I.
Mottram went from being a bank clerk in Norwich,
before the war, to becoming mayor there in 1953. The Spanish Farm (The
Spanish Farm (1924), a trilogy with Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four (1925) and
The Crime at Vanderlynden’s(1926), won the 1924 Hawthornden
Prize. He also wrote a biography of John
Galsworthy.

Llewelyn Powys (13 August 1884 – 2 December 1939) was a British
writer and younger brother of John Cowper
Powys and T. F. Powys. His time spent in Africa, farming
with his brother William near Gilgil in British East Africa (now in Kenya) from 1914 to 1919,
was to prove inspirational, as were many of his other life experiences. His
other writings include a novel, Apples Be Ripe (1930), and a biography
of Henry Hudson
(1927).

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. A prolific
writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two
plays and three volumes of memoirs. Walpole’s
first novel, The Wooden Horse (1909), received good reviews but barely
repaid the cost of having it typed.^[1][2]
His first commercial success was Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill, published in
1911. Walpole worked in Russia and drew on this experience
for The Dark Forest (1916) and The Secret City (1919).^[
His novels of the 1920s included The Cathedral (1922), a novel of
ecclesiastical machinations; and Wintersmoon (1928), illustrating the
clash between traditionalism and modernism. In 1930 Walpole
began his most popular series of novels with his historical romance Rogue
Herries set in Cumberland in the mid-eighteenth century. This was followed by
Judith Paris (1931), The Fortress (1932) and Vanessa
(1933), which brought the saga up to the twentieth century.

Francis Brett Young (June 29, 1884 – March 28, 1954) was an English
novelist,
poet, playwright,
and composer.
His first published novel Deep
Sea (1914) has Brixham
as a background while Portrait of Clare (1927) is set in the West Midlands, as are several of his works from this
period. The Iron Age (1916) is set partly in Ludlow, Shropshire.
The central project of Brett Young’s career was a series of linked novels set
in a loosely fictionalised version of the English West Midlands and Welsh Borders.
The Mercian novels were originally inspired by the construction of Birmingham
Corporation’s Elan Valley Reservoirs from 1893–1904, and
the country traversed by their associated aqueduct.^[1]
The Black Diamond (1921) tells the story of a labourer working on the
aqueduct in the region around Knighton, while The House Under the Water (1932) deals
at length with the construction of the reservoirs themselves. The series
expanded into a wide-ranging study of Midlands
society from the 1890s through to the outbreak of the Second World
War. Although linked by recurring characters, each of the Mercian
novels can be read as an independent work. They range in style from the
atmospheric psychological horror of Cold Harbour (1924; praised by H. P.
Lovecraft)^[2]
to the romantic family saga of Portrait of Clare
(1927), which won that year’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was an English painter
and author. His novels include his pre–World War I–era novel Tarr (set in Paris), and The Human
Age, a trilogy comprising The Childermass (1928), Monstre Gai
and Malign Fiesta (both 1955), set in the afterworld. A fourth volume of
The Human Age, The Trial of Man, was begun by Lewis but left in a
fragmentary state at the time of his death. He also wrote two autobiographical
volumes, Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude
Assignment: A Narrative of my Career up-to-date (1950). In The Apes of
God (1930) he wrote a biting satirical attack on the London literary scene,
including a long chapter caricaturing the Sitwell
family, which did not help his position in the literary world. His book Hitler
(1931), which presented Adolf Hitler as a “man of peace”
whose party-members were threatened by communist street violence, confirmed his
unpopularity among liberals and anti-fascists,
especially after Hitler came to power in 1933. He later wrote The Hitler
Cult (1939), a book which firmly revoked his earlier willingness to
entertain Hitler. Lewis’s novels have been criticized for their satirical and
hostile portrayals of Jews, homosexuals, lesbians and other minorities. During
the years 1934–37 Lewis wrote The Revenge for Love
(1937) set in the period leading up to the Spanish Civil
War, regarded by many as his best novel. It is strongly critical of communist
activity in Spain,
and presents English intellectual fellow-travellers as deluded.

Frank Arthur Swinnerton (12 August 1884 – 6 November 1982) was an English
novelist, critic, biographer and essayist.

He was the
author of more than 50 books, and as a publisher’s editor helped other writers
including Aldous Huxley and Lytton
Strachey. His long life and career in publishing made him one of the
last links with writers including H. G. Wells,
John
Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett born in the nineteenth century.
Swinnerton achieved critical and commercial success with Nocturne in 1917.
His last novel, Some Achieve Greatness (1976), was published when he was
in his early nineties. In The Georgian Literary Scene, an evocation of
the era of the gentlemanly man of letters in its final years. “My
best books, in my own opinion, are Harvest Comedy
and The Georgian Literary Scene, but I do
not regard either one as of lasting importance.

David Herbert Richards
Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2
March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist and literary
critic. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the
dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues
relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Lawrence’s opinions earned
him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and
misrepresentation of his creative work but is now valued by many as a visionary
thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature. Lawrence is perhaps best
known for his novels Sons and Lovers,
The Rainbow, Women in Love
and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Within
these Lawrence
explores the possibilities for life and living within an industrial setting. In
particular Lawrence
is concerned with the nature of relationships that can be had within such
settings. Though often classed as a realist,
Lawrence’s use
of his characters can be better understood with reference to his philosophy.
His use of sexual activity, though shocking at the time, has its roots in this
highly personal way of thinking and being. In his later years Lawrence developed the potentialities of the
short novel form in St Mawr, The Virgin and the Gypsy and The Escaped
Cock. Lawrence’s best-known short stories include The Captain’s Doll, The Fox, The Ladybird,
Odour of Chrysanthemums, The Princess, The Rocking-Horse Winner, St Mawr,
The Virgin and the Gypsy and The Woman who Rode Away. (The
Virgin and the Gypsy was published as a novella
after he died.) Among his most praised collections is The Prussian Officer and Other
Stories, published in 1914. His collection The Woman Who Rode
Away and Other Stories, published in 1928, develops his themes of
leadership that he also explored in novels such as Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent and Fanny and Annie.
Although best known for his novels, Lawrence
wrote almost 800 poems, most of them relatively short. His first poems were
written in 1904 and two of his poems, Dreams Old and Dreams Nascent,
were among his earliest published works in .The English Review. His
early works clearly place him in the school
of Georgian poets.
Lawrence’s
criticism of other authors often provides great insight into his own thinking
and writing. Of particular note is his Study of
Thomas Hardy and Other Essays and Studies in Classic American
Literature. In the latter, Lawrence’s
responses to Whitman, Melville and Edgar Allan
Poe shed particular light on the nature ofLawrence’s craft.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence,
CB, DSO (16 August 1888^[5]
– 19 May 1935), known professionally as T. E. Lawrence, was a British Army
officer renowned especially for his liaison role during the Arab Revolt
against Ottoman Turkish rule of 1916–18. The extraordinary breadth and variety
of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in
writing, have earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia, a
title popularised by the 1962 film based on his life. Lawrence’s major work is Seven Pillars of Wisdom, an account
of his war experiences. Revolt in the Desert was an abridged
version of Seven Pillars, which he began in 1926 and was published in
March 1927 in
both limited and trade editions.

Joyce Cary (born Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary, December 7,
1888 – March 29, 1957), was an Irish novelist,
and artist.^[1][2]
His family had been landlords in Donegal since Elizabethan times, but lost their property after
passage of the Irish Land Act in 1882. The family dispersed
and wound up in England.
Some of this upbringing is described in the fictionalized memoir A House of
Children (1941) and the novel Castle Corner (1938)—. in 1932, Cary managed to publish Aissa
Saved, a novel that drew on his Nigerian experience. Cary’s next novel, An American Visitor
(1933), had little critical success. The African Witch (1936) did a
little better. One last African novel, Mister Johnson (1939), followed.
Charley Is My Darling (1940), about displaced young people at the start of
World War II, found a wider readership, and the memoir A House of Children
(1941) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize
for best novel. The Horse’s Mouth (1944)
remains his most popular novel. The Moonlight (1946), a novel about the
difficulties of women, ended a long period of intense creativity for Cary. Gertrude died as A
Fearful Joy (1949) was being published. Cary’s mature work shows several consistent
themes. First, the tension between creativity, which destroys the old as it
fashions the new, and the conservative desire to preserve things as they are;
second, the difference between liberty, which consists of a lack of restraint,
and freedom, which lies in the ability to act; finally, the sense that human
life is difficult and happiness elusive, that fleeting joy is life’s only
reward and that love is necessary to humanity.

Stephen McKenna (1888-1967),
author, was born in England
and educated at Oxford
University (MA 1914). His
writing career was launched in 1912 with the publication of ‘The reluctant
lover’. He produced several novels of manners which were popular in the United Kingdom
between the wars. An inveterate traveller, McKenna was in Africa, South America
and the Caribbean during the 1920s and 1930s.
He is the author of ‘Sonia,’ (1917), ‘The education of Eric Lane,’ (1921), ‘The magic quest,’
(1933), and several other titles. Stephen McKenna
(1888-1967) published forty-seven novels and six nonfiction books about English
upper-class life before and after World War I. In 1917, towards the end of
World War I, McKenna published his fifth and best-known novel, Sonia: Between Two Worlds, which sold through
twelve editions by the end of the year. Sonia‘s plot follows the
political and social adventures of three young Oxford men from 1890 to 1917 and was lauded
for its depiction of the changes in English governing class society brought on
by World War I. Following the success of Sonia, McKenna continued to
publish books, sometimes two a year, in England
and America, although he
remained most popular in England
due to his focus on the particularities of English society. Other notable
publications include Ninety-Six Hours’ Leave (1917), Midas and Son
(1919) and Sonia Married (1919). The majority of McKenna’s fiction can
be characterized as sentimental romances and morality tales known for their
meticulous detailing of pre-war upper-class life. However, he also wrote
several nonfiction works, including an autobiography titled While I Remember
(1921), a biography of his friend the translator Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
titled Tex: A Chapter in the Life of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos
(1922), and a biography of his uncle titled Reginald McKenna, 1863-1943: A
Memoir (1948). McKenna continued to write until his death on September 26,
1967.

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was
a prominent modernist
writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand
and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield
left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers
such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf
with whom she became close friends. Her stories often focus on moments of
disruption and frequently open rather abruptly. Among her most well known
stories are “The Garden Party,” “The Daughters of the
Late Colonel,” and “The Fly.” she was also
a first cousin of author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim. Her experiences of Germany
formed the foundation of her first published collection, In a German
Pension,^[4]
in 1911, a
work that was lauded by a number of critics. The most successful story from
this work was Frau Brechenmacher
Attends a Wedding. Mansfield
pursued with The Woman at the Store a tale of murder and
mental illness. In January 1914, she moved to Paris
and embarked on a brief relationship with French writer Francis Carco;
her visiting him, in Paris
in February 1915,^[4]
was retold in one of her short stories, An Indiscreet Journey. At the beginning of
1917 Mansfield
entered into her most prolific period of writing post-1916, which began with
several stories, including Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day and A Dill Pickle.
In December 1917 she continued to produce stories, including Je ne parle pas
français, one of her darker works. In 1918–19 she wrote The Man Without
a Temperament, the story of an ill wife and her long suffering
husband. “Miss Brill,” the bittersweet story of a fragile woman
living an ephemeral life of observation and simple pleasures in Paris,
established Mansfield
as one of the preeminent writers of the Modernist period, upon its publication in 1920’s
Bliss.

Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay, DBE (born 1 August 1881, Rugby, Warwickshire, England
– died 30 October 1958) was a British writer. She published thirty-five books,
mostly novels but also biographies and travel writing. She began writing her
first novel, Abbots Verney (published 1906), after leaving Somerville and while living with her parents at Ty Isaf,
near Aberystwyth, in Wales.
Later novels include The Lee Shore (1912), Potterism (1920), Dangerous
Ages (1921), Told by an Idiot (1923), And No Man’s Wit
(1940), The World My Wilderness (1950), and The Towers of Trebizond (1956). Her
non-fiction work includes They Went to Portugal, Catchwords and
Claptrap, a biography of Milton, and Pleasure of Ruins. The Towers of Trebizond, Macaulay’s final
novel, is generally regarded as her masterpiece. Strongly autobiographical, it
treats with wistful humour and deep sadness the attractions of mystical
Christianity,
and the irremediable conflict between adulterous love and the demands of the
Christian faith.

Dame Agatha Christie, DBE,
(15
September 1890 – 12 January 1976), was a British
crime writer
of novels,
short stories
and plays.
She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is
best remembered for her 80 detective novels—especially those featuring Hercule Poirot
and Miss Jane Marple—and her successful West End theatre
plays. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles,
came out in 1920 and introduced the long-running character detective Hercule Poirot,
who appeared in 33 of Christie’s novels and 54 short stories. Her other well
known character, Miss Marple, was introduced in The Tuesday Night Club in 1927
(short story) and was based on women like Christie’s grandmother and her
“cronies”.

Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, DBE (5
June 1884 – 27 August 1969) was an English
novelist,
published (in the original hardback editions) as I. Compton-Burnett. She
was awarded the 1955 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her
novel Mother and Son. Apart from Dolores (1911), a traditional novel she later rejected
as something “one wrote as a girl”, Compton-Burnett’s fiction
deals with domestic situations in large households which, to all intents and
purposes, invariably seem Edwardian.
The description of human weaknesses and foibles of all sorts pervades her work,
and the family that emerges from each of her novels must be seen as
dysfunctional in one way or another. Starting with Pastors and Masters (1925), Compton-Burnett developed a highly
individualistic style. In her essay collection L’Ère du soupçon (1956),
an early manifesto for the French nouveau roman,
Nathalie Sarraute hails Compton-Burnett as an
“one of the greatest novelistsEngland has ever had”.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE (3 January 1892 – 2 September
1973)^[1]
was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the
author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Tolkien to be
popularly identified as the “father” of modern fantasy literature^[6][7]—or,
more precisely, of high fantasy.^[

David Garnett (9 March 1892 – 17 February 1981) was a British
writer and publisher. A prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group,
Garnett received literary recognition when his novel Lady into Fox, an allegorical
fantasy,
^[1]was
awarded the 1922 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
fiction. He wrote the novel Aspects of Love (1955), on which the later Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical was based.

Cicely Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892–15 March 1983),
known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English
author,
journalist,
literary critic and travel writer.
A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to
feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public
intellectuals of the twentieth century. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on
the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage
of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker;
The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason, a
study of World War II and Communist
traitors; The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I
novel; and the “Aubrey trilogy” of autobiographical novels, The
Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. Time
called her “indisputably the world’s number one woman writer” in 1947.

Dorothy Whipple (née Stirrup) (1893, Blackburn,
Lancashire
– 1966, Blackburn, Lancashire) was an English
writer
of popular fiction. Described as the “Jane
Austen of the 20th Century” by J. B. Priestley^[1],
her work enjoyed a period of great popularity between the wars, two of her
novels being made into feature films, They Were Sisters^[2] (1945)
and They Knew Mr Knight^[3] (1946).
While the popularity of her work declined in the 1950s, it has seen a recent
revival; four of her novels have recently been republished

Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was
an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family.
He spent the later part of his life in the United
States, living in Los
Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known
for his novels including Brave New World and a
wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry,
and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and
scripts. Later, in Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington
lifestyle and Eyeless in Gaza. In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, California where he wrote Ends and Means
(published in 1937). In this work he examines the fact that although most
people in modern civilization agree that they want a world of “liberty,
peace, justice, and brotherly love”, they have not been able to agree on
how to achieve it. Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta
(Veda-Centric Hinduism), meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of
ahimsa.
In 1938 Huxley befriended J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired.
Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and
ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed
the teachings of renowned mystics of the world. his satirical novel After Many a Summer (1939) won Huxley that
year’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
fiction. His psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays The Doors of Perception (the title deriving
from some lines in the book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake),
and Heaven and Hell. Some of his writings on
psychedelics became frequent reading among early hippies.
After the publication of The Doors of Perception, Huxley and the
Swami disagreed about the meaning and importance of the LSD drug experience.

John Boynton Priestley, OM (13
September 1894 – 14 August 1984), known as J.B. Priestley, was an
English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He published 27 novels, notably The Good Companions (1929), as well
as numerous dramas such as An Inspector Calls. His output included
literary and social criticism. Priestley’s first major success came with a
novel, The Good Companions (1929), which earned
him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
fiction and made him a national figure. His next novel, Angel Pavement
(1930) further established him as a successful novelist. In 1934 he published
the travelogue English Journey, which is an account of
what he saw and heard while travelling through the country. He moved into a new
genre and became equally well known as a dramatist.
Dangerous Corner was the first of a series
of plays that enthralled West End theatre audiences. His best-known play
is An Inspector Calls (1945). His literary
reminiscences, Margin Released (1962), provide valuable insights into
his work. His interest in the problem of time led him to publish an extended
essay in 1964 under the title of Man and Time.

Leslie Poles Hartley (30 December 1895 – 13 December 1972)
was a British writer, known for novels
and short stories.
His best known work is The Go-Between (1953),
which was made into a 1970 film, directed by Joseph Losey.
He was, however, awarded the 1947 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Eustace and
Hilda

Margaret Kennedy (23 April 1896 – 31 July 1967) was an English
novelist and playwright. She is perhaps best-remembered for her 1924 novel The Constant Nymph, but received considerable critical acclaim for other
works, most notably Troy Chimneys, for
which she was awarded the 1953 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her later
drama included Escape Me Never in 1934 for which she was
nominated for an Academy Award.

Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963), commonly
referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family
as “Jack”, was an Irish-born British^[1]
novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay
theologian and Christian apologist. He is well known for his
fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy. Lewis was a close
friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, and both authors were leading
figures in the English faculty at Oxford University and in the informal Oxford literary group
known as the “Inklings“.

Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 – 12 January 1960) was a popular British
novelist
and a successful aeronautical engineer. In 1948 after World War II,
he flew his own Percival Proctor light airplane to Australia
. He had a brief career as a racing driver in Australia between 1956 and 1958.
Some of this experience found its way into his book On the Beach. Many of his books were
filmed, including Lonely Road, Pied Piper, On the Beach (in 1959 and also in 2000), No Highway
(in 1951) and A Town Like Alice (in 1956). Shute lived a
comfortable middle-class English life, during a period, from the turn of the
nineteenth century to past the middle of the twentieth, when class was a
predominant factor in life. His heroes tended to be middle class: solicitors,
doctors, accountants, bank managers, engineers. Usually, like himself, they had
enjoyed the privilege of university, not then within the purview of the lower
classes. However (as in Trustee from the Toolroom), Shute
valued the honest artisan, his social integrity and contributions to society,
more than the contributions of the upper classes.

Cecil Scott Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis
Troughton Smith (27 August 1899 – 2 April 1966), an English novelist who
rose to fame with tales of naval warfare. His most notable works were the
11-book Horatio Hornblower series, depicting a Royal
Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (1935; filmed in 1951
by John Huston).
His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours
were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
fiction. Forester wrote many other novels, among them The African Queen (1935) and The General (1936); Peninsular War
novels in Death to the French (published in the
United States as Rifleman Dodd) and The Gun
(filmed as The Pride and the Passion in 1957);
and seafaring stories that did not involve Hornblower, such as Brown on Resolution (1929); The Captain from Connecticut (1941); The Ship
(1943) and Hunting the Bismarck (1959), which was
used as the basis of the screenplay for the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! Several of his works
were filmed, most notably the 1951 film The African Queen, directed by John Huston.
Forester is also credited as story writer for several movies not based on his
published fiction, including Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942). He wrote
several volumes of short stories set during the Second World War. Those in The
Nightmare (1954) were based on events in Nazi Germany, ending at the Nuremberg Trials.
Stories in The Man in the Yellow Raft (1969) followed the career of the
destroyer USS Boon, while many of those in Gold from Crete (1971)
followed the destroyer HMS Apache. The last of the stories in the latter
book—”If Hitler had invaded England”—offers an imagined sequence of
events starting with Hitler‘s attempt to implement Operation Sea Lion, and culminating in the
early military defeat of Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941. His non-fiction seafaring
works include The Age of Fighting Sail (1956), an account of the sea
battles between Great Britain
and the United States
in the War of 1812.
In addition to his novels of seafaring life, Forester also published two crime
novels, Payment Deferred (1926), and Plain Murder (1930), and two
children’s books. One, Poo-Poo and the Dragons (1942). The second, The
Barbary Pirates
(1953), is a children’s history of those early 19th-century pirates.

Antonia White (born 1 March 1899, London — died 10
April 1980) ^[1]
was a British writer. In 1933, White completed her
first novel, Frost in May, which fictionalized her experiences at
Catholic boarding school and her expulsion. She also began writing a second
novel, but a failed marriage and mental illness hindered its completion.
Fifteen years later, she completed her second novel The Lost Traveller,
which was published in 1950.
In the subsequent five years, after undergoing treatment
for mental illness and reconverting to Catholicism, she completed the Clara Batchelor trilogy, which includes The Lost Traveller, about her relationship with
her mother and father, The Sugar House,
about her first unconsummated marriage, and Beyond
the Glass, about an intense love-affair followed by a breakdown
which is vividly described. As with her previous work, the trilogy was
fictional, but mainly autobiographical. ^[2]
The four novels together narrate her life from ages 9 to 23. In 1966, she published a
collection of letters entitled The Hound and the Falcon: The Story of a
Reconversion to the Catholic Faith. She wrote Three in a Room, a
three-act comedy, as well as many short stories, poems and juvenile fiction.

Richard Arthur Warren Hughes OBE
(19 April 1900 – 28 April 1976) was a British
writer of poems, short stories, novels and plays. He wrote only four novels,
the most famous of which is A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), which was first published in the USA
under the title of its successful stage adaptation, The Innocent Voyage.
He wrote an allegorical novel In Hazard (1938), and volumes of
children’s stories, including The Spider’s Palace. His most important
work is perhaps the trilogy The Human Predicament,
of which only the first two volumes, The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The
Wooden Shepherdess (1973), were complete when he died.

Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge (24 April 1900 – 1 April 1984) was an English
author of novels,
short stories
and children’s books. Goudge’s first book, The
Fairies’ Baby and Other Stories (1919), was a failure and it was several
years before she authored her first novel, Island
Magic (1934), which was an immediate success. It was based on Channel Island
stories, many of which she had learned from her mother, a native of Guernsey.
The Little White Horse (1946) was Goudge’s
own favourite among her works. Her Green Dolphin Country (1944) was made
into a film (under its American title, Green Dolphin Street) which won the Academy Award
for Special Effects in 1948. Goudge’s books are notably Christian in outlook,
containing such themes as sacrifice, conversion, discipline, healing, and
growth through suffering. Her novels, whether realistic, fantasy, or
historical, interweave legend and myth and reflect her spirituality and her
deep love of England.
Whether written for adults or children, the same qualities pervade Goudge’s
work and are the source of its appeal to readers.

Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE (16 December 1900 –
20 March 1997), was a British writer and critic. He was particularly known for
his short stories, collected in a number of volumes. His most famous nonfiction
works are the memoirs A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil
(1971), and his many collections of essays on literary biography and criticism.^[

Rosamond Lehmann, CBE
(3 February 1901 – 12 March 1990), was a British novelist.
Her first novel, Dusty Answer (1927), was a succès de scandale; she subsequently became
established in the literary world and intimate with members of the Bloomsbury set.
Her novel The Ballad and the Source
received particular critical acclaim and another, The Echoing Grove, was
filmed after her death. “The Weather In The Streets” was filmed in 1983.
Though none of her later novels were as successful as her first, Lehmann went
on to publish six more novels, a play (No More Music, 1939), a
collection of short stories (The Gypsy’s Baby & Other Stories,
1946), a spiritual autobiography (The Swan in the Evening, 1967), and a
photographic memoir of her friends (Rosamond Lehmann’s Album, 1985). Her
novels include A Note in Music (1930), Invitation to the Waltz
(1932), The Weather in the Streets (1936), The Ballad and the Source
(1944), The Echoing Grove (1953), and A Sea-Grape Tree (1976).
Her 1953 novel The Echoing Grove was
made into the 2002 film Heart of Me.
Her book The Ballad and the Source depicts an unhappy marriage from the
point of view of a child, and has been compared to Henry James‘
What Maisie Knew. The Swan in the
Evening (1967) is an autobiography which Lehmann described as her
“last testament”.

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950),^[3]
better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and
journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound
awareness of social injustice, an intense, revolutionary
opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a
belief in democratic socialism.^[4][5]
He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in
1949) and the satirical
novella
Animal Farm (1945).
They have together sold more copies than any two books by any other
twentieth-century author.^[7]
His Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of
his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War,
together with his numerous essays on politics, literature, language
and culture, are widely acclaimed. His Burma police experience yielded the
novel Burmese Days (1934) and the essays “A Hanging”
(1931) and “Shooting an Elephant” (1936). During most
of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism, in essays, reviews,
columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books of reportage: Down and Out in Paris and London
(describing a period of poverty in these cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the
living conditions of the poor in northern England, and the class divide
generally) and Homage to Catalonia. Coming Up for Air,
his last novel before World War II is the most ‘English’ of his novels; alarums
of war mingle with images of idyllic Thames-side Edwardian
childhood of protagonist George Bowling. The novel is pessimistic;
industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of Old England, and there
were great, new external threats.

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an
English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. His best-known works
include his early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), his
novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) and his
trilogy of Second World War novels collectively known as Sword of Honour (1952–61).

John Wyndham was the pen name
used by the often post-apocalyptic
English
science fiction
writer—and the creator of triffids— John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris
(10 July 1903 – 11 March 1969). In 1951 he wrote the novel The Day of the Triffids. The book
proved to be an enormous success and established Wyndham as an important
exponent of science fiction. Major works: The Day of the Triffids,
The Kraken Wakes (was published in the United States
as Out of the Deeps), The Chrysalids was
published in the United States as Re-Birth, and was adapted as a BBC Radio 4
play in the early 1980s, The Midwich Cuckoos has been filmed twice
as Village of the Damned, Trouble with Lichen, Chocky

Nancy Freeman-Mitford, CBE (28 November 1904, London – 30 June
1973, Versailles),
styled The Hon. Nancy Mitford before her marriage and The
Hon. Mrs Rodd thereafter, was an English novelist and biographer, one of
the Bright Young People on the London social scene
in the inter-war years. She is best remembered for her series of novels about
upper-class life in England and France, particularly the four published after
1945; but she also wrote four well-received, well-researched popular
biographies (of Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire,
and Frederick the Great). She was an essayist in Noblesse Oblige (1956), which helped
to popularise the “U”, or upper-class, and “non-U”
classification of linguistic usage and behaviour. Her letters and essays are
notable for their humour, irony and cultural and social breadth. One of her
novels, The Pursuit of Love (1945), had been used by Professor Alan Ross,
the actual inventor of the phrase, as an example of upper-class linguistic
usage. Other novels include Christmas Pudding
(1932), The Blessing (1951).

Christopher William Bradshaw
Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4
January 1986) was an English-American novelist.^[
His first novel, All the Conspirators, appeared in 1928. It was an
anti-heroic story, written in a pastiche of many modernist novelists, about a
young man who is defeated by his mother. Isherwood’s second novel, The Memorial (1932), made into the film Little
Friend, an experience that became the basis of his novel Prater Violet
(1945) was another story of conflict between mother and son, based closely on
his own family history. He worked as a private tutor while writing the novel Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and a
short novel called Goodbye to Berlin(1939). These works provided the
inspiration for the play I Am a Camera (1951), the 1955 film I Am a Camera
(both starring Julie Harris), the Broadway musical Cabaret
(1966) and the film (1972) of the same name. In 1947 Isherwood
wrote The Condor and the Cows. In 1954 Isherwood finished the novel on
which he had worked for some years, The World in the Evening. Down
There on a Visit, a novel published in 1962, comprised four related stories
that overlap the period covered in his Berlin
stories.

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an
English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the
ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Greene was notable
for his ability to combine serious literary acclaim with widespread popularity.
Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing,
especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.^[1]
Several works such as The Confidential Agent, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor also show an avid
interest in the workings of international politics and espionage. As his career
lengthened, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between
entertainments and novels increasingly problematic. The last book Greene termed
an entertainment was Our Man in Havana in 1958. When Travels with My Aunt was published eleven years later, many reviewers
noted that Greene had designated it a novel, even though, as a work decidedly
comic in tone, it appeared closer to his last two entertainments, Loser Takes All
and Our Man in Havana, than to any of the
novels. Greene also wrote short stories and plays, which were well-received,
although he was always first and foremost a novelist. He collected the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Heart of the Matter. In 1986, he was
awarded Britain’s
Order of Merit.
He produced two other books, the factual The Lawless Roads
(published as Another Mexico in the U.S.) and the novel The Power and the Glory. His book Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party
(1980) bases its themes on combined philosophic and geographic influences. His
cinematic visual sense led to most of his novels being made into films,^[17]
such as Brighton Rock in 1947, The End of the Affair in 1955 and 1999, and
The Quiet American in 1958 and 2002. In 1983 Greene’s novel, The Honorary Consul, published ten years earlier, was made into a famous Hollywood
movie.

Henry Green was the nom de plume
of Henry Vincent Yorke^[1]
(29 October 1905 – 13 December 1973), an English author best remembered for the
novel Loving, which was
featured by Time in its list of the 100 Best
English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.^[2]
Green’s novels are often described as being, along with those of Virginia Woolf,
among the most important works of English modernist literature.^[8]
In his later years, he became increasingly focused on studies of the Ottoman Empire.
He stopped his writing career in 1952, after releasing nine novels and a
memoir. Green’s work has received comparatively little critical attention from
academics. He wrote most of his first novel, Blindness in
Gloucestershire where he attended Eton College.
He went on to study at Oxford University and there began a friendship
and literary rivalry with Evelyn Waugh.^[4]
During this time he gained the experience to write Living,
his second novel, which was written during 1927 and 1928. In 1940, Green
published Pack My Bag, which he regarded as a nearly-accurate
autobiography.^[
in his novel Caught he echoed
wartime experiences. they were also a strong influence on his subsequent novel,
Back.
Herbert Ernest Bates, CBE (16 May 1905 – 29 January 1974),
better known as H. E. Bates, was an English
writer and author. His best-known works include Love for Lydia,
The Darling Buds of May, and My Uncle Silas.
His first novel The Two Sisters, was inspired by one of his
midnight walks, which took him to the small village of Farndish.
During World War II
he was commissioned into the RAF
solely to write short stories. His first financial success was Fair Stood the Wind for France.
Following a posting to the Far East, this was followed by two novels about Burma, The Purple Plain
in 1947 and The Jacaranda Tree, and one set in India, The Scarlet
Sword. After the war other novels followed; in fact he averaged one novel
and a collection of short stories a year, a prodigious feat. These included The
Feast of July and Love for Lydia. His most popular creation,
however, was the Larkin family in The Darling Buds
of May. Pop Larkin and his family were inspired by a colourful
character seen in a local shop in Kent by Bates and his family when
on holiday

Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow
of the City Of Leicester CBE (15 October 1905 – 1 July 1980)
was an English physicist and novelist who also served in several important
positions with the UK government.^[1]
Snow’s first novel was a whodunit, Death under Sail (1932). In 1975 he wrote a
biography of Anthony Trollope. But he is better known as the
author of a sequence of novels entitled Strangers and Brothers depicting intellectuals in academic and government
settings in the modern era. The Masters
is the best-known novel of the sequence. It deals with the internal politics of
a Cambridge
college as it prepares to elect a new master, and has all the appeal of being
an insider’s view. The novel depicts concerns other than the strictly academic
influencing the decisions of supposedly objective scholars. The Masters
and The New Men were jointly awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1954.^[10]
Corridors of Power added a phrase to the language of the day. In 1974,
Snow’s novel In Their Wisdom was shortlisted
for the Booker Prize.^[11]
In The Realists, an examination of the work of eight novelists — Stendhal,
Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens,
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy,
Benito Pérez Galdós, Henry James
and Marcel Proust
— Snow makes a robust defence of the realistic novel.

Arthur Koestler CBE (5 September 1905, Budapest
– 3 March 1983, London)
was an author of essays, novels and autobiographies. Koestler was born in Budapest
but, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria.
His early career was in journalism. In 1931 he joined the Communist Party of Germany but,
disillusioned, he resigned from it in 1938 and in 1940 published a devastating
anti-totalitarian
novel, Darkness at Noon, which propelled him
to international fame. Over the next 43 years, Koestler espoused many political
causes and wrote novels, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1968 he was
awarded the prestigious Sonning Prize “for outstanding contribution to European
culture”, and in 1972 he was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE).
Arthur Koestler CBE (5 September 1905, Budapest
– 3 March 1983, London)
was an author of essays, novels and autobiographies. In 1937 he wrote L’Espagne
Ensanglantée, which was later incorporated into his book Spanish
Testament. He was imprisoned under sentence of death. This
experience is thoroughly revisited in Dialogue with Death. In July 1938,
he finished work on his novel The Gladiators. a new novel that in
1941 was to be published in London
with the title Darkness at Noon. Koestler described the
period 1939 to 1940 and his incarceration in Le Vernet in his book Scum of the Earth (January–March
1941), which was the first book he wrote in English. For the next twelve months
he served in the Pioneer Corps. In March 1942 he wrote a novel, Arrival and Departure. He stayed in
Palestine until
August 1945, collecting material for his next book Thieves in the Nightv. In January 1949 he
commenced work on his autobiography Arrow in the Blue,
and finished work on Promise and Fulfilment.
His other book to come out in 1949 was Insight and Outlook.
In the autumn he started work on The Age of Longing. The
Invisible Writing, which covers the years 1932 to 1940, were published in
1952 and 1954 respectively. A collection of essays, The Trail of the
Dinosaur and Other Essays, largely on the perils facing
civilization, was published in 1955.
In July he started work on Reflections on Hanging.
In 1959, he started work on  The Sleepwalkers.
In 1958 he left for the East – India
and Japan
– and was away until the spring of 1959. The resulting book was The Lotus and the Robot.

Rex Warner (March 9, 1905 – June 24, 1986) was an English
classicist,
writer
and translator.
He is now probably best remembered for The Aerodrome
(1941), an allegorical
novel
whose young hero is faced with the disintegration of his certainties about his
loved ones and with a choice between the earthy, animalistic life of his home
village and the pure, efficient, emotionally detached life of an airman. his
first novel, The Wild Goose Chase, is in part a dystopian
fantasy of a tyrannical government which is overthrown in a heroic revolution.
His second novel, The Professor, published around the time of the Nazi Anschluss,
is the story of a liberal academic whose compromises with a repressive
government lead eventually to his arrest, imprisonment and execution
“while attempting to escape”. After Why Was I Killed? (1943),
Warner abandoned contemporary allegory in favour of historical novels about Ancient Greece
and Rome,
including Imperial Caesar for which he
was awarded the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
fiction.

Anthony Dymoke Powell (pronounced in one syllable, as a homophone
of “pole”)^[1]
CH, CBE (21 December 1905 – 28 March 2000) was
an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time,
published between 1951 and 1975. Powell’s first novel, Afternoon Men,
was published by Duckworth during 1931. The same firm
published his next three novels, two of them after Powell had left the firm.
Powell completed his fifth novel, What’s Become of Waring, in late 1938,
completing the manuscript of John Aubrey and
His Friends in May 1946, as among the finest English fiction of
the twentieth century. Powell was awarded the 1957 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the
fourth volume, At Lady Molly’s. The eleventh volume, Temporary Kings,
received the W.H. Smith Prize in 1974.Powell
served as the primary fiction reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.

James Hadley Chase is a pseudonym
for British
writer Rene Brabazon Raymond (December 24, 1906 — February 6, 1985)^[1]
who also wrote under the names James L. Docherty, Ambrose Grant,
and Raymond Marshall. he composed in six weeks No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Chase wrote most of
his books using a dictionary of American slang, detailed maps,
encyclopedias, and reference books on the American underworld. Most of the some
80 books were based on events occurring in the United
States, even though he never really lived in the United States.
His plots typically centre around dysfunctional families, and the final
denouement justifies the title! Chase was wildly popular in Asia and Africa. He also enjoyed success in Italy and France where more than twenty of
his books were made into movies. Under his various pseudonyms he provided much
of the material for the Série noire.
He was also extremely popular in the Soviet Union
during and after the perestroika years around 1990–1993. Other famous books were
“Miss Calaghan comes to grief”, “Blonde’s requiem”, “You never know with
women”, “The fast buck”, “Not safe to be free”, ”The soft centre”.

Nigel Balchin (3 December 1908 – 17 May 1970)^[1][2]
was an English novelist
and screenwriter
particularly known for his novels written during and immediately after World War II:
Darkness Falls From the Air, The Small Back Room (which popularised the
terms “boffin”
and “backroom boys“)^{[citation needed]} and Mine Own
Executioner. a consultant to JS Rowntree &
Sons,^[2]
he claimed, responsible for the success of the Aero and Kit Kat brands.^[2]
His novels enjoyed great popular success for a time. Darkness Falls
From the Air is set during the London Blitz
and was written while the bombing was still in progress. The Small Back Room became a Powell and Pressburger film. A Way Through
the Wood was adapted as a stage play Waiting for Gillian, and as the
2005 film Separate Lies. As a screenwriter he worked on an early
draft of Cleopatra but is principally remembered for
The Man Who Never Was, for which he won
the 1956 BAFTA Award for Best British
Screenplay, and Mandy, the story of a deaf child.

Clarence Malcolm Lowry (28 July 1909 – 26 June 1957) was a British
poet and novelist who was best known for his novel, Under the Volcano,
Ultramarine (1933), written while Lowry was still an undergraduate,
follows a young man’s first sea voyage and his determination to gain the crew’s
acceptance.

A collection of
short stories, Hear Us, O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961) was published
after Lowry’s death. The scholar and poet Earle Birney
edited Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry (1962). He also collaborated with
Lowry’s widow in editing the novella Lunar Caustic (1968) for
re-publication. It is a conflation of several earlier pieces concerned with Bellevue Hospital, which Lowry was in the process
of rewriting as a complete novel. With Douglas Day,
Lowry’s first biographer, Lowry’s widow has also completed and edited the
novels Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend Is Laid (1968) and October Ferry to Gabriola (1970) from
Lowry’s manuscripts. The Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, edited by
his widow and Harvey Breit, was released in 1965, followed in 1995-6 by the two
volume Sursam Corda! The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, edited by
Sherrill E. Grace. Scholarly editions of Lowry’s final work in progress, La Mordida and his
screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s Tender Is the Night
have also been issued.

Commander Nicholas John Turney Monsarrat RNVR (22 March 1910 – 8 August 1979)
was a British novelist known today for his sea stories,
particularly The Cruel Sea (1951) and Three
Corvettes (1942-45), but perhaps best known internationally for his novels,
The Tribe That Lost
Its Head and its sequel, Richer Than All His Tribe.
The Cruel Sea (1951), Monsarrat’s first
postwar novel, is widely regarded as his finest work. Monsarrat’s more famous
novels, notably The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956) and its sequel Richer
Than All His Tribe (1968), drew on his experience in the diplomatic service
and make important reference to the colonial
experience of Britain in Africa. The Nylon Pirates (1960) tells a story of
piracy aboard a modern ocean liner, A Fair Day’s Work (1964) deals with
labour unrest in a shipyard. The Kappillan of Malta
(1973) is as much a story of a place, the island of Malta,
as it is of a priest on that island during the terrible days of World War II.
The Story of Esther Costello (1952),
while perceived as an uncomplimentary take on the life of Helen Keller
and her teachers and assistants, is really an exposé of sleazy practices and
exploitation of real causes in the fundraising racket. His final work,
unfinished at the time of his death but published in its incomplete form, was a
two-volume historical novel titled The Master Mariner.

William Cooper was a rare instance of a writer whose appearance
and manner were entirely congruent with his novels. Of those novels, the
largely autobiographical trilogy made up of Scenes from Provincial Life, Scenes from Metropolitan Life, and
Scenes from Married Life, together with its sequels, Scenes from Later Life and Scenes from Death and Life,
must be regarded as the summit of his achievement. “I write about the real
world and real people in it,” Cooper once declared; and by
“real” people he meant “ordinary” people – the sort of
folk, lacking any particular social or intellectual distinction, who go about
their usually humdrum lives in provincial towns up and down the country. The
tone is unbuttoned, colloquial, even chatty. The world described is, in effect,
that of the Little Englander – who has no time for the literary
experimentation, the cultural references or the political extremism which he
associates with “abroad”. Cooper’s influence on a wide spectrum of
writers from Kingsley Amis to Malcolm Bradbury is obvious. Out of Cooper’s work
for such bodies as the Civil Service Commission, the United Kingdom Atomic
Energy Authority and the Central Electricity Board came two of the most
satisfactory of his other novels, The Struggles of Albert Woods (1952)
and Memoirs of a New Man (1966). As the title of the second of these
suggests, their world, that of modern technology, is not dissimilar to that of
the roman fleuve of Cooper’s close friend C.P. Snow. The most
self-revelatory, if not the most successful, of Cooper’s later books was his
1976 You’re Not Alone: a doctor’s diary.

Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British
novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, best
known for his novel Lord of the Flies. It was shortly followed by other novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin
and Free Fall. He was also awarded the Booker Prize
for literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth. Golding’s often allegorical
fiction makes broad use of allusions to classical literature, mythology, and Christian symbolism. No distinct thread unites
his novels (unless it be a fundamental pessimism about humanity), and the
subject matter and technique vary. However his novels are often set in closed
communities such as islands, villages, monasteries, groups of hunter-gatherers,
ships at sea or a pharaoh’s court. The Inheritors (1955) looked back into
prehistory. The Spire 1964 follows the building (and near collapse) of
a huge spire onto a medieval cathedral church. His 1954 novel Pincher Martin
concerns the last moments of a sailor thrown into the north Atlantic
after his ship is attacked. The 1967 novel The Pyramid comprises three separate
stories linked by a common setting (a small English town in the 1920s) and
narrator. The Scorpion God (1971) is a volume of
three novellas set in a prehistoric African hunter-gatherer band. Golding’s
later novels include Darkness Visible (1979), The Paper
Men (1984), and the comic-historical sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth (BBC TV 2005),
comprising the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage (1980), Close
Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989).

John Rayner Heppenstall (27 July 1911 in Lockwood, Huddersfield, Yorkshire,
England – 23 May 1981 in Deal, Kent,
England)
was a British novelist, poet, diarist, and a BBC radio producer.
Heppenstall’s first novel The Blaze of Noon (1939), was neglected at the
time. Much later, in 1967, it received an Arts Council
award.^[12]
He was Francophile in literary terms, and his non-fiction writing reflects his
tastes. Critical attention has linked him to the French nouveau roman,
in fact as an anticipator, or as a writer of the “anti-novel”.
Several critics (including, according to his diaries, Hélène Cixous) have named Heppenstall in this connection. He
is sometimes therefore grouped with Alain Robbe-Grillet, or associated with other
British experimentalists: Anthony Burgess, B. S. Johnson,
Ann Quin,
Alan Burns,
Stefan Themerson
and Eva Figes.
The Connecting Door (1962) is singled out
as influenced by the nouveau roman.^[13]
Later novels include The Shearers, Two Moons and The Pier.

William Sansom FRSL
(18 January 1912 – 20 April 1976) was a British novelist, travel and short
story writer known for his highly descriptive prose. After the war, Sansom
became a full-time writer. In 1946 and 1947 he was awarded two literary prizes
by the Society of Authors, and in 1951 was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature. He married actress Ruth Grundy. As well as exploring
war-torn London,
Sansom’s writing deals with romance (The Face of Innocence), murder
(‘Various Temptations’), comedy (‘A Last Word’) and supernatural horror (‘A Woman Seldom Found’). The latter, perhaps his most
anthologized story, combines detailed description with narrative tension to
unravel a young man’s encounter with a bizarre creature inRome.

Lawrence George Durrell (27 February 1912 – 7 November 1990) was an
expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist,
and travel writer,
though he resisted affiliation with Britain
and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan.
His most famous work is the tetralogy
The Alexandria Quartet. In 1935,
Durrell’s first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published.
Durrell’s next novel, Panic Spring was heavily influenced by Miller’s work^[4].
Durrell’s first novel of note, The Black Book: An Agon, was heavily
influenced by Miller and was published in Paris
in 1938. After the summer of 1948 Durrell was posted to Belgrade,
Yugoslavia.
This sojourn gave him material for his book White Eagles over Serbia
(1957). He wrote about his time in Cyprus in Bitter Lemons,
which won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1957. In 1957, he published Justine,
the first part of what was to become his most famous work, The Alexandria Quartet. Justine,
Balthazar (1958), Mountolive
(1959) and Clea (1960) deal with events before and during the Second
World War in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.
The first three books tell essentially the same story but from different
perspectives, a technique Durrell described in his introductory note to Balthazar
as “relativistic”. Only in the final part, Clea, does the story
advance in time and reach a conclusion. in Languedoc, he wrote The Revolt of Aphrodite, comprising Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970), and The Avignon Quintet, which attempted to
replicate the success of The Alexandria Quartet and revisited many of the same
motifs and styles to be found in the earlier work.

Colin MacInnes (20 August 1914 – 22 April 1976) was
an English
novelist.
He served in the British intelligence corps during World War II,
and This led to his first novel, To The Victors The Spoils.
He was the author of a number of books depicting London youth
and black immigrant culture during the 1950s, in particular City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959) and Mr. Love and Justice (1960). Many
of his books were set in the Notting Hill area of London,
then a poor and racially mixed area.

Fred Hoyle (1915 – 2001) In addition to his work as an astronomer,
Hoyle was a writer of science fiction, including a number of books
co-written with his son Geoffrey Hoyle. Hoyle appeared in a series of radio
talks on astronomy for the BBC
in the 1950s; these were collected in the book The Nature of the
Universe, and he went on to write a number of other popular
science books. In the play Sur la route de Montalcino, the character of
Fred Hoyle confronts Georges Lemaître on a fictional journey to the Vatican
in 1957.^[9]

Monica Enid Dickens, MBE (born 10 May 1915, London — died 25
December 1992, Reading, Berkshire) was an English
writer,
the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens.^[1]
her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her
first book, One Pair Of Hands in 1939.
One Pair Of Feet (1942) recounted her work as a nurse. She worked in an aircraft
factory and on a local newspaper which inspired her 1951 book My Turn To
Make The Tea.^[2]
Her work with the National Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children  is reflected in her 1953 book No More
Meadows and her 1964 work Kate and Emma. Cobbler’s Dream, The
Listeners, her autobiography, An Open Book were other successes. She died on Christmas Day
1992, aged 77.

Sir Angus Frank Johnstone
Wilson, CBE (11 August 1913 – 31
May 1991) was an English
novelist
and short story
writer. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and later received a knighthood
for his services to literature.^[
first publication was a collection of short stories, The Wrong Set
(1949), followed quickly by the daring novel Hemlock
and After, which was a great success. He jointly helped to establish
the now renowned creative writing course at the University of East Anglia.^[3]

Gerald Hanley (1916–1992) was a
British novelist
and travel writer
of Irish
descent. Hanley served in both in Somalia
and in Burma,
where Monsoon Victory (1946) is set.^[5]
Prior to this he had had a few short stories published. The Consul at Sunset
(1951), Drinkers of Darkness (1955) and The Year of the Lion
(1959) have for their background the life of expatriates in Kenya, as the British Empire
declines.^[13]
While Warriors and Strangers (1971), a mixture of autobiography and
travel writing, again has Africa as its
setting. Without Love is set in present-day Barcelona. The Journey Homeward
(1961), along with Hanley’s last novel, Noble Descents (1982), are both
set in India.
Noble Descents is set six years after independence.. His stance against
colonialism certainly didn’t help his cause at the time.

John Burgess Wilson (25 February 1917 – 22 November
1993) — who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess — was an
English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic.
The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess’ most famous novel, though he dismissed it
as one of his lesser works.^[
Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers. At his stationing in Gibraltar, which he later wrote about in A Vision of Battlements, he worked as a
training college lecturer in speech and drama. He devoted some of his free time
in Malaya to creative writing and published his first novels, Time for a Tiger,
The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East.^[28]
These became known as The Malayan Trilogy and were later
published in one volume as The Long Day Wanes. During his time
in the East he also wrote English Literature: A Survey for Students, the
first Burgess work published. In the sultanate of Brunei Burgess sketched the novel
that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled Devil of a State.
In early 1958, The Enemy in the Blanket appeared and this at once
provoked a libel suit.”^[29]
Burgess’ repatriate years (c. 1960–69) produced Enderby and The Right to an Answer, which touches on
the theme of death and dying, and One Hand Clapping, a satire on the
vacuity of popular culture. Nothing Like the
Sun, is a fictional recreation of Shakespeare‘s
love-life and an examination of the (partly syphilitic) sources of the bard’s
imaginative vision. In Napoleon Symphony,
Burgess brought Bonaparte to life by shaping the novel’s structure to Beethoven‘s Eroica symphony. In the 1980s, religious
themes began to feature heavily (The Kingdom of the Wicked, Man of Nazareth,
Earthly Powers).
The late novel Any Old Iron is a generational saga of two families, one Russian-Welsh,
the other Jewish.

Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur Charles
Clarke, CBE, FRAS (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008)
was a British science fiction
author, inventor,
and futurist,^[2]
most famous for the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, written in parallel
with the script for the eponymous film, co-written with
film-director Stanley Kubrick;^[3]
and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World.^[4][5]
For many years, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov,
and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the “Big Three” of science
fiction. He
was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II
of the United Kingdom in 1998,^[11][12]
and was awarded Sri Lanka’s highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005.^[13]
Clarke spent most of his wartime service working on Ground Controlled Approach (GCA) radar as
documented in the semi-autobiographical Glide Path,
his only non-science-fiction novel. Clarke also wrote a number of non-fiction
books describing the technical details and societal implications of rocketry
and space flight. The most notable of these may be The Exploration of Space
(1951) and The Promise of Space (1968). In 1948 he wrote “The Sentinel” for a BBC competition. Though
the story was rejected, it changed the course of Clarke’s career. Not only was
it the basis for A Space Odyssey, but “The
Sentinel” also introduced a more mystical and cosmic element to Clarke’s
work. Many of Clarke’s later works feature a technologically advanced but
still-prejudiced mankind being confronted by a superior alien intelligence. In
the cases of The City and the Stars (and its original
version, Against the Fall of Night), Childhood’s End,
and the 2001 series, this encounter produces a conceptual breakthrough
that accelerates humanity into the next stage of its evolution. In 1957 he
published The Reefs of Taprobane. The ship, ultimately identified as
belonging to the Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb,
yielded fused bags of silver rupees,
cannons, and other artefacts, carefully documented, became the basis for The
Treasure of the Great Reef.^[24Living
in Sri Lanka
and learning its history also inspired the backdrop for his novel The Fountains of Paradise in which he
described a space elevator. Profiles of the Future
published in book form in 1962. his final work, The Last Theorem.

Percy Howard Newby CBE
(25 June 1918 – 6 September 1997) was an English novelist
and broadcasting administrator. He was the first winner of the Booker Prize,
his novel Something to Answer For having received the
inaugural award in 1969. His first novel, A Journey into the Interior,
was published in 1946. He then returned to England to write. In the same year
he was given an Atlantic Award in literature, and two years thence he received
the Somerset Maugham Prize.

Iris Murdoch DBE (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was
an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about
political and social questions of good and evil, sexual relationships,
morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected
in 2001 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library
as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her
philosophical writings were influenced by Simone Weil
(from whom she borrows the concept of ‘attention’), and by Plato, under whose banner
she claimed to fight. Her
novels, in their attention and generosity to the inner lives of individuals,
follow the tradition of novelists like Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy,
George Eliot,
and Proust,
besides showing an abiding love of Shakespea re. The Unicorn (1963) can be read
as a sophisticated Gothic
romance,
or as a novel with Gothic trappings, or perhaps as a parody of the Gothic mode
of writing. The
Black Prince (1973), for which Murdoch won the James
Tait Black Memorial Prize, is a study of erotic
obsession,. Murdoch was awarded the Booker Prize
in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea, a finely detailed
novel about the power of love and loss. From 1938, she was, like a large
proportion of her Oxford
contemporaries, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Ireland
is the other sensitive detail of Murdoch’ political life that seems to attract
interest.^[

Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; born 22 October
1919) is a British writer. Her novels
include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook, and five novels
collectively known as Canopus in Argos. Lessing was
awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her first
novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in
1950.^[11]
Her breakthrough work, The Golden Notebook, was written in 1962.^[10]
The Diary of a Good Neighbour ^[16]
was published in England and the US in 1983, and If the Old Could in
both countries in 1984 [2],
both as written by “Jane Somers, re-published in both countries with the
title The Diaries of Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If the
Old Could, listing Doris Lessing as author.^[17]
Lessing’s fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases: the Communist
theme (1944–1956), when she was writing radically on social issues (to which
she returned in The Good Terrorist [1985]), the psychological
theme (1956–1969), and after that the Sufi theme, which
was explored in the Canopus in Argos sequence of science fiction
(or as she preferred to put it “space fiction”) novels and novellas.

Phyllis Dorothy James,
Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL (born 3 August 1920), commonly known
as P. D. James, is an English crime writer and Conservative life peer
in the House of Lords, most famous for a series of
detective novels starring policeman and poet Adam Dalgliesh.^[1]
Her first novel, Cover Her Face, featuring the investigator and poet Adam Dalgliesh
of New Scotland Yard, named after a teacher at Cambridge High School, was published in 1962. Her
2001 work, Death in Holy Orders, displays a
grasp of the inner workings of church hierarchy. The
Private Patient, was published in
August 2008 in
the U.K.
Talking About Detective Fiction was published in 2009. Her 1992 novel The Children of Men was the basis for a
2006 feature film of the same name.

John Gerard Braine (13 April 1922 – 28
October 1986) was an English novelist. Braine is usually associated with the Angry Young Men
movement. Braine is chiefly remembered today for his first novel, Room at the Top (1957). His 1968 novel, The Crying Game, is set in London
and captures some of the atmosphere of the ‘Swinging Sixties’.

Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE (16 April 1922 – 22
October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more
than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, and various short stories,
radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary
criticism. Amis’ first novel Lucky Jim
(the novel satirizes the high-brow academic set of a redbrick
university, seen through the eyes of its protagonist, Jim Dixon, as he tries to
make his way as a young lecturer of history. The novel was perceived by many as
part of the Angry Young Men movement of the 1950s which
reacted against the stultifications of conventional British life, though Amis
never encouraged this interpretation) was published to great acclaim; critics
saw it as having caught the flavour of Britain in the 1950s. Amis is chiefly
known as a comedic novelist of mid- to late-20th century British life, but his
literary work extended into many genres — poetry, essays and criticism, short
stories, food and drink writing, anthologies and a number of novels in genres
such as science fiction and mystery. That Uncertain
Feeling (1955) centres on a young provincial librarian (again
perhaps with reference to Larkin, librarian at Hull) and his temptation towards
adultery; I Like It Here (1958) presents Amis’s contemptuous view of
“abroad” and followed upon his own travels on the Continent with a young
family; Take a Girl Like You (1960) steps away from
the immediately autobiographical, but remains grounded in the concerns of sex
and love in ordinary modern life. With The
Anti-Death League (1966), Amis begins to show some of the
experimentation which would mark much of his work in the 1960s and 70s. The
Anti-Death League takes liberties with reality not found in Amis’s earlier
novels. The Green Man (1969) (mystery/horror) and The Alteration
(1976) (alternate history) was about the improbable
existence of any benevolent deity involved in human affairs. I Want It Now
(1968) and Girl, 20 (1971) both depict the “swinging” atmosphere of London in the late ’60s,
in which Amis certainly participated. In 1965, he wrote the popular The James Bond Dossier under his own name.
That same year, he wrote The Book of Bond,
or, Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual about being a
sophisticated spy, under the pseudonym “Lt Col. William (‘Bill’)
Tanner”, Tanner being M’s Chief of Staff in many of Fleming’s Bond novel.  The Amis Anthology (1988), a
personal selection of his favourite poems, grew out of his work for a London newspapers. Amis
was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times in his writing
career for Ending Up (1974), Jake’s Thing (1978), and finally
winning the prize for The Old Devils in 1986.^[13]

Francis Henry King, CBE (born 1923) is a British novelist
and short story
writer, and a poet. In Yesterday Came Suddenly (1993), after his
longterm partner had died from AIDS
in 1988, he described the relationship. He is a past winner of the W. Somerset Maugham Prize for his novel The
Dividing Stream (1951).

John Griffith Bowen (born November 5, 1924) is a British playwright
and novelist noted for exploding popular assumptions by his examination of the
complexity and ambivalence of human motives and behaviour. Bowen started writing books in
the mid-1950s.: “The Truth Will Not Help Us: Embroidery on an Historical
Theme”(1956), “After the Rain” (1958), “The Centre of the Green”(1959),” The
Girls: A Story of Village Life”(1986),” The Precious Gift”(1992).

Desmond Stewart (1924-1981) was a British journalist who worked for
many years in Cairo.
He wrote a number of books about Egyptian culture and history. His main novels
are ‘The Leopard in the Grass’ (1953), ‘The
Unsuitable Englishman’ (1955), trilogy ‘The Sequence of Roles’, ‘The
Round Mosaic'(1965), ‘The Pyramid Inch’ (1966), ‘The Mamelukes’ (1968).

John Barrington Wain (14 March 1925 – 24 May 1994) was an English
poet, novelist, and critic, associated
with the literary group “The Movement“. He wrote his first novel Hurry on Down during 1953, a comic picaresque
story about an unsettled university graduate who rejects the standards of
conventional society. Other notable novels include Strike the Father Dead
(1962), a tale of a jazzman‘s
rebellion against his conventional father, and Young shoulders
(1982), winner of the Whitbread Prize, the tale of a young boy
dealing with the death of loved ones.

Christine Frances Evelyn
Brooke-Rose (born 16 January 1923) is
a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her
later, experimental novels. She shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
fiction for Such (1966). Her other novels are Amalgamemnon,
Xorandor,
Verbivore
and Textermination
and her earlier novels Out, Such, Between and Thru
form the Brooke-Rose
Omnibus. Also available is her autobiographical work, Remake
(1996).

John Robert Fowles (31 March 1926 – 5 November 2005) was an English
novelist and essayist.
It was also at Oxford
that Fowles first considered life as a writer, particularly after reading existentialists
like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.
Though Fowles did not identify as an existentialist, their writing, like
Fowles’, was motivated from a feeling that the world was wrong.^[5]
During late 1960, though he had already drafted The
Magus, based in part on his experiences in Greece, Fowles
began working on The Collector. During 1965 Fowles left London,
moving to a farm, Underhill, in Dorset,
where the isolated farm house became the model for “The Dairy” in the
book Fowles was then writing, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(1969). His works The Ebony Tower (1974), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1981), and A Maggot
(1985) were all written from Belmont House in Lyme Regis. Fowles, died on 5
November 2005.

Sir Thomas Willes Chitty (born 1926), better known as Thomas
Hinde, is a British novelist. His first novel, Mr
Nicholas, was published in 1953. His second, Happy As Larry, the
story of a disaffected, unemployable, aspiring writer with a failed marriage,
led critics to associate him with the Angry Young Men
movement.^[
Hinde published thirteen further novels before turning to non-fiction among
which : A Place Like Home (1962), Games of Chance: The Interviewer,
The Investigator (1965), The Village (1966), Our Father
(1975), Daymare (1980).

Bob Shaw, born Robert Shaw,^[1]
(31 December 1931 – 12 February 1996) was a science fiction
author and fan from Northern Ireland.
He was noted for his originality and wit. He was two-time recipient (in 1979
and 1980) of the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. His short story
“Light of Other Days”, the story that introduced the concept of slow glass,
through which the past can be seen, was a Hugo Award
nominee in 1967, as was his novel The Ragged Astronauts in 1987. Shaw
expanded on the concept in the novel Other Days, Other Eyes.
His work ranged from essentially mimetic
stories with fantastic elements far in the background (Ground Zero Man)
to van Vogtian
extravaganzas (The Palace of Eternity). Later in his career he began
writing trilogies: The Land trilogy (The Ragged Astronauts, The
Wooden Spaceships and The Fugitive Worlds) was set on system of
worlds where technology has evolved with no metals.

Alan Sillitoe (4 March 1928 – 25 April 2010)^[1][2]
was a British writer and one of the “Angry Young Men”
of the 1950s. Sillitoe started work on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
which was published in 1958. Influenced in part by the stripped-down prose of Hemingway,
the book conveys the attitudes and situation of a young factory worker faced
with the inevitable end of his youthful philandering. The novel’s real subject
was the disillusionment of postwar Britain, and the lack of
opportunities for the working class. Sillitoe’s story The Loneliness of the Long Distance
Runner, which concerns the rebellion of a borstal
boy with a talent for running, won the Hawthornden Prize
in 1959. His 1995 autobiography, Life Without Armour
was critically acclaimed on publication, and offers a view into his squalid
childhood. In 2007 Gadfly in Russia, an account of his travels in Russia spanning 40
years, was published. In 2008 London Books republished A Start in Life
as part of its London Classics series.

Anita Brookner CBE
(born 16 July 1928) is an English
novelist
and art historian who was born in Herne Hill,
a suburb of London.^[1][  Her parents emigrated from Poland; originally
called Bruckner, they changed the family’s surname to Brookner owing to anti-German
sentiment in England.
Brookner published her first novel, A Start In Life, in 1981 at the age of 53. Since then she has
published a novel approximately every year. Her fourth book, Hotel du Lac, published in 1984, won the Booker Prize.
Brookner is highly regarded as a stylist. Her novels, which have been heavily
influenced by personal experience, explore themes of emotional loss and
difficulties associated with fitting into English society.

Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey (12 June 1929, in London, England – 7 August 1995, in Louth, Lincolnshire,
England)
was an English novelist, essayist, critic, biographer, and dramatist. She was a
feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War,
religious education in schools, sex, some of her books being: “The Crown
Princess and Other Stories” (1953),” The Snow Ball” (1964),” In
Transit: An Heroicycle Novel” ( 2002), “Palace without Chairs: A Baroque
Novel” (1978).

David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), who writes
under the name John le Carré, is an author of espionage novels.
During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for MI5 and MI6, and began writing
novels under the pseudonym “John le Carré”. His third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
became an international best-seller and remains one of his best known works to
date. Le Carré has since written several novels that have established him as
one of the finest writers of espionage fiction in 20th century literature. whilst an active MI5 officer,
Cornwell began writing Call for the Dead
(1961), his first novel. He later was transferred to Hamburg
as a political consul. There, he wrote the detective story
A Murder of Quality (1962) and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
(1963), as John le Carré, a pseudonym. His intelligence officer career was
ended by the betrayal of the covers of British agents to the KGB by Kim Philby,
a British double agent in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). The spy novel
œuvre of John le Carré stands in contrast to the physical action and
moral certainty of the James Bond thriller
established by Ian Fleming in the mid nineteen-fifties. A Perfect Spy
(1986), chronicling the boyhood moral education of Magnus Pym, as it leads to
his becoming a spy, is the author’s most autobiographic espionage novel –
especially the boy’s very close relationship with his con man
father. the notable exception to his spy-story writing  is The Naïve and Sentimental Lover
(1971), an autobiographic, stylistically uneven, mainstream novel of a man’s post-marital
existential crisis. Another diversion form East-West conflict is The Little Drummer Girl, dipping into the
Israel-Palestinian conflict. The Night Manager,
his first completely post-Cold-War novel, deals with drug and arms smuggling in
the murky world of Latin America drug lords.
Other marked novels are “The Tailor of Panama”, “The Constant
Gardener”.

Fay Weldon CBE (born 22 September 1931) is an English
author, essayist
and playwright, whose work has been associated with feminism.
In her fiction, Weldon typically portrays contemporary women who find
themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal
structure of western, and in particular British, society. in 1967, she
published her first novel, The Fat Woman’s Joke. Other novels
include : Down Among the Women (1971), Remember Me (1976), The Cloning of Joanna May (1989), My Mother said (1998),
Chalcot Crescent
(2009)

Colin Henry Wilson (born 26 June 1931 in Leicester),
a prolific British writer, first came to prominence as a philosopher
and novelist.
Wilson has
since written widely on true crime, mysticism, and other topics. His first novel The Outsider in 1956 examines
the role of the social “outsider” in seminal works of various key
literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus,
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Ernest Hemingway,
Hermann Hesse,
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James,
T. E. Lawrence,
Vaslav Nijinsky
and Vincent Van Gogh; Wilson discusses his
perception of social alienation in their work. Wilson became associated
with the “Angry Young Men” of British literature. He
contributed to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers
associated with the movement, and wrote a popular paperback sampler, Protest:
The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men.^[5][6]
Wilson and his friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd,
were viewed as a sub-group of the “Angries” – one more concerned with
“religious values” than with liberal or socialist politics.^[7]
Critics on the left swiftly labeled them as fascistic.
After the initial success of Wilson’s
first work, critics universally panned Religion and the Rebel (1957).

Edna O’Brien (born 15 December 1930) is an Irish
novelist and short story writer whose works often revolve around the inner
feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men and to society as a
whole.^[1]
The first book O’Brien ever bought was Introducing James Joyce by T.S.
Eliot. She has said that Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man made her realize that she wanted to pursue literature for
the rest of her life. She published her first book, The Country Girls,
in 1960. This was the first part of a trilogy of novels (later collected as The Country
Girls Trilogy) which also included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls
in Their Married Bliss (1964). Shortly after their publication, these books
were banned, and in some cases burnt, in Ireland due to their frank
portrayals of the sex lives of their characters. Her novel A Pagan Place,
published in 1970, was about her childhood in a repressive Irish town. Other
notable works were a biography of James Joyce, released in 1999, and a
biography of poet Lord Byron, Byron in Love, published in 2009. She has
received numerous awards for her works, including a Kingsley Amis
Award in 1962, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1990 for Lantern
Slides.

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, TC
(born 17 August 1932) is a Trinidadian-British writer. Most well-known for his
novels focusing on postcolonial themes, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.^[1]
He has been called “a master of modern English prose.”^[2]
He has been awarded numerous literary prizes including the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (1958), the Somerset Maugham Award (1960), the Hawthornden Prize
(1964), the W. H. Smith Literary Award (1968), the Booker Prize
(1971), and the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement
in British Literature (1993). His novels include The Mystic Masseur – (1957), Miguel Street
– (1959), Guerrillas – (1975), A Way in the World – (1994), Magic
Seeds – (2004).

Michael J. Frayn (born 8 September 1933) is an English
playwright
and novelist.
He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the
dramas Copenhagen and Democracy.
His novels, such as Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong and Spies, have also
been critical and commercial successes, making him one of the handful of writers
in the English language to succeed in both drama and prose fiction. His works
often raise philosophical questions in a humorous context. Perhaps his best
known work, and considered by many to be his finest, the play Copenhagen
deals with a historical event, a 1941 meeting between the Danish physicist
Niels Bohr
and his protege, the German Werner Heisenberg,
when Denmark is under German occupation, and Heisenberg is – maybe? – working
on the development of an atomic bomb. The play explores various possibilities. Frayn’s
more recent play Democracy ran successfully in London (the National Theatre, 2003-4 and West End
transfer), Copenhagen
and on Broadway (Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 2004-5); it dramatised
the story of the German chancellor Willy Brandt
and his personal assistant, the East German spy Günter Guillaume. Five years later, again at
the National Theatre, it was followed by Afterlife,
a biographical drama of the life of the great Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt,
director of the Salzburg
Festival. He has written a number of novels, including, Headlong (shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize),
The Tin Men
(won the 1966 Somerset Maugham Award), The Russian
Interpreter (1967, Hawthornden Prize) Towards the End of the Morning, Sweet
Dreams, A Landing on the Sun, A Very Private Life and Now You
Know. The most recent, Spies,
won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction in 2002. He has
also written a book about philosophy, Constructions, and a book of his
own philosophy, The Human Touch.

David Rhames Storey (born 13 July 1933) is an English
playwright,
screenwriter,
award winning novelist
and a former professional rugby league player. His first novel was This Sporting Life (1963). Storey’s novels
include Flight into Camden, which won the
1963 Somerset Maugham Award, and Saville, which won the 1976 Booker Prize.
Storey’s novels are often perceived as belonging to the realist tradition, with
long descriptive passages detailing many items that appear, at least
superficially, to play no role in furthering the plot. Much of his work
features isolated men trying to escape or connect.

Dr Andrew Sinclair (born 1935) is a prolific British
novelist, historian, biographer, critic and film-maker. His book The Better
Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1967.^[1]
His biographies have covered a wide variety of famous people: Che Guevara,
Dylan Thomas,
Jack London,
John Ford,
J Pierpont Morgan, Francis Bacon
The Breaking of Bumbo, 1959; The Raker, 1964; A Patriot for
Hire, 1978.; The Strength of the Hills, 1992.

Auberon Alexander Waugh (17 November 1939 – 16 January 2001) was a British
author and journalist. He was known to his family and friends as Bron Waugh.
While recuperating from the accident in Italy, he began his first novel, The
Foxglove Saga. Waugh wrote five novels before giving up writing fiction,
partly in protest at the inadequate money authors received from public lending rights at libraries and
partly because he knew he would always be compared unfavourably to his father.
The five novels are:

• The Foxglove Saga (1960)
• Path of Dalliance (1963)
• Who Are The Violets Now? (1965)
• Consider the Lilies (1968)
• A Bed of Flowers (1972).

He also wrote a book about the
Thorpe case, The Last Word.

Dame Margaret Drabble Holroyd, DBE (née Drabble; born 5 June 1939), known
as Margaret Drabble, is an English novelist,
biographer and critic. Drabble has published seventeen novels to date. Her
first novel, A Summer Bird Cage, was published in 1963. Her third novel,
The Millstone (1965), brought her the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in
1966, and Jerusalem the Golden won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1967. A theme of her novels
is the correlation between contemporary England’s society and its
individual members. Her characters’ tragic faults reflect the political and
economic situation and the restrictiveness of conservative surroundings, making
the reader aware of the dark spots of a seemingly wealthy country. Most of her
protagonists are women. Thus, her first novels describe the life of young women
during the late 1960s and 1970s, for whom the conflict between motherhood and
intellectual challenges is being brought into focus. 1998’s The Witch of Exmoor finally
shows the withdrawn existence of an old author. Other novels include The
Needle’s Eye (1972), The Middle Ground (1980), The Seven
Sisters (2002).

Marina Sarah Warner, CBE, FBA
(born 9 November 1946 in
London,
England)
is a British novelist,
short story
writer, historian and mythographer. She is known for her many non-fiction books
relating to feminism
and myth.
Her first book was The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz’u-hsi,
Empress Dowager of China,
1835-1908 (1972), followed by the controversial Alone of All Her Sex:
The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) a provocative
study of Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary.
These were followed by Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female
Form and Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. Her novel The
Lost Father was on the Booker Prize shortlist in 1988; the non-fiction From the
Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers won a Mythopoeic Award
in 1996. The companion study of the male terror figure (from ancient myth and
folklore to modern obsessions), No Go the Bogeyman: On Scaring, Lulling, and
Making Mock was published in 2000 and won the British Academy‘s
Rose Mary Crawshay Prize that year.. Her other
novels include The Leto Bundle and Indigo. Her latest book is Phantasmagoria
(2006), tracing the ways in which ‘the spirit’ has been represented across
different mediums, from waxworks to cinema.

Susan Wicks (1947 –

Poet
and novelist Susan Wicks was born in Kent,
England,
in 1947. She is the author of five collections of poetry including Singing
Underwater (1992), which won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and The
Clever Daughter (1996), which was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and
Forward Prizes, and she was included in the Poetry Society’s ‘New Generation
Poets’ promotion in 1994. A
short memoir, Driving My Father, was published in 1995. She is also the
author of two novels, The Key (1997), the story of a middle-aged woman
haunted by the memory of a former lover, and Little Thing (1998), a
novel which subverts conventional expectations of time and causality in the
story of a young English woman teaching in France. Her latest collection of
poetry is De-iced (2007). Roll Up for the Arabian Derby, a
collection of short stories, was published in 2008.

Ian Russell McEwan CBE, FRSA, FRSL (born 21 June 1948) is an English
novelist and screenwriter. McEwan’s first published works were two collections
of short stories,
First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978). The Cement
Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were
his two earliest novels. The nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed
“Ian Macabre”. These were followed by three novels of some success in
the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1997, he published Enduring Love,
which was made into a film. He won the Man Booker
Prize with Amsterdam
(1998). In 2001, he published Atonement, which was made into an Oscar-winning
film.
This was followed by Saturday (2003) and On Chesil
Beach (2007). His latest novel is Solar
(2010)

Robert Paul Holdstock (2 August 1948 – 29 November 2009) was
an English novelist
and author best known for his works of Celtic, Nordic,
Gothic
and Pictish
fantasy literature, predominantly in the fantasy subgenre
of mythic fiction.
Holdstock’s writing was first published during 1968. His science fiction
and fantasy works explore philosophical, psychological,
anthropological,
spiritual,
and woodland
themes. Robert Holdstock’s first published story, Pauper’s Plot,
appeared in the New Worlds magazine in 1968.^[6]
His first novel was a science fiction work titled Eye Among the Blind,
released in 1976.^[7]
During the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s Holdstock wrote many fantasy and
science fiction novels along with a number of short stories, most of which were
published under a pseudonym. Robert Holdstock’s pseudonyms include Robert
Faulcon, Chris Carlsen, Richard Kirk, Robert Black, Ken Blake, and Steven Eisler.^[8]
During this same period, he wrote “Space Wars, Worlds, and Weapons,”
a series of essays. In 1980 Holdstock cowrote Tour of the Universe with Malcolm Edwards.
Holdstock wrote a novella, The Dark Wheel,
which was included with the best-selling 1984 computer game Elite. Holdstock’s breakthrough novel Mythago Wood
was published during 1984 with his true name. From 2001 to 2007 Holdstock
produced a trilogy of fantasy novels, the Merlin Codex, consisting of Celtika,
The Iron Grail and The Broken Kings.

Kate Atkinson (born 1951) is an English
author. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won
the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year. Her work is
often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterization, and the
surprising twists and plot turns. Her most recent work has featured the popular
former detective Jackson Brodie. In 2009, she donated the short story Lucky
We Live Now to Oxfam’s ‘Ox-Tales‘ project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors.
In March 2010, Atkinson appeared at the York Literature Festival, giving a
world-premier reading from an early chapter from her forthcoming novel Started
Early, Took My Dog, which is set mainly in the English city of Leeds.

William Boyd, CBE (born 7 March 1952) is a Scottish
novelist
and screenwriter.
Boyd, who is of the same generation as Martin Amis,
Julian Barnes
and Ian McEwan,
has been, some people believe, “overlooked” as a novelist, largely
because he has kept a low public profile. His novels include Brazzaville Beach (1991), about a female scientist researching chimpanzee
behaviour in Africa;
A Good Man in Africa, for which he won the Whitbread Book award and Somerset Maugham Award in 1981, and An Ice-Cream War, for which he was
nominated for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1982. The book
won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the same
year. Any Human Heart was long-listed for the
Booker Prize in 2002. Restless was published October 3, 2006.
Other novels include The New Confessions; Hamish Hamilton, 1987;
Armadillo; Hamish Hamilton, 1998; Nat Tate: An American Artist
1928-1960; 21 Publishing, 1998.

Sebastian Faulks CBE (born 20 April, 1953) is a British journalist and
novelist. He is best known for his trilogy of
novels set in France:
The Girl at the Lion d’Or, Birdsong, and Charlotte Gray, the latter two of
which were bestsellers. Other titles include
A Fool’s Alphabet, The Fatal Englishman, The Long
White Winter, On Green Dolphin Street,
Human Traces,

Pistache, Engleby,
A Week in December, Devil May Care

Anthony Horowitz (born 5 April 1956) is an English
author and screenwriter. He has written many children’s novels, including The Power of Five,
Alex Rider
and The Diamond Brothers series and has written
over fifty books. From the age of eight, Horowitz knew he wanted to be a
writer, realizing “the only time when I’m totally happy is when I’m
writing”. Anthony Horowitz’s first book, The Sinister Secret of
Frederick K Bower, was a humorous adventure for children, published in 1979^[7]
and later reissued as Enter Frederick K Bower. In 1981 his second novel,
Misha, the Magician and the Mysterious Amulet was published and he moved
to Paris to
write his third book.^[8]
In 1983 the first of the Pentagram series, The Devil’s Door-bell was
released. This story saw Martin Hopkins battling an ancient evil that
threatened the whole world. Only three of four remaining stories in the series
were ever written: The Night of the Scorpion (1984), The Silver
Citadel (1986) and Day of the Dragon (1986). In 1988, Groosham Grange
was published. It was partially based on the years Horowitz spent at boarding
school. However, the major release of Horowitz’s early career was The Falcon’s Malteser (1986). This book was
the first in the successful Diamond Brothers. It was followed in 1987
with Public Enemy Number Two, and by South by
South East in 1991 followed by The French Confection, I Know What You Did Last Wednesday and
The Blurred Man and most recently “The
Greek who stole Christmas”. He wrote many stand-alone novels in the 1990s.
1994’s ‘[Granny]’ was Horowitz’s first book in three years, and it was the
first of three books for an audience similar to that of Groosham Grange.
The second of these was The Switch, first published in 1996. The third
was 1997’s The Devil and His Boy,
which is set in the Elizabethan era, and explores the rumour of Elizabeth I‘s secret son. In 1999, The
Unholy Grail was published as a sequel to Groosham Grange.

The
Unholy Grail was renamed as Return to Groosham Grange
in 2003, possibly to help readers understand the connection between the books. Horowitz Horror
(1999) and More Horowitz Horror (2000) saw Horowitz
exploring a darker side of his writing. Each book contains several short horror
stories. Many of these stories were repackaged in twos or threes as the Pocket
Horowitz series. In 2004 Horowitz branched out to an adult audience with The Killing Joke, a comedy about a man who
tries to track a joke to its source with disastrous consequences. The Power of Five
has gained more public recognition than his earlier works, earning number 1 in the top 10 book chart.

Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English^[1][2]
actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television
presenter and film director, and a director of Norwich City Football Club.Since
the publication of his first novel, The Liar
(1991),
Fry has written three additional novels, several non-fiction works and two
volumes of autobiography. Making History (1997)
is partly set in an alternative universe where Adolf Hitler’s father is made
infertile. The Hippopotamus (1994)
centres around Edward (Ted/Tedward) Wallace and his stay at his old friend Lord
Logan’s country manor in Norfolk.
The Stars’ Tennis Balls (2000)
is a modern retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. Fry’s book,
The Ode Less
Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, is a guide to writing
poetry. On 26 May 2009, Fry unveiled The Dongle of Donald Trefusis, an
audiobook series following the character Donald Trefusis (a character from
Fry’s novel The Liar)

Jeanette Winterson OBE (born 27 August 1959) is a British
novelist. her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was
published when she was 24 years old. It won the 1985 Whitbread Prize
for a First Novel. She won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The
Passion, a novel set in Napoleonic Europe. Winterson’s subsequent novels explore the
boundaries of physicality and the imagination, gender polarities, and sexual
identities, and have won several literary awards, but have never sold. Her
novel Written on the Body was inspired by her affair with Pat Kavanagh, her literary agent.^[7] Other
novels include The Passion (1987), The World and Other Places (1998), The
Battle of the Sun (2009)

Andrew O’Hagan (born 1968) is a Scottish
writer
and novelist.
He was selected by the literary magazine Granta for
inclusion in their 2003 list of the top 20 young British novelists.^[1In
1995, he published his first book, The Missing, to considerable critical
acclaim. A genre-crossing book which explored the lives of people who have gone
missing in Britain
and the families that they left behind. O’Hagan’s debut novel Our Fathers (1999) was also nominated for
several awards, including the Booker Prize.
His next novel Personality (2003), which has close similarities to the
life of Lena Zavaroni, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
His third novel, Be Near Me, was published in August 2006. O’Hagan’s
2010 novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn
Monroe is a picaresque story told in the voice of a Scottish maltese poodle
called Maf, the real-life dog given by Frank Sinatra
to Marilyn Monroe
in 1960.

Jonathan Coe (born 19 August 1961) is an English novelist
and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues,
although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. He published
his first novel in 1987. As of 2010, he has published nine novels. They have
been well received and three have won literary awards. These include The Accidental Woman,
Duckworth, 1987, The Dwarves of Death,
Fourth Estate, 1990, What a Carve Up! or The Winshaw Legacy
Viking, 1994, The Rain Before It Falls, Viking, 2007, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim,
Viking, 2010.

II. American
literature

 

1. Colonial period

Captain John Smith
(c. January
1580 – June 21, 1631) Admiral of New England was an English
soldier,
explorer,
and author.
He was knighted
for his services to Sigismund Bathory, Prince of Transylvania.
He is remembered for his role in establishing the first permanent English
settlement in North America at Jamestown, Virginia, and his brief association
with the Virginia Indian^[1]
girl Pocahontas
during an altercation with the Powhatan Confederacy and her father, Chief
Powhatan. He was a leader of the Virginia
Colony (based at Jamestown) between
September 1608 and August 1609, and led an exploration along the rivers of Virginia and the Chesapeake
Bay. His books and maps may have been as important as his deeds, as
they encouraged more Englishmen and women to follow the trail he had blazed and
to colonize the New World. He gave the name New England
to that region. “The General History of Virginia” and
“The True Travels…of Captain John Smith”

Daniel Denton (c. 1626 – 1703) was an early American colonist. Denton led an expedition into the interior of northern New Jersey.
He was one of the purchasers of what is known as the Elizabethtown Tract in 1664, in the area of (and
surrounding) present day Elizabeth, New Jersey. In 1670 he wrote
the first English-language
description of the area. Denton wrote and
published A Brief Description
of New-York: Formerly Called New-Netherlands in London in 1670.
The work was a promotional tract designed to encourage English
settlement of territories recently seized from the Dutch.
It is one of the earliest English accounts of the geography, climate, economy,
and native inhabitants of the region that includes present-day New York City,
Long Island,
Staten Island,
and New Jersey.
The tract is perhaps most famous for its early statement of Manifest
Destiny

George Percy (September 4, 1580 – 1632) was an English
explorer, author, and early Colonial Governor of Virginia.
George Percy was born in England,
the youngest son of Henry Percy, 2nd/8th Earl of
Northumberland and Lady Catherine Neville. He was sickly for much of
his life, possibly suffering from epilepsy or severe asthma. He graduated from Oxford University in 1597. While at
university, he gained admission to Gloucester Hall and the Middle Temple.
Percy’s vocation was the military. His first service came in the Dutch
struggle for independence from Spain in the early 1600s. He also
served in Ireland.
George Percy, “Observations gathered out of a discourse of the plantation
of the southern colony in Virginia by the
English, 1606,” in Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness accounts of the Virginia Colony, The
First Decade, 1607-1617, ed. Edward Wright Haile

William Strachey (4 April 1572 – 21 June 1621 (buried)) was an
English writer whose works are among the primary sources for the early history
of the English colonisation of North America.
He is best remembered today as the eye-witness reporter of the 1609 shipwreck
on the uninhabited island of Bermuda
of the colonial ship Sea Venture, which was caught in a
hurricane while sailing to Virginia.
The survivors eventually reached Virginia
after building two small ships during the ten months they spent on the island. His
account of the incident and of the Virginia colony is thought by most
Shakespearean scholars to have been a source for Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.

Strachey’s works

• “A
  True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates,
  Knight” modern-spelling version at Virtual Jamestown
• For The
  Colony in Virginia Brittannia: Laws Divine, Moral and Martial, etc.
  modern-spelling version at Virtual Jamestown.
• The Historie of
  Travaile Into Virginia Britannia at Google Books.
• “A
  Dictionary of Powhatan” at Google Books.

John Hammond : Wrote
Leah and Rachel; or, The
Two Fruitfull Sisters, Virginia
and Maryland. This pamphlet by
a colonist who lived in Virginia and Maryland from 1635 to 1656
contrasts living conditions in England and the colonies and advocates
relocation of Britain‘s poor to America.

Dr. Daniel Coxe (1640 – 19 January 1730)
was a governor of West Jersey, USA 1687-1688 and 1689-1692.
Dr.Coxe received an immense grant of land in the lower Mississippi valley from Charles II but he
never actually went to the North American continent; instead, his son Colonel
Daniel Coxe, Jr.(1673–1739), and an agent, John Tatham,
went in place of him. Colonel Daniel Coxe, Jr. lived in the American colonies
from 1702 to 1716 and after returning to England
he published an account in 1722 of his travels and a description of the area
encompassed by his father’s claim, entitled “A
Description of the English Province of Carolana, by the Spaniards called Florida, And by the
FrenchLa Louisiane.”

John Lawson (1674? – 1711) was a British
explorer, naturalist and writer. He played an important role in the history of
colonial North Carolina, publicizing his expeditions in
a book, and founding two settlements. Lawson published an account of his
adventure in 1709, in
which he described the native inhabitants and the natural environment of the
region. The book was an instant success, and several editions were published,
including versions in German and French.
The resulting publicity attracted many settlers to the colony of North Carolina. In 1709
Lawson returned to London
to oversee the publication of his book, A New Voyage
to Carolina.

^[John Winthrop (12 January 1588 – 26 March 1649) obtained a royal
charter, along with other wealthy Puritans, from King Charles I for the Massachusetts Bay Company and led a group
of English Puritans
to the New World
in 1630.^[1]
He was elected the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony the year before.
Between 1639 and 1648, he was voted out of the governorship
and then re-elected a total of 12 times. Although Winthrop was a respected political figure, he
was criticised for his obstinacy regarding the formation of a legislature in
1634, and he clashed repeatedly with other Puritan leaders like Thomas Dudley,
Rev. Peter Hobart and others.
Though rarely published and relatively unappreciated for his literary
contribution during his time, Winthrop
spent his life continually producing written accounts of historical events and
religious manifestations. Literary scholars and historians often turn to two
works in particular for analytical inspection. Winthrop’s 1630 A Model of Christian Charity and The Journal of John Winthrop are considered^{[by whom?]} to be his most
profound contributions to the literary world.

John Winthrop
wrote and delivered the sermon that would be called A Modell of Christian
Charity en route to America
with a group of Puritans in the year 1630. It described the ideas and plans to
keep the Puritan society strong in faith as well as the struggles that they
would have to overcome in theNew World.

Edward Winslow (October 18, 1595 – May
8, 1655) was an English Pilgrim leader on the Mayflower.
He served as the governor of Plymouth
Colony in 1633, 1636, and finally in 1644. His testimony
in Mourt’s Relation is one of only two primary
sources of the “first thanksgiving” in existence. His writings,
though fragmentary, are of the greatest value to the history of the Plymouth colony. They
include:

• Good Newes from
  New England, or a True Relation of Things very Remarkable at the Plantation
  of Plimouth in New England (1624);
• Hypocrisie
  Unmasked; by a True Relation of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts
  against Samuel Gorton, a Notorious Disturber of the Peace (1646), to which
  was added a chapter entitled “A Brief Narration of the True Grounds
  or Cause of the First Plantation of New England”;
• New
  England‘s Salamander (1647); and
• The Glorious
  Progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New
  England (1649).

With William Bradford he also is supposed to
have prepared a Journal of the Beginning and Proceeding of the English Plantation settled at Plymouth
in New England (1622), which is generally
known as Mourt’s Relation, owing to its preface having been signed by “G.
Mourt.” Some of his writings may be found reprinted in Alexander
Young‘s Chronicles of the Pilgrims (Boston, 1841).

Increase
Mather Increase Mather (June 21, 1639 – August 23, 1723) was a major
figure in the early history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts). While
engaged in petitioning he published pieces to build popular support for his
positions, such as A Narrative of the Miseries of New-England, By Reason
of an Arbitrary
Government Erected there Under Sir Edmund Andros (1688) and A
Brief Relation for the Confirmation of Charter Privileges (1691).As
an influential member of the community, Increase was involved in the notorious
witch hysteria of Salem, Massachusetts. As the court of oyer and terminer
was beginning to hear cases of suspected witchcraft, Increase published
“The Return of Several Ministers Consulted,” which urged moderation
in the use and credence of “spectral evidence“.
In June and July 1692 as the trials and executions grew, Mather made a number
of sermons interpreted as a plea to cool the heated atmosphere. In September he
published Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men,
Witchcrafts, infallible Proofs of Guilt in such as are accused with that Crime (more commonly
known as just “Cases of conscience concerning evil spirits”), which
defended the judges and trials, but strongly denounced the spectral evidence
used by them.

William Bradford (March 19, 1590 – May 9,
1657) was an English leader of the settlers of the Plymouth
Colony in Massachusetts, and was elected thirty times to
be the Governor after John Carver died. His journal (1620–1647) was
published as Of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford is credited as the first civil authority to
designate what popular American culture now views as Thanksgiving in the United States.^.
William Bradford’s most well-known work by far is Of Plymouth Plantation. It was a
detailed history in manuscript form about the founding of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony and the lives of the Puritan colonists from 1621 to 1646).^[43].
It is a common misconception that the manuscript was actually Bradford’s
journal. Rather, it was a retrospective account of his recollections and
observations, written in the form of two books. The first book was written in
1630; the second was never finished, but “between 1646 and 1650, he
brought the account of the colony’s struggles and achievements through the year
1646.”^[4

Roger Williams, (near 1603 – between January and February
1683) was an English Protestant theologian who was an early proponent of religious freedom
and the separation of church and state. In 1636,
he began the colony of Providence
Plantation, which provided a refuge for religious minorities.
Williams started the first Baptist church in America, the First
Baptist Church of Providence, before leaving to become a Seeker.
He was a student of Native American languages and an advocate
for fair dealings with Native Americans.
Williams’s career as an author began with A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643), written during his first voyage to England. His
next publication was Mr. Cotton’s Letter lately Printed, Examined and
Answered (London,
1644; reprinted, with Cotton’s letter, which it answered, in Publications of
the Narragansett Club, vol. ii.). The Bloody Tenent
of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience soon followed (London, 1644). This is
his most famous work, and was the ablest statement and defense of the principle
of absolute liberty of conscience that had appeared in any language. During the
same year an anonymous pamphlet appeared in London which now is ascribed to Williams,
entitled: Queries of Highest Consideration Proposed to Mr. Tho. Goodwin, Mr.
Phillip Nye, Mr. Wil. Bridges, Mr. Jer. Burroughs, Mr. Sidr. Simpson, all
Independents, etc. In 1652, during his second visit to England,
Williams published The Bloody Tenent yet more Bloody.

Anne Bradstreet was born in Northampton,
England, in the
year 1612, daughter of Thomas Dudley and Dorothy Yorke;  Dudley, who had
been a leader of volunteer soldiers in the English Reformation and Elizabethan
Settlement, was then a steward to the Earl of Lincoln;  Dorothy was a
gentlewoman of noble heritage and she was also well educated.  At the age of 16, Anne was married to Simon
Bradstreet, a 25 year old assistant in the Massachusetts Bay Company and the
son of a Puritan  minister, who had been in the care of the Dudleys since the death of his father. Anne and her
family emigrated to America in
1630 on the Arabella, one of the first
ships to bring Puritans to New England in
hopes of setting up plantation colonies. Anne, who was a well educated girl,
tutored in history, several  languages and literature, was ill prepared
for such rigorous travel, and would find the journey very difficult. Anne, who
was a well educated girl, tutored in history, several  languages and
literature, was ill prepared for such rigorous travel, and would find the
journey very difficult. Anne Bradstreet was especially fond of poetry, which
she had begun to write herself; her works were kept private though, as it was
frowned upon for women to pursue intellectual enlightenment, let alone create
and air their views and opinions.  She wrote for herself, her family, and
close circle of educated friends, and did not intend on publication. Anne
Bradstreet was especially fond of poetry, which she had begun to write herself;
her works were kept private though, as it was frowned upon for women to pursue
intellectual enlightenment, let alone create and air their views and
opinions.  She wrote for herself, her family, and close circle of educated
friends, and did not intend on publication. However, Anne’s work would not
remain unnoticed… Her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, had secretly copied
Anne’s work, and would later bring it to England to have it published,
albeit without her permission.  Woodbridge
even admitted to it in the preface of her first collection,  “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those
Parts”, which was published in 1650.  The book did fairly well
in England,
and was to be the last of her poetry to be published during her lifetime.
All her other poems were published
posthumously.

Edward Taylor (Sketchley, Leicestershire,
England,
1642 – Westfield, Massachusetts, June
29, 1729)
was a
colonial American poet, pastor and physician. He chronicled his Atlantic
crossing and early years in America
(from April 26, 1668, to July 5, 1671) in his now-published Diary. Taylor’s poems, in leather
bindings of his own manufacture, survived him, but he had left instructions
that his heirs should “never publish any of his writings,” and the
poems remained all but forgotten for more than 200 years. His
most important poems, the first sections of Preparatory
Meditations (1682–1725) and God’s
Determinations Touching His Elect (c. 1680), were published shortly
after their discovery. His complete poems, however, were not published until
1960. He is the only major American poet to have written in the metaphysical style. Among his works: Huswifery, Les Meditations,
Upon a Spider Catching a Fly

Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705) was a Puritan
minister and poet whose The Day of
Doom was a bestseller in early New England.
Through his diaries, he recounts his struggle to remain pure and good, despite
continually relapsing into what he viewed as man’s natural depravity. In his
diaries, Wigglesworth expresses an overwhelming sense of inferiority. First
with his refusal to accept the presidency of Harvard due to his lack of self-confidence,
and again when he married his cousin because, he claims, he is not good enough
to find another woman. In 1662 he published The Day of
Doom or a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment, a
“doggerel epitome of Calvinistic theology”, according to the
anthology, Colonial Prose and Poetry
(1903), that “attained immediately a phenomenal popularity. Eighteen
hundred copies were sold within a year, and for the next century it held a
secure place in [New England] Puritan
households. Other works by Wigglesworth include God’s Controversy with New
England, Meat out of the Eater, and “God’s Controversy with New England,” (1662). The latter poem was
unpublished, yet provides a lengthy commentary on the fears of Puritans that
they would be stricken by God for their sin, and persecuted by House of Stuart.^[3]

Major-General Daniel Gookin (1612 – 19 March 1687)
was a settler of Virginia and Massachusetts,
and a writer on the subject of American Indians. Gookin
wrote two books on the Indians: Historical Collections
of the Indians in New England (completed
in 1674, published by the Massachusetts Historical Society,
1792), and The Doings and Sufferings of the
Christian Indians (completed in 1677, published in 1836). He wrote
also a History of New England, but only portions of this have survived.

Alexander Whitaker (1585–1616) was a
Christian theologian
who settled in North America in Virginia
Colony in 1611 and established two churches near the Jamestown colony. Known as “The Apostle of
Virginia” by contemporaries, he was the son of William Whitaker (1548–1595), noted
Protestant scholar and Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge. His
relative tolerance of the Native American population
that English colonists encountered can be found in his sermons, some of which
were sent back to England
to help win support for the new colonies in North America.
The most famous of these sermons is Good Newes from
Virginia (1613), in which he describes the native population as “servants
of sinne and slaves of the divill,” but also recognizes them as “sons
of Adam,” who are “a very understanding generation, quicke of
apprehension, suddaine in their despatches, subtile in their dealings,
exquisite in their inventions, and industrious in their labour.”

Mary (White) Rowlandson (c. 1637 – January 1711) was a
colonial American woman who was captured by “Indians”^[1]
(Native Americans^[2])
during King Philip’s War and endured eleven weeks of
captivity before being ransomed. After her release, she wrote a book about her
experience, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of
the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, which is considered
a seminal work in the American literary genre
of captivity narratives. Her book earned
Rowlandson an important place in the history of American literature. A
Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is a
frequently cited example of a captivity narrative, an important American
literary genre used by James Fenimore Cooper, Ann Bleecker,
John Williams, and James Seaver. Because of Rowlandson’s close encounter with
her Indian captors, her book is interesting for its treatment of cultural
contact. Finally, in its use of autobiography, Biblical typology, and homage to the “Jeremiad“,
Rowlandson’s book helps the reader understand the Puritan mind.

John Eliot (c. 1604 – 21 May 1690) was a Puritan
missionary
to the American Indians. His
efforts earned him the designation “the Indian apostle.” John Eliot and fellow
ministers Thomas Weld (also of Roxbury) and Richard
Mather of Dorchester, are credited with being the
editors of the Bay Psalm Book, which was the first book
published in the British North American colonies. He participated in the
examination, excommunication and exile of Anne
Hutchinson, whose opinions he deplored. He was instrumental in the
conversion of Massachusett Indians. To help achieve this,
Eliot translated the Bible
into the Native language and published it in 1663.^[4]
In 1666, his grammar of Massachusett, called “The Indian Grammar
Begun”, was published as well. Eliot was also the author of The Christian Commonwealth:
or, The Civil Policy Of The Rising Kingdom
of Jesus Christ, considered the first
book on politics written by an American and also the first book to be banned by
an American government. Written in the late 1640s, and published in England
in 1659, it proposed a new model of civil government based on the system Eliot
instituted among the converted Indians, which was based in turn on Exodus 18,
the government instituted among the Israelites by Moses in the wilderness.
Eliot asserted that “Christ is the only right Heir of the Crown of
England,” and called for the institution of an elected theocracy
in England
and throughout the world. The accession to the throne of Charles II of England made the book an
embarrassment to the Massachusetts colony, and in 1661 the General Court
banned the book and ordered all copies destroyed. Eliot was forced to issue a
public retraction and apology

Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 – March 22, 1758) was a preacher,
theologian, and missionary to Native Americans. Edwards
“is widely acknowledged to be America’s
most important and original philosophical theologian,”^[3]
and one of America’s
greatest intellectuals.^[4]
Edwards’s theological work is very broad in scope, but he is often associated
with his defense of Reformed theology, the metaphysics
of theological determinism, and the Puritan
heritage. Recent studies have emphasized how thoroughly Edwards grounded his
life’s work on conceptions of beauty, harmony, and ethical fittingness, and how
central The Enlightenment was to his mindset.^[5]
Edwards delivered the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God“,
a classic of early American literature. Edwards is widely known for his many
books: The End For Which God Created the World; The Life of David Brainerd, which
served to inspire thousands of missionaries throughout the nineteenth century; and Religious Affections, which many Reformed Evangelicals read even today.^[8]
The entire corpus of Edwards’s
works including previously unpublished works is available online through the Jonathan Edwards
Center at Yale University
website. The Works of Jonathan Edwards project at Yale has been bringing out
scholarly editions of Edwards based on fresh transcriptions of his manuscripts
since the nineteen-fifties. There are twenty-six volumes so far.

George Whitefield (December 16, 1714 – September 29, 1770) was an Anglican
Protestant minister who helped spread the Great Awakening in Britain and, especially, in the British North American colonies. He was
one of the founders of Methodism and of the evangelical movement generally.^[1]
He became perhaps the best-known preacher in Britain
and America in the 18th
century, and because he traveled through all of the American colonies and drew
great crowds and media coverage, he was one of the most widely recognized
public figures in colonial America.
Numerous sermons, public letters and journals were published during his
lifetime. The journals were originally intended for private circulation but
were surreptitiously published by Thomas Cooper. This led to James Hutton
publishing a version with Whitefield’s approval. Exuberant and “too
apostolical” language resulted in great criticism. This led him to cease
publishing his journals after 1741 (although he was preparing a journal in
1744-45 for publication, the Journal was published in 1938 and later
biographers refer to a manuscript journal which was available to them). He
published “A Short Account of God’s Dealings with
the Reverend George Whitefield” in 1740. This covered his life up
to his ordination. In 1747 he published “A Further Account of God’s
Dealings with the Reverend George Whitefield” covering the period from his
ordination to his first voyage to Georgia. In 1756 he published a
heavily edited version of his Journals and autobiographical accounts. After his
death John Gillies, a Glasgow
friend, published a memoir and six volumes of works, comprising three volumes
of letters, a volume of tracts and two volumes of sermons. A collection of
sermons was published just before he left London
for the last time in 1769. These were disowned by Whitefield and Gillies (who
tried to buy all copies and pulp them). They had been taken down in shorthand,
but Whitefield said that they made him say nonsense on occasion. These sermons
were included in a nineteenth century volume Sermons on Important Subjects
along with the “approved” sermons from the Works. An edition of the
Journals, in one volume, was edited by William Wale in 1905. This edition was
reprinted with additional material in 1960 by the Banner of Truth Trust. It
lacks the Bermuda journal found in Gillies
biography, and the quotes from manuscript journals found in nineteenth century
biographies. A comparison of this edition with the original 18th century
publications shows numerous omissions, some minor, a few major.

Thomas Shepard (November 5, 1605 – August 25,
1649) was an American Puritan
minister and a significant figure in early colonial New England.
Shepard was regarded as one of the foremost Puritan ministers of his day,
esteemed in the company of individuals like Richard
Mather and John Cotton. He took special interest in
Puritan ministry to the Massachusetts Native Americans. His
written legacy includes an autobiography and numerous sermons, which in some
measure of contrast with others of his day, tended to accent God as an accessible and
welcoming figure in the individual life. Today a plaque at Harvard University, in the words of Cotton Mather,
records that it was in consideration of the salutary effect of Shepard’s ministry
that the college ultimately came to be placed in “Newtowne”, known
today as Cambridge, Massachusetts. Works

• The Sincere
  Convert & the Sound Believer (Volume 1 of The Works).
  Soli Deo Gloria. pp. 543. ISBN 1877611328. .
• The Parable of
  the Ten Virgins (Volume 2 of The Works). Soli Deo Gloria. pp. 635. .

Samuel Sewall (March 28,
1652 – January 1, 1730) was a Massachusetts
judge, best known for his involvement in the Salem witch trials, for which he later
apologized, and his essay The Selling of Joseph (1700), which
criticized slavery. In The Selling of Joseph (1700), for instance, he
came out strongly against slavery, making him one of the earliest colonial abolitionists.
His 1725 essay “Talitha Cumi” refers to the “right of
women.” His Journal, kept from 1673 to 1729, describes his life as
a Puritan against the changing tide of colonial life, as the devoutly religious
community of Massachusetts gradually adopted more secular attitudes and emerged
as a liberal, cosmopolitan-minded community.

Colonel
William Byrd II (28 March
1674 – 26 August 1744) was a planter, slave-owner and author from Charles City County, Virginia.
He is considered the founder of Richmond, Virginia. William Byrd not only was
an avid politician and statesman, but he was also a great writer. Many of his
works are now part of the American literary canon. His most famous work is
arguably The History of the Dividing Line, published in 1841, but he also wrote The Secret
History, which provides a much more “colorful” perspective of the
mapping of the border between Virginia and North Carolina. His
other works, published in The Westover Manuscripts in 1841, include but are not
limited to A Journey to the Land
of Eden, A Progress to
the Mines, and The Secret Diaries of William Byrd of Westover.

Samuel Adams (September 27
[O.S. September 16] 1722 – October 2, 1803)
was an American statesman, political philosopher, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
Adams continued to work for amendments to the
Constitution, a movement that ultimately resulted in the addition of a Bill of Rights in 1791. Two years
later, Adams wrote an essay intended to serve as the official statement from
the Massachusetts
assembly. In the essay, he discussed colonial power, liberties, freedoms,
self-government and the suspension of the legislature, among other things.^[59]
The assembly carefully examined and revised the essay. After much deliberation,
the statement was approved on January 12,
1768 to be sent to
the king and his ministry. Adams then decided
to write a circular letter expressing the American policy that he would send to
each colony for approval. On January 21,
Adams tried to rally support in the assembly
for the motion, but growing concerns from other representatives ultimately
doomed the plan in a House vote. Again, Adams
went to his fellow delegates to gain their support for the circular letter.
This time, it passed with a large majority on the February 4 vote. Colonial response to the circular
letter was positive, and it was subsequently published alongside a Massachusetts petition in London by Thomas Hollis.
Hollis, a British publisher in support of the American cause, published the
combined work under the title “The True Sentiments of America“. The
publication had a profound impact on both American and British readers. Britain felt
this was an act of defiance, and cries to “send over an army and a fleet”^[63]
were soon heard. By May 1768, Britain
had responded by sending soldiers intoBoston.

John Dickinson  (November 8,
1732 – February 14, 1808) was an American lawyer and politician from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Wilmington,
Delaware. he is known as the “Penman of the Revolution”
for his Letters from a
Farmer in Pennsylvania ; upon receiving news of his death,
President Thomas ^.

Thomas Jefferson, (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801–1809)
and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776).
Jefferson supported the separation of church and state^[11]
and was the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious
Freedom (1779, 1786).

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6,
1705] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers
of the United States of America. A noted polymath,
Franklin was a leading author and printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, satirist, civic
activist, statesman, and diplomat. In 1733, Franklin began to publish
the famous Poor Richard’s Almanack (with
content both original and borrowed) under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, on
which much of his popular reputation is based.. In 1758, the year he ceased
writing for the Almanack, he printed Father Abraham’s Sermon, also known
as The Way to Wealth. Franklin’s autobiography, begun in
1771 but published after his death, has become one of the classics of the
genre. Daylight saving time (DST) is often erroneously
attributed to a 1784 satire that Franklin
published anonymously.^[17In
his later years, as Congress was forced to deal with the issue of slavery, Franklin wrote several essays that attempted
to convince his readers of the importance of the abolition of
slavery and of the integration of blacks into American society.
These writings included: An Address to the Public, (1789), A Plan for
Improving the Condition of the Free Blacks (1789), and Sidi
Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade (1790).

Thomas “Tom” Paine (February 9,
1737 [O.S. January 29, 1736^[1]] –
June 8, 1809) was an author,
pamphleteer,
radical, inventor,
intellectual,
revolutionary,
and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
He has been called “a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist
by profession, and a propagandist by inclination.” His principal contributions
were the powerful, widely read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), advocating
colonial America’s independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary
pamphlet series. His writing of “Common Sense” was so influential in
spurring on the Revolutionary War that John Adams reportedly said,
“Without the pen of the author of ‘Common Sense,’ the sword of Washington would have
been raised in vain.”^. He wrote the Rights of Man
(1791), in part a defence of the French Revolutionagainst its
critics, in particular the British statesman Edmund Burke.
He also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice
(1795), discussing the origins of property,
and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.

John Trumbull (April 24, 1750 – May 11,
1831) was an American poet. While studying at Yale he had contributed in
1769–1770 ten essays, called “The Meddler”, imitating The Spectator, to the Boston
Chronicle, and in 1770 similar essays, signed ” The
Correspondent” to the Connecticut Journal and New Haven Post Boy.
While a tutor he wrote his first satire in verse, The Progress of Dulness (1772–1773), an attack in three poems on educational
methods of his time. His great poem, which ranks him with Philip
Freneau and Francis Hopkinson as an American political
satirist of the period of the War of Independence, was M’Fingal,
of which the first canto,
“The Town-Meeting”, appeared in 1776 (dated 1775). After the war
Trumbull was a rigid Federalist, and with the “Hartford Wits”
David Humphreys, Joel Barlow
and Lemuel Hopkins, wrote the Anarchiad, a poem
directed against the enemies of a firm central government.

Francis Hopkinson (September 21, 1737 – May 9, 1791), an
American
author, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence
as a delegate from New Jersey. He later served as a federal judge in Pennsylvania. His supporters
believe he played a key role in the design of the first American flag. His principal writings are A
Pretty Story . . . (1774), a satire about King George, The Prophecy
(1776), and The Political Catechism (1777). Other notable essays are
“Typographical Method of conducting a Quarrel”, “Essay on White
Washing”, and “Modern Learning”. Many of his writings can be
found in Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings, published at Philadelphia in three
volumes in 1792 (see Bibliography).

Philip Morin Freneau (January 2, 1752 – December
18, 1832) (spelled Phillip Frenau in Oxford’s
Poetry of Slavery Anthology 2003) was a notable American
poet, nationalist,
polemicist, sea captain and newspaper editor sometimes called the “Poet of
the American Revolution”.

2. Early American literature

Alexander Hamilton (January 11, 1755 – July 12,
1804) was the first United States Secretary of the
Treasury, a Founding Father, economist,
and political philosopher. Aide-de-camp
to General George Washington during the American Revolutionary War, he called for
a new Constitution
and has been lauded as one who “more than any other designed the
Government of the United States”:he was one of America’s first
constitutional lawyers, and wrote most Federalist Papers, a principal
source for Constitutional interpretation. Hamilton was the primary
author of the economic policies of the George Washington Administration,

James Madison Jr. (March 16, 1751 – June 28, 1836) was an American politician
and political philosopher who served as the fourth President of the United States (1809–1817)
and is considered one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He was the
principal author of the United States Constitution, and is often called
the “Father of the Constitution”. In 1788, he wrote over a third of
the Federalist Papers, the most influential
commentary on the Constitution. In one of his most famous roles he drafted the
first ten amendments to the Constitution and thus is known as the “Father
of the Bill of Rights“.^[Among
other contributions, Madison
wrote paper #10, in which he explained how a large
country with many different interests and factions could support republican
values better than a small country dominated by a few special interests. His
interpretation was largely ignored at the time, but in the twentieth century
became a central part of the pluralist interpretation of American
politics.^[13]

John Jay (December 12,
1745 – May 17, 1829) was an American politician, statesman, revolutionary, diplomat,
a Founding Father of the United States,
and the first Chief Justice of the United States
(1789–95). Jay also co-wrote the Federalist Papers, along with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.

James Otis Jr. (February 5, 1725 – May 23, 1783) was a lawyer in colonial Massachusetts, a member of the Massachusetts Legislature, and an early
advocate of the political views that led to the American Revolution. The phrase “Taxation without Representation is
Tyranny” is usually attributed to him.^[1]
However, the phrase had been used for more than a generation in Ireland. Originally
politically based in the rural Popular Party, Otis effectively made alliances
with Boston
merchants so that he instantly became a patriot star after the writs of assistance. He was elected by an
overwhelming margin to the Massachusetts House of
Representatives a month later. Otis subsequently wrote several
important patriotic pamphlets, served in the Massachusetts legislature and was a leader
of the Stamp Act Congress. He also was friends with Thomas Paine,
the author of Common Sense. He wrote: The Rudiments of Latin Prosody (1760), A
Vindication of the Conduct of the House of Representatives (,762), The Rights
of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764), Considerations on Behalf of
the Colonists (1765).

William Hill Brown (November 1765, Boston
– 2 September 1793, Murfreesboro, North Carolina) was an
American novelist, the author of what is usually considered the first American
novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789) and
“Harriot, Or The Domestick Reconciliation”as well as the
serial essay “The Reformer” published in Isaiah Thomas’ Massachusetts Magazine. In both, Brown
proves an extensive knowledge of European literature for example of Clarissa
by Samuel Richardson but tries to lift the
American literature from the British corpus by the choice of an American
setting. Brown also wrote the tragedy West Point Preserved, about the
British spy, Major John André.

Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745 – 31 March 1797)also known as Gustavus Vassa,
was one of the most prominent Africans involved in the British
movement towards the abolition of the slave trade.
His autobiography depicted the horrors of slavery and helped influence British
lawmakers to abolish the slave trade through the Slave Trade Act of 1807. ^[3]
Despite his enslavement as a young man, he purchased his freedom and worked as
an author, merchant and explorer in South America,
the Caribbean,
the Arctic,
the American colonies and the United Kingdom.
His account surprised many with the quality of its imagery, description, and
literary style. Some who had not yet joined the abolitionist cause felt shame
at learning of his suffering. Entitled The Interesting
Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, it was first
published in 1789 and rapidly went through several editions. It is one of the
earliest known examples of published writing by an African writer. It was the
first influential slave autobiography. Equiano’s personal account of slavery
and of his experiences as an 18th-century black immigrant caused a sensation
when published in 1789. The book fueled a growing anti-slavery movement inGreat Britain.

Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810), an American
novelist,
historian,
and editor of the Early National period, is
generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist
before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most
frequently studied and republished practitioner of the “early American
novel,” or the US
novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was by no means the first
American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity
of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories,
essays
and periodical
writings of every sort, poetry,
historiography,
reviews)
makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first
decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider
Atlantic print culture and public sphere
of the era of the French Revolution. During the novelistic phase
that lasts from 1798 until late 1801, Brown published the
Wollstonecraftian-feminist dialog Alcuin (1798), and seven subsequent
novels. An additional novel was written, but was lost by a series of mishaps
and consequently never saw publication. Brown’s novels are often characterized
simply as gothic fiction. Of the seven novels extant,
the first four to be published in book form (Wieland, Ormond, Edgar
Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn) have received the lion’s share of commentary and attention. Because of their
sensational violence, dramatic intensity, and intellectual complexity, these
four novels are often referred to as the “gothic” or “Godwinian” novels: their crudeness may have been
influenced by Brown’s personal experience of lifelong illness and morbidity. Stephen
Calvert, which appeared only in serialized form and in the posthumous
1815 biography,
remained little-read until the end of the 20th century, but is notable as the
first US
novel to thematize same-sex sexuality. Clara Howard
and Jane Talbot have been regarded sometimes as relatively conventional
works distinct from the earlier novels because they have classic epistolary
form and concern domestic issues that seem very different from the violence and
sensationalism of the first four novels. Recent scholarship (since the 1980s),
however, has largely revised this view and emphasizes the continuities and
overall coherence of all seven novels understood as a loosely unified ensemble.

 

 

 

3. Unique American model

Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an
American author, essayist,
biographer
and historian
of the early 19th century. He was best known for his short stories
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and
“Rip Van Winkle“, both of which appear in
his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His
historical works include biographies of George Washington,
Oliver Goldsmith
and Muhammad,
and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors,
and the Alhambra.
In late 1809, while mourning the death of his seventeen year old fiancée
Matilda Hoffman, Irving
completed work on his first major book, A History of New-York
from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich
Knickerbocker (1809), a satire on self-important local history and
contemporary politics. With full access to the American consul’s massive
library of Spanish history, Irving
began working on several books at once. The first offspring of this hard work, The Life and Voyages of Christopher
Columbus, was published in January 1828. The book was popular in
the United States and in Europe and would have 175 editions published before the
end of the century. It was also the first project of Irving’s to be published with his own name,
instead of a pseudonym, on the title page. The Chronicles of the
Conquest of Granada was published a year later, followed by Voyages
and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus in 1831. Irving is largely
credited as the first American Man of Letters, and the first to earn his living
solely by his pen.

William Cullen Bryant (November 3, 1794 – June 12, 1878) was an American
romantic poet,
journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post. Bryant
developed an interest in poetry early in life. Under his father’s tutelage, he
emulated Alexander Pope and other Neo-Classic British
poets. The Embargo, a savage attack on
President Thomas Jefferson published in 1808, reflected
Dr. Bryant’s Federalist political views. The first edition quickly sold
out—partly because of the publicity earned by the poet’s young age—and a
second, expanded edition, which included Bryant’s translation of Classical
verse, was printed. Bryant developed an interest in poetry early in life. Bryant
edited the very successful Picturesque America which was
published between 1872 and 1874. This two-volume set was lavishly illustrated
and described scenic places in the United States
and Canada.^[7]

James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 – September 14, 1851) was a
prolific and popular American writer of the
early 19th century. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote
numerous sea-stories and the historical
novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring
frontiersman Natty Bumppo. Among his most famous works is
the Romantic
novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece. He anonymously
published his first book, Precaution (1820). He soon issued
several others. In 1823, he published The Pioneers; this was the first of
the Leatherstocking series, featuring Natty
Bumppo, the resourceful American woodsman at home with the Delaware
Indians and especially their chief Chingachgook. Cooper’s most
famous novel, Last of the Mohicans (1826), became
one of the most widely read American novels of the 19th century. The book was
written in New York City,
where Cooper and his family lived from 1822 to 1826.

In 1826 Cooper
moved his family to Europe,
where he sought to gain more income from his books as well as provide better
education for his children. While overseas he continued to write. His books
published in Paris
include The Red Rover and The
Water Witch—two of his many sea stories. Cooper was one of the most popular
19th-century American authors, and his work was admired greatly throughout the
world. While on his death bed, the Austrian composer Franz
Schubert wanted most to read more of Cooper’s novels.^[6]
Honoré de Balzac, the French novelist and
playwright, admired him greatly^{[citation needed]}. Cooper’s
stories have been translated into nearly all the languages of Europe and into
some of those of Asia.

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7,
1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part
of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery
and the macabre,
Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is
considered the inventor of the detective-fiction
genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of
science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a
living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and
career. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym of Nantucket was published and widely reviewed in 1838.
Also in 1839, the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
was published in two volumes, though he made little money off of it and it
received mixed reviews.

Seba Smith (September 14, 1792 –
July 28, 1868) was an American humorist and writer. He was married to
Elizabeth Oakes Smith, also a major writer
and feminist.
Born in Buckfield, Maine, Smith graduated from Bowdoin
College in 1818 and then lived in Portland,
Maine. He edited various papers including the Eastern Argus and then
founded the Portland Courier and
edited it from 1830 to 1837. He was one of the first writers to use American
vernacular in humor. His series with the New England
character Major Jack Downing was popular
after its start in 1830. His dry, satirical humor influenced other 19^th
century humorists, including Artemus Ward and Finley Peter Dunne. He is also credited as
being a forerunner of other American humorists like Will Rogers.

Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber (1814 – 1890) was an American humorist.

He was born in 1814 inPortsmouth, New Hampshire and began work
in a printing-office in 1830. He moved to Boston
in 1832, and then became an editor with the Boston Daily Post and Boston
Saturday Evening Gazette. He then became editor of The Carpet-Bag humor
magazine in the 1850s, one of his creations was Mrs. Partington, the
American version of Mrs. Malaprop. He died in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1890. Works

• Life and
  Sayings of Mrs. Partington (1854)
• Partingtonian
  Patchwork (1873)
• Ike and his Friends (1879)

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (September 22, 1790-July 9, 1870) was an American
lawyer, minster, educator, and humorist, known for his book Georgia Scenes. At an
early age, he began to write for the press, and his pen was never idle. His
chief periodical contributions are to be found in The Methodist Quarterly,
The Southern
Literary Messenger, The Southern
Field and Fireside, The Magnolia, and The Orion, and include
“Letters to Clergymen of the Northern Methodist Church” and “Letters from
Georgia to Massachusetts.” His fame is based, however, on a single book, of
which he was the author: Georgia Scenes (1835),
originally published in newspapers, then gathered into a volume at the South,
and finally issued in 1840
in New York. It featured realistic sketches of
Southern humor. It is said that he disavowed the second edition (1867) and
tried to destroy the first.

Johnson Jones Hooper (June 9, 1815– June 7, 1863) was an American
humorist,
born in Wilmington, North Carolina. He moved to Dadeville, Alabama
where he edited a newspaper and practiced law. He was secretary of the Provisional Confederate Congress.
In 1845 he published the Adventures of Captain Simon
Suggs, broadly, cruelly, and uncouthly humorous, yet one of the
raciest books of its time, descriptive of a gambling sharp of the Southwest in
the “flush times.” His Widow Rugby’s Husband and Other Tales of
Alabama (1851) was less successful.^[1]

Joseph Baldwin (October 31, 1827, some sources indicate October
27, 1827 – January 13, 1899) was a pioneering educator and called by some the
“father of the normal school system”. While living in Texas he wrote several
books on education:

• Art of School Management (1881)
• Elementary Psychology and
  Education, a text-book for high schools, normal schools, normal institutes, and
  reading circles, and a manual for teachers. (1887) another ed. D. Appleton, New
  York, 1897
• Psychology Applied to the
  Art of Teaching (1892)
• School Management
  and School Methods (1897)

James Russell Lowell (February 22, 1819 – August 12, 1891) was an American
Romantic
poet, critic, editor, and diplomat. He is associated with the Fireside
Poets, a group of New England writers who were among the first
American poets who rivaled the popularity of British poets. These poets usually
used conventional forms and meters in their poetry, making them suitable for
families entertaining at their fireside. He gained notoriety in 1848 with the
publication of A Fable for Critics, a book-length
poem satirizing
contemporary critics and poets. The same year, he published The Biglow Papers,
which increased his fame. He would publish several other poetry collections and
essay collections throughout his literary career. Lowell attempted to emulate the true Yankee
accent in the dialogue of his characters, particularly in The Biglow Papers.
This depiction of the dialect, as well as Lowell’s
many satires, were an inspiration to writers like Mark Twain
and H. L. Mencken.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American poet
and educator whose works include “Paul Revere’s Ride“, The Song of Hiawatha, and “Evangeline“.
He was also the first American to translate Dante
Alighieri’s The Divine
Comedy and was one of the five Fireside
Poets. Longfellow predominantly wrote lyric poems
which are known for their musicality and which often presented stories of
mythology and legend. He became the most popular American poet of his day and
also had success overseas. He has been criticized, however, for imitating
European styles and writing specifically for the masses. In 1845, he published The
Poets and Poetry of Europe, an 800-page compilation of translations made by
other writers, including many by his friend and colleague Cornelius Conway Felton. In 1874,
Longfellow oversaw a 31-volume anthology called Poems of Places, which
collected poems representing several geographical locations, including
European, Asian, and Arabian countries.^[
Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea (Travelogue) (1835)

• Hyperion, a Romance (1839)
• The Spanish Student. A Play
  in Three Acts (1843)^[52]
• Evangeline:
  A Tale of Acadie (epic poem) (1847)
• “Kavanagh: A Tale”
  (1849)
• “The Golden
  Legend” (poem) (1851)
• The Song of Hiawatha (epic poem) (1855)
• The Children’s Hour (1860)
• Household Poems (1865)
• The New England Tragedies (1868)
• The Divine Tragedy (1871)
• Christus: A Mystery (1872)
• “Aftermath” (poem)
  (1873)
• The Reaper and the Flowers (1839)
• The Bell of Atri (from The Sicilian’s
  Tale) (1863–72)

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (August 29, 1809 – October 7, 1894) was an
American physician,
professor, lecturer, and author. Regarded by his peers as one of the best
writers of the 19th century, he is considered a member of the Fireside
Poets. His most famous prose works are the “Breakfast-Table” series, which began with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858). He is recognized as an important medical
reformer. Holmes retired from Harvard in 1882 and continued writing poetry,
novels and essays until his death in 1894. Surrounded by Boston‘s
literary elite—which included friends such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell—Holmes made an
indelible imprint on the literary world of the 19th century. Many of his works
were published in The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that he
named. For his literary achievements and other accomplishments, he was awarded
numerous honorary degrees from universities around the world. Holmes’s writing
often commemorated his native Boston
area, and much of it was meant to be humorous or conversational. Some of his
medical writings, notably his 1843 essay regarding the contagiousness of
puerperal fever, were considered innovative for their time. He was often called
upon to issue occasional poetry, or poems written specifically for an event,
including many occasions at Harvard. Holmes also popularized several terms,
including “Boston Brahmin” and “anesthesia“.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an
American lecturer, essayist and poet,
who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th
century. He was seen as a champion of individualism
and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he
disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than
1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually
moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries,
formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836
essay, Nature. Following this
ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to
be America’s
“Intellectual Declaration of Independence”.Considered one
of the great lecturers of the time, Emerson had an enthusiasm and respect for
his audience that enraptured crowds. Emerson wrote most of his important
essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two
collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published
respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include
such well-known essays as Self-Reliance,
The Over-Soul,
Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature,
these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson’s most
fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed
philosophical tenets,
but developing certain ideas such as individuality,
freedom,
the ability for man to realize almost anything, and the relationship between
the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson’s “nature” was more
philosophical than naturalistic; “Philosophically considered,
the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul.” While his writing style
can be seen as somewhat impenetrable, and was thought so even in his own time,
Emerson’s essays remain one of the linchpins
of American thinking, and Emerson’s work has greatly influenced the thinkers,
writers and poets that have followed him. When asked to sum up his work, he
said his central doctrine was “the infinitude
of the private man.”

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862)
(properly pronounced Thaw-roe) was an American
author, poet, abolitionist,
naturalist,
tax resister,
development critic, surveyor,
historian,
philosopher,
and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his
book Walden, a
reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument
for individual resistance to civil government in moral
opposition to an unjust state. Thoreau’s books, articles, essays,
journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions
were his writings on natural history and philosophy,
where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology
and environmental history, two sources of modern
day environmentalism. His literary
style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed
rhetoric, symbolic
meanings, and historical lore; while displaying a poetic sensibility,
philosophical austerity, and “Yankee” love of practical detail. He
was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile
elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated
abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life’s true essential needs. He
was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings
of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience influenced the political
thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy,
Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Amos Bronson Alcott (November 29, 1799 – March 4, 1888) was an
American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. His experience there was
turned into two books: Records of a School
and Conversations with Children on the Gospels.
Alcott became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and became a major figure
in transcendentalism. His writings on behalf of
that movement, however, are heavily criticized for being incoherent. Based on
his ideas for human perfection, Alcott founded Fruitlands, a
transcendentalist experiment in community living. The project was short-lived
and failed after seven months. Alcott continued to struggle financially for
most of his life. Nevertheless, he continued focusing on educational projects
and opened a new school at the end of his life in 1879. He died in 1888.

Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, commonly known as Margaret Fuller, (May 23,
1810 – July 19, 1850) was an American journalist, critic, and women’s
rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism
movement. She was the first full-time American female book reviewer in
journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist
work in theUnited States.

Born Sarah
Margaret Fuller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was given a
substantial early education by her father, Timothy
Fuller. She later had more formal schooling and became a teacher
before, in 1839, she began overseeing what she called
“conversations”: discussions among women meant to compensate for
their lack of access to higher education. She became the first editor of the
transcendentalist journal The Dial in 1840, before joining the staff of the New York
Tribune under Horace
Greeley in 1844. By the time she was in her 30s, Fuller had earned a
reputation as the best-read person in New England,
male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard
College. Her seminal work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
was published in 1845. A
year later, she was sent to Europe for the Tribune
as its first female correspondent. She soon became involved with
the revolution
in Italy
and allied herself with Giuseppe Mazzini. She had a relationship with
Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child. All three members of the family
died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, as they were
traveling to the United
States in 1850. Fuller’s body was never
recovered. Fuller was an advocate of women’s rights and, in particular, women’s
education and the right to employment. She also encouraged many other reforms
in society, including prison reform and the emancipation
of slaves in the United
States. Many other advocates for women’s
rights and feminism, including Susan B.
Anthony, cite Fuller as a source of inspiration. Many of her
contemporaries, however, were not supportive, including her former friend Harriet
Martineau. She said that Fuller was a talker rather than an activist.
Shortly after Fuller’s death, her importance faded; the editors who prepared
her letters to be published, believing her fame would be short-lived, were not
concerned about accuracy and censored or altered much of her work before
publication

George Ripley (October 3, 1802 – July 4, 1880) was an American
social
reformer, Unitarian minister, and journalist associated
with Transcendentalism. He was the founder of the
short-lived Utopian
community Brook Farm
in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, George Ripley
was pushed to attend Harvard College by his father and completed his
studies in 1823. He went on graduate from the Harvard Divinity School and the next year
married Sophia Dana. Shortly after, he became ordained
as the minister of the Purchase Street Church
in Boston, Massachusetts, where he began to
question traditional Unitarian beliefs. He became one of the founding members
of the Transcendental Club and hosted its first
official meeting in his home. Shortly after, he resigned from the church to put
Transcendental beliefs in practice by founding
an experimental commune called Brook Farm.
The community later converted to a model based on the work of Charles
Fourier, although the community was never financially stable in
either format. After Brook Farm’s failure, Ripley was hired by Horace
Greeley at the New York
Tribune. He also published the New American Cyclopaedia, which made
him financially successful. He built a national reputation as an arbiter of
taste and literature before his death in 1880

Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803–1876) was a New England
intellectual
and activist,
preacher, labor organizer, and noted Catholic convert and writer. Brownson was
a publicist,
a career which spanned his affiliation with the New England Transcendentalists,
through his subsequent conversion to Roman
Catholicism. In 1838 he founded the Boston Quarterly Review,
and served as its editor and main contributor for four years. Other
contributors included George Bancroft, Margaret
Fuller, George Ripley, and Elizabeth
Peabody.^[4]
Brownson originally offered use of the Boston Quarterly Review as the
vehicle for the transcendentalists; they declined and instead created The Dial.^[5]
Brownson’s writing contributions were political, intellectual, and religious
essays. Among these was a review of Thomas
Carlyle’s Chartism, separately published as The Laboring Classes (1840),
which caused considerable controversy. The article is sometimes blamed for
causing the incumbent Democratic President, Martin Van
Buren, whom Brownson avidly supported, to lose the 1840 Presidency
to William Henry Harrison.^[6]
Also in 1840, Brownson published his semi-autobiographical work Charles Elwood; Or, The Infidel Converted.

Jones Very (August 28, 1813 – May 8, 1880) was an American
essayist, poet,
clergymen, and mystic associated with the American Transcendentalism
movement. He was known as a scholar of William Shakespeare and many of his poems were
Shakespearean sonnets.
He was well-known and respected amongst the Transcendentalists, though he had a
mental breakdown early in his career. Born in Salem, Massachusetts to two unwed first cousins,
Jones Very became associated with Harvard University, first as an undergraduate,
then as a student in the Harvard Divinity School and as a tutor of Greek.
He heavily studied epic poetry and was invited to lecture on the
topic in his home town, which drew the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Soon after, Very asserted
that he was the Second Coming of Christ, which
resulted in his dismissal from Harvard and his eventual institutionalization in
an insane asylum. When he was released,
Emerson helped him issue a collection called Essays
and Poems in 1839. Very lived the majority of his life as a recluse
from then on, issuing poetry only sparingly. He died in 1880.

John Greenleaf Whittier (December 17, 1807 – September 7, 1892) was an
influential American Quaker poet
and ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery
in the United States. He is usually listed as one of
the Fireside
Poets. Whittier
was strongly influenced by the Scottish poet, Robert Burns.
Garrison gave Whittier
the job of editor of the National Philanthropist, a Boston-based temperance weekly. Shortly after a change in
management, Garrison reassigned him as editor of the weekly American
Manufacturer in Boston.^[6]
Whittier became an out-spoken critic of President Andrew
Jackson, and by 1830 was editor of the prominent New England
Weekly Review in Hartford, Connecticut, the most influential
Whig journal in New England.
In 1833 he published The Song of the Vermonters, 1779,
which he had anonymously inserted in The New England Magazine. The poem
was erroneously attributed to Ethan Allen for nearly sixty years. In 1833, Whittier published the
antislavery pamphlet Justice and Expediency,^[7]
and from there dedicated the next twenty years of his life to the abolitionist
cause. The controversial pamphlet destroyed all of his political hopes—as his
demand for immediate emancipation alienated both northern businessmen and
southern slaveholders—but it also sealed his commitment to a cause that he
deemed morally correct and socially necessary. He was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and signed
the Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833, which he often considered the most
significant action of his life. In 1845, he began writing his essay “The Black Man”
which included an anecdote about John Fountain, a free black who was jailed in Virginia for helping
slaves escape. After his release, Fountain went on a speaking tour and thanked Whittier for writing his
story.^[13]
Whittier’s first
two published books were Legends of New England
(1831) and the poem Moll Pitcher (1832). In 1833 he published The Song of the Vermonters, 1779,
which he had anonymously inserted in The New England
Magazine. The poem was erroneously attributed to Ethan Allen
for nearly sixty years. This use of poetry in the service of his political
beliefs is illustrated by his book Poems Written during
the Progress of the Abolition

Harriet Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1,
1896) was an American abolitionist
and author.
Her novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) depicted life for African-Americans
under slavery;
it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States
and United
Kingdom.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July
4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer born in
1804 in
the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and
Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne. His ancestors include John Hathorne,
a judge during the Salem Witch Trials. Nathaniel later added a
“w” to make his name “Hawthorne”.
He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa
in 1824, and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne
anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe,
in 1828. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he
collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became
engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House
and joined Brook Farm,
a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850,
followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took
Hawthorne and family to Europe before their
return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne
died on May 19, 1864, leaving behind his wife and their three children. Much of
Hawthorne’s writing centers on New England,
many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan
inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement
and, more specifically, dark romanticism. His themes often center on
the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages
and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short
stories, and a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce.
Hawthorne was
predominantly a short story writer in his early career. Upon publishing Twice-Told
Tales, however, he noted, “I do not think much of them”, and he
expected little response from the public. His four major romances
were written between 1850 and 1860: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun (1860).
Another novel-length romance, Fanshawe
was published anonymously in 1828. Hawthorne
defined a romance as being radically different from a novel by not being
concerned with the possible or probable course of ordinary experience. In the
preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne describes his romance-writing as
using “atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and
deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.” Hawthorne also wrote
nonfiction. In 2008, The Library of America selected Hawthorne’s “A
Collection of Wax Figures” for inclusion in its two-century retrospective
of American True Crime.

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891)
was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist,
and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the
posthumous novella Billy Budd. His first three books gained much contemporary
attention (the first, Typee,
becoming a bestseller), but after a fast-blooming literary success in the late
1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never
recovered during his lifetime. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely
forgotten. It was not until the “Melville Revival” in the early 20th
century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick
which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world
literature. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published
by the Library of America.

 

4. American Poetry

Walter “Walt”
Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26,
1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist,
he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism
and realism, incorporating both views in his works.
Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called
the father of free verse.^[1]
His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection
Leaves of Grass, which was described as
obscene for its overt sexuality. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin
Evans (1842). Whitman’s major work, Leaves
of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work
was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic.
He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American
poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful
family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive
life. Although Dickinson
was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred
poems were published during her lifetime.^[2]
The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered
significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the
time. Dickinson’s
poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines,
typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme
as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.^[3]
Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring
topics in letters to her friends. Although most of her acquaintances were
probably aware of Dickinson’s writing, it was
not until after her death in 1886—when Lavinia, Emily’s younger sister,
discovered her cache of poems—that the breadth of Dickinson’s work became apparent. Her first
collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis
Todd, both of whom heavily edited the content. A complete and mostly
unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time in 1955
when The Poems of Emily Dickinson was
published by scholar Thomas H. Johnson. Despite unfavorable reviews and
skepticism of her literary prowess during the late 19th and early 20th century,
critics now consider Dickinson
to be a major American poet.^[4]

 

5. Realism

Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),^[1]
better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist.
He is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and
its sequel,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the
latter often called “the Great American Novel.”  William Faulkner
called Twain “the father of American literature.”^[3] Twain’s
first important work, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County,” was first published in the New York Saturday Press on
November 18, 1865. The only reason it was published there was that his
story arrived too late to be included in a book Artemus Ward
was compiling featuring sketches of the wild American West.
After this burst of popularity, the Sacramento Union
commissioned Twain to write letters about his travel experiences. The first
journey he took for this job was to ride the steamer Ajax
in its maiden voyage to Hawaii, referred to at
the time as the Sandwich Islands. These humorous letters proved
the genesis to his work with the San Francisco Alta California
newspaper, which designated him a traveling correspondent for a trip from San Francisco to New York City
via the Panama isthmus.
All the while, Twain was writing letters meant for publishing back and forth,
chronicling his experiences with his burlesque humor. On June 8, 1867,
Twain set sail on the pleasure cruiser Quaker City
for five months. This trip resulted in The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims’ Progress.
In 1872, Twain published a second piece of travel literature, Roughing It,
as a semi-sequel to Innocents. Roughing It is a
semi-autobiographical account of Twain’s journey to Nevada and his subsequent life in the American West. The book lampoons American and
Western society in the same way that Innocents critiqued the various
countries of Europe and the Middle East.
Twain’s next work kept Roughing It’s focus on American society but
focused more on the events of the day. Entitled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, it
was not a travel piece, as his previous two books had been, and it was his
first attempt at writing a novel.
Twain’s next two works drew on his experiences on the Mississippi
River. Old Times on the Mississippi, a series
of sketches published in the Atlantic Monthly
in 1875, featured Twain’s disillusionment with Romanticism.
Old Times eventually became the starting point for Life on the Mississippi.

George Washington Cable (October 12, 1844 – January 31, 1925)
was an American novelist
notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native Louisiana.
His fiction has been thought to anticipate that of William Faulkner.
His most important works are Old Creole Days, The Grandissimes, and Madame Delphine.

Mary Noailles Murfree (January 24, 1850 – July 31, 1922) was an American
fiction
writer
of novels
and short stories
who wrote under the pen name Charles Egbert Craddock. She is considered by
many to be Appalachia‘s
first significant female writer and her work a necessity for the study of
Appalachian literature, although a number of characters in her work reinforce
negative stereotypes about the region. She has been favorably compared to Bret Harte
and Sarah Orne Jewett, creating post-Civil War
American local-color literature (In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), The
Frontiersmen (1904), The Ordeal: A Mountain Romance of Tennessee
(1912). Murfree was born near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in the house
later celebrated in her novel, Where the Battle was Fought and in the
town named after her great-grandfather, Colonel Hardy Murfree.^[1]
Her father was a successful lawyer of Nashville, and her youth was spent in both
Murfreesboro and Nashville. From 1867 to 1869 she attended the
Chegary Institute, a finishing
school in Philadelphia. For a number of years after the Civil War the Murfree family lived in St. Louis, returning in 1890 to Murfreesboro, where she
lived until her death. Being lame from childhood, Murfree turned to reading the novels of Walter Scott
and George Eliot.
For fifteen successive summers the family stayed in Beersheba
Springs in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, giving
her the opportunity to study the mountains and mountain people more closely. By
the 1870s she had begun writing stories for Appleton’s Journal under the
penname of “Charles Egbert Craddock” and by 1878 she was contributing
to the Atlantic Monthly. It was not until seven
years later, in May, 1885, that Murfree divulged that she was Charles Egbert
Craddock to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, an editor at the Atlantic
Monthly.

Sarah Orne Jewett (September 3, 1849 –
June 24, 1909) was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for her local color works set in or near South Berwick, Maine, on the border of New Hampshire,
which in her day was a declining New England
seaport.
She published her first important story in the Atlantic
Monthly at age 19, and her reputation grew throughout the 1870s
and 1880s. Her literary importance arises from her careful, if subdued, vignettes
of country life that reflect a contemporary interest in local color rather than
plot. Jewett possessed a keen descriptive gift that William Dean Howells called “an
uncommon feeling for talk — I hear your people.” Jewett made her
reputation with the novella The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).^[6]
A Country Doctor
(1884), a novel reflecting her father and her early ambitions for a medical
career, and A White Heron (1886), a collection of short stories are among her
finest work.^[7]
Some of Jewett’s poetry was collected in Verses (1916), and she also
wrote three children’s books. Willa Cather
described Jewett as a significant influence on her development as a writer,^[8]
and “feminist
critics have since championed her writing for its rich account of women’s lives
and voices.”^[5]

Henry Cuyler Bunner (3 August 1855 – 11 May 1896) was an American
novelist and poet born in Oswego,
New York.
He was educated in New York City. From being a clerk in an
importing house, he turned to journalism, and after some work as a reporter,
and on the staff of The Arcadian (1873), he became in 1877 assistant
editor of the comic weekly Puck.
He soon assumed the editorship, which he held until his death in Nutley, New Jersey. He developed Puck
from a new struggling periodical into a powerful social and political organ. In
1886 he published a novel, The Midge, followed in 1887 by The Story
of a New York House. But his best efforts in fiction were his short stories
and sketches Short Sixes (1891), More Short Sixes (1894), Made in
France (1893), Zadoc Pine and Other Stories (1891), Love in Old
Cloathes and Other Stories (1896), and Jersey Street and Jersey Lane
(1896). His verses Airs from A ready and Elsewhere (884), containing the
well-known poem, The Way to Arcady; Rowen (1892); and Poems
(1896), edited by his friend Brander
Matthews, displaying a light play of imagination and a delicate
workmanship. He also wrote clever vers de société and parodies. One of his
several plays (usually written in collaboration), was The Tower of Babel
(1883). His short story “Zenobia’s Infidelity” was made into a
feature film called Zenobia starring Harry Langdon
and Oliver Hardy
by the Hal Roach
Studio in 1939.

Henry James OM
(April 15, 1843(1843-04-15)
– February 28, 1916(1916-02-28))
was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century
literary realism.
James spent the last 53 years of his life in England, becoming a British subject
in 1915, one year before his death. He is primarily known for the series of
novels in which he portrays the encounter of Americans with Europe
and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character
within a tale allows him to explore issues related to consciousness
and perception,
and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist
painting. James contributed significantly to literary criticism, particularly in his
insistence that writers be allowed the greatest possible freedom in presenting
their view of the world. James claimed that a text must first and foremost be
realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognizable to its
readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly,
interesting. The concept of a good or bad novel is judged solely upon whether
the author is good or bad. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and possibly unreliable narrators in his own novels and tales
brought a new depth and interest to narrative
fiction. An extraordinarily productive writer, in addition to his voluminous
works of fiction he published articles and books of travel,
biography,
autobiography,
and criticism,
and wrote plays, some of which were performed during his lifetime with moderate
success. His theatrical work is thought to have profoundly influenced his later
novels and tales. His first novel, Watch and Ward
(1871), was written while traveling through Venice
and Paris.
Among James’s masterpieces are Daisy Miller (1879); in
which the eponymous protagonist, the young and innocent American Daisy Miller,
finds her values in conflict with European sophistication; and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), in which a
young American woman finds that her upbringing has ill prepared her against two
scheming American expatriates during her travels in Europe. The Bostonians (1886) is set
in the era of the rising feminist movement. What Maisie Knew (1897)
depicts a preadolescent girl who must choose between her parents and a motherly
old governess. In The Wings of the Dove (1902) an inheritance
destroys the love of a young couple. James considered The Ambassadors (1903) his
most “perfect” work of art. James’s most famous short story is The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story in
which the question of childhood corruption obsesses a governess. Although James
is best known for his novels, his essays are now attracting a more general
audience. James is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic
literature.
His works frequently juxtapose characters from the Old World
(Europe), embodying a feudal civilization that is beautiful, often corrupt, and
alluring, and from the New World (United States), where people are often brash, open,
and assertive
and embody the virtues—freedom and a more highly evolved moral character—of the
new American society. James explores this clash of personalities and cultures,
in stories of personal relationships in which power is exercised well or badly.
His protagonists were often young American women facing oppression or abuse,
and as his secretary Theodora Bosanquet
remarked in her monograph Henry James at Work: James’s later work
foreshadows extensive developments in 20th century fiction.^[22]
Indeed, he might have influenced stream-of-consciousness writers such as Virginia Woolf,
who not only read some of his novels but also wrote essays about them. Then and
later many readers find the late style difficult and unnecessary; his friend Edith Wharton,
who admired him greatly, said that there were passages in his work that were
all but incomprehensible. H.G. Wells harshly portrayed James as a hippopotamus
laboriously attempting to pick up a pea that has got into a corner of its cage.
Although any selection of James’s
novels as “major” must inevitably depend to some extent on personal
preference, the following books have achieved prominence among his works in the
views of many critics. James believed a novel must be organic. Parts of the
novel need to go together and the relationship must fit the form. If a reader
enjoys a work of art or piece of writing, then they must be able to explain
why. The very fact that every reader has different tastes, lends to the belief
that artists should have artistic freedom to write in any way they choose to
talk about subject matter that could possibly interest everyone.

6. Turn of the Century

Edith Wharton born Edith Newbold Jones (January 24,
1862 – August 11, 1937; was a Pulitzer Prize-winning
American novelist,
short story
writer, and designer.
Many of Wharton’s novels are characterized by a subtle use of dramatic irony.
Having grown up in upper-class pre-World War I
society, Wharton became one of its most astute critics. In such works as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence she employed both
humor and profound empathy to describe the lives of New York’s upper class and the vanishing of
their world in the early years of the 20th century. In contrast, she used a
harsher tone in her novel Ethan Frome to convey the
atmosphere of lower-class rural Massachusetts.
In addition to writing several respected novels, Wharton produced a wealth of
short stories and is particularly well regarded for her ghost stories. In 1934
Wharton’s autobiography A Backward Glance was published.
Wharton was friend and confidante to many gifted intellectuals of her time:
Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau
and André Gide
were all guests of hers at one time or another. Theodore Roosevelt, Bernard Berenson,
and Kenneth Clark
were valued friends as well. But her meeting with F. Scott Fitzgerald is described by the editors
of her letters as “one of the better known failed encounters in the
American literary annals”. She spoke fluent French (as well as several
other languages), and many of her books were published in both French and
English.

Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (August 27, 1871 – December 28, 1945)
was an American novelist and journalist. He pioneered the naturalist school and is known for portraying
characters whose value lies not in their moral code, but in their persistence
against all obstacles, and literary situations that more closely resemble
studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), tells
the story of a woman who flees her country life for the city (Chicago)
and there lives a life far from a Victorian ideal. It sold poorly and was not
widely promoted largely because of moral objections to the depiction of a
country girl who pursues her dreams of fame and fortune through relationships
to men. The book has since acquired a considerable reputation. It has been
called the “greatest of all American urban novels.” (It was made into
a 1952 film by William Wyler, which starred Laurence Olivier
and Jennifer Jones.) He witnessed a lynching
in 1893 and wrote the short story, Nigger Jeff, which appeared in Ainslee’s
Magazine in 1901. His second novel, Jennie Gerhardt,
was published in 1911. Many of Dreiser’s subsequent novels dealt with social
inequality. His first commercial success was An American Tragedy (1925), which was
made into a film in 1931 and again in 1951 (as A Place in the Sun). Already in 1892, when
Dreiser began work as a newspaperman he had begun “to observe a certain
type of crime in the United
States that proved very common. It seemed to
spring from the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrown
ambition to be somebody financially and socially.” “Fortune hunting
became a disease” with the frequent result of a peculiarly American kind
of crime, a form of “murder for money”, when “the young ambitious
lover of some poorer girl” found “a more attractive girl with money
or position” but could not get rid of the first girl, usually because of
pregnancy. Dreiser claimed to have collected such stories every year between
1895 and 1935. The murder in 1911 of Avis Linnell by Clarence Richeson
particularly caught his attention. By 1919 this murder was the basis of one of
two separate novels begun by Dreiser. The 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette
eventually became the basis for An American Tragedy. Though primarily
known as a novelist, Dreiser published his first collection of short stories, Free and Other Stories
in 1918. The collection contained 11 stories. Another story, “My Brother
Paul”, was a brief biography of his older brother, Paul Dresser,
who was a famous songwriter in the 1890s. This story was the basis for the 1942
romantic movie, “My Gal Sal“. Other works include The
“Genius” and Trilogy of Desire (a three-parter based on
the remarkable life of the Chicago streetcar tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes and composed of The Financier
(1912), The Titan
(1914), and The Stoic). The latter was published posthumously in 1947. Dreiser was
often forced to battle against censorship because of his depiction of some
aspects of life, such as sexual promiscuity, offended authorities and popular
opinion.

John Henry O’Hara (January 31, 1905 – April 11, 1970)
was an American writer.
He initially became known for his short stories and later became a best-selling
novelist whose works include Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8. He was
particularly known for an uncannily accurate ear for dialogue. O’Hara was a
keen observer of social status and class differences, and wrote frequently
about the socially ambitious. A controversial figure, O’Hara had a
reputation for personal irascibility and for cataloging social ephemera, both
of which frequently overshadowed his gifts as a storyteller. Writer Fran Lebowitz
called him “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald.” John Updike,
one of his consistent supporters, grouped him with Chekhov
in a C-SPAN
interview. By contrast, Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times
dismissed him as “a well-known lout.” In 1934, O’Hara published his
first novel, Appointment in Samarra, which was acclaimed
on publication. This is the O’Hara novel that is most consistently praised by
critics. Ernest Hemingway wrote: “If you want to
read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written
it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra.” His 1939 epistolary novel,
Pal Joey, led to the
notable musical of the same name, with libretto by O’Hara and songs by Rodgers and Hart.
The 1940 production starred Gene Kelly and Vivienne Segal;
it was successfully revived in 1952 and became a 1957 motion picture starring Frank Sinatra
and Rita Hayworth.

Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. (March 5, 1870 – October 25, 1902) was an American
novelist, during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A Story of California
(1901), and The Pit
(1903). Frank Norris’s work often includes depictions of suffering caused by
corrupt and greedy turn-of-the-century corporate monopolies. In The Octopus: A California Story, the
Pacific and Southwest Railroad is implicated in the suffering and deaths of a
number of ranchers in Southern California. At
the end of the novel, after a bloody shootout between farmers and railroad
agents at one of the ranches (named Los Muertos), readers are encouraged to
take a “larger view” that sees that “through the welter of blood
at the irrigating ditch, […] the great harvest of Los Muertos rolled like a
flood from the Sierras to the Himalayas to feed thousands of starving scarecrows
on the barren plains of India.” Though free-wheeling market capitalism
causes the deaths of many of the characters in the novel, this “larger
view always […] discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all
things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good.” Vandover and the Brute, written in the 1890s, but
not published until after his death, is about three college friends, on their
way to success, and the ruin of one through a degenerate lifestyle. Although he did not openly
support socialism
as a political system, his work nevertheless evinces a socialist mentality and
influenced socialist/progressive writers such as Upton Sinclair.
Like many of his contemporaries, he was profoundly affected by the advent of Evolution,
and Thomas Henry Huxley‘s philosophical defense of
it. Norris was particularly influenced by an optimistic strand of Evolutionary
philosophy taught by Joseph LeConte, whom Norris studied under while
at the University of California, Berkeley.
Through many of his novels, notably McTeague, runs a preoccupation with
the notion of the civilized man overcoming the inner “brute,” his
animalistic tendencies. His peculiar, and often confused, brand of Social
Darwinism also bears the influence of the early criminologist Cesare Lombroso
and the French naturalist Emile Zola. Norris’s short story “A Deal in
Wheat” (1903) and the novel The Pit
were the basis for the 1909 D.W. Griffith film A Corner in Wheat.
Norris’ McTeague has been filmed repeatedly, most famously as a 1924
film called Greed by director Erich von Stroheim

Edward Bellamy (26 March 1850  – 22 May 1898)
was an American author
and socialist,
most famous for his utopian
novel, Looking Backward, set in the year
2000. He was a very influential writer during the Gilded Age
of United States history. According to Erich Fromm,
Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward is “one of the most remarkable
books ever published in America.”
It was the third largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of
the Christ. In the book, Julian West, an upper class
man from 1887, awakes in 2000 from a hypnotic trance
to find himself in a socialist utopia.
The book influenced a large number of intellectuals, and appears by title in
many of the major Marxist
writings of the day. “It is one of the few books ever published that
created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement.”^[4]
“Bellamy Clubs” sprang up all over the United States for discussing and
propagating the book’s ideas. This political movement came to be known as
Nationalism. His novel also inspired several utopian communities. Although Looking
Backward is unique, Bellamy owes many aspects of his philosophy to a previous
reformer and author, Laurence Gronlund, who published his treatise
“The Cooperative Commonwealth: An Exposition of Modern Socialism” in
1884.  Bellamy’s second utopian novel, Equality, published in
1897, continues the story of Julian West as he adjusts to life in the future.
Although Equality was less successful commercially or culturally than
its prequel, a short story “The Parable of the Water-Tank”
from Equality, was popular with a number of early American
socialists,
reprinted in various editions as a propaganda
pamphlet.

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), was a Pulitzer Prize-winning
American
author who wrote close to 100 books in many genres. He achieved popularity in
the first half of the 20th century, acquiring particular fame for his 1906 muckraking
novel The Jungle. It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat
packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the
passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Time magazine
called him “a man with every gift except humor and silence.”Sinclair
devoted his writing career to documenting and criticizing the social and
economic conditions of the early twentieth century in both fiction and
non-fiction. He exposed his view of the injustices of capitalism and the
overwhelming impact of the poverty. He also edited collections of fiction and
non-fiction. In The Jungle
(1906), Sinclair gave a scathing indictment of unregulated capitalism as
exemplified in the meatpacking industry. His descriptions of both the
unsanitary conditions and the inhumane conditions experienced by the workers
shocked and galvanized readers. Sinclair had intended it as an attack upon
capitalist enterprise, but readers reacted viscerally. Domestic and foreign
purchases of American meat fell by half. Sinclair lamented: “I aimed at
the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” The novel
was so influential that it spurred government regulation of the industry, as
well as the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.  Sylvia (1913) was a
novel about a Southern girl. In her autobiography, Mary Craig Sinclair said she had written the
book based on her own experiences as a girl, and Upton collaborated with her. She asked him to
publish it under his name. When it appeared in 1913, the New York Times
called it “the best novel Mr. Sinclair has yet written–so much the best
that it stands in a class by itself.” Sylvia’s Marriage (1914),
Craig and Sinclair collaborated on a sequel, also published by John C. Winston
Company under only Sinclair’s name.^[25] In his 1962
autobiography, Upton Sinclair wrote: “[Mary] Craig had written some tales
of her Southern girlhood; and I had stolen them from her for a novel to be
called Sylvia.” Between 1940 and 1953, Sinclair wrote a series of
11 novels featuring a central character named Lanny Budd. He was the
son of an American arms manufacturer who moved in the confidence of world
leaders, not simply witnessing events but often propelling them. The
protagonist has been characterized as the antithesis
of the “Ugly American“, a sophisticated socialite
who mingles easily with people from all cultures and socioeconomic
classes.  The series covers in
sequence much of the political history of the Western world, particularly
Europe and America,
in the first half of the twentieth century. Out of print and almost totally
forgotten today, the novels were all bestsellers upon publication and were
published in 21 countries. The third book in the series, Dragon’s Teeth, won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1943.

Charles Edwin Anson Markham (April 23, 1852 – March 7, 1940) was an American poet. Markham taught literature in El Dorado County until 1879, when he
became education superintendent of the county.
While residing in El Dorado County, Markham
became a member of Placerville Masonic Lodge.
Charles also accepted a job as principal of Tompkins
Observation School in Oakland, California in 1890. While in Oakland,
he became well acquainted with many other famous contemporary writers and
poets, such as Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith,
Charles Warren Stoddard, and Edmund Clarence Stedman. Edwin’s most
famous poem was first presented at a public poetry reading in 1898. He read
“The Man With the Hoe,” which accented
laborers‘
hardships. His main inspiration was a French painting
of the same name (in French, L’homme à la houe) by Jean-François Millet. Markham’s poem was published, and it became
quite popular very soon. In New York,
he gave many lectures to labor groups. These happened as often as his poetry
readings. In 1922, Markham’s
poem “Lincoln, the Man of the People” was selected from 250 entries
to be read at the dedication of the Lincoln
Memorial. The author himself, read the poem. Of it, Dr. Henry Van
Dyke, of Princeton said,”Edwin Markham’s Lincoln is the greatest poem ever written on
the immortal martyr, and the greatest that ever will be written.” Later
that year, Markham
was filmed reciting the poem by Lee De Forest
in his Phonofilm
sound-on-film process. As recounted by literary biographer William R. Nash,^[4]
“‘[‘b]etween publications, Markham
lectured and wrote in other genres, including essays and nonfiction prose. He
also gave much of his time to organizations such as the Poetry Society of
America, which he established in 1910. In 1922, at the conclusion to the
dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, Markham read
a revised version of his poem, “Lincoln
the Man of the People.”^[5]
Throughout Markham’s
later life, many readers viewed him as an important voice in American poetry, a
position signified by honors such as his election in 1908 to the National Institute
of Arts and Letters. Despite his numerous accolades, however, none of his later
books achieved the success of the first two

William Vaughn Moody (July 8, 1869 – October 17, 1910) was a U.S.
dramatist
and poet. Author of The Great Divide,
first presented under the title of The Sabine Woman at the Garrick Theatre
in Chicago
on April 12, 1906. Moody’s poetic dramas included The Masque of Judgment
(1900), The Fire Bringer (1904), and The Death of Eve (left
undone at his death).

Ida Minerva Tarbell (November 5, 1857 – January 6, 1944) was an
American teacher,
author and journalist.
She was known as one of the leading “muckrakers”
of the progressive era, work known in modern times as
“investigative journalism“. She wrote
many notable magazine series and biographies. She is best-known for her 1904
book The History of the Standard Oil
Company, which was listed
as No. 5 in
a 1999 list by the New York Times of the top 100 works of
20th-century American journalism.^[1]
She began her work on The Standard after her editors at McClure’s Magazine called for a story on
one of the trusts.

Joseph Lincoln Steffens (April 6, 1866 – August 9, 1936) was
an American journalist, lecturer, and political philosopher, and one of the
most famous practitioners of the journalistic style called muckraking.
Steffens began his journalistic career at the New York Evening
Post. He later became an editor of McClure’s
magazine, where he became part of a celebrated muckraking
trio, along with Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker. He specialized in
investigating government and political corruption, and two collections of his
articles were published as The Shame of the Cities (1902) and The Struggle
for Self-Government (1906). He also wrote The Traitor State, which
criticized New Jersey
for patronizing incorporation. In 1906, he left McClure’s,
along with Tarbell and Baker, to form The American Magazine. In The Shame of
the Cities, Steffens sought to bring about political reform in urban America by
appealing to the emotions of Americans. He tried to make them feel outraged and
“shamed” by showing examples of corrupt governments throughout urban America. In
1910 he covered the Mexican Revolution and began to see revolution
as preferable to reform. In 1919, he visited the Soviet
Union together with William C. Bullitt and the Swedish Communist Karl Kilbom,
and Steffens developed an enthusiasm for Communism.
In 1921, he made his famous remark about the new Soviet government: “I
have been over into the future, and it works.” It is often quoted as:
“I’ve seen the future, and it works.” The second version of that
quote appears on the title page of his wife Ella Winter‘s
Red Virtue (1933). Historian Richard Pipes
believed Steffens wrote those words on a train in Sweden before
arriving in the USSR.
His enthusiasm for communism had soured
by the time his memoirs appeared in 1931. He was a member of the California Writers
Project, a New Deal program.

Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 – March 27, 1918; normally
called Henry Adams) was an American
journalist,
historian,
academic
and novelist.
He is best-known for his autobiographical book, The Education of Henry Adams.
He was a member of the Adams political family. Adams’s The History of the
United States of America (1801 to 1817) (9 vols., 1889–1891)
has been called “a neglected masterpiece” by Garry Wills
(Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005)). In the 1880s, Adams also wrote two novels. He is credited as the author
of Democracy, which was published
anonymously in 1880 and immediately became popular. (Only after Adams’s death
did his publisher reveal Adams’s authorship.)
His other novel, published under the nom de plume of Frances Snow
Compton, was Esther, whose eponymous heroine was
believed to be modeled after his wife.

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was
an American-Jewish writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in
France.
While living in Paris, Gertrude began writing for publication. Her earliest
writings were mainly retellings of her college experiences. Her first
critically acclaimed publication was Three Lives. In 1911 Mildred Aldrich
introduced Gertrude to Mabel Dodge Luhan and they began a short-lived
but fruitful friendship during which a wealthy Mabel Dodge promoted Gertrude’s
legend in the United States.
Mabel was enthusiastic about Gertrude’s sprawling publication The Makings of
Americans and, at a time when Gertrude had much difficulty selling
her writing to publishers, privately published 300 copies of, (ibid.) a
copy of which was valued at $25,000 in 2007 (James S. Jaffee
Rare Books). Dodge was also involved in the publicity and planning
of the 69th Armory Show in 1913, “the first avant-garde art
exhibition in America.”
(Ibid.) In
addition, she wrote the first critical analysis of Gertrude’s writing to appear
in America, in “Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose”,
published in a special March 1913 publication of Arts and Decoration.
Foreshadowing Gertrude’s later critical reception, Mabel wrote in
“Speculations”: In Gertrude Stein’s writing every word lives and,
apart from concept, it is so exquisitely rhythmical and cadenced that if we
read it aloud and receive it as pure sound, it is like a kind of sensuous
music. Just as one may stop, for once, in a way, before a canvas of Picasso,
and, letting one’s reason sleep for an instant, may exclaim: “It is
a fine pattern!” so, listening to Gertrude Steins’ words and forgetting to
try to understand what they mean, one submits to their gradual charm.(Ibid) Mabel
attributed the end of their friendship to an exchange in the autumn of 1912
when, during lunch, Gertrude sent her “such a good strong look over the
table that it seemed to cut across the air to me in a band of electrified
steel– a smile traveling across on it– powerful– Heavens!”. Alice interpreted the look as a flirtation and left the
room, prompting Gertrude to follow, and when Gertrude returned, she said,
“[Alice]
doesn’t want to come lunch … She feels the heat today.” The salon, and
the people that came to visit it, provided the inspiration for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Alfred Damon Runyon (October 4, 1880– December 10, 1946)
was a newspaperman and writer.^[2]
He was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew
out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his
generation, a “Damon Runyon character” evoked a distinctive social
type from the Brooklyn
or Midtown demi-monde.
The adjective “Runyonesque” refers to this type of character as well
as to the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicted. He spun humorous
tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by
“square” names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as
“Nathan Detroit,” “Benny Southstreet,” “Big Jule,”
“Harry the Horse,” “Good Time Charley,” “Dave the
Dude,” or “The Seldom Seen Kid.” Runyon wrote these stories in a
distinctive vernacular style: a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang,
almost always in present tense, and always devoid of contractions. The musical Guys and Dolls was based on two Runyon
stories, “The Idyll of Miss
Sarah Brown” and “Blood Pressure”.^[3]
The musical also takes characters and story elements from a few other Runyon
stories, most notably “Pick The Winner.” The film Little Miss Marker
(and its remake, Sorrowful Jones)
grew from his short story of the same name. The original series Star Trek
episode 49 “A Piece Of The Action” is also Runyonese influenced, both
in costume and dialog. Runyon was also a newspaperman. He wrote the lead
article for UP on Franklin Delano Roosevelt‘s Presidential
inauguration in 1933.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound  (30 October
1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major
figure in the early modernist movement in poetry. He became
known for his role in developing Imagism, which, in reaction to the Victorian and Georgian
poets, favored tight language, unadorned imagery, and a strong correspondence
between the verbal and musical qualities of the verse and the mood it
expressed. His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his
unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos,
which consumed his middle and late career, and was published between 1917 and
1969.

T. S. Eliot,
Thomas Stearns Eliot OM
(September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was an American-born English poet,
playwright, and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language
poet of the 20th century. The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in
1910 and published in Chicago
in 1915—is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist
movement. He followed this with what have become some of the best-known poems
in the English language, including Gerontion
(1920), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men
(1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets
(1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot
also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism,
strongly influencing the school
of New Criticism.

John Phillips Marquand (November 10, 1893 – July 16, 1960)
was a 20th-century American writer. Originally best known for his Mr. Moto spy stories, he
achieved popular success and critical respect for his satirical novels, winning
a Pulitzer Prize for The Late George
Apley in 1938. One of his abiding themes was the confining
nature of life in America’s
upper class and among those who aspired to join it. Marquand treated those
whose lives were bound by these unwritten codes with a characteristic mix of
respect and satire.
In 1925, Marquand published his first important book, Lord Timothy Dexter,
an exploration of the life and legend of eighteenth century Newburyport eccentric Timothy Dexter (1763–1806). By the
mid-1930s he was a prolific and successful writer of fiction for slick
magazines like the Saturday Evening Post; during this period
Marquand began producing a series of novels on the dilemmas of class, most
centered on New England. The first of these, The Late George
Apley (1937), a satire of Boston’s
upper class, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1938.
Other Marquand novels exploring New England
and class themes include Wickford Point (1939), H.M. Pulham, Esquire
(1941), and Point of No Return (1949). The last is especially notable
for its satirical portrayal of Harvard anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, whose Yankee City
study attempted (and in Marquand’s view, dismally failed) to describe and
analyze the manners and mores of Marquand’sNewburyport.

 

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21,
1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the
paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as
one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is
considered a member of the “Lost Generation”
of the 1920s. He finished four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night and his most famous,
The Great Gatsby. A fifth, unfinished
novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon was
published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat
themes of youth and promise along with despair and age. Fitzgerald’s work and
legend has inspired writers ever since he was first published. The publication
of The Great Gatsby prompted T. S. Eliot
to write, in a letter to Fitzgerald, “[I]t seems to me to be the first
step that American fiction has taken since Henry James…”.
Don Birnam, the protagonist of Steph and Charles Jackson‘s The Lost Weekend, says to himself,
referring to Gatsby, “There’s no such thing…as a flawless novel.
But if there is, this is it.” In letters written in the 1940s, J. D. Salinger
expressed admiration of Fitzgerald’s work, and his biographer Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw
himself for some time as “Fitzgerald’s successor.” Richard Yates, a writer often compared to
Fitzgerald, called The Great Gatsby “the most nourishing
novel [he] read…a miracle of talent…a triumph of technique.”^[17]
It was written in a New York Times editorial after his death
that Fitzgerald “was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary
sense he invented a generation…. He might have interpreted them and even
guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom
threatened with destruction.” Into the 21st century, millions of copies of
The Great Gatsby and his other works have been sold, and Gatsby,
a constant best-seller, is required reading in many high school and college
classes.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an
American author and journalist. His distinctive writing style, characterized by
economy and understatement, influenced 20th-century
fiction, as did his life of adventure and public image. He produced most of his
work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
Hemingway’s fiction was successful because the characters he presented
exhibited authenticity that resonated with his audience. Many of his works are
classics of American literature. He published seven novels,
six short story collections, and two non-fiction works during his lifetime; a
further three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction
works were published posthumously. Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After leaving high school
he worked for a few months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for
the Italian front to become an ambulance driver during World
War I, which became the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. He was seriously
wounded and returned home within the year. In 1922 Hemingway married Hadley Richardson,
the first of his four wives, and the couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign
correspondent. During his time there he met and was influenced by modernist
writers and artists of the 1920s expatriate community known as the “Lost Generation“.
His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in
1926. After divorcing Hadley Richardson in 1927 Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer;
they divorced following Hemingway’s return from covering the Spanish Civil War,
after which he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn
became his third wife in 1940, but he left her for Mary Welsh after World War II,
during which he was present at D-Day
and the liberation of Paris. Shortly after the
publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952
Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he
was almost killed in a plane crash that left him in pain or ill-health for much
of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida,
and Cuba
during the 1930s and ’40s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba
to Ketchum, Idaho,
where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961.

Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951)
was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright.
In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for his
vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and
humor, new types of characters.” His works are known for their insightful
and critical views of American society and capitalist
values, as well as for their strong characterizations of modern working women.
Sinclair Lewis’s first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures
of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk:
A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915) and The Job (1917). That same
year also saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents: A Story
for Lovers, an expanded version of a serial story that had originally appeared in Woman’s Home Companion. Free Air,
another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919. Upon moving to Washington, D.C.,
Lewis devoted himself to writing. As early as 1916, he began taking notes for a
realistic novel about small-town life. Work on that novel continued through
mid-1920, when he completed Main Street, which was published
on October 23, 1920.^[4]
As his biographer Mark Schorer wrote, the phenomenal success of Main Street
“was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing
history.”^[5]
Based on sales of his prior books, Lewis’s most optimistic projection was a
sale of 25,000 copies. In the first six months of 1921, Main Street sold 180,000 copies,
and within a few years, sales were estimated at two million. According to
Richard Lingeman, “Main
Street earned Sinclair Lewis about three
million current [2002] dollars”. Lewis followed up this first great
success with Babbitt (1922), a novel that satirized the American
commercial culture and boosterism. The story was set in the fictional Midwestern town
of Zenith, Winnemac, a setting to which Lewis
would return in future novels, including Gideon Planish and Dodsworth. Lewis
continued his success in the 1920s with Arrowsmith (1925), a novel about
the challenges faced by an idealistic doctor. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (which Lewis refused).
Adapted as a 1931 Hollywood film directed by John Ford
and starring Ronald Colman, it was nominated for four Academy Awards.
Next Lewis published Elmer Gantry (1927), which
depicted an evangelical minister as deeply hypocritical. The novel was
denounced by many religious leaders and banned in some U.S. cities. Adapted for the screen more than a generation
later, the novel was the basis of the 1960 movie starring Burt Lancaster,
who earned a Best Actor Oscar
for his performance. Lewis closed out the decade with Dodsworth
(1929), a novel about the most affluent and successful members of American
society. He portrayed them as leading essentially pointless lives in spite of
great wealth and advantages. The book was adapted for the Broadway
stage in 1934 by Sidney Howard, who also wrote the screenplay for the 1936 film
version. Directed by William Wyler and a great success at the time, the film is
still highly regarded. In 1990, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry,
and in 2005 Time magazine named it one of the “100
Best Movies” of the past 80 years. In 1930, Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first
writer from the United
States to receive the award.

Sherwood Anderson (September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941) was an American
novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story
sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has
influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner,
John Steinbeck,
J. D. Salinger,
and Amos Oz,
among others. Anderson’s
first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son, was published in
1916, followed, three years later, by his second major work, Marching Men. However, he
is most famous for the collection of interrelated short stories, which were
published in 1919, known as Winesburg, Ohio. He claimed that
“Hands”, the opening story, was the first “real” story he
ever wrote. Although his short stories were very successful, Anderson felt the need to write novels. In
1920, he published Poor White, which was rather successful. In 1923, Anderson published Many Marriages, the themes
of which he would carry over into much of his later writing. The novel had its
detractors, but the reviews were, on the whole, positive. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, considered Many
Marriages to be Anderson’s
finest novel. Beginning in 1924, Anderson lived
in the historic Pontalba Apartments (540-B
St. Peter Street) adjoining Jackson Square in New Orleans.
There, he and his wife entertained William Faulkner,
Carl Sandburg,
Edmund Wilson
and other literary luminaries. Of Faulkner, in fact, he wrote his ambiguous and
moving short story “A Meeting South,” and, in 1925, wrote Dark Laughter, a novel
rooted in his New Orleans
experience. Although the book is now out of print (and was satirized by Ernest Hemingway
in his novel The Torrents of Spring), it was Anderson’s only
bestseller.

Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) was an
Anglo-American novelist and screenwriter who had an immense stylistic
influence upon the modern private
detective story, especially in the style of the writing and the
attitudes now characteristic of the genre. His protagonist,
Philip
Marlowe, along with Dashiell
Hammett‘s Sam Spade, is considered synonymous with
“private detective”, both being played on screen by Humphrey
Bogart. In 1954, Raymond Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye. his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” is the
standard reference work in the field. All but one of his novels have been
cinematically adapted. Most notable was The Big Sleep (1946), by Howard Hawks,
with Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. William
Faulkner was a co-writer on the screenplay. Raymond Chandler’s few
screen writing efforts and the cinematic adaptation of his novels proved
stylistically and thematically influential upon the American film noir
genre.

John Roderigo Dos Passos (January 14, 1896 – September 28,
1970) was an American novelist and artist. Considered one of the Lost Generation
writers, Dos Passos published his first novel in 1920, One Man’s Initiation:
1917. It was followed by an antiwar story, Three Soldiers, which
brought him considerable recognition. His 1925 novel about life in New York City, titled Manhattan Transfer, was a commercial
success and introduced experimental stream-of-consciousness techniques into
Dos Passos’s method. These ideas also coalesced into the U.S.A. Trilogy (see below),
of which the first book appeared in 1930. At this point a social revolutionary,
Dos Passos came to see the United
States as two nations, one rich and one
poor. He wrote admiringly about the Wobblies,
and the perceived injustice in the criminal convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and joined with other
notable personalities in the United States
and Europe in a failed campaign to overturn
their death sentences. In 1928, Dos Passos spent
several months in Russia
studying their socialist system. He was a leading participator in the April
1935 First Americans Writers Congress sponsored by the Communist-leaning League of American Writers, but he
eventually balked at the idea of the control that Stalin
would have on creative writers in the United States. In the 1930s, he served on
The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky,
commonly known as the “Dewey Commission,”
with other notable figures such as Sidney Hook,
Reinhold Niebuhr,
Norman Thomas,
Edmund Wilson
and chairman John Dewey which had been set up following the first of the Moscow “Show
Trials” in 1936. The following year, he wrote the screenplay
for the film The Devil is a Woman, starring Marlene Dietrich
and directed by Josef von Sternberg, adapted from the 1898
novel La Femme et le pantin by Pierre Louÿs.
In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, he returned to Spain with his friend Ernest Hemingway,
but his views on the Communist movement had already begun to change. Dos Passos
broke with Hemingway and Herbert Matthews over their cavalier attitude
towards the war and their willingness to lend their names to deceptive Stalinist
propaganda
efforts, including the cover-up of the Soviet responsibility in the murder of José Robles,
Dos Passos’s friend and translator of his works into Spanish. (In later years,
Hemingway would give Dos Passos the derogatory moniker of “the pilot
fish” in his memoirs of 1920s Paris, A Moveable Feast.)

Of
communism, Dos Passos would later write: “I have come to think, especially
since my trip to Spain,
that civil liberties must be protected at every stage. In Spain I am sure that the
introduction of GPU methods by the Communists did as much
harm as their tank men, pilots and experienced military men did good. The
trouble with an all powerful secret police in the hands of fanatics, or of
anybody, is that once it gets started there’s no stopping it until it has
corrupted the whole body politic. I am afraid that’s what’s happening in Russia.”
Dos Passos had attended the 1932 Democratic National Convention
and subsequently wrote an article for The New Republic
in which he harshly criticized the selection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the party’s
nominee. In the mid-1930s he wrote a series of scathing articles about
Communist political theory, and created an idealistic Communist in The Big
Money who is gradually worn down and destroyed by groupthink
in the party. As a result of socialism gaining popularity in Europe
as a response to Fascism,
there was a sharp decline in international sales of his books. Between 1942 and
1945, Dos Passos worked as a journalist and war correspondent covering World War II.
In 1947, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Tragedy struck the same year when an automobile accident killed his wife of 18
years, Katharine Smith, and cost him the sight in one eye. The couple had no
children. Dos Passos married Elizabeth Hamlyn Holdridge (1909–1998) in 1949, by
whom he had an only daughter, Lucy Hamlin Dos Passos (b. 1950).

His
politics, which had always underpinned his work, moved to the right, and Dos
Passos came to have a qualified, and temporary, sympathy for the goals of Joseph McCarthy
in the early 1950s. However, his longtime friend, journalist John Chamberlain, believed that “Dos
always remained a libertarian.” In 1950s, Dos Passos also contributed to
publications such as the libertarian journal The Freeman
and the conservative
magazine, National Review.  In the same decade, he published the
influential study, The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson
(1954), about which fellow ex-radical Max Eastman
wrote: “I think John Dos Passos has done a great service to his country
and the free world by lending his talents to this task. He has revived the
heart and mind of Jefferson, not by psycho-analytical
lucubrations or soulful gush, but in the main by telling story after story of
those whose lives and thoughts impinged upon his. And Jefferson’s
mind and heart are so livingly related to our problems today that the result
seems hardly to be history.”

Recognition
for his significant contribution to literature
would come thirty years later in Europe when, in 1967, he was invited to Rome, Italy,
to accept the prestigious Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for
international distinction in literature. Although Dos Passos’s partisans have
contended that his later work was ignored because of his changing politics,
many critics agree that the quality of his novels declined following U.S.A. In
the 1960s, he actively campaigned for presidential candidates Barry Goldwater
and Richard M. Nixon, and became associated with
the group Young Americans for Freedom. He continued
to write until his death in Baltimore, Maryland in 1970. He is interred in Yeocomico
Churchyard Cemetery in Cople Parish, Westmoreland County, Virginia, not far
from where he had made his home. Over his long and successful career, Dos
Passos wrote forty-two novels, as well as numerous poems, essays, and plays,
and created more than four hundred pieces of art. His major work is the
celebrated U.S.A. trilogy, comprising The 42nd Parallel
(1930), Nineteen Nineteen or 1919 (1932),
and The Big Money (1936). Dos Passos used
experimental techniques in these novels, incorporating newspaper clippings,
autobiography, biography and fictional realism
to paint a vast landscape of American culture during the first decades of the
twentieth century. Though each novel stands on its own, the trilogy is designed
to be read as a whole. Dos Passos’s political and social reflections in the
novel are deeply pessimistic about the political and economic direction of the United States,
and few of the characters manage to hold onto their ideals through the First
World War.

William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer of novels, short stories,
poetry
and occasional screenplays.  The
majority of his works are based in his native state of Mississippi.
Faulkner is considered one of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States, along
with Mark Twain,
Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote,
Eudora Welty,
Thomas Wolfe,
Harper Lee
and Tennessee Williams. Though his work was
published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner
was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.  In 1998, the Modern Library
ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of
the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century;
also on the list were 1930’s As I Lay Dying and Light in August (1932). From
the early 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, when Faulkner left for California, he published
13 novels and numerous short stories. This body of work formed the basis of his
reputation and led to him being awarded the Nobel Prize at age 52. This
prodigious output, mainly driven by an obscure writer’s need for money,
includes his most celebrated novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August
(1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner was
also a prolific writer of short stories.

His
first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most acclaimed
(and most frequently anthologized) stories, including “A Rose for Emily“,
“Red Leaves“,
“That Evening Sun“, and “Dry September“.
Faulkner set many of his short stories and novels in Yoknapatawpha County—based on, and nearly
geographically identical to, Lafayette
County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi is the county seat.
Yoknapatawpha was Faulkner’s “postage stamp”, and the bulk of work
that it represents is widely considered by critics to amount to one of the most
monumental fictional creations in the history of literature. Three novels, The Hamlet,
The Town
and The Mansion, known collectively as the Snopes Trilogy, document
the town of Jefferson and its environs, as an extended family headed by Flem
Snopes insinuates itself into the lives and psyches of the general populace.

Faulkner
was known for his experimental style with meticulous attention to diction
and cadence.
In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his contemporary Ernest Hemingway,
Faulkner made frequent use of “stream of consciousness” in his
writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and
sometimes Gothic or grotesque
stories of a wide variety of characters including former slaves or descendants
of slaves, poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, and Southern
aristocrats. Faulkner wrote two volumes of poetry which were published in small
printings, The Marble Faun
(1924) and A Green Bough (1933),
and a collection of crime-fiction short stories, Knight’s Gambit
(1949).

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr.(February 27,
1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952) and the
novella Of Mice and Men (1937). Author of twenty-seven books,
including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and five collections of short
stories, Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold,
published in 1929, is based on the life and death of privateer
Henry Morgan.
It centers on Morgan’s assault and sacking of the city of Panama, sometimes
referred to as the ‘Cup of Gold’, and on the woman, fairer than the sun, who
was said to be found there.  After Cup
of Gold, between 1931 and 1933 Steinbeck produced three shorter works. The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932,
comprised twelve interconnected stories about a valley near Monterey, that was discovered by a Spanish corporal
while chasing runaway American Indian slaves. In
1933 Steinbeck published The Red Pony, a 100-page,
four-chapter story weaving in memories of Steinbeck’s childhood.^[10]
To a God Unknown follows the life of a homesteader
and his family in California,
depicting a character with a primal and pagan worship of the land he works. Steinbeck
achieved his first critical success with the novel Tortilla Flat (1935), which
won the California Commonwealth Club‘s Gold Medal. The book
portrays the adventures of a group of classless and usually homeless young men
in Monterey after World War I, just before U.S. prohibition. The characters, who are
portrayed in ironic comparison to mythic knights on a quest, reject nearly all
the standard mores of American society in enjoyment of a dissolute life centered
around wine, lust, camaraderie and petty theft. The book was made into the 1942
film Tortilla Flat, starring Spencer Tracy,
Hedy Lamarr
and John Garfield,
a friend of Steinbeck’s. Steinbeck began to write a series of “California novels”
and Dust Bowl
fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression.
These included In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men
and The Grapes of Wrath. Of Mice and Men,
about the dreams of a pair of migrant laborers working the California soil, was critically acclaimed.  Steinbeck would write two more stage plays (The Moon Is Down
and Burning Bright).

Nathanael West (born Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein,
October 17,
1903 – December 22, 1940) was a US
author, screenwriter and satirist. Nathanael West (born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein)
was born in New York City, the first child of
German-speaking Russian Jewish parents
from Lithuania
who maintained an upper middle class household in a Jewish neighborhood on the Upper West
Side. West displayed little ambition in academics, dropping out of
high school and only gaining admission into Tufts
University by forging his high school transcript. Although West had
been working on his writing since college, it was not until his quiet night job
at the hotel that he found the time to put his novel together. It was at this
time that West wrote what would eventually become Miss Lonelyhearts
(1933). In 1931, however, two years before he completed Miss Lonelyhearts,
West published The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a novel
he had conceived of in college. By this time, West was within a group of
writers working in and around New
York that included William Carlos Williams and Dashiell
Hammett. He published a third novel, A Cool
Million, in 1934. None of West’s three works sold well, however,
so he spent the mid-1930s in financial difficulty, sporadically collaborating
on screenplays. Many of the films he worked on were B-movies,
such as Five Came Back (1939). It was at this time
that West wrote The Day of the Locust. West took many of the settings and minor characters
of his novel directly from his experience living in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.

Jack Conroy (December 5, 1898 to February 28, 1990) a leftist
American writer ^[1],
also known as a Worker-Writer ^[2],
and was best known for his contributions to “proletarian literature,” fiction and
nonfiction about the life of American workers during the early decades of the
20th century ^[3].
A Depression-era novelist, Conroy drew upon his childhood growing up in a
mining camp ^[2]
and elements of this can be seen in his novels, The Disinherited
^[2]
and A World to Win^[5].
From 1931 to 1941 Conroy edited successively the magazines Rebel Poet, The
Anvil, and The New Anvil. He included works by Erskine
Caldwell, Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Williams, among others ^[1].
Conroy later edited, with Curt Johnson, a collection of these pieces, Writers
in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology (1973) ^[1].
In 1938 Conroy came to Chicago, on Algren’s suggestions, to work on the Illinois
Writer’s Project ^[3].
Along with recording folktales and industrial folklore, Conroy was assigned to
the black history portion of the IWP, and collaborated with Arna Bontemps,
producing the pioneering black studies works They Seek A City (1945) and
Anyplace But Here (1965), both about African-American migration from the
South to the North ^[3].
Conroy and Bontemps also collaborated on several successful juvenile books
based on folktales,
including The Fast Sooner Hound (1942) and Slappy Hooper, The
Wonderful Sign Painter (1946) ^[3].

In 1965, Conroy
moved from Chicago
back to Moberly, Missouri, where he lived until his
death in 1990. He continued to write into his 80’s, publishing The Weed King
and Other Stories in 1985 ^[3].
Over the course of his career, Conroy was also a teacher and lecturer, and a
mentor to younger radical writers ^[3].
Known as The Sage of Moberly ^[3],
Conroy also wrote under the pseudonyms of Tim Brennan and John Norcross ^[1

Ayn Rand ( born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum,
February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982),
was a Russian-American novelist,
philosopher,^[2]
playwright, and screenwriter. She is known
for her two best-selling novels and for developing a philosophical system she
called Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, Rand migrated to the United States
in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play
produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. She first achieved fame
with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. Over a
decade later, she published her magnum opus, the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged, in 1957. Rand’s political views, reflected in both her fiction and
nonfiction work, emphasize individual rights
(including property rights) and laissez-faire capitalism, enforced by a
constitutionally limited government.
She was a fierce opponent of all forms of collectivism and statism,^[3][4]
including fascism,
communism, socialism, and the welfare state,^[5]
and promoted ethical egoism
while rejecting the ethic of altruism.^[6]
She considered reason
to be the only means of acquiring knowledge and its advocacy
the most important aspect of her philosophy

Thomas (Tom) Kromer (1906–1969) was an American writer known for his one novel, Waiting for
Nothing, an account of vagrant or hobo
life during the nineteen-thirties. Dedicated “to Jolene, who turned off
the gas,” the work is a realistic account of life as a homeless man during
the Great Depression. Straightforward, declarative
sentences in the tough-guy argot of the time (“I admire that stiff. He has
got the guts. He does not like parting with his dough”) are characteristic
of Kromer, as are spare descriptions of grim scenes (“When I look at these
stiffs by the fire, I am looking at a graveyard. There is hardly room to move
between the tombstones. . . . The epitaphs are chiseled in sunken shadows on
their cheeks”). The settings
include rescue missions, flop houses, abandoned buildings and the sidewalk
outside a nice restaurant. In one chapter, the narrator slowly comes to realize
that the pitch-black boxcar
he is riding in contains another rider, who is quietly, slowly, stalking him. Waiting
for Nothing was first published by Alfred A. Knopf
in 1935, reissued by Hill & Wang in 1968, and, in a definitive
edition edited by Arthur D. Casciato and James L.W. West III, reprinted as Waiting
for Nothing and Other Writings by the University of Georgia Press

in 1986.

Robert Emmett Cantwell (January 31, 1908 –
December 8, 1978) was a novelist and critic. His most notable work, The Land
of Plenty, focuses on a lumber mill in a thinly disguised version of his
hometown of Aberdeen, Washington. He worked on a
number of articles, three of which became books: Alexander Wilson:
Naturalist and Pioneer (1961), The
Real McCoy (1971), and The Hidden Northwest (1972).

Albert Halper (1904–1984) was an American novelist and
playwright. His first novel, Union Square,
was a Literary Guild selection..”).^[2]
In his New Masses review, Mike Gold
slammed the novel as “a gold brick, an utter bourgeois sham,” while
citing its praise from other writers who included Sinclair
Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Carl Van Doren,
Horace
Gregory, and Lewis Gannett. Lieber quickly got two articles
by Halper published by the New Masses, thereby restoring his Leftist
credibility. In his 1970 memoir, Good-Bye, Union Square,
Halper recalled the Leftist literary scene and impact of the Great Depression.
The title for memoir and earlier novel come from the place Halpert considered
the focal point of his life in New
York. “Union
Square became my hangout.”^[1]

Mary Therese McCarthy (June 21, 1912 – October 25, 1989) was an American
author,
critic,
and political activist. McCarthy explores the complex events of her early life
in Minneapolis and her coming of age in Seattle in her memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.
Her debut novel, The Company She Keeps
received critical acclaim as a succès de scandale, depicting the social milieu
of New York
intellectuals of the late 1930s with unreserved frankness. After building a
reputation as a satirist and critic, McCarthy enjoyed popular success when her
1963 novel The Group
remained on the New York Times Best Seller list
for almost two years. Her work is noted for its precise prose and its complex
mixture of autobiography and fiction.

 

7. Post World War II

 

Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900) was
an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific
throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist
tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism. He is recognized by modern
critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation. The eighth
surviving child of staunch Methodist
Protestant parents, Crane began writing at the age of four and had
published several articles by the age of 16. Having little interest in university
studies, he left school in 1891 and began work as a reporter and writer.
Crane’s first novel was the 1893 Bowery
tale Maggie: A Girl of
the Streets, which critics generally consider the first
work of American literary Naturalism. He won international acclaim for his 1895
Civil War novel The Red Badge of
Courage, which he wrote without any battle experience. In 1896,
Crane endured a highly publicized scandal after acting as witness for a
suspected prostitute. Late that year he accepted an offer to cover the Spanish-American War as a war correspondent. As he
waited in Jacksonville,
Florida for passage to Cuba, he met Cora Taylor,
the madam of a brothel with whom he would have a lasting relationship. While en
route to Cuba, Crane’s
ship sank off the coast of Florida,
leaving him adrift for several days in a dinghy. His ordeal was later described in
“The Open Boat“.
During the final years of his life, he covered conflicts in Greece and lived in England with Cora, where
he befriended writers such as Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. Plagued by
financial difficulties and ill health, Crane died of tuberculosis in a Black Forest sanatorium at
the age of 28. Crane is also known for short stories such as “The Open
Boat”, “The Blue Hotel“,
“The Bride Comes to
Yellow Sky“, and The Monster. His writing made a deep
impression on 20th century writers, most prominent among them Ernest Hemingway, and is
thought to have inspired the Modernists and the Imagists.

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962),
popularly known as E. E. Cummings,
with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase
letters as e.e. cummings (in the style of some of his poems), was
an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of
work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four
plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is
remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry, as well as one of the
most popular.

Malcolm Cowley (August 28, 1898 Belsano, Cambria County, Pennsylvania – March 27,
1989) was an American novelist, poet, literary critic, and journalist.
Perhaps the most famous work he wrote was his early book of poetry, Blue Juniata (1929), encouraged by Hart Crane.
His most autobiographical was Exile’s Return, published in 1934. The
second book is one of the first published in the United States about the “Lost
Generation”, and was reissued in a less radical edition with new material,
like his Fitzgerald revivals, in 1951. American literary historian Van Wyck
Brooks described it as “an irreplaceable literary record of the
most dramatic period in American literary history.”^[citation As an editorial
consultant to Viking Press, he pushed for the publication of Jack Kerouac‘s
On the Road.
In 1946 Cowley edited Viking’s edition of The Portable Faulkner, and his
introduction is generally considered^[who?] a turning point in William
Faulkner‘s reputation in the United States at a time when many
of his early works were in danger of going out of print. Cowley’s work
anthologizing 28 Fitzgerald short stories and editing a reissue of Tender is
the Night, restructured based on Fitzgerald’s notes, both in 1951, were key
to reviving Fitzgerald’s reputation as well, and his introduction to Sherwood
Anderson‘s Winesburg, Ohio, written in the early
1960s, is said to have had a similar effect on Anderson’s reputation. Other
works of literary and critical importance include Eight More Harvard Poets
(1923), A Second Flowering: Works & Days of the
Lost Generation (1973), And I
Worked at the Writer’s Trade (1978), and The Dream of the Golden
Mountains: Remembering the 1930s (1980).  When The Portable Malcolm Cowley
(Donald Faulkner, editor) was published in 1990, the year after Cowley’s death,
Michael Rogers wrote in Library Journal: “Though a respected name
in hardcore literary circles, in general the late Cowley is one of the unsung
heroes of 20th-century American literature. Cowley’s writings on the great
books are as important as the books themselves . . . . All American literature
collections should own this.”

Archibald MacLeish (May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982) was an American poet, writer, and the
Librarian of Congress. He is associated
with the Modernist
school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer
Prizes for his work (A Continuing
Journey, A Time to Speak (1941), Champion
of a Cause: Essays and Addresses on Librarianship (1971), Letters of
Archibald MacLeish, 1907-1982 (1983))

Samuel Dashiell Hammett ( May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American
author of hard-boiled detective
novels and short stories. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora
Charles (The Thin Man),
and the Continental Op
(Red Harvest and The Dain Curse). In
addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on film,
Hammett “is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of
all time”^[1]
and was called, in his obituary in The New York Times,
“the dean of the… ‘hard-boiled’ school of detective fiction”.
Known for his authenticity and realism, Hammett drew on his experiences
as a Pinkerton operative.

James Gould Cozzens (August 19, 1903 – August 9, 1978) was
a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.
He is often grouped today with his contemporaries John O’Hara and John P. Marquand, but his
work is generally considered more challenging. he published his first novel, Confusion,
in 1924. he wrote a second novel, Michael Scarlett. Other early novels
include S.S. San Pedro (1931),
The Last Adam
(1933), and Castaway (1934). Cozzens received O. Henry Awards
for his short stories “A Farewell to Cuba” (1931) and “Total
Stranger”, published in The Saturday
Evening Post on February 15, 1936, then went on to author two
more highly-regarded novels, Ask Me Tomorrow
(1941), and The Just and the
Unjust (1942). His 1948 novel Guard of Honor,  won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize. His 1957
novel By Love Possessed became a surprise
runaway hit. His last novel, Morning, Noon and Night, was published in
1968 but sold poorly. Philosophical in nature, his novels take place over the
course of just a few days, exhibit little action, and explore a variety of
concepts such as love, duty, racial sensitivities, and the law. Cozzens’ novels
disregarded modernist literary trends, and are characterized by the use of
often unfamiliar, archaic words, traditional literary structures, and
conservative themes. As a result many contemporary critics regarded his work as
old-fashioned or moralistic, and he was viciously attacked as a reactionary by his
harshest critics. His prose is crafted meticulously and has an objective,
clinical tone and subtle, dry humor.

James Thomas Farrell (February 27, 1904 – August 22, 1979) was an American
novelist.
One of his most famous works was the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and into
a television miniseries in 1979. The trilogy was voted number 29 on the Modern
Library‘s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. A
novelist, journalist, and short story writer known for his realistic portraits
of the working class South Side Irish, especially in the novels about
the character Studs Lonigan. Farrell based his writing on his own experiences. Among
the writers who acknowledged Farrell as an inspiration was Norman Mailer.

Lillian Florence “Lily” Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an
American
playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes. She was romantically involved
for 30 years with mystery and crime writer Dashiell Hammett (and was
the inspiration for his character Nora Charles), and was also a long-time friend
and literary executor
of author Dorothy Parker.
Hellman’s most famous plays include The Children’s Hour (1934), The Little Foxes
(1939), and Toys in the Attic (1960). Hellman also
wrote three autobiographical memoirs: An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir
(1969), Pentimento (1973), and Scoundrel Time
(1976). The Oscar-winning film Julia
was based on Pentimento.

Meyer
Levin (October 7, 1905 in Chicago, Illinois
– July 9, 1981 in
Israel) was a Jewish-American
novelist often called the top Jewish-American writer of the 20th century, known
for works on the Leopold and Loeb
case and the Anne Frank
case. Meyer wrote the 1956 novel Compulsion inspired by
the Leopold and Loeb
case. Levin had attended the University of
Chicago at the same time as Leopold and Loeb, before the murder of Bobby Franks. The novel, for which Levin was given a
Special Edgar Award
by the Mystery Writers of
America in 1957, was the basis for Levin’s own 1957 play adaptation
and the 1959 film based on it. Levin wrote a novel, The Fanatic, based on his experiences,
but that was not sufficient to exorcise his inner demons. Some years later, he
wrote one of his best-received books, The Obsession, containing his
straightforward version of all the facts. His 30-year battle to have his play
performed and the legal battles were also covered in An Obsession with Anne
Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary by Lawrence Graver, The Stolen Legacy
of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman and the Staging of the Diary by
Ralph Melnick, as well as in the French-language book by Levin’s wife, Tereska Torres, Les
maisons hantees de Meyer Levin, published by Editions Phebus (Paris).

James Albert Michener (February 3, 1907 – October 16, 1997)
was an American author of more than 40 titles, the majority of which
were sweeping sagas, covering the lives of many generations in particular
geographic locales and incorporating historical facts into the stories.
Michener’s major books include Tales of the South
Pacific (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction in 1948), Hawaii,
The Drifters, Centennial, The Source, The Fires of Spring,
Chesapeake, Caribbean,
Caravans, Alaska,
Texas,
and Poland. His nonfiction works include the
1968 Iberia about his travels in Spain
and Portugal,
his 1992 memoir The World Is My
Home, and Sports in America. Return to Paradise combines fictional
short stories with Michener’s factual descriptions of the Pacific areas where
they take place.

James Ramon Jones (November 6, 1921 – May 9, 1977) was
an American
author known for his explorations of World War II and its
aftermath. His wartime experiences inspired some of his most famous works. He
witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, which led to his first published novel, From Here to Eternity. The Thin Red Line reflected his combat
experiences on Guadalcanal. His last novel, Whistle,
was based on his hospital stay in Memphis, Tennessee. His
second published novel, Some Came Running, had
its roots in his first attempted novel, which he called They Shall Inherit
the Laughter, a thinly disguised autobiographical novel of his experiences
in Robinson immediately after World War II. Jones assisted in the formation of
the Handy Writers’
Colony in Marshall, Illinois.
The posthumous publication of Whistle in 1978 saw the completion of
Jones’ war trilogy (the first parts being From Here to Eternity and The
Thin Red Line).

Gay Talese (born February 7, 1932) is an American author. He
wrote for The New York Times in the early 1960s and
helped to define literary journalism. His most famous articles are about Joe DiMaggio,
Dean Martin
and Frank Sinatra.
Gay and Nan Talese’s marriage will be the subject of Talese’s next book, the
third in a series published by Knopf.^[2]
The first two books, Unto the Sons and A Writer’s
Life, were published in 1992 and 2006, respectively. Talese wrote
The Bridge
(1964), a reporter-style, non-fiction depiction of the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City. Talese’s
1966 Esquire article on Frank Sinatra,
“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” is one
of the most influential American magazine articles of all time, and a
pioneering example of New Journalism. With what some have called a
brilliant structure and pacing, the article focused not just on Sinatra
himself, but also on Talese’s pursuit of his subject. Talese’s celebrated Esquire
piece about Joe DiMaggio, The Silent Season of a Hero,—in part a
meditation on the transient nature of fame—also appeared in 1966. When a number
of Esquire pieces were collected into a book called Fame and Obscurity Talese paid tribute in its introduction to two
writers he admired by citing “an aspiration on my part to somehow bring to
reportage the tone that Irwin Shaw and John O’Hara
had brought to the short story.” Honor Thy Father (1971) was made
into a feature film.

James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an
American novelist,
writer,
playwright,
poet, essayist
and civil rights activist. Most of Baldwin’s
work deals with racial
and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States.
His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of
identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological
pressures related to being black and homosexual
well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was
improved.^[1]
In 1953, Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, an
autobiographical bildungsroman, was published. Baldwin’s
first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son appeared two
years later. Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s
Room, stirred controversy when it was first published in 1956
due to its explicit homoerotic content.^[
Baldwin’s next two novels, Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been
Gone, are sprawling, experimental works^[10]
dealing with black and white characters and with heterosexual, homosexual, and
bisexual characters.^[11]
These novels struggle to contain the turbulence of the 1960s: they are
saturated with a sense of violent unrest and outrage. Baldwin’s
lengthy essay Down at the Cross talked
about the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the burgeoning Black
Muslim movement. No Name in the Street, also
discussed his own experience in the context of the later 1960s, specifically
the assassinations of three of his personal friends: Medgar Evers,
Malcolm X,
and Martin Luther King, Jr.

James Clavell, born Charles Edmund Dumaresq Clavell (10 October 1924 – 7
September 1994) was an Australian (later naturalized American) novelist,
screenwriter, director and World War II veteran and prisoner of war. Clavell
is best known for his epic Asian Saga series of novels and their televised adaptations,
along with such films as The Great Escape and To Sir, with Love.
Following the outbreak of World War II, at the age of 16 he joined the Royal Artillery in 1940,
and was sent to Malaya to fight the Japanese.
Wounded by machine-gun fire, he was eventually captured and sent to a Japanese
prisoner-of-war camp on Java.
Clavell’s first novel, King Rat, was a semi-fictional
account of his prison experiences at Changi. When the book was published in
1962, it became an immediate best-seller and three years later, it was adapted
for film. His next novel, Tai-Pan,
was a fictional account of Jardine-Matheson‘s
rise to prominence in Hong Kong, as told through the character who was to
become Clavell’s heroic archetype, Dirk Struan. Struan‘s
descendants would inhabit almost all of his forthcoming books. This was
followed by Shōgun in 1975, the story of an English navigator
set in 17th century Japan,
based on that of William Adams. When the story was made into a
TV series in 1980, produced by Clavell, it became the second highest rated
mini-series in history with an audience of over 120 million. In 1981, Clavell
published his fourth novel, Noble House, which
became a number one best seller during that year and was also made into a
miniseries. Following the success of Noble House, Clavell wrote Whirlwind
(1986) and Gai-Jin
(1993) along with The Children’s
Story (1981) and Thrump-o-moto (1985).

James Salter (born June 10, 1925, New York City) is an American writer. Salter
was born James Arnold Horowitz, the son of a moderately wealthy New Jersey entrepreneur,
on June 10, 1925. He entered West Point on July 15, 1942. He used his Korean experience for
his first novel, The Hunters (1956), which was made into a film starring Robert Mitchum in 1958.
His 1961 novel The Arm of Flesh drew on his experiences flying with the
36th Fighter-Day Wing at Bitburg Air Base,
Germany,
between 1954 and 1957. An extensively revised version of the novel was reissued
in 2000 as Cassada. Widely regarded as one of the most artistic writers
of modern American fiction, Salter himself is critical of his own work, having
said that only his 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime comes close to
living up to his standards. Set in post-war France, A Sport and a Pastime
is a piece of erotica
involving an American student and a young French girl, told as flashbacks in
the present tense by an unnamed narrator who barely knows the student and who
himself yearns for the girl, and who freely admits that most of his narration
is fantasy.

Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960) was an American
author
of powerful, sometimes controversial novels, short stories
and non-fiction.
Much of his literature concerns racial themes. His work helped redefine
discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century.
Wright gained national attention for the collection of four short stories
titled Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). By May 6, 1938 excellent sales had
provided him with enough money to move to Harlem,
where he began writing Native Son (1940). Wright moved to Paris in 1946, and became
a permanent American expatriate. In Paris,
he became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.
His Existentialist
phase was depicted in his second novel, The Outsider (1953), which described an African-American
character’s involvement with the Communist Party in New York. In 1954 he published a minor
novel, Savage Holiday. Other works by Richard Wright included White Man, Listen!
(1957); a novel The Long Dream in 1958; as well as a collection of short stories,
Eight Men,
published in 1961, shortly after his death in 1960.

Irwin Shaw (February 27, 1913 – born Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff
in the South Bronx,
New York City, to Russian Jewish
immigrants,
May 16, 1984) was an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and
short-story author. Shaw’s first novel The Young
Lions (1949), was published in 1949. Based on his experiences in Europe during the war, the novel was very successful and
was adapted into a 1958 film. Shaw’s second novel, The Troubled Air,
chronicling the rise of McCarthyism, was published in 1951. While living in Europe, Shaw wrote more
bestselling books, notably Lucy Crown (1956), Two Weeks in Another Town (1960), Rich Man, Poor Man (1970) (for which he would later write a less
successful sequel entitled Beggarman, Thief)
and Evening in Byzantium (made into a 1978
TV movie). Rich Man, Poor Man was adapted into a highly successful ABC television
miniseries in 1976. His novel Top of the Hill was made into a
TV movie about the Winter Olympics atLake Placid.

Herman Wouk (born May 27, 1915) is a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish American
author with a number of
notable novels
to his credit, including The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance.
Herman Wouk was born in New York City
into a Jewish
family that had emigrated from Russia.
He started writing a novel, Aurora Dawn,^[2]
during off-duty hours aboard ship. His novels after The Caine Mutiny
include Marjorie Morningstar (1955), Youngblood Hawke
(1962), and Don’t Stop the
Carnival (1965). In 1956 he published in paperback the novel Slattery’s
Hurricane, which he had written in 1948 as the basis for the
screenplay for the film of the same name. Wouk’s first work of non-fiction was
1959’s This is My God, an
explanation of Orthodox Judaism.

Jerome David Salinger (January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as
his reclusive
nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview
in 1980. In
1948 he published the critically acclaimed story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in The New
Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his subsequent
work. In 1951 Salinger released his novel The Catcher in the Rye, an
immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent
alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist
Holden
Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers.^[3]
The novel remains widely read and controversial,^[4]
selling around 250,000 copies a year. He followed Catcher with a short
story collection, Nine Stories (1953), a volume
containing a novella
and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a volume
containing two novellas, Raise High
the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).
His last published work, a novella entitled “Hapworth 16,
1924“, appeared in The New
Yorker on June 19, 1965.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (22 April 1899^c
– 2 July 1977) was a multilingual Russian-American
novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian,
then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist. He
also made contributions to entomology and had an interest in chess
problems.

Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) is frequently cited as among his most
important novels and is his most widely known, exhibiting the love of intricate
word play
and synesthetic
detail that characterised all his works. The novel was ranked at #4 in the list
of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels.^[1]
Pale Fire
(1962) was ranked at #53 on the same list. His memoir, Speak, Memory,
was listed #8 on the Modern Library nonfiction list.^[
Nabokov’s first writings were in Russian, but he came to his greatest
distinction in the English language. For this achievement, he has been compared
with Joseph Conrad;
yet Nabokov viewed this as a dubious comparison, as Conrad composed in French
and English. Nabokov is noted for his complex plots, clever word play, and use
of alliteration.
He gained both fame and notoriety with his novel Lolita (1955), which
tells of a grown man’s devouring passion for a twelve-year-old girl. This and
his other novels, particularly Pale Fire (1962), won him a place among
the greatest novelists of the 20th century. His longest novel, which met with a
mixed response, is Ada (1969). He devoted
more time to the composition of this novel than any of his others. Nabokov’s
fiction is characterised by its linguistic playfulness. For example, his short
story “The Vane Sisters” is famous in part for
its acrostic
final paragraph, in which the first letters of each word spell out a message
from beyond the grave. Nabokov’s stature as a literary critic is founded
largely on his four-volume translation of and commentary on Alexander
Pushkin‘s epic of the Russian soul, Eugene Onegin,
published in 1964. Not until glasnost did Nabokov’s work become officially available in his
native country. Mikhail Gorbachev authorised a five-volume
edition of his writing in 1988.

William Seward Burroughs II (also known by his pen name
William Lee; February 5, 1914(1914-02-05) – August 2, 1997(1997-08-02)) was an American
novelist, poet, essayist
and spoken word
performer. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation
and a major postmodernist author who affected popular
culture as well as literature. He is considered to be “one of the most
politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the
twentieth century.” Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six
collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have
been published of his interviews and correspondences. Burroughs also
collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians,
and made many appearances in films. He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the founder of
the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of
public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early
adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studying English and anthropology,
but after being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy to serve in World War II, dropped out
and spent the next twenty years working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living
in New York City,
he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac,
the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement
of the Beat Generation, while becoming involved in the drug addiction that
affected him for the rest of his life.

Much of Burroughs’s
work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he
lived throughout Mexico City, London,
Paris, Berlin, the South
American Amazon and Tangier
in Morocco.
Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third
novel Naked Lunch (1959), a work wrought with controversy that
underwent a court case under the sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin,
he also popularized the literary cut-up technique
in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961–64). In 1983, Burroughs
was elected to the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France.
Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the “greatest satirical writer
since Jonathan Swift,” a reputation he owes to
his “lifelong subversion”of the moral, political and
economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly
humorous sardonicism.
J. G. Ballard
considered Burroughs to be “the most important writer to emerge since the
Second World War,” while Norman Mailer
declared him “the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by
genius.” Burroughs’s major works can be divided into four different
periods. The dates refer to the time of writing, not publication, which in some
cases was not until decades later. Early
Work (early 1950s): Junkie,
Queer
and The Yage Letters are relatively
straightforward linear narratives, written in and about Burroughs’s time inMexico City andSouth America.

The Cut-Up Period (mid 1950s to mid 1960s): Naked Lunch
is a fragmentary collection of “routines” from The Word Hoard
– manuscripts written in Tangier, Paris, London, as well as of some other texts
written in South America such as “The Composite City”, blending into
the cut-up and fold-in fiction also heavily drawn
from The Word Hoard: The Soft Machine,
Nova Express,
The Ticket That Exploded, also referred to
as “The Nova Trilogy” or “the Nova
Epic”, self-described by Burroughs as an attempt to create “a
mythology for the space age”. Interzone
also derives from this period.

Experiment & Subversion (mid 1960s to mid 1970s): This period saw
Burroughs continue experimental writing with increased political content and
branching into multimedia such as film and sound recording. The only major
novel written in this period was The Wild Boys, but he also wrote dozens of
published articles, short stories, scrap books and other works, several in
collaboration with Brion Gyson. The major anthologies representing work from
this period are The Burroughs File, The Adding Machine and
Exterminator!.

The Red Night Trilogy (mid 1970s to mid 1980s): The books Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands
came from Burroughs in a final, mature stage, creating a complete mythology.

Burroughs
also produced numerous essays and a large body of autobiographical material,
including a book with a detailed account of his own dreams (My Education: A
Book of Dreams).

Allen Stuart Drury (September 2, 1918 – September 2,
1998) was a U.S. novelist.
He wrote the 1959 novel Advise and Consent,  Drury’s 1959 novel about the Senate’s
consideration of a controversial nominee for Secretary of State for which he
won the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction in 1960.^[1] In the 1990s, he would write three
novels inspired by his experiences at Stanford: Toward What Bright Glory?,
Into What Far Harbor?,
and Public Men. Drury followed Advise
and Consent with several sequels. A Shade of
Difference is set a year after Advise and Consent. Drury
then turned his attention to the next presidential election after those events
with Capable of Honor
and Preserve and
Protect. He then wrote two alternative sequels based on a
different outcome of an assassination attack in an earlier work: Come Nineveh, Come Tyre and The Promise of Joy. In 1970, Drury
published The Throne of
Saturn, a science fiction novel about the first attempt at
sending a manned mission to Mars. The 1977 novel Anna Hastings, was
more a novel about journalism than politics. He returned to the timeline in
1979, with the political novel Mark Coffin U.S.S. It was succeeded, by the
two-part The Hill of Summer and
The Roads of Earth,
which are true sequels to Mark Coffin U.S.S. He also wrote stand-alone
novels, Decision (about the Supreme Court) and Pentagon,
as well as several other fiction and non-fiction works. Drury had completed his
20th novel, Public Men set at Stanford, just two
weeks before his death.

Allen Ginsberg, Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American
poet who vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression.
In the 1950s, Ginsberg was a leading figure of the Beat Generation.
Ginsberg’s epic poem “Howl“,
in which he celebrates his fellow “angel-headed hipsters” and
excoriates what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism
and conformity
in the United States, is one of the classic poems of the Beat Generation.
Ginsberg’s poetry
was strongly influenced by Modernism (specifically Ezra Pound,
T. S. Eliot,
Hart Crane,
and most importantly William Carlos Williams), Romanticism
(specifically John Keats), the beat and cadence of jazz (specifically that of
bop
musicians such as Charlie Parker), and his Kagyu Buddhist
practice and Jewish
background. He considered himself to have inherited the visionary poetic mantle handed down from the
English poet and artist William Blake, and the American poet Walt Whitman.
The power of Ginsberg’s verse, its searching, probing focus, its long and
lilting lines, as well as its New World exuberance, all echo the continuity of inspiration
that he claimed.  He studied poetry under
William Carlos Williams, who was then in the middle of writing his epic poem Paterson
about the industrial city near his home. Ginsberg, after attending a reading by
Williams, sent the older poet several of his poems and wrote an introductory
letter. Most of these early poems were rhymed and metered and included archaic
pronouns like “thee.” Williams hated the poems. He told Ginsberg
later, “In this mode perfection is basic, and these poems are not
perfect.”

Though
he hated the early poems, Williams loved the exuberance in Ginsberg’s letter.
He included the letter in a later part of Paterson.
He taught Ginsberg not to emulate the old masters, but to speak with his own
voice and the voice of the common American. Williams taught him to focus on
strong visual images, in line with Williams’ own motto “No ideas but in
things.” His time studying under Williams led to a tremendous shift from
the early formalist work to a loose, colloquial free verse style. Early
breakthrough poems include Bricklayer’s Lunch Hour and Dream Record.
Carl Solomon introduced Ginsberg to the
work of Antonin Artaud (To Have Done with the Judgement of God and Van
Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society), and Jean Genet (Our Lady of the
Flowers). Philip Lamantia introduced him to other Surrealists
and Surrealism continued to be an influence (for example, sections of
“Kaddish” were inspired by André Breton‘s
Free Union). Ginsberg claimed that the anaphoric repetition of
“Howl” and other poems was inspired by Christopher Smart in such
poems as Jubilate Agno. Ginsberg also claimed other more traditional
influences, such as: Franz Kafka, Herman Melville,
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe,
and even Emily Dickinson.  Ginsberg also made an intense study of haiku and the paintings of
Paul Cézanne,
from which he adapted a concept important to his work, which he called the Eyeball
Kick. He noticed in viewing Cézanne’s paintings that when the eye moved
from one color to a contrasting color, the eye would spasm,
or “kick.” Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming
opposites was a common feature in haiku. Ginsberg used this technique in his
poetry, putting together two starkly dissimilar images: something weak with something
strong, an artifact of high culture with an artifact of low culture, something
holy with something unholy. The example Ginsberg most often used was
“hydrogen jukebox” (which later became the title of a song cycle
composed by Philip Glass with lyrics drawn from Ginsberg’s poems). Another
example is Ginsberg’s observation on Bob Dylan during Dylan’s hectic and
intense 1966 electric-guitar tour, fuelled by a cocktail of amphetamines,^[72]
opiates,^[73]
alcohol,^[74]
and psychedelics,^[75]
as a Dexedrine
Clown. The phrases “eyeball kick” and “hydrogen
jukebox” both show up in “Howl”, as well as a direct quote from
Cézanne: “Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus”.^[58]

Jean-Louis “Jack”
Kerouac (March 12,
1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American
novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast
and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg,
a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his
spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity,
Buddhism,
drugs, poverty, and travel. His writings have inspired other writers, including
Ken Kesey,
Bob Dylan,
Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon,
Lester Bangs,
Tom Robbins,
Will Clarke,
Haruki Murakami.
Unsympathetic critics of his work have labeled it “slapdash”,
“grossly sentimental”,^[3]
and “immoral”.^[4]
Kerouac became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of
the Hippie movement,^[5]
although he remained antagonistic toward it. In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died
from internal bleeding due to long-standing abuse of alcohol. Since his death
Kerouac’s literary prestige has grown and several previously unseen works have
been published. All of his books are in print today, among them: On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums,
Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans,
Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody
and Big Sur. Kerouac wrote constantly, carrying a
notebook with him everywhere. Letters to friends and family members tended to
be long and rambling, including great detail about his daily life and thoughts.
Prior to becoming a writer, he tried a varied list of careers. He was a sports
reporter for The Lowell Sun; a temporary worker in
construction and food service; a United States Merchant Marine and he
joined the United States Navy twice. The Town and the City was published in 1950
under the name “John Kerouac” and, though it earned him a few
respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily influenced by Kerouac’s
reading of Thomas Wolfe, it reflects on the generational epic formula and
the contrasts of small town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger,
city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux;
some 400 pages were taken out.

For
the next six years, Kerouac continued to write regularly. Building upon
previous drafts tentatively titled “The Beat Generation” and
“Gone on the Road,” Kerouac completed what is now known as On the Road
in April 1951, while living at 454
West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty.
The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac’s road-trip
adventures across the United States
and Mexico
with Neal Cassady
in the late-40s, as well as his relationships with other Beat writers and
friends. He completed the first version of the novel during a three-week
extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Kerouac wrote the final
draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him bowls of pea soup and mugs
of coffee to keep him going. Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing
paper into long strips, wide enough for a type-writer, and taped them together
into a 120-foot (37 m)
long roll he then fed into the machine. This allowed him to type continuously
without the interruption of reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained
no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit than what would
eventually be printed. Though “spontaneous,” Kerouac had prepared
long in advance before beginning to write. In fact, according to his Columbia professor and
mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the
work in his journals over the several preceding years.

Though
the work was completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a
publisher. Before On the Road was accepted by Viking Press, Kerouac got
a job as a “railroad brakesman and fire lookout” traveling between
the East and West coasts of America
to collect money, so he could live with his mother. During this period of
travel, he conspired what was to be “his life’s work”, “The
Legend of Duluoz.”^[28] According
to Kerouac, On the Road “was really a story about two Catholic
buddies roaming the country in search of God. In late 1951, Joan Haverty left
and divorced Kerouac while pregnant. In February 1952, she gave birth to
Kerouac’s only child, Jan Kerouac, though he refused to acknowledge her as his own
until a blood test confirmed it 9 years later.^[30]
For the next several years Kerouac continued writing and traveling, taking
extensive trips throughout the U.S.
and Mexico
and often fell into bouts of depression and heavy drug and alcohol use. During
this period he finished drafts for what would become 10 more novels, including The Subterraneans,
Doctor Sax,
Tristessa,
and Desolation Angels, which chronicle
many of the events of these years. In 1957, after being rejected by several
other firms, On the Road was finally purchased by Viking Press,
which demanded major revisions prior to publication.^[27]
Many of the more sexually explicit passages were removed and, fearing libel suits, pseudonyms
were used for the book’s “characters”. These revisions have often led
to criticisms of the alleged spontaneity of Kerouac’s style.^[26]

Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American
novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms
and developing a new sort of ‘novel’ that is a mixture of novel, autobiography,
social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist
free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive
of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional.^[1]
His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring. He also wrote travel
memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis. His works contain
detailed accounts of sexual experiences, and his books did much to free the
discussion of sexual subjects in American writing from both legal and social
restrictions. He continued to write novels that were banned in the United States
on the grounds of obscenity. Along with Tropic of Cancer, his Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939) were
smuggled into his native country, building Miller an underground reputation.
One of the first acknowledgments of Henry Miller as a major modern writer was
by George Orwell
in his 1940 essay Inside the Whale. The publication of Miller’s Tropic
of Cancer in the United
States in 1961 led to a series of obscenity
trials that tested American laws on pornography.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in Grove Press,
Inc., v. Gerstein, citing Jacobellis v. Ohio (which was decided the
same day in 1964), overruled the state court findings of obscenity
and declared the book a work of literature; it was one of the notable events in
what has come to be known as the sexual
revolution.

Elia Kazan (September 7, 1909 – September 28,
2003) was a Greek-American director and actor, described as “one of the
most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history”.^[2]
He also produced, and wrote screenplays and novels. Born in the Ottoman Empire to Greek parents, they
emigrated to New York
when he was four. He wrote
The
Arrangement (1951), America America (1962),
The Assassins (1972).

Tennessee Williams (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) born Thomas
Lanier Williams, was an American playwright
who received many of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama. After he
moved from St. Louis to New
Orleans in 1939, he changed his first name to “Tennessee”, the Southeastern U.S.
state and his father’s birthplace. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and
for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In addition, The Glass Menagerie (1944 in Chicago,
1945 in
New York) and
The Night of the Iguana (1961)
received New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards. His
1952 play The Rose Tattoo received the Tony Award
for best play. In 1980 he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President
Jimmy Carter.

Budd Schulberg (March 27, 1914 – August 5, 2009) was
an American
screenwriter, television producer,
novelist
and sports writer.
He was known for his 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy
Run?, his 1947 novel The Harder They Fall, his 1954
Academy-award-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront, and his
1957 screenplay for A Face in the Crowd. In 1950,
Schulberg published The Disenchanted, about a young
screenwriter who collaborates on a screenplay about a college winter festival
with a famous novelist at the nadir of his career. The novelist (who at the
time was assumed by reviewers to be a thinly disguised portrait of Fitzgerald,
who had died ten years earlier) is portrayed as a tragic and flawed figure,
with whom the young screenwriter becomes disillusioned.

Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005)^[1][2]
was an American playwright
and essayist.
He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays
such as All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible.
Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s
and early 1960s, a period during which he testified before the House Un-American Activities
Committee, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and was married
to Marilyn
Monroe.

Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 – December 12, 1999) was an American
satirical
novelist, short story
writer and playwright. He wrote the influential novel Catch-22
about American servicemen during World War II.
The title of this work entered the English lexicon to refer to absurd, no-win
choices, particularly in situations in which the desired outcome of the choice
is an impossibility, and regardless of choice, the same negative outcome is a
certainty. Heller is widely regarded as one of the best post-World War II
satirists. Although he is remembered primarily for Catch-22, his other
works center on the lives of various members of the middle class
and remain exemplars of modern satire.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (pronounced /ˈvɒnɨɡət/; November 11, 1922 – April
11, 2007) was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century.
He wrote such works as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat’s Cradle
(1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blending
satire,
black comedy,
and science fiction. He was known for his humanist
beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

Richard Yates (February 3, 1926 – November 7, 1992)
was an American novelist and short story writer, known for his exploration of mid-20th
century life. Yates’s first novel, Revolutionary Road, was a finalist for
the National Book Award that year (alongside Walker Percy‘s
The Moviegoer,
which won, and Joseph Heller‘s Catch-22).
Yates was championed by writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut,
Dorothy Parker,
William Styron,
Tennessee Williams and John Cheever.
Yates’s brand of realism was a direct influence on writers such
as Andre Dubus,
Raymond Carver
and Richard Ford.
For much of his life, Yates’s work
met almost universal critical acclaim, yet not one of his books sold over
12,000 copies in hardcover first edition. All of his novels were out of print
in the years after his death, though his reputation has substantially increased
posthumously and many of his novels have since been reissued in new editions.
This current success can be largely traced to the influence of Stewart O’Nan‘s
1999 essay in the Boston Review, “The Lost World of Richard
Yates: How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print”.Yates
was also an acclaimed author of short stories. Despite this, only one of his
short stories appeared in The New Yorker
(after repeated rejections). This story, “The Canal,” was published
in the magazine nine years after the author’s death to celebrate the 2001
release of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates.

Ira Levin (August 27, 1929 – November 12, 2007)^[1]
was an American author,
dramatist
and songwriter. Levin’s first
novel, A Kiss Before Dying, was well
received, earning him the 1954 Edgar Award for Best First
Novel. Levin’s best-known novel is Rosemary’s Baby, a horror
story of modern day Satanism
and other occultisms,
set in Manhattan’s Upper
West Side. In 1968, it was made into a film starring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. Other
Levin novels that were made into films included The Boys from Brazil in 1978; The Stepford Wives in
1975 and again in 2004 and Sliver
in 1993. Currently a new version of The Boys from Brazil is in
development for 2012. In
the 1990s, Levin wrote two more bestselling novels: Sliver (1991) which became a
film by Philip Noyce,
the director of Patriot Games
with Sharon Stone
and Tom Berenger, and Son of Rosemary
(1997), the sequel to Rosemary’s Baby.

William Goldman (born August 12, 1931) is an American
novelist,
playwright, and screenwriter. According to
his memoir, Adventures in the
Screen Trade (1983), Goldman began writing when he took a creative-writing
course in college. Goldman published five novels and had three plays produced
on Broadway before he began to write screenplays.
He wrote mostly serious literary works until the death of his first agent, when
he started writing thrillers, the first of which was Marathon Man. Goldman
researched Butch Cassidy and
the Sundance Kid for eight years and used Harry Longbaugh
(a variant spelling of the Sundance Kid’s real name) as his pseudonym for No Way to Treat a
Lady. After deciding he did not want to write a cowboy novel, he
turned the story into his first original screenplay and sold it for a record
$400,000.^[1]
He went on to use several of his novels as the foundation for his screenplays,
such as The Princess Bride.
Among the other scripts Goldman has written are The Stepford Wives (1975), Marathon Man (based on
his novel) (1976), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Misery
(1990), Chaplin (1992), Maverick
(1994) and Absolute Power (1997). Goldman also wrote The Silent
Gondoliers under the Morgenstern pseudonym.

Barbara Garson (born July 7, 1941 in Brooklyn,
New York City)
is an American playwright, author
and social activist. Garson is best known for the
play MacBird,
a notorious 1966 counterculture drama/political
parody
of Macbeth
that sold over half a million copies as a book and had over 90 productions
world wide. The play was originally intended for an anti-war
teach-in
at the University of California, Berkeley. The
first published edition was printed on an offset press that Garson had restored
the year before in order to print The Free Speech
Movement Newsletter which she edited. She was one of 800 arrested
with Mario Savio
during these early student protests of the 1960s. Garson’s self-published
edition of MacBird had sold over 200,000 copies by 1967 when the play
opened in New York in a production starring Stacey Keach,
Bill Devane,
Cleavon Little,
and Rue McClanahan.
While these then unknown actors went on to become fixtures in American theater,
movies and television,
the author disappeared from public view at the height of fame. A full-length
play, The Department (1983), written for and performed by the organizing
group Women Office Workers (WOW), is set in a bank’s back office that is about
to be automated. The Department, though a light farce, sets out many of
the problems that Garson expanded on in her 1989 book The Electronic
Sweatshop: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the
Factory of the Past. In addition to plays, Garson is the author of three
non-fiction books: All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of
Routine Work, 1975; The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are
Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past, 1988; Money Makes the
World Go Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global Economy, 2001. All
three books explain complex capitalist phenomena — Taylorism in the first two, global finance in
the third — through dramatic anecdotes and interviews. They each describe a
historical turning point through the voices of a range of people who may (or
may not) themselves, understand the changes happening in their own lives. MacBird
is remembered as an attack on then U.S. President Lyndon Johnson.
In Money Makes the World Go Around, Garson explained the global economy
by depositing her book advance in a one branch small town bank, then following
it around the world. At one point, her money was invested in Suez,
the French
company that owned Johannesburg‘s water system. When protesters were arrested for
opposing price increases and water shut offs, Garson organized a
“shareholders” demonstration on their behalf in front of the South
African consulate. Garson insists that activism is essential to her writing.

John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009^[1])
was an American novelist, poet, short story
writer, art critic,
and literary critic. Updike’s most famous work is
his Rabbit series (the novels Rabbit, Run;
Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is
Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and the novella “Rabbit
Remembered“) which chronicled the life of Harry
“Rabbit” Angstrom over the course of several decades, from
young adulthood to his death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest
(1990) received the Pulitzer Prize. He is one of only three
authors (the others being Booth
Tarkington and William
Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once.
Updike published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story
collections, as well as poetry, art criticism,
literary criticism and children’s books.
Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New
Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.
a regular contributor to The New Yorker. In New York, Updike wrote the poems and stories
that came to fill his early books like The Carpentered Hen (1958) and The Same Door
(1959). These works were influenced by Updike’s early engagement with The New
Yorker.^[10]
This early work also featured the influence of J. D.
Salinger (“A&P“), John Cheever
(“Snowing in Greenwich Village”), and the Modernists Marcel Proust,
Henry Green,
James Joyce,
and Vladimir Nabokov.^[10]
In 1971, Updike published a sequel to Rabbit, Run called Rabbit Redux,
his response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike’s confusion and
ambivalence towards the social and political changes that beset the United States
during that time.^[16]
In 1980 he published another novel featuring that character, Rabbit Is
Rich, which won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction–all three
major American literary prizes. The novel found “Rabbit
the fat and happy owner of a Toyota dealership.”^[10]
Updike found it difficult to end the book, because he was “having so much
fun” in the imaginary county Rabbit and his family inhabited.^[16]
In 1990, he published the last Rabbit novel, Rabbit At
Rest, in which his main character died. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book
Critics Circle Award. Over 500 pages long, the novel is among Updike’s most
celebrated. In 2000, Updike included the novella “Rabbit
Remembered” in his collection Licks of Love, drawing a
final close to the Rabbit saga. His Pulitzers for the two final Rabbit novels
make him one of only three writers to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction,
the other two being William Faulkner and Booth
Tarkington.

Mary Flannery O’Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American
novelist,
short-story
writer
and essayist.
An important voice in American literature, O’Connor wrote two novels
and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was
a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern
Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque
characters. O’Connor’s writing also reflected her own Roman
Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality
and ethics.
Her two novels were Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). She
also published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge
(published posthumously in 1965). She wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction
about deceptively backward Southern characters, usually fundamentalist
Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that to O’Connor’s
thinking brought them closer to the Catholic mind. several stories reveal that
O’Connor was familiar with some of the most sensitive contemporary issues that
her liberal and fundamentalist characters might encounter. She addressed the Holocaust
in her famous story “The Displaced Person,” and racial integration in “Everything that
Rises Must Converge.” O’Connor’s fiction often included references to the
problem of race in the South; occasionally, racial issues come to the
forefront, as in “The Artificial Nigger,” “Everything that Rises
Must Converge,” and “Judgment Day,” her last short story and a
drastically rewritten version of her first published story, “The
Geranium.” Fragments exist of an unfinished novel tentatively titled Why
Do the Heathen Rage? that draws from several of her short stories,
including “Why Do the Heathen Rage?,” “The Enduring Chill,”
and “The Partridge Festival.”

Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an
American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter
and film director.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion,
Hunter S. Thompson, John McPhee,
and Tom Wolfe,
Mailer is considered an innovator of narrative nonfiction, a genre sometimes
called New Journalism, which superimposes the essay onto the nonfiction
novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1948, while
continuing his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, Mailer published The Naked and the Dead, based on his
military service in World War II. A New York Times best
seller for 62 weeks, it was hailed by many as one of the best American wartime
novels and named one of the “one hundred best novels in
English language” by the Modern
Library. Barbary Shore (1951) was a surreal parable
of Cold War
left politics set in a Brooklyn rooming-house.
His 1955 novel The Deer Park drew on his experiences
working as a screenwriter in Hollywood
in 1949–50. In the tradition of Dickens
and Dostoevsky, Mailer wrote his fourth novel, An American
Dream, as a serial in Esquire magazine over eight months (January
to August 1964), publishing the first chapter only two months after he wrote
it. In 1980, The Executioner’s Song – Mailer’s
novelization of the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore
– won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Mailer spent a
longer time writing Ancient Evenings – his novel of Egypt
in the XX dynasty (about 1100 B.C.E.). Harlot’s
Ghost, Mailer’s longest novel (1310 pages), appeared in 1991. It
is an exploration of the unspoken dramas of the CIA from the end of WWII
to 1965. His final novel, The Castle in the Forest, which
focused on Hitler’s childhood, reached number five on the Times
best-seller list after publication in January 2007. From the mid-1950s, Mailer
became known for his counter-cultural essays. In 1955, he co-founded The Village
Voice for which he wrote a column from January to April 1956.^[3]
Mailer’s famous essay “The White
Negro“^[4]
(1957) “analyzes and partly defends the moral radicalism of the outsider
and hipster. In 1960, Mailer wrote “Superman Comes to the
Supermarket” for Esquire magazine, an account of the
emergence of John F. Kennedy during the Democratic party
convention. The essay was an important breakthrough for the New Journalism of
the nineteen sixties. Mailer’s contributions to the New Journalism include
major books such as The Armies of the Night (1968—awarded
a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award); Miami and the Siege of
Chicago (1968); Of a Fire on the Moon (1971); and The
Prisoner of Sex (1971). Hallmarks of these works are a highly subjectivized
style and a greater application of techniques from fiction-writing than common
in journalism. His 1973 Marilyn^[15]
was particularly controversial.

Truman Capote (September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an
American author and comedian, many of whose short stories,
novels,
plays,
and nonfiction
are recognized literary classics, including the novella
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a “nonfiction
novel.” At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from
Capote novels, stories and screenplays. Capote began his professional career
writing short stories. The critical success of one story, “Miriam” (1945), attracted the
attention of Random House publisher Bennett Cerf,
resulting in a contract to write Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Capote earned the most fame with In Cold Blood (1966),
a journalistic work about the murder of a Kansas farm family in their home. Between 1943 and 1946, Capote wrote a continual flow of short
fiction, including “A Mink of One’s Own,” “Miriam,”
“My Side of the Matter,” “Preacher’s Legend,” “Shut a
Final Door” (for which he won the O. Henry
Award at the age of 24) and “The Walls Are Cold.” These
stories were published in both literary quarterlies and well-known popular
magazines. In the spring of 1946, Capote was accepted at Yaddo, the 400-acre (1.6
km²) artists and writers colony at Saratoga Springs, New York. Random House,
the publisher of his novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (see below), moved
to capitalize on this novel’s success with the publication of A Tree of
Night and Other Stories in 1949.
In addition to “Miriam,” this collection also
includes “Shut a Final Door.” First published in The Atlantic
Monthly (August, 1947), “Shut a Final Door” won an O. Henry Award
(First Prize) in 1948.

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (born October 3, 1925) is an American
author,
playwright,
essayist,
screenwriter,
and political activist. Early in his career he
wrote The City and the Pillar (1948), which outraged mainstream critics as one of
the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality.
He subsequently emerged as one of America’s most important literary figures due
to the enormous quantity and quality of work produced over the course of his
career, including novels, essays, plays, and short stories covering a wide
variety of topics and eras. He also ran for political office twice and served as
a longtime political critic. In the 1960s, Vidal wrote three novels. The first,
Julian
(1964) dealt with the apostate Roman emperor, while the second, Washington, D.C. (1967) focused on a political family during the Franklin D. Roosevelt era. Vidal’s third
novel in the ’60s was the satirical transsexual
comedy Myra Breckinridge
(1968), a variation on familiar Vidalian themes of sex, gender, and popular
culture. After the staging of the plays Weekend (1968) and An Evening
With Richard Nixon
(1972), and the publication of the novel Two Sisters (1970), subtitled
“A Novel in the Form of a Memoir”, Vidal focused on essays and two
distinct strains in his fiction. The first strain comprises novels dealing with
American history, specifically with the nature of national politics.^[30]
Critic Harold Bloom
wrote, “Vidal’s imagination of American politics…is so powerful as to
compel awe.” This series’ Narratives of Empire titles include Burr
(1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln
(1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), The Golden Age (2000),
and another excursion into the ancient world: Creation
(1981, published in expanded form 2002).

The second
strain consists of the comedic “satirical inventions”: Myron
(1974, a
sequel to Myra Breckinridge), Kalki
(1978), Duluth (1983), Live from
Golgotha: The Gospel according to Gore Vidal (1992), and The Smithsonian Institution
(1998). In 1987, Vidal wrote the essays titled Armageddon?, exploring
the intricacies of power in contemporary America. He pilloried the incumbent
president Ronald Reagan as a “triumph of the
embalmer’s art.” In 1993, he won the National Book Award for his collection of
essays, United States (1952–1992).
A subsequent collection of essays, published in 2000, is The Last Empire. Since
then, he has published such self-described “pamphlets” as Perpetual
War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush
Junta, and Imperial America, critiques of American expansionism, the
military-industrial complex, the national
security state, and the George W. Bush administration. Vidal also
wrote an historical essay about the U.S.’s founding fathers, Inventing a Nation. In
1995, he published a memoir Palimpsest, and in 2006 its follow-up volume, Point to Point Navigation.
Earlier that year, Vidal also published Clouds and
Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories.

Louis Stanton Auchincloss (September 27, 1917 – January 26, 2010) was
an American lawyer, novelist, historian, and essayist. He is best known as a
prolific novelist who parlayed his firsthand knowledge into dozens of finely
wrought books exploring the private lives of America’s East Coast patrician class (especially the world of Wall Street
bankers,
lawyers
and stockbrokers).
His dry, ironic works of fiction continued the tradition of Henry James
and Edith Wharton.
Auchincloss is known for his closely observed portraits of old New York and New England
society. Among his best-known books are the multi-generational sagas The House of Five Talents (1960), Portrait in
Brownstone (1962), and East Side Story (2004). Other well-known
novels include The Rector of Justin (1964), the tale of a renowned headmaster
of a school like Groton^[7]
trying to deal with changing times, and The
Embezzler (1966), a look at white-collar crime.

Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born American
writer.
For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts.^[2]
He is the only writer to have won the National Book Award three times, and the only
writer to have been nominated for it six times. In the words of the Swedish Nobel
Committee, his writing exhibited “exuberant ideas, flashing
irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion… the mixture of rich
picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure,
drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic
conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and
penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to
act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our
age.”^[3]
His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog,
Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt’s Gift and Ravelstein.
Widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors, Bellow has
had a “huge literary influence.”^[4]
In the 1930s, Bellow was part of the Chicago
branch of the Works Progress Administration Writer’s
Project, which included such future Chicago
literary luminaries as Richard Wright and Nelson Algren.
Most of the writers were radical: if they were not card-carrying members of the
Communist Party USA, they were sympathetic to
the cause. Bellow was a Trotskyist, but because of the greater numbers of Stalinist-leaning
writers he had to suffer their taunts.^[11]

In 1941 Bellow
became a naturalized
US
citizen.^[12]
Bellow hit the bestseller list in 1964 with his novel Herzog.
Bellow returned to his exploration of mental instability, and its relationship
to genius, in his 1975 novel Humboldt’s
Gift. Bellow used his late friend and rival, the brilliant but
self-destructive poet Delmore Schwartz, as his model for the novel’s
title character, Von Humboldt Fleisher.^[16]
Bellow won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976. he died on
April 5, 2005, at age 89. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery Shir HeHarim of Brattleboro,
Vermont.
He was the first novelist to win the National Book Award three times. His friend and
protege Philip Roth
has said of him, “The backbone of 20th-century American literature has
been provided by two novelists – William
Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville,
Hawthorne, and Twain
of the 20th century.” James Wood, in a eulogy of Bellow in The New
Republic, wrote:^[19]
Jewish life and identity is a major theme in Bellow’s work, although he
bristled at being called a “Jewish writer.” Bellow’s work also shows
a great appreciation of America,
and a fascination with the uniqueness and vibrancy of the American experience. Bellow’s
work abounds in references and quotes from the likes of Marcel Proust
and Henry James.

8. Contemporary American Fiction

Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American
writer.
She wrote novels, short stories, and two plays, as well as essays and some
poetry. Her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter explores
the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts
of the South. Her other novels have similar
themes and are all set in the South. Altogether she published eight books. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), written at
the age of twenty-three, Reflections in a Golden Eye
(1941) and The Member of the Wedding (1946), are the best-known. The novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951) also
depicts loneliness and the pain of unrequited love. She was an alumna of Yaddo in Saratoga, New York.
In 1945, Carson and Reeves McCullers remarried. Three years later, she attempted
suicide
while depressed. In 1953, Reeves tried to convince her to commit suicide with
him, but she fled.^[2]
After Carson left, Reeves killed himself in
their Paris
hotel with an overdose of sleeping pills. Her bittersweet play, The Square
Root of Wonderful (1957), was an attempt to examine these
traumatic experiences. The Member of the Wedding (1946)
describes the feelings of a young girl at her brother’s wedding.

Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994) was a novelist,
literary
critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best
known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and
Act (1964), a collection of political, social and
critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). Published in 1952, Invisible Man
explores the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society, as
seen from the perspective of an unnamed black man in the New York City of the 1930s. In contrast to
his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters
that are dispassionate, educated, articulate and self-aware won the National Book Award in 1953. In 1964, Ellison
published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays. In
1986, his Going to the Territory was published. This is a collection of
seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William
Faulkner and Ellison’s friend Richard Wright, as well as the music
of Duke
Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America’s
national identity. In 1999, five years after his death, Ellison’s second novel,
Juneteenth, was published.

Nelle Harper Lee (born April 28, 1926) is an American
author
best known for her 1960 Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with the issues of racism that were
observed by the author as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.
Despite being Lee’s only published book, it led to Lee being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom of the United States
for her contribution to literature in 2007.^[

Patricia Highsmith (January 19, 1921 – February 4, 1995) was an American
novelist and short-story writer most widely known for her psychological thrillers, which have led to
more than two dozen film adaptations. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train has been adapted for stage and screen numerous times,
notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. In addition to her
acclaimed series about murderer Tom Ripley,
she wrote many short stories, often macabre, satirical or
tinged with black humour. Although she wrote specifically
in the genre of crime fiction, her books have been lauded by various writers
and critics as being artistic and thoughtful enough to rival mainstream
literature. Michael Dirda observed that, “Europeans
honoured her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist
tradition represented by her own favourite writers, in particular Dostoevsky,
Conrad,
Kafka,
Gide,
and Camus.”^[1]
Highsmith’s first novel was Strangers on a Train, which emerged in 1950,
and which contained the violence that became her trademark.^[4]
At Truman Capote‘s
suggestion, she rewrote the novel at the Yaddo writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York.^[5]
The book proved modestly successful when it was published in 1950. However,
Hitchcock’s 1951 film adaptation of the novel propelled
Highsmith’s career and reputation. Highsmith’s second novel, The Price of Salt, was published
under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. Though her writing — 22 novels and eight
books of short stories — was highly acclaimed, especially outside of the United
States, Highsmith preferred for her personal life to remain private. She had
friendships and correspondences with several writers, and was also greatly
inspired by art and the animal kingdom.

Janet Flanner (13 March, 1892 – 7 November, 1978) was an American
writer
and journalist
who served as the Paris
correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she
retired in 1975.^[1]
She wrote under the pen name Genet. She also published a single novel, The Cubical City, set in New York City
which achieved little success..

Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – december 28, 2004)
was an American author, literary theorist, public intellectual and political
activist; her published works include On Photography and Against
Interpretation. Sontag’s literary career began and ended
with works of fiction.
At age 30, she published an experimental novel called The Benefactor (1963),
following it four years later with Death Kit (1967). Despite a relatively
small output, Sontag thought of herself principally as a novelist and writer of
fiction. Her short story “The Way We Live Now” was published to
great acclaim on 26 November 1986
in The New Yorker.
Written in an experimental narrative style, it remains a significant text on
the AIDS epidemic.
She achieved late popular success as a best-selling novelist with The Volcano Lover (1992). At
age 67, Sontag published her final novel In America (2000). The last two novels were
set during the past, which Sontag said gave her greater freedom to write in the
polyphonic voice.

Woody Allen (born Allen Stewart Konigsberg; December 1, 1935) is an American
screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright.
Published plays : Don’t Drink the Water: A comedy in two acts (1967), Play It Again, Sam (1969),God: A comedy in
one act (1975), The Floating Light Bulb (1981),Three
One-Act Plays: Riverside Drive / Old Saybrook / Central Park West (2003),
Writer’s Block: Two One-Act Plays (2005),A Second Hand Memory: A drama in two
acts (2005), Without Feathers (God and Death). 1975. Short stories: Getting Even (1971), “The Whore of Mensa” (1974), Without Feathers (1975), Side Effects (1980), Mere Anarchy
(2007).

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon received
the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as
a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.^[1]
Pynchon is a MacArthur Fellow noted for his dense and
complex novels, and both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of
subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the
fields of history,
science,
and mathematics.
After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early
1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and Mason &
Dixon (1997).

John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt, Jr.; March 2, 1942) is
an American
novelist
and Academy Award-winning
screenwriter. Irving achieved critical
and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According
to Garp in 1978. Some of Irving’s
novels, such as The Cider House
Rules and A Prayer for Owen
Meany, have been bestsellers
and many have been made into movies. Several of Irving’s books (Garp, Meany, A Widow for One
Year) and short stories have been set in and around Phillips Exeter
Academy in Exeter, New
Hampshire where Irving grew up as the son of an Exeter faculty
member. Irving’s
career began at the age of 26 with the publication of his first novel, Setting Free the
Bears. His second and third novels, The Water-Method
Man and The 158-Pound
Marriage, were similarly received. Garp transformed Irving from an obscure,
academic literary writer to a household name, and his subsequent books were
bestsellers. The first was The Hotel New
Hampshire (1981), which sold well despite mixed reviews. Irving’s next novel was A Prayer for Owen
Meany, another New England family epic about religion set in a New England boarding school. his next book, A Son of the Circus
(1995). Arguably his most complicated and difficult book. Irving returned in 1998 with A Widow for One
Year, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. Soon after, Irving wrote My Movie
Business, a memoir about his involvement in creating the film version of The
Cider House Rules. When The Fourth Hand was
published in 2001 it became a bestseller. A Sound Like
Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, a children’s story
originally included in A Widow for One Year, was published as a book
with illustrations by Tatjana Hauptmann in 2004.
Irving’s novel,
Until I Find You,
was released on July 12, 2005. On June 28, 2005, The New York Times
published an article^[3]
revealing that Until I Find You
contains two specifically personal elements about his life that he has never
before discussed publicly: his sexual abuse at age 11 by an older woman, and
the recent entrance in his life of his biological father’s family. In his most
recent novel, Last Night in
Twisted River, published in 2009, Irving’s central character is
a novelist with “a career that teasingly follows Irving’s own,” as
one journalist put it^[2]
(e.g., including the aforementioned reference to Irving’s own mandatory conscription).

Tim O’Brien (born October 1, 1946 in Minnesota)
is an American
novelist
who mainly writes about his experiences in the Vietnam War
and the impact the war had on the American servicemen who fought there. He has
held the endowed chair at the MFA program of Texas State University-San Marcos
several times, from 2003 to 2004, then from 2005 to 2006, and a third time from
2008 to 2009. In
the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” in The Things They Carried, O’Brien
casts a distinction between “story-truth” (the truth of fiction) and
“happening-truth” (the truth of fact or occurrence), writing that
“story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth.” Story truth is
emotional truth; thus the feeling created by a fictional story is sometimes
truer than what results from reading the facts. Certain sets of stories in The Things They Carried seem to
contradict each other, and certain stories are designed to “undo” the
suspension of disbelief created in previous stories; for example,
“Speaking of Courage” is followed by “Notes,” which
explains in what ways “Speaking of Courage” is fictional. O’Brien
received the National Book Award in 1979 for his book Going After Cacciato.^[3]
His novel In the Lake of the Woods won the James
Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1995. His most
recent novel is July, July.

Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American
author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed
portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. DeLillo’s
novels have tackled subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the
complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the
advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. DeLillo’s inaugural decade of
novel writing has been his most productive to date, resulting in the writing
and publication of six novels in eight years between 1971-1978.^[4]
DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, was written over the course of four years and
finally published in 1971, to modest critical praise. Americana was followed in rapid
succession by the American college football/nuclear war black comedy End Zone
(1972) and the rock and roll satire Great Jones Street (1973). DeLillo’s
fourth novel, Ratner’s Star (1976), took two years to
write^[8]
and drew numerous favorable comparisons to the works of Thomas
Pynchon. Players (1977) concerned the lives of a
young yuppie couple as they get involved with a cell of domestic terrorists,
and Running Dog
(1978), written in a brief four month streak, was a thriller concerning
numerous individuals hunting down a celluloid reel of Adolf Hitler’s sexual
exploits. In 1979, DeLillo was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to
fund a trip around the Middle East before settling in Greece.^[
The Names (1982), a
complex thriller concerning “a risk analyst who crosses paths with a cult
of assassins in the Middle East”.^[2]
While lauded by an increasing number of literary critics, DeLillo was still
relatively unknown outside of small academic circles. With the publication of
his eighth novel White Noise in 1985, DeLillo began a
rapid ascendancy to being a noted and respected novelist. White Noise
was arguably a major breakthrough both commercially and artistically for
DeLillo, earning him a National Book Award^[2]
and a place among the academic canon of contemporary postmodern novelists.
DeLillo followed White Noise with Libra
(1988), a speculative fictionalised take on the life of Lee Harvey
Oswald up to the 1963 assassination of John F.
Kennedy. DeLillo’s concerns about the position of the novelist and
the novel in a media- and terrorist-dominated society were made clear in his
next novel, Mao II
(1991). In 1997, DeLillo finally broke cover with his long awaited eleventh
novel, the epic Cold War history Underworld. The book was widely
heralded as a masterpiece, with novelist and critic Martin Amis
saying it marked “the ascension of a great writer.”^[16]
Underworld went on to become DeLillo’s most acclaimed novel to date,
achieving mainstream success and earning nominations for the National Book
Award,^[17]
the New York Times Best Books of the Year award in 1997, and a second Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction nomination in 1. The Body Artist in 2001. DeLillo
followed The Body Artist with 2003’s Cosmopolis, a modern re-interpretation of James Joyce‘s
Ulysses transposed to New York around the time of the collapse of
the dot-com bubble in the year 2000. his final novel of the decade with Falling Man in May, 2007. The novel
concerned the impact on one family of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on
the World Trade Center in New York, “…an intimate story which
is encompassed by a global event.”^[
DeLillo published Point Omega as his fifteenth novel under
his own name in February 2010.

Pat Conroy (born October 26, 1945 in Atlanta, Georgia USA), is a New York Times bestselling author who has written several
acclaimed novels
and memoirs.
Two of his novels, The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, were made
into Oscar-nominated films. Conroy is a graduate of The Citadel, and his experiences there
provided the basis for two of his best-known works, the novel The Lords of
Discipline and the memoir My Losing Season. The
latter details his senior year on the school’s underdog basketball team. His
first book, The Boo, is a collection of anecdotes about
cadet life centering on Lt. Colonel Nugent Courvoisie, who had served as
Assistant Commandant of Cadets at the Citadel from 1961 to 1968^. Conroy
wrote his book The Water Is Wide based on his experiences
as a teacher. In 1995, Conroy published Beach Music, a novel about an American ex-patriate
living in Rome who returns to South Carolina upon news
of his mother’s terminal illness.
The story reveals his attempt to confront personal demons, including the
suicide of his wife, the subsequent custody battle with his in-laws over their
daughter, and the attempt by a film-making friend to rekindle old friendships
which were compromised during the days of the Vietnam War. In 2009, Conroy
published South of Broad,
which again uses the familiar backdrop of Charleston following the suicide of
newspaperman Leo King’s brother, and alternates narratives of a diverse group
of friends between 1969 and 1989. His recent non-fiction work, The Pat
Conroy Cookbook, is a collection of favorite recipes accompanied by stories
about his life, including many stories of growing up inSouth Carolina.

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author
known for works blending absurdism, existentialism,
crime fiction
and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace
(1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002) and The Brooklyn
Follies (2005). Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir
entitled The Invention of Solitude, Auster
gained renown for a series of three loosely-connected detective stories
published collectively as The New York Trilogy. Auster’s more
recent works, Oracle Night (2003), The Brooklyn
Follies (2005) and the novella Travels in the Scriptorium have also
met critical acclaim. two central influences in Paul Auster’s writing are Jacques
Lacan’s psychoanalysis and the American transcendentalism
of the early to middle 19th century, namely amongst others Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lacan is considered to be
one of the key figures of French poststructuralism.
Some academics are keen to discern traces of other poststructuralist
philosophers throughout Auster’s oeuvre – mainly Jacques
Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Michel de
Certeau – although Auster himself has claimed to find such philosophies
‘unreadable’ [.Edgar Allan
Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Herman
Melville have also had a strong influence on Auster’s writing. Not
only do their characters reappear in Austers work (like William Wilson in City of Glass or Hawthorne’s Fanshawe
in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy).

Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American author best
known for her novels and personalized, journalistic essays. The disintegration
of American morals and cultural chaos upon which her essays comment are
explored more fully in her novels, where the overriding theme is individual and
social fragmentation. A sense of anxiety or dread permeates much of her work.
Didion published Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1968,
her first work of non-fiction. Play It As It Lays, set in Hollywood,
was published in 1970 and A Book of Common Prayer was published
in 1977. Her 1983 essay, Salvador,
was written after a two-week long trip to El Salvador
with her husband. She also wrote Democracy
in 1984 which deals with her concern for the loss of society’s traditional
values. Her 1987 nonfiction book, Miami,
looked at the Cuban expatriate community in Miami. In 1992, she published After Henry, a collection of twelve
geographical essays. In 1996, she published The Last Thing He Wanted, a romantic
thriller. Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking on
October 4, 2004, and finished 88 days later on New Year’s Eve was awarded the National Book Award in 2005. In the autumn of
2011, Knopf will publish a new memoir about aging by Joan Didion called Blue
Nights. Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem exemplifies much of
what New Journalism represents as they explore the cultural values and
experiences of American life in the 1960s. Didion includes her personal
feelings and memories in this first person narrative, describing the chaos of
individuals and the way in which they perceive the world. Didion is heavily
influenced by Ernest Hemingway, whose writing taught Didion
the importance of the way sentences worked within a text. Other influences
include writer Henry James, who wrote “perfect, indirect,
complicated sentences” and George Eliot.^[13]

Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an
American journalist and author, most famous for his works Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign
Trail ’72 (1973). He is credited as the creator of Gonzo
journalism, a style of reporting
where reporters
involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central
figures of their stories. He is known also for his unrepentant lifelong use of alcohol, LSD, mescaline,
and cocaine
(among other substances); his love of firearms;
his long-standing hatred of Richard Nixon; and his iconoclastic
contempt for authoritarianism. While suffering a bout of
health problems, he committed suicide in 2005, at the age of 67. Thompson’s
friends and letters from this period note he was an avid reader of the Beat
Generation during his early years as a writer and that he associated
himself with the Beat culture while living in New York City. He would later befriend such
Beat authors as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.^[10]

John Angus McPhee (born 8 March 1931) is an American Pulitzer
Prize-winning writer, widely considered one of the pioneers of
narrative nonfiction. Unlike Tom Wolfe and Hunter
Thompson, who helped kick-start the “new
journalism” in the 1960s, McPhee produced a gentler, literary
style of journalism by incorporating techniques from fiction. McPhee avoided
the streams of consciousness of Wolfe and
Thompson, but detailed description of characters and appetite for details make
his writing lively and personal, even when it focuses on obscure or difficult
topics. He is highly regarded by fellow writers for his literary output.
McPhee’s writing career began at Time
magazine and led to a long association with The New
Yorker weekly magazine beginning in 1965 and continuing to the
present. Many of his twenty-nine books include material originally written for
that magazine. McPhee has received many literary honors, including the Award in
Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
and the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1999,
awarded for Annals of the Former World. McPhee’s subjects, reflecting his personal
interests, are highly eclectic. He has written pieces on lifting body
development (The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed), the United States Merchant Marine (Looking
for a Ship), farmers’ markets (Giving Good Weight), the shifting
flow of the Mississippi River (The Control of Nature),
geology
(in several books), as well as a short book entirely on the subject of oranges.
One of his most widely read books, Coming into the Country, is about the Alaska
wilderness. His most recent book, Uncommon Carriers, published 16 May
2006, is about freight
transportation.

Thomas Kennerly “Tom” Wolfe, Jr. (born March 2, 1931,
although his Who’s Who entry gives his date of birth as March 2, 1930) is a best-selling
American
author
and journalist.
He is one of the founders of the New
Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Published in 1964, was
“There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake
Streamline Baby.” The article was widely discussed—loved by some, hated by
others—and helped Wolfe publish his first book, The
Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, a collection of
his writings in the Herald-Tribune, Esquire and elsewhere. This
was what Wolfe called New Journalism, in which some journalists and
essayists experimented with a variety of literary techniques, mixing them with the
traditional ideal of dispassionate, even-handed reporting. One of the most
striking examples of this idea is Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The book, a narrative account of the adventures of
the Merry Pranksters, a famous sixties
counter-culture group, was highly experimental in its use of onomatopoeia,
free
association, and eccentric use of punctuation—such as multiple
exclamation marks and italics— to convey the manic ideas and personalities of Ken Kesey
and his followers. In addition to his own forays into this new style of
journalism, Wolfe edited a collection of New Journalism with EW Johnson,
published in 1973 and titled simply The New Journalism. This book brought
together pieces from Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer,
Gay Talese,
Joan Didion,
and several other well-known writers, with the common theme of journalism that
incorporated literary techniques and could be considered literature. In 1970 he
published two essays in book form as Radical Chic &
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers: “Radical Chic,” a biting
account of a party given by Leonard
Bernstein to raise money for the Black Panther Party, and “Mau-Mauing The
Flak Catchers,” about the practice of using racial intimidation
(“mau-mauing”) to extract funds from government welfare bureaucrats
(“flak catchers”). The phrase “radical chic”
soon became a popular derogatory term for upper class leftism. In 1977, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter
& Vine hit bookstores; embodying one of Wolfe’s more famous
essays, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” Back Row – Shepard,
Grissom,
Cooper;
Front Row – Schirra, Slayton,
Glenn,
Carpenter.

The astronauts of the Mercury Seven were the subject of The Right Stuff. In 1979 Wolfe published The Right Stuff, an account of the
pilots who became America’s
first astronauts.
Famously following their training and unofficial, even foolhardy, exploits, he
likened these heroes to “single combat champions” of a by-gone era,
going forth to battle in the Space Race on behalf of their country. In 1983
the book was adapted as a successful feature film. Wolfe also wrote two highly
critical social histories of modern art and modern architecture, The Painted
Word and From Bauhaus to Our House, in 1975 and
1981, respectively. The Painted Word mocked the excessive insularity of
the art world and its dependence on faddish critical theory, while From
Bauhaus to Our House explored the negative effects of the Bauhaus
style on the evolution of modern architecture.^[10

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford^[1]
on February 18, 1931) is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist,
editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic
themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed black
characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest
Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved.
She went to one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to
have blue eyes. The story later evolved into her first novel, The Bluest
Eye (1970), which she wrote while raising two children and
teaching at Howard.^[4]
In 2000 it was chosen as a selection for Oprah’s Book Club.^[6]
In 1975 her novel Sula (1973) was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her
national attention. The book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month
Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright‘s Native Son
in 1940. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In 1987 Morrison’s novel Beloved
became a critical success. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award,
a number of writers protested over the omission.^[4][7]
Shortly afterward, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award. Beloved was adapted
into the 1998 film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey
and Danny Glover.
Morrison later used Margaret Garner‘s life story again in an opera,
Margaret Garner, with music by Richard Danielpour. In May 2006, The New York Times Book Review
named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous
twenty-five years. In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933)^[1]
is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella
Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and
humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award.^[2]
In 1969 he became a major celebrity with the publication of the controversial Portnoy’s Complaint, the humorous
psychoanalytical monologue of “a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish
bachelor,” filled with “intimate, shameful detail, and coarse,
abusive language.”his
books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and
three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American
Pastoral, which featured his best-known character, Nathan Zuckerman,
the subject of many other of Roth’s novels. His 2001 novel The Human
Stain, another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom’s
WH Smith Literary Award for the best book
of the year. His fiction, set frequently in Newark, New Jersey,
is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically
and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its
“supple, ingenious style,” and for its provocative explorations of Jewish
and American identity.^[4]
Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus,
a novella
and five short stories,
won the National Book Award in 1960, and afterwards he
published two novels, Letting Go and When She Was
Good. However, it was not until the publication of his third
novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, in 1969 that
Roth enjoyed widespread commercial and critical success. During the 1970s Roth
experimented in various modes, from the political satire Our Gang
to the Kafkaesque
The Breast.
By the end of the decade Roth had created his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. In a
series of highly self-referential novels and novellas that followed between
1979 and 1986, Zuckerman appeared as either the main character or an
interlocutor. Sabbath’s Theater (1995) has perhaps Roth’s
most lecherous protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced former puppeteer. In
complete contrast, the first volume of Roth’s second Zuckerman trilogy, 1997’s American Pastoral, focuses on the
life of virtuous Newark
athletics star Swede Levov and the tragedy that befalls him when his teenage
daughter transforms into a domestic terrorist
during the late 1960s. I Married a Communist (1998) focuses
on the McCarthy
era. Inspired by the life of the writer Anatole
Broyard, The Human Stain examines identity
politics in 1990s America.
The Dying Animal (2001) is a short novel
about eros
and death that revisits literary professor David Kepesh, protagonist of two
1970s works, The Breast and The Professor of Desire. In The Plot Against America (2004), Roth
imagines an alternate American history in which Charles
Lindbergh, aviator hero and isolationist, is elected U.S. president in 1940, and the U.S.
negotiates an understanding with Hitler’s Nazi Germany and embarks on its own
program of anti-Semitism. Roth’s novel Everyman,
a meditation on illness, aging, desire, and death, was published in May 2006.
For Everyman Roth won his third PEN/Faulkner Award, making him the only
person so honored. Exit Ghost, which again features Nathan
Zuckerman, was released in October 2007. According to the book’s publisher, it
is the last Zuckerman novel.^[7]
Indignation, Roth’s 29th book, was
published on September 16, 2008. Set in 1951, during the Korean War, it follows
Marcus Messner’s departure from Newark to Ohio’s Winesburg
College, where he begins
his sophomore year. In 2009, Roth’s 30th book The Humbling
was published, which told the story of the last performances of Simon Axler, a
celebrated stage actor. Roth’s 31st book, Nemesis, was published on October 5,
2010. According to the book’s notes, Nemesis is the final in a series of four
“short novels,” which also included Everyman,
Indignation and The Humbling.

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy;^[1]
July 20, 1933) is an American novelist and playwright.
He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern
Gothic, Western, and post-apocalyptic genres.
He has also written plays and screenplays. He received the Pulitzer
Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road.
His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy
Awards, including Best Picture. He received a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award
for his 1992 novel, All the Pretty Horses. His previous
novel, Blood Meridian, (1985) was among Time
Magazine’s poll of 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and
2005^[2]
and placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best
American fiction published in the last 25 years.^[3]
Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major
American novelists of his
time, along with Don DeLillo, Thomas
Pynchon and Philip Roth,^[4]
calling Blood Meridian “the greatest single
book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.”^[5]
In 2010 The Times
ranked The Road
first on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10
years. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William
Faulkner. McCarthy is increasingly mentioned as a candidate for the
Nobel Prize in Literature by the influential and well informed Swedish
newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. ^[6]

John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story
writer. Sometimes called “the Chekhov
of the suburbs,”
his fiction is mostly set in the Upper East
Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England
villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born,
and Italy,
especially Rome.
He is “now recognized as one of the most important short fiction writers
of the 20th century.” While Cheever is perhaps best remembered for his
short stories (including “The Enormous Radio,” “Goodbye, My
Brother,” “The Five-Forty-Eight,” “The
Country Husband,” and “The Swimmer“),
he also wrote a number of novels, such as The Wapshot Chronicle (National Book Award, 1958), The Wapshot
Scandal (William Dean Howells Medal, 1965), Bullet
Park (1969), and Falconer (1977). His main themes include the duality of human
nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character’s decorous
social persona and inner corruption, and sometimes as a conflict between two
characters (often brothers) who embody the salient aspects of both – light and
dark, flesh and spirit.

Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author. Oates
published her first book in 1963 and has since published over fifty novels, as
well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novel them (1969) won the National Book Award, and her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For
(1994), and Blonde (2000) were nominated for the Pulitzer
Prize. As of 2008, Oates is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in
the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, where she has taught
since 1978.^[2]
Oates published her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), when she
was twenty-six years old. In 1966, she published “Where Are You Going, Where Have You
Been?“, a short story dedicated to Bob Dylan
and written after listening to his song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” In
1996, Oates published We Were the Mulvaneys, a novel following the disintegration of an American
family, which became a best-seller after being selected by Oprah’s Book Club in 2001.^[12]
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Oates wrote several books, mostly mystery novels,
under the pen names
“Rosamond Smith” and “Lauren Kelly.”
Oates for dummies”, The Rocky Mountain News recommended
starting with her early short stories and the novels A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), them
(1969), Wonderland (1971), Black Water (1992), and Blonde
(2000).^[29]
In 2006, The Times
listed them, On Boxing (1987), Black
Water, and High
Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966-2006 (2006) as
“The Pick of Joyce Carol Oates”.^[30]
In 2007, Entertainment Weekly listed their
Oates “favorites” as Wonderland, Black Water, Blonde,
I’ll Take You There (2002), and The Falls (2004).^[31

Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945) is a Pulitzer
Prize-winning American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and
non-fiction. She has published two novels, poetry, essays, prose, literary
criticism, and a memoir.^[
Dillard’s memoir An American Childhood is
about growing up in Pittsburgh
in the fifties in “a house full of comedians. Not only are there
references to Christ
and the Bible
in her first prose book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, (a sustained nonfiction narrative about the fauna,
creeks, and mountains near Roanoke,
Virginia.)but also to Judaism,
Buddhism,
Sufism,
and even Eskimo
spirituality. Dillard converted briefly to Roman
Catholicism, and eventually won the Campion Award given to a
Catholic writer

Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American
author of contemporary horror,
suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have
sold more than 350 million copies,^[7]
which have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and
comic books. As of 2011, King has written and published 49 novels, including
seven under the pen name
Richard Bachman,
five non-fiction books,
and nine collections of short stories. Many of his stories are set in his home state
of Maine. In 1973, King’s
novel Carrie was accepted
by publishing house Doubleday. ‘Salem’s Lot was
published 1975. After his mother’s death, King and his family moved to Boulder, Colorado, where
King wrote The Shining (published 1977).
The family returned to western Maine
in 1975, where King completed his fourth novel, The Stand (published
1978). In 1985 King wrote his first work for the comic book medium, writing a
few pages of the benefit X-Men
comic book Heroes for Hope Starring the X-Men.
The book, whose profits were donated to assist with famine relief in Africa, was written by a
number of different authors in the comic book field, such as Chris Claremont, Stan Lee, and Alan Moore, as well as
authors not primarily associated with that industry, such as Harlan Ellison.^[19]
The following year, King wrote the introduction to Batman #400, an anniversary issue in
which he expressed his preference for that character over Superman.^[20]
In the late 1970s, King began what became a series of interconnected stories
about a lone gunslinger, Roland. The first of these stories, The Dark Tower: The
Gunslinger, was first published in five installments by The Magazine of
Fantasy & Science Fiction under the editorship of Edward L. Ferman,
beginning in 1977 and the last in 1981. The Gunslinger was continued as a large
7-book epic called The Dark Tower, which were written and
published infrequently over four decades. His 1980 novel, Firestarter, had an
initial print-run in trade hardcover at 100,000 copies, and his 1983 novel, Christine,
had a trade hardcover print-run of 250,000 copies. In 1987, King released the
second installment, The Dark Tower II:
The Drawing of the Three. The series reached seven books, with
the final installment called The Dark Tower
VII: The Dark Tower, in 2004. In October 2005, King signed a deal with Marvel Comics to publish a
seven-issue, miniseries
spin-off
of the series called The Gunslinger Born. In
the late 1970s-early 1980s, King published a handful of short novels—Rage
(1977), The Long Walk
(1979), Roadwork
(1981), The Running Man
(1982) and Thinner (1984)—under the pseudonym Richard
Bachman. King dedicated his 1989 book The Dark Half, about a
pseudonym turning on a writer, to “the deceased Richard Bachman”, and
in 1996, when the Stephen King novel Desperation was
released, the companion novel The Regulators carried
the “Bachman” byline.

John Barrett McInerney Jr. (born January 13, 1955 in Hartford,
Connecticut) is an American
writer. His novels include
Bright Lights, Big City; Ransom;
Story of My Life; Brightness Falls; and The Last of the
Savages. He edited The Penguin Book of New American Voices, wrote the
screenplay for the 1988 film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, and co-wrote
the screenplay for the television film Gia, which starred Angelina Jolie. He was the
wine columnist for House & Garden magazine, and his
essays on wine have been collected in Bacchus & Me (2000) and A
Hedonist in the Cellar (2006). His most recent novel is titled The Good Life, published in 2006, and since
April 2010 he is a wine columnist for The Wall Street
Journal. He achieved fame with his first published novel Bright
Lights, Big City. Published in 1984, the novel
was unique at the time for its depiction of cocaine culture in second-person
narrative. The novel established McInerney’s reputation as part of a
new generation of writers. Labelled the ‘literary brat pack‘ in a 1987 article in the Village Voice,
McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis
and Tama Janowitz
were presented as the new face of literature: young, iconoclastic and fresh.^[1]
Five novels followed in rapid succession: Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, The
Last of the Savages and Model Behavior.

Bret Easton
Ellis (born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, California) is an American novelist
and short story
writer. He was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack,^[1]
which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney.
He is a self-proclaimed satirist, whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the
expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style.^[2][3]
Ellis employs a technique of linking novels with common, recurring characters.
Ellis’ first novel, Less Than Zero, a tale of disaffected,
rich teenagers of Los Angeles,
was praised by critics and sold well (50,000 copies in its first year). He
moved back to New York City
in 1987 for the publication of his second novel, The Rules of Attraction, which follows
a group of sexually promiscuous college students and sold fairly well, though
Ellis admits he felt he had “fallen off”, after the novel failed to
match the success of his debut effort. His most controversial work is the
graphically violent American Psycho.
The book was intended to be published by Simon &
Schuster, but they withdrew after external protests from groups such
as the NOW and many others due to
the allegedly misogynistic nature of the book. The novel was
later published by Vintage. Some consider this novel, whose protagonist,
Patrick
Bateman, is both a cartoonishly materialistic yuppie and a serial killer,
to be an example of transgressive art. American Psycho has
achieved considerable cult status. His collection of short stories, The Informers,
was published in 1994. It contains vignettes of wayward Los Angeles characters ranging from rock
stars to vampires. Ellis’s novel Lunar Park
(2005), uses the form of a celebrity memoir to tell a ghost story about the
novelist “Bret Easton Ellis” and his chilling experiences in the
apparently haunted home he shares with his wife and son. In keeping with his
usual style, Ellis mixes absurd comedy with a bleak and violent vision. Imperial
Bedrooms (2010) follows the characters of Less Than Zero
25 years later.

Michael Cunningham (1965-…)

Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952)^[1]
is an American
writer, best known for his
1998 novel The Hours,
which won the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. The Hours
established Cunningham as a major force in American writing, and his most
recent novel, Specimen Days,
was also well received by American critics. Novels
: Golden States,1984; A Home at the End
of the World, 1990; Flesh and Blood, 1995; The Hours,
1998; Specimen Days,
2005; By nightfall, 2010.

Dennis Lehane (born
August 4, 1965) is an American author. He has written several
award-winning novels,
including A Drink
Before the War and the New York Times bestseller Mystic River, which was later made into an Academy Award-winning film. Another novel, Gone, Baby, Gone, was also adapted into an Academy
Award-nominated film. His novel Shutter Island was adapted
into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2010.
His first book, A Drink
Before the War (1994), which introduced the recurring characters
Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, won the 1995 Shamus Award for Best
First P.I. Novel. The Kenzie-Gennaro novels A Drink
Before the War (1994), Darkness,
Take My Hand (1996), Sacred
(1Moonlight Mile (2010)997), Gone, Baby, Gone (1998), Prayers for Rain (1999). Other works: Mystic River (2001), Shutter Island
(2003), Coronado: Stories (2006), The Given Day (2008)

Claire Messud (born 1966) is an American
novelist.
She is best-known as the author of the 2006 novel The Emperor’s
Children. Messud’s debut novel, When The World Was Steady
(1995), was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1999, she published
her second book, The Last Life, about
three generations of a French-Algerian family. Her 2001 work, The Hunters, consists
of two novellas. Her most recent novel, The Emperor’s Children, was longlisted for
the 2006 Man Booker Prize.

Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American
writer,
editor,
and publisher.
He is known for the best-selling memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius, ( which focused on
the author’s struggle to raise his younger brother in San Francisco following the deaths of both of
their parents. The book quickly became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer
Prize for General Non-Fiction. The memoir was praised for its
originality, idiosyncratic self-referencing, and for several innovative
stylistic elements) and his more recent work as a screenwriter. He is also the
co-founder of the literacy project, 826 Valencia
(a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for kids ages 6–18 in San Francisco.^[21]
It has since grown into seven chapters across the country: Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle,
Chicago,
Ann Arbor,
Michigan, Washington, D.C., and Boston,).
In 2002, Eggers published his first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, a story
about a frustrating attempt to give away money to deserving people while
haphazardly traveling the globe. He has since published a collection of short
stories, How We Are Hungry, and three politically
themed serials for Salon.com.^[17]

In November
2005, Eggers published Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and
Exonerated, a book of interviews with former prisoners sentenced to death
and later exonerated. Eggers’s 2006 novel What Is the
What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (McSweeney’s)
was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award
for Fiction.^[19]
Eggers also edits the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, an
annual anthology of short stories, essays, journalism, satire, and alternative
comics. Eggers founded McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house.
McSweeney’s produces a quarterly literary journal, Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern,
first published in 1998; a monthly journal, The Believer, which debuted in 2003
and is edited by Eggers’s wife, Vendela Vida; and, beginning in 2005, a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin.
Other works include The Future
Dictionary of America, Created in
Darkness by Troubled Americans, and “Dr. and Mr.
Haggis-On-Whey”, all children’s books of literary
nonsense, which Eggers writes with his younger brother and uses as a
pseudonym. Ahead of the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Eggers wrote an essay
about the U.S. national team and
soccer in the United States for The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup,
which contained essays about each competing team in the tournament and was
published with aid from the journal Granta.

Charles Michael “Chuck” Palahniuk
(born
February 21, 1962) is an American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist. He is best known for
the award-winning novel Fight Club,
which was later made into a film
directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt,
Edward Norton,
and Helena Bonham Carter. A revised version of
Invisible Monsters, as well as his fourth novel, Survivor, were also
published that year, allowing Palahniuk to become a cult figure
himself. A few years later Palahniuk managed to make his first New York Times bestseller,
the novel Choke. In the spring of 2001 Palahniuk
began working on the novel Lullaby.
While on his 2003 tour to promote his novel Diary,
Palahniuk read to his audiences a short story titled “Guts”, a tale
of accidents which appears in his book Haunted.
He also indicated that his then-forthcoming novel Rant
would be the first of a “sci–fi
trilogy”.

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an
American author
of novels,
essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona
College in Claremont, California. He was widely known
for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest,
which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering
the period 1923–2006). Wallace’s first novel, 1987’s The Broom of the System, garnered
national attention and critical praise. Wallace committed suicide
by hanging
himself on September 12, 2008.

Ann Patchett (born December 2, 1963 ^[1])
is an American
author. She received the Orange Prize for
Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002 for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett’s
other novels include Run, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, and The
Magician’s Assistant, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize

 

III. Other Anglo-Saxon writers

 

1.  Australia

 

Marcus Andrew
Hislop Clarke (24 April
1846 – 2 August 1881) was an Australian novelist and poet, best known for his
novel For the Term of his Natural
Life. His great novel His Natural Life, a powerful tale of an
Australian penal
settlement (later called For the Term of His Natural Life) commenced
serialisation in the Australasian Journal. He also wrote The Peripatetic
Philosopher (1869), a series of amusing papers reprinted from The Australasian;
Long Odds (London, 1870), a novel; and numerous comedies and pantomimes, the
best of, which was Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (Theatre Royal, Melbourne;
Christmas, 1873). Clarke was an important literary figure in Australia, and
was the centre of an important bohemian
circle. Among the writers were in contact with him were Victor Daley
and George
Gordon McCrae.

Miles Franklin (born “Stella Maria Sarah Miles
Franklin”; 14 October 1879 – 19 September 1954) was an Australian writer
and feminist who is best known for her autobiographical novel, My Brilliant Career, published in 1901. While she wrote throughout her
life, her other major literary success, All That
Swagger, was not published until 1936. She was committed to the
development of a uniquely Australian form of literature, and she actively
pursued this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers’
organisations. She has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life
through her endowment of a major literary award known as the Miles Franklin Award.

Patrick Victor Martindale
White (28 May 1912 – 30
September 1990), an Australian author, is widely regarded as an important
English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he
published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays. White’s
fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantage points and a stream of consciousness technique. In
1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature—the only
Australian to have been awarded the prize. The Vivisector was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. After the war
started to make a reputation for himself as a writer, publishing The Aunt’s Story and The
Tree of Man in the US in 1955 and shortly after in the UK. The
Tree of Man was released to rave reviews in the US,
but, in what was to become a typical pattern, was panned in Australia. His
first breakthrough in Australia
came when his next novel, Voss, won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award. In 1961,
White published Riders in the Chariot. This was to become
both a bestseller as well as a prize-winner, garnering him a second Miles
Franklin Award. In 1979, his novel The Twyborn Affair was short-listed
for the Booker Prize.
In 1981, White published his autobiography, Flaws in
the Glass: a self-portrait, which explored issues about which he had
publicly said little, such as his homosexuality, and his refusal to accept the
Nobel Prize personally. In 1986 White released one last novel, Memoirs of Many in One.

Thomas Michael
Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist, playwright and
author of non-fiction
. He is best known for writing Schindler’s Ark, the Booker Prize
winning novel of 1982 which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. The book would later be
adapted to Steven Spielberg‘s Schindler’s List,
which won the Academy Award for Best Picture

 

Colleen McCullough-Robinson AO, is an internationally acclaimed Australian
author. It was while at Yale that her first two books were written. The success
of these books enabled her to give up her medical-scientific career and to try
and “live on her own terms”. Her 2008 novel The Independence of
Miss Mary Bennett engendered
controversy with her reworking of characters in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Other novels include “Tim”, “An indecent obsession”
and “The song ofTroy”.

David Keith Williamson AO (born 19 February 1942) is one of Australia’s
best-known playwrights. He has also written screenplays
and teleplays.
Williamson rose to prominence in the early 1970s, with works such as Don’s Party
and The Removalists . Major
works include The Club, The Department, Travelling North,
The Perfectionist, Emerald City, Money and Friends and Brilliant Lies.

John Barry Humphries (expat), AO, CBE (born 17 February 1934) is an Australian
comedian, satirist,
dadaist, artist, author
and character actor, best known for his on-stage
and television alter egos Dame Edna Everage,
a Melbourne housewife and “gigastar”, and Sir Les Patterson,
Australia’s foul-mouthed cultural attaché to the Court of St. James’s. He is a film producer and
script writer, a star of London’s West End musical theatre, an award-winning writer and an
accomplished landscape painter. For his delivery of dadaist and absurdist
humour to millions, biographer Anne Pender described Humphries in 2010 as not
only the most significant theatrical figure of our time … [but] the most
significant comedian to emerge since Charlie Chaplin.
Humphries is the author of many books including two autobiographies, two novels
and a treatise on Chinese drama in the goldfields. He has written several plays
and has made dozens of recordings. His first autobiography More Please won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for
Autobiography in 1993.

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO (born 28 July 1938) is an
Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has
resided in New York
since 1970. In
1987, The Fatal Shore,
Hughes’s study of the British penal colonies
and early European settlement of Australia, became an international
best-seller. Hughes published the first volume of his memoirs,
Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006.

Clive James, AM (born 7 October 1939) is an Australian
author, critic, broadcaster, poet and memoirist, best known for his
autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and
documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism. He has
lived and worked in the United
Kingdom since the early 1960s. The Metropolitan Critic, his first collection of
literary criticism, was published in 1974, followed by At the Pillars of
Hercules (1979), From the Land of Shadows (1982), Snakecharmers
in Texas (1988), The Dreaming Swimmer (1992), Even As We Speak
(2004), The Meaning of Recognition (2005) and Cultural Amnesia (2007), a collection of
mini-intellectual biographies of over 100 significant figures in modern
culture, history and politics. A defence of humanism,
liberal democracy and literary clarity,
the book was listed among the best of 2007 by The Village Voice.
Another volume of essays, The Revolt of the Pendulum,
was published in June 2009.

Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939) is an Australian
writer, academic, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of
the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century^.. Greer’s
ideas have created controversy ever since her book The Female Eunuch became an
international best-seller in 1970, turning her into a household name and bringing
her both adulation and opposition. She is also the author of many other books
including, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984); The
Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991) and Shakespeare’s Wife
(2007). She is Professor Emeritus of English Literature and
Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick.

 

2.   New Zealand

Patricia Frances Grace (born in Wellington,
New Zealand
in 1937) is a notable Māori writer of novels, short stories, and children’s books.
Her first published work, Waiariki (1975) was the first
collection of short stories by a Māori woman writer. She has been described as
“A key figure in contemporary world literature and in Maori literature in
English” ^.  The Cambridge
Guide to Literature in English refers to her prose as distinctive in its
“spare style based on the speech structures of Maori English”.

Albert Wendt, (born 1939) is a Samoan poet and writer who
also lives in New Zealand. Among his works is Leaves of the Banyan
Tree (1979).

Maurice Gee, born August 22, 1931^[1]
in Whakatane,
New Zealand,^[2]
is one of New Zealand’s most distinguished novelists.^[3]
He was awarded the 1978 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Plumb. Maurice Gee
was brought up in Henderson, a suburb of Auckland
and that frequently features in his writing.

Keri Hulme (born March 9, 1947) is a New Zealand
writer,
best known for The Bone People, her only novel.

Robin Hyde (South African) (19 January 1906 – 23 August 1939) is one of New Zealand’s major poets. She was
born Iris Guiver Wilkinson in Cape Town, South Africa and taken to Wellington,
New Zealand
before her first birthday. In 1929 Hyde published her first book of poetry, The Desolate
Star. Between 1935 and 1938 she published five novels: Passport
to Hell (1936), Check To Your King (1936), Wednesday’s Children
(1937), Nor the Years Condemn (1938), and The Godwits Fly (1938).

Daniel Marcus (Dan) Davin (1 September 1913 – 28 September 1990)
was an author who wrote about New Zealand, although for most of his career he was in Oxford, England
with the Oxford University Press. He was born in Southland, New Zealand, into an Irish Catholic
family in (largely Scottish Presbyterian) Invercargill,
and was educated at local Catholic primary and secondary schools. He won a
scholarship for a final school year at Sacred Heart College in Auckland,
then a university scholarship to the University of Otago. In 1934 he received First
Class Honours in English, and in 1935
a Dip. MA Single Honours in Latin. Two of his novels, Cliffs of Fall (1945) and Not Here, Not
Now (1970) are set in Otago
University, though
Bertram says they are “among his least satisfactory works.” Winning a
Rhodes Scholarship in 1935, he studied at
Balliol College Oxford (BA, 1st class 1939, MA 1945). He served as an
Intelligence Officer in the New Zealand Division in the Middle East in World
War II, being evacuated from Greece
and wounded on Crete. He was mentioned in
Despatches three times and awarded an MBE (Mil). Writing the official war
history Crete took most of his
spare time from 1946 to 1953.

Katherine “Kathleen”
Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a prominent modernist
writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand
and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield
left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers
such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf
with whom she became close friends. Her stories often focus on moments of
disruption and frequently open rather abruptly. Among her most well known
stories are “The Garden Party,” “The Daughters of the
Late Colonel,” and “The Fly.” During the
First World War Mansfield contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis which rendered
any return or visit to New
Zealand impossible and led to her death at
the age of 34.

 Roger Leighton Hall, (playwright)  (b. 1939) is
a British born New Zealander actor and playwright, known for his comedies that
carry a serious vein of social criticism and feelings of pathos.Hall’s
best-known works internationally are Middle Age Spread (1978,
revised 1980), which had a run in the West End
and was also filmed in 1979, and Conjugal Rites
(1991) which was made into a situation comedy
series in the UK.

3.   Canada

Timothy Irving Frederick
Findley (October 30, 1930 – June
21, 2002) was a Canadian
novelist
and playwright.
Findley’s first two novels, The Last of the Crazy People (1967) and The
Butterfly Plague (1969), were originally published in Britain
and the United States after having been rejected by Canadian
publishers. Findley’s third novel, The Wars, was published to great acclaim in 1977 and went on
to win the Governor General’s Award for fiction. It was
adapted for film in 1981. His writing, typical of the Southern Ontario Gothic genre, was heavily
influenced by Jungian
psychology, and mental illness, gender
and sexuality were frequent recurring themes in his
work. His characters often carried dark personal secrets, and were often
conflicted — sometimes to the point of psychosis
— by these burdens.

Anne Hébert (August 1, 1916 – January 22, 2000), was a Canadian author and poet. She is a descendant
of famed French-Canadian historian Francois-Xavier Garneau, “and has carried
on the family literary tradition spectacularly.” She won Canada’s top
literary honor, the Governor General’s Award, three times,
twice for fiction and once for poetry. Hébert’s first book of stories, Le Torrent, “a collection of tales that
appeared in 1950, shocked the reading public” but has “become a
classic.”^[1]
Les Chambres de bois (1958), her first novel, “contained
particularly original imagery, exploring mortally constrained worlds in which
interaction is based on brutal passion and primitive violence.” The book
“signaled a significant shift in style and content for Québécois
literature. Instead of realistic discourse, we find a literature of rebellion
that is experimental and expresses a deep sense of alienation.”  In 1970, “Hébert convincingly
demonstrated her virtuosity in the great novel Kamouraska. Here she skillfully combines two plots in a 19th-century
Québec setting. The writing has a breathless, anguished and romantic rhythm
that underlines well-controlled suspense.Anne Hébert “has been
less prolific as a writer of poetry than of fiction, but her relatively small
number of works has earned her a prominent place in the canon of Québécois
poetry.” Hébert’s road to maturity as a poet had three stages. In 1942 she
published her first collection, Les Songes en équilibre in which
she portrays herself as existing in a dreamlike torpor. In 1953 Le
Tombeau des rois appeared, in which the self triumphs over the powerful
dead who rule our dreams. Finally, in 1960 (when Québec was in the spring of
the Quiet Revolution), the powerful verse of “Mystère
de la parole” reveals the liberated self. “Mystere…” was a
“new cycle of poems inspired by light, the sun, the world, and the
word…. Thus Hébert’s poetic trajectory was complete: from writing about
solitary, anguished dreams, she had arrived at a form of expression that was
both opulent and committed to the real world.

Mordecai Richler (January 27, 1931 – July 3, 2001)was a Canadian
author, screenwriter and essayist. A leading critic called him “the great
shining star of his Canadian literary generation” and a pivotal figure in
the country’s history. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Barney’s Version, and the Jacob Two-Two children’s stories. His 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here was shortlisted for
the Booker Prize
in 1990. Richler published his fourth novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy
Kravitz in 1959. The book featured a frequent Richler theme: Jewish life in
the 1930s and 40s in the neighbourhood of Montreal
east of Mount Royal Park
on and about St. Urbain Street
and Saint Lawrence Boulevard (known colloquially as
“The Main”). Richler wrote of the neighbourhood and its people,
chronicling the hardships and disabilities they faced as a Jewish minority. In Oh
Canada!
Oh Quebec!, Richler acknowledges the error, blaming himself for having
“cribbed” the information from an article by Irwin Cotler
and Ruth Wisse
for the Jewish American magazine Commentary. Co-writer of the Commentary
article Cotler eventually issued a written apology to Lévesque. Richler also
apologized for the incident and called it an “embarrassing gaffe”.

Jean Margaret Laurence (née Wemyss) (18 July 1926 – 5 January
1987) was a Canadian
novelist
and short story
writer, one of the major figures in Canadian literature. One of Canada’s most esteemed and beloved
authors by the end of her literary career. Laurence began writing short stories
shortly after her marriage, as did her husband. Each published fiction in
literary periodicals while living in Africa,
but Margaret continued to write and expand her range. Her early novels were
influenced by her experience as a minority in Africa.
They show a strong sense of Christian symbolism and ethical concern for
being a white person in a colonial state. It was after her return to Canada that she
wrote The Stone Angel,
the book for which she is best known.

Philip Michael Ondaatje  (born
September 12, 1943), OC, is a Sri Lankan-born
Canadian novelist and poet of Burgher
origin. He is perhaps best known for his Booker Prize-winning
novel, The English Patient, which was adapted
into an Academy-Award-winning film. Ondaatje’s work
includes fiction, autobiography, poetry and film. He has published thirteen
books of poetry, and won the Governor General’s Award for The Collected
Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m
Learning to Do: Poems 1973-1978 (1979). Anil’s Ghost
was winner of the 2000 Giller Prize, the Prix Médicis,
the Kiriyama Pacific
Rim Book Prize, the 2001 Irish Times
International Fiction Prize and Canada’s Governor General’s
Award. The English Patient won of the Booker
Prize, the Canada Australia Prize,
and the Governor General’s
Award and later made into a motion picture, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. The
English Patient could be considered a sequel to In the Skin of a Lion (1987). In the Skin of a Lion, a fictional story
about early immigrant settlers in Toronto, won the 1988 City of Toronto Book Award, finalist for
the 1987 Ritz Paris
Hemingway Award for best novel of the year in English, and winner of
the first Canada Reads competition in 2002. Coming Through Slaughter, is a fictional
story of New Orleans, Louisiana circa 1900 loosely based
on the lives of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and photographer E. J. Bellocq.
It was the winner of the 1976 Books in Canada First Novel Award. Divisadero won the 2007 Governor General’s
Award. Running in the Family (1982) is a
semi-fictional memoir of his Sri Lankan childhood.

Wayson Choy,  (崔維新 Pinyin: Cuī
Wéixīn ; Jyutping:
Ceoi1 Wai4-san1) (born April 20, 1939) is a Canadian
writer. Choy is the author
of the novel The Jade Peony (1995) which
won the Trillium Book Award and the City of Vancouver Book Award. In 2010, it
was selected as one of five books for the CBC’s annual Canada Reads
competition. His memoir Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood
(1999) won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction
and was nominated for a Governor General’s Award. Choy’s latest
novel, All That Matters, was published in 2004 and
was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2005, he was named
a member of the Order of Canada.

William Robertson Davies (born August 28, 1913, at Thamesville, Ontario,
and died December 2, 1995 at Orangeville, Ontario) was a Canadian novelist,
playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada’s
best-known and most popular authors, and one of its most distinguished
“men of letters”, a term Davies is variously said to have gladly
accepted for himself and to have detested. During his tenure as editor of the Examiner, which
lasted from 1942 to 1955, and when he was publisher from 1955 to 1965, Davies
published a total of 18 books, produced several of his own plays and wrote
articles for various journals. For example, Davies set out his theory of acting
in his Shakespeare for
Young Players (1947) and then put theory into practice when he
wrote Eros at Breakfast, a
one-act play which was named best Canadian play of the year by the 1948
Dominion Drama Festival. Eros at Breakfast was followed in close
succession by Fortune, My Foe in
1949 and At My Heart’s Core, a three-act play, in 1950. Meanwhile,
Davies was writing humorous essays in the Examiner under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks.
Some of these were collected and published in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947),
The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks
(1949), and later in Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack (1967).
Although his first love was drama and he had achieved some success with his
occasional humorous essays, Davies found greater success in fiction. His first
three novels, which later became known as The Salterton Trilogy, were Tempest-Tost
(1951), Leaven of Malice (1954) (which won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour), and A Mixture of Frailties (1958). These novels
explored the difficulty of sustaining a cultural life in Canada, and life on a small-town
newspaper, subjects of which Davies had first-hand knowledge. He would teach
literature until 1981. The following year he published a collection of essays
on literature, A Voice From the Attic, and was awarded the
Lorne Pierce Medal for his literary
achievements. In 1963, he became the Master of Massey College, the University of Toronto’s new graduate college. During
his stint as Master, he initiated the tradition of writing and telling ghost stories
at the yearly Christmas celebrations. His stories were later collected in his
book, High Spirits (1982). Davies
drew on his interest in Jungian psychology to create Fifth Business
(1970), a novel that draws heavily on Davies’ own experiences, his love of myth
and magic and his knowledge of small-town mores. Davies built on the
success of Fifth Business with two more novels: The Manticore
(1972), a novel cast largely in the form of a Jungian analysis
(for which he received that year’s Governor-General’s Literary Award), and World of Wonders
(1975). Together these three books came to be known as The Deptford Trilogy. When Davies retired from
his position at the University, his seventh novel, a satire of academic life, The Rebel Angels
(1981), was published, followed by What’s Bred in the Bone (1985). The Lyre of Orpheus follows these two
books in what became known as The Cornish Trilogy. During his retirement he
continued to write novels which further established him as a major figure in
the literary world: The Lyre of Orpheus (1988), Murther and Walking Spirits (1991) and
The Cunning Man (1994). A third novel in
what would have been a further trilogy — the Toronto Trilogy — was in progress
at Davies’ death. He also realized a long-held dream when he penned the libretto
to an opera: The Golden Ass, based
on The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius,
just like that written by one of the characters in Davies’ 1958 A Mixture of
Frailties. The opera was performed by the Canadian Opera Company at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto, in April, 1999, several years after
Davies’ death.

Stephen Butler Leacock (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was
an English-born Canadian
teacher, political scientist, writer, and humorist.
In the early part of the 20th century he was the best-known humorist in the
English-speaking world. Early in his career Leacock turned to fiction, humour,
and short reports to supplement (and ultimately exceed) his regular income. His
stories, first published in magazines in Canada
and the United States and later in novel form, became extremely
popular around the world. It was said in 1911 that more people had heard of
Stephen Leacock than had heard of Canada. Also, between the years
1915 and 1925, Leacock was the most popular humorist in the English-speaking
world.  A humorist particularly admired
by Leacock was Robert Benchley from New York. Leacock opened correspondence with
Benchley, encouraging him in his work and importuning him to compile his work
into a book. Benchley did so in 1922, and acknowledged the nagging from north
of the border. Near the end of his life, the American comedian Jack Benny
recounted how he had been introduced to Leacock’s writing by Groucho Marx
when they were both young vaudeville comedians. Benny acknowledged Leacock’s influence
and, fifty years after first reading him, still considered Leacock one of his
favorite comic writers. He was puzzled as to why Leacock’s work was no longer
well-known in the United States.  During
the summer months, Leacock lived at Old
Brewery Bay,
his summer estate in Orillia, across Lake Simcoe from where he was
raised and also bordering Lake Couchiching.
A working farm, Old
Brewery Bay
is now a museum and National Historic Site of Canada. Gossip
provided by the local barber, Jefferson Short, provided Leacock with the
material which would become Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), set
in the thinly-disguised Mariposa. Although he wrote learned
articles and books related to his field of study, his political theory is now
all but forgotten. Leacock was awarded the Royal Society of Canada‘s Lorne Pierce Medal in 1937, nominally for his
academic work. Shortly after his death, Barbara Nimmo, his niece, literary executor
and benefactor, published two major posthumous works: Last Leaves (1945)
and The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946). His physical legacy was less
treasured, and his abandoned summer cottage became derelict. It was rescued
from oblivion when it was declared a National Historic Site of Canada in 1958
and ever since has operated as a museum called the Stephen Leacock Memorial
Home.

Alistair MacLeod (born July 20, 1936 in North Battleford,
Saskatchewan)
is a noted Canadian
author and retired professor of English at the University of Windsor. A specialist in British literature of the nineteenth century,
MacLeod taught English for three years at Indiana University before accepting a post
in 1969 at the University of Windsor as professor of English
and creative writing. During the summer, his family resides near Inverness on Cape Breton Island, where he spends part of his
time “writing in a cliff-top cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island.” MacLeod’s published
works include the 1976 short story collection The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and the 1986 As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and
Other Stories. All of the stories in these two volumes
along with his other published stories are included in MacLeod’s 2000 collection Island.
Among other awards, Macleod won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary
Award for his 1999 novel No Great Mischief.

Mavis Leslie Gallant, née Mavis Leslie Young (born 11 August
1922) is a Canadian
writer. In 1981, Gallant was honoured by her native country and made an Officer
of the Order of Canada for her contribution to
literature; that year, she received the Governor General’s Award for literature for her
collection of stories, Home Truths. In 1983-84, she returned to Canada to be the writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. Queen’s University awarded her an honorary LL.D. in 1991. She was
promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada
in 1993. Gallant has written two novels, Green Water, Green Sky (1959)
and A Fairly Good Time (1970); a play, What is to be Done?
(1984); numerous celebrated collections of stories, The Other Paris
(1953), My Heart is Broken (1964), The Pegnitz Junction (1973), The
End of the World and Other Stories (1974), Across the Bridge(1976), From
the Fifteenth District (1978), Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories
(1981), Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris (1985), and In
Transit (1988); and a non-fiction work, Paris Journals: Selected Essays
and Reviews (1986).

Norman Levine (October 22, 1923 – June 14, 2005) was
a Canadian
short-story
writer, novelist
and poet.
He is perhaps best remembered for his terse prose. Though he was part of the St. Ives
artistic community in Cornwall,
and friends with painters Patrick Heron and Francis Bacon, his written expression was not
abstract, but concrete. His wealthy Jewish family had fled from Poland to Canada with the
advent of anti-semitism in the years prior to World War II.
His adolescence was spent on the streets of Ottawa,
but his coming of age was his time as a Lancaster bomber
pilot for the Canadian division of the Royal Air Force.
He was based at Leeming.

Post-war he met
an Englishwoman, Margaret, settled down and they had three children. His
writing, a reflection of his life, was also a direct influence on that life, as
he had little money to keep up rent payments; as a result his family often
moved. After England he
lived, for a time, in Canada,
with his second wife. He also lived in France before,
finally, returning to England,
where he died some ten years later. In 2002 he was presented with the Matt Cohen Prize
(established in 2001 by the Writers’ Trust of Canada to recognize a
lifetime of work by a Canadian writer). Novels : The Angled Road (1952), From a Seaside Town (1970)

Irving Peter Layton (March 12, 1912 – January 4, 2006) was
a Romanian-born
Canadian
poet. He was known for his
“tell it like it is” style which won him a wide following but also
made enemies. As T. Jacobs notes in his biography (2001), Layton fought Puritanism throughout his life. “Of the
poets who emerged in Montréal during this period,” of the early 1950s
(says the Canadian Encyclopedia), “Layton was the most
outspoken and flamboyant. His satire was generally directed against bourgeois
dullness, and his famous love poems were erotically explicit.”  By the mid-1950s, Layton’s activism and poetry had made him a
staple on the CBC televised debating program
“Fighting Words,” where he earned a reputation as a formidable
debater. The publication of A Red Carpet For The Sun in 1959
secured Layton’s national reputation while the many books of poetry which
followed eventually gave him an international reputation, never as high however
in the United States and Britain as it was in some countries where Layton was
read in translation. Moving, at the end of 1983, to the Montreal district of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. It
was here that Layton
wrote his memoir Waiting For the Messiah and with Anna’s support saw to
the publication of his final books and translations.

Francis Reginald Scott, commonly known as Frank Scott
or F.R. Scott, (August 1, 1899 – January 30, 1985) was a Canadian poet,
intellectual and constitutional expert. He helped found the first Canadian
social democratic
party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation,
and its successor, the New Democratic Party. He won Canada‘s top
literary prize, the Governor General’s Award, twice, once for poetry and once
for non-fiction. Scott began translating French-Canadian poetry, publishing Anne Hébert
and Saint-Denys Garneau in 1962. He edited Poems of French
Canada (1977),
which won the Canada Council prize for translation. F.R. Scott
won the 1977 Governor General’s Award for non-fiction
for his Essays on the Constitution and the 1981 Governor General’s Award for poetry
for his Collected Poems.

Arthur James Marshall Smith (November 8, 1902 – November 21, 1980)
was a Canadian poet and anthologist. He “was a
prominent member of a group of Montreal poets” — the Montreal Group,
which included Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, A.M. Klein, and F.R. Scott
— “who distinguished themselves by their modernism in a culture still
rigidly rooted in Victorianism.” He became well known as both a scholar
and an author of poetry, with many of his best known works focusing on Canadian
themes (for example his 1929 poem “The Lonely Land,”
which was inspired by a 1926 Group of Seven
exhibition).  As early as 1939, Smith
applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the
preparation of an anthology of Canadian poetry. In 1943 his first anthology was
published: The Book of Canadian Poetry, in which he argued that there
was a distinctive Canadian voice. The book was praised by literary critic Northrop Frye,
who called its publication “an important event in Canadian literature. For
instead of confining his reading to previous compilations, as most anthologists
do, he has made a first-hand study of the whole English field with unflagging industry
and unfaltering taste.” The Encyclopædia Britannica says that The
Book of Canadian Poetry, and Smith’s later anthologies, “contributed
greatly to the modernization of literary standards in Canada.” Smith won the 1943 Governor General’s Award for poetry or drama
for his own first collection of poetry, News of the Phoenix and
Other Poems.

Susan Joan Wood (August 22, 1948-November 12, 1980 was
a Canadian
author,
critic, and science fiction
fan, born in Ottawa, Ontario.
She joined the English Department at the University of British Columbia in 1975 and
taught Canadian literature, science fiction and children’s literature. She was the Vancouver editor of the Pacific
Northwest Review of Books (Jan.-Oct. 1978) and also edited the special
science fiction/fantasy issue of Room of One’s Own. She wrote numerous
articles and book reviews that were published in books and academic journals,
while continuing to write for fanzines.

Judith Josephine Grossman (January 21, 1923 – September 12,
1997), who took the pen-name Judith Merril about 1945, was an American
and then Canadian
science fiction
writer, editor and political activist. Although Judith Merril’s first paid
writing was in other genres, in her first few years of writing published
science fiction she wrote her three novels (all but the first in collaboration
with C.M. Kornbluth) and some stories. Her roughly
four decades in that genre also included writing 26 published short stories,
and editing a similar number of anthologies. Her story “Dead Center” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction, November, 1954) is one of only two stories taken from
any science fiction or fantasy magazine for the Best American Short Stories volumes
edited by Martha Foley in the 1950s. Groff Conklin
described her first novel, Shadow on the Hearth, as “a masterly
example of sensitive and perceptive story-telling.” Boucher
and McComas praised it as “a sensitively human
novel, terrifying in its small-scale reflection of grand-scale
catastrophe.”^[6].

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian
poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is
among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner
of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature,
has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist
for the Governor General’s Award seven times, winning
twice. While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she is also a poet,
having published 15 books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been
inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an
early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review,
Alphabet, Harper’s, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other
magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three
collections of unclassifiable short prose works. Moodie’s
books and poetry inspired Margaret Atwood‘s collection of poetry, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, published in 1970.

Yann Martel (born June 25, 1963) is a Canadian author best known
for the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi. In 2001, he
published Life of Pi, which was awarded the Man Booker Prize
in 2002. Life of Pi was later chosen for the 2003 edition of CBC Radio‘s
Canada Reads
competition, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee. In addition, its French
translation, Histoire de Pi, was included in the French version of the
competition, Le combat des livres, in 2004, championed by singer Louise Forestier.
His novel Beatrice and Virgil deals with the Holocaust:
its main characters are two stuffed animals (a monkey and a donkey) in a
taxidermy shop. Martel describes them as simply two approaches to the same
subject. From 2007 to 2011, Martel worked on a project entitled What is Stephen Harper
Reading?, where he sent the Prime Minister of Canada one book every two
weeks that portrays “stillness” with an accompanying explanatory
note. He posted his letters, book selections and responses received to a
website devoted to the project. A book-length account of the project was
published in the fall of 2009. Martel ended the project in February 2011, after
sending Harper a total of 100 books.

Carol Ann Shields, (née Warner) (June 2, 1935 –
July 16, 2003) was an American-born Canadian
author.
She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won
the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General’s Award in Canada.
Shields was the author of several novels and short story collections, including
The Orange Fish (1989), Swann (1987), Various Miracles
(1985), Happenstance (1980), and The Republic of Love (1992). She
was the recipient of a Canada Council Major Award, two National
Magazine Awards, the 1990 Marian Engel Award, the Canadian Author’s Award,
and a CBC short story award. She was appointed
as an officer of the Order of Canada in 1998 and was elevated to
companion of the Order in 2002. Shields was also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Manitoba.
She won the 1998 Orange Prize for Fiction for her 1997 novel Larry’s
Party. Her last novel, Unless (2002), was nominated for the 2002 Giller Prize,
the Governor General’s Award, the Booker Prize and the 2003 Orange Prize for
Fiction. It was awarded the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Shields was
also intensely interested in Jane Austen. She wrote the biography entitled Jane
Austen, which won the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction
in April 2002, an award accepted by her daughter Meg on her behalf in Toronto,
Ontario, on April 22, 2002. Her last novel, Unless, contains a
passionate defense of female writers who write of ‘domestic’ subjects.

Susanna Moodie, born Strickland (6 December 1803 – 8
April 1885), was an English-born Canadian author
who wrote about her experiences as a settler in Canada, which was a
British colony at the time. In 1852, she published Roughing it in the Bush, detailing
her experiences on the farm in the 1830s. In 1853, she published Life in the
Clearings Versus the Bush, about her time inBelleville.

Catharine Parr Traill, born Strickland (9 January 1802 – 29
August 1899) was an English-Canadian author who wrote
about life as a settler in Canada.
Her early work, such as Disobedience, or Mind What Mama Says (1819), and
“Happy Because Good”, were written for children, and often dwell on
the benefits of obedience to one’s parents. A prolific author, until her
marriage she averaged one book per year. She described her new life in letters
and journals, and collected these into The Backwoods of Canada (1836),
which continues to be read as an important source of information about early Canada.
She describes everyday life in the community, the relationship between
Canadians, Americans, and natives,
the climate, and local flora and fauna. More observations were included in a
novel, Canadian Crusoes (1851). She also collected
information concerning the skills necessary for a new settler, published in The
Female Emigrant’s Guide (1854), later retitled The Canadian Settler’s
Guide. She wrote “Pearls and Pebbles” and “Cot and Cradle
Stories”. She often sketched the plant life of Upper
Canada, publishing Canadian Wild Flowers (1865), Studies
of Plant Life in Canada (1885) and “Rambles in theCanadianForest”.

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (December 17, 1796 – August 27, 1865) was the
first international best-selling author from Canada. Haliburton
became noted local business man and a judge, but his great fame came from his
writing. He wrote a diverse number of books on history, politics, and farm
improvement. He rose to world wide fame with his Clockmaker serial that first appeared in the Novascotian
and was later published in book form throughout the British Empire.
The books recounted the humorous adventures of the character Sam Slick
and became extremely popular light reading. Haliburton received an honorary degree
from Oxford for service to literature and continued
writing until his death in August 27th, 1865, at his home in Isleworth.
In 1884, faculty and students at King’s College, Windsor, founded a literary society
in honour of the College’s most celebrated man of letters.
The Haliburton Club, still active at King’s College, Halifax, is now the longest-standing
collegial literary society in the Commonwealth of Nations or North America.

Alice Ann Munro (née
Laidlaw; born 10 July 1931) is a Canadian
short-story writer, winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her
lifetime body of work, three-time winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction, and a
perennial contender for the Nobel Prize.^[2]
Generally regarded to be one of the world’s foremost writers of fiction, her
stories focus on the human condition and relationships seen through the lens of
daily life. While the locus of Munro’s fiction is Southwestern Ontario,^[3]
her reputation as a short-story writer is international. Her “accessible,
moving stories” explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless
style.^[ She
began writing as a teenager and published her first story, “The Dimensions
of a Shadow,” while a student at the University of Western
Ontario in 1950. Alice Munro’s first collection
of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades
1968, was highly acclaimed and won that year’s Governor General’s Award, Canada’s
highest literary prize. This success was followed by Lives of Girls and
Women 1971,
a collection of interlinked stories that was published
as a novel. In 1978, Munro’s collection of interlinked stories, Who Do You
Think You Are?, was published (titled The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo
and Rose in the United
States). This book earned Munro the Governor
General’s Literary Award for a second time. From 1979 to 1982, she toured Australia, China
and Scandinavia. In 1980 Munro held the
position of Writer-in-Residence at both the University
of British Columbia and the University of Queensland. Through the 1980s and 1990s,
Munro published a short-story collection about once every four years to
increasing acclaim, winning both national and international awards. In 2002,
her daughter Sheila Munro published a childhood memoir, Lives of Mothers and
Daughters: Growing Up With Alice Munro.

Farley McGill Mowat, (born May 12, 1921) is a conservationist
and one of Canada’s
most widely-read authors. His works have been translated into 52 languages and
he has sold more than 14 million books. He achieved fame with the publication
of his books on the Canadian North, such as People of the Deer (1952) and Never Cry Wolf (1963). The
latter, an account of his experiences with wolves in the Arctic, was made
into a film, released in 1983.

 

4. South Africa

Christiaan Maurits van den
Heever, almost
universally known C.M. van den Heever (February 27, 1902 in the concentration camp near Norvalspont in Cape Province,
now Northern Cape Province, South Africa
– July 8, 1957), was an Afrikaans-language novelist, poet, essayist, and biographer. Counted
among the Dertigers,
van den Heever is noted for his most famous novels: Somer (“Summer”) and Laat
vrugte (“Late Fruits”). The latter won the Hertzog Prize
for prose in 1942.

Etienne Leroux (1922–1989) was an influential Afrikaans
author and a key member of the South African Sestigers
literary movement. He was born on June 13 as Stephanus Petrus Daniël le Roux,
son of S.P. Le Roux, a South African Minister of Agriculture.
His works gained critical acclaim and were translated into many languages. His
1968 book, translated into English as One for the devil is titled Een
vir Azazel (One for Azazel) in Afrikaans, and makes use of the Azazel myth. He
studied Law at Stellenbosch University (BA, LLB) and worked
for a short time at a solicitor’s office in Bloemfontein. From 1946 he farmed and lived
as a writer on his farm, Ja-Nee, in the Koffiefontein
district. Etienne Leroux is known as one of the most important (and at the time
controversial) writers of the avant garde group of the sixties. He died on 30
December 1989

André Philippus Brink, (born 29 May 1935 in Vrede) is a South African
novelist.
He writes in Afrikaans and English
and is a Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. It is rumoured that
Ingrid Jonker had an affair
with him and Jack Cope,
one which resulted in her pregnancy and then abortion,
which was illegal at the time in South Africa,
Ingrid Jonker was married already, and the stress of the affair, abortion and
rebuttal of her father, chairman of the parliament of South Africa at the time,
led her into rehab and then to killing herself. In the 1960s he, Ingrid Jonker
and Breyten Breytenbach were key figures in the Afrikaans
literary movement known as Die Sestigers
(“The Sixty-ers”). These writers sought to use Afrikaans as a
language to speak against the apartheid government, and also to bring into Afrikaans literature the influence of
contemporary English and French
trends. His novel Kennis van die aand (“Knowledge of the night”)
(1973) was the first Afrikaans book to be banned by the South African
government.^[1]

Novels

• The Ambassador
• Looking on Darkness
• An Instant in the Wind
• Rumours of Rain
• A Dry White Season (1979)
• A Chain of Voices
• The Wall of the Plague

• States of Emergency
• An Act of Terror
• The First Life of Adamastor (1993)
• On the Contrary
• Imaginings of Sand
• Devil’s Valley
• The Rights of Desire
• Anderkant die Stilte (2002), translated
  as The Other
  Side of Silence
• Before I Forget (2004)
• The Other Side of Silence (2004)
• Praying Mantis (2005)
• The Blue Door (2006)
• Other Lives (2008)

 

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