Pakistani novelist, critic, and poet, born in Delhi, educated at the Universities of Aligarh and Lucknow. Ali was for some years, after his move to Pakistan upon the Partition of India, a diplomat; he served, among other postings, in China. He began his literary career as a short-story writer in his native Urdu in the 1930s; he was associated with the Progressive Writers Association, which brought…
Pakistani writer, born in Lahore, educated in Pakistan and at Oxford University. He first gained a reputation as a Marxist journalist and political activist (he was involved with the Vietnam Solidarity campaign), and later worked as a documentary film-maker and television producer. His Marxist orientation is reflected in his first published works, including Pakistan: People's Power or Military Rul…
American writer of mixed Laguna/Sioux and Lebanese descent, born in New Mexico, educated at the Universities of Oregon and New Mexico. She is the cousin of Leslie Marmon Silko. Allen held a number of academic posts before joining the Native American Studies programme at the University of California at Berkeley. Her writing is inseparable from her political activism as a feminist, pacifist, and env…
English novelist and critic, born in Birmingham, educated at Birmingham University. Among his many academic appointments he was Professor and Chairman of English Studies, New University of Ulster, Coleraine (1967?73). In the 1930s he wrote three realistic novels about English working-class life, Innocence is Drowned (1938), Blind Man's Ditch (1939), and Living Space (1940), all set in Birmingham, …
American historical novelist, poet, and biographer, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, educated at the University of Pittsburgh, the United States Naval Academy, and Harvard. His experiences on active service during the First World War inform a number of the poems in Wampum and Old Gold (1921), his first book, and are recorded in detail in the autobiographical Towards the Flame (1926). With Israfel…
a play by Arthur Miller, published in 1947. An Ibsen-like drama of moral evasion and confrontation, it concerns the Keller family, the head of which, Joe Keller, a self-made businessman, has been acquitted of the charge of connivance in the sale of defective cylinder heads to the US Air Force during the Second World War, a crime for which his neighbour and employee, Steve Deever, has been imprison…
British poet, born in Glamorganshire; he grew up in Cumberland and was educated at the University of Durham and St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He became a leading contributor of poetry to New Verse, of which he was assistant editor from 1936 to 1939. In 1946 he began lecturing at the University of Liverpool, where he was A. C. Bradley Professor of Modern English Literature (1964?73). His reputation as a …
American novelist, born in Tennessee, educated at Wellesley College. Alther achieved popular success with her first novel, Kingflicks (1976); based on the events of her life after leaving her native Tennessee to move north, the novel explores the nature of the relationship between mother and daughter. Called back home by the imminent death of her mother, the heroine considers all those influences …
Nigerian novelist, born in Ilesha, Western Nigeria, educated at Government College (Ibadan), Lagos University, and the University of London. He was director of public works for Nigeria's Western Region, and in 1966 became senior lecturer in engineering at Lagos University. His most accomplished novel, One Man, One Matchet (1964), set in preindependence Nigeria, depicts with comic verve political c…
British critic, poet, and novelist, born in London, educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In addition to his work as a freelance writer, he has held numerous visiting posts at American universities. The Shaping Spirit (1958), a discussion of modern English and American poetry, was the first of his critical works. Subsequent studies include The School of Donne (1961) and The Savage God (1971)…
American Latina novelist; born in New York, she spent her early years in the Dominican Republic. Alvarez later became a professor of English at Middlebury College, Vermont. Her first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent (1991), written in reverse chronological order, recounts the events surrounding the immigration of the fictional Garcia family to the US. Much like Alvarez and her own sis…
Nigerian novelist and teacher, born in Aluu, near Port Harcourt in Eastern Nigeria, educated at University College, Ibadan. After being employed as a surveyor for several years during 1953?60, he became a teacher, and has since held several Government and academic posts in Nigeria. Amadi served in the Nigerian Federal Army (1963?6 and 1968?9). During the Nigerian Civil War (1967?70) he was impriso…
a novel by Henry James, published in 1903. When Chad Newsome does not return from Paris to take up his family responsibilities, his mother sends as an ?ambassador? the intelligent and conscientious American editor Lambert Strether. In Paris, he gradually learns the reasons for Chad's desire to remain in the Old World culture, with its fascinations and satisfactions in the shape of the Mme de Vione…
a magazine founded in 1959 by Martin Bax in an attempt to invigorate British poetry, which he saw as having taken on an apathetic character; since then it has appeared as a quarterly, publishing stories, graphics, critical articles, and reviews. The lively tone of Bax's initial editorials anticipated the flamboyantly irreverent and anarchically experimental character Ambit rapidly assumed; the ero…
British thriller writer, born in London; he studied engineering at London University, and later worked in advertising. Ambler served in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and becoming assistant director of Army Kinematography; later he produced films for the J. Arthur Rank Organisation and wrote numerous screenplays, his adaptation of Nicholas…
a monthly magazine founded in 1924 with H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan as editors. Urbanely scathing commentary on the social and cultural follies of contemporary America was Mencken's speciality, the prohibition of alcohol being a recurrent object of his scorn. Nathan directed the magazine's interest towards drama; the entire text of Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings appeared in …
a novel by Theodore Dreiser, published in 1925. The plot draws on the 1906 New York murder trial of Chester Gillette. Clyde Griffiths, son of poor street missionaries in Kansas City, yearns for wealth and social status and finds work as a bellhop in a luxury hotel, where he shares the fast life of his fellow workers. But, after a joyriding accident in which a little girl is killed, Clyde flees to …
British novelist and poet, born in South London, educated at the City of London School and St John's College, Oxford. He was the father of Martin Amis. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University, and Peterhouse, Cambridge. Amis won immediate fame with his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954); in its portrayal of the ?Angry Young Man?, Jim Dixon, a lecturer …
English novelist, born in Oxford, the son of Kingsley Amis, educated at Exeter College, Oxford. Amis began his literary career with The Rachel Papers (1973; Somerset Maugham Award, 1974), a scabrously funny account of a young man's sentimental education, narrated in the first person by its precociously articulate 19-year-old hero, Charles Highway. Dead Babies (1975) is a surreal black comedy set i…
American poet, born in Whiteville, North Carolina, educated at the University of California at Berkeley. After twelve years as an executive with a glass manufacturing company, in 1964 he began his academic career at Cornell University, where he became Goldwin Smith Professor of English in 1973. The examples of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams informed the ambitiously inclusive thematic and d…
Indian novelist, born in Peshawar, educated at the Universities of Lahore, London, and Cambridge. Deeply influenced by his years in England, where he was exposed to the aesthetic of the Bloomsbury set and E. M. Forster and to the evolving theories of the left, Anand published his first and best-known novel, Untouchable, in 1935. The novel, which was dramatized in 1989, centres on the tribulations …
Chicano novelist, poet, dramatist, and writer, born in New Mexico, educated at the University of New Mexico of which he became Professor of English in 1988. He is best known for the trilogy Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Heart of Aztl?n (1976), and Tortuga (1979). Anaya's narrative technique weaves together the historical with the mythical, the imaginative or fantastic, and the ritual aspects of Chicano…
Australian novelist and short-story writer, born in Brisbane. She spent several years in England but has lived mainly in Sydney where here first novel, An Ordinary Lunacy (1963), is set. The Last Man's Head (1970) is an unusual crime novel delivered in her characteristically laconic and ironic style. Her novels display her gift for psychological observation and social commentary. The Commandant (1…
American playwright, born in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, brought up in North Dakota, educated at Stanford University. In 1918 he moved to New York where he worked on various journals and helped found Measure, a magazine of verse. His own collection of poems, You Who Have Dreams, appeared in 1925. His first play, the verse tragedy White Desert (1923), was drawn from childhood memories and told the stor…
American playwright, born in New York City, educated at Harvard. His first play, Come Marching Home (1945), is a study in the political idealism of an ex-serviceman whose aspirations conflict with the complacency of the community in which he seeks political election. He is best known for Tea and Sympathy (1953; directed by Elia Kazan), which had a broadway run of 712 performances. Set in a New Eng…
American noveliyst and short-story writer, born in Camden, Ohio, into an itinerant poor white family. He served in the Spanish-American War and held a succession of jobs before abandoning his wife and family to move to Chicago in 1912 to become a full-time writer with the encouragement of Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and Floyd Dell he published his first novels, Windy McPherson's Son (1916) an…
American poet, born in Chicago, educated at Harvard. He settled in New York in 1975, where he became a professor of politics at Fordham. He was editor of L-A-N-G-U- A-G-E with Charles Bernstein (1979?81). He is a performance artist and poet whose texts are some of the most radical of the Language school (see Language Poetry); his poetry tries ?to cast doubt on each and every ?natural? construction…
African-American autobiographical writer and poet, born in St Louis, Missouri, educated at Mission High School, San Francisco. She was largely brought up in Stamps, Arkansas by her paternal grandmother and in 1940 she rejoined her mother in San Francisco. In the 1950s she moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers' Guild, performed in off-Broadway productions, and sang in night-clubs. …
a novel by Angus Wilson, published in 1956. The novel concerns the excavation of a tomb in Suffolk, of the seventh-century Bishop Eorpwald, which has had a profound effect on Anglo-Saxon scholarship. Its central figure is Gerald Middleton, Professor Emeritus of Early Medieval History, who considers the discoveries to be fake, but for his own reasons has concealed this belief from the public. In la…
although Welsh poets have written work of note in English since the seventeenth century, the term ?Anglo-Welsh poetry? was not in general use until the late 1930s, when it was given currency by Keidrych Rhys's Wales, established in 1937, and The Welsh Review, edited by Gwyn Jones from its inception in 1939. Among the poets whose work they published were Idris Davies, Hugh Menai, Glyn Jones, Alun L…
an Australian quarterly (1940?6), first edited by Max Harris (later joined by John Reed). It contained poetry and reviews of literature, jazz, film, and sociology as well as art reproduction, from painters such as Sydney Nolan and Arthur Boyd. Where poetry was concerned, the editorial rejection of existing national socialist canons, in favour of the influence of European modernism, was too brash f…
a novel by George Orwell, published in 1945. Orwell's most famous and widely read work, Animal Farm is a political fable that partly recounts, in an allegorical mode, the aftermath of the Russian revolution, and partly illustrates a belief in the universal tendency of power to corrupt. The major characters are all animals, who have overthrown their human masters to establish a collective farm run …
a novel by H. G. Wells, published in 1909. In this novel of suburban rebellion Ann Veronica Stanley, a 21-year-old science student, refuses to accept her father's authority, leaves home, and looks unsuccessfully for work in London. She becomes indebted to Ramage, a businessman who tries to take advantage of her innocence, and falls in love with Capes, a married biology instructor. Meanwhile, her f…
a novel by James Baldwin, published in 1962. Considered by many critics to be Baldwin's finest mature work of fiction, the novel examines, from a variety of perspectives, the lives, destinies, and sensibilities of a group of characters linked by their love for the singer, Rufus. The tragic Rufus dominates the first few chapters, allowing Baldwin to comment on the effect of heritage and history?in …
a collection of poetry by W. H. Auden, published in 1940, his first after his move to New York in January 1939. In addition to work produced in England subsequent to Look, Stranger! (1936), the volume contained numerous well-known poems written after his arrival in the USA, among them ?In Memory of W. B. Yeats?, ?In Memory of Sigmund Freud?, ?The Prophets?, and ?The Unknown Citizen?. The tonal, em…
British writer, born in London, educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and trained for the Bar. A prolific author of novels of humour and fantasy, he is best known for his first book, Vice Versa (1882), which was filmed by Peter Ustinov and televised; subtitled ?A Lesson to Fathers?, the novel concerns a father, Mr Bultitude, who adopts the age and persona of his son (and vice versa) and suffers com…
many anthologies of poetry defining the aesthetic or ideological standpoints of successive schools or movements have appeared in the twentieth century. Georgian Poetry (1912?22) disseminated new work by young poets with the intention of revitalizing verse at a time when late Victorian reputations remained predominant. The Georgians, however, were identified with a moribund literary tradition by th…
Trinidadian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, born in Mayaro, Trinidad. In 1954 he migrated to England where he later worked as a journalist for Reuters in London. During 1967?70 he and his family lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he worked as a diplomat, returning to Trinidad in 1970. His novels are very much about the day-to-day concerns of ordinary people, being particularly no…
a novel by A. Huxley, published in 1923. Regarded at the time as an ?immoral? book as much for its intellectual irreverence as for its open depiction of sexual affairs, drug-taking, jazz clubs, and birth control, the novel made Huxley a hero to the younger generation of 1920s readers. The febrile atmosphere of the novel, set amongst post-war London's fashionable artistic bohemia, is indebted to Th…
American performance poet, born in Brooklyn, New York, educated at New York University. Antin was already the author of several books of poetry, including one of the finest contemporary elegies, ?Definitions for Mendy?, when he began experimenting with talks as the basis for making poems. Since ?Talking at Pomona? (Talking, 1972), he has not published conventional poems; instead he gives improvise…
Chicana writer and poet, born in Hargill, Texas, educated at Pan American University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her approach to Chicana lesbian feminist studies was met with resistance at the academic institutions she attended in the 1980s. She and Cherrie Moraga co-edited a breakthrough anthology of writings by feminists of colour entitled …
a novel by Wyndham Lewis, published in 1930. The novel, a satirical roman-?-clef, established Lewis's reputation as the scourge of literary London and ?Enemy? of such circles as the Bloomsbury Group and the Sitwell coterie, whom he regarded as dilettantes and poseurs. Descriptions of Osbert and Edith Sitwell (Lord Osmund and Lady Harriet Finnian Shaw), Stephen Spender (Dan Boleyn), and such litera…
a term derived from a Greek verb meaning ?to uncover? or ?to disclose? a revelation, hence the title of the last book of the New Testament. The term refers to the end of the present world and the coming of the messiah's kingdom. There is a long tradition of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writing, but the modern use of the term tends to focus on esoteric or secular endings, particularly those whi…
a society founded for discussion and debate at Cambridge University in 1820 under the title ?the Cambridge Conversazione Society?. Because they were twelve in number and tended towards evangelical Christianity, the founding members became known as ?the Apostles?. In the course of the nineteenth century, the society developed into a forum for radical nonconformity and intellectual speculation. Unde…
a play by G. B. Shaw, first performed in Polish in Warsaw in June 1929 and in English at the Malvern Festival two months later. Set in the future, it mainly involves conflict between the astute and effective King Magnus and an inept and quarrelsome Cabinet (?like an overcrowded third-class railway carriage?) in a Britain where the most powerful institution is a capitalist conglomerate, Breakages L…
a play by Tom Stoppard, first performed and published in 1993. The action of this intricately plotted piece occurs in a mansion called Sidley Park in both the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, which allows the same room, often identically furnished, to be used for both periods. Half of the action concerns the Coverly family, in particular the adolescent Thomasina, an embryonic mathema…
British playwright, born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, educated at Cambridge University and the Edinburgh College of Art; he briefly practised as an architect. His principal plays are Live Like Pigs (1958), about conflict between the ?deserving? and ?underserving? classes on a housing estate; Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (1959); The Happy Haven (1960), in which a group of old people rebel against their pat…