Encyclopedia of Literature: Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais Biography to Michel Bibaud Biography

Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction

Bruce Beaver Biography - (1928–2004), Under the Bridge, Seawall and Shoreline, Open at Random, Letters to Live Poets

Australian poet, born in Manly, New South Wales. He led a peripatetic early life, including four years spent in New Zealand. As a young man he had suffered from manic depression and his early collections of poetry, Under the Bridge (1961), Seawall and Shoreline (1964), and Open at Random (1967), reflect his inner turmoil. Letters to Live Poets (1969), his major work, was written at great speed at …

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Samuel Beckett (Samuel Barclay Beckett) Biography - (1906–89), (Samuel Barclay Beckett), lecteur d'anglais, More Pricks Than Kicks

Irish playwright, born at Foxrock, near Dublin, the son of a quantity surveyor, and brought up as a Protestant. He was educated at Portora Royal School, Co. Fermanagh, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he took a degree in modern languages. After nine months spent teaching French in Belfast, he became lecteur d'anglais at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he formed a strong friendshi…

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Sybille Bedford Biography - (1911–2006), A Legacy, A Favourite of the Gods, A Compass Error, The Sudden View

British novelist and essayist, born in Charlottenburg, Germany; she has used her cosmopolitan background to explore the complexities of European heritage and experience. Her first novel, A Legacy (1956), depicts a German aristocratic family whose way of life is undermined by the Prussian hegemony, which values efficiency and military might over gentler, more civilized values. In A Favourite of the…

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Patricia Beer Biography - (1924–1999), Mrs Beer's House, Loss of the Magyar, Just Like the Resurrection, The Estuary

British poet, born in Exmouth, Devon, educated at the University of Exeter and St Hilda's College, Oxford; her father was a railway clerk and her mother a member of the Plymouth Brethren. Mrs Beer's House (1968) is a memorably vivid account of her early years and family background. She taught at various universities in Italy and at Goldsmiths' College, London. Her first collection of poetry was Lo…

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Max Beerbohm (Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm) Biography - (1872–1956), (Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm), Strand, The Yellow Book, Saturday Review, Around Theatres, More Theatres

British essayist and critic, born in London, educated at Merton College, Oxford. From 1892 he was publishing caricatures (signed ?Max?) in the Strand and other periodicals, satirizing literary and political figures in his characteristic urbane and ironic tone; in 1894 the first of his essays, ?A Defence of Cosmetics?, appeared in The Yellow Book. As half-brother to the actormanager Herbert Beerboh…

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S. N. Behrman (Samuel Nathaniel Behrman) Biography - (1893–1973), (Samuel Nathaniel Behrman), Amphitryon 38, Auprès de Ma Blonde, I Know My Love

American dramatist, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, educated at Clark, Harvard, and Columbia Universities. He enrolled in George Pierce Baker's ?47 Workshop? at Harvard, and went on to graduate work at Columbia University under Brander Matthews and St John Ervine. Of Behrman's twenty-six plays, several were co-authored, and some were adaptations, such as his version of Jean Giradoux's Amphitryon…

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David Belasco Biography - (1859–1931), The Heart of Maryland, Madame Butterfly, The Girl of the Golden West

American dramatist, born in San Francisco. Belasco wrote his first play at the age of 12 and worked in the theatre from the age of 14. Though he spent his apprentice years in San Francisco as an actor, producer, stage manager, and eventually theatre manager, his name is indelibly linked with the history of the theatre in New York from the mid-1880s to the early 1920s. He also had a talent for disc…

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Rosalind Belben Biography - (1941– ), The Limit, Is Beauty Good, Dreaming of Dead People, Choosing Spectacles

British novelist, born in Dorset, the daughter of a naval officer. She is one of a handful of women novelists engaged in experimenting with fictional form in the European tradition. The author of several novels including The Limit (1974), Belben received the recognition she deserves only with the publication of Is Beauty Good (1989) and the reappearance of an earlier work, Dreaming of Dead People …

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Gertrude Bell (Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell) Biography - (1868–1926), (Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell), The Desert and the Sown, The Thousand and One Churches

British writer on travel and archaeology, born in Washington, County Durham, educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; she subsequently acquired Persian and Arabic in the course of her extensive travels. In 1905 she began some ten years' work as an archaeologist. The Desert and the Sown (1907) formed an account of her first major expedition, which took her from Jerusalem to Konya in Turkey. She sust…

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Martin Bell Biography - (1918–78), Collected Poems: 1937–66, Penguin Modern Poets: 3, Martin Bell: Complete Poems

British poet, born in Southampton, where he was educated at the University. By profession he was a schoolteacher, and, latterly, an opera critic and lecturer. In 1964 he received the first of the Arts Council's Poetry Bursaries, and was Gregory Fellow of Poetry at Leeds University from 1967 to 1969. Bell's publishing history is unusual in that his Collected Poems: 1937?66 (1967) was the only indep…

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Bell Jar, The - Mademoiselle, The Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar

a novel by Sylvia Plath, published under the pseudonym ?Victoria Lucas? in 1963. Its vivid, sometimes disturbingly evocative, imagery links it with her poetry. The title is supplied by the recurrent metaphor of ?the bell jar? as an enclosing barrier between the central protagonist, Esther Greenwood, and the possibility of valid relations with others. The narrative corresponds to the author's exper…

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Hilaire Belloc (Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc) Biography - (1870–1953), (Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc), The Speaker, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts

British writer, born in France to a French father and an English mother; he was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. Belloc took up journalism, contributing articles to The Speaker, a political and literary journal, sometimes in collaboration with Chesterton, and soon earned a reputation as a writer of great versatility in both prose and poetry. His verses for children, which included The Bad Chil…

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Saul Bellow Biography - (1915–2005), Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day

, American novelist, born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian emigrant parents; he grew up in a Jewish ghetto in Montreal before moving to Chicago when he was nine. He was educated at the universities of Chicago, Northwestern, and Wisconsin. He has since taught English at a number of colleges, and served in the Merchant Marines during the Second World War. Since 1944 he has been a leading exponent of …

2 minute read

Bell, The - Bell, Dublin Magazine

a literary a socio-cultural periodical founded in 1940 by Sean O'Faolain. Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, Frank O'Connor, and Jack B. Yeats were among the contributors to the first issue. In the course of its fourteen-year career, the Bell was variously subtitled ?A Survey of Irish Life?, ?A Magazine of Creative Fiction?, and ?A Magazine of Ireland Today?; its concern with social…

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Beloved

a novel by Toni Morrison, published in 1987 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The novel is loosely based on a true story and begins in 1873 Ohio where Sethe, an escaped slave, is living an isolated existence at 124 Bluestone Road with her daughter Denver and a poltergeist; her two sons, Howard and Buglar, had fled when they were only thirteen years old, and their grandmother Baby Suggs had died so…

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Robert Benchley (Robert Charles Benchley) Biography - (1889–1945), (Robert Charles Benchley), Vanity Fair, New Yorker, Of All Things!, Inside Benchley

American essayist, playwright, and reviewer, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard. Benchley rose to a prominent position in the New York literary world by the end of the First World War; he was drama critic then managing editor of Vanity Fair, and a regular contributor to many New York journals including the New Yorker, of which he was a founder member and drama critic. With Dorot…

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Bend in the River, A

a novel by V. S. Naipaul, published in 1979. It is narrated by Salim, an East African of Indian provenance, who, in the aftermath of the disruptions and racial conflicts that result from the politics of African independence, migrates inland to rebuild his career in an unnamed country that resembles Zaire. Here, embodied in a vividly portrayed group of characters both African and Asian, he encounte…

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Stephen Vincent Benét Biography - (1898–1943), Five Men and Pompey, Young Adventure, The Beginning of Wisdom, Jean Huguenot, Spanish Bayonet

American poet, born at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, educated at Yale. As an undergraduate he published two collections of verse, Five Men and Pompey (1915) and Young Adventure (1918). His first novel, The Beginning of Wisdom (1921), draws heavily on his experiences of university. Subsequent novels include Jean Huguenot (1923) and Spanish Bayonet (1926). As a writer of prose his accomplishment was more…

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William Rose Benét Biography - (1886–1950), Literary Review, Evening Post, Saturday Review of Literature, The Reader's Encyclopaedia

American poet and literary journalist, born in Fort Hamilton, New York, educated at Yale. The elder brother of the poet Stephen Vincent Ben?t and the third husband of the novelist and poet Elinor Wylie, Ben?t was associate editor of the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post and in 1924 he co-founded, with Christopher Morley, the influential Saturday Review of Literature. He compiled over fi…

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Alan Bennett Biography - (1934– ), Beyond the Fringe, Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus, The Old Country, Enjoy

British dramatist, born in Yorkshire, educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He first came to prominence as one of the authors and performers of the anti-establishment revue Beyond the Fringe (1960). There is also a satiric thrust to some of his own plays, notably Forty Years On (1968), set in the assembly hall of Albion House, a public school, in which scenes involving the headmaster and his colleag…

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Arnold Bennett (Enoch Arnold Bennett) Biography - (1867–1931), (Enoch Arnold Bennett), Woman, The Yellow Book, A Man from the North

British novelist, born in Hanley, Staffordshire, the eldest son of a self-educated and self-made solicitor who had struggled up to professional status from a family of potters and shopkeepers. Bennett was also destined for the law but he continued (uncharacteristically) to fail his legal examinations, rebelled against his dominating father, and escaped to London, where, after working briefly as a …

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Louise Bennett Biography - (1919–2006), (Jamaica) Dialect Verses, Jamaican Humour in Dialect, Anancy Poems in Dialect, Jamaican Labrish

Jamaican poet, born in Kingston, Jamaica, educated in Jamaica and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She worked briefly for the BBC. When she first composed verses in ?patois? or Jamaican dialect in the 1930s and 1940s, Bennett used the language of the common people which was regarded as uneducated. But her early books such as (Jamaica) Dialect Verses (1942), Jamaican Humour in Dialec…

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A. C. Benson (Arthur Christopher Benson) Biography - (1862–1925), (Arthur Christopher Benson), Life, Fasti Etonenses, The Hill of Trouble, The Isles of Sunset, Rosetti

British writer, brother of E. F. and R. H. Benson, born at Wellington College, Berkshire, of which his father, E. W. Benson (1829?96), who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first headmaster; he was educated at King's College, Cambridge. In 1904 he was elected a fellow of Magdalene College, of which he became Master in 1915. Among his early works in a prolific career are his Life of hi…

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E. F. Benson (Edward Frederic Benson) Biography - (1867–1940), (Edward Frederic Benson), Dodo, grande dame, Queen Lucia, Miss Mapp, Lucia in London

British novelist, brother of A. C. and R. H. Benson, born at Wellington College, Berkshire, educated at King's College, Cambridge and the British School of Archaeology in Athens. His successful first novel, Dodo (1893), was followed by a stream of novels, biographies, and reminiscences. He is most famous for the series of comic novels he published during the 1920s and 1930s, the ?Mapp and Lucia? b…

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Peter Benson Biography - (1956– ), The Levels, A Lesser Dependency, The Other Occupant, Odo's Hanging, Riptide

British novelist, born in Broadstairs, Kent. He was living in Dorset, where he worked as a basketmaker, when his first novel, The Levels (1987), was published. The novel is a subtle adolescent romance set in the Dorset countryside, with rich resonances of folklore and myth. His interest in archetypal structure and his keen novelistic intelligence are displayed in A Lesser Dependency (1988), a more…

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Edmund Clerihew Bentley Biography - (1875–1956), Daily News, Daily Telegraph, Biography for Beginners, Trent's Last Case

British Journalist and writer of detective fiction and light verse, born in London, educated at Merton College, Oxford. He was called to the Bar in 1902 but subsequently became a journalist on the Daily News and on the Daily Telegraph, where he was leader writer from 1912 to 1934. In Biography for Beginners (1905), illustrated by his lifelong friend G. K. Chesterton, he invented the epigrammatic v…

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Phyllis Bentley Biography - (1894–1977), Environment, Carr, Inheritance, A Man of His Time, A Modern Tragedy, Manhold

British novelist, born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College and the University of London. She wrote nearly thirty books, including nineteen novels, many of them set in the West Riding of Yorkshire, including Environment (1922), her first novel, and Carr (1929). Success first came with Inheritance (1932), which began a saga about the Oldroyd family of mill owners cover…

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Bernard Berenson Biography - (1865–1959), The Venetian Painters, The Florentine Painters, The Central Italian Painters, The North Italian Painters

American art historian, born near Vilnius in Lithuania; from 1875 onward he grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and was educated at Harvard. As a student he was influenced in the eventual formulation of his theories concerning the tactile and spatial values of art by William James's emphasis on the primarily subjective nature of aesthetic experience. In 1887 he left America, travelling widely in Eur…

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John Berger (John Peter Berger) Biography - (1926– ), (John Peter Berger), Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing, The Success and Failure of Picasso

British novelist, artist, and art critic, born in Stoke Newington, London, educated at London's Central School of Art and Chelsea School of Art. Among his influential works as an art critic are Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing (1960), The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the U.S.S.R (1969), The Moment of Cubism and Other Essay…

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Thomas Berger Biography - (1924– ), Crazy in Berlin, Reinhart in Love, Vital Parts, Reinhart's Women, Little Big Man

American novelist, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, educated at the University of Cincinnati and Columbia University. His first novel, Crazy in Berlin (1958), introduced the figure of Carlos Reinhart, who reappears in Reinhart in Love (1961), Vital Parts (1970), and Reinhart's Women (1982). Reinhart moves through the world encapsulated in the bubble of the American dream, an innocent and honest man conti…

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Bernard Bergonzi Biography - (1929– ), The Early H. G. Wells, Heroes' Twilight, T. S. Eliot

British critic, born in London; he left school at 15 to work as a clerk. He was subsequently educated at Newbattle Abbey College, Dalkeith, and Wadham College, Oxford. In 1971 he became Professor of English at the University of Warwick. The Early H. G. Wells (1961) was the first of his numerous works of criticism, which also include Heroes' Twilight (1965), a study of the literature of the First W…

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Anthony Berkeley, pseudonym of Anthony Berkeley Cox Biography - (1893–1971), pseudonym of Anthony Berkeley Cox, Punch, Brenda Entertains, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times

British crime writer, born in Watford, educated at University College, London. He contributed to Punch, and under his own name published several comic novels (e.g. Brenda Entertains, 1925); as Francis Iles he reviewed crime and other fiction for the Daily Telegraph and later the Sunday Times and Manchester Guardian. The Layton Court Mystery (1925) was the first of a series of bright and amusing de…

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Steven Berkoff Biography - (1937– ), The Penal Colony, Metamorphosis, The Trial, Agamemnon, Fall of the House of Usher, Salome, East

British dramatist, born in London, educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School; he studied mime at the ?cole Jacques Le Coq, Paris, finished his training for the stage at the Webber-Douglas Academy in London, and has since frequently appeared in adaptations and original plays written by himself. His work has always been notable for the opportunities it offers actors for bravura physical invention. It…

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Sir Isaiah Berlin Biography - (1909–1997), Historical Inevitability, Two Concepts of Liberty, Four Essays on Liberty

British moral and political philosopher and historian of ideas, born at Riga in Latvia, the son of a timber merchant, educated at St Paul's School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, gaining his MA in 1935. Throughout his career he has lectured at Oxford, and was President of Wolfson College from 1966 to 1975. He has also held numerous visiting professorships in the USA and was President of the Br…

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Charles Bernstein Biography - (1950– ), L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E

American poet, born in New York, educated at Harvard; he became David Gray Professor of Poetry at the State University of New York at Buffalo, successor to Robert Creeley. Editor of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E with Bruce Andrews, editor of The Politics of Poetic Form (1990), author of two collections of essays Content's Dream (1986) and A Poetics (1992), he has done as much as anyone to publicize and theorize…

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James Berry Biography - (1924– ), Fractured Circles, Lucy's Letter and Loving, Chain of Days

British poet, born in Boston, Jamaica; he arrived in London in 1948. After years of working as a telegraphist (1951?77), he became a full-time writer. He conducts writing workshops at comprehensive schools and has taken an active interest in multicultural education. Rooted in Jamaican proverbs and folklore, and imbued with avuncular wisdom, many of his poems are in Creole dialect, or Nation Langua…

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Wendell Berry (Wendell Erdman Berry) Biography - (1934– ), (Wendell Erdman Berry), Nathan Coulter, A Place on Earth, The Memory of Old Jack, Remembering

American poet, novelist, and essayist, born in Henry Country, Kentucky, educated at the University of Kentucky, where he became Distinguished Professor of English in 1971. The intensity of his writing's involvement with the human and natural characters of his native locality has gained him recognition as one of the leading regional writers of the twentieth century. Nathan Coulter (1960), A Place o…

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John Berryman Biography - (1914–72), Five Young American Poets, Poems, The Dispossessed, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, The Waste Land

American poet, born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma; his father committed suicide in 1926 and he subsequently adopted his stepfather's name. He was educated at Columbia University, New York, and at Clare College, Cambridge. From 1939 onwards he was a lecturer and latterly a professor at various American universities, notably the University of Minnesota. His poems began appearing in periodicals i…

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Bestsellers (and ‘Bestsellerism’) - (and ‘Bestsellerism’), The Bookman, Publisher's Weekly, In His Steps, Gone with the Wind

are particularly associated with the twentieth-century American book trade. The practice of systematically identifying certain books as noteworthy for the speed and volume of their sales began with the American monthly magazine The Bookman, and its editor, Harry Thurston Peck, in 1895. The magazine was the first to list a selection of new titles, ?in order of demand?. In the 1890s, the fiction bes…

5 minute read

Ursula Bethell (Mary Ursula Bethell) (pseudonym, Evelyn Hayes) Biography - (1874–1945), (Mary Ursula Bethell) (pseudonym, Evelyn Hayes), From a Garden in the Antipodes

New Zealand poet, born in Rangiora near Christchurch, educated at schools in Oxford and Geneva. From 1890 until 1908 Bethell worked with the poor and underprivileged as a member of an Anglican community in London and returned to New Zealand after the First World War. At the age of about 50 she began writing. Her poetry is characterized by a plainness and spareness (as well as freshness of image) w…

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Sir John Betjeman Biography - (1906–84), Summoned by Bells, Architectural Review, Mount Zion, Continual Dew, New Bats in Old Belfries

British poet, born in Highgate, London; his childhood and youth are described in detail in his blank-verse autobiography Summoned by Bells (1960). He was educated at Highgate Junior School, where T. S. Eliot was among his teachers, at Marlborough College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became well acquainted with W. H. Auden and Maurice Bowra; he impressed the latter with his ?extraordi…

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Between the Acts - To the Lighthouse

V. Woolf's last novel, published posthumously in 1941. Unrevised, it is constructed in short scenes of dialogue, dramatic speech, and fragmentary descriptions with recurring motifs. It expresses Woolf's interest at this time in an English history made up of a community of obscure, ordinary lives, in the possibility of anonymity of the author, in the relation between groups and individuals (she was…

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Beyond the Horizon - Beyond the Horizon, Birthright

a three-act tragedy by Eugene O'Neill, first produced in 1920 when it won a Pulitzer Prize. Often regarded as the play which marks the onset of serious modern American drama, Beyond the Horizon is an exploration of the bondage of family life which constrains the ambitions of its central characters. In addition, it offers an early version of a characteristic figure of O'Neill's theatre, the would-b…

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