American poet (who wrote as ?H.D.?), the daughter of a professor of mathematics, born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and educated at Bryn Mawr College. As a student she was closely associated with Marianne Moore, W. C. Williams, and Ezra Pound, to whom she was briefly engaged and of whom she writes extensively in the autobiographical End to Torment (written in 1958, but not published until 1979). Whi…
American poet, born in Villa Grove, Illinois, educated at the University of Illinois. Dorn's childhood in the Great Depression was marked by the transient migrant life of his impoverished mother and stepfather. He became disaffected from the orthodoxies of the state educational system, and went to Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he came under the influence of Charles Olson, whose A B…
Native American novelist, critic, and anthropologist of the Modoc Tribe, born in Dayton, Washington, educated at Georgetown University and Yale; in 1983 he was appointed professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth. In 1971 Dorris became the first unmarried man to adopt a child; the story of his son's life is juxtaposed with an account of the physical, mental, and social devastation caused by…
American novelist, poet, and playwright, born in Chicago, educated at Harvard. He contributed to various magazines whilst at Harvard, some of his college verse being published later in Eight Harvard Poets (1917). His father sought to prevent him from joining an American ambulance unit in 1916 by financing a year of architectural study in Spain, yet he enlisted in the famous Norton-Harjes ambulance…
British travel writer and poet, born in Suffolk; he studied geology at Caius College, Cambridge. In 1870 he began travelling in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; after a year in Damascus learning Arabic, he joined a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1876, undergoing much hardship before his journey concluded at Jedda in 1878. His experiences were recorded in Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888); apart f…
British poet, born near Worcester, educated at Winchester and at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1891 he was introduced to Oscar Wilde by Lionel Johnson. Douglas's father, the Marquis of Queensbury, disapproved of the relationship which developed and precipitated the sequence of events leading to Wilde's imprisonment in 1895. Douglas's translation from the original French of Wilde's Salome appeared w…
American novelist, born in Mississippi, where she has spent most of her life. Her constant themes are the position of women and the relationship between black and white, using her considerable powers of observation of life in Mississippi to come to more universal conclusions. Her first novel, A Family's Affairs (1962), drawing on her own family, was followed by a volume of related novellas and sto…
British poet, born at Tunbridge Wells, Kent; he began writing poems at the age of ten. He was educated at Merton College, Oxford, where Edmund Blunden was his tutor. From 1937 onwards his work appeared in a variety of periodicals, including Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse. He was posted to the Middle East in 1941 and became a tank commander in the North African Campaign, during which much of his fine…
British travel writer and novelist, born at Th?ringen in the Vorarlberg, Austria, a region he describes in the autobiographical Together (1923), educated at Uppingham School, which he found uncongenial, and Karlsruhe Gymnasium. Following a period in the British Foreign Service, from 1898 onward he lived chiefly in Capri and Florence. Between 1910 and 1916 he was in London and spent three years as …
American poet, born in Akron, Ohio, educated at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the University of T?bingen in Germany, and the University of Iowa where she studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. A professor of English at Arizona State University, Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1987 for her volume Thomas and Beulah: Poems (1986), an extended sequence of poems describing the lives …
an autobiographical work by George Orwell, published in 1933. Down and Out was Orwell's first book, and its mixture of autobiographical insight, social criticism, and descriptive bravura make it an early index of the way his ?uvre was to pull in a number of directions. The reflective asides on the social position of the Paris plongeur and of the British tramp are easily detached from a vigorous na…
British writer of detective and historical fiction, of Irish descent, born in Edinburgh, educated at Stonyhurst and the University of Edinburgh, where he studied medicine. After a brief and unsatisfactory medical partnership with a friend in Plymouth?The Stark?Munro Letters (1895) gives a fictionalized account of the episode?he practised in Southsea from 1882 to 1890, and later served as an army p…
poet, an Irishman born in Birmingham, and educated at Victoria University College, British Columbia, the University of New Zealand, and Auckland University; he served in the Royal Navy in 1945?54. For many years he was Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, British Columbia (and, prior to 1970, published under his original name, Charles Doyle). His first poetry collection, A…
Irish novelist and playwright, born in Dublin, educated at University College, Dublin. He became a teacher at Greendale Community School, Dublin, in 1980. Like his contemporary, Dermot Bolger, Doyle is concerned with the people who live on the housing estates of north Dublin. However, his work differs from that of the more surreal Bolger in approaching its subject with a vibrant humour and gentlen…
British novelist, born in Sheffield, educated at The Mount School, York and Newnham College, Cambridge. She has lectured at home and abroad for the Arts Council and the British Council. Drabble's novels are traditional in form, displaying the author's allegiance to the Realist tradition of George Eliot and Arnold Bennett (of whom she published a biography in 1974), although latterly a note of iron…
a body of 385 poems by John Berryman, initially published as 77 Dream Songs (1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest: 308 Dream Songs (1968) and collected as The Dream Songs in 1969. Each poem consists of three six-line stanzas which make variable use of rhyme and employ a wide range of rhythmic effects. The sequence relies for its continuity on the presence of ?Henry?, generally regarded as a quas…
American novelist, born in Terre Haute, Indiana, into an impoverished Catholic family. Despite a largely negative and irregular pattern of formal education, he became a journalist for newspapers in St Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York. He drew frequently on the social and economic vicissitudes of his own large family for the material of his early novels, and his powers of keen observation g…
Australian writer, born in Melbourne. He travelled in China, India, the Philippines, the Pacific, and Japan as a journalist; he also worked as literary editor for the Australian and has written for the Age and the Bulletin. His first novel, The Savage Crows (1976), tells the story of Stephen, a young journalist researching into the life of the nineteenth-century Protector of Aborigines in Tasmania…
British poet and playwright, born in Leytonstone, Essex; he grew up in north Oxfordshire, whence the predominantly rural imagery of much of his poetry derives, and was educated at Oxford High School. He began writing poetry while working as a clerk in insurance offices in Nottingham and Birmingham, and became manager of the Birmingham Repertory Company upon its formation in 1913. He directed and a…
a South African magazine which began publication as The African Drum primarily for a white readership. Jim Bailey took over the journal in 1951. Under the editorship of Anthony Sampson, and subsequently of Sylvester Stein (1956?7) and Tom Hopkinson (1958?61), Drum became almost legendary for its portrayal, addressed mainly to a black readership, of township life in and around Johannesburg, particu…
American playwright and historian, born in New York City, educated at Yale. He began his career as an actor and playwright; many of his plays were Off-Broadway productions, such as In White America (1963). His other dramatic works include Male Armor: Selected Plays 1968?1974 (1975), Visions of Kerouac (1977), and Mother Earth: An Epic Play on the Life of Emma Goldman (1991). Much of his early scho…
a volume of fifteen short stories by James Joyce. Begun in 1904, it was repeatedly rejected for publication, successively destroyed and then burnt by censorious printers, added to by its author, championed by George Russell (AE), Yeats, and Pound, and finally published with reluctance by Grant Richards in 1914. Naturalistic in style and easily accessible by Joyce's standards, Dubliners represents …
a literary periodical begun in 1923 by James Starkey, who was known as editor and contributor under his pseudonym ?Seamus O'Sullivan?. It was conceived of as providing a point of cultural detachment from the upheavals which accompanied the emergence of the Irish Free State, and Starkey maintained his policy of political nonalignment throughout his thirty-five years as editor. The first issue of th…
African-American historian, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, educated at Fisk University and Harvard. He began his academic career at Wilberforce University in 1894 and was subsequently a professor at Atlanta University. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896), Black Reconstruction (1935), on the achievements of African-Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War, and The World a…
a phrase coined by Black British poet Linton Kwesi Johnson to denote poems written to be performed with musical accompaniment. Dub Poetry is invariably more readily available on records than in books, a situation which evolved through the collaboration between poets and West Indian, or Black British, disc jockeys. Populist in appeal, Dub Poetry is often political, and performed in Creole, or what …
New Zealand novelist, sister of the poet Fleur Adcock, born in Auckland, educated in England and Wellington, including part-time attendance at Wellington University. Her first novel, A Gap in the Spectrum (1959), a science-fiction exploration of a woman's dependency, was published when she was 23 and established the fictional terrain of her early work: the constricting roles ascribed to women are …
Canadian poet, born in Montreal, Quebec, educated at McGill and Columbia Universities. In 1951 he began teaching at McGill University, where he became Professor of English in 1969. Throughout his career at McGill he initiated various publishing ventures, which include the McGill Poetry series (1956?66) and the Delta Canada Press (1967??). East of the City (1946) was his first collection of verse. …
British poet, born in Glasgow; she grew up in Staffordshire, and studied philosophy at the University of Liverpool, a city reflected in a number of her poems. Two of her plays, Take My Husband and Cavern of Dreams, were produced at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1982 and 1984 respectively. She became poetry editor for Ambit magazine in 1983 and has worked as a writer-in-residence at various schools an…
British novelist, poet, and playwright, born in Worthing, Sussex, educated at King's College, London. She worked as a schoolteacher and in adult education between 1951 and 1960, when she became a freelance writer. That's How It Was (1960), her substantially autobiographical first novel, was acclaimed for its portrayal of the relationship between an illegitimate child and her impoverished mother. H…
New Zealand shortstory writer, born in Auckland, and educated at Auckland University. His first collection, Immanuel's Land (1956), contained work mostly written in Europe during 1949?53 and included the extended piece ?The Voyage?. Summer in the Gravel Pit (1965) contained the fine story ?Along the Rideout Road that Summer?. At his best Duggan showed mastery of a complex format of interrelated st…
British philosopher, born in London, educated at Winchester and at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1950 he was elected a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and was a senior research fellow from 1974 to 1979, when he was appointed Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford. He has also held numerous visiting posts in the USA and elsewhere. His early publications include Frege and the Philosophy of Language (…
African-American novelist, playwright, and poet, born in Dayton, Ohio, educated at Dayton High School. Dunbar was one of the most important black American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in part because of his singular contributions to dialect verse. He began writing poetry whilst working as a lift operator in an office building in Dayton and his first volume of verse…
African-American writer, born in New Orleans, educated at Straight University (now Dillard University). Dunbar-Nelson pursued many different careers in addition to her writing. She served as the secretary of the National Association of Colored Women; as an English teacher and the head of the English Department at Howard High School; she co-founded the Delaware Industrial School for Colored Girls; …
American poet, born in Oakland, California, educated at the University of California, Berkeley. As an editor of the Experimental Review in 1940 and 1941 he published work by Henry Miller, Ana?s Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Kenneth Patchen, and others. Heavenly City, Earthly City (1947), his first collection of verse, reflected his admiration for the work of George Barker, whose mystical and rhetorical q…
British poet and novelist, born in Beverley, Yorkshire, educated at York University. Her first volume of poems, The Apple Fall (1983), was praised for its rhythmical assurance which is a characteristic of her verse. The Sea Skater (1986) fuses personal and familial experience with more general socio-cultural themes, which are conveyed by precise and fluent successions of images. Further volumes in…
Scottish poet, born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, educated at the Scottish School of Librarianship in Glasgow and the University of Hull; he subsequently worked in the University's Brynmor Jones Library as an assistant librarian under Philip Larkin, with whom he became well acquainted. He was a freelance writer from 1971 to 1991, when he was appointed to a professorship at the University of St Andre…
British novelist and dramatist, born in London, and educated at a convent school. Her collection of realistic interlinked short stories, Up the Junction (1963), and her novel, Poor Cow (1967), were considered sensational at the time. Both are about the constrained lives of independent-minded working-class women in London. The novel focuses on Joy, and her relationship with her husband, a professio…
Irish dramatist and short-story writer, of Anglo-Irish parentage, born in London, educated at Eton and Sandhurst. He was a friend of Yeats, Gogarty, and Lady Gregory and others associated with the Irish Revival. His first play, The Glittering Gate (performed 1909), was published in Five Plays (1914) together with other fantasies showing the influence of Maurice Maeterlinck; other plays appeared in…
Irish poet, born in Dublin, educated at University College, Cork. His numerous collections of poetry have included Teresa's Bar (1976), Jesus, Break His Fall (1982), Jumping the Train Tracks with Angela (1983), The Berlin Wall Caf? (1985), Going Home to Russia (1987), Jesus and Angela (1988), and Daddy, Daddy (1990). The lavishly produced In the Land of Punt (1988) is a collaboration between Durca…
British novelist, poet, and travel writer, born in Julundur, India, educated at St Edmund's School. From 1934 onward he spent most of his life in Mediterranean locations, working as a journalist, for the British Foreign Service, and for the British Council between 1940 and 1957, when he achieved financial independence as a writer. His early novels, which include Pied Piper of Lovers (1935) and Cef…