Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
a play by Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones), first performed in 1964 off-Broadway to immediate acclaim. Divided into two scenes, the play's setting is a New York subway carriage, ?In the flying underbelly of the city. Steaming hot, and summer on top, outside. Underground. The subway heaped in modern myth.? Clay, a respectable young black passenger, becomes a victim of a lynching. Lula, his …
American feminist writer, critical commentator, and political activist, born in Camden, New Jersey, educated at Bennington College. Active in women's campaigns throughout the USA, Dworkin has associated herself with the anti-pornography campaign. Her impassioned, and frequently controversial, writings attempt to lay bare the nature of patriarchal control; above all she sees such control expressed …
American songwriter and singer, born in Duluth, Minnesota, educated at the University of Minnesota. Originally named Robert Zimmerman, he became known as Bob Dylan in 1962. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) and The Times They Are A'Changin' (1964) made him internationally famous as the leading ?protest singer? of the day. Much of his most impressive work was recorded on Highway 61 Revisited (1965)…
subtitled ?an epic-drama of the war with Napoleon, in three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes?: a verse-drama by Thomas Hardy, published in three parts: 1904; 1906; and 1908. It is an extraordinary mixture of prose and poetry, epic and drama, incorporating narrative, theatrical, and even cinematic techniques. The first part of the work centres on the figure of Napoleon and con…
British critic, born in Salford, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge; he became Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. A lively and committed literary reviewer, Eagleton's abiding interest, as a Marxist from a working-class Catholic background, has been in what he calls the politics of power, and more precisely, in the influence of buried or denied historical conditions on works of a…
a novel by Anthony Burgess, published in 1980. Narrated by Kenneth Toomey, an ageing homosexual and celebrated novelist, the story covers six decades and a vast geographical area. It is driven by a strong moral anger belied by the wit and humour of much of the book and the acknowledged decadence of its narrator. The first part portrays a society flawed and fallen, made evident in the developing tr…
American novelist, born in New York. He spent four years in the army, attended the Alliance Fran?aise in Paris, and later settled on a 300-acre cattle ranch in Cuba, New Mexico. There are three strands to his writing, the least important being his political work in A Child's Garden of Verses for the Revolution (1970) and The Long Naked Descent into Boston (1977). The second strand is his remarkabl…
Native American writer, born in Minesota of mixed Sioux Indian and white parentage, educated at Dartmouth and Boston University Medical School. Eastman was one of the first Native American writers to achieve a mass popular audience through his magazine accounts of Indian life and customs, and volumes such as Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904) and Old Indian Days (1907). He has also inspired …
American political writer and critic, born in Canandaigua, New York, educated at Williams College and Columbia University, where he taught philosophy between 1907 and 1911. In 1912 he became editor of the socialist periodical The Masses and subsequently edited the pro-Soviet Liberator. His enthusiasm for the Soviet system was subdued by a visit to Russia during Stalin's ascendancy to power. Since …
American poet, born in Austin, Minnesota, educated at the universities of Minnesota, Dartmouth, Cambridge, and Harvard. Eberhart spent eight years as a school teacher in Southboro where one of his pupils was Robert Lowell. At Cambridge in the late 1920s he became acquainted with the critical theories of William Empson, and of I. A. Richards who encouraged him as a poet. Eberhart's first book of po…
British playwright, born in Birmingham, the son of a television producer, educated at Manchester University. His first plays, mostly pieces of radical agitprop, were produced in Bradford while he was working there as a journalist; he continued in broadly the same vein until the mid-1970s, producing such work as the anti-Common Market A Fart for Europe (1972) and a Shakespearian parody about Richar…
a quarterly literary magazine begun in 1969 as the New Edinburgh Review, the title alluding to the Edinburgh Review (1802?1929), to which many of the major writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed. David Cubitt was the first editor of the New Edinburgh Review, which was published by students of Edinburgh University and contained poetry, short stories, and reviews of book…
New Zealand poet, born in Hawkes Bay, educated there at Wellington Teachers' College and at Waikato University, Hamilton. Having married and produced five children Edmond was 51 when her first book appeared. Her collections include In Middle Air (1975), The Pear Tree: Poems (1977), Wellington Letter (1980), Seven Poems (1980), Salt from the North (1980), Catching It (1980), Selected Poems (1984), …
New Zealand poet, playwright, and critic, born in Hamilton, educated at the University of Auckland. He has since worked in the theatre while continuing to write poetry. Edmond was published in Landfall while still at school, and in the early 1970s he was the editor of several issues of the ?messianic? and important though short-lived magazine The Word is Freed, which was very much the vehicle of a…
British novelist, born in Sheffield, educated at Hull University; he became a full-time writer in 1982. His novels A Season of Peace (1985) and Across the Autumn Grass (1986) were published under his original name. Winter Garden (1985), the first of his novels as Edric, won the James Tait Black Award, and displayed his masterful handling of the complex and sinisterly comic narratives often charact…
an autobiography by Henry (Brooks) Adams, privately printed in 1907 and posthumously published in 1918. Generally ranked as one of the most distinguished autobiographies, its subtitle, ?A Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity?, describes Adams's purpose; he employs a series of selected moments from his life in order to illustrate his highly privileged existence and to set out his dynamic theorie…
Nigerian novelist and short-story writer, educated at the University of Iowa and Howard University, Washington, DC. He lived in England from 1961 to 1973, where he became involved in the Black Power movement. Radical and impassioned, Destroy This Temple: The Voice of Black Power in Britain (1971) describes his spell on remand in Brixton Prison and the general political turmoil during this time. Th…
a literary periodical strongly associated with the development of Modernism in England from 1914 to 1919. Dora Marsden had formed the Freewoman in 1911, a magazine devoted to issues facing the ?new woman? and to philosophical discussion; in 1913 it became the New Freewoman, subtitled An Individualist Review, and attracted the attention of Ezra Pound, who persuaded Marsden that innovative literary …
Nigerian novelist and short-story writer, born in Minna, Northern Nigeria, educated at the Universities of Ibadan and Ghana, and at the Chelsea School of Pharmacy, University of London. He has also been a lecturer and broadcaster, and has served with the Federal Ministry of Information, Lagos, and the Bureau of External Publicity in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War. Ekwensi is generally recogn…
American poet, critic, and dramatist, the son of a successful businessman of New England descent, born in St Louis, Missouri, where he attended the Smith Academy, contributing poems and stories to the school's magazine. In 1906 he entered Harvard, studying literature, history, and philosophy as an undergraduate and taking a master's degree in English Literature; among his teachers was Irving Babbi…
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Brooklyn, New York City, educated at the University of Illinois. Elkin has been described as a ?major Jewish-American post- modernist? although his reputation has been somewhat eclipsed by other Jewish writers such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth. His first novel, Boswell (1964), revealed his striking talent for absurdist black hum…
British poet, born in Liverpool; he spent his childhood in the north of England and the USA, and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. Among other posts, he has been a librarian in Britain, Europe, and the Middle East. The first of his principal collections of poetry, Contentions (1978), was followed by subsequent volumes including Talking Back (1982); On the Appian Way (1984), a long sequence re…
British novelist, born in Derby, educated at St Anne's College, Oxford. She worked as a journalist in London until she became a freelance writer in 1962. She achieved wide recognition with her ?England Trilogy?, A State of Peace (1971), Private Life (1972), and Heaven on Earth (1975), which depicts the social and cultural character of England in the years immediately following the Second World War…
British novelist, born in Liverpool, educated at Bangor Grammar School and Liverpool School of Art. The landscapes of North Wales, where she grew up, form the background to many of her short, poignant, and witty novels, the first of which was The Sin Eater (1977). Roman Catholicism, to which she is a convert, is an important influence on her vision, as is a strong sense of tragedy, which invariabl…
American novelist, born in Los Angeles, educated at Bennington College, Vermont. His first novel, Less than Zero (1985), was published while the author was still a student and portrayed disaffected 1980s' youth, preoccupied with drugs, casual sex, and money, against a background of affluent Los Angeles society. The book was subsequently made into a film. Similar themes recur in Rules of Attraction…
British writer, born in Croydon, Surrey. His early travels to Australia were reflected in his novel Kanga Creek (1922). He later trained as a physician at St Thomas's Hospital, London. During this time he contributed to journals and edited the unexpurgated Mermaid Series of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists as well as the Contemporary Science Series. He was an energetic campaigner for a more lib…
African-American novelist and essayist, born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He studied music at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, and worked for some time as a jazz musician before going to New York City in the late 1930s to pursue a career in sculpture; there he met Richard Wright, who encouraged him to write. In 1939 Ellison began to write in earnest with the New York Federal Writers' Project, and in 19…
American crime novelist, born in Los Angeles. After serving in the US Army he drifted through a series of jobs, living for some time as a down-and-out before taking up writing. Perhaps the darkest of all ?hardboiled? writers, Ellroy's novels portray Los Angeles and its inhabitants since the 1940s. His vision of contemporary life, like that of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, is one in which crime a…
British historian, born at T?bingen, Germany. After his family moved to Britain in the late 1930s he was educated at Rydal School, Colwyn Bay, and the University of London. Originally surnamed ?Ehrenberg?, he adopted ?Elton? as his name in 1944 while serving with British military intelligence. From 1949 onward he taught at Cambridge University, where he became Regius Professor of Modern History in…
Nigerian-born British novelist, born in Lagos, educated at the University of London; she took up residence in Britain in 1962. Her first two novels, In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974), are semiautobiographical. The first novel chronicles the struggles of Adah, Nigerian mother of five, to raise her children in poverty in North London, while working on a degree in Sociology, and sep…
a play by Eugene O'Neill, published in 1920. His first great success in the theatre, it is an experiment in theatrical expressionism, about the rise and fall of Brutus Jones, a former Pullman porter and escaped prisoner who flees to a West Indian island where he establishes himself as emperor. His regime is brutal, corrupt, and dictatorial, and he is warned by a white Cockney trader, Smithers, of …
British poet and critic, born at Yokefleet Hall near Howden, Yorkshire, educated at Magadalene College, Cambridge, where he initially read mathematics and went on to study English. In lieu of essays, Empson was permitted by I. A. Richards, his supervisor, to submit a dissertation which formed the core of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), the range and fluency of which established his reputation as …
the most notable of the periodicals devoted to the theatre during the post-war decades. It was first published in 1954 by students of the Central College of Speech and Drama; Robert Pinker, Clive Goodwin, and Vanessa Redgrave were founding members of its editorial board. The magazine quickly attracted wide notice after it published Sean O'Casey's controversial treatment of Beckett's Waiting for Go…
a magazine of political, cultural, and literary commentary begun in 1953 under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organization opposed to communism, which intended Encounter as a forum for the expression of unified Anglo-American opinion. It was originally edited by Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender, both of whom had renounced their former Marxism; Kristol was predominant…
a play by Samuel Beckett, originally written in French and published and performed as Fin de Partie in 1957; it was translated into English by the author and published and performed under its present name in 1958. Its two main characters are the blind Hamm, who sits immobile in an armchair, and Clov, who may be his son and may simply be his servant. Its two subsidiary ones are Hamm's grotesque par…
a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1951. Like much fiction concerned with wartime experience, it juxtaposes present loss and remembered fulfilment. These contrasts are sharpened by complexities of structure and point of view unusual in Greene's writing and owed, he suggests, to the influence of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. Chapters in the first section enact the wish of the narrator?th…
Canadian novelist and short-story writer, born in Toronto; Engel spent her early years in Ontario and attended the Universities of McMaster, where she studied modern languages, and McGill, before winning a scholarship to study French literature in Aix-en-Provence. She subsequently worked in London and Cyprus, a period of her life which provided the inspiration for her novel Monodromos (1973; reiss…