Australian writer, born in Victoria, the son of Irish emigrants. He left school early to work on his father's farm and subsequently worked as a gold-digger, labourer, and teamster, before hardship forced him to work in his brother's foundry. A self-made but widely read individualist, Furphy possessed an idiosyncratic familiarity with the literary classics (including the Bible) which he used to gre…
a radically innovative movement in literature and the graphic arts begun in Italy by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876?1944), whose Futurist Manifesto of 1909 called for the exalted participation of the arts in the dynamically mechanistic ethos of modernity. The Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910) by Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and others emphasized flux and movement as essentials of representat…
American novelist, born in New York City, educated at Harvard. After a period of travel in Europe he published The Recognitions (1955), a complex, experimental, satirical novel whose settings range from nineteenth-century New England to Central America and contemporary New York, and whose central figure is the artist turned faker Wyatt Gwyon, who prostitutes his talent in the service of the demoni…
African-American novelist, born in Oscar, Louisiana, educated at San Francisco State College and Stanford University, California. Among other academic posts he was Professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette. Gaines has been compared to William Faulkner in his focus on one small area of the American South, describing the people of southern Louisiana including those …
American Keynesian, economist born in Ontario, Canada, educated at the universities of Toronto, California, and Cambridge. His distinguished career has ranged from academic posts (he was Professor of Economics at Harvard) to journalism (he edited Fortune), government service (he directed the Strategic Bombing Survey after the Second World War), and diplomat (he was United States Ambassador to Indi…
British novelist, born on the Isle of Wight, educated at Winchester and at New College, Oxford. His first novel, The Aerodynamics of Pork (1986), was followed by Ease (1986), and Kansas in August (1987), a romantic comedy involving a young gay man, his sister, and the lover they both share. Other novels include Facing the Tank (1988) and Little Bits of Baby (1989). In The Cat's Sanctuary (1990), G…
Canadian writer, born in Montreal, brought up in Quebec, Ontario and the USA, before returning to Canada in 1941. She then worked with the National Film Board and became a feature writer with the Montreal Standard. During the 1950s she moved to Paris, but Canada frequently features in her writings. She has published several collections of stories, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker and…
British novelist and playwright, born in Coombe, Surrey, the son of a wealthy solicitor; he studied jurisprudence at New College, Oxford. From 1890 to 1895, when he became a full-time writer, he practised as a barrister and travelled extensively; in the course of a voyage in 1892, he began a lasting friendship with Joseph Conrad. His early works, all published under the pseudonym ?John Sinjohn?, i…
British novelist, born in Coatham, Yorkshire, educated at Bedford College, London University. Her first published work, A Few Fair Days (1971), was a children's book based on her own childhood experiences on the north-east coast of England. She has written several other children's books; her novels A Long Way from Verona (1971), The Summer After the Funeral (1973), and Bilgewater (1977), all with …
American detective story writer, born in Malden, Massachusetts, and after an adventurous youth admitted to the California Bar in 1911. From 1923 he combined law with writing, contributing hundreds of stories under many pseudonyms to pulp mystery and Western magazines. After the success of his first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933), which introduced his best-known detective, the Los Angel…
British scholar, critic, and editor, born in London, educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she taught before becoming Oxford's Merton Professor of English Literature from 1966 until her retirement in 1975. Among her early works was The Art of T. S. Eliot (1949), a subject to which she returned in T. S. Eliot and the English Poetic Tradition (1965) and the highly regarded The Composition of…
American novelist, poet, short-story writer, editor, and critic, born in Batavia, New York, educated at De Pauw University, Washington University, and the University of Iowa. Gardner successfully combined the life of the teacher and scholar (particularly of medieval and classical literature) with those of novelist, editor, translator, and librettist. After finishing his doctorate at the University…
Scottish poet, originally named Robert Garioch Sutherland; he was born in Edinburgh, where he was educated at the university. After a long career as a schoolteacher in England and the east of Scotland, in 1965 he returned to the University of Edinburgh as a lexicographer and transcriber in the School of Scottish Studies. Garioch's poetry is largely written in Scots, out of his stated intention of …
American novelist and short-story writer, born in West Salem, Wisconsin, educated at Cedar Valley Seminary, Osage, Iowa. Garland is an important figure in the history of American literary realism and one of the foremost exponents of ?local-colorism? or regionalism in American fiction at the turn of the century. In 1884 he moved to Boston where he began his literary and intellectual education, imme…
British poet, born in London, educated at University College of North Wales. After working as a schoolteacher in Wales, he taught in the Netherlands from 1960 to 1967, when he became a senior lecturer at Trinity College, Carmarthen. In 1949 he founded the magazine Dock Leaves, later known as The Anglo-Welsh Review, which, until its disappearance in 1988, was one of the principal forums for Anglo-W…
Australian novelist and short-story writer, born in Victoria, educated at the University of Melbourne. Her dismissal from her teaching job in a Melbourne secondary school in 1972, for using explicit language when answering her pupils' questions about sex, became a cause c?l?bre. She later worked as a journalist, reviewer, and actress, and lived in Paris for a number of years. She achieved immediat…
Canadian novelist and short-story writer, born in Batley, Yorkshire, and taken to Canada when he was six. Garner is regarded as one of the major exponents of realism in Canadian fiction. During the 1930s he travelled in the West, eking out a living from whatever temporary employment he could find, and fought for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. His Second World War naval experiences provide…
British translator, born in Brighton, educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. A member of the Fabian Society, she worked as librarian at the People's Palace in the East End of London. In 1889 she married Edward Garnett, through whom she met Peter Kropotkin and other exiled Russian revolutionaries. From them she learned Russian in the months before the birth of her son, David Garnett, in 1892. The …
British novelist and critic, born in Brighton, the son of E. and C. Garnett, educated at the Royal College of Science. Prominent among the younger associates of the Bloomsbury Group, he was involved in a famous m?nage ? trois with Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell while working on the land as a conscientious objector during the First World War. He subsequently ran a bookshop in Soho. His greatest succ…
American poet, born in Evansville, Indiana, educated at the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa; she held a succession of posts as an instructor in English and poet-in-residence at numerous American colleges and universities, chiefly in the New York area. Her first collection of poetry, The Ego and the Centaur (1947), was acclaimed for the rich precision of diction and imagery which c…
British poet, born in Harrow, Middlesex, educated at Salisbury Cathedral Choir School and Regent Street Polytechnic. His first collection of poetry, Roman Balcony (1932), appeared when he was 16. Advance royalties on his novel Opening Day (1933) enabled him to travel to Paris in 1933, where the work of the surrealistes made a profound impression upon him. His A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935), w…
American novelist, short-story writer, and literary critic, born in Fargo, North Dakota, educated at Kenyon College, Ohio Wesleyan University, and Cornell University. For three years he studied philosophy at Cornell where he attended seminars led by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein which he later referred to as ?the most important intellectual experience of my life?. In 1950 he took up a teachi…
African-American critic, born in Keyser in West Virginia, educated at Yale and at Cambridge University where his tutor was Wole Soyinka. He became Professor of English at Duke University. Gates has contributed significantly to the increased accessibility of African-American writings, especially of the pre-twentieth-century period. In Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self (1987), Black…
British novelist, born in Poole, Dorset, educated at Somerville College, Oxford. Her first novel, Dying in Other Words (1981), a blackly comic meditation on death focusing around a group of Oxford students, was followed by The Burning Book (1983), an apocalyptic vision of nuclear holocaust, which received widespread critical acclaim. In 1983 she was selected as one of the Book Marketing Council's …
New Zealand novelist, born in Whakatane in the North Island, educated at the University of Auckland. Gee's first story was published in Landfall in 1955; his first book, The Big Season (1962), showed his interest in New Zealand small town life which he later developed to great effect. His early fiction includes A Special Flower (1965), My Father's Den (1972), and Games of Choice (1976). In his tri…
American dramatist, born in Chicago, educated at the University of Illinois. Gelber is chiefly famous for his play about drug addiction, The Connection (1959), produced by the Living Theatre in 1959 when it ran for over 700 performances. His other plays are The Apple (1961), Square in the Eye (1965), The Cuban Thing (1968), Sleep (1972), Barbary Shore (adapted from Norman Mailer's novel) (1973), F…
American novelist and journalist, born in St Louis, Missouri, educated at Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia. Her career began as Paris correspondent for the New Republic. Her fiction, which is noted for its clarity and directness, is invariably informed by her experiences as a journalist and traveller. The Trouble I've Seen (1936), a set of four novellas, originated in her investigations of urban po…
British dramatist, born in Hampshire, educated at Manchester University. She was in her forties, and had worked as a gardener and a research assistant at the BBC, when she began to write plays. Her best work has involved the place of women in society?and especially that of the woman of passion and energy in a society hostile to those things?and combines feminist conviction with openness of mind an…
originally the title of a series of five poetry anthologies produced between 1912 and 1922, the term is more generally applied to predominantly rural and stylistically conventional verse of the kind the books tended to contain. The series was conceived by Edward Marsh, who proposed to invigorate English poetry at a time when it remained dominated by late Victorian reputations; the title Georgian P…
British novelist, born in St Petersburg. He served in the British embassy at Petrograd, and the British military mission in Siberia during the First World War, after which he was educated at Worcester College, Oxford. There he wrote Anton Chehov (sic) (1923), the first book on Chekhov to be written in English, and his first novel, Futility: A Novel on Russian Themes (1922), which enjoyed a conside…
a novel by Henry Handel Richardson, published in 1910. The novel is based on the author's experiences as a boarder at the Presbyterian Ladies College, in Melbourne, during 1883 to 1887. It consists in a series of ironically depicted scenes whereby Laura Rambotham, ostracized by her teachers and peers because of her name, unusual clothes, and forthright opinions, painfully acquires wisdom about her…
Pakistani-American novelist and poet, born in Sialkot (now Pakistan); he lived in England from 1952 to 1969, and later became a professor at the University of Texas. He is the author of several volumes of poetry, including The Loss of India (1964), The Violent West (1972), and A Memory of Asia (1984); his Selected Poems were published in Pakistan in 1991. His first novel, The Contradictions (1966)…
Indian novelist, travel writer, and anthropologist, born in Calcutta, educated at Delhi University and at Oxford. His writings in all genres display his experiences of a variety of cultures. His first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), was praised by some critics for its spontaneity and vitality, but others found it derivative of Rushdie's Midnight's Children and the school of magic realism. His …
Scottish writer, born in Aberdeenshire; he grew up in Kincardineshire, the setting of his great trilogy, A Scots Quair (1932?4). He worked on the Aberdeen Journal and Scottish Farmer before joining the Royal Army Service Corps and the RAF, travelling extensively throughout Persia, India, and Egypt. His experiences enliven his early fiction, Hanno (1928), Stained Radiance (1930), and The Calends of…
British novelist and short-story writer, born in London, educated at University College, London. She worked for the Evening Standard, and as book reviewer for The Lady. The latter occupation presumably suggested the elements of literary parody that made her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), so successful. Its continuing popularity has obscured her other novels?she wrote over twenty, plus four…
British poet, born at Hexham, Northumberland, the upland landscapes and communities of which strongly inform much of his writing. He became a social worker in the East End of London in 1912, when he met Edward Marsh and Rupert Brooke; he developed a close friendship with the latter, who bequeathed him a share in his posthumous royalties. With Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drinkwater, in 1912 he f…
American novelist and screenwriter, born in Conway, British Columbia, educated at the University of British Columbia. He became renowned as the main inventor of Cyberpunk on the publication of his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), which is recognized as the seminal text of that movement. With this novel and its sequels Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Gibson has created a sense of …
a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1938. Generally considered the greatest of Nabokov's Russian works, The Gift was published as Dar in Paris (1937?8) under Nabokov's pseudonym of V. Sirin, though this edition lacked the fourth chapter which was not restored until the New York publication (again in Russian) in 1952; the English translation appeared in 1963. The novel explores one of Nabokov…
Australian part-Aboriginal writer, born in Condoblin, New South Wales. Orphaned at seven, and brought up in welfare homes and by relations, he worked as a labourer, and married early. Found guilty in 1956 of murdering his wife, Gilbert was sentenced to life imprisonment, and in this environment developed interests in both art and literature. On his parole in 1971, The Cherry Pickers (perf. 1971; p…
British biographer and historian, born in London, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1962 he became a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. From 1968 to 1988 Gilbert was engaged in completing the biography of Sir Winston Churchill, having formerly been research assistant to Randolph Churchill, the author of the first two volumes (1966, 1967); the subsequent six volumes appeared in 1971, 1975, 19…