African-American novelist, born in Trinidad; she grew up in Harlem, New York. After working in a clothing factory, she attended New York University and began writing through her involvement with the American Negro Theatre; her play Venetian Blind was produced in 1954. She was one of the founders of the Harlem Writers' Guild in 1950. Bird at My Window (1966), her first novel, forms an uncompromisin…
American poet, born in New York City, educated at Washington Square College of New York University and the Art Students League. In her first volume of poetry, Presentation Piece (1974; National Book Award, 1975), and in Separations (1976), Hacker begins to articulate her dissatisfaction with woman's traditional roles. Taking Notice (1980) and Assumptions (1985) contain reflections on the women in …
British-Canadian novelist, born in Luton, Bedforshire, he left school at fourteen to work as a clerk and emigrated to Canada in 1947 after serving in the RAF throughout the Second World War. He worked in commercial capacities until 1956, when he became a full-time writer, initially of television plays. Flight into Danger (1956), his first novel, drew its factual authenticity from Hailey's experien…
British geneticist and writer, born in Oxford, educated at New College, Oxford; he was successively professor of genetics and of biometry at University College, London. His The Causes of Evolution (1932) was one of the most influential works on evolutionary theory of its day. During the 1930s he became a Communist and wrote brilliant articles for the Communist paper the Daily Worker, of which he w…
American poet, essayist, and editor, born in New Haven, Connecticut, educated at Harvard University, Oxford University, where he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem ?Exiles?, and Stanford University. He later became a professor at Michigan University. He has published poetry prolifically, from the more traditional metres, rhythms, and formalism of his early collections To the Loud Wind, and Other…
British novelist and ]poet, born in Bournemouth; she was privately educated and spent one year at King's College, London. She established herself as a minor poet of note with numerous collections of accomplished lyric verse, among which are 'Twixt Earth and Stars (1906) and Songs of Three Counties (1913). Two of her early novels, The Forge (1924) and A Saturday Life (1925), are mild satires on mar…
Australian novelist and poet, born in England; he went to Australia after the Second World War and was educated at the University of Queensland. He was poetry editor of The Australian (1967?78), and has travelled widely in Europe, Asia, and the USA. His numerous volumes of poetry include Penniless till Doomsday (1962), Forty Beads on a Hangman's Rope (1963), Eyewitness (1967), The Law of Karma (19…
British poet and translator, born in Berlin of a Jewish family who emigrated to England in 1933; he was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. In addition to his work as a writer and translator he has held numerous visiting professorships in the USA. His verse translations of H?lderlin in Poems of 1943 brought the work of that poet to a wider English-speaking readership and established Hamburger as a …
British poet, critic, biographer, and editor, born in King's Lynn, Norfolk, educated at Keble College, Oxford. In 1962 he founded The Review, one of the foremost periodicals of its day in the sphere of poetry and criticism. He became assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1965 and was poetry critic for The Observer from 1965 to 1970. In his editorial and critical capacities he exerci…
English novelist and dramatist, born in Hassocks, Sussex, educated at Westminster School. He was described by Priestley as ?above all the novelist of the homeless?; most of his novels focus on the seedier side of urban life and the dispossessed, and the shabby boarding-house setting of his novel Craven House (1926) was a characteristic background. A trilogy (The Midnight Bell, 1929; The Siege of P…
British novelist, born in Kent, educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He worked for several years as a teacher and journalist for the New Statesman and The Sunday Times. He received critical acclaim for Gerontius (1989; Whitbread Prize), a novel about the composer Edward Elgar. His subsequent novels include The Bell Boy (1990), set in south-east Asia, concerning the relationship between a middle-age…
American crime writer, born in Maryland; he left school at 13, and from 1915 worked for Pinkerton's Detective Agency, first in Baltimore, then in San Francisco. He served in the US Army in the First World War, and again in the Second, when he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands. From 1923 he contributed short stories, originally under the name of Peter Collinson, to pulp magazines, especially Bl…
British novelist, born in Birmingham into a theatrical family; he grew up in poverty and was educated at home. From 1914 to 1918 he worked as a billiard marker and a chef, amongst other jobs, and his knowledge of hotel life provided material for his fiction. His first novel, Saturday Night at the Greyhound (1931), set mainly in a Derbyshire pub, concerns the devotion of an introverted young man fo…
British dramatist, born in the Azores; he lived as a child in Aden and Egypt, was educated at Oxford University, and was still an undergraduate when his first play, When Did You Last See My Mother? (1964), was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London. His subsequent work has included Total Eclipse (1968), about the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine; The Philanthropist (1970), about a…
a novel by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1934. The novel, whose title is from Eliot's The Waste Land and which is amongst Waugh's most savage portrayals of the idleness and decadence of the ?Bright Young Things?, describes the deteriorating marriage of Lady Brenda Last, a beautiful but shallow young woman, and her husband Tony, who embodies the moral decency and respect for tradition the author clear…
a novel by Margaret Atwood, published in 1986. It is at once a feminist reworking of the traditional narrative mode of women's Gothic, and a cautionary tale in the manner of Orwell, projecting its vision of a Christian fundamentalist dystopia on the America of the future. Offred, the narrator and heroine of the novel, is a woman whose ordinary life has been devastated by the radical overhaul of th…
British novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, born in Dublin; he grew up in working-class Liverpool, which he vividly depicted in his most popular novel sequence, The Furys (1935). His formative years at sea in the merchant navy inspired his best work, bringing him early recognition for Drift (1930), Hollow Sea (1938), The Ocean (1942), and Sailor's Song (1944). His second book, Boy (1931)…
American novelist and short-story writer, born and brought up in Clinton, Mississippi, educated at the University of Alabama. Hannah presents a world as dislocated and violent as William Faulkner's, but without Faulkner's sustaining metaphysical beliefs. Lacking a sense of continuity, his characters live in an abrupt, staccato world over which they have little or no control. Hannah displays no rev…
Australian writer and artist, born in Adelaide. She studied art in London and became an internationally known painter and print-maker. As a writer, she achieved recognition with her first book, The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973), an autobiographical work drawing on her memories of Adelaide from childhood to adolescence; it was followed by the sequel Kewpie Doll (1984). Her many novels include Sea Gree…
American crime writer, born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, educated there and in Minneapolis. Like Barbara Wilson, he belongs to that group of contemporary writers eager to exploit the form of the crime novel to investigate social issues, notably gender and sexuality. Southern California is the setting for these mysteries, and alongside Armistead Maupin, Hansen is a witty chronicler of the fads and ec…
American novelist and short-story writer, born in Omaha, Nebraska, educated at Creighton University, the University of Iowa, and Stanford University. Among other academic posts he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Though he is not a prolific writer, Hansen's work depends upon a sustained immersion in the minute particularities of time and place; his boo…
Chinese writer (naturalized British), born in Sinyang (Henan), China. Han has chronicled her experiences as a Eurasian in China, a medical practitioner in Asia, and a leading expert on contemporary Chinese politics, in a series of autobiographical works which conflate objective reportage and personal memoir. Her best-known works are probably The Crippled Tree (1965), A Mortal Flower (1967), and Bi…
a play by Samuel Beckett, first performed in 1961; it involves Winnie, who spends the action with her shopping bag and parasol on a low mound in the hot and glaring sun, embedded in the first act up to her waist, and in the second to her neck. She is awoken by a piercing bell from off-stage, fiddles with a toothbrush, a handkerchief, her spectacles, and other domestic items, and even when she can …
Irish short-story writer and autobiographer, born in Belfast. He worked for a time on a dredger in Belfast Lough before deciding to become a medical missionary. He studied theology at the South Wales Bible College and subsequently taught in Canada and Venezuela. After giving up theology he took up diamond prospecting in Canada and South America. During the 1960s he wrote many travel books under hi…
a self-consciously tough and uncompromising school of crime writing originally associated with the American pulp magazine Black Mask (1920?36) and the novels of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler. Unlike ?classic? British detective fiction, hardboiled writing avoids the reassuring pattern of puzzle and solution, and the cosy country house setting. In a vividly realized urban env…
American novelist and critic, born in Lexington, Kentucky, educated at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and at Columbia University. She contributed reviews and stories from the early 1940s onwards to Partisan Review, Harpers, and the New Yorker. Her first novel, The Ghostly Lover (1945), was followed by The Simple Truth (1955), concerning the murder trial of a college student. Sleepless Nigh…
British novelist and poet, born at Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, Dorset, educated at the school in Dorchester run by the British and Foreign School Society. From 1856 to 1861 he was articled to a Dorchester ecclesiastical architect whose office was next door to the school run by William Barnes (1801?86), the Dorset dialect poet; with Barnes as his mentor, Hardy began writing verse at the ag…
British playwright, born in Bexhill, Sussex, educated at Cambridge University. He began writing plays for Portable Theatre, a touring company he co-founded in 1968. His subsequent work has primarily concentrated on aspects of British politics and society since the Second World War, a period he regards as characterized by opportunism, avarice, corruption, and the betrayal of the hopes of those who …
British moral philosopher, born at Backwell near Bristol, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He became an officer in the Royal Artillery in 1940 and was held prisoner-of-war by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945. In 1950 he began his academic career as a fellow and tutor of Balliol College; he was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford between 1966 and 1983, when he was appointed Graduate R…
Native American poet and script-writer of the Creek tribe, born in Oklahoma, educated at the University of New Mexico and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Harjo has been a consultant for Native American groups and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Third World Writers, and has taught at the University of Arizona. Her interest in Native American women and their experience …
the term normally used to describe the upsurge of black American writing in the 1920s and 1930s. Though sometimes seen as a movement, it is better regarded as the more or less contemporary emergence of a number of writers who together make up the first modern generation of black American writers, a generation whose work, while often protesting about dispossession, poverty, and racial prejudice, is…
Wallace Stevens's first collection of poetry, initially published in 1923; it contains seventy-four poems, including several lengthy sequences, written from approximately 1912 onward. A revised edition with fourteen further poems appeared in 1931. Its invigorating range extends from lengthy philosophical investigations like ?The Comedian as the Letter C? to the buoyant simplicity of ?Ploughing on …
African-American poet and critic, born in Brooklyn, educated at UCLA and the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Among several important academic posts Harper was appointed Kapstein Professor at Brown University. His main interests are music, particularly jazz and blues, and history within both a national and a mythical framework; these themes he established in his first two volumes …
American writer and academic, born in California, educated at the University of Southern California; he taught for many years at the University of California, Irvine, and published literary criticism under his own name. After several early novels, such as Private Demons (1961), depicting modern American life, his range widened with Bull Fire (1973), a retelling of the story of the Minotaur and his…
Guyanese novelist, poet, and critic, born in New Amsterdam, educated at Queen's College, Georgetown, British Guiana. He was a land surveyor before leaving Guyana for England in 1959 to become a full-time writer. His exploration of the almost impenetrable forests, rivers, and vast savannahs of the Guyanese hinterland features prominently in many of his novels. Harris's novels are densely complex, a…
British scholar and critic, born in Hove, Sussex, educated at Queens' College, Cambridge. In 1924 he began lecturing at King's College, University of London, subsequently holding professorships at Queen's University, Ontario, and the University of Michigan. Among his many works on Shakespeare and his period were Shakespeare's Fellows (1923), Elizabethan Plays and Players (1940), and Shakespeare's …
American novelist and poet, born in Grayling, Michigan, educated at Michigan State University. His early works are included in Selected and New Poems, 1961?81 (1982), but it is as a novelist that he is best known. His first novel, Wolf (1971), was personal, angry, and confessional in tone. His second novel, A Good Day to Die (1973), more traditional in technique, has been called the first Vietnam …
British novelist and writer of science fiction. He came to notice through his science fiction stories in magazines; his first novel, The Committed Men (1971), displays the influence of J. G. Ballard. His originality is increasingly evident in The Pastel City (1971), A Storm of Wings (1980), and In Viriconium (1982), a trilogy sustained by the imaginative adaptation of contemporary urban landscapes…
British poet, translator, and dramatist, born in Leeds, educated at the University of Leeds, where he studied classics and did postgraduate work in linguistics. From 1962 to 1966 he taught at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, where he collaborated with James Simmons on a version of Aristophanes' Lysistrata entitled Aikin Mata (1966), the first of his many adaptations of classical works. He …
British economist, born in London, educated at New College, Oxford. From 1923 until his retirement in 1967 he taught at Christ Church, Oxford. Harrod was one of a select group of younger economists from whom Keynes solicited comments on his early drafts of the General Theory (1926), and was among those responsible for the propagation of Keynesianism in main-stream economic and political circles in…
British poet, born in Devonshire. He worked as a bookseller and was a literary critic with the Times Literary Supplement and the Spectator before becoming editor-in-chief and director at Andr? Deutsch in 1979. A Violent Country (1969), his first collection of poetry, established his reputation as a poet of unusual candour and emotional power. Its unflinchingly direct treatments of personal crisis …
American playwright and director, born in New York, where he was educated in public schools; he began his theatrical career working for the celebrated agent Augustus Pitou. With George S. Kaufman he collaborated in Once in a Lifetime (1930), and many other successful theatrical comedies including The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) which was also filmed. Hart collaborated with many of the major popu…
British novelist, critic, and short-story writer, born at Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, into a prosperous family and brought up at Fletton Towers, the family home near Peterborough; he was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. Throughout his literary career he was a fiction reviewer for the Spectator, the Observer, and many other journals. The first of his many volumes of short stories, a genre in wh…
German-born scholar and critic, educated at Queens College, New York, Dijon University, France, and Yale. Hartmann is well known for his work on Romanticism (The Unmediated Vision, 1954; Wordsworth's Poetry, 1964); he was a close associate at Yale of Harold Bloom and Paul de Man. He shares Bloom's interest in problems of interpretation and immediacy, and was an important figure in the diffusion of…
Irish poet, born in Newcastle West, Co. Limerick, educated at University College and Trinity College in Dublin. After living in London and Madrid, he returned to Limerick to teach at the National College of Physical Education. Anatomy of a Clich? (1968), his first collection of poetry, was followed by numerous volumes in both Irish and English. His works in Irish include Adharca Broic (1978) and D…