Encyclopedia of Literature: Knole Kent to Mary Lavin Biography

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

Monsignor Ronald Knox (Monsignor Ronald Arbuthnott Knox) Biography - (1888–1957), (Monsignor Ronald Arbuthnott Knox), Signa Severa, Absolute and Abitofhell, A Spiritual Aeneid

British writer, born at Kibworth, Leicestershire, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. At the age of 18 he enjoyed considerable success with Signa Severa (1906), a collection of epigrammatic light verses in English, Latin, and Greek. He entered the ministry in 1911 and became Chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford, in 1912. Absolute and Abitofhell (1913) is the most notable of his versified attacks o…

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C. J. Koch (Christopher John Koch) Biography - (1932– ), (Christopher John Koch), The Boys in the Island, Across the Sea Wall

Australian novelist, born in Hobart, educated at the University of Tasmania. His work, which draws on his experiences in Europe, America, and Asia, reflects a preoccupation with the political and cultural relationships between Australia and the Far East. His first novel, The Boys in the Island (1958; revised 1974) was acclaimed for its sensitive account of growing up in Tasmania and Melbourne. Acr…

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Kenneth Koch Biography - (1925– ), Poems, Ko, or a Season on Earth, Permanently, Thank You and Other Poems

American poet, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, educated at Harvard and Columbia Universities. Koch served for three years in the US Army as a rifleman in the Pacific theatre of war. He has taught at several colleges and became resident poet at Columbia. Koch is a founding member of the ?New York School of Poets?, with John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara. His books include Poems (1953), Ko, or a Season on Eart…

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Arthur Koestler Biography - (1905–83), News Chronicle, Spanish Testament, Scum of the Earth, Arrow in the Blue, The Invisible Writing

Anglo-Hungarian novelist and journalist, born in Budapest, educated at the University of Vienna. Koestler served in the Spanish Civil War as war correspondent for the News Chronicle, was arrested by Franco's Nationalists in 1937, and finally freed by the intervention of the British government. The experience resulted in Spanish Testament (1937) which, like all his books before 1941, was written in…

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Joy Kogawa Biography - (1935– ), The Splintered Moon, A Choice of Dreams, Jericho Road, Woman in the Woods, Obasan

third-generation Japanese-Canadian writer, born in Vancouver. She was interned with her family during the Second World War and transported to the ghost town of Slocan in the Rockies of British Columbia, and then to Alberta. Her writings provide an invaluably complex vision of the ?Canadian? experience from her own unique perspective, at the same time writing into the nation's imaginative history a…

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Arthur Kopit Biography - (1937– )

American dramatist, born in New York, educated at Harvard. He won his reputation with a student play, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet, and I'm Feelin' So Sad (1961). Written in the idiom of European theatre of the Absurd, Oh Dad is at once imitative and parodic of fashionable avant-garde theatre of the 1960s, and features a woman who keeps her husband's corpse in a wardrobe and do…

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Bernard Kops Biography - (1926– ), The Hamlet of Stepney Green, The Dream of Peter Mann

British dramatist, born in Stepney, London, educated at Stepney Jewish School. He worked as a docker, chef, salesman, waiter, and barrow-boy before writing his first play, The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1959), about a young dreamer who, having sworn to take revenge on behalf of a father ?poisoned? by an unfulfilling world, instead falls in love with the local Ophelia. Subsequent stage work, much of …

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Jerzy Kosinski (Jerzy Nikodem Kosinski) Biography - (1933–91), (Jerzy Nikodem Kosinski), The Future Is Ours, Comrade, No Third Path, The Painted Bird

Polish-born American novelist, born in Lodz, Poland, educated at the University of Lodz, (Polish) State Academy of Sciences, and Columbia University. Separated from his parents at the age of six, Kosinski spent the years of the Second World War wandering through Russia and Poland, living on his wits in alien communities before being reunited with his parents in 1945. This extraordinary experience …

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William Kotzwinkle Biography - (1939– ), Fata Morgana, Herr Nightingale and the Satin Woman, The Hot Jazz Trio

American novelist and short-story writer, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, educated at Penn State University. Kotzwinkle is a prolific writer, dividing his attention equally between books for adults and for children. His transparent style and his stress on the primacy of illusion derive from his Buddhist conception of the universe, which also gives his novels their curious combination of playfulnes…

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Larry Kramer Biography - (1935– ), Women in Love, Faggots, The Normal Heart

American playwright and novelist, born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, educated at Yale University. He worked as an executive in the film industry, first in London and later in New York. In 1970 he wrote and produced the screenplay for Ken Russell's acclaimed adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. His controversial novel Faggots (1978) was praised by some for its forthright account of the New Y…

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Krapp's Last Tape

a play by Samuel Beckett, written in 1957 for the actor Patrick Magee. It shows a 69-year-old man listening to a tape-recording he made thirty years before. In this, he is variously heard talking of his beliefs and spiritual health, complaining of his evidently chronic constipation, remembering a vaguely sexual encounter while his mother lay dying, and mocking the worthy ?aspirations? and ?resolut…

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Henry Kreisel Biography - (1922–91), The Rich Man, The Betrayal, The Almost Meeting

Canadian novelist, born in Vienna, where he spent his first sixteen years, before fleeing to England to escape the Nazi occupation. Interned as an ?enemy alien? at the beginning of the Second World War, he was sent to Canada in 1940 and remained interned there for a further eighteen months. He subsequently studied at the Universities of Toronto and London and became a Professor of English at the U…

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Saul A. Kripke (Saul Aaron Kripke) Biography - (1940– ), (Saul Aaron Kripke), Naming and Necessity, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Languages

American logician and philosopher, born in Bayshore, New York State, educated at Harvard, where he was subsequently an associate professor. In 1972 he became Professor of Logic and Philosophy at Rockefeller University, New York, and in 1977 he was appointed McCosh Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. His numerous visiting posts include his appointment as Locke Lecturer at Cambridge in …

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Robert Kroesch Biography - (1927– ), The Studhorse Man, Gone Indian, Badlands, The Words of My Roaring, What the Crow Said

Canadian novelist, poet, and critic, born in Heisler, Alberta, educated at the Universities of Alberta, McGill, and Iowa. His work as a critic is informed by a strong interest in American post-modernism and an attempt to relate this to the Western Canadian environment. His novels are particularly concerned with gender issues and the cultural identity of Prairie communities; they habitually employ …

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Maxine Kumin (Maxine Winokur Kumin) Biography - (1925– ), (Maxine Winokur Kumin), Up Country: Poems of New England, New and Selected Poems

American novelist, poet, and short-story writer, born in Philadelphia, educated at Radcliffe College. Kumin is well known as a writer of children's literature. She is also a gifted, if underestimated, poet whose verse is frequently confessional, like much post-war American poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1973 for her volume Up Country: Poems of New England (1972), though the best …

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Mazisi Kunene (Mazisi Raymond Kunene) Biography - (1930–2006), (Mazisi Raymond Kunene), Zulu Poems, Emperor Shaka the Great, Anthem of the Decades

South African poet, born in Durban, educated at Natal University and at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies. After a period as Director of Education for the South African United Front, he was the chief representative of the African National Congress in Europe and the USA and subsequently became Professor of African Literature and Language at the University of California, Los…

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Stanley Kunitz Biography - (1905–2006), Wilson Library Bulletin, Intellectual Things, Passport to the War, Selected Poems, 1928–1958

American poet, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard. Kunitz worked in New York editing the Wilson Library Bulletin, and, with Howard Haycraft, four biographical dictionaries of major English and American authors. He taught at various American colleges and in 1969 became editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His first book of poems, Intellectual Things (1930), was followed by…

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Frank Kuppner Biography - (1951– ), A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty, The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women

Scottish poet, born in Glasgow, where he read English and German at the University, and later qualified as an electronics engineer. His principal collections of poetry are A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (1984) and The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women (1987). Much of his attractively unorthodox verse takes the form of long and highly discursive sequences whose fluent free-verse lines are stri…

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Hanif Kureishi Biography - (1954– ), Outskirts, Borderline, Birds of Passage, My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

British novelist and screenwriter, born in London, educated at King's College, London. In 1981 he received the George Devine award for his play Outskirts (pub. 1983), and he was writer-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre in 1982. Other published plays include Borderline (1981) and Birds of Passage (1983). He achieved fame as author of the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette (pub. 1986), whic…

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Tony Kushner Biography - (1956– ), A Bright Room Called Day, Angels in America, Millenium Approaches, Perestroika, Columbia, Angels, A Dybbuk

American playwright, born in New York, educated at Columbia and New York University. His first play, A Bright Room Called Day (1984), concerns the dissolution of a small circle of friends under pressures created by the Nazis' rise in Germany during the last months of the Weimar Republic. He came to prominence with his seven-hour, twopart epic, Angels in America: Part I, Millenium Approaches (1991)…

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Lady Chatterley's Lover - Lady Chatterley's Lover, The First Lady Chatterley, John Thomas and Lady Jane

a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The novel is inseparable from its notoriety. The plot centres on the unhappy marriage of Sir Clifford Chatterley and his wife Constance, and her affair with the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors in the years after the First World War. Sir Clifford's wartime wounds have left him paralysed, and his physical and psychological injuries symbolize for Lawrence…

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Lady's Not for Burning, The

a play by Christopher Fry, first performed in 1948. Set in a small English town in 1400 ?either more or less or exactly?, this involves Thomas Mendip, a profoundly disillusioned soldier who unsettles the local authorities by demanding to be hanged, and Jennet Jourdemayne, a scientifically minded young woman sentenced to die as a witch. Thanks to the feelings of love she excites in him, her growing…

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B. Kojo Laing (Bernard Kojo Laing) Biography - (1946– ), (Bernard Kojo Laing), Search Sweet Country, Woman of the Aeroplanes

West African novelist and poet, born in Kumasi, Ghana, educated in Ghanaian and Scottish schools and at the University of Glasgow. He has worked in Ghanaian central and local government and since 1985 has helped to manage a private school established by his mother. His first two novels have drawn much praise for their linguistic ebullience; both contain glossaries which include Ghanaian words and …

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R. D. Laing (Ronald David Laing) Biography - (1927–89), (Ronald David Laing), In The Divided Self, The Self and Others, The Politics of Experience

British psychiatrist and author, born in Glasgow, where he obtained his M.D. in 1951 and worked as an instructor in psychological medicine at the University. He moved to London in 1956 to practise psychiatry. In 1964 he founded the Philadelphia Association to experiment with more humane treatments of mental illness. In The Divided Self (1960) and The Self and Others (1961; revised, 1969), Laing ad…

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George Lamming Biography - (1927– ), In the Castle of My Skin, The Emigrants, Of Age and Innocence, Season of Adventure

Barbadian novelist, poet, lecturer, and trade union activist, born in Barbados. Apart from writing, he has produced programmes for the BBC and travelled and lectured widely. Lamming's first novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), explores quintessential Caribbean themes of cultural displacement and fragmentation, and the relationship between nationality and colonial or political subjection. It is …

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Lanark: A Life in Four Books - Bildungsroman, Lanark

a novel by Alisdair Gray, published in 1981. After belated publication, sections being written between 1952 and 1976, the book's magisterial qualities established Gray as both a leading post-modernist and exemplary Scottish artist. Two narratives are interwoven over 560 pages. Books I and II recount the fraught early life of ?Duncan Thaw?, an art student growing up in postwar Scotland, while Books…

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Landfall - Landfall

New Zealand's most notable and longest established literary journal, founded in 1947 by the poet Charles Brasch, who remained its editor until 1966. The magazine was of central importance in fostering an independent literary culture in New Zealand during the 1950s and 1960s; in addition to the publication of work by established New Zealand writers like Brasch, Frank Sargeson, and Allen Curnow, it …

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Lee Langley Biography - (1940?– ), Changes of Address, The Only Girl, From the Broken Tree, The Dying Art

British novelist of Scottish descent, born in Calcutta. She spent her childhood travelling widely in India, an experience that shapes some of her best fiction, such as the autobiographical Changes of Address (1987), which analyses the relationship of a daughter with her volatile, alcoholic mother. Langley began her career as a novelist in 1973 with the publication of The Only Girl and later publis…

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Language Poetry - The Tennis Court Oath

a literary movement which emerged in the USA in the early 1970s. It began in a series of small magazines and poetry presses outside the mainstream which was then dominated by the first-person autobiographical poem. It was probably more of a reaction to the waning power of the existential dramas of projective verse, Beat poetry, and the New York School, than a direct hit at what had become the defa…

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Ring Lardner (Ringold Wilmer Lardner) Biography - (1885–1933), (Ringold Wilmer Lardner), Chicago Tribune, Redbook, The Saturday Evening Post

American journalist and short-story writer, born in Niles, Michigan, educated at Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago. He first established himself as a sportswriter and journalist for various newspapers, notably the Chicago Tribune for which he wrote the column ?In the Wake of the News?. In 1919 he moved to Long Island, taking up a syndicated column for the Bell Syndicate. Lardner devoted much…

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Philip Larkin (Philip Arthur Larkin) Biography - (1922–85), (Philip Arthur Larkin), The North Ship, Jill, A Girl in Winter, The Less Deceived

British poet and novelist, born in Coventry, educated at St John's College, Oxford. In 1943 he began his career in librarianship at Wellington in Shropshire; after working at University College, Leicester, and Queen's University, Belfast, he became Librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull in 1955, a post he held until his death. The North Ship (1945), his first collection o…

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Marghanita Laski Biography - (1915–88), Oxford English Dictionary, Love on the Supertax, To Bed With Grand Music, Tory Heaven

British novelist and critic, born in London, educated at Somerville College, Oxford. A journalist, broadcaster, and contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, she became Vice-Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1982 and was Chairman of its Literature Panel from 1980 to 1984. Her novels Love on the Supertax (1944), To Bed With Grand Music (under the pseudonym ?Sarah Russell?, 1946),…

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Last Poems and Plays - New Poems, Last Poems and Two Plays

the last major collection of Yeats's poetry, which appeared posthumously in January 1940. The volume, which amalgamated the contents of the Dublin editions of New Poems (1938) and Last Poems and Two Plays (1939), formed a substantial gathering of work produced between 1936 and 1939; ?The Black Tower? and ?Cuchulain Comforted? were written in the last two weeks of his life, the latter forming what …

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Last Puritan, The - The Last Puritan

a novel by George Santayana, published in 1935. Santayana's only novel, The Last Puritan is a study of the conflict between puritanism and hedonism intended as a fictional epitaph for New England puritanism which both attracted and repelled Santayana, and whose historical roots and culture he had philosophically analysed. Partly autobiographical, it tells the story of Oliver Alden, the heir of a w…

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Latino/Latina Literature in English - La Relacion, La Historia de la Nueva Mexico, mestizaje, Puertorriquenos, Cubanos, The Memoirs of Bernardo Vega

Traditional views of American literary history have often emphasized the westward expansion of the United States and have tended to overlook the Spanish settlement of the American southwest. Since a number of American Latino communities were established over three hundred years ago, well before the advent of the United States, it is difficult to place their literature within the dominant perspecti…

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Margaret Laurence Biography - (1926–87), The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, The Diviners

Canadian novelist of Scots ancestry, best known for her ?Manawaka? novels, a sequence set in a fictional version of Neepawa, the small Manitoba town where she was born and grew up. Mainly written in England, where Laurence lived between 1962 and 1972, the Manawaka novels are about the problems encountered by women in provincial Canada. They began with The Stone Angel (1964), a classic study of old…

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Mary Lavin Biography - (1912–96), Tales from Bective Bridge, The Shrine, A Family Likeness, The House in Clewe Street

Irish short-story writer and novelist, born in East Walpole, Massachusetts, and moved to Ireland at the age of ten; she was educated at University College, Dublin, and at the National University of Ireland. Lavin's talents for characterization, dialogue, and succinct description are best displayed in her short stories, of which she published more than a dozen collections since Tales from Bective B…

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