Encyclopedia of Literature: McTeague to Nancy [Freeman] Mitford Biography

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

Candia McWilliam Biography - (1955– ), A Case of Knives, A Little Stranger, Debatable Land

Scottish novelist, born in Edinburgh, educated at Girton College, Cambridge. Her first novel, A Case of Knives (1988), a deftly plotted account of a triangular love affair involving an eminent heart surgeon, his male prot?g?, and the girl he selects as his beloved's future wife, was acclaimed for its sinister wit and stylistic inventiveness. A Little Stranger (1989), a black comedy about the uneas…

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Meanjin - Meanjin Papers, Meanjin, Meanjin Quarterly, On Native Grounds, The Temperament of Generations

an Australian cultural journal with a special interest in new poetry and prose and literary criticism. ?Meanjin? is the Aboriginal word for Brisbane; its first editor, Clem Christesen, poet and journalist, founded the magazine there under the title Meanjin Papers in 1940. It subsequently adopted the titles of Meanjin (1947?60), Meanjin Quarterly (1960?76), and Meanjin again from 1977. With Christe…

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Ved Mehta (Ved Parkash Mehta) Biography - (1934– ), (Ved Parkash Mehta), New Yorker, Walking the Indian Streets, Face to Face, Daddyji, Mamaji, Vedi

Indian journalistand autobiographical writer, born in Lahore, educated at Balliol College, Oxford and at Harvard. For many years he wrote for the New Yorker and in 1975 he became an American citizen. Walking the Indian Streets (1960; revised edition 1971) describes his return to India, together with his compatriot Dom Moraes. Mehta is best known for his autobiographical memoirs which include Face …

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Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man - Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Sherston's Progress, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston

the first part, published in 1928, of Siegfried Sassoon's ?Sherston Trilogy?, the others being Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936). The three books were published as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston in 1937, describing Sherston's life from infancy to the years immediately after the First World War. Although the trilogy is closely based on Sassoon's personal …

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Memoirs of an Infantry Officer - Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Sherston's Progress

the second part of Siegfried Sassoon's quasi-autobiographical ?Sherston Trilogy?; published in 1930, it followed Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and preceded Sherston's Progress (1936). The books offer a selective and lightly fictionalized version of the period between Sassoon's infancy and the years immediately after the First World War; other aspects of his earlier life are dealt with in the…

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H. L. Mencken (Henry Louis Mencken) Biography - (1880–1956), (Henry Louis Mencken), Baltimore Herald, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays

American journalist, editor, and critic, born in Baltimore; he began his career in journalism in 1899 as a reporter for the Baltimore Herald group, becoming a full editor by 1906. George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905) and The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), the first American studies of their subjects, gained Mencken the notice that led to his appointment as literary editor of The Smart …

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Edward Mendelson Biography - (1946– ), Collected Poems, The English Auden, Early Auden

American scholarand editor; born in New York, educated at the University of Rochester and at Johns Hopkins University. He began his academic career at Yale in 1969 and became Professor of English at Columbia University in 1983. In the course of his doctoral research he had numerous meetings with W. H. Auden, who chose him to be his literary executor. His edition of Auden's Collected Poems appeared…

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David Mercer Biography - (1928–80), Where the Difference Begins, A Climate of Fear, A Suitable Case for Treatment, Morgan

British dramatist, born in Wakefield, the son of an engine driver. After leaving school at 14 he worked as a laboratory technician, then went to King's College, Newcastle, first to study chemistry, then to take a degree in fine arts. After some years spent teaching he became a full-time writer, achieving recognition with a series of television plays, including Where the Difference Begins (1961), A…

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William Meredith (William Morris, Jr Meredith) Biography - (1919–2007), (William Morris, Jr Meredith), Love Letter from an Impossible Land, Ships and Other Figures

American poet, born in New York, educated at Princeton University, where he was three times Resident Fellow in Creative Writing between 1947 and 1966. From 1955 to 1983 he taught at Connecticut College, New London, becoming Professor of English in 1965. The most impressive work in Love Letter from an Impossible Land (1944), his first collection of poetry, and Ships and Other Figures (1948) display…

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James Merrill (James Ingram Merrill) Biography - (1926–95), (James Ingram Merrill), First Poems, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, Water Street

American poet, born in New York, educated at Amherst College, Massachusetts. First Poems (1951) attracted favourable notice for its concentration and technical accomplishment. Successive volumes, among them The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), Water Street (1962), Nights and Days (1966), and The Fire Screen (1969), displayed his increasing ability to combine personal experience, vivid …

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W. S. Merwin (William Stanley Merwin) Biography - (1927– ), (William Stanley Merwin), A Mask for Janus, The Dancing Bears, Green with Beasts

American poet, born in New York City, educated at Princeton University where he established an enduring friendship with Galway Kinnell. His books of poems include A Mask for Janus (1952), The Dancing Bears (1954), Green with Beasts (1956), The Drunk in the Furnace (1960), The Moving Target (1963), The Lice (1967), The Carrier of Ladders (1970; Pulitzer Prize), Writings to an Unfinished Accompanime…

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Metafiction - Lost in the Funhouse, Ficciones, Tristram Shandy, Jacques le fataliste, Tom Jones

is a term which became current in the 1960s and fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s. It refers to writing which reflects on its own fictional status, fiction about fiction. Such work is not necessarily concerned with fiction as opposed to reality, or its own techniques as opposed to the world beyond the book; it does necessarily acknowledge the presence in the text of a fiction-making mind. John Ba…

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Metalanguage - Meta, Hamlet, Jerk

Meta is a Greek term which in English suggests, apparently on the basis of a misunderstanding of the etymology of the word ?metaphysics?, going beyond or above a particular domain?See metafiction for a similar use of the prefix. Metalanguage accordingly is a language which discusses language. A dictionary, for example, is almost all metalanguage in relation to the words it defines; descriptive gra…

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John Metcalf Biography - (1938– ), The Lady Who Sold the Furniture, Going Down Slow, General Ludd

Canadian novelistand short-story writer, born in Carlisle, England, educated at the University of Bristol; he emigrated to Canada in 1962. After teaching in Loyola College in Montreal he became a full-time writer in 1971. His abiding reputation as one of the finest prose stylists in contemporary Canada was established with the vividly observed and imaginatively disquieting stories collected in The…

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Paul Metcalf Biography - (1917–1999), Genoa, Patagonia, Both, Call Me Ishmael, Apalache, Waters of Potomac

American prose writer, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, educated at Harvard; he was the great-grandson of Herman Melville. Since his mother was Melville's literary executor, Metcalf's home was constantly visited by scholars, one of whom was Charles Olson, who later had a profound influence on the development of Metcalf's writing. Metcalf led an independent existence, refusing to be tied to any pa…

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Charlotte Mew (Charlotte Mary Mew) Biography - (1869–1928), (Charlotte Mary Mew), The Yellow Book, The Farmer's Bride, The Rambling Sailor

British poet and short-story writer, born in Bloomsbury; she attended lectures at University College, London. Following the appearance in 1894 of her story ?Passed? in The Yellow Book, she contributed poems and stories to numerous periodicals. The Farmer's Bride (1915), her first collection of poetry, displayed the austerely lyrical tone and preoccupation with torment and grief that characterize m…

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Alice Meynell (née Alice Thompson Meynell) Biography - (1847–1922), (née Alice Thompson Meynell), Preludes, Poems, A Father of Women, Last Poems

British poet and essayist, born in Barnes, London. She became a Roman Catholic in 1868, which determined the devotional character of much of her poetry. Preludes (1875), her first collection of verse, was much admired by the author and editor Wilfrid Meynell (1852?1948), whom she married in 1877. In 1891 they rescued Francis Thompson from destitution and secured him literary recognition. Her subse…

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Christopher Middleton (John Christopher Middleton) Biography - (1926– ), (John Christopher Middleton), Torse 3: Poems 1949–1961, Our Flowers and Nice Bones

British poet, born in Truro, Cornwall, educated at Merton College, Oxford. After lecturing at Zurich University and King's College, University of London, in 1966 he became Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Texas. Torse 3: Poems 1949?1961 (1962), his first major collection of poetry, was followed by numerous succeeding volumes including Our Flowers and Nice Bones (…

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Stanley Middleton Biography - (1919– ), The Daysman, Holiday, Two Brothers, An After-Dinner's Sleep, After a Fashion

British novelist, born in Bulwell, Nottingham, educated at University College of Nottingham. For many years he worked as a teacher, becoming Head of the English Department at High Pavement College, Nottingham. Teachers are among the characters who inhabit his acutely observed novels about provincial life in the Midlands. His novels focus on the emotional dilemmas that beset articulate, middle-clas…

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Midnight's Children

a novel by Salman Rushdie, published in 1981 and winner of the Booker Prize. This highly innovative novel was the forerunner of a new genre of writing from India, other Asian countries, and Africa, combining the magic realism of Latin American novels with political comment, satire, and dissertations on contemporary history in the context of decolonization. It is narrated entirely in the voice of S…

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Edna St Vincent Millay Biography - (1892–1950), The Princess Marries the Page, Aria da Capo, The Lamp and the Bell

American poet and writer, born in Rockland, Maine, educated at Barnard and Vassar Colleges. Millay gained her reputation by voicing the spirit of rebelliousness and liberalism in the 1920s. She worked as an actress, becoming associated with the Provincetown Playhouse and the Theatre Guild, and writing several satirical verse-plays, The Princess Marries the Page (1918, published 1932), Aria da Capo…

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Arthur Miller Biography - (1915–2005), All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge

American dramatist, born in New York, educated at the University of Michigan. Miller is widely regarded as one of America's foremost playwrights, whose accomplishment bears comparison with Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. After the success of his earliest work, there followed a ten-year period of apprentice work with eight plays which were not commercially successful, but laid the foundation…

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Henry Miller (Henry Valentine Miller) Biography - (1891–1980), (Henry Valentine Miller), Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, Sexual Politics

American author, essayist, and painter, born in New York. At the age of 33 he went to Paris and began chronicling his own seedy life there while working as an editor for various periodicals. For their treatment of intense personal experiences and sexual relations, as a teenager in Brooklyn and as an expatriate in France, Tropic of Cancer (1934; USA 1961), Black Spring (1936; USA 1963), and Tropic …

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Kate Millett (Kate Katherine Murray Millett) Biography - (1934– ), (Kate Katherine Murray Millett), Sexual Politics, Three Women, The Prostitution Papers, Flying, Sita

American feminist cultural analyist and novelist, born in St Paul, Minnesota, educated at the University of Minnesota and St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has lectured in literature and philosophy, is an accomplished sculptor and now divides her time between New York and her Poughkeepsie farm in upper New York State. Sexual Politics (1970), her rigorous literary and cultural study of patriarchial b…

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Sarah Gertrude Millin Biography - (1889–1968), White Writing, God's Stepchildren, The Herr Witchdoctor, Adam's Rest

South African novelist, born in Lithuania, educated in Kimberley. Her obsession as a novelist was with the supposed dire consequences of miscegenation. As J. M. Coetzee has shown in White Writing (1988), though she was Jewish her assumptions about race were derived from Victorian anthropologists and Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer. Yet this discredited outlook, so widespread at the time, di…

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Mills and Boon

a publishing company founded in 1909 by Gerald Mills and Charles Boon, both of whom had previously worked for Methuen. They quickly established themselves on a successful basis, with Hugh Walpole, P. G. Wodehouse, and Jack London among the authors on their early lists. During the 1920s their sales declined, with the result that the company began to concentrate on supplying the commercial circulati…

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A. A. Milne (Alan Alexander Milne) Biography - (1882–1956), (Alan Alexander Milne), Punch, The Day's Play, Once a Week, The Sunny Side

British playwright, novelist, essayist, and writer of short stories and poems, born in St John's Wood, London, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Though known today primarily for his children's books, Milne acquired several large and distinct audiences in his lifetime. His weekly contributions to Punch (as ?A.A.M.?) in 1908?18 were collected into several popular volumes including The Day's Pl…

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Robert Minhinnick Biography - (1952– ), A Thread in the Maze, Native Ground, Life Sentences, The Dinosaur Park, The Looters

Welsh poet, born in Neath, Glamorgan, educated at University College, Cardiff. He worked as a postman, a clerk, a schoolteacher, and in other capacities before becoming involved in environmental education in 1984. He is also active as a writer-in-residence for schools and residential courses. His collections of poetry include A Thread in the Maze (1978), Native Ground (1979), Life Sentences (1983)…

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Minty Alley

C. L. R. James's only novel, written before he left Trinidad in the mid-1930s, published in London in 1936. Set in a ?barrack-yard? in a poor part of Port of Spain, it is the story of Haynes, a young black man from a lower middle-class background, who on his mother's death has to find cheaper lodgings. He takes a room at No. 2, Minty Alley, a community of working-class people dominated by women: t…

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Miss Lonelyhearts

a story by Nathanael West, published in 1933, described as a ?modernized, faithless Pilgrim's Progress?. The nameless protagonist, a middle-aged son of a Baptist minister, is a reporter who writes an agony column for a New York newspaper under the name ?Miss Lonelyhearts?. Disillusioned, anxiety-ridden, and alienated in a world of irrational violence and capitalist indifference, and suffering from…

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Adrian Mitchell Biography - (1932– ), Poems, Out Loud, Ride the Nightmare, The Apeman Cometh, On the Beach at Cambridge

British poetand playwright, born in London, educated at Christ Church, Oxford. After graduating, he worked as a journalist until 1959, when he became a freelance author. Poems (1964), Mitchell's first substantial collection, gained him recognition as a persuasively original writer on social and political themes. Subsequent volumes include Out Loud (1969), Ride the Nightmare (1971), The Apeman Come…

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Julian Mitchell Biography - (1935– ), Imaginary Toys, The White Father, The Undiscovered Country, Half-Life, The Enemy Within

British novelist and playwright, born in Epping, Essex, educated at Wadham College, Oxford. His novels include Imaginary Toys (1961), The White Father (1964), and the more experimental The Undiscovered Country (1968), in which a narrator, ?Julian Mitchell?, in an apparently straight autobiographical mode, tells the story of his school and university days, describing his relationship with a boyhood…

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Margaret Mitchell Biography - (1900–49), Gone With the Wind, Gone with the Wind

American novelist, born in Atlanta, educated at Smith College; she is the author of America's most celebrated bestseller, Gone With the Wind (1936). The daughter of an attorney who was president of the Atlanta Historical Society, she grew up with stories of the Civil War. These, combined with her grandmother's reminiscences of the South and her own early disastrous marriage to a bootlegger, ?Red? …

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W. O. Mitchell (William Ormond Mitchell) Biography - (1914– ), (William Ormond Mitchell), Who Has Seen the Wind, Maclean's, Jake and the Kid

Canadian novelist, born in Saskatchewan, educated at the Universities of Manitoba and Alberta. His best book, Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), a novel about a Prairie boyhood, captures vividly ?moments when an enquiring heart seeks finality, and the chain of darkness is broken?. Margaret Laurence has said of his ?Jake and the Kid? stories published in Maclean's in the 1940s (and later translated to r…

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Jessica Mitford (Jessica Lucy Mitford) Biography - (1917–1996), (Jessica Lucy Mitford), Hons and Rebels, Daughters and Rebels, The American Way of Death

Anglo-American memoirist, social critic, and journalist, born in Gloucester, the daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale. Her sisters were Nancy Mitford, Unity, well-known as a Nazi sympathizer, and Diana, who married Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. Jessica was always closer to the left of the political spectrum. Her first husband, Esmond Romilly, was killed during the Batt…

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Nancy Mitford Biography - (1904–73), The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, Don't Tell Alfred

British novelistand biographer, the eldest of the seven children (six daughters and a son) of the second Lord Redesdale. In The Pursuit of Love (1945), the novel which made her name, she gives an almost detached view of her extraordinary family with her father appearing as ?Uncle Matthew?. Of her sisters, Jessica Mitford became a communist, Diana married the British fascist Oswald Mosley, and Unit…

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