Encyclopedia of Literature: Edgar Mittelholzer Biography to Mr Norris Changes Trains

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

Edgar Mittelholzer Biography - (1909–65), Corentyne Thunder, The Children of Kaywana, The Harrowing of Hubertus, Hubertus, Kaywana Stock, Kaywana Blood

Guyanese novelist, born in British Guiana (now Guyana) from where he moved to Trinidad before emigrating to England in 1948. His first novel, Corentyne Thunder (1941), describes the impoverished and degraded living conditions of Indian peasants in British Guiana during the 1930s. The Kaywana trilogy, which consists of The Children of Kaywana (1952), The Harrowing of Hubertus (1954; republished as …

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MLA - Modern Language Association, Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), PLMA, PMLA

The MLA (Modern Language Association) is the main professional organization of teachers of modern languages and their literatures (predominantly English) in America. As Article II of its constitution states: ?The object of the association shall be to promote study, criticism, and research in the more and less commonly taught modern languages and their literatures and to further the common interest…

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Timothy Mo Biography - (1950– ), The Monkey King, Sour Sweet, An Insular Possession, The Redundancy of Courage

Anglo-Chinese novelist, born in Hong Kong, educated at Oxford. His fiction is traditionalist in form, reflecting a wide range of interests and extensive travels in the Far East and in America. Dickensian characterization and fine comic writing distinguishes his first novel, The Monkey King (1978), a study of a domestic tyrant, the wealthy Hong Kong merchant Mr Poon. Sour Sweet (1982) explores Chin…

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Modernism - Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, The Waste Land, Jacob's Room, Ulysses, The Cantos

a term encompassing numerous movements characterizing international developments in literature, music, and the graphic and plastic arts from the late nineteenth century onward. Most commentators consider literary Modernism's typifying manifestations in English to have appeared between 1890 and 1930. Among the authors most frequently cited are Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ford Mado…

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John Mole Biography - (1941– ), The Love Horse, From the House Opposite, Feeding the Lake, Homing, Depending on the Light

British poet, born in Taunton, Somerset, educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Since 1964 he has worked as a schoolteacher and is well-known as a presenter of poetry broadcasts for BBC radio. With Peter Scupham, he is co-editor of the Mandeville Press, which has produced numerous limited editions of his verse. His collections of poetry include The Love Horse (1974), From the House Opposite (19…

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M. J. Molloy (Michael Joseph Molloy) Biography - (1917–1994), (Michael Joseph Molloy), The Old Road, The Visiting House

Irish playwright, born in Co. Galway; he trained for the priesthood until illness forced him to end his studies. Molloy's plays concern the decay of the West of Ireland caused by emigration and economic deprivation. In dealing with the violent consequences of this destitution, he anticipated the finest work of Tom Murphy and John B. Keane. Molloy also recalls Synge in the way he dramatizes individ…

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N. Scott Momaday (Navarre Scott Momaday) Biography - (1934– ), (Navarre Scott Momaday), House Made of Dawn, The Ancient Child, The Way to Rainy Mountain

Native American writer, born in Lawton, Oklahoma, of Kiowa Indian ancestry, educated at the University of New Mexico and at Stanford University, where he was taught by Yvor Winters. He has taught at several American universities. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his first published novel, House Made of Dawn (1969), about a young Native American unable to feel acceptance either in the white American wor…

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Paul Monette Biography - (1945–95), Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll, The Gold Diggers

American novelist, born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, educated at Yale. Monette's early novels, such as Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (1978) and The Gold Diggers (1979), were mostly traditional romances in which gay characters replaced straight characters. He is best known for Becoming A Man: Half A Life Story (1992; National Book Award), an autobiography covering childhood to graduation, and Borrowed…

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Harold Monro (Harold Edward Monro) Biography - (1879–1932), (Harold Edward Monro), Proposals for a Voluntary Nobility, The Chronicle of a Pilgrimage, Poetry Review

British poetand publisher, born in Brussels; he moved to Somerset in 1886, and was educated at Caius College, Cambridge. After a period of poultry farming in Ireland, he established the Samurai Press in Haslemere, Surrey; its publications include his prose treatise Proposals for a Voluntary Nobility (1907) and verse by John Drinkwater and Wilfrid Gibson. His subsequent travels in Europe resulted i…

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Harriet Monroe Biography - (1860–1936), Columbian Ode, Valerie and Other Poems, The Passing Show, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse

American poetand editor, born in Chicago, where she spent most of her life. Monroe came to public notice with Columbian Ode (1892), a poem in celebration of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; her Valerie and Other Poems (1892) was followed by a book of five verse-plays, The Passing Show (1903). Monroe's main claim to fame is through her editorship of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, devoted …

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Nicholas Monsarrat (Nicholas John Turney Monsarrat) Biography - (1910–79), (Nicholas John Turney Monsarrat), This is the Schoolroom, The Cruel Sea, The Kapillan of Malta

English novelist, born in Liverpool, educated at Winchester and at Trinity College, Cambridge. His early childhood was spent on Merseyside, but it was at the family country home in Anglesey that he developed his love of the sea and sailing which he was subsequently to employ to such fruitful effect in his fiction. His novels of the 1930s include This is the Schoolroom (1938). During the Second Wor…

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John Montague (John Patrick Montague) Biography - (1929– ), (John Patrick Montague), Forms of Exile, Poisoned Lands, The Rough Field, The Great Cloak

Irish poet, born in Brooklyn, New York; he returned as a child to his family's farm at Garvaghey, Co. Tyrone. He was educated at University College, Dublin, and at the Universities of Yale and Iowa, USA. After working as a journalist in Dublin and Paris, he became Lecturer in Poetry at the University of Cork in 1972. His collections of poetry include Forms of Exile (1958), Poisoned Lands (1961), T…

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L. M. Montgomery (Lucy Maud Montgomery) Biography - (1874–1942), (Lucy Maud Montgomery), Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island

Canadian novelist, born on Prince Edward Island, educated at Dalhousie University, Halifax. She was brought up by her maternal grandparents after her mother died when she was only two; these early experiences provided the basis for most of her fiction. Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), which brought her international fame, deals with the growing pains of its heroine, the spirited and i…

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Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres - The Education of Henry Adams, Chanson de Roland

a historical study by Henry (Brooks) Adams, privately printed in 1904 and published in 1913. Conceived of as the companion volume to The Education of Henry Adams, Adams saw the book as being the start of a larger study of the role of historical forces and motions. By focusing on the period 1150 to 1250, he chose ?the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified…

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William Vaughan Moody Biography - (1869–1910), The Masque of Judgment, The Fire Bringer, The Death of Eve, The Great Divide

American dramatist, born in Spencer, Indiana, educated at Harvard. Moody later taught English at Harvard and then at the University of Chicago. He was both poet and playwright, and his earliest plays were blankverse dramas, The Masque of Judgment (1900) and The Fire Bringer (1904), neither produced in his lifetime. The first debates man's rightful exercise of free will which leads him to rebel aga…

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Michael Moorcock Biography - (1939– ), New Worlds, Behold the Man, The Final Programme, A Cure for Cancer, The English Assassin

British writer and editor, born in Mitcham, Surrey. Having published several ?sword-and-sorcery? tales he first came to notice as one of the most prominent of the ?New Wave? science fiction writers when he was editor of New Worlds from 1964 to 1971; others, including B. Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, M. John Harrison, Thomas M. Disch, Keith Roberts, and John Sladek, published their experimental work in th…

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Brian Moore Biography - (1921–1999), Judith Hearne, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Feast of Lupercal, A Moment of Love

Irish novelist, born in Belfast, educated there at St Malachy's College. Moore emigrated to Canada in 1948, taking Canadian citizenship; he later moved to New York and thence to California, where he settled and worked on film scripts. The uprooted individual is a recurring theme in his fiction, and the confusion of values consequent on expatriation has elicited some of his most powerful and origin…

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George Moore (George Augustus Moore) Biography - (1852–1933), (George Augustus Moore), A Modern Lover, A Mummer's Wife, A Drama in Muslin

Irish novelist, born in Ballyglass, Co. Mayo, the eldest son of a landowner and racehorse breeder. After his father's death in 1870, he inherited the family estate with which he subsidized seven years in Paris, studying art and literature. Due to his absence and the effects of the Land War in Ireland, he suffered a financial crisis in 1880 and had to leave Paris. He became a professional writer of…

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G. E. Moore (George Edward Moore) Biography - (1873–1958), (George Edward Moore), Mind, Principia Ethica, Principia Mathematica, Jumpers, Ethics, Philosophical Studies, Philosophical Papers

British moral philosopher and epistemologist, born in London to a Quaker family, educated at Dulwich College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He lectured at Cambridge where he became professor of philosophy and logic (1925?39). From 1921 to 1947 he was editor of the academic journal Mind. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903), alongside his associate Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica (1903), estab…

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Lorrie Moore Biography - (1957– ), Self-Help, Anagrams, Like Life, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

American novelist, born in Glen Falls, New York, educated at St Lawrence College and Cornell University; she then taught English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Her first book, Self-Help (1985), was a collection of stories characterized by their wit, polish, and experimental zeal; Moore employs the title's reference to pop psychology as a metaphor and thematic link between her stories. …

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Marianne Moore (Marianne Craig Moore) Biography - (1887–1972), (Marianne Craig Moore), Others, The Dial, The Egoist, Poems, Observations, Selected Poems, The Pangolin, Nevertheless

American poet, born in St Louis, Missouri, educated at Bryn Mawr College; she grew up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Her specialization in biology informs the many poems based on her observations of animals, which occasionally employ items of scientific vocabulary. In 1916 she became acquainted with W. C. Williams and the group of poets associated with the New York magazine Others; in 1918 she moved t…

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Nicholas Moore Biography - (1918–1986), A Wish in Season, The Glass Tower: Poems, 1936–1943

British poet, born in Cambridge, the son of the philosopher G. E. Moore; he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. As a leading contributor to the anthologies of the New Apocalypse, his reputation was considerable during the 1940s. A Wish in Season (1941), his first book of poetry, was followed by seven further early collections, the contents of which are represented by The Glass Tower: Poems…

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T. Sturge Moore (Thomas Sturge Moore) Biography - (1870–1944), (Thomas Sturge Moore), The Vinedresser and Other Poems

British poetand illustrator, born in Hastings, Sussex, the brother of the philosopher G. E. Moore; he was privately educated. His collections of verse include The Vinedresser and Other Poems (1899), The Little School: A Posy of Rhymes (1905), The Sea Is Kind (1914), and The Unknown Land and a Dozen Odd Poems (1939). Among his highly regarded verse-dramas are Aphrodite against Artemis (1901), Maria…

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Alan Moorehead (Alan McCrae Moorehead) Biography - (1919–83), (Alan McCrae Moorehead), Herald, Daily Express, African Trilogy, Eclipse, The Rage of the Vulture, Gallipoli

Australian journalistand historian, born in Melbourne, where he was educated at the University and spent six years with the Melbourne Herald. He arrived in Britain in 1936 and joined the Daily Express. The courage and distinction with which he worked as a war correspondent from 1939 to 1945 gained him an international reputation. His accounts of the North African campaigns were collected as Africa…

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Frank Moorhouse Biography - (1938– ), Tabloid Story, Southerly, The Americans, Baby, Days of Wine and Rage

Australian fiction writer, born in Nowra on the southern coast of New South Wales. He initially worked as a journalist (and in 1972 was one of a Sydney group which founded the alternative magazine Tabloid Story). His first story was published in Southerly in 1957. Moorhouse's fascination with the subcultures and sexual prowlings of urban society made publication difficult, but The Americans, Baby …

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Geoffrey Moorhouse Biography - (1931– ), Guardian, Britain in the Sixties: The Other England, Against all Reason, Calcutta

British travel writer and historian, born in Bolton, Lancashire, educated at Bury Grammar School. From 1952 to 1970, when he became a freelance author, he was a journalist, travelling widely from 1963 onward as chief features writer with the Guardian. His earlier works include the sociological Britain in the Sixties: The Other England (1964) and Against all Reason (1970), his widely acclaimed inve…

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Dom Moraes (Dom Dominic Moraes) Biography - (1938–2004), (Dom Dominic Moraes), Beginnings, John Nobody, Bedlam Etc, Absences, Gone Away, Mrs Gandhi

Indian poetand writer, born in Bombay, educated at Jesus College, Oxford; he was the son of the writer Frank Moraes. Moraes held a variety of editorial and journalist posts. His reputation as a leading Indo-Anglian poet rested largely on the enthusiastic reception of his first collection, Beginnings (1957). His work reflects Western influences and mentors in its idiom, sensibility, and subject mat…

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Cherrie Moraga Biography - (1952– ), This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color

Chicana writer, born in Whittier, California, educated at San Francisco State University. Moraga was one of the first writers to explore Chicana lesbianism. She co-edited This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color (1981) with Gloria Anzald?a and began establishing her own voice as a literary critic, particularly in her examination of the key differences between white feminism a…

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Edwin Morgan (Edwin George Morgan) Biography - (1920– ), (Edwin George Morgan), The Vision of Cathkin Braes, The Second Life, From Glasgow to Saturn

Scottish poetand translator, born in Glasgow; he was educated at the University of Glasgow, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement as Professor of English in 1980. The interplay between actuality and imagination that is a consistent feature of his writing was already apparent in The Vision of Cathkin Braes (1952), his first collection of poetry. Among his many subsequent volumes are The Se…

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Jan Morris (formerly James Morris) Biography - (1926– ), (formerly James Morris), The Times, Guardian, Coronation Everest, Coast to Coast, Venice

British travel writer, born at Clevedon, Somerset, educated at Christchurch, Oxford. Morris became a journalist in 1947 after a period of military service. He held successive posts as a foreign correspondent with The Times and the Guardian from 1951 to 1962. He travelled with the 1953 Everest expedition, becoming widely known for his reports of the ascent; Coronation Everest (1958) forms an accoun…

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Wright Morris Biography - (1910–1998), My Uncle Dudley, The Man Who Was There, The Inhabitants

American novelist, born in Central City, Nebraska, educated at Crane College, Chicago, and Pomona College, Claremont, California. Despite considerable praise from many influential critics and writers, Morris remains one of the most neglected of major American writers. He travelled extensively in Europe before returning to the USA in 1934 to begin his literary career; he also established a compleme…

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Blake Morrison (Philip Blake Morrison) Biography - (1950– ), (Philip Blake Morrison), Times Literary Supplement, Observer, Independent on Sunday. Dark Glasses

British poetand critic, born in Burnley, Lancashire, educated at the University of Nottingham and University College, London. He was poetry and fiction editor with the Times Literary Supplement from 1978 to 1981, when he joined the staff of the Observer. In 1990 he became literary editor of the Independent on Sunday. Dark Glasses (1984), his first collection of verse, contained work of impressive …

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John Morrison (John Gordon Morrison) Biography - (1904– ), (John Gordon Morrison), Meanjin, Overland, The Creeping City, Port of Call, Sailors Belong Ships

Australian writer, born in Sunderland, England; he settled in Australia in 1923. He has been a jackeroo, swagman, dock worker, and gardener. He published stories in Meanjin and Overland, about fellow workers, union activities, the people he met on the tram to work, and social conditions. Morrison published two novels, The Creeping City (1947) and Port of Call (1949), and several collections of sto…

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Toni Morrison (Toni Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison) Biography - (1931– ), (Toni Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison), The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved

American novelist, born in Lorain, Ohio, educated at Howard and Cornell Universities. Since graduation, she has worked as a teacher at various American universities, and as a senior editor at Random House Press, editing the work of several of her contemporaries. Her own fiction, using a blend of realism, history, myth, folktale, and poetic fantasy, attempts to describe the different political real…

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John Mortimer (John Clifford Mortimer) Biography - (1923– ), (John Clifford Mortimer), The Dock Brief, The Judge, A Voyage Round My Father

British novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, born in Hampstead, London, educated at Harrow and Brasenose College, Oxford. He was a practising barrister for many years, and became a Queen's Counsel in 1966. He had published several novels before turning to the theatre, where he achieved popular recognition with plays such as The Dock Brief (1957), about the relationship between an inept la…

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Penelope Mortimer Biography - (1918–1999), The Pumpkin Eater, Daddy's Gone a'Hunting, Cave of Ice

British novelist, born in Wales, the daughter of a clergyman, and educated at University College, London. Her novels tend to focus on destructive relationships between men and women, notably The Pumpkin Eater (1962), the story of a woman harried by the breakdown of her marriage, who obsessively uses motherhood to define her identity; it was made into a film with the screenplay written by Harold Pi…

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H. V. Morton (Henry Canova Vollam Morton) Biography - (1892–1979), (Henry Canova Vollam Morton), Daily Mail, The Heart of London, In Search of …

British travel writer, born in Ashton-under-Lyme; he grew up in Birmingham, where he began reporting for local newspapers before becoming a sub-editor on the Daily Mail. After active service in the First World War, he resumed his journalistic career in 1919 and produced his first book, The Heart of London, in 1925; by the end of 1926, he had published four further books about London. An In Search …

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J. B. Morton (John Cameron Andrieu Bingham Michael Morton) (‘Beachcomber’) Biography - (1893–1979), (John Cameron Andrieu Bingham Michael Morton) (‘Beachcomber’), Sunday Express, Daily Express

British humorist, born in London; he went from Harrow to Worcester College, Oxford, but left after his first year due to family difficulties. Following service on the Western Front and in intelligence during the First World War, he joined the staff of the Sunday Express. In 1924 he took over as ?Beachcomber? on the Daily Express from D. B. Wyndham Lewis; he continued to write the column daily unti…

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Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale Mosley Biography - (1923– ), 3rd Baron Ravensdale Mosley, Spaces of the Dark, The Rainbearers, Corruption, Accident, Impossible Object

British novelistand biographer, born in London, educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford. Since the publication of his first novel, Spaces of the Dark (1951), Mosley's fiction has responded to, and experimented with, ideas. He is an uncompromising writer who has sought narrative forms which reflect intellectual debate rather than succumbing to the rewards of a recognizable style. His early …

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Andrew Motion Biography - (1952– ), Poetry Review, The Pleasure Steamers, Secret Narratives, Natural Causes, Love in a Life

British poet, biographer, and critic, born in London, educated at University College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry in 1975. After lecturing at the University of Hull, he edited Poetry Review until 1983, when he entered publishing, becoming an editor with Faber and Faber in 1989. In 1995 he succeeded Malcolm Bradbury as Chair of Creative Writing at the University of East Angl…

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Willard Motley (Willard Francis Motley) Biography - (1912–65), (Willard Francis Motley), Knock on Any Door, Native Son, We Fished All Night

African-American novelist, born and raised in Chicago; he spent several nomadic years during the Depression as a migrant labourer and freelance journalist. His first and most successful work was Knock on Any Door (1947), a grim narrative of urban poverty, vice, and violence in the naturalistic tradition of Dreiser, J. T. Farrell, and Richard Wright. Like Wright in Native Son, Motley saw crime as e…

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R. H. Mottram (Ralph Hale Mottram) Biography - (1883–1971), (Ralph Hale Mottram), For Some We Loved, The Spanish Farm

British novelist, born in Norwich. For some years he worked as a bank clerk but with encouragement from John Galsworthy, who was to be the subject of the later work For Some We Loved (1956), he turned to writing. His first novel, The Spanish Farm (1924), with a preface by GalsworthyM, reflected his experiences in France and Flanders during the First World War; it was followed by Sixty-four, Ninety…

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Mourning Becomes Electra - Homecoming, The Hunted, The Haunted, Oresteia

a dramatic trilogy by Eugene O'Neill, produced and published in 1931, comprising Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted. Reflecting O'Neill's absorption in Greek tragedy and Freud, the work transposes the situations and events of the Oresteia of Aeschylus to America at the close of the Civil War, with Brigadier Ezra Mannon as O'Neill's Agamemnon, his wife Christine as Clytemnestra, and his son an…

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Movement, The - Spectator, Poets of the 1950s, New Lines, The Movement, Purity of Diction in English Verse

a group of young poets of the 1950s ?announced?, as Ian Hamilton writes in his essay ?The Making of the Movement?, ?to be in concerted reaction against the tangled and pretentious neo-romanticism?, of the New Apocalypse and their immediate successors. The name was coined in an unsigned leading article in the Spectator in October 1954 which stressed the sceptically intelligent, accessible, and robu…

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Es'kia Mphahlele, formerly known as Ezekiel Mphahlele Biography - (1919– ), formerly known as Ezekiel Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue, Black Orpheus, Man Must Live

South African novelist, essayist, and short-story writer, born in Pretoria, educated at the University of South Africa and the University of Denver. In Down Second Avenue (1959) Mphahlele gives an impassioned account of his impoverished childhood in Pretoria. He left South Africa for Nigeria in 1957. Together with Wole Soyinka and Ulli Beier he edited the literary journal Black Orpheus (1960?4). A…

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Mr Britling Sees It Through - And Now War Ends, The War That Will End War, The Better Government of the World

a novel by H. G. Wells, published in 1916. Set on the eve of the First World War, the novel concerns Hugh Britling, a well-known author resembling Wells himself, who presides over a pleasant and well-run household in the Essex village of Matching's Easy. Here he is visited by an American friend, Mr Direck, to whom he confides his view that war is by no means inevitable, as long as the spirit of ra…

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Mr Norris Changes Trains - Goodbye to Berlin

a novel by Christopher Isherwood, published by the Hogarth Press in 1935, which firmly established his reputation as a novelist of importance. Set in Berlin, it is strongly informed by Isherwood's experiences of living in the city from 1929 to 1933, Hitler's ascendancy becoming increasingly apparent in the latter stages of the narrative. The book draws its episodic structure from the encounters of…

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