a novel by V. Woolf, published in 1925. A day in the life of a middle-aged upper-class London woman planning her party is Woolf's first completely successful modernist novel, and one of her finest books. She arrived at it through experimenting with new forms of narrative in her earlier novels and through what she called her ?tunnelling process? (Diary, 15 Oct. 1923), digging out ?beautiful caves? …
a ?play unpleasant? by G. B. Shaw, completed in 1893, published in 1898, but refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain. Though it was privately performed by the Stage Society in 1902, it was not seen on the public stage in London until 1926. The main reason for the ban was that the play presents a brothel madame, Kitty Warren, with understanding and a degree of sympathy. As Mrs Warren explains to …
Kenyan poet, critic, and playwright, born in Baricho in the Kiriyaga District of Kenya; she was educated at Makerere University, Uganda, and at the Canadian universities of New Brunswick and Toronto. Her Ph.D. thesis formed the basis of Visions of Africa (1978), her best-known critical work, which considers treatments of Africa in the writings of several women novelists. Having been Dean of the Fa…
Scottish poet, critic, and translator, born at Deerness in Orkney, educated at Kirkwall Grammar School. In 1901 the family moved to Glasgow, where Muir lost both his parents and two of his brothers in five years and himself experienced physical and mental ill-health. This period of privation informed his work as an imaginative antithesis to the vision of purity of being he strove to manifest in hi…
American novelistand short-story writer, born in Calcutta, educated at the universities of Calcutta, Baroda, and Iowa, where she obtained her doctorate in 1969. She has held many academic appointments including a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley. Of Bengali background herself, Mukherjee's stories and novels, which often employ shock tactics, focus on the experience of immi…
Northern Irish poet, born in Co. Armagh, educated at Queen's University, Belfast, where Seamus Heaney was among his lecturers. He worked as a radio producer with the BBC in Northern Ireland until 1986. After holding a succession of posts as writer-in-residence in Britain and America, he became a lecturer at Princeton University in 1990. His considerable reputation was established by the freshness …
American cultural critic, born in Flushing, Long Island, New York, educated at Columbia and New York universities. He taught at several colleges and universities. His first work, The Story of Utopias (1922), was followed by Sticks and Stones (1924), which considered American life through its architecture. His many books have challenged modern life from a perspective deeply rooted in a respect for …
Zimbabwean novelistand short-story writer, born near Enkeldoorn in the Manyene Tribal Trust Land, educated at St Augustine's Secondary School. After working with the Rhodesian Forestry Commission and as a clerk in a book-distribution company, he entered publishing in 1975 and became Literary Director of the Zimbabwe Publishing House in 1981. Mungoshi is the most eminent Zimbabwean author writing i…
Canadian short-story writer and novelist, born in Wingham in southwestern Ontario, educated at the University of Western Ontario; she subsequently lived in British Columbia before returning to Ontario. Munro has been described as one of the finest living short-story writers and is acclaimed for her ability to dissect the contradictory passions of relationships. Her fictional territory is mainly pr…
the first of T. S. Eliot's major verse-dramas, published in 1935; it deals with the martyrdom of Thomas Becket and was first performed in 1935 in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral, close to the site of Becket's death, after which it ran successfully in London and on tour. The work resulted from a suggestion by the Bishop of Chichester, who had been favourably impressed by Eliot's ecclesias…
British novelistand philosopher, born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents, educated at Badminton School, at Somerville College, Oxford and later at Newnham College, Cambridge. She became a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, and a lecturer in philosophy. From her first novel, Under the Net (1954), Murdoch has followed a highly productive career as a novelist. Although filled with incident and vivid …
Irish travel writer, born at Cappoquin, Co. Waterford, Ireland; she was educated at the Ursuline Convent, Waterford, until the age of 14, when she began nursing her invalid mother. Following her mother's death, she cycled to India, where she worked with Tibetan refugees; her experiences are recorded in Full Tilt: Ireland to India by Bicycle (1965) and Tibetan Foothold (1966), which established her…
Irish poet, born in Co. Galway; he spent much of his childhood in Sri Lanka, where his father was the last British mayor of Colombo. He was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. He was skipper of the fishing boat described in his poem ?The Last Galway Hooker? from 1960 to 1967, after which he held a succession of visiting posts at American universities. His collections of poetry …
Irish playwright, born in Tuam, Co. Galway, educated at the Vocational Teachers' Training College, Dublin. He taught at a local vocational school from 1957 until 1962, when he moved to London and became a full-time writer. His first play, A Whistle in the Dark, having been rejected by the Abbey in 1960, was produced at the Theatre Royal in 1961. Kenneth Tynan described it as ?the most uninhibited …
British lexicographer and philologist, born at Denholm, Roxburghshire, and educated in local schools. After a period as a schoolmaster, he moved to London in 1864. He worked for the Chartered Bank of India until 1870, when he took a teaching post at Mill Hill School. Having joined the London Philological Society, he became a respected associate of those involved in compiling the Society's New Engl…
Australian poet, born at Nabiac, New South Wales, educated at Sydney University. Murray worked as a translator before becoming an influential critic, reviewer, and poet. His challenging view on the importance of the land in the mythology of Australians, both indigenous and settler, is expressed in the essay ?The Human Hair Thread? (first published 1977) in his critical collection Persistence in Fo…
African-American author and lawyer, born in Baltimore; she worked as a schoolteacher before studying law at Howard University and the University of California, Berkeley. Active in the causes of racial equality and women's rights, in 1946 she became the first black woman to hold the office of Deputy Attorney of California and was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1966…
British criticand editor, born at Peckham in London, educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he founded the magazine Rhythm; his insistence as editor on the direct relationship between art and society established the central emphasis of his career. Through the magazine he met Katherine Mansfield, whom he married in 1918, and D. H. Lawrence, with whom he sustained a troubled but intense friend…
Kenyan novelist, born in Nanyuki, Kenya, educated at Kenyatta College. His novels, which focus on Kenyan social problems, are brisk, sometimes humorous, and written in a meticulously realist style. Carcase for Hounds (1974) and Taste of Death (1975) deal with the anti-colonial Mau Mau insurgency of the 1950s; they are distinguished by emphasis on the ?impersonal mechanism?, as he put it, of guerri…
a novel by Willa Cather, published in 1918. It is the author's most popular novel, which has been studied by generations of young Americans for its lyrical appreciation of pioneer life. The novel is related by Jim Burden, who looks back on his early years in Nebraska, seeing Antonia Shimerda as a symbol of them and what was significant about them. Antonia's father was tricked into buying poor land…
British novelist, son of the poet and psychical researcher F. W. H. Myers (1843?1901), born in Cambridge, educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge. A private income enabled him to occupy himself solely with writing, with the exception of a period during the First World War when he worked as a clerk in the Board of Trade. Arvat (1908), a verse-drama, was his first publication. The Orisser…
Swedish economist, born in Gustafs, Sweden, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics (1974), and Swedish parliamentarian. As a young economist, Myrdal was a leading member of the so-called Stockholm School of Economics (which included Erik Lindahl and Dag Hammarskj?ld, later Secretary-General of the United Nations), and which is sometimes seen as having anticipated certain of Keynes's ideas. His…
American novelist, born in St Petersburg, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Nabokov enjoyed a privileged childhood, interrupted by the Russian Revolution when his father, who had been a leading member of the Russian Constituent Assembly, evacuated the family south to Yalta to avoid the Red Army. In 1919 Nabokov left Russia, never to return. In 1922 he rejoined his family in Berlin for a shor…
American philosopher, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia; from 1939 onward he lived in the USA, of which he became a naturalized citizen in 1944. After studying at Cornell and Oxford, he obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1963, when he became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He subsequently held a succession of posts at Princeton University before becoming Professor of Phi…
Indian novelist, born in Sialkot, formerly in India and now in Pakistan, educated at the University of Delhi and the University of Nottingham. Since 1949 he has taught in a succession of universities in India; he became Professor of English at the University of Delhi in 1980. My True Faces (1973), his first novel, was followed in 1975 by Azadi, a compelling narrative of the divisive effects of Par…
Trinidadian novelist, born in Port of Spain, educated at Queen's Royal College, Trinidad, and at University College, Oxford. His first two novels, Fireflies (1970) and The Chip-Chip Gathers (1973), focus on wealthy Indian families, particularly the women, and the inexorable disintegration of their Hindu culture in modern Trinidad. In his autobiographical essay ?Beyond the Dragon's Mouth?, Naipaul …
Trinidadian novelist and travel writer, born in Trinidad, educated at Queen's Royal College, Trinidad, and at University College, Oxford. After graduation, Naipaul remained in England where he became known as a witty and satirical novelist through such works as The Mystic Masseur (1957), a story of religious and political charlatanism: The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), an account of electioneering tr…
a novel by Norman Mailer, published in 1948. It is a realistic and naturalistic pseudo-historical narrative about the lives of some soldiers who survive the battle for the Japanese-held island, Anopopei, in the Pacific during the Second World War. General Cummings leads the invasion to attack the garrison of General Tayaku, a battle which takes on symbolic significance in the eyes of the American …
a novel by William Burroughs, published in 1959; subsequently republished in 1962 as Naked Lunch. Burroughs explained in an interview that much of his novel, in form both hallucinatory and disorganized, was written under the influence of specific drugs, particularly cannabis. The novel has no plot and makes few concessions to social or psychological realism, though many of its evocations of a worl…
British historian, born near Warsaw, educated at the London School of Economics and Balliol College, Oxford. He became a British subject in 1913 and was variously engaged in business activities, historical research, and work on behalf of the Zionist movement before his appointment as Professor of Modern History at Manchester University in 1931. His reputation as a political historian of originalit…
Indian novelist and short-story writer, born in Madras, educated mostly in Mysore. He worked as a teacher and as a journalist before the publication of his first novel, Swami and Friends (1935). This evocation of a South Indian middle-class childhood attracted the attention of Graham Greene, who recommended it for publication in Britain. A number of novels followed, all set in the imaginary town o…
is the study of narrative methods and strategies. It assumes that story-telling is a fundamental human activity which can be explored in different cultures and different modes which will reveal common, or at least comparable, features and habits. Narratologists examine fairy tales, myths, detective stories, classic novels, films, epic poems, gossip, jokes, advertising, comic strips?it is the manag…
American poet, born in Rye, New York; he attended Harvard University in 1921 and 1922. He established himself as a successful writer of light verse in the early 1930s, when he was a member of the editorial staff of the New Yorker. Free Wheeling and Hard Lines of 1931 were followed at regular intervals by many further collections, which include I'm a Stranger Here Myself (1938), The Face Is Familia…
American drama critic and essayist, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, educated at Cornell University. After working as a journalist and drama critic, in 1908 he joined the staff of the Smart Set, which he co-edited with H. L. Mencken from 1914 to 1923. Collections of Nathan's essays and reviews from this period include Mr George Jean Nathan Presents (1917), The Popular Theatre (1918), and Materia Criti…
While Native American literature in English does not significantly predate the early nineteenth century, it is intimately linked to the rich oral traditions of the tribes whose ancestors migrated to the continent over 28,000 years before. The oral cultures of the Native Americans remain vigorously current in their principal forms of song, a category encompassing many forms of poetry, ritual drama,…
a novel by Richard Wright, published in 1940. Bigger Thomas, a black youth from the ratinfested squalor of Chicago's South Side ghetto, is hired as chauffeur by the wealthy white Dalton family. Late the first night, having been coerced into socializing with his employers' daughter Mary and her communist boyfriend, he has to help the intoxicated girl to her bedroom; when blind Mrs Dalton appears, B…
British playwright, born in Co. Mayo, raised in Lancashire. After leaving school he was variously employed as a lorry driver, weaver, and coal-bagger before turning seriously to drama. His first plays were for the radio, but two of them, My Flesh, My Blood (1957) and Alfie Elkins and His Little Life (1962), were subsequently adapted by him for the stage, and respectively became the highly successf…
African-American novelist, born in New York City, educated at Brooklyn College and Yale. Her novels focus imaginatively on aspects of the black experience within the wider American context. Her reputation was firmly established with the appearance of her first work of fiction, The Women of Brewster Place. As one of the emergent generation of black American writers, her work displays the liberating…
Ugandan novelist, critic, and dramatist, born in Kampala, educated at Uganda's Makerere University College and the University of Leeds. Following a period in public service in Uganda, the success of In a Brown Mantle (1972), his first novel, gained him a Seymour Lustman Fellowship at Yale University. In 1973 he began teaching at the University of Iowa, where he became Associate Professor of Englis…
South African writer and president of the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW); born in Johannesburg, he grew up there and in Charleston Location, Nigel. He earned a reputation as an outstanding poet in the late 1960s, being widely published in South African journals such as Staffrider, Contrast, Classic, and Izwi. As editor of the student literary journal Expression he emerged as a leading l…
American poet, born near Sharpsburg, Illinois, brought up in Wayne, Nebraska and educated at Nebraska Normal College. He finished his first book, The Divine Enchantment (1900), when he was only 16 and started his major work, the five-part A Cycle of the West (1949), in 1912, after having spent the years from 1901 to 1907 collecting stories on the Omaha Indian Reservation. In 1921 he was declared P…
Australian poet, born at Penola, South Australia, the son of the poet John Neilson (1842?1922); he received an elementary education in Minimay, Victoria, and spent most of his adult life as an itinerant labourer. Having achieved recognition as a poet, he was awarded a pension from the Commonwealth Literary Fund in 1922 and held a sinecure with the Melbourne County Roads Board from 1928 onward. In …
American poet, novelist, and critic, born in New York City, educated at Harvard; he subsequently served as a pilot in the Second World War, an experience informing many of his poems. After holding a succession of posts at American colleges and universities, he became Distinguished University Professor at Washington University, Missouri, in 1976. From 1988 to 1990 he was Poet Laureate of The United…
Australian-born novelist, playwright, and poet who has spent most of her life in London. Her novels include Fall Girl (1966), a picaresque novel about an Australian adrift in London; The Girl Who Played Gooseberry (1968), the study of a philanderer, a leap in literary style and range; The Love Germ (1970), which captures the euphoria of Paris in 1968; The Living Daylights (1974), shimmering fragme…
journal originally founded as a liberal weekly in 1894; it was not a success until it was acquired by A. R. Orage in association with G. B. Shaw and Holbrook Jackson in 1907. Subsequently announcing itself as ?an independent socialist review of politics, literature, and art?, it became one of the leading periodicals of its day. Although firmly aligned with the Fabian Society, the New Age avoided a…
a group of writers, predominantly poets, who cohered closely as a movement from the appearance in 1939 of The New Apocalypse: An Anthology of Criticism, Poems and Stories, edited by J. F. Hendry, until the later 1940s. With Henry Treece, Hendry edited two further anthologies, The White Horseman (1941) and The Crown and the Sickle (1944); the former is prefaced with a passage from Apocalypse (1931)…
British poet, born in Bilston, Staffordshire, educated at Corpus Christi, Oxford; he became a barrister in 1887. The enormous success of Admirals All and Other Verses (1897), his forthrightly patriotic first collection of verse, prompted him to retire from the bar and devote himself to literature. His numerous popular collections of poetry include The Island Race (1898), The Sailing of the Long-Sh…
British travel writer, born in London, educated at St Paul's School. After two years with an advertising agency he became an apprentice seaman on a Finnish sailing-vessel in 1938; his experiences at this time form the basis of The Last Grain Race (1956). In 1939 he began a period of active service in the Second World War; from 1942 to 1945 he was a prisoner of war in Italy, an interlude reflected …
British novelist, born in Crowborough, Sussex, educated at Hanley Castle Grammar School, Worcester, and St Paul's College, Cheltenham. His experiences as a lecturer in English at Fouad I University in Cairo (1942?6) strongly inform his fiction, in which Egyptian and Mediterranean settings recur. In 1949 he joined the BBC as a producer in the Talks Department, rising to become Managing Director of …
a movement in American literary criticism associated with a group of poets and critics who were strongly influenced by the ideas and practice of I. A. Richards and William Empson. It received its name from the book of that title published by John Crowe Ransom in 1941; the group also included Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks (see Agrarians). The New Criticism was not a tightly kni…
a magazine founded by Michael Horovitz in 1959, since when issues have appeared at irregular intervals. At its best, New Departures has fulfilled its editor's original intention of making it a forum for all the arts: poetry by leading authors from various parts of the world has been accompanied by graphic and photographic work of high quality, and musical scores by eminent experimental composers h…