American dramatist, born in Dubuque, Iowa, educated at Villanova University, Pennsylvania. Rabe served in Vietnam in 1965?7, an experience which informs much of his early drama. A controversial trilogy of plays about Vietnam established his reputation?The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), Sticks and Bones (1971), and Streamers (1976). His other plays include The Chameleon (1959), The Orphan (…
a novel by Robert Tressell, published in 1914. ?I have invented nothing. There are no scenes or incidents in the story that I have not witnessed wither myself or had conclusive evidence of?, said Tressell of his pioneering novel, and the great strength of the work is its authentic portrayal of Edwardian society and its insights into the misery and extortion which formed the backbone of this great …
American literary critic and editor, born in Kupin, Ukraine, educated at Brown University. He migrated to the USA in 1922 and within little more than a decade had made an important contribution to American culture: his founding, with William Phillips, in 1934 of the Partisan Review, the most distinguished journal of radical thought in contemporary American letters. When he resigned from the journa…
a novel by D. H. Lawrence, published in 1915. Begun in early 1913, The Rainbow had a tormented compositional and publishing history and was suppressed by Court Order on grounds of obscenity. It is now regarded, with Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, as amongst his best work. The novel is written to a classic generic pattern?the three-generation family saga?and there is evidence that Lawrence init…
British poet, born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, educated at Exeter College, Oxford. After lecturing at various Oxford colleges from 1971 to 1979, he held a succession of editorial posts in London before returning to Oxford as a fellow of New College in 1991. The Onion Memory (1978), his first collection of poems, rapidly established his reputation as an imaginatively inventive stylist. His c…
British poet and critic, born in London; much of her childhood was spent in Northumberland. She was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she became a research fellow in 1955. She was the first wife of the poet and sociologist Charles Madge. Her poems were featured in Poetry London, which published her first collection entitled Stone and Flower, illustrated by Barbara Hepworth, in 1943. Num…
four novels by Paul Scott, published between 1966 and 1974. Set between 1939 and 1947, these inter-connected novels gradually bring to light the corruption and bigotry within the Anglo-Indian community, and trace the roots of the violence following on the British departure and the Partition of India. The books share a complex narrative structure which incorporates letters, conversations, reports, …
American poet, born in Berlin; in 1910 he emigrated to the USA, where he was educated at the Universities of Wisconsin, Chicago, and Texas. In 1932 he began a career in social work and was Director of the Jewish Family and Children's Service in Minneapolis from 1945 to 1968. He has held numerous posts as a writer-in-residence. Rakosi was eminent among the Objectivist poets and was represented in t…
Indian poet, born in Mysore, educated there and at Indiana University. Long resident in the USA, he was appointed Professor of Linguistics and of South East Asian Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago. More austere in style than fellow ?Indo-Anglian? poets like Dom Moraes and Nissim Ezekiel, his poems are particularly notable for applying Indian sensibilities to American culture.…
American novelist, essayist, and pamphleteer, born in St Petersburg, Russia, educated at the University of Petrograd; she emigrated to America shortly afterwards. Her first novel, We the Living (1936), was the melodramatic account of a woman's emotional involvement with two men, one communist, one not; it was largely dismissed by the critics, as was Anthem (1938), a futuristic fantasy. A self-styl…
American poet and critic, born in Pulaski, Tennessee, educated at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, and at Christ Church, Oxford. He taught at Vanderbilt from 1914 to 1937, when he was appointed Carnegie Professor of Poetry at Kenyon College and began the Kenyon Review. Poems about God (1919), his first collection of verse, has much in common with the distinctively ironic manner of his subsequent …
British writer, journalist, and illustrator, born in Leeds, educated at Rugby. He rose from office boy for the publisher Grant Richards to reporter for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian. In 1913 he visited Russia and later returned to report the Revolution for the Daily News. His interest in Russia resulted in Old Peter's Russian Tales (1916), a collection of legends and fairy tales, and …
Indian novelist, born in Hassan, Karnataka, educated in Hyderabad and Aligarh, before attending the universities of Montpellier and the Sorbonne in France. In 1965 he became a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Austin, Texas. Rao's first novel, Kanthapura (1938), foregrounded the Gandhian struggle for national independence, but is remarkable for its narrative voice?a village grandmother?…
American novelist, born in Chicago, educated St John's College, Cambridge; he has lived chiefly in England as a fulltime writer. His early novels include The Limits of Love (1960) and A Wild Surmise (1961), which display the moral and psychological concern with relations between the individual and a larger community that pervades his writing. The Trouble with England (1962) and The Graduate Wife (…
British dramatist, born in London, the son of a diplomat, educated at Trinity College, Oxford. From the age of 25 he was one of England's commercially most successful play-wrights. French without Tears (1936), a comedy set in a language school, was followed by plays both serious and humorous: among them, Flare Path (1942), a tribute to the RAF at war; The Winslow Boy (1946), about a father's battl…
British novelist, born in London, educated at Charterhouse and at King's College, Cambridge. After a career as an officer in the British Army, Raven began his successful literary career with The Feathers of Death (1959), a novel about homosexuality in the army. A sequence of ten linked novels, ?Alms for Oblivion? (1964?75), which includes Friends in Low Places (1965), The Judas Boy (1968), and Sou…
American philosopher and political theorist, born in Baltimore, educated at Princeton and Cornell Universities. Following military service during the Second World War, he began his academic career; in 1960 he became a professor at Harvard, where he was made James Bryant Conant University Professor in 1979. ?Justice as Fairness? (1958) and ?Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play? (1964) were am…
British poet, born in Bexleyheath, Kent, educated at the University of Essex, and the University of Granada, Spain. Since 1969 he has worked as a writer-in-residence at numerous universities in the UK and the USA. He founded the Matrix and Goliard Presses in 1959 and 1965 respectively (see small presses). From the outset, his poetry displayed a striking independence of both conventional verse form…
a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, published in 1944. This was the first work in which the narrative voice is identified as Maugham's by name. Written after much painstaking research into Eastern philosophy and mysticism, The Razor's Edge is Maugham's twentieth-century manifesto for human fulfilment. In it he mercilessly satirizes American and European materialism, and holds up the figure of the spir…
British poet and critic, born in Kirbymoorside, Yorkshire, educated at the University of Leeds. His experiences on active service during the First World War are reflected in the prose works In Retreat (1925) and Ambush (1930) and in the verse collected in Songs of Chaos (1915) and Naked Warriors (1919). He became an Assistant Keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1922. His subsequent works a…
British novelist, born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, educated at St John's College, Cambridge; the son of Sir Herbert Read. His first novel, A Game in Heaven with Tussey Marx (1966), was followed by The Junkers (1969), a study of Nazism and the Holocaust. Political and moral preoccupations predominate in Read's novels, notable among which are The Professor's Daughter (1971), The Upstart (1973)…
This approach to criticism derives from Hermeneutics, a discipline which places at its centre the practice of interpretation rather than particular results. In such a perspective, the reader of a literary text, so long ignored or taken for granted, makes a dramatic reappearance as the focus of meaning, the site of the construction of significance, if not always the actual constructor. Hans Robert …
British poet, born in Liverpool, educated at the Liverpool College of Art, where he lectured from 1968 to 1970. He then moved to Shropshire and worked as a weighbridge operator at an agricultural feed mill before becoming a free-lance writer. His first substantial collection of poetry was For the Municipality's Elderly (1974), which established his enduring concern with lives overlooked by the soc…
is a word with many meanings and uses, in philosophy, history of art, literary criticism, and ordinary language. In literature it is most often used to describe the great achievements of the European novel in the nineteenth century: the work of, for instance, Balzac. Tolstoy, and George Eliot. This writing characteristically depicts a large and complex social world from the point of view of a shar…
Canadian poet and playwright, born in Ontario, educated at the University of Toronto. He worked under Northrop Frye for his doctorate, and shares his interest in the mythic dimension of poetry. From 1960 to 1971 he edited the magazine Alphabet, dedicated to the ?iconography of the imagination?, and has retained a commitment to experimentation. His early poetry demonstrated a formidable range of bo…
American novelist, born in El Paso, Texas, educated at Texas Western College and the New School for Social Research, New York. His first novel, City of Night (1963), was a celebrated exploration of a homosexual underworld and the rootlessness of big city life. Its narrator moves from El Paso to Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, encountering gay prostitution and drug-taking in bars and cheap hote…
British poet and novelist, born in Kingston, Surrey; he read Natural Sciences at Queens' College, Cambridge and subsequently worked as a scientific journalist. He was a founding member of the Group in 1956. After holding visiting posts at the University of New York and the University of Leeds from 1961 to 1965, he became poet-in-residence at Falmouth School of Art. He married Penelope Shuttle in 1…
British poet and radio dramatist, born in Birmingham, educated at Birmingham University. After periods as a teacher and a journalist, he worked in the Foreign Office and Naval Intelligence during the Second World War and began his prolific career as a writer for radio in 1945. Five of his many verse-dramas are collected in The Streets of Pompeii and Other Plays (1971); selections from his humorous…
American novelist and poet, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, educated at the University of Buffalo. Highly innovative and experimental, Reed's novels weave American myths and legends into a playful pattern of parody which satirizes many aspects of contemporary America, and radically re-evaluates its past. His first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), parodies early African-American autobiogra…
British poet, born in Jersey, educated at Essex University. Bleecker Street (1980), his first substantial collection, established acute observation, imaginative range, and literary allusion as essential characteristics of his poetry. By the Fisheries (1984) and Nero (1985) brought him prominence among younger British poets, initiating controversy over the merits of his verse; Kathleen Raine declar…
American journalist, born in Portland, Oregon, educated at Harvard. Rejecting his wealthy background, he became one of the USA's most famous radical journalists and the only American to be buried in the Kremlin Wall. With the aid of Lincoln Steffens, the famous radical journalist, he began his career with The American Magazine, but finding it politically restrictive he began to write for other jou…
British poet, born in London, educated at Jesus College, Oxford. From 1932 to 1952 he taught English in a number of schools and teachers' training colleges, subsequently becoming a freelance author and editor. His first collection of poems, The Natural Need, was published in 1936 by the Seizin Press, run by Robert Graves and Laura Riding, whose work Reeves's early poetry sometimes resembles. Numer…
verse reflecting certain essential aspects of specific geographical areas, generally approximating in size and distinctness of cultural identity to counties. Although there are numerous earlier examples of poets firmly associated with particular districts or landscapes, John Clare and Thomas Hardy among them, the term is primarily applicable to work produced from the late 1950s onward; at this tim…
Ulster novelist, born in Belfast where he spent most of his life, educated at Cambridge University. His work combines a sense of the numinous with an appreciation of the mundane, particularly as evidenced in bourgeois provincial Ulster life. His first book, The Kingdom of Twilight (1904), was followed by Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys (1905), dedicated to his admired Henry James who would not ackn…
Scottish poet and novelist, born in Glasgow, where he later worked as a journalist. In 1936 his wife accepted a medical post in the Highlands, and Reid spent virtually the rest of his life there. Though he published two books of poems, and though two novels were issued posthumously, his reputation rests on his remarkable novel Homeward Journey (1934). This is a study of the relationship between tw…
Jamaican novelist, journalist, and editor, born in Jamaica, educated at Kingston Technical High School. His first novel, New Day (1949), reconstructs the history of Jamaica, as narrated by 87-year-old John Campbell, from his childhood days to 1944, when Jamaica gained internal selfgovernment from Britain. The novel is written entirely in a version of Jamaican English, and interweaves episodes from…
British crime writer, born in London; she worked briefly for an Essex newspaper. With From Doom with Death (1964) she began a long series of police novels set in the mid-Sussex town of Kingsmarkham, with Detective Chief Inspector Wexford as their central character. Though these have similarities in method with the classical pre-war detective story, they differ from it in their subjects, which incl…
New Zealand playwright, born in Napier, educated at Massey University and at the University of Auckland. Her first full-length play, Setting the Table (1984), was followed by Wednesday to Come (1985), the first play of a trilogy, which established Renee's reputation. The play draws on both feminist and working-class perspectives in a family drama which takes place in a house situated on the path o…
a collection of poems by W. B. Yeats, published in 1914, which completes the gradual development away from the melancholy romanticism of the Celtic Twilight in his early work. The most striking advances are achieved in a group of poems placed near the opening of the book which include ?To a Wealthy Man??, ?September 1913?, and ?To a Shade?; these and others are remarkable for the combative directn…
a novel by Wyndham Lewis, published in 1937. Set at the time of the Spanish Civil War, the novel opens in the Spanish gaol where its central character, Percy Hardcaster, an English revolutionary fighting for the Communists, is incarcerated following his capture by the Civil Guard. He attempts to escape, but is shot and repatriated, after losing a leg?a war wound which gives him great cachet amongs…
a magazine of poetry and criticism founded by Ian Hamilton in 1962. As editor, Hamilton sought to establish ?a new lyricism, direct, personal, concentrated?; the sometimes acerbic tone of its reviewing recalled that of Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse, which like The Review was the leading poetry periodical of its decade. Contributors of criticism included Clive James, Peter Porter, and Alan Brownjohn…
American poet and essayist, born at South Bend, Indiana; he grew up mainly in Chicago, where he studied at the Art Institute. An Autobiographical Novel (1966) recounts his precocious involvement in a range of Modernist movements in literature and the graphic arts. From 1927 he lived principally in San Francisco, working as a journalist and latterly as a visiting lecturer at various universities. H…
American poet, born in Brooklyn, New York, educated at the School of Journalism of the University of Missouri and at New York University, where he gained his LL.B. in 1915. His early publications as a poet include Rhythms (1918), Uriel Acosta (1921), and the verse-dramas of Chatterton, The Black Death, and Meriwether Lewis (1922). The terse compression of his mature style emerged in Five Groups of…