Encyclopedia of Literature: John Rhode to Jack [Morris] Rosenthal Biography

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

Trevor Rhone Biography - (1940– ), The Gadget, Old Story Time and Other Plays, Smile Orange, School's Out

Jamaican playwright, born in Kingston, Jamaica; he studied drama at the Rose Bruford College in Kent. In 1965 he founded ?Theatre 77?, which performed at the Barn Theatre in Kingston, for which Rhone wrote The Gadget (1969). His published plays include Old Story Time and Other Plays (1981), which also contains Smile Orange and School's Out, and Two Can Play and School's Out (1986). Set in a ?third…

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Jean Rhys (Jean Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams Rhys) Biography - (1890–1979), (Jean Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams Rhys), Postures, Quarted, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie

British novelist, born in Roseau, Dominica, of Welsh descent; she moved to Britain in 1907. Her shifting life as a chorus girl, her years in Paris, her difficult first marriage, and her encounter with Ford Madox Ford gave her ample material for her early fiction. Her first two novels, Postures (1928, reprinted as Quarted in 1969) and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), present the story of the reco…

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Elmer Rice Biography - (1892–1967), On Trial, The Adding Machine, Wake Up, Jonathan, Close Harmony, Cock Robin, The Subway

American playwright, novelist, and producer, born Elmer Reizenstein in New York, educated at the New York Law School. His first successful play, On Trial (1914), a courtroom melodrama and murder mystery, employed the ?flashback? technique and a revolving stage. His later plays are also characteristically experimental in form and subversive in content, notably The Adding Machine (1923), an expressi…

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Adrienne Rich (Adrienne Cecile Rich) Biography - (1931– ), (Adrienne Cecile Rich), A Change of World, The Diamond Cutters

American poet, born in Baltimore, educated at Radcliffe College. She has held posts at numerous American universities and became Professor of English and Feminist Studies at Stanford University in 1986. A Change of World (1951), her first collection of verse, was notable for the restraint with which her accomplished versification conveyed an underlying sense of vulnerability and impermanence. Stro…

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I. A. Richards (Ivor Armstrong Richards) Biography - (1893–1979), (Ivor Armstrong Richards), Principles of Literary Criticism, Practical Criticism, learn, Coleridge on the Imagination

English critic, born in Cheshire, educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a teacher of enormous importance for the development of modern methods of reading and thinking about literature. Principles of Literary Criticism (1925) was acclaimed by T. S. Eliot not only for changing the course of criticism but for altering the meaning of the term, and there were many who thought Richards had re…

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Dorothy M. Richardson (Dorothy Miller Richardson) Biography - (1873–1957), (Dorothy Miller Richardson), Pilgrimage, Life and Letters, Close Up, Journey to Paradise, Pointed Roofs

British novelist, born in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. An important and long-neglected British modernist, Richardson is best known for her influential and original work Pilgrimage, which was published in parts, as eleven separate novels, between 1915 and 1935, then reissued as a single novel, in four volumes, comprising twelve ?chapter novels? (Richardson's own term) in 1938. A thirteenth novel, probabl…

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Henry Handel Richardson (born Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson) Biography - (1870–1946), (born Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson), Maurice Guest, Rhapsody, The Getting of Wisdom

Australian novelist, born in Melbourne. In 1888, accompanied by her mother and sister, she travelled to Europe and studied music at the Leipzig Conservatorium. In Germany she read widely in European literature and also met her future husband, J. G. Robertson, who later became Professor of German Literature at the University of London. She settled in London in 1903. Her first novel, Maurice Guest (…

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Mordecai Richler Biography - (1931–2001), Son of a Smaller Hero, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Dravitz, The Incomparable Atuk, Cocksure

Canadian novelist and short-story writer, born in Montreal, educated at Sir George Williams University. From 1951 to 1972 he was in Britain??I wasn't going somewhere as much as getting to hell out of Montreal?; an uneasy, though productive, coming to terms with memories of the now-vanished Montreal Jewish ghetto of his childhood colours much of his best writing, notably Son of a Smaller Hero (1955…

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Christopher Ricks Biography - (1933– ), Tennyson's Methods of Composition, Tennyson: A Biographical and Critical Study

British critic, born in London, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. After teaching at the universities of Oxford, Bristol, and Cambridge, in 1986 he became Professor of English at Boston University. His edition of the poems of Tennyson which appeared in 1969 is the fullest available text of that poet's work; his Tennyson's Methods of Composition (1966) and Tennyson: A Biographical and Critical St…

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Edgell Rickword (John Edgell Rickword) Biography - (1898–1982), (John Edgell Rickword), Behind the Eyes, Rimbaud: The Boy and the Poet

British poet and critic, born in Colchester, Essex, educated at Pembroke College, Oxford. His experience of active service on the Western Front from 1916 to 1918 is reflected in numerous poems in Behind the Eyes (1921), his first volume of verse. During the early 1920s he established his reputation as a critic through his contributions to leading literary periodicals. His Rimbaud: The Boy and the …

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Lola Ridge (Lola Rose Emily Ridge) Biography - (1871–1941), (Lola Rose Emily Ridge), Mother Earth, The Ghetto, Sun-Up, Red Flag, Firehead

American poet, born in Dublin. At the age of 16 she accompanied her mother to New Zealand; they eventually settled in Sydney, Australia, where she attended Trinity College and studied art at the Academie Julienne. Following her mother's death, in 1907 she travelled to the USA and settled in New York, working as an artist's model and an advertising copywriter. She became identified as a poet of pol…

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Laura Riding Biography - (1901–91), Fugitive, A Survey of Modern Poetry, Contemporaries and Snobs, Anarchism Is not Enough

American poet, born in New York, educated at Cornell University. She first attracted notice as a poet through her association with J. C. Ransom and other contributors to the Fugitive (1922?5; see Agrarians, The), in which her verse repeatedly appeared. From 1925 to 1939 she lived with Robert Graves, with whom she produced the seminal critical work A Survey of Modern Poetry (1927). Contemporaries a…

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Anne Ridler Biography - (1912–2001), Poems, The Nine Bright Shiners, A Matter of Life and Death, Some Time After

British poet, born in Rugby, Warwickshire, educated at King's College, the University of London. She worked in the editorial department of Faber and Faber from 1935 to 1940, after which she was fully occupied with motherhood and writing. Her first collection of verse was Poems (1939); subsequent volumes include The Nine Bright Shiners (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1959), Some Time After (197…

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Joan Riley Biography - (1958– ), The Unbelonging, Waiting in the Twilight, Romance, A Kindness to the Children

Jamaican novelist, born in St Mary, Jamaica, educated there and at the universities of Sussex and London. Her novels, dealing primarily with the experiences of women who have moved from the West Indies to Britain, are notable for their scrupulous realism and sensitive characterization. Her first, The Unbelonging (1985), is about an II-year-old girl, Hyacinth, who finds herself abruptly cut off fro…

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Rites of Passage - Lord of the Files, Close Quarters, Fire Down Below

a novel by W. Golding, published in 1980 and awarded the 1980 Booker Prize. Edmund Talbot, an immature dandy, is travelling by ship to Australia to take up a prestigious post; his journal of the voyage forms the text of the novel. The community of passengers and crew includes Zenobia, who seduces him, and Prettiman, the free-thinker, but the main storyline concerns the clergyman Colley, ridiculed …

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Richard Rive Biography - (1931–89), African Songs, Advance Retreat: Selected Short Stories, Selected Writings, Emergency, Emergency Continued

South African novelist and short-story writer, born in District Six, Cape Town, educated at the University of Cape Town, Columbia University (New York), and Magdalen College, Oxford. Rive lived mainly in South Africa, and held various teaching and academic appointments. Like his compatriot Alex La Guma, he chronicled the squalor and tension of township life arising directly from apartheid legislat…

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Tomás Rivera Biography - (1935–84), y no se lo trago la tierra / And the Earth Did Not Part

Chicano novelist and poet, born in Crystal City, Texas, educated at the University of Oklahoma. He is best known for the novel ? y no se lo trago la tierra / And the Earth Did Not Part (1971), a story-cycle recounted as the dying words of a Chicano elder who recalls through the persona of an unnamed child the racial conflicts that have shaped the identity of his ethnic community. The novel is char…

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Road to Wigan Pier, The - Vogue, Daily Worker, œuvre

a polemical work by George Orwell, published in 1937. This powerful indictment of grim living conditions in the mining communities of the north of England established Orwell's credentials as a left-wing commentator but also aroused suspicion and hostility in the communist press. The reception of his text did much to confirm an inclination towards political independence that had grown so strong by …

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Lionel Charles Robbins Biography - (1898–1984), Autobiography of an Economist, Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science

British economist, who became Baron Robbins of Clare Market in 1961, born in Middlesex, educated at the London School of Economics where he later became Professor of Economics. Between the wars he was an active anti-Keynesian (something he later declared to have been ?the greatest mistake of my professional career? in his Autobiography of an Economist, 1971). He chaired a committee on higher educa…

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Tom Robbins (Tom Thomas Eugene Robbins) Biography - (1936– ), (Tom Thomas Eugene Robbins), Guy Anderson, Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

American novelist, born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, educated at Lee University and the University of Washington. He first published the biography Guy Anderson (1965), and remained relatively unknown until his two novels Another Roadside Attraction (1971) and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976) were republished in paperback. His hugely popular novels embrace the counter-cultural attitudes of pe…

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Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts) Biography - (1860–1943), (Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts), Orion, In Divers Tones, Songs of the Common Day

Canadian poet and writer, born in Douglas, New Brunswick, educated at the University of New Brunswick. Roberts is sometimes regarded as the father of Canadian poetry, chiefly because the favourable reception of his early and best work, which blends late Romantic poetic modes with an attempt to encompass Canadian themes, proved an inspiration to other poets of his generation. He is generally classi…

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Keith Roberts (Keith John Kingston Roberts) Biography - (1935–2000), (Keith John Kingston Roberts), Pavane, Kiteworld, The Chalk Giants, Machines and Men, The Grain Kings

British writer of science fiction and fantasy, born in Kettering, Northamptonshire, educated at Leicester College of Art. Most of his work is set in southern England; Pavane (1968), his first success, presented an alternate history of England in which the Spanish Armada won, and an intriguingly different culture ensued; a bleaker alternate history governed the England of Kiteworld (1985). Many of …

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Michael Roberts (Michael William Edward Roberts) Biography - (1902–48), (Michael William Edward Roberts), New Signatures, New Country, The Faber Book of Modern Verse

British poet, critic, and editor, born in Bournemouth, educated at King's College, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge. After working as a school-teacher, he joined the BBC's European Service during the Second World War, and became Principal of the College of St Mark and St John in Chelsea in 1945. As the editor of New Signatures (1932) and New Country (1933) he gave a corporate identity to the…

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Michèle Roberts Biography - (1949– ), A Piece of the Night, The Visitation, The Wild Girl, The Book of Mrs Noah

British novelist, born in Bushey, Hertfordshire, educated at convent school and at Somerville College, Oxford. Her mother was a French Catholic and her father an English Protestant. Roberts's early novels, A Piece of the Night (1978) and The Visitation (1983), earned her a reputation as a leading feminist novelist. In The Wild Girl (1984) she turned to myth and archetype, a lasting preoccupation, …

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Edwin Arlington Robinson Biography - (1869–1935), The Man against the Sky, Merlin, Lancelot, The Three Taverns, The Man who Died Twice

American poet, born in Maine, educated at Harvard. During his early life Robinson struggled to attain recognition as a poet, finally achieving it with The Man against the Sky (1916), which began his most prolific and successful period. During the years that followed he produced numerous volumes of verse including Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), The Three Taverns (1920), The Man who Died Twice (192…

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Joan Violet Robinson Biography - (1903–83), The Economics of Imperfect Competition, laissez-faire, An Essay on Marxian Economics, Economic Philosophy

British economist, born in Camberley, Surrey, educated at Girton College, Cambridge. She was one of the group of younger economists at Cambridge which was instrumental in staging the so-called Keynesian Revolution. Her first book, The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933), launched an entire revolution of its own in thinking about the theory of the firm?but she later disowned it (as a wrong tu…

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Lennox Robinson Biography - (1886–1958), The Clancy Name, The Whiteheaded Boy, Crabbed Youth and Age, The Lost Leader

Irish playwright and theatre director, born in Douglas, Co. Cork, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, and educated at Bandon Grammer School. After the popular success of his first play, The Clancy Name (1908), he was invited by W. B. Yeats to manage the Abbey Theatre, a position he held from 1910 to 1914 and then from 1919 to 1923, subsequently serving as an influential member of the theatre…

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Billy Roche Biography - (1949– ), Tumbling Down, A Handful of Stars, Poor Beast in the Rain, Belfry, Amphibians, The Cavalcaders

Irish dramatist, born in Wexford, Ireland, the son of a publican, educated in the same town. He worked in a car-seat factory, then went to England in an unsuccessful attempt to make his living as a folk-singer, but achieved some success when he returned to Ireland and formed his own touring rock band. A novel, Tumbling Down (1986), was followed by three plays which, like the novel, take place in h…

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W. R. Rodgers (William Robert Rodgers) Biography - (1909–69), (William Robert Rodgers), Irish Literary Portraits, Awake! and Other Poems, Europa and the Bull

Northern Irish poet, born in Belfast, where he was educated at Queen's University. In 1935 he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. He resigned from the ministry in 1946, after an opportunity with the BBC in London arose through his association with Louis MacNeice, whom he commemorated in the fine elegy ?A Last Word?. Transcripts of his broadcasts on eminent Irish writers were published as Iris…

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Theodore Roethke (Theodore Huebner Roethke) Biography - (1908–63), (Theodore Huebner Roethke), Open House, The Lost Son, Praise to the End!, The Waking

American poet, born in Saginaw, Michigan, where his father, a wholesale florist, owned the greenhouses which became a major source of imagery in Roethke's poetry. Educated at the University of Michigan, he began his academic career in 1931 at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and was Professor of English at the University of Washington from 1948 until his sudden death in 1963. His first collection…

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Jane Rogers Biography - (1952– ), Separate Tracks, Her Living Image, The Ice Is Singing, Mr Wroe's Virgins

British novelist, born in London, educated at Cambridge University. Her first novel, Separate Tracks (1983), traces with imaginative boldness the lives of Emma, an undergraduate of enlightened middle-class parents, and Orph, a working-class youth brought up in care. Her Living Image (1984) deals with a split personality, Carolyn Tanner, who is both conventional wife and mother and, as Caro, a radi…

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Frederick William Rolfe Biography - (1860–1913), Stories Toto Told Me, The Yellow Book, In His Own Image

British novelist, essayist, painter, and calligrapher, self-styled variously as Baron Corvo and ?Fr Rolfe?, born in London. Rolfe's desire to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood was never fulfilled; he converted to Roman Catholicism from a dissenting background and trained for Holy Orders, but his vocation was rejected. Six retellings of folk legends of the Catholic saints, Stories Toto Told Me (1…

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romantic fiction - Clarissa, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Three Weeks, The Way of an Eagle

The antecedents of popular Romantic Fiction can be found in the Gothic romances of Sir Walter Scott, with their powerfully drawn heroes and villains and their complex and sympathetically drawn heroines, and in the eighteenth-century novels of manners, such as Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), which focused on a contest of wills between its eponymous heroine and her sexually attractive but ruthl…

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Room at the Top

a novel by John Braine, published in 1957. Hardened by war service and the loss of his parents, Joe Lampton arrives in the Yorkshire town of Warley convinced of the supremacy of materialistic values, and intent on making his way into the upper echelons of bourgeois society. Braine's self-assured, iconoclastic hero serves as a sardonic observer of the personalities and politics of a provincial town…

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Room of One's Own, A - Three Guineas

a feminist essay about women's education, exclusion, and writing, by V. Woolf, published in 1929 and based on two lectures on ?Women and Fiction? given in October 1928 to Newnham and Girton Colleges, Cambridge. Woolf describes the educational, social, and financial disadvantages and prejudices against which women have struggled throughout history. The history of women's writing is a slowly accumul…

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Room with a View, A

a novel by E. M. Forster, published in 1908. The opening scene takes place in the Pensione Bertolini, in Florence, where Lucy Honey-church, a charmingly na?ve young Englishwoman, her chaperone, Miss Bartlett, and an assortment of other English visitors are staying. Amongst these are the unconventional Mr Emerson and his son George, who, learning that the room which Lucy and her companion are shari…

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Isaac Rosenberg Biography - (1890–1918), émigré, Night and Day, Youth, Moses, Georgian Poetry, Collected Works, The Half Used Life

British poet and painter, the son of a Russian-Jewish ?migr?, born in Bristol; from the age of seven he grew up in Stepney, London. He worked as an apprentice engraver before becoming a student at the Slade School of Art, and began his career as an artist in 1913. Examples of his work are on permanent exhibition in the Tate Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery in London. His early poetry is c…

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