Encyclopedia of Literature: M(acha)L(ouis) Rosenthal Biography to William Sansom [Norman Trevor Sansom] Biography

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

Alan Ross Biography - (1922–2001), Something of the Sea, The Derelict Day: Poems in Germany, The London Magazine

British poet and editor, born in Calcutta, educated at St John's College, Oxford. His wartime experiences on the Murmansk convoys are memorably dealt with in the verse of Something of the Sea (1954). In 1945 and 1947 he was in Germany with the Naval Staff; The Derelict Day: Poems in Germany (1947) reflects the atmospheres of defeat and bewilderment he encountered. In 1961 he became editor of The L…

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Sinclair Ross (James Sinclair Ross) Biography - (1908– ), (James Sinclair Ross), As for Me and My House, manqué, The Well, Whir of Gold

Canadian novelist and short-story writer, born near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He was a bank employee throughout his working life. After retirement he travelled to Europe, where he lived in Athens, Barcelona, and Malaga, before returning to Canada and settling in Vancouver in 1980. Ross is often regarded as a onebook novelist. His masterpiece, As for Me and My House (1941), is a classic study of…

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Henry Roth Biography - (1906–95), Call It Sleep, Shifting Landscapes, Mercy of a Rude Stream

American author, born in Tysmenica, Austria-Hungary, educated at the City College, New York. His reputation rests on one book, Call It Sleep (1934), which was little known until the 1960s, when it was chosen as the ?most neglected book? of twentieth-century American literature by Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler. The target of several vigorous attacks and defences from both right and left, it conce…

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Philip Roth Biography - (1933– ), Goodbye Colombus, Letting Go, When She Was Good, Portnoy's Complaint, Our Gang

American novelist, born in Newark, New Jersey, educated at Bucknell and Chicago Universities. He taught creative writing at Iowa and Princeton Universities before becoming a full-time writer. His collection of an eponymous novella and five short stories, Goodbye Colombus (1959), won him immediate success for its sensitive portrayal of the problems facing young Jewish-Americans. Many novels followe…

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Jerome Rothenberg (Jerome Dennis Rothenberg) Biography - (1931– ), (Jerome Dennis Rothenberg), White Sun, Black Sun, The Seven Hells of the Jigoku Zoshi

American poet, born in New York City, educated at the City College of New York and at the University of Michigan. He held various various visiting academic posts throughout the USA before becoming a professor at the University of California, San Diego, in 1988. White Sun, Black Sun (1960), his first publication as a poet, displayed an allegiance to Imagism in the concentrated forms of its meditati…

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Sheila Rowbotham Biography - (1943– ), Black Dwarf, Women, Resistance and Revolution

British feminist historian, born in Leeds, educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. During the 1960s and 1970s she taught with the Workers' Educational Association. In 1968 she joined the editorial staff of the radical socialist journal Black Dwarf. She has also held several academic posts. Her endeavour to establish the historical provenance of the women's movement of the 1970s began with Women, R…

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A. L. Rowse (Alfred Leslie Rowse) Biography - (1903–1997), (Alfred Leslie Rowse), Poems of a Decade: 1931–1941, Poems of Deliverance

British poet and historian, born at St Austell, Cornwall, educated at Christ Church, Oxford. From 1925 to 1974 he was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Rowse's remark that ?Places speak to me rather than people and are apt to mean more to me? indicates the emphatically local quality of much of his poetry, which draws widely on the landscapes of Cornwall and Oxford (see topographical poetry). …

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Bernice Rubens (Bernice Ruth Rubens) Biography - (1928–2004), (Bernice Ruth Rubens), Set on Edge, Madame Sousatzka, Mate in Three, The Elected Member

British novelist, born in Cardiff, educated at University College, Cardiff. She taught English at a boy's grammar school in Birmingham, and subsequently worked as a documentary film writer and director for the United Nations and other organizations. Her first novel, Set on Edge (1960), displayed the elements of outrageous comedy and keen observation of the family unit which emerge in different com…

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Steele Rudd Biography - (1868–1935), Bulletin, On Our Selection, Dad in Politics, Grandpa's Selection, The Old Homestead

Australian short-story writer and novelist, born Arthur Hoey Davis in Drayton, Queensland; he received a rudimentary education and worked as a shearer before taking clerical employment in Brisbane in 1885. He took the name Steele Rudd for the spuriously autobiographical stories about the typically Australian Rudd family which he began contributing to the Sydney Bulletin in 1895. Following the succ…

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David Rudkin (James David Rudkin) Biography - (1936– ), (James David Rudkin), Afore Night Come

British playwright, born in London, educated at St Catherine's College, Oxford; he worked for a time as a school-teacher. He came to prominence with Afore Night Come (1962), a powerful drama in which a scapegoat, an inoffensive Irish tramp, is ritually murdered by his fellow fruit-pickers in an orchard in the contemporary Midlands. His later work includes Cries from Casement as His Bones Are Broug…

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Muriel Rukeyser Biography - (1913–80), Student Review, Theory of Flight, U. S. 1, Beast in View

American poet and biographer, born in New York, educated at Vassar College, where she founded the Student Review with Elizabeth Bishop and Mary McCarthy, and at Columbia University. She subsequently undertook research at the Roosevelt Aviation School, which provided material central to Theory of Flight (1935), her first collection of poetry. From the outset Rukeyser's verse is marked by the politi…

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Jane Rule Biography - (1931–2007), Desert of the Heart, This Is not for You, Against the Season

Canadian novelist, born in Plainfield, New Jersey, educated at Mills College (California), University College (London), and Stanford University. Her first and best-known novel, Desert of the Heart (1964), tells, in alternating narrative voices, the story of two women who break away from heterosexual constraints to find fulfilment in a lesbian relationship. This Is not for You (1970) is limited to …

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Carol Rumens Biography - (1944– ), Literary Review, A Strange Girl in Bright Colours, A Necklace of Mirrors, Unplayed Music

British poet, born in Lewisham, London, educated at Bedford College, University of London. She became poetry editor of the Literary Review in 1982; she is also active as a teacher of creative writing. A Strange Girl in Bright Colours (1973) was her first collection of poetry; subsequent volumes include A Necklace of Mirrors (1978), Unplayed Music (1981), Star Whisper (1983), Direct Dialling (1985)…

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Damon Runyon (Alfred Damon Runyon) Biography - (1884–1946), (Alfred Damon Runyon), Guys and Dolls, Take It Easy, A Slight Case of Murder

American writer, born in Manhattan, Kansas. Runyon won fame for his stories of Broadway life, turning the gamblers, gangsters, and high-rollers of the 1920s and 1930s into exotic characters, whose inventive slang vocabulary captured the imagination of his audience. Many of these stories were later gathered in collections such as Guys and Dolls (1932) and Take It Easy (1938). A theatrical farce cal…

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Salman Rushdie (Ahmed Salman Rushdie) Biography - (1947– ), (Ahmed Salman Rushdie), Midnight's Children, Grimus, The Conference of the Birds, Shame

Anglo-Indian novelist, born in Bombay, educated at Rugby School, and King's College, Cambridge. He worked as an actor and as an advertising copywriter before taking up writing full-time after the great success of his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981; Booker Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). His first published novel, Grimus (1975), a fantasy inspired by a twelfth-century Sufi…

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Bertrand Russell (Bertrand Arthur William Russell) Biography - (1872–1970), (Bertrand Arthur William Russell), The Analysis of Matter, The Analysis of Mind

3rd Earl Russell, British philosopher, born in Trellech, Gwent, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He published prolifically on a wide range of social, philosophical, and cultural issues and was instrumental in leading modern British philosophy in an anti-Idealist direction. This trend is evident in The Analysis of Matter (1921) and The Analysis of Mind (1927), where the principal thesis is t…

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George William (‘AE’) Russell Biography - (1867–1935), The Candle of Vision, Homeward: Songs by the Way, The Earth Breath

Irish poet, editor, and agronomist, born in Lurgan, Co. Armagh, of an Irish Protestant family, educated at Dublin's Metropolitan School of Art, where he began a lasting friendship with his fellow student W. B. Yeats. ?AE?, as he was generally known, was an abbreviated form of ?Aeon?, a pseudonym he had once used. Yeats was influenced by Russell's wide knowledge of esoteric philosophies and Irish m…

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Willy Russell Biography - (1947– ), John Paul George Ringo … and Bert, Breezeblock Park, Stags and Hens, Educating Rita

British dramatist, born in Whiston near Liverpool, the son of a factory worker; he left school at 15 and became a hairdresser. Later, however, he went to St Katharine's College of Education and gained the qualifications to launch on a brief career as a teacher. His first success was a musical play about the Beatles, John Paul George Ringo ? and Bert (1974). That was followed by other plays wryly a…

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George Ryga Biography - (1932–87), Indian, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Grass and Wild Strawberries, Captives of the Faceless Drummer

Canadian dramatist, born in Alberta. He grew up on a homestead farm and received only an elementary schooling. Youthful communism gave way to a more loosely held socialist belief after 1956, when his disillusionment over the Hungarian uprising caused him to leave the party. Ryga's drama deals with social outsiders and is written in a vein of protest. His early plays, Indian (1964) and his best-kno…

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Gilbert Ryle Biography - (1900–76), Mind, The Concept of Mind, Locke on the Human Understanding, Dilemmas, Collected Papers, On Thinking

British analytic philosopher, born in Brighton, educated at Queen's College, Oxford. He was Wayneflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy (1945?68) at Oxford, and succeeded G. E. Moore as editor of Mind (1947?71). Like J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ryle was interested in scrutinizing the workings of language, and in demonstrating how everyday linguistic idioms could create inappropriate …

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Hon. Victoria Mary Sackville-West (Hon. Victoria ‘Vita’ Mary Sackville-West) Biography - (1892–1962), (Hon. Victoria ‘Vita’ Mary Sackville-West), The Edwardians, The Heir, Challenge, Orlando

British poet and novelist, born at Knole, in Kent, which provided the setting and inspiration for much of her writing, including The Edwardians (1930) and The Heir (1922). Her parents were first cousins; her father became the 3rd Baron Sackville and her mother was the illegitimate daughter of Lionel Sackville-West and the Spanish Flamenco dancer, Pepita de Oliva, about whom she wrote a book publis…

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Sacred Fount, The

a novelette by Henry James, published in 1901. This is the last of a series of tales of curiosity and wonder, in which James explores the extent to which humans live by their own fabricated ?realities? of the mind. During a houseparty at Newmarch, an English country house, the narrator reports his observations and theories to the reader. Moving among the guests, he is struck by the fact that Grace…

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Nayantara Sahgal Biography - (1927– ), Prison and Chocolate Cake, From Fear Set Free, A Time To Be Happy

Indian memoirist, novelist, and political analyst, born in Allahabad, India, educated there and at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. The fascinating events that formed her intellect are chronicled in two autobiographical works, Prison and Chocolate Cake (1954) and From Fear Set Free (1963). Sahgal grew up in the heart of India's struggle for independence; her mother was Vijayalaxmi Pandit and her …

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Edward Said Biography - (1935–2003), Beginnings, Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, The Politics of Dispossession, After the Last Sky

Palestinian critic, born in Jerusalem, educated at Princeton and Harvard. In 1970 he became Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Said wrote widely and forcefully on literature, politics, and music. His first book was on Joseph Conrad and he continued to work on the major Anglo-British Modernists, but much of his reputation rests on his engagement with European phi…

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George Saintsbury (George Edward Bateman Saintsbury) Biography - (1845–1933), (George Edward Bateman Saintsbury), Scrap-Book, A Primer of French Literature

British critic, born in Southampton, educated at Merton College, Oxford. The second volume of his Scrap-Book (3 volumes, 1922?4) contains his recollections of Oxford. After working as a school-teacher in Guernsey, he settled in London in 1876 and began his prolific career as a journalist and author. His first book, A Primer of French Literature (1880), established the historically descriptive mode…

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Saki, pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro Biography - (1870–1916), pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro, Westminster Gazette, Morning Post, Reginald, Reginald in Russia

British writer, born in Burma, educated in England; after his mother's death when he was an infant he was brought up in North Devon by two aunts. He served in the Burmese military police, and from 1900 wrote political satire for the Westminster Gazette. During 1902?8 he was correspondent for the Morning Post in Poland, Russia, and Paris. He is best remembered for the mercilessly alienated stories …

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J. D. Salinger (Jerome David Salinger) Biography - (1919– ), (Jerome David Salinger), The Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, Nine Stories

American novelist and short-story writer, born in New York, educated at Valley Forge Military Academy, New York University, and Columbia University. The Catcher in the Rye (1951), his first published book, had enormous success, particularly with the young who were able to identify with the young hero/narrator, Holden Caulfield. Owing something to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Holden relates his a…

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Andrew Salkey (Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey) Biography - (1928–95), (Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey), A Quality of Violence, Escape to an Autumn Pavement

Jamaican novelist and poet, born in Colon, Panama, educated at St George's College in Jamaica, and the University of London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence (1959), set in rural Jamaica during the drought of 1900, focuses on the desperately violent rituals of the Pocomania cult. Subsequent novels featured alienated middle-class protagonists who asserted themselves through violent personal c…

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Paul Anthony Samuelson Biography - (1915– ), Economics, General Theory, Foundations of Economic Analysis, Newsweek, Economics from the Heart, The New Palgrave

American economist, born in Gary, Indiana, educated at Chicago and Harvard Universities, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics (1970). Samuelson is known to generations of students as the author of a best-selling introductory textbook, Economics (1st edition 1948). He spent his academic career as Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a student in the 1930s, K…

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Sonia Sanchez Biography - (1934– ), Homecoming, WE a BaddDDD People, Liberation Poem, A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women

American poet, born in Birmingham, Alabama, educated at Hunter College, New York. From 1967 onwards she held posts at numerous colleges and universities and became Professor of English at Temple University, Philadelphia, in 1979. Homecoming (1969), WE a BaddDDD People (1970), and Liberation Poem (1970), her early collections of verse, established Sanchez as an outspoken and verbally inventive poet…

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Sanctuary - Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary: The Original Text, grand guignol

a novel by William Faulkner, first published in 1931, and, in what has become known as ?the original text?, in 1981. Sanctuary, Faulkner's sixth novel in order of publication, though written before As I Lay Dying (1930), the fifth to appear, exists in two quite distinct versions. The novel, said by the author to be ?the most horrific tale I could imagine? and ?deliberately conceived to make money?…

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Carl Sandburg (Carl August Sandburg) Biography - (1878–1967), (Carl August Sandburg), Chicago Daily News, In Reckless Ecstasy, The Plaint of a Rose, Poetry

American poet, born in Galesburg, Illinois; he left school at 13 and spent several years travelling before serving in the Spanish-American War. After study at Lombard College, Galesburg, in 1902 he became a reporter and was on the staff of the Chicago Daily News from 1917 to 1930. In Reckless Ecstasy (1904) and The Plaint of a Rose (1905) contained lyrically sentimental poems he discounted in prep…

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Mari Sandoz Biography - (1896–1966), Old Jules, Slogum House, Capital City, Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas

American historian, biographer, and novelist, born to Swiss immigrant homesteaders on the northwestern Nebraska frontier. Her childhood memories, her Native American neighbours, and the region of the western Plains inspired her work. From her earliest success, Old Jules (1935), a biography of her father doubly marked by the brutality of his character and the rawness of the Nebraska frontier, Sando…

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San Francisco Renaissance - The Dharma Bums, The San Francisco Renaisance

an interlude of heightened literary activity based in San Francisco which is generally considered to have begun with a poetry reading in October 1955 at which Kenneth Rexroth introduced Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Philip Lamantia; Jack Kerouac recorded his impressions of the reading in The Dharma Bums (1958). Although frequently associated with the activity of …

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