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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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). …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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)…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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?…
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…
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…
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 …