Friday, July 11, 2008

Hermann Hesse ( 1877 - 1962 )


Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His best known works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) which explore an individual's search for spirituality outside society.

The novels of the German author Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) are lyrical and confessional and are primarily concerned with the relationship between the contemplative, God-seeking individual, often an artist, and his fellow humans.

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Erich Wolf Segal (1937)

Erich Wolf Segal (born June 16, 1937 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American author, screenwriter, and educator.


The son of a rabbi, Segal attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn and traveled to Switzerland to take summer courses. He attended Harvard University, graduating as both the class poet and Latin salutatorian in 1958, after which he obtained his master's degree and a doctorate.

He was a professor of Greek and Latin literature at Harvard University, Yale University and Princeton University. He now is teaching at Wolfson College, Oxford.

works

Yellow Submarine

In 1967, from the story by Lee Minoff, he wrote the screenplay for The Beatles 1968 motion picture, Yellow Submarine.

Love Story

In the late 1960s, Segal collaborated on other screenplays, and also had written a synthetic romantic story by himself about a Harvard and a Radcliffe student, but failed to sell it. However, literary agent Lois Wallace at the William Morris Agency suggested he turn the script into a novel and the result was a literary and motion picture phenomenon called Love Story. A New York Times No. 1 bestseller, the book became the top selling work of fiction for all of 1970 in the United States, and was translated into more than 20 languages worldwide. The motion picture of the same name was the number one box office attraction of 1971.

Erich Segal went on to write more novels and screenplays, including the 1977 sequel to Love Story, called Oliver's Story.


He has published a number of scholarly works as well as teaching at the university level. He has acted as a visiting professor for the University of Munich, Princeton University, and Dartmouth College. He has written widely on Greek and Latin literature. His novel The Class (1985), a saga based on the Harvard Class of 1958, was also a bestseller, and also won literary honour in France and Italy [citation needed]. Doctors was another New York Times bestseller from Segal.


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Joyce Carol Oates ( 1938 )


Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16 1938) is an American author and the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1978.[1]

She serves as associate editor for the Ontario Review, a literary magazine, and the Ontario Review Press, a literary book publisher, both of which are edited by her husband, Raymond J. Smith.

Oates has also written under the pseudonyms "Rosamond Smith" and "Lauren Kelly."


Extraordinarily prolific, Oates has published more than 100 books in a variety of genres, among them dozens of novels. These include With

Shuddering Fall (1964); a trilogy:
A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967, rev. ed. 2003),
Expensive People (1968), and them (1969);
Wonderland (1971); Childwold (1976); Cybele (1979);
Bellefleur (1980); Solstice (1985);
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990);
What I Lived For (1994);
My Heart Laid Bare (1998);
Blonde (2000),
a fictional work based on the life of Marilyn Monroe; and The Falls (2004).

Oates's numerous short stories are collected in such volumes as
Wheel of Love (1970),
A Sentimental Education (1981),
Heat (1991),
Will You Always Love Me? (1996),
Faithless (2001), and High Lonesome (2006).

Oates also has written thrillers under the name Rosamond Smith, plus poems, plays, children's fiction, essays, literary criticism, and a book on boxing (1988).


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Ian Fleming ( 1908 - 1964)


* Born: 28 May 1908
* Birthplace: London, England
* Died: 12 August 1964 (pleurisy and internal bleeding)
* Best Known As: The creator of James Bond 007

Ian Fleming is the creator of the fictional superspy James Bond. Bond is a suave, lady-killing British agent who travels the globe, battles super-villains bent on world domination, and famously prefers his vodka martinis "shaken, not stirred." After publishing his first Bond adventure, Casino Royale, in 1953, Fleming wrote one Bond book each year until his death. The stories spawned a highly profitable movie series which continued into the 21st century, with Sean Connery and Roger Moore the most famous actors to play Bond. Fleming also wrote a series of travel books and the popular children's story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Quotes By: Ian Fleming

"A horse is dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle."

"Older women are best, because they always think they may be doing it for the last time."

"I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."



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E.B. White (1899-1985)


Elwyn Brooks White (July 11, 1899, Mount Vernon, New York – October 1, 1985, North Brooklin, Maine) was a leading American essayist, author, humorist, poet and literary stylist.

"No one can write a sentence like White," James Thurber once said of his crisp and graceful writing style. A liberal free-thinker, White often wrote as an ironic onlooker, championing freedom of the individual. His writing ranged from satire to textbooks and children's fiction. His writers' style guide, The Elements of Style, remains a well-regarded text; his three children's books, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan, are regarded as classics of the field.

White's style was wry, understated, thoughtful, and informed. He was widely regarded as a master of the English language, noted for clear, well-constructed, and charming prose. Many readers single out his essay "Here Is New York", written for Holiday magazine in 1948 and published in book form the next year, for its distillation of the bittersweet pleasures of New York City life. It was widely quoted after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, because of a passage--written at the beginning of the age of nuclear weapons--in which he talks about New York's vulnerability: "The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York in the sound of the jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition."

Through his writing, he set a way to write in American English by adopting Anglo-Saxon-derived terms rather than focusing on finding the Latin origin of the words he used. The Associated Press uses White's words in showing his writing style

The rules of The Elements of Style were as simple to state -- 'Omit needless words' -- as they were difficult to obey



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Alice Munro ( 1931 )


* Born: 10 July 1931

* Birthplace: Wingham, Ontario, Canada

* Best Known As: Canadian writer of The Love of a Good Woman stories

Alice Munro is a three-time winner of the Governor General's Award, one of the most prestigious literary awards in Canada. Known for short stories that explore the undercurrents of human relationships through the ordinary events of daily life, Munro has been called "the Canadian Chekhov." Raised in Ontario, where many of her stories take place, Munro was a housewife for many years before gaining international attention for her first collection of stories, 1968's Dance of the Happy Shades. Her other books of stories include Who Do You Think You Are? (1978, also known as The Beggar Maid), The Moons of Jupiter (1982) and The Love of a Good Woman (1993). In 2006 she announced her retirement from writing and published two books, Carried Away: A Selection of Stories and The View from Castle Rock.

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