Elio Vittorini (1908-1966)

The Italian novelist, translator, editor, and journalist Elio Vittorini (1908-1966) helped to prepare the ground for the Italian neorealist movement.

Elio Vittorini (July 23, 1908 - February 12, 1966) was an Italian writer and novelist. He was a contemporary of Cesare Pavese and an influential voice in the modernist school of novel writing. His best-known work is the anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily, for which he was jailed when it was published in 1941. The first U.S. edition of the novel, published in 1949, included an introduction from Ernest Hemingway, whose style influenced Vittorini and that novel in particular.

Vittorini was born in Syracuse, Sicily, and throughout his childhood moved around Sicily with his father, a railroad worker. Several times he ran away from home, culminating in his leaving Sicily for good in 1924. For a brief period, he found employment as a construction worker in the Julian March, after which he moved to Florence to work as a type corrector (a line of work he abandoned in 1934 due to lead poisoning). Around 1927 his work began to be published in literary journals. In many cases, separate editions of his novels and short stories from this period, such as The Red Carnation were not published until after World War II, due to fascist censorship. In 1937, he was expelled from the Fascist Party for writing in support of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1939 he moved once again, this time to Milan. An anthology of American literature which he edited was, once more, delayed by censorship. Remaining an outspoken critic of Mussolini's regime, Vittorini was arrested and jailed in 1942. He joined the Italian Communist Party and began taking an active role in the Resistance, which provided the basis for his 1945 novel Men and not Men. Also in 1945, he briefly became the editor of the Italian Communist daily L'Unità.

After the war, Vittorini chiefly concentrated on his work as editor, helping publish work by young Italians such as Calvino and Fenoglio. His last major published work of fiction during his lifetime was 1956's Erica and her Sisters. The news of the events of the Hungarian Uprising deeply shook his convictions in Communism and made him decide to largely abandon writing, leaving unfinished work which was to be published in unedited form posthumously. For the remainder of his life, Vittorini continued in his post as an editor. He also ran a candidate on a PSI list. He died in Milan in 1966.

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Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)

* Born: 23 July 1888

* Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois

* Died: 26 March 1959 (pneumonia)

* Best Known As: The creator of detective Philip Marlowe

Raymond Chandler was a founder (with Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain) of the hard-boiled school of mystery fiction. His detective hero Philip Marlowe, a tough and handsome urban loner, was much imitated by other mystery writers and in film noir movies. Chandler didn't begin writing seriously until he was nearly 45 years old; from 1922 to 1932 Chandler was an accountant and manager for the Dabney Oil Syndicate in Los Angeles. (Nearly all of the Marlowe stories were set in Los Angeles, considered an unusual setting at the time.) Chandler's early short stories were published in pulp magazines like Black Mask and he later wrote seven complete novels, the most famous of which are The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The Long Goodbye (1953). He also did some writing for films, including Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944, based on Cain's novel) and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train (1951). Chandler was given the Edgar Allan Poe Award by the Mystery Writers of America in 1946 and 1954.

Chandler fought with the Canadian Army in World War I... His wife, Cissy, was 18 years older than Chandler... Months after her death he attempted suicide (by pistol) but failed... Chandler's unfinished novel Poodle Springs was completed by mystery writer Robert B. Parker in 1989.


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Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

* Born: 22 July 1898

* Birthplace: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

* Died: 13 March 1943

* Best Known As: He wrote "The Devil And Daniel Webster"

Stephen Vincent Benét was an American poet, novelist and short story writer, the author of the famous story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1937). He won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for "John's Brown Body," the epic Civil War poem that recounts John Brown's 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry, and his novels include The Beginning of Wisdom (1921), Young People's Pride (1922) and James Shore's Daughters (1934). Beginning in the 1930s Benét worked occasionally in Hollywood, but he was primarily a poet and short story writer; his last collection of poems, Western Star won him a second (and posthumous) Pulitzer in 1944.

His short story "The Sobbin Women" was the basis for the musical Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954)... His brother, William Rose Benét, was also a Pulitzer-winning poet.


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Oskar Maria Graf (1894-1967)

Oskar Maria Graf (born July 22 1894 in Berg, Bavaria ; died June 28 1967 in New York) was a German author.

He wrote several socialist-anarchist novels and narratives about life in Bavaria, mostly autobiographical.

In the beginning Graf wrote under his real name Oskar Graf. Since 1918, he edited his works for newspapers under the pseudonym, Oskar Graf-Berg; for himself as "worth being read", regarded his works, he selected the name Oskar Maria Graf.

An apprentice baker, Graf went to Munich in 1911, where he supported himself with a variety of menial jobs. Drafted into military service, he was a soldier at the Russian front during World War I. He joined a revolutionary socialist group and participated in a strike by munitions workers and in the November Revolution that resulted in the short-lived Socialist Republic of Bavaria. After its demise in 1919, Graf worked as a director for the Munich Workers’ Theatre before turning to writing. In 1933 Graf fled Germany for Vienna and later for Czechoslovakia, and in 1938 he left Europe and eventually settled in New York.

His early work centres on themes of social revolution and protest, ideas that were never totally absent from his work, but he found his genre in stories of Bavarian folk life. He was concerned about the effects of modernity on traditional lives. Those fears are voiced in several novels about the future, in particular his utopian novel, Die Eroberung der Welt (1949; “The Conquest of the World”), reissued as Die Erben des Untergangs (1959; “The Heirs of the Ruins”).


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Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)

* Born: 22 July 1849
* Birthplace: New York, New York
* Died: 19 November 1887 (Hodgkin's disease)
* Best Known As: Author of the poem on the Statue of Liberty

Emma Lazarus was an American writer of Portugese-Jewish ancestry whose 1883 poem, "The New Colossus," is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in New York and began writing poems as a teenager. In 1886 her first collection, Poems and Translations, was published by her father. She attracted the attention and support of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and soon found herself a member in the elite literary circles of New York City. In the 1880s Lazarus was moved by the news of the Russian and Eastern European persecution of Jews to become more active as an advocate for Jewish immigrants. She published many well-received poems and essays, including "The New Colossus," now one of the most often quoted poems in U.S. history, especially the lines "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to be free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Upon returning to the U.S. from a trip to Europe, Lazarus, who was suffering from Hodgkin's disease, died at the age of 38. Her poem was placed on the Statue of Liberty in 1903. Her other works include Admetus and Other Poems (1871), The Spagnoletto: A Drama in Verse (1876), Songs of a Semite (1882) and the novel Alide: An Episode in Goethe's Life (1874).


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Hart Crane (1899-1932)

* Born: 21 July 1899

* Birthplace: Garrettsville, Ohio

* Died: 27 April 1932 (suicide)

* Best Known As: Suicidal poet of The Bridge

Name at birth: Harold Hart Crane

Bright, volatile, short-lived and hard-drinking, Crane was in some ways an archetype of the Roaring Twenties author. Crane is best known for The Bridge (1930), an epic vision of American life with the Brooklyn Bridge as a central image. Crane is often compared to Walt Whitman, both for his modern American sensibilities and for the homoerotic imagery some find in his work. In sheer style Crane also resembled T.S. Eliot, whom he admired. Crane committed suicide by leaping from the S.S. Orizaba in 1932.

Crane was no relation to Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage.

Crane's personal life was anguished and turbulent. After an unhappy childhood during which he was torn between estranged parents, he held a variety of uninteresting jobs, always, however, returning to New York City and his writing. An alcoholic and a homosexual, he was constantly plagued by money problems and was often a severe trial to friends who tried to help him. In 1931 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Mexico to work on a long poem about Latin America; a year later, returning by ship to the United States, the poem not even started, he jumped overboard and drowned. His collected poems were published in 1933.


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Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

* Born: 21 July 1899

* Birthplace: Oak Park, Illinois

* Died: 2 July 1961 (suicide)

* Best Known As: Famously manly author of For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most famous American writers of the 20th century. He wrote novels and short stories about outdoorsmen, expatriates, soldiers and other men of action, and his plainspoken no-frills writing style became so famous that it was (and still is) frequently parodied. His dashing machismo was almost as famous as his writing: he lived in Paris, Cuba and Key West, fancied bullfighting and big game hunting, and served as a war correspondent in WWII and the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway sealed his own notoriety when he killed himself with a shotgun in 1961. His books include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). His short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and Hemingway was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His memoir of his early life in Paris, A Moveable Feast, was published posthumously in 1964.

Hemingway is also called by his familiar nickname "Papa"... His birthdate is sometimes listed in error as 1898. According to a 1954 article in the New York Times, "In most reference books and in his own conversation he is one year older because he gave 1898 as his birth date when he tried to enlist [in the army] early in 1917, and stuck to that date ever since"... Hemingway's father also committed suicide, shooting himself with a Civil War pistol in 1928... He wrote several short stories about the character Nick Adams, his youthful alter ego; they were collected in The Nick Adams Stories in 1972


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