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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Jessamyn West (1907-1984)

American novelist, born in . Indiana, USA . A Quaker herself, her most famous novel is The Friendly Persuasion (1945), about the conflicts felt by a Quaker farm family during the Civil War. Other works include the novels Cress Delahanty (1954) and Except for Me and Thee (1969), a sequel to The Friendly Persuasion; collections of stories including Love, Death, and the Ladies Drill Team (1955), and Collected Stories (1987); and the autobiographical Hide and Seek (1973) and The Woman Said Yes (1976).


Works: Works by Jessamyn West

1945 The Friendly Persuasion. The Indiana-born author's debut is a series of affectionate and humorous sketches recalling her ancestors, a Quaker farming family during the second half of the nineteenth century. The story would be adapted as a film, starring Gary Cooper, in 1956.

1953 Cress Delahanty. One of West's most popular and best works is this series of episodes in the title character's development from ages twelve to sixteen.


Quotes By: Jessamyn West

"A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself."

"To meet at all, one must open ones eyes to another; and there is no true conversation no matter how many words are spoken, unless the eye, unveiled and listening, opens itself to the other."

"It's very easy to forgive others their mistakes, it takes more gut and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own."

"If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one."

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."

"I have done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt."


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Clifford Odets (1906-1963)

American dramatist, born in Philadelphia. After graduating from high school he became an actor and in 1931 joined the Group Theatre. Turning his attention from acting to playwriting, Odets soon came to be regarded as the most gifted of the American naturalistic social-protest dramatists of the 1930s.

His first work for the Group, Waiting for Lefty (1935), a vernacular, Marxian drama of the awakening and insurgency of the impoverished working classes, aroused immediate international attention. Awake and Sing (1935), his first full-length play and widely considered his best work, compassionately portrays the struggles and rebellion of a financially destitute Jewish-American family. Other plays include Till the Day I Die (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), Night Music (1939), and Clash by Night (1942). Odets spent many years in Hollywood writing film scripts, e.g., Sweet Smell of Success (1957). In his later plays he turned from social drama to self-conscious dramas of the individual, such as The Big Knife (1949), The Country Girl (1950), and The Flowering Peach (1954).


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William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)

English novelist and author of The Rose and the Ring (1855). This satirical fairy story, subtitled ‘a fireside pantomime for great and small children’, was written to amuse his two daughters who were in Rome with him in 1853. The preface describes how they wanted to give a Twelfth Night party, but that no shop in Rome could provide ‘the characters—those funny painted pictures of the King, the Queen, the Lover, the Lady, the Dandy, the Captain, and so on, with which our young ones are wont to recreate themselves at this festive time’. Thackeray thereupon drew the characters and wove a story round them. We see King Valoroso and his queen on facing pages—‘Here behold the monarch sit | With her majesty opposite’; this running commentary in couplets continues through the book. Valoroso has usurped the throne of his nephew, Prince Giglio, who has been encouraged to lapse into a state of unambitious indolence. At Giglio's christening the gift of Fairy Blackstick—bored with necromancy after two or three thousand years—merely had been that he should have ‘a little misfortune’. She had made a similar wish at the christening of Princess Rosalba of Crim Tartary, whose identity is lost when she is a small child, and who becomes maid to Princess Angelica, Valoroso's daughter. The rose and the ring are gifts that Blackstick had once bestowed on godchildren, and have been passed on; they have the power of making wearers seem attractive—even the lumpish Prince Bulbo who comes to woo Angelica.

There are many subsidiary comic characters, among them the hideous Countess Gruffanuff and her husband, porter at Valoroso's palace, who is turned into a door knocker by Blackstick as a punishment for his insolence. The story is labyrinthine in its complexity, and the only moral is a flippant one; Giglio grasps that to be attractive he must have education. He departs for ‘Bosforo’ (Oxford) where he studies assiduously, then discards his books and goes off to win back his throne. The story finishes with the marriages of Giglio and Rosalba (their respective misfortunes now ended) and of Bulbo and Angelica, Gruffanuff's husband having ceased to be a door knocker just in time to prevent the marriage of the Countess to Giglio, who had once unguardedly proposed to her.


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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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Saul Bellow (1915 - 2005 )

Born: 10 June 1915

Birthplace: Lachine, Quebec, Canada

Died: 5 April 2005

Best Known As: Author of Henderson, The Rain King and Seize the Day

Name at birth: Solomon Bellows

Saul Bellow was a Jewish-American writer who in 1976 won the Nobel Prize for a career that included the novels Herzog (1965) and Seize the Day (1956). The son of Russian immigrants, he spent most of his life in Chicago and was closely associated with the city. His first novel, The Dangling Man, was written while Bellow was a Merchant Marine during World War II and published in 1944. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948 allowed him to travel in Europe and work on The Adventures of Augie March (1953), a National Book Award winner in 1954. His 1959 novel, Henderson, The Rain King, was a commercial and critical success, and Bellows was hailed as one of America's finest writers. Herzog (1964) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) both won National Book Awards, and Humboldt's Gift (1975) earned Bellows a Pulitzer Prize. Bellows wrote about modern man -- an urban American Jew in most cases -- and the attempt to find identity and spiritual comfort in a neurotic and alienating society. He also wrote essays, short stories and plays, and taught for many years at the University of Chicago, and, after 1993, Boston University. His other books include More Die of Heartbreak (1987), A Theft (1989) and To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), his non-fiction account of his 1975 sojourn to Israel.

Bellow was married five times, the last time to Janis Freedman, a former student who was more than 40 years younger; in 1999 they had a daughter, when Bellow was 84 years old.
Works

* Dangling Man (1944)
* The Victim (1947)
* The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
* Seize the Day (1956)
* Henderson the Rain King (1959)
* Herzog (1964)
* Mosby's Memoirs (short stories also available in Collected Stories) (1968)
* Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970)
* Humboldt's Gift (1975), won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize
* The Dean's December (1982)
* Him with His Foot in His Mouth (short stories also available in Collected Stories) (1984)
* More Die of Heartbreak(1987)
* A Theft (1989)
* The Bellarosa Connection (1989)
* Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales (collecting the eponymous short story, A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection) (1991)
* The Actual (1997)
* Ravelstein (2000)
* Collected Stories (2001)

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Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 - 1896)

Born: 14 June 1811

Birthplace: Litchfield, Connecticut

Died: 1 July 1896

Best Known As: Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin

Name at birth: Harriet Elizabeth Beecher

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American reformer and writer whose novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) is a classic of 19th century anti-slavery literature. From an activist and influential New England family that included her father Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), sister Catharine Beecher (1800-1878) and brother Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), Harriet moved to Cincinnati in 1833 and married Calvin Ellis Stowe in 1836. While living in Cincinnati, she became active in the anti-slavery movement and, while raising seven children, began writing professionally. Uncle Tom's Cabin, first serialized in 1851, appeared in book form in 1852 and became a bestseller in the United States and England. The story examined the "life among the lowly" and helped frame the slavery issue as a moral one. Stowe wrote more than two dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, including A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), a fact-filled companion to her famous novel. Her other works include Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), Pearl of Orr's Island (1862) and Pink and White Tyranny (1871).

Beecher Stowe caused a controversy in 1869 with a magazine article, "The True Story of Lady Byron's Wife," a piece she wrote after making the acquaintance of the great poet's widow, in which she accused Lord Byron of committing incest with his sister, Augusta... In 1896 her works were published in 16 volumes as The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

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Henry Fielding (1707-1754)

Henry Fielding was born in Glastonbury in Somerset in 1707. The son of a army lieutenant and a judge's daughter, he was educated at Eton School and the University of Leiden before returning to England where he wrote a series of farces, operas and light comedies.

Fielding formed his own company and was running the Little Theatre, Haymarket, when one of his satirical plays began to upset the government. The passing of the Theatrical Licensing Act in 1737 effectively ended Fielding's career as a playwright.

In 1739 Fielding turned to journalism and became editor of The Champion. He also began writing novels, including: The Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), Abraham Adams (1842) and Jonathan Wild (1743).

Fielding was made a justice of the peace for Westminster and Middlesex in 1748. He campaigned against legal corruption and helped his half-brother, Sir John Fielding, establish the Bow Street Runners.

In 1749 Fielding's novel, The History of Tom Jones was published to public acclaim. Critics agree that it is one of the greatest comic novels in the English language. Fielding followed this success with another well received novel, Amelia (1751).

Fielding continued as a journalist and his satirical journal, Covent Garden, continued to upset those in power. Throughout his life, Fielding suffered from poor health and by 1752 he could not move without the help of crutches. In an attempt to overcome his health problems, Henry Fielding went to live in Portugal but this was not successful and he died in Lisbon in 1754.

Selected works:

• LOVE IN SEVERAL MASQUES, 1728
• THE TRAGEDY OF TRAGEDIES: OR, THE THE LIFE AND DEATH OF TOM THUMB THE GREAT, 1730
• THE COFFEE-HOUSE POLITICIAN, 1730
• THE MODERN HUSBAND, 1732
• DON QUIXOTE IN ENGLAND, 1734
• PASQUIN, 1937
• THE HISTORICAL REGISTER, 1737
• AN APOLOGY FOR THE LIFE OF MRS. SHAMELA ANDREWS, 1741
• THE HISTORY OF THE ADVENTURES OF JOSEPH ANDREWS, 1742 - Joseph Andrews - film 1976, dir. by Tony Richardson, starring Peter Firth, Ann-Margret
• THE HISTORY OF MR. JONATHAN WILD THE GREAT, 1743
• A JOURNEY FROM THIS WORLD TO THE NEXT, 1743
• THE HISTORY OF TOM JONES, A FOUNDLING, 1749 - Tom Jones - film 1963. dir. by Tony Richardson, written by John Osborne, starring Albert Finney, Susannah York
• AMELIA, 1751
• PROPOSAL FOR MAKING EFFECTIVE PROVISION FOR THE POOR, 1753
• THE JOURNAL OF A VOYAGE TO LISBON, 1755
• WORKS, 1766
• COLLECTED WORKS, 1882, 1902, 1967

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Anita Desai (1937 )

Anita Desai was born June 24, 1937 in India to a German mother and an Indian father. Although she now resides in South Hadley, Massachusetts, teaching writing at Mount Holyoke College, she is a member of the Advisory Board for English in New Delhi. Desai writes in English, saying, "I first learned English when I went to school. It was the first language that I learned to read and write, so it became my literary language. Languages tend to proliferate around one in India, and one tends to pick up and use whatever is at hand. It makes one realize each language has its own distinct genius." Her family spoke German at home and Hindi to their friends.

Desai's work is part of a new style of writing to come out of India which is not nearly as conservative as Indian writing has been in the past. One concern that is part of her work, especially the novel Baumgartner's Bombay, is that about foreignness and dividedness. Desai grew up during World War II and could see the anxiety her German mother was experiencing about the situation and her family in Germany. After the war when she realized the Germany she had known was devasted, her mother never returned there, nor had any desire to return. Anita herself did not visit until she was an adult.

Selected works:

* The Peacock, 1963
* Voices in the City, 1965
* Bye-Bye, Blackbird, 1971
* The Peacock Garden, 1974
* Where Shall We Go This Summer?, 1975
* Cat on a Houseboat, 1976
* Fire on the Mountain, 1977
* Games at Twilight and Other Stories, 1978
* Clear Light of Day, 1980
* Village by the Sea, 1982
* In Custody, 1984 - film 1993, dir. by Ismail Merchant, starring Shashi Kapoor, Shabana Azmi, Om Puri, screenplay by Anita Desai
* Baumgartner's Bombay, 1988
* Journey to Ithaca, 1996
* Fasting, Feasting, 1999
* Diamond Dust, 2000
* The Zigzag Way: A Novel, 2004

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R. K. Narayan (1906 -2001)

R. K. Narayan was born in Madras in 1906 and educated there and at Maharajah's College in Mysore. He has lived in India ever since, apart from his travels. Most of his work, starting from his first novel Swami and friends (1935) is set in the fictional town of Malgudi which at the same time captures everything Indian while having a unique identity of its own. After having read only a few of his books it is difficult to shake off the feeling that you have vicariously lived in this town. Malgudi is perhaps the single most endearing "character" R. K. Narayan has ever created.

He has published numerous novels, five collections of short stories (A Horse and Two Goats, An Astrologer's Day, Lawley Road, Malgudi Days, and The Grandmother's Tale), two travel books (My Dateless Diary and The Emerald Route), four collections of essays (Next Sunday, Reluctant Guru, A Writer's Nightmare, and A Story-Teller's World), a memoir (My Days), and some translations of Indian epics and myths (The Ramayana, The Mahabharata, and Gods, Demons and Others).

In 1980, R. K. Narayan was awarded the A.C. Benson award by the Royal Society of Literature and was made an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1989 he was made a member of the Rajya Sabha (the non-elective House of Parliament in India). He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Guide (1958).

R. K. Narayan's full name is Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Naranayanaswami. In his early years he signed his name as R. K. Narayanaswami, but apparently at the time of the publication of Swami and Friends, he shortened it to R. K. Narayan on Graham Greene's suggestion."(from R. K. Narayan:
a Profile)

Novels

* Swami and Friends (1935)
* The Bachelor of Arts (1937)
* The Dark Room (1938)
* The English Teacher (1945)
* Mr. Sampath - The Printer of Malgudi (1949)
* The Financial Expert (1952)
* Waiting for the Mahatma (1955)
* The Guide (1958)
* The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961)
* The Vendor of Sweets (1967)
* The Painter of Signs (1976)
* A Tiger for Malgudi (1983)
* Talkative Man (1986)
* The World of Nagaraj (1990)
* A Grandmother's Tale (1994)

Collections

* The World of Malgudi (2000)
* Salt and Sawdust: Stories and Table-Talk

Short Story Collections

An asterisk indicates a collection published only in India.

* Dodu and Other Stories (1943)*
* Cyclone and Other Stories (1945)*
* An Astrologer's Day and Other Short Stories (1947)
* Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956)*
* A Horse and Two Goats (1970)
* Malgudi Days (1982)
* Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985)
* The Grandmother's Tale and Selected Stories (1993)
* The Watchman
* Fruition at Forty

Non-Fiction

* Next Sunday (1960)
* My Dateless Diary (1964)
* My Days (1974)
* The Emerald Route (1980)
* A Writer's Nightmare (1988)
* Like The Sun

Mythology

* Gods, Demons and Others (1965)
* The Ramayana (1972)
* The Mahabharata (1972)


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Agatha Christie ( 1890 - 1976 )

* Born : 15 September 1890

* Birthplace : Torquay, Devon, England

* Died : 12 January 1976 (Natural causes)

* Best Known As : Author of Murder on the Orient Express

Name at birth: Agatha May Clarissa Miller

From the 1920s until the 1970s Agatha Christie was the world's most popular mystery author, reportedly selling more than one billion books worldwide. While other mystery authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett came and went, Christie continued to turn out gentle stories of murder and detection in polite society, sometimes publishing two or three books in a year. Her two most popular detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, were featured in 30 and 12 novels, respectively. Dozens of Christie's stories became movies, most notably the star-studded 1974 film Murder on the Orient Express. In 1971 Christie was made a Dame of the British Empire for her contributions to British literature and culture.
Christie's play The Mousetrap has been running continuously in London's theater district since its premiere on November 25, 1952. It is now regarded as history's longest-running play

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Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

* Born: 16 October 1854

* Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland

* Died: 30 November 1900

* Best Known As: The author of The Importance of Being Earnest

Name at birth: Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde

Oscar Wilde was an 19th century Irish writer whose works include the play The Importance of Being Earnest and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. He is also one of the Victorian era's most famous dandies, a wit whose good-humored disdain for convention became less favored after he was jailed for homosexuality. Wilde grew up in a prosperous family and distinguished himself at Dublin's Trinity College and London's Oxford. He published his first volume of poems in 1881 and found work in England as a critic and lecturer, but it was his socializing (and self-promotion) that made him famous, even before the 1890 publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In 1895, at the height of his popularity, his relationship with the young poet Lord Alfred Douglas was declared inappropriately intimate by Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde sued for libel, but the tables were turned when it became clear there was enough evidence to charge Wilde with "gross indecency" for his homosexual relationships. He was convicted and spent two years in jail, after which he went into self-imposed exile in France, bankrupt and in ill health. His other works include the comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895), several collections of children's stories and the French drama Salomé (1896).

The phrase "the Love that dare not speak its name" comes from a poem by Lord Alfred Douglas, and when questioned about its meaning in open court, Wilde gave an impassioned speech on the value of male love... Lord Alfred Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry (John Sholto Douglas), was a boxing enthusiast who endorsed the prizefighting rules that bear his name... One of Wilde's most famous quotes: "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."

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Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

* Born: 7 February 1812

* Birthplace: Portsmouth, England

* Died: 9 June 1870

* Best Known As: The author of A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and other popular novels of 19th-century England. Dickens' own childhood poverty influenced much of his writing, and he is known especially for characters pulled from the sooty streets of London: orphans and urchins, rogues, shopkeepers, stuffed shirts, widows, and other colorful characters. An all-around workhorse, Dickens edited a monthly magazine, wrote novels, gave public readings and came out with a Christmas story every year. His novels were typically published first in serial form -- as chapter-by-chapter monthly installments in magazines of the day. Among his major works are Oliver Twist (completed 1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), David Copperfield (1850), the historical drama A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861). His 1843 tale A Christmas Carol featured the miser Ebenezer Scrooge and the sickly tot Tiny Tim, and has remained a popular holiday classic into the 21st century.
Dickens used the pen name Boz early in his career, and his first publication was the short story collection Sketches By Boz (1836)... Oliver Twist was the basis for the stage musical Oliver!; the show won the Tony Award for best musical in 1963, and a 1968 movie version (with Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger) won the Academy Award for best picture... Dickens married the former Catherine Hogarth in 1836. They had 10 children, but their marriage was often tense, and they separated in 1858... He was buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey, near Geoffrey Chaucer and other fellow writers.

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Anton Chekhov ( 1860 - 1904 )

* Born : 29 January 1860

* Birthplace : Taganrog, Russia

* Died : 2 July 1904 (tuberculosis)

* Best Known As : Author of The Cherry Orchard

Anton Chekhov wrote both plays and short stories. He is generally listed in the first rank of Russian playwrights and in the high second rank (a notch below Pushkin and Tolstoy) as a writer of prose. His most famous plays include The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1899), and The Cherry Orchard (1904). Chekhov had a famous love affair with the actress Olga Knipper; they married in 1901.
Chekhov's birthdate was January 29 according to the Gregorian calendar, which wasn't adopted in Russia until the 20th century. By the old-style Julian calendar, his birthdate was January 17.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley ( 1792 -1822 )

* Born : 4 August 1792

* Birthplace : Near Sussex, England

* Died : 8 July 1822 (drowning)

* Best Known As : 19th century romantic poet

A radical young fellow, Percy Shelley was expelled from Oxford University in 1811 when he published The Necessity of Atheism. His early poems advocated social reform, reflecting the influence of the philosophical writings of William Godwin. He fell in love with Godwin's daughter Mary, who later gained fame as the author of Frankenstein. After Shelley's first wife committed suicide in 1816, Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin were married. Shelley was lost at sea in 1822, while sailing off the coast of Italy.

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P. G. Wodehouse(1881-1975)

Prolific English comic novelist, short story writer, lyricist and playwright, best known as the creator of Jeeves, the perfect "gentleman's gentleman," Bertie Wooster of the Drones Club, a young bachelor aristocrat, and the absentminded Lord Emsworth of the Blandings Castle. Most of Wodehouse's works gently parodied the British aristocracy of the 1920s and 1930s. After World War II Wodehouse lived in the United States. During the decades, Wodehouse's picture of Edwardian England gradually disengaged from reality, and became an imaginary land which was untouched by time. As a prose stylist Wodehouse praised by such writers as Hilaire Bellock and Evelyn Waugh. Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey, as the third son of Henry Ernest Wodehouse, a British judge in Hong Kong, and Eleanor (Deane) Wodehouse. Within the family, Wodehouse's first name was abbreviated to "Plum" and later also his wife and friends used this name. Until the age of four, Wodehouse lived in Hong Kong with his parents. Returning to England, he spent much of his childhood in the care of various aunts, seeing rarely his parents. Wodehouse attended boarding schools and received his secondary education at Dulwich College, London, which he always remembered with affection. "To me, the years between 1894 and 1900 were like heaven," he once said. His first story Wodehouse wrote at the age of seven. His first article for which he was paid was 'Some Aspects of Game Captaincy". Wodehouse wrote it for a competition sponsored by The Public School Magazine. However, Wodehouse's father did not approve of his son's writing, and after graduating in 1900 Wodehouse worked two years at the London branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. Wodehouse entered the literary world first as a free-lance writer, contributing humorous stories to Punch and the London Globe, where he had a column called 'By the Way'. Most of his stories appeared first serialized at the Saturday Evening Post. After 1909 he lived and worked long periods in the United States and in France. In 1914 he married Ethel Newton, a widow; they had met in New York eight weeks earlier. She had a daughter, Leonora, whom Wodehouse adopted legally. In 1926 he dedicated THE HEART OF A GOOF to his daughter "without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half time." Leonora died in 1943. Wodehouse wrote for musical comedy in New York and for Hollywood, but viewed the film industry ironically. "In every studio in Hollywood there are rows and rows of hutches, each containing an author on a long contract at a weekly salary. You see their anxious little faces peering out through the bars. You hear them whining piteously to be taken for a walk. And does the heart bleed? You bet it bleeds. A visitor has to be very callous not to be touched by such a spectacle as this." (Wodehouse in Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 1929) Once he spent a week at William Randolph Hearst's estate and wrote: "I sat on [Hearst's mistress Marion Davies's] right the first night, the found myself being edged further and further away till I got to the extreme end . . . Another day, and I should have been feeding on the floor." Wodehouse's early stories were mainly for schoolboys centering on a character known as Ronald (or sometimes Rupert) Eustace Psmith, a "very tall, very thin, very solemn young man". Following the World War I Wodehouse gained fame with the novel PICCADILLY JIM (1918). At the time he married Ethel, he had only $100 in bank, but by the 1920s he was earning $100,000 in a year. His major breakthrough Wodehause made with the THE INIMITABLE JEEVES (1924). He had introduced Bertie Woorster and a valet named Jeeves in the short story 'The Man with Two Left Feet' (1917). THANK YOU, JEEVES (1934), his novel centering on these characters, was immediately greeted as one of his very best. Although the juxtaposition of a clever servant and foolish master had been known since classical times and was famously used by Cervantes in the Don Quixote-Sancho Panza pair, Wodehouse managed to refresh the old idea and add to it a peculiar British twist. Usually Jeeves saved Bertie from many disasters. Of his relatives the most formidable was Aunt Agatha. C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in his Jeeves, A Gentleman's Personal Gentleman (1979): "Bertie was under the impression that he had chosen Jeeves, approving the man who had been sent by an agency. But that is not what happened. Proust once remarked that, 'It is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.'" In addition to his humorous novels and stories, Wodehouse collaborated with Guy Bolton in writing several popular Broadway musicals, notably SALLY (1920), SITTING PRETTY (1924), ANYTHING GOES (1934), and BRING ON THE GIRLS (1954). Wodehouse's greatest lyrics include 'Bill', a hit in the musical Show Boat. "Musical comedy was my dish," he once said. He collaborated among others with Jerome Kern (Oh, Boy!, 1917; Leave it to Jane, 1917), George Gershwin (Oh, Kay!, 1926), and Cole Porter, who wrote lyrics and music for Anything Goes. Wodehouse spent the remainder of his life in several homes in the U.S. and Europe. During World War II Wodehouse was captured by the Germans at Le Touquet, France, where he used to stay when not living in England-partly because tax authorities. At that time the U.S. had not entered the war. After spending about a year in various German camps, he was interned in Berlin, and naïvely recorded five interviews, depicting humorously his experiences as an internee. These interviews were broadcast by German radio to America and England, but his made Wodehouse liable to charges of treason. Wodehouse was labelled as a quisling in the Daily Mirror and libraries withdrew his books-the Battle of Britain was no laughing matter. After the liberation of Paris, Wodehouse was arrested by the French, and released in 1945 through the intervention of British officials. For fear of prosecution, which the British officials had actually dropped, he was not able to return to his home country. Wodehouse settled in the United States, living in his new home country in near-seclusion. He bought a ten-acre estate on Long Island in 1952. An American citizen he became three years later. By this time his political mistakes were forgotten, and Wodehouse was subsequently awarded a D.Litt. from Oxford University. He died in Remsenburg, Long Island, on February 14, 1975. Wodehouse had received a knighthood a few weeks before he died. Wodehouse wrote nearly 100 novels, about 30 plays and 20 screenplays. His first book, THE POTHUNTERS, a short story collection, was published 1902. The last, AUNT'S AREN'T GENTLEMEN, appeared 1974. Wodehouse also wrote his memoirs, PERFORMING FLEA (1951) and OVER SEVENTY (1957). In the 1960s Wodehouse's stories inspired the television series The World of Wooster and Blandings Castle. Wodehouse Playhouse started in 1975 and in the 1990s Hugh Laurie as Bertie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves appeared in new television series. Piccadilly Jim was made into a film by Robert Z. Leonard in 1936, starring Robert Montgomery, Madge Evans, and Frank Morgan.

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