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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