Walter Besant
Sir Walter Besant was a novelist and historian from London. His sister-in-law was Annie Besant. The son of a merchant, he was born in Portsea, Portsmouth, Hampshire and attended school at St Paul's, Southsea, Stockwell Grammar, London and King's College London. In 1855, he was admitted as a pensioner to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1859 as 18th wrangler. After a year as Mathematical Master at Rossall School, Fleetwood, Lancashire and a year at Leamington College, he spent 6 years as professor of mathematics at the Royal College, Mauritius. A breakdown in health compelled him to resign, and he returned to England and settled in London in 1867. He took the duties of Secretary to the Palestine Exploration Fund, which he h
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Henry James
Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
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He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in -
George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
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Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as t -
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
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Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, W -
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review were important in the development of early 20th-century English and American literature.
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Ford is now remembered for his novels The Good Soldier (1915), the Parade's End tetralogy (1924–1928) and The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–1908). The Good Soldier is frequently included among the great literature of the 20th century, including the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, The Observer′s "100 Greatest Novels of All Time", and The Guardian′s "1000 novels everyone must read". -
Jack London
John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.
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London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of animal rights, workers’ rights and socialism. London wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, War of the Classes, and Before Adam.
His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and Wh -
Mark Twain
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. -
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Best known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle, and outspoken and blunt public image. Most of Hemingway's works were published between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, including seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works. His writings have become classics of American literature; he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, while three of his novels, four short-story collections and three nonfiction works were published posthumously.
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Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he spent six months as a -
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and often is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
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Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. During World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, but did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925). He went back to Oxford -
Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin was an American novelist and short-story writer best known for her startling 1899 novel, The Awakening. Born in St. Louis, she moved to New Orleans after marrying Oscar Chopin in 1870. Less than a decade later Oscar's cotton business fell on hard times and they moved to his family's plantation in the Natchitoches Parish of northwestern Louisiana. Oscar died in 1882 and Kate was suddenly a young widow with six children. She turned to writing and published her first poem in 1889. The Awakening, considered Chopin's masterpiece, was subject to harsh criticism at the time for its frank approach to sexual themes. It was rediscovered in the 1960s and has since become a standard of American literature, appreciated for its sophistication
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Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. He went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.
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Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations. He is best known for his novels, including The Joke (1967), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism. -
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914, and the second with Alice B. Toklas, from 1907 until Stein's death in 1946. Stein shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, first with Leo and then with Alice. Throughout her lifetime, Stein cultivated significant tertiary relationships with well-known members of the avant garde artistic and literary world of her time.
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Alfred Uhry
Alfred Uhry was born in Atlanta, Georgia. His book for the musical version of Eudora Welty's The Robber Bridegroom was Tony nominated in 1976. Driving Miss Daisy won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Last Night of Ballyhoo and his book for the musical Parade won Tony Awards. In 2006 his play Without Walls, starring Laurence Fishburne, opened in Los Angeles, and Edgardo Mine opened at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. He has also written the book for Lovemusik, which opened on Broadway in May 2007. Screenplays include Mystic Pizza, Rich in Love, and I'll Take Virginia.
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Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes of France applied semiology, the study of signs and symbols, to literary and social criticism.
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Ideas of Roland Gérard Barthes, a theorist, philosopher, and linguist, explored a diverse range of fields. He influenced the development of schools of theory, including design, anthropology, and poststructuralism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_... -
Philip Sidney
Sir Philip Sidney was an English poet, courtier and soldier, and is remembered as one of the most prominent literary figures of the Elizabethan Age.
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Samuel Richardson
Pamela (1740) and Clarissa Harlowe (1748) of English writer Samuel Richardson helped to legitimize the novel as a literary form in English.
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An established printer and publisher for most of his life, Richardson wrote his first novel at the age of 51. He is best known for his major 18th-century epistolary novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_... -
T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.
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See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot -
Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American novelist, poet and journalist, best known for the novel, The Red Badge of Courage. That work introduced the reading world to Crane's striking prose, a mix of impressionism, naturalism and symbolism. He died at age 28 in Badenweiler, Baden, Germany.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. -
Dick King-Smith
Dick King-Smith was born and raised in Gloucestershire, England, surrounded by pet animals. After twenty years as a farmer, he turned to teaching and then to writing children's books.
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Dick writes mostly about animals: farmyard fantasy, as he likes to call it, often about pigs, his special favorites. He enjoys writing for children, meeting the children who read his books, and knowing that they get enjoyment from what he does.
Among his well-loved books is Babe, The Gallant Pig, which was recently made into a major motion picture, and was nominated for an Academy Award.
Dick lived with his wife in a small 17th-century cottage, about three miles from the house where he was born. -
Yōko Ogawa
Yōko Ogawa (小川 洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored „An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics“ with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.
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A film in French, "L'Annulaire“ (The Ringfinger), directed by Diane Bertrand, starring Olga Kurylenko and Marc Barbé, was released in France in June 2005 and subsequently made the rounds of the international film festivals; the film, some of which is filmed in the Hamburg docks, is based in part on Og -
Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.
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Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including "Miss Brill", "Prelude", "The Garden Party", "The Doll's House", and later works such as "The Fly", are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing.
Katherine Mansfield was part of a "new dawn" in English literature with T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was associat -
Lillian Hellman
Lillian Florence "Lilly" Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American dramatist and screenwriter famously blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–52.
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Hellman was praised for sacrificing her career by refusing to answer questions by HUAC; but her denial that she had ever belonged to the Communist Party was easily disproved, and her veracity was doubted by many, including war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and literary critic Mary McCarthy.
She adapted her semi-autobiographical play The Little Foxes into a screenplay which received an Academy Award nomination in 1942.
Hellman was romantically involved with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Ham -
William Dean Howells
Willam Dean Howells (1837-1920) was a novelist, short story writer, magazine editor, and mentor who wrote for various magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine.
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In January 1866 James Fields offered him the assistant editor role at the Atlantic Monthly. Howells accepted after successfully negotiating for a higher salary, but was frustrated by Fields's close supervision. Howells was made editor in 1871, remaining in the position until 1881.
In 1869 he first met Mark Twain, which began a longtime friendship. Even more important for the development of his literary style — his advocacy of Realism — was his relationship with the journalist Jonathan Baxter Harrison, who during the 1870s wrote a series of articles for the Atla -
Jacob Grimm
German philologist and folklorist Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm in 1822 formulated Grimm's Law, the basis for much of modern comparative linguistics. With his brother Wilhelm Karl Grimm (1786-1859), he collected Germanic folk tales and published them as Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812-1815).
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Indo-European stop consonants, represented in Germanic, underwent the regular changes that Grimm's Law describes; this law essentially states that Indo-European p shifted to Germanic f, t shifted to th, and k shifted to h. Indo-European b shifted to Germanic p, d shifted to t, and g shifted to k. Indo-European bh shifted to Germanic b, dh shifted to d, and gh shifted to g.
This jurist and mythologist also authored the monumental German Dictionary and his -
Branimir Šćepanović
Branimir Šćepanović (Бранимир Шћепановић) was a Serbian and Yugoslav writer. He was born in Podgorica, then Kingdom of Yugoslavia. His father was a teacher and a published author. Young Šćepanović started writing while still being a student in high school.
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His famous novel Usta puna zemlje (Mouth full of earth) had 32 editions in Serbia and 23 editions in France. Šćepanović's 1977 novel, Smrt gospodina Goluže (The Death of Mr. Goluzha) was adapted in 1997 by Alan Wade for the film he directed, and was released by Fine Line Features and New Line International.
Branimir Šćepanović won the October award from the city of Belgrade and two Golden Arenas for Best Screenplays: Before the Truth (1968) and The Battle of Sutjeska (1973). -
Dai Sijie
Dai Sijie was born in China in 1954. He grew up working in his fathers tailor shop. He himself became a skilled tailor. The Maoist government sent him to a reeducation camp in rural Sichuan from 1971 to 1974, during the Cultural Revolution. After his return, he was able to complete high school and university, where he studied art history.
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In 1984, he left China for France on a scholarship. There, he acquired a passion for movies and became a director. Before turning to writing, he made three critically acclaimed feature-length films: China, My Sorrow (1989) (original title: Chine, ma douleur), Le mangeur de lune and Tang, le onzième. He also wrote and directed an adaptation of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, released in 2002. He li