Documents for "English Literature, 20th cent. to the Present: Biographies":

• Abercrombie, Lascelles 1881-1938, English poet and critic. Complex and cerebral in style, his poetry often expresses his distaste for 20th-century industrialism. His volumes of poetry include Interludes and Poems (1908),...

• Ackroyd, Peter 1949-, British author, b. London; studied Clare College, Cambridge (M.A., 1971) and Yale Univ. A literary journalist, he wrote for the Spectator (1973-82) and has reviewed books for the London Times since 1986. His early work includes three volumes of poetry (1973, 1978, 1987), a polemic on literary modernism (1976), and a study of transvestism (1979). His first novel, The Great Fire of London (1982), was followed by The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Hawksmoor (1985), Chatterton (1987), English Music (1992), Milton in America (1997), The Plato Papers (2000), and The Clerkenwell Tales (2004). Typically novels of ideas that defy traditional realism, his fiction frequently deals with the active interplay between the past and the present and often uses the city of London as both...

• Aldington, Richard 1892-1962, English poet and novelist. While studying at the Univ. of London, he became acquainted with Ezra Pound and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle ), whom he married in 1913. He was one of the leading imagists and helped edit the Egoist, the principal imagist organ. His early poems, extraordinary in their verbal precision, were published under the title Images (1915). Images of War and Images of Desire followed in 1919, the latter marking a departure from pure imagism. Aldington's first novel, Death of a Hero (1929), was a bitter indictment of war. It was followed by The Colonel's Daughter (1931), equally biting in its satiric intent. Aldington was at his best when in an angry state of artistic and intellectual rebellion; experiments with milder satire proved less effective. After...

• Allingham, Margery 1904-66, English detective-story writer, b. London. Most of her novels feature Mr. Albert Campion, a scholarly detective of noble birth, bespectacled, mild, and believable. Her thrillers are...

• Alvarez, A. (Alfred Alvarez) , 1929-, English writer and critic, b. London, grad. Oxford. He has been a theater critic, a writer for the British Broadcasting Corp., a poetry editor and critic, and a visiting professor at...

• Ambler, Eric 1909-98, English novelist. An advertising executive, he turned exclusively to writing after his realistic and innovative suspense novels became popular. Ambler has often been called the first...

• Amis, Martin ā´mĬs , 1949-, English novelist; son of Kingsley Amis. The younger Amis, who turned from literary journalism to fiction, invites comparison with his father through his choice of career and style. Often writing satire so bitterly sardonic that it goes...

• Amis, Sir Kingsley 1922-95, English novelist. He attended St. John's College, Oxford (B.A., 1949) and taught at Oxford, Swansea, and Cambridge and in the United States for some 20 years before he could afford to...

• Arden, John 1930-, English playwright and novelist. In a manner reminiscent of Brecht, Arden's dramas employ songs, poetry, and visceral realism to make sharp, political points. His plays include Sergeant Musgrave's...

• Arlen, Michael 1895-1956, English novelist, b. Bulgaria as Dikran Kuyumjian. The son of Armenian parents, he was brought to England as a child. In 1922 he became a British subject and changed his name, and in...

• Arnim, Mary Annette (Beauchamp), Countess von see Russell, Mary Annette (Beauchamp) Russell, Countess.

• Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh Auden) , 1907-73, Anglo-American poet, b. York, England, educated at Oxford. A versatile, vigorous, and technically skilled poet, Auden ranks among the major literary figures of the 20th cent. Often...

• Bagnold, Enid 1889-1981, English novelist and playwright, b. Rochester, Kent, England. She was a nurse in a military hospital in World War I. In 1920 she married Sir Roderick Jones, head of Reuters news agency...

• Baring, Maurice 1874-1945, English author. After a career in the diplomatic service, he turned to journalism in 1904. A war correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War, he wrote several books on Russia, including A...

• Barker, George (George Granville Barker), 1913-91, English poet, b. Essex, England. He has taught in Japan and the United States as well as in England. His highly dramatic poems, often concerned with themes of...

• Barker, Harley Granville- see Granville-Barker.

• Barrie, J. M. (Sir James Matthew Barrie) , 1860-1937, Scottish playwright and novelist. He is best remembered for his play Peter Pan (1904), a supernatural fantasy about a boy who refuses to grow up. The son of a weaver, Barrie studied at the Univ. of Edinburgh. He took up journalism, worked for a Nottingham newspaper, and...

• Bates, H. E. (Herbert Ernest Bates), 1905-74, English author, b. Rushden, Northamptonshire. During World War II he served with the Royal Air Force. A good storyteller, Bates had the ability to render the sense...

• Bedford, Sybille 1911-2006, English writer, b. Charlottenberg, Germany, as Sybille von Schoenebeck. She worked as a legal reporter for various publications, covering more than 100 trials including the Auschwitz...

• Beerbohm, Sir Max 1872-1956, English essayist, caricaturist, and parodist. He contributed to the famous Yellow Book while still an undergraduate at Oxford. In 1898 he succeeded G. B. Shaw as drama critic for the...

• Behan, Brendan 1923-64, Irish dramatist. A notoriously outspoken and uninhibited man, he joined the Irish Republican Army in 1937 and was twice imprisoned for political offenses. His first play, The Quare Fellow...

• Bell, Clive 1881-1964, English critic of art and literature. He was a member of the Bloomsbury group. His works include Art (1914), Since Cézanne (1922), Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Painting (1927),...

• Bell, John Joy 1871-1934, Scottish author. He wrote a number of humorous stories and plays, frequently in dialect, of life in Glasgow, but is best remembered for his story Wee Macgreegor (1902).

• Belloc, Hilaire (Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc) , 1870-1953, English author, b. France. He became a British subject in 1902, and from 1906 to 1910 was a Liberal member of Parliament for South Salford. Poet, essayist, satirist, and historian, he...

• Bennett, Arnold (Enoch Arnold Bennett), 1867-1931, English novelist and dramatist. One of the great 20th-century English novelists, Bennett is famous for his realistic novels about the "Five Towns," an imaginary manufacturing district in northern England. Bennett's early career included editing the fashionable magazine Woman and writing literary reviews and articles. About 1900 he began to devote himself industriously to his own work, producing a series of excellent regional novels. Influenced by the naturalism of Zola, he depicted in great detail the grim, sometimes sordid, lives of shopkeepers and potters. His attitude toward his characters was one of affectionate sympathy, and he always managed to make...

• Benson, Arthur Christopher 1862-1925, English author; eldest son of Archbishop Benson. He was master at Eton (1885-1903) and at Magdalene College, Cambridge (1915-25). His works include poetry; novels; essays, notably From...

• Benson, Edward Frederic 1867-1940, English author; 3d son of Archbishop Benson. He wrote several biographies and reflections on contemporary society, but he is chiefly remembered for his lightly satirical novels, notably...

• Benson, Robert Hugh 1871-1914, English author and clergyman; 4th son of Archbishop Benson. He was converted to Roman Catholicism in 1903 and ordained the next year. In 1911, as a monsignor, he became privy chamberlain...

• Betjeman, Sir John 1906-84, English poet, b. London. His verse combined a witty appraisal of the present with nostalgia for the past, especially the Victorian past. His published collections include Mt. Zion (1933),...

• Blake, Nicholas see Day Lewis, Cecil.

• Blunden, Edmund Charles 1896-1974, English author. Beginning his career as a poet of nature, Blunden became a cosmopolitan teacher and writer. His prose works include Undertones of War (1928), an account of his experiences in World War I, and a study of World War I poets (1962); also biographical and critical studies of Leigh Hunt (1930), Charles Lamb (1933), and Shelley (1946)...

• Bottomley, Gordon 1874-1948, English poet and dramatist, b. Yorkshire. His major artistic efforts were directed at reviving verse drama in English. Among his plays are The Crier by Night (1902), The Riding To Lithend...

• Bowen, Elizabeth 1899-1973, Anglo-Irish novelist, b. Dublin. In impeccable prose she treated love and frustration through studies of complex psychological relationships. Her novels include The Hotel (1927), To the...

• Bowra, C. M. (Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra) , 1898-1971, English classical scholar, b. China. Associated with Oxford Univ. throughout his adult life, he was warden of Wadham College (1922-71) and also served as professor of poetry (1946-51)...

• Bradley, Andrew Cecil 1851-1935, English scholar and critic, b. Cheltenham; brother of Francis Herbert Bradley. He taught at Oxford for many years and was professor of poetry there (1901-6). Bradley is known for his Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), a classic work of criticism noted for its exposition of Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth as psychological beings and of Shakespeare as a consummate interpreter of the human soul. Bradley's...

• Braine, John Gerard 1922-86, English novelist, b. Bradford, Yorkshire. With his first novel, Room at the Top (1957), Braine established himself as one of England's angry young men. This novel bitterly chronicles the rise of a young working-class man into the upper middle class of an English factory town. In its penetrating analysis of the English class structure and of...

• Bridges, Robert Seymour 1844-1930, English poet. In 1882 he abandoned medical practice to devote himself to writing. An excellent metrist, he wrote many beautiful lyrics and longer poems, noted for their refined...

• Brooke, Rupert 1887-1915, English poet. At the outbreak of World War I he joined the Royal Naval Division, served at Antwerp, and was in the Dardanelles expedition when he died of blood poisoning at the island of...

• Brookner, Anita 1928-, English writer and art critic. After establishing an academic career at London's Courtauld Institute of Art and becoming the first woman appointed (1968) Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge,...

• Buchan, John, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir 1875-1940, Scottish author and statesman. Included among his works are a history (4 vol., 1921-22) of World War I; biographies of Julius Caesar (1932), Scott (1932), and Cromwell (1934); short...

• Burgess, Anthony 1917-93, English novelist, b. Manchester as John Anthony Burgess Wilson, grad. Manchester Univ., 1940. He taught school in England and in East Asia and pursued an early interest in music. His...

• Byatt, A. S. (Antonia Susan Byatt) , 1936-, British novelist; sister of Margaret Drabble. Educated at Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College, Pa., and Oxford, she is a noted critic and novelist whose work is erudite, subtle,...

• Carroll, Paul Vincent 1900-1968, Irish playwright. His plays, vigorous commentaries on the conflicts of village life in Ireland, include Shadow and Substance (1937), The White Steed (1939), The Wise Have Not Spoken...

• Cary, Joyce (Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary), 1888-1957, English author. From 1910 to 1920 he served as an administrator and soldier in Nigeria. Several of his early works, including Mister Johnson (1939), reflect his African experiences. Cary is perhaps best known for his two trilogies. Both these works, full of humor and compassion, convey a sense of the gradual change in the social and...

• Cecil, Lord David (Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne Cecil), 1902-86, English biographer. He was professor of English literature at Oxford (1948-70). Cecil's works are all distinguished for their artistry as well...

• Challens, Mary see Renault, Mary.

• Chambers, Sir Edmund Kerchever 1866-1954, English literary critic and Shakespearean scholar. He wrote The Mediaeval Stage (1903), The Elizabethan Stage (1923), Arthur of Britain (1927), William Shakespeare (1930), and studies...

• Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith Chesterton), 1874-1936, English author. Conservative, even reactionary, in his thinking, Chesterton was a convert (1922) to Roman Catholicism and its champion. He has been called the...

• Christie, Dame Agatha 1890-1976, English detective story writer, b. Torquay, Devon, as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller. Christie's second husband was the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan , and she gained much material for her later novels during his excavations in the Middle East. An extraordinarily popular author, Christie wrote over 80 books, most of them featuring one of her two...

• Clarke, Arthur C. (Arthur Charles Clarke), 1917-, British science fiction writer. During World War II he served as a radar instructor and aviator in the Royal Air Force. After the war he obtained a degree in physics...

• Compton-Burnett, Dame Ivy 1892-1969, English novelist. Educated at the Univ. of London, she lived quietly in London for most of her life. She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1967. Ivy Compton-Burnett's...

• Connolly, Cyril 1903-74, English critic and editor, b. Coventry, England. After attending Oxford Univ., he began his career as a journalist. With Stephen Spender he founded Horizon (1939-49), a small literary magazine...

• Conrad, Joseph 1857-1924, English novelist, b. Berdichev, Russia (now Berdychiv, Ukraine), originally named Jósef Teodor Konrad Walecz Korzeniowski. Born of Polish parents, he is considered one of the greatest...

• Coppard, Alfred Edgar 1878-1957, English author. Almost entirely self-educated, he worked at several clerical positions. His tales, written in a poetic and fanciful vein, include Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (1921), Nixey's...

• Cornwell, David John Moore see le Carré, John.

• Cronin, A. J. (Archibald Joseph Cronin) , 1896-1981, Scottish novelist. He gave up his prosperous London medical practice to devote himself to writing after the success of his first novel, Hatter's Castle (1931)....

• Dahl, Roald 1916-90, British writer known for inventive, often macabre children's books and horror-tinged adult fiction. Dahl spurned a university education in favor of world travel, journeying to...

• Daiches, David 1912-2005, British critic, b. Sunderland. A graduate of Edinburgh Univ. and Oxford (M.A., 1934; Ph.D., 1939), Daiches taught at several English universities and wrote many works of criticism. They...

• Dane, Clemence pseud. of Winifred Ashton, 1888-1965, English novelist and playwright. She was an artist, teacher, and actress before she turned to writing. Her first novel, A Regiment of Women (1917), is a compelling...

• Davies, William Henry 1871-1940, British poet, b. Wales. Leaving school at a young age, Davies lived for a number of years as a peddler and a beggar in the United States and England. His first attempt at poetry, The Soul's...

• Day Lewis, C. (Cecil Day Lewis), 1904-72, English author, b. Ireland. While he was still at Oxford, he became associated with a group of leftist poets led by W. H. Auden. After graduation he taught at various schools until 1935 and then decided to devote himself to writing. He was professor of poetry at Oxford from 1951 to 1956. Included among his volumes of poetry...

• de la Mare, Walter 1873-1956, English poet and novelist. For many years he worked in the accounting department of the Anglo-American Oil Company. Much of his verse and prose shows delight in imaginative excursions...

• De Morgan, William Frend 1839-1917, English artist and novelist; son of Augustus De Morgan. A famous potter, he designed glass and tiles and rediscovered an old process of making colored lusterware. When he was 66 he...

• Delaney, Shelagh 1939-, English playwright, b. Salford, Lancashire. Her first play, written when she was only 17, was A Taste of Honey (1958), about a young working-class girl who refuses to conform to her dreary...

• Delderfield, R. F. (Ronald Frederick Delderfield), 1912-73, English writer, b. London. He did not start writing novels until he was 44, after having been a successful playwright and newspaperman. His "old-fashioned"...

• Dobrée, Bonamy 1891-1974, English scholar and critic, b. London, grad. Cambridge (B.A., 1921, M.A., 1924). He served with the Royal Artillery in both world wars, attaining the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Dobrée...

• Douglas, Norman (George Norman Douglas), 1868-1952, British novelist and essayist, b. Scotland. He spent the years from 1894 to 1896 in diplomatic service in Russia but resigned from the foreign service in 1896...

• Drabble, Margaret 1939-, English novelist, b. Sheffield, Yorkshire. Drabble's realistic vision of an England split between traditional values and contemporary desires is apparent in such works as The Millstone (1965),...

• Drinkwater, John 1882-1937, English author. A founder of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, he was associated with it as actor, director, and general manager for many years. He is best known for his chronicle plays,...

• Du Maurier, George Louis Palmella Busson 1834-96, English artist and novelist, b. Paris of a French father and an English mother. He studied chemistry, but later turned to art for a livelihood. In spite of the loss of one eye when he was...

• Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron 1878-1957, Anglo-Irish author. His life was spent as a soldier and sportsman. Often dealing with the fantastic and the supernatural, his works are frequently set in wholly imaginary worlds and...

• Durrell, Lawrence 1912-90, British author, b. India, of Irish parents. Durrell traveled widely, often serving in diplomatic positions; most of his works are set in exotic locations and convey an extraordinary sense...

• Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns Eliot), 1888-1965, American-British poet and critic, b. St. Louis, Mo. One of the most distinguished literary figures of the 20th cent., T. S. Eliot won the 1948 Nobel Prize in...

• Elizabeth see Russell, Mary Annette.

• Empson, William 1906-84, English critic and poet. His Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), a study of the meanings of poetry, is a classic of modern literary criticism. It was followed by Some Versions of Pastoral (1935)...

• Evans, Caradoc 1883-1945, Anglo-Welsh novelist and short-story writer. His chief works are his short-story collections, My People (1915), Capel Sion (1916), and My Neighbors (1919), and his novel Nothing to...

• Fairchild, Cicely see West, Dame Rebecca.

• Firbank, Ronald (Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank), 1886-1926, English author. Of a delicate and eccentric nature, Firbank lived the life of a leisured aesthete. His novels, which have appealed to a small but...

• Fleming, Ian Lancaster 1908-64, English spy novelist, b. London. Son of a Conservative member of Parliament, Fleming was educated at Eton, Sandhurst, and Munich and Geneva universities and worked as Reuters' Moscow...

• Ford, Ford Madox 1873-1939, English author; grandson of Ford Madox Brown. He changed his name legally from Ford Madox Hueffer in 1919. The author of over 60 works including novels, poems, criticism, travel essays,...

• Forester, C. S. (Cecil Scott Forester), 1899-1966, British novelist, b. Cairo, Egypt, educated in England. A prolific and popular author, C. S. Forester is best known for his novels of the royal navy in the days...

• Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan Forster), 1879-1970, English author, one of the most important British novelists of the 20th cent. After graduating from Cambridge, Forster lived in Italy and Greece. During World...

• Fowles, John 1926-2005, English writer, b. Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, grad. Oxford, 1950. A complex, cerebral writer and a superb storyteller, Fowles was interested in manipulating the novel as a genre. His central...

• Francis, Dick (Richard Stanley Francis), 1920-, English novelist. He was formerly a professional champion steeplechase jockey (1946-57) and a racing writer for a London newspaper (1957-73). Francis parlayed his...

• Fry, Christopher 1907-2005, English dramatist, b. Bristol as Christopher Fry Harris. Like his friend and mentor, T. S. Eliot , he was one of the few 20th-century dramatists to write successfully in verse. Fry's first...

• Galsworthy, John 1867-1933, English novelist and dramatist. Winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature, he is best remembered for his series of novels tracing the history of the wealthy Forsyte family from the...

• Gibbs, Sir Philip 1877-1962, English journalist and author. As a result of his distinguished service in World War I as a front-line correspondent for the Daily Chronicle (London) he was knighted in 1920. Among his many...

• Godden, Rumer (Margaret Rumer Godden) , 1907-98, English novelist. Godden was highly praised for the subtlety of her characterization (particularly of children), the charm of her style, and her unflinching focus on characters usually...

• Gogarty, Oliver St. John 1878-1957, Irish author. A physician, he also served (1922-36) in the parliament of the Irish Free State. Gogarty is perhaps best known as the model for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce's Ulysses. As...

• Golding, Sir William (Gerald) 1911-93, English novelist. Praised for his highly imaginative and original writings, Golding was basically concerned with the eternal nature of man. In his best-known work, the allegorical Lord of the Flies (1954), he described the nightmarish adventures of a group of English schoolboys stranded on an island and traced their degeneration from a state of innocence to blood lust and savagery. His later...

• Gosse, Sir Edmund William 1849-1928, English biographer and critic. He was lecturer in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge (1884-90) and librarian of the House of Lords (1904-14). Although he wrote with...

• Granville-Barker, Harley 1877-1946, English dramatist, actor, producer, and critic. As comanager of the Court Theatre from 1904 to 1907 he was an advocate and producer of "uncommercial" and experimental theater in his time. Granville-Barker was the chief producer of the plays of new dramatists as well as those of the great masters; he presented the works of Euripides, Shakespeare,...

• Graves, Alfred Percival 1846-1931, Irish poet. An inspector of schools, he was also twice president of the Irish literary society. He compiled several volumes of Irish music and folksongs. Included among his own writings...

• Graves, Robert Ranke 1895-1985, English poet, novelist, and critic; son of Alfred Percival Graves. He established his reputation with Good-bye to All That (1929), an outspoken book on his war experiences. A versatile and highly prolific writer, Graves considered himself primarily a poet; his poems were characterized by gracefulness and lucidity...

• Green, Henry pseud. of Henry Vincent Yorke, 1905-73, English novelist. Born to an aristocratic family, he was the longtime managing director of his family's industrial engineering business in London. His nine novels, with laconic titles such...

• Greene, Graham (Henry Graham Greene), 1904-91, English novelist and playwright. Although most of his works combine elements of the detective story, the spy thriller, and the psychological drama, his novels are...

• Gregory, Lady Augusta (Isabella Augusta Persse), 1859-1932, Irish dramatist. Though she did not begin her writing career until middle-age, Lady Gregory soon became a vital force in the Irish drama. She was a founder and...

• Grieve, Christopher Murray see MacDiarmid, Hugh.

• Hare, David 1947-, British playwright. Hare is prominent as a member of the British theatrical left. A founder of the Portable Theatre and the Joint Stock, he became resident dramatist and literary manager of...

• Heaney, Seamus 1939-, Irish poet, b. Londonderry (now Derry), Northern Ireland. Heaney may be the finest poet writing in English today. In his early works, such as Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), Heaney is a lyrical nature poet, writing with limpid simplicity about the disappearing world of unspoiled rural Ireland. He moved from Belfast to the Irish Republic in 1972, ultimately...

• Herbert, A. P. (Sir Alan Patrick Herbert), 1890-1971, English author and member of Parliament. He was a regular contributor to the comic magazine Punch from 1910 until his death. Herbert served in Parliament from 1935 until 1950 as a representative for Oxford Univ. and was largely responsible for the bill (1937) liberalizing English divorce law...

• Hodgson, Ralph 1871-1962, English poet. He wrote five volumes of poetry before his collected poems appeared in 1917. After a silence of nearly 40 years—during which time he taught in Japan and emigrated to the...

• Houghton, William Stanley 1881-1913, English dramatist. He was (1907-12) a critic for the Manchester Guardian. His plays, greatly influenced by Ibsen, include The Dear Departed (1908), The Younger Generation (1910), and...

• Housman, A. E. (Alfred Edward Housman) , 1859-1936, English poet and scholar, whose verse exerted a strong influence on later poets. He left Oxford without a degree because he had failed his final examinations. Ever afterward he was a...

• Housman, Laurence 1865-1959, English author; brother of A. E. Housman. He achieved success as the anonymous author of An Englishwoman's Love Letters (1900). Best known as a dramatist, he wrote Little Plays of St. Francis...

• Howard, Elizabeth Jane see under Amis, Kingsley.

• Hughes, Richard 1900-1976, English novelist. After graduating from Oxford in 1922, he helped found the Portmadoc Players and was for a time vice president of the Welsh National Theatre. In addition, he wrote...

• Hughes, Ted (Edward James Hughes), 1930-98, English poet, b. Mytholmyroyd, Yorkshire. Hughes's best poetry focuses on the unsentimental within nature. His poems are marked by controlled diction and style,...

• Huxley, Aldous Leonard 1894-1963, English author; grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he traveled widely and during the 1920s lived in Italy. He came to the United States in the 1937 and settled in California. On the verge of blindness from the time he...

• Innes, Michael pseud. of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, 1906-94, British writer and scholar, b. near Edinburgh. From 1969 to 1973 he was a reader in English literature at Oxford. Under his own name he wrote novels, short stories, and such critical...

• Isherwood, Christopher 1904-86, British-American author. After the appearance of his first novel, All the Conspirators (1928), Isherwood went to Germany. The four years he spent there furnished him with the material for what are probably his best novels, The Last of Mr. Norris (1935) and Goodby to Berlin (1939; reissued as The Berlin Stories, 1946); these books formed the basis for John Van Druten's play, I Am a Camera (1951), and for the Broadway musical Cabaret (1966). The Berlin novels, which report on the period of social and political unrest during the Nazi rise to power, illustrate Isherwood's general concern with the problem of the intellectual in a...

• Ishiguro, Kazuo 1954-, English novelist, b. Nagasaki. His family left Japan in 1960 and immigrated to England, where he attended the universities of Kent (B.A., 1978) and East Anglia (M.A., 1980). Ishiguro, who...

• Jacobs, William Wymark 1863-1943, English author. His humorous sea stories were first collected in Many Cargoes (1896). Of his several horror stories, the most famous is "The Monkey's Paw."

• James, P. D. (Phyllis Dorothy James White, Baroness James of Holland Park), 1920-, English mystery novelist, b. Oxford. From 1964 to 1979 she worked in the criminal department of the Department of Home Affairs...

• Jameson, Storm (Margaret Storm Jameson), 1891-1986, English novelist and critic, b. Whitby, Yorkshire, grad. Leeds Univ., 1912. Descended from a shipbuilding family, she drew on her knowledge of that business for...

• Johnson, Pamela Hansford see under Snow, C. P.

• Joyce, James 1882-1941, Irish novelist. Perhaps the most influential and significant novelist of the 20th cent., Joyce was a master of the English language, exploiting all of its resources. His novel Ulysses, which...

• Knight, George Wilson 1897-1985, English writer and critic, grad. Oxford (B.A., 1923; M.A., 1925). He wrote numerous books and essays on English literature, including The Wheel of Fire (1930), The Imperial Theme (1931),...

• Koestler, Arthur 1905-83, English writer, b. Budapest of Hungarian parents. Koestler spent his early years in Vienna and Palestine. An influential Communist journalist in Berlin in the early 1930s, Koestler was...

• Larkin, Philip 1922-85, English poet. He graduated from St. John's College, Oxford (B.A., 1943; M.A., 1947) and was for many years librarian at the Univ. of Hull. With an eye for the ordinary and a diction that...

• Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert Lawrence), 1885-1930, English author, one of the primary shapers of 20th-century fiction.

• le Carré, John pseud. of David John Moore Cornwell, b. 1931-, English novelist, b. Poole, Dorset, grad. Oxford, 1956. He was a tutor at Eton College (1956-58), subsequently working for the British Foreign Service in Germany (1961-64). Le Carré's...

• Le Gallienne, Richard 1866-1947, English man of letters. As literary critic and contributor to the Yellow Book, he was associated with the fin-de-siècle aesthetes of the 1890s before becoming a resident of the United...

• Leavis, F. R. (Frank Raymond Leavis) , 1895-1978, English critic and teacher. Leavis was one of the most influential literary critics of the 20th cent. A formidable controversialist, he combined close textual analysis with a commitment...

• Lehmann, John 1907-89, English poet, editor, and publisher. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, he began working at Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1931 and managed it from 1938 to 1946. In...

• Lessing, Doris 1919-, British novelist, b. Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran). She was brought up on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and in 1949 went to England, where her first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), was published. Widely regarded as one of the major writers of the mid-20th cent. and an influential figure among feminists, Lessing writes on a wide variety of themes: Rhodesia, women,...

• Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples Lewis), 1898-1963, English author, b. Belfast, Ireland. A fellow and tutor of English at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1954, C. S. Lewis was noted equally for his literary...

• Lewis, Cecil Day see Day Lewis, Cecil.

• Lewis, Wyndham (Percy Wyndham Lewis) , 1886-1957, English author and painter, born on a ship on the Bay of Fundy. With Ezra Pound, he was cofounder and editor of Blast (1914-15), a magazine connected with vorticism. Lewis's paintings, however, were not limited to the cubism of the vorticists; he produced many conventional works that gained him critical recognition. His paintings are in several museums,...

• Llewellyn, Richard 1907-83, Welsh novelist. He is best known as the author of How Green Was My Valley (1939), a story of life in the S Wales mining areas, and None but the Lonely Heart (1943). His later novels include...

• Lodge, David 1935-, English novelist and critic, b. London, grad. University College, London (B.A., M.A.) and the Univ. of Birmingham (Ph.D.). Lodge taught at the Univ. of Birmingham (1960-87), during which...

• Lowry, Malcolm (Clarence Malcolm Lowry) , 1909-57, English novelist, b. New Brighton, Wirral. Lowry is widely recognized as an important writer who effectively articulated the spiritual desolation of the individual in the 20th cent. While...

• Lucas, Edward Verrall 1868-1938, English author and critic. For several years he was assistant editor of Punch. He wrote many volumes of gently satirical essays and travel books, including Old Lamps for New (1911), Saunterer's...

• Lucie-Smith, Edward 1933-, British poet and art critic, b. Jamaica, grad. Oxford, 1954. He has lived in London since 1951, where he worked as an advertising copywriter (1956-66) and as an editor of books on art. Among...

• Macaulay, Dame Rose 1889?-1958, English author. Remembered primarily for her novels satirizing middle-class life, she first achieved fame with Potterism (1920). Her subsequent novels include Told by an Idiot (1923),...

• MacBeth, George 1932-92, Scottish poet, grad. Oxford, 1955. He was until 1976 a producer for the BBC. His best poetry, such as The Broken Places (1963), often treats violent subjects in a combination of fantasy and reality. He wrote with wit and vitality, blending an enthusiasm for many formal poetic forms and figures of speech with an...

• MacDiarmid, Hugh pseud. of Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892-1978, Scottish poet and critic, b. Langholm, Dumfrieshire. Passionately devoted to Communism and to Scottish independence from England, he was a founder of the Scottish Nationalist Party in...

• Machen, Arthur 1863-1947, British author, b. Wales. He wrote a series of semiautobiographical fantasies, notably The Hill of Dreams (1907) and Far Off Things (1922), and tales of horror and the supernatural. Machen...

• MacInnes, Colin 1914-76, English novelist, b. London. Son of the novelist Angela Thirkell, MacInnes was educated in Australia and served in the British intelligence corps during World War II. He was best known...

• MacKenzie, Sir Compton 1883-1972, English author, b. West Hartelpool, Durham, educated at Oxford. In Apr., 1923, he founded the Gramophone, a periodical devoted to reviewing recordings. A prolific and versatile writer, MacKenzie...

• MacNeice, Louis 1907-63, Irish poet. Educated in England, he became a classical scholar and teacher and later was a producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. In the 1930s MacNeice allied himself with a...

• Manning, Olivia 1911-80, English novelist, b. Portsmouth, Hampshire. During World War II she served as a journalist in the Middle East. She is best known for her "Balkan trilogy" : The Great Fortune (1960), The...

• Masefield, John 1878-1967, English poet. He went to sea as a youth and later spent several years in the United States. In 1897 he returned to England and was on the staff of the Manchester Guardian. His first volumes...

• Maugham, William Somerset 1874-1965, English writer, b. Paris. He was noted as an expert storyteller and a master of fiction technique. An introverted child afflicted with a stammer, Maugham was orphaned at 10 and sent to...

• McEwan, Ian (Ian Russell McEwan) , 1948-, English novelist, b. Aldershot, grad. Univ. of Sussex (B.A., 1970), Univ. of East Anglia (M.A., 1971). His early short-story collections, First Love, Last Rites (1975) and Between the Sheets (1978), and novels, The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), gained recognition for their experimentations with form and their tone of macabre menace, violence, and obsessive sexuality. In later novels McEwan moved away from his more perverse themes,...

• Menen, Aubrey Clarence 1912-89, English novelist, b. London. The son of an Indian father and an Irish mother, he was a drama critic, theater director, and advertising agency executive. Menen was primarily a satirist,...

• Milne, A. A. (Alan Alexander Milne) , 1882-1956, English author. Milne began his literary career as a journalist and later became a regular contributor to Punch. He is best known for his collections of verses for children, including When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927), and for the books Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), which established the characters Christopher Robin (named for and based on his own son, 1920-96) and his toy animal friends, including Pooh Bear, Piglet, and Eeyore. These stories have...

• Mitchison, Naomi 1897-1999, British writer, b. Scotland, educated at Oxford; daughter of the biologist J. S. Haldane. She wrote many types of novels on a variety of subjects. They include historical novels set in ancient...

• Mitford, Nancy 1904-73, English novelist and biographer, b. London. She managed a London bookshop during World War II and moved to Paris in 1945. Mitford was born into the British aristocracy, which she satirizes...

• Monro, Harold 1879-1932, English poet, b. Belgium. In 1911 he founded the Poetry Review and the following year established the Poetry Bookshop, which became a refuge and intellectual center for poets. His Poetry...

• Montague, Charles Edward 1867-1928, English journalist and author, b. London. He joined the staff of the Manchester Guardian in 1890, remaining until his retirement in 1925 except for service (1914-19) in World War I, as a private and later as an intelligence officer. His war experience is reflected in his antiwar essays...

• Moore, Thomas Sturge 1870-1944, English author. Although his themes were classical and conservative, his poetic technique was innovative. His first volume of poetry, The Vinedresser, appeared in 1899. Later works in verse...

• Morrison, Arthur 1863-1945, English novelist. A journalist, he worked on the National Observer for William Ernest Henley. His stories of life in the London slums include Tales of Mean Street (1894), A Child of the...

• Muir, Edwin 1887-1959, British author, b. Orkney Islands, Scotland. He moved with his family to Glasgow in 1901, where he remained for 18 years. In 1919 he went to London and joined the staff on the New Age. During the early 1920s he traveled on the Continent, supporting himself chiefly with contributions to the Freeman. At the age of 35 he turned to writing poetry, producing such collections as Chorus of the Newly Dead (1926) and The Labyrinth (1949). However, it was not until his Collected Poems appeared in 1952 that Muir achieved recognition. A visionary poet, he sought in his personal, often dreamlike verse to understand the meaning of the spiritual universe. Muir is also well known as a...

• Munro, Hector Hugh pseud. Saki , 1870-1916, English author, b. Myanmar. He began his career writing political satires for the Westminster Gazette. From 1902 to 1908 he was a foreign correspondent for the Tory Morning...

• Murdoch, Dame Iris (Dame Jean Iris Murdoch) , 1919-99, British novelist and philosopher, b. Dublin, Ireland. In 1948 she was named lecturer in philosophy at Oxford, and in 1963 she was made an honorary fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford...

• Murry, John Middleton 1889-1957, English critic and editor. In 1919 he became editor of the Athenaeum and in 1923 founded his own review, the Adelphi, with which he was associated until 1948. He was friendly with many...

• Myles na Gopaleen see O'Brien, Flann.

• Newbolt, Sir Henry John 1862-1938, English poet and historian. He is best remembered for his vigorous and imperialistic poems of the sea, collections of which include Admirals All (1897), The Sailing of the Long Ships (1902),...

• Noyes, Alfred 1880-1958, English poet, best known for his poems "The Highwayman" and "The Barrel-Organ." His first volume of verse, Loom of Years, appeared in 1902. It was followed by such poems as the epic Drake (1908) and the colorful Tales of the Mermaid Tavern (1913). From 1914 to 1923, Noyes was professor of English literature at Princeton. In 1925, Noyes converted to Roman Catholicism; The Unknown God (1934) is an account of his conversion. His later writings include The Torch Bearers (1922-30), a trilogy in verse on man's scientific accomplishments; The Sun Cure (1929), a novel; and a biography of Voltaire (1938). His collected poems were published in 1950. Noyes was a literary conservative who adhered to traditional models in the structure and substance...

• O Nuallaian, Brian see O'Brien, Flann.

• O'Brian, Patrick 1914-2000, British novelist, b. near London as Richard Patrick Russ. He changed his name in 1945 and after World War II settled in France. O'Brian's first novel, Caesar (1930), written when he was a teenager, was followed during the 1950s and 60s by several rather well-received novels, e.g., Testimonies (1952), and a book of short stories. In 1969 he published Master and Commander, the first novel of the celebrated Aubrey-Maturin series. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, these tales of the sea and men at war ultimately included 20 novels, ending with Blue at the Mizzen (1999). They follow the Royal Navy's Capt. Jack Aubrey and his Irish-Catalan friend Stephen Maturin, a doctor, naturalist, and spy, in their daily lives and adventures in Lord Nelson's navy. These...

• O'Brien, Edna 1932-, Irish writer, b. Twamgraney. After living in Dublin, she moved (1954) to London, where she still lives. In richly sensual prose, O'Brien explores the dreams, failed marriages, doomed...

• O'Brien, Flann pseud. for Brian Ó Nualláin 1911-66, Irish novelist and political commentator. Born in County Tyrone and raised in Dublin, he entered the Irish civil service in 1937 and formally retired in 1953. From 1940 until his death, he...

• O'Casey, Sean 1884-1964, Irish dramatist, one of the great figures of the Irish literary renaissance. A Protestant, he grew up in the slum district of Dublin and was active in various socialist movements and in...

• O'Connor, Frank 1903-66, Irish short-story writer, whose name originally was Michael O'Donovan. He was a librarian in Dublin and later a director of the Abbey Theatre (1936-39). O'Connor is noted primarily for his...

• O'Faoláin, Seán 1900-1991, Irish writer. The relation of the individual to society was often the theme of his novels and stories. He frequently wrote about Ireland, analyzing the nation's agony in adjusting past...

• O'Flaherty, Liam 1897-1984, Irish novelist, b. Aran Islands, Co. Galway. Many of his realistic novels have a compassion