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Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski 1920-94, American underground poet and fiction writer, b. Andernach, Germany. His family immigrated to the United States in 1922, settling in Los Angeles. A hard-drinking unskilled worker and sometime denizen of skid row, Bukowski published his first short stories in the 1940s and ...
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Church of Scientology
Church of Scientology philosophical religion founded by L(afayette) Ron(ald) Hubbard, 1911-86, b. Tilden, Nebr. Hubbard's book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950) first set forth the basis of his philosophy, offering an alternative path to overcoming physical and mental stress. ...
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Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens 1879-1955, American poet, b. Reading, Pa., educated at Harvard and New York Law School. After 1916 he was associated with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, and from 1934 until his death he served as its vice president. A master of exquisite verse, Stevens was specifically...
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E. L. Doctorow
E. L. Doctorow (Edgar Laurence Doctorow) , 1931-, American novelist, b. New York City. Doctorow is known for his skillful blending of fiction and fact into reconstructions of eras in American history. His first work was a novel of the 19th-century West, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), but he did...
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Robertson Davies
Robertson Davies (William Robertson Davies) dā´vĬs , 1913-95, Canadian writer and editor. After receiving a B.Litt. from Oxford (1938), he joined the Old Vic Theatre Company before returning to Canada (1940) as an editor. In 1963 he became the first master of Massey College, a gra...
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Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke (Sir Arthur Charles Clarke), 1917-2008, 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 and mathematics from King's College, London (1948) and in 1956 he settled pe...
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Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje (Philip Michael Ondaatje) , 1943-, Canadian writer, b. Colombo, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). Emigrating (1962) to Canada, he attended the Univ. of Toronto (B.A., 1965) and Queen's Univ., Ontario (M.A., 1967). Since 1971 he has been an English professor at Glendon College, York Univ., ...
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William Styron
William Styron 1925-2006, American novelist, b. Newport News, Va., grad. Duke, 1947. His fiction is often powerful, deeply felt, poetic, and elegiac. He became well known for his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967; Pulitzer Prize), a fictional recreation of the 1831 slave rebellion in Virg...
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Q. D. Leavis
Q. D. Leavis (Queenie Dorothy Leavis), 1906-81, British literary critic; wife of F. R. Leavis . After studying at Cambridge, she wrote Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), which analyzed the market for different types of fiction among readers). Her essays on Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and oth...
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science fiction
science fiction literary genre in which a background of science or pseudoscience is an integral part of the story. Although science fiction is a form of fantastic literature, many of the events recounted are within the realm of future possibility, e.g., robots, space travel, interplanetary war, inv...
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