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John Barth
John Barth , 1930-, American writer, b. Cambridge, Md. He attended Johns Hopkins (B.A. 1951, M.A. 1952), and, beginning in 1973, taught writing at its graduate school for nearly 20 years. Barth's postmodern novels—experimental, comic, self-referential, and often sprawling—reflect his ang...
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Harrisburg
Harrisburg city (1990 pop. 52,376), state capital and seat of Dauphin co., SE Pa., on the Susquehanna River; settled c.1710 by John Harris, who established a trading post and operated a ferry there; inc. 1791. It is a commercial, wholesale, administrative, and transportation center. Manufactures in...
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Lusaka
Lusaka , city (1990 est. pop. 982,400), alt. 4,200 ft (1,280 m), capital of Zambia, S central Zambia. A sprawling city located in a productive farm area, Lusaka is an administrative, financial, and commercial center. Manufactures include foodstuffs, beverages, clothing, and cement (made from limesto...
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Paolo Soleri
Paolo Soleri 1919-, Italian-American architect. He studied architecture in Turin (Ph.D., 1946). Soleri's works have been influenced by both Frank Lloyd Wright , with whom he worked, and Antonio Gaudí . He developed an architecture that expresses a functional and organic way of life. Soleri...
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Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison (Ralph Waldo Ellison), 1914-94, African-American author, b. Oklahoma City, Okla.; studied Tuskegee Inst. (now Tuskegee Univ.). Originally a trumpet player and aspiring composer, he moved (1936) to New York City, where he met Langston Hughes , who became his mentor, and became friends...
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William Gaddis
William Gaddis 1922-98, American novelist, b. New York City. An erudite master of satire and black comedy, he was both praised and criticized for his avant-garde techniques—repetitions, multiple layers of meaning, sprawling shapelessness, frequent digressions, complexities of plot and languag...
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horsetail
horsetail any plant of the genus Equisetum [Lat.,=horse bristle], the single surviving genus of a large group (Equisetophyta) of primitive vascular plants. Like the ferns and club mosses, relatives of the living horsetails thrived in the Carboniferous period (when they contributed to coal deposit...
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Johannesburg
Johannesburg , city (1991 pop. 1,574,631), Gauteng, NE South Africa, on the southern slopes of the Witwatersrand at an altitude of 5,750 ft (1,753 m). Johannesburg is the largest city in South Africa, the center of its important gold-mining industry, its manufacturing and commercial center, and th...
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Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon pĬn´chen , 1937-, American novelist, b. Glen Cove, N.Y., grad. Cornell Univ., 1958. Pynchon is noted for his amazingly fertile imagination, his wild sense of humor, and the teeming complexity of his novels. He is sometimes grouped with authors of black humor (such as Kur...
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Robert Altman
Robert Altman 1925-2006, American film director, b. Kansas City, Mo. One of the most original talents in late-20th-century American filmmaking, he created complex, often loosely plotted movies marked by brilliant and often huge ensemble casting, sharply delineated characters, overlapping dialogue, ...
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