William Boyd Allison

William Boyd Allison 1829-1908, U.S. Senator from Iowa (1873-1908), b. Ashland co., Ohio. He served (1863-71) in the House of Representatives and entered the Senate in 1873. One of the most influential Republican members of Congress, he spoke for the farmers of the Midwest and was considered a political moderate. Allison opposed high tariffs on goods needed in quantity by the farmers and helped to build compromise tariff bills. He changed the bill for "free and unlimited coinage" of silver to allow specified limited coinage and thus gave his name to the Bland-Allison Act .

Bibliography: See biography by L. Sage (1956).

Boyd, William (1952– ) British novelist and short story writer, b. Ghana. His sometimes grimly comic works are often set in Africa, where he grew up. These include A Good Man in Africa (1981), An Ice-cream War (1982), and Brazzaville Beach (1990). His most ambitious novel, The New Confessions (1987), ranges across the whole history of the 20th century.

Boyd, William (Andrew Murray) (1952– ), novelist, born in Accra, Ghana, and educated at the universities of Nice and Glasgow and at Jesus College, Oxford. He was a lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford (1980–83). A Good Man in Africa (1981) is a comic tale of diplomatic life in a minor West African posting somewhat in the manner of K. Amis. An Ice-Cream War (1982), a serio-comic tale set in East Africa during the First World War, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. Stars and Bars (1984) and The New Confessions (1987), the sadly comic autobiography of a self-styled genius, consolidated Boyd's reputation as an accomplished storyteller with an instinct for inventive comedy. Brazzaville Beach (1990), again set in Africa, explores the theme of the origins of human and animal violence. The Blue Afternoon (1993), set in 1936, is the story of a young female architect who meets an enigmatic stranger claiming to be her father. Armadillo (1998) recounts the amorous and financial adventures in late 20th-cent. London of a Romany-born loss adjuster with sleeping difficulties. Any Human Heart (2002) is a fictional journal of a novelist, spanning the twentieth century. Boyd has written television screenplays, and collections of short stories, including On the Yankee Station (1981) and The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’ (1995).