SHORT STORIES: Author S Biographies

SHORT STORIES: Author’s Biographies Name: ______

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was born in Boston, the son of itinerant actors who died before he was three years old. he became the ward of a Virginia couple, the Allans, whose name he added to his own. His student days at the University of Virginia were brought to a quick end by his drinking and gambling, but then, enlisting in the Army, he served soberly and well from 1827 to 1829. Accepted into West Point in 1830, h quickly ruined his prospects for a military career by more carousing, and that established a pattern he never again escaped. In 1836 he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, then a girl of thirteen, and tried to support her by writing and editing. He was an editor of the Richmond Southern Literary Messenger, among other publications, and for a time had his own magazine The Stylus. He won a number of literary prizes early in his writing career, but his earnings remained meager and alcoholic excess repeatedly cost him his jobs in journalism. After his wife died in 1847, he became engaged to a wealthy widow; there was hope of relief from his long run of misfortune and poverty. Traveling to meet the widow in 1849, he met some acquaintances and with them set out to celebrate the change in his luck. After this binge he was found unconscious in a Baltimore street and died a few days later. His short fiction, with its effects of terror and its supernatural trappings, made him a household name for American readers, though in fact there are few traces of American experience in his work. Gothic devices and the mood of German romanticism were his specialty. He has been called the inventor of the detective story. His critical writings have deeply influenced literary taste and practice – for example, his insistence on unity of effect in the short story. His poetry has been admired more greatly and persistently abroad, particularly in France, than at home. He is remembered, as well, for the picturesqueness of his career, for his striking personal appearance, his fine manners, his debauchery, and his poverty – the stuff of a romantic legend.

Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff (1945- ) was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He received his B.A. from Oxford University and his M.A. from Stanford. In 1975 he was awarded a prestigious Wallace Stenger Fellowship at Stanford. Since that time, Wolff has authored the novels The Barracks Thief and Old School, the memoirs This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, and the short story collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question. His most recent collection of short stories, Our Story Begins, won The Story Prize for 2008. Other honors include the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award - both for excellence in the short story - the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also been the editor of Best American Short Stories, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, and A Doctor's Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and other magazines and literary journals. Wolff is currently the Ward W. and Pricilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford.

James Joyce

James Joyce (1882-1941) was born in Dublin, and though he fled the narrowness of Catholic Ireland for the broader cultural horizons of Europe, the Dublin of his experience and imagination was the setting for all his major work. In 1904 he went to live permanently on the Continent, supporting himself – badly – by teaching in language schools in Trieste and Zurich. The fear of censorship, coupled with the timidity of his publisher, delayed until 1914 the publication of his short stories in Dubliners. Soon after this, however, Joyce came to the attention of the energetic American poet Ezra Pound, who arranged for the first publication of A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man (1916), Joyce’s semiautobiographical novel. Pound’s support continued through the following years while Joyce was writing what is generally acknowledged as his masterpiece, the novel Ulysses (1922). When parts of it began to appear in a literary magazine, it touched off a storm of controversy that brought him both notoriety and lasting fame. On the one hand, this work experimented more boldly with language and devices of narration, including the use of stream of consciousness, than any work in English which preceded it. On the other, some of the sexual passages were so candid that censors banned it from the United States until 1933. Joyce continued to explore the resources of language in his years of fame, these experiments reaching their height in Finnegans Wake (1939).