Society of Young Nigerian Writers

Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey (1927-1989), American writer, best known for his work focusing on the ecology and management of the American West, particularly its deserts. Abbey first won wide acclaim for Desert Solitaire (1968), a collection of nonfiction essays that reveal his strong narrative voice and his deep passion for the environment. The essays also analyze the impact of tourism, industrialization, and government practices on the environment.

Born in Home, Pennsylvania, Abbey grew up in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania and was the eldest of five children. At age 17 he traveled alone to the West, where he became enamored with the desert. After being drafted into the United States Army and serving in Italy from 1945 to 1947, Abbey received his B.A. degree in philosophy and English from the University of New Mexico in 1951. He then studied at Edinburgh University in Scotland as a Fulbright scholar. He was a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellow at Stanford University in 1957, and he received his M.A. degree in philosophy from the University of New Mexico in 1960. In the late 1950s Abbey worked as a National Park Service ranger in what is now Arches National Park in Utah. His notes on this experience became the basis for Desert Solitaire. From the late 1970s until his death, Abbey lived in Tucson, Arizona, and he taught English at the University of Arizona until 1988.

Abbey’s early books reveal his lifelong interests in social criticism and anarchy. His second book, The Brave Cowboy (1956), features an individualist with anarchist tendencies. In defiance of the government practice of leasing public land to cattle ranchers in the Western states, the main character systematically cuts down the barbed-wire fencing the ranchers use to mark their leased property. Two of Abbey’s works of popular fiction, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and Hayduke Lives (1989), depict a pro-environment group that sabotages equipment owned by commercial land developers. Abbey’s semiautobiographical book The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel (1988) features a character who returns to Appalachia in search of his personal roots. Abbey’s other works of nonfiction include Slickrock (1971) and The Journey Home (1977).

Abbey won a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction writing in 1974. He also won the 1987 Academy of Arts and Letters Creative Achievement Award but declined it because he was unable to attend the award ceremony. Instead he went on a previously planned river-rafting trip.

George Abbott

George Abbott (1887-1995), American actor, playwright, producer, and director, born in Forestville, New York, and educated at the University of Rochester and Harvard University. He became an actor in 1913, and he later was a film director (1927-30) before embarking on a career as a theatrical director. Abbott directed and produced the comedies Boy Meets Girl (1935) and Kiss and Tell (1943) and the musicals Pal Joey (1940), On the Town (1944), Call Me Madam (1950), Wonderful Town (1953), and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962). He wrote and directed the musicals The Boys from Syracuse (1938; adapted from Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors), Where's Charley? (1948), and New Girl in Town (1957). He was coauthor and director of the comedy Three Men on a Horse (1934) and the musicals The Pajama Game (1954), Damn Yankees (1955), and Fiorello! (1959; Pulitzer Prize, 1960).

James Adair

James Adair (1709?-1783?), American trader and writer, born in Ireland. He lived for almost 40 years among the Native Americans, primarily the Chickasaw, in the region now constituting the southeastern United States. His book The History of the American Indians (1775), although it insists on the Jewish origin of the Native American race, is one of the best firsthand accounts of the habits and character of the tribes of the region. The work contains an incomplete but valuable vocabulary of various Native American dialects.

Samuel Hopkins Adams

Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871-1958), American journalist and author, born in Dunkirk, New York, and educated at Hamilton College. From 1891 to 1900 he was a newspaper writer on the staff of the New York Sun; from 1903 to 1905 he was on the staff of McClure's Magazine. As a journalist he played an important role in the muckraking movement, an attempt to expose corruption in business and politics. His most notable disclosure was a series of magazine articles on the evils of the patent- medicine industry. His novel Revelry (1926) deals with corruption in the administration of President Warren G. Harding. He also wrote biographies, short stories, and several film scripts.

Mortimer Adler

Mortimer Adler (1902-2001), American scholar and author. Mortimer Jerome Adler was born in New York City and educated at Columbia University. He taught psychology at Columbia (1923-1929) and philosophy of law at the University of Chicago (1930-1952). In 1945 he became associate editor, with the American educator Robert Hutchins, of Great Books of the Western World (54 volumes, 1945-1952). He resigned from the University of Chicago in 1952 to head the newly established Institute for Philosophical Research at San Francisco. Adler published numerous books, including How to Read a Book (1940), The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (1967), and Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography (1977). He was editor in chief of The Annals of America (20 vol., 1969) and served as director of planning for the 15th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, which appeared in 1974.

James Agee

James Agee (1909-1955), American writer, known for his delicate and moving prose.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Agee was educated at Harvard University. His first book, the poetry collection Permit Me Voyage, was published in 1934. In 1936 Agee traveled to the Southern United States with American photographer Walker Evans to document the lives of sharecroppers (see Peonage) for an article in Fortune magazine. The article never appeared, but Agee and Evans later collaborated on a book on the subject, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).

In the 1940s Agee worked as a film critic for the magazines Time and The Nation. Beginning in 1948 he worked as a motion-picture scriptwriter. His best-known works are The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). In 1951 his novelette The Morning Watch, about the religious struggles of a young boy, was published.

A Death in the Family (1957; Pulitzer Prize, 1958) is generally regarded as Agee's masterpiece. The novel recounts the effects of a man's death on his family. The book was dramatized under the title All the Way Home as a play (1960; Pulitzer Prize, 1961) and a motion picture (1963).

Agee's film criticism was collected in two volumes, Agee on Film (1958, 1960). The publication of the volume Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (1962), correspondence between Agee and a friend, revealed Agee's inner turmoil. The work helped to establish his place in American letters. Agee’s Collected Poems was published in 1968.

Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken (1889-1973), American poet and novelist. Conrad Potter Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Harvard University. His first volume of verse, Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse (1914), reveals his talent for sensuous imagery and flowing rhythms. His Selected Poems won the 1930 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and his Collected Poems won the 1954 National Book Award. Later volumes of his poetry include Cats and Bats and Things with Wings (1965), Preludes (1966), Selected Poems (1969), and Thee (1971).

Aiken wrote numerous novels and short stories, many of them based on psychoanalytic theory (see Psychoanalysis). One of his most notable stories is “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” published in his Among the Lost People (1934). The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken was published in 1950; the autobiographical Ushant appeared in 1952; his Collected Novels was published in 1964; and Collected Criticism appeared in 1968. Aiken's work most consistently explores the difficulty in achieving a stable personal identity in a constantly changing world. In recognition of his literary achievement, Aiken held the Chair of Poetry of the Library of Congress from 1950 to 1952 and was awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry by the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1958.

Edward Albee

Edward Albee, born in 1928, American playwright, whose most successful plays focus on familial relationships. Edward Franklin Albee was born in Washington, D.C., and adopted as an infant by the American theater executive Reed A. Albee of the Keith-Albee chain of vaudeville and motion picture theaters. Albee attended a number of preparatory schools and, for a short time, Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He wrote his first one- act play, The Zoo Story (1959), in three weeks. Among his other plays are the one-act The American Dream (1961); Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962); The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963), adapted from a novel by the American author Carson McCullers; Tiny Alice (1964); and A Delicate Balance (1966), for which he won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize in drama. For Seascape (1975), which had only a brief Broadway run, Albee won his second Pulitzer Prize. His later works include The Lady from Dubuque (1977), an adaptation (1979) of Lolita by the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, and The Man Who Had Three Arms (1983). In 1994 he received a third Pulitzer Prize for Three Tall Women (1991). Albee won a Tony Award in 2002 for The Goat, or Who is Sylvia (2002), a play about a happily married architect who falls in love with a goat. Albee’s plays are marked by themes typical of the theater of the absurd, in which characters suffer from an inability or unwillingness to communicate meaningfully or to sympathize or empathize with one another.

Bronson Alcott

Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), American educator and philosopher, who developed a method of teaching young children by means of conversation. He was born in Wolcott, Connecticut. In 1834 Alcott established a school at Boston in which his system of teaching through conversation was employed. The school was criticized by the press and regarded by the general public as a revolutionary innovation. In 1839 Alcott closed the school and later moved to Concord, Massachusetts. Thereafter he became widely known as a lecturer. He was a prominent abolitionist and a leader of the philosophic doctrine of transcendentalism. His writings include Observations on the Principles and Methods of Infant Instruction (1830), Concord Days (1872), Table Talk (1877), and Sonnets and Canzonets (1882).

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), American author, considered one of the major writers of children’s fiction. Alcott’s best-known book is the novel Little Women (1868-1869), which portrays the trials and triumphs of four sisters growing up in New England in the 19th century. Little Women and its sequels center around family relationships and promote virtues such as perseverance and unselfishness.

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania. She was the second of four daughters of American educator Bronson Alcott and his wife Abigail May Alcott. When Louisa was two years old, the family moved to Boston, Massachusetts. There her father founded the Temple School, which minimized punishment and included organized play, gymnastics, and an honor system (system in which people are trusted without direct supervision). The program urged respect for the intelligence of children and for their potential for personal growth.

In 1839 the Temple School closed, and the next year the Alcott family moved to nearby Concord, Massachusetts, where Bronson became known as a lecturer. He eventually served as superintendent of Concord’s schools, and Abba worked in Boston as a social worker. When Louisa started receiving payments for her fiction, however, she became the main breadwinner for her family. In her writings she indicated that she wrote some of her books, even her admired children’s fiction, primarily for money.

Louisa’s first book, Flower Fables, was published in 1854. The work is a collection of fairy tales. In the late 1850s Alcott began writing Gothic stories for magazines. These dramatic tales emphasized mystery, adventure, and horror. In all, Alcott wrote more than 150 short stories, many of them in the Gothic vein. However, she did not confine herself to one type of writing. Her flexibility as an author showed in her volume Hospital Sketches (1863). Written for an adult audience, this work wryly and vividly describes her experiences as a volunteer nurse for the Union during the American Civil War (1861-1865). Her next book, Moods (1864), also for adults, describes women’s struggles in marriage. Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907), American writer and editor, whose most famous work, Story of a Bad Boy (1870), was based on his boyhood experiences in Portsmouth. He was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He served (1866-74) as editor of Every Saturday and later (1881-90) as editor of the Atlantic Monthly. His collection of short stories, Marjory Daw and Other People (1873), is written in a graceful style. Among his other works are the novels Prudence Palfrey (1874), Queen of Sheba (1877), and Stillwater Tragedy (1880).

Sholom Aleichem

Sholom Aleichem, pseudonym of SOLOMON RABINOVITZ (1859-1916), Yiddish short-story writer, dramatist, and humorist, who is regarded as one of the most creative writers in Yiddish. He was born in Pereyaslav (now Pereyaslav-Khmel’nitskiy), near Kyiv, Ukraine. His pseudonym, also spelled Shalom and Sholem, is a traditional Hebrew and Yiddish greeting that means “peace be with you.” He was a teacher and rabbi. In 1905 he fled Jewish persecution in Russia and at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 settled in New York City. His best-known works, written in Yiddish, describe the life of simple Russian Jews in small towns. Certain characters recur, including Menachem Mendel, the typical small-town Jew; the eternal dreamer and schemer (Luftmensch); and the best loved, Tobias the Dairyman (Tevye der Milchiger), an indestructible optimist.

Sholom Aleichem's works in English translation include Stempenyu (1913), Inside Kasrilevke (1938), The Old Country (1946), Tevye's Daughters (1949), and Adventures of Mottel, The Cantor's Son (1953). The musical comedy Fiddler on the Roof (1964) is based on Sholom Aleichem's stories about Tevye.

Lloyd Alexander

Lloyd Alexander (1924-2007), American writer of fantasy novels for children. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Alexander attended West Chester State Teachers College in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1942; Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1943; and the Sorbonne in Paris in 1946. During World War II (1939-1945), he served in the United States armed forces, rising to the position of staff sergeant in military intelligence, and he was stationed for a time in Wales. After the war, he translated works by French writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, and wrote several books for adults before focusing his attention on writing books for children.

Alexander’s most popular and acclaimed series of books, The Prydain Chronicles, is set in the imaginary Welsh kingdom of Prydain and reveals the author’s fascination with mythology, especially Welsh legends of King Arthur. The Book of Three (1964) introduces the series with the character Taran, a boy of unknown parentage who works as an assistant pig keeper and struggles against the Lord of Death. The Book of Three is followed in the series by The Black Cauldron (1965), a Newbery Honor Book, The Castle of Llyr (1966); and Taran Wanderer (1967). The final book, The High King (1968)—in which Taran achieves ultimate victory over the army of the dead—received the 1969 Newbery Medal.

The Marvelous Misadventures of Sebastian (1970; National Book Award, 1971) reflected Alexander’s interest in music. In the book a young fiddler helps an orphaned princess escape marriage to a tyrannical king. Alexander wrote two other series of fantasy books: The Westmark Trilogy (1981-1984), chronicling the revolution besetting the imaginary land of Westmark; and The Vesper Holly Adventures (1986-1990), featuring the brave heroine Vesper Holly, who embarks on a number of fantastic adventures. Alexander’s other writings include The Wizard in the Tree (1975), The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha (1978), The Fortune-Tellers (1992), The Arkadians (1995), and The House Gobbaleen (1995). He received the 1986 Regina Medal for lifetime achievement from the Catholic Library Association. Walt Disney Studios adapted The Black Cauldron into an animated motion picture in 1985. Horatio Alger

Horatio Alger (1832-1899), American writer, born in Revere, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School. Ordained a Unitarian minister in 1864, Alger became chaplain of a lodging house for newsboys in New York City in 1866.

In Alger's first volume of fiction, Ragged Dick (1867), and in similar works, such as Luck and Pluck (1869) and Tattered Tom (1871), he portrayed underprivileged youths who win fame and wealth by practicing the virtues of honesty, diligence, and perseverance. Alger wrote more than 100 such works. Although they have little literary significance, his novels influenced American youth by emphasizing merit, rather than mere social status, as the chief determinant of success. His works became so closely identified with this theme that the stories of people who succeeded through the strength of their own efforts became known as “Horatio Alger tales.”

Steve Allen

Steve Allen (1921-2000), American comedian, musician, and television (TV) personality, prominent in show business from the 1950s through the mid-1980s, noted for being the first host of “The Tonight Show,” which began broadcasting in 1954, on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) network. During his unique career, he played piano, wrote more than 40 books and thousands of songs, acted in motion pictures and TV dramas, and hosted both comic and serious TV programs.

Born Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen in New York City, he attended Drake University and Arizona Teachers College but did not graduate from either school. He became a radio announcer in Phoenix, Arizona, before moving to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, where he worked as a disc jockey and radio talk show host. In the early 1950s he hosted a TV variety show (a program consisting of several separate performances, such as song-and-dance sequences, comedy routines, and skits) and served as a quiz-show panelist. From 1954 to 1957 Allen hosted “The Tonight Show,” which became popular for its freshness and intelligence and for the singers and comedians he assembled for regular appearances on the show.

From 1956 to 1964 Allen hosted “The Steve Allen Show.” In 1964 he became host of the popular quiz show “I've Got a Secret” (1952-1967, 1972, 1976). From 1977 to 1981 Allen moderated a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) public affairs series, “Meeting of Minds” (1977-1981). Since then, he has hosted various syndicated programs and specials.

In addition to his television work, Allen has appeared in several motion pictures and made a number of jazz recordings. His song “Gravy Waltz” (1963) won a Grammy Award in 1963. His books include The Funny Men (1956), Mark It and Strike It (1960), Bigger Than a Bread Box (1967), Explaining China (1980), The Man Who Turned Back the Clock (1995), and Die Laughing (1998).

Woody Allen

Woody Allen, born in 1935, American motion-picture director, actor, and writer, many of whose films are humorous depictions of neurotic characters preoccupied with love and death. Allen frequently stars in his own movies.

Allen’s own first film, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), was actually made from a forgettable Japanese spy thriller that Allen transformed by dubbing it with absurd dialogue in English. He made his true directorial debut with Take the Money and Run (1969), followed by Bananas (1971), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972), and Sleeper (1975). All featured Allen in his characteristic role of the befuddled underachiever.

Allen’s first major critical success came with Annie Hall (1977), in which he plays a comedian who falls in love with a singer played by Diane Keaton. Annie Hall won Academy Awards for best picture and best screenplay; Allen won the Academy Award for best director, and Keaton won for best actress. Allen famously snubbed the Oscar ceremony that year because it coincided with his weekly appearance playing jazz clarinet at Michael’s Pub in New York.

Allen’s film Interiors (1978) was a somber psychological drama, while Stardust Memories (1980) was an obviously autobiographical work. Around this time Allen also made what is regarded by many critics as his greatest film, Manhattan (1979), a deft comedy about the romantic anxieties of a New York television comedy writer, noted for its inspired title sequence set to Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin and for its luminous black-and-white photography. Allen’s 1982 film, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, the first of a new association with Orion Pictures, was also the first of many to feature his future partner, Mia Farrow.

Allen’s subsequent films include the spoof newsreel documentary Zelig (1983); Broadway Danny Rose (1984), a comedy about a failed talent agent; the 1930s takeoff Purple Rose of Cairo (1985); the family sagas Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Radio Days (1987); Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), about adultery; Husbands and Wives (1992), a dissection of marriage; the comic suspense story Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993); the mob comedy Bullets over Broadway (1994); the marital comedy Mighty Aphrodite (1995); and the musical Everyone Says I Love You (1997).

An acrimonious separation from Farrow occurred in 1992 over his affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, whom Allen married in 1997. After his marriage Allen made Deconstructing Harry (1997) and Celebrity (1998), two films that were notably more cynical in tone than his previous work. In 1999 Allen wrote and directed Sweet and Lowdown, a comedic biopic about the life of a fictional 1930s jazz guitarist, Emmett Ray, starring Sean Penn. He starred in, as well as wrote and directed, the crime capers Small Time Crooks (2000) and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). In Hollywood Ending (2002) an aging filmmaker tries to cover up the fact that he has been struck blind during the making of a movie. Allen returned to romantic comedy in 2003 with Anything Else, and in 2004 wrote and directed Melinda and Melinda, a comedy exploring the same events from contrasting standpoints, comedic and tragic. Match Point (2005) was Allen’s first film made in Britain. This morality tale of ambition and social climbing set amid London’s high society was his biggest commercial success in two decades. He stayed in the British capital to shoot the murder mysteries Scoop (2006) and Cassandra’s Dream (2007). Allen has received Academy Award nominations in various categories for many of his films.

Allen wrote and starred in the plays Don’t Drink the Water (1966; motion picture, 1969) and Play It Again, Sam (1969; motion picture, 1972). A 1994 film version of Don’t Drink the Water was Allen’s first made- for-television movie. He has also published collections of short humorous writings, including Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1976), and Side Effects (1980).

Robert Altman

Robert Altman (1925-2006), American motion-picture director, producer, and screenwriter, known for his idiosyncratic, iconoclastic, and innovative feature films. Altman directed more than 80 films during his lengthy career.

Robert Bernard Altman was born in Kansas City, Missouri, where he apprenticed making films with the Calvin Company. Early in his career he directed television programs before scoring a surprise hit with the movie M*A*S*H in 1970. Altman became renowned for his unorthodox production methods (during the filming of M*A*S*H, the cast and crew lived on the “Army camp” set), daring style (such as overlapping, improvisational dialogue, and semidocumentary-style camerawork and editing), and irreverence toward Hollywood’s authorities and conventions.

After M*A*S*H Altman directed a string of well-received films, including McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Images (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973), Thieves Like Us (1974), California Split (1974), Nashville (1975), and 3 Women (1977). However, he later alienated audiences, industry people, and film critics as his films became increasingly mean-spirited or eccentric, as in Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), A Wedding (1977), and Quintet (1980).

Altman closed his Hollywood production center after releasing Popeye (1980), which made a profit but earned little acclaim. After directing several off-Broadway plays, he spent most of the 1980s filming stage dramas for art houses or cable television. Notable projects included Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), Laundromat (1983), Streamers (1984), and Secret Honor (1984). Altman also directed the movie Vincent and Theo in 1990.

Altman’s openness to alternative formats reached its peak in Tanner '88, an epic project he filmed for cable television. Featuring a fictitious candidate for the 1988 United States presidential nomination, Tanner was written and shot as the real presidential campaign unfolded. It included cameos by such real-life personages as Senator Bob Dole and Kitty Dukakis, wife of Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.

The Player (1992), a critically acclaimed movie satire about the film industry, restored Altman to directorial stardom. That success was followed by another hit, Short Cuts (1993), an intricately interwoven, multi-character narrative of contemporary mores in Southern California based on short stories by Raymond Carver. Later films directed by Altman included Prêt-à-Porter (1994), a satire on the world of high fashion; Kansas City (1996), a tragicomedy set in the 1930s; Cookie’s Fortune (1999), a good-natured drama set in the American South; the comedy Dr. T and the Women (2000); and the 1930s murder mystery Gosford Park (2001). He followed these with The Company (2003), an ensemble piece about a fictional Chicago ballet company, and A Prairie Home Companion (2006), a film inspired by the long-running Garrison Keillor radio favorite of the same name.

Altman was nominated five times for the best director Academy Award—for the films M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park—but never won. Laundromat and Tanner '88 earned Emmy Awards. In 2006 Altman received an honorary Academy Award for his body of work.

Rudolfo Anaya

Rudolfo Anaya, born in 1937, American novelist and short-story writer, whose best-known work, Bless Me, Ultima (1972), is one of the most celebrated novels of Hispanic literature. Anaya was born in the rural village of Pastura, New Mexico, and while he was growing up in the area, he became familiar with the practices of traditional Hispanic farming and ranching, which would become the subject of many of his narratives. Anaya was educated at the University of New Mexico and subsequently taught in public schools in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He joined the faculty of the English department of the University of New Mexico in 1974, and he retired from teaching in 1994.

In Anaya's novel Bless Me, Ultima, the protagonist, a boy named Antonio, must find his place in the society of the American Southwest by choosing between two competing family heritages: the indigenous farming traditions that are followed by his mother's side of the family, and the Spanish- influenced ranching practices of his father's side. Antonio's choices represent two different ways of viewing humanity's relationship to the natural world. He must also decide whether knowledge should come through religious or secular (nonreligious) experience. Antonio follows a mystic quest through the real dangers in the world around him as well as through the mysteries of his own puzzling dreams. His mentor throughout this quest is Ultima, a wise old faith healer. In 1971 Bless Me, Ultima won the Premio Quinto Sol, the major award at that time for Chicano literature in the United States. Largely based on the popularity of this novel, Anaya was given the City of Los Angeles Award in 1977 and the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence and Achievement in Literature in 1980.

In most of his works, Anaya is concerned with instinct and intuition as guides to humanity's understanding of the universe. He shows the importance of these guides in the context of plots, characters, and symbols drawn directly from the Hispanic culture of New Mexico. Anaya's other books include the novels Heart of Aztlán (1976); Tortuga (1979); The Legend of La Llorona (1984); and Alburquerque (1994; the name spelled to reflect the original Spanish spelling of Albuquerque, New Mexico), and the short story collection My Land Sings (1999).

Maxwell Anderson

Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959), American playwright, known for the wide- ranging dramatic style of his 30 produced plays. Born in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, Anderson was educated at the University of North Dakota and Stanford University. He was a schoolteacher and journalist until 1924, when his play What Price Glory?, a colorful drama of World War I (1914- 1918) written in collaboration with American author Laurence Stallings, was successfully produced in New York City. Anderson's concerns in his dramas included the corrupting influences of power and wealth, especially in politics; the disillusionment of men caught up in war; and the need for action by the individual in defense of justice and freedom. He wrote several historical dramas in blank verse, including Elizabeth the Queen (1930), Mary of Scotland (1933), and Anne of the Thousand Days (1947). He also wrote the domestic dramas Saturday's Children (1927) and The Bad Seed (1954), as well as the librettos for several musicals, including Knickerbocker Holiday (1938) and Lost in the Stars (1949). Anderson won the 1933Pulitzer Prize in drama for Both Your Houses (1933). His verse play Winterset (1935), inspired by the 1920s murder trial of two anarchists, known as the Sacco-Vanzetti case, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1936 and is considered a classic.

Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), American author, born in Camden, Ohio. He left school at the age of 14 and worked at various jobs until 1898. He served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (1898). After the war he went to Chicago, Illinois, where he began to write novels and poetry. His work won praise from American writers Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and Ben Hecht.

Anderson's talent was not widely recognized until the publication of the collection of his short stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which deals with the instinctive, if inarticulate, struggle of ordinary people to assert their individuality in the face of standardization imposed by the machine age. Noted for his poetic realism, psychological insight, and sense of the tragic, Anderson helped also to establish a simple, consciously naive short-story style. His choice of subject matter and style influenced many American writers who followed him, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Anderson's other works include several novels, short stories, and essays. His autobiographies are Tar, a Midwest Childhood (1926) and Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942).

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou, born in 1928, American author, poet, performer, and civil rights activist, best known for portrayals of strong African American women in her writings. Characteristically using a first-person point of view and the rhythms of folk song, she writes of the African American woman’s coming of age, of struggles with discrimination, of the African and West Indian cultural heritage, and of the acceptance of the past. In 1993 Angelou read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton.

Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. The child of divorce, she spent most of her childhood living with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, the place she calls her hometown. After graduating with honors from Lafayette County Training School in 1940, Angelou was reunited with her mother in San Francisco. At the age of 16 she graduated from high school, gave birth to her son Guy, and began a series of jobs, including cooking and waiting tables.

Angelou’s career in the arts began on the West Coast, as a calypso performer and cabaret entertainer, and as a dancer in a touring company production of Porgy and Bess. She adopted the stage name Maya Angelou in 1953. “Maya” was what her brother had called her as a child, and “Angelou” was based on the last name of Tosh Angelos, whom she had married the year before. Upon moving to New York City in the mid-1950s, she attended meetings of the Harlem Writers Guild, won parts in the off-Broadway musical Calypso Heatwave (1957) and the Jean Genet drama The Blacks (1961), and recorded an album of calypso music. In 1960 she wrote and produced a revue entitled Freedom Cabaret as a way of raising money for the civil rights movement.

Angelou began her writing career as a playwright and journalist, receiving the attention and encouragement of writer James Baldwin and cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer. In 1970 she published the first of her autobiographical books, the popular and widely acclaimed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In it she describes her rape at the age of seven and subsequent five years of self- imposed speechlessness. The series of autobiographical books continues with Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), and A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002). These writings stress the themes of courage, perseverance, self-acceptance, and the realization of an individual’s full potential.

In 1971 Angelou published her first book of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie. Subsequent poetry collections include Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975), And Still I Rise (1978), Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (1983), Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), and Phenomenal Woman (1994). The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou appeared in 1994. Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, a book of inspirational meditations on life, was published in 1993. A collection of essays, Even the Stars Look Lonesome, appeared in 1997. In 2004 Angelou published a cookbook with anecdotes from her past, Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes.

Angelou has acted in several television broadcasts, including the miniseries Roots (1977) and the weekly drama Touched by an Angel. She has received many awards and honorary degrees, including Grammy Awards (1994 and 1996) for her recordings of her poetry on the albums On the Pulse of Morning (1993) and Phenomenal Woman (1995). Sholem Asch

Sholem Asch (1880-1957), Russian-born American writer, born in Kutno, Poland (then part of Russia), and educated at a rabbinical college. He moved to the United States in 1914. Early in his literary career Asch wrote in Hebrew; later he wrote primarily in Yiddish. All his important writings were published in English translation. Salvation (1934), probably his most significant work, expresses his faith, which transcends any religious creed. His success came largely from his ability to treat biblical figures in a style that was both reverential and realistic. The novels of Asch include The Apostle (1943), a life of St. Paul; East River (1946), about Jewish life in New York City; Mary (1949); and Moses (1951).

John Ashbery

John Ashbery, born in 1928, American poet, playwright, and novelist, whose book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1976) won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the 1976 National Book Award for poetry. Influenced by surrealism, a 20th-century artistic and literary movement, Ashbery’s poetry is characterized by abstract, unconventional use of imagery and syntax. His verse often focuses on the act of writing and attempts to reveal the internal world of the poet, rejecting conventional realism. To challenge his readers’ preconceptions about poetry, Ashbery uses unexpected juxtapositions of evocative and incongruous imagery.

Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York. He received his B.A. degree in 1949 from Harvard University and his M.A. degree in English literature in 1951 from Columbia University. While at Columbia, Ashbery established close literary friendships with several other poets, including Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. This group—along with artists and musicians of their generation—later became known as the New York School.

In 1955 Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden chose Ashbery’s first collection of poetry, Some Trees (1956), for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The same year, Ashbery received a Fulbright Fellowship and moved to Paris. He stayed in France until 1965, working as an art and literature critic for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune and as a correspondent for the American art magazine Art News. Upon his return to New York City, Ashbery served as the executive editor for Art News until 1972. From 1974 to 1990 he taught English at Brooklyn College and Bard College, both in New York state.

Ashbery’s early works include The Tennis Court Oath (1962), Rivers and Mountains (1966), and Sunrise in Suburbia (1968). His later works include As We Know (1979), Shadow Train (1981), Flow Chart (1991), And the Stars Were Shining (1994), Can You Hear, Bird (1995), and Wakefulness (1998). In 1997 the anthology The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry was published. With James Schuyler, Ashbery coauthored the novel A Nest of Ninnies (1969), a parody of suburban American life as seen through the lives of two families. He also published a collection of plays, Three Plays (1978), and his art criticism is collected in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957—1987 (published 1989).

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), Russian-born American writer, esteemed for his science fiction and for his popular works in all branches of science.

Isaac Asimov was born in Petrovichi. His family immigrated to the United States when he was three years old and settled in Brooklyn, New York. Asimov's encounters with science-fiction magazines led him to follow the dual careers of writing and science. He entered Columbia University at the age of 15, and at the age of 18 he sold his first story, to the magazine Amazing Stories.

After serving in World War II (1939-1945), Asimov earned a Ph.D. degree at Columbia University in 1948; from 1949 to 1958 he taught biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine. His first science-fiction novel, Pebble in the Sky, appeared in 1950 and his first science book, a biochemistry text written with two colleagues, was published in 1953.

Asimov turned to writing full time in 1958. He authored more than 400 books for young and adult readers, extending beyond science and science fiction to include mystery stories, humor, history, and several volumes about the Bible and English playwright William Shakespeare. Asimov’s best- known science-fiction works include I, Robot (1950; film version, 2004); The Foundation Trilogy (1951-1953), to which he wrote a sequel 30 years later, Foundation's Edge (1982); The Naked Sun (1957); and The Gods Themselves (1972). Asimov's major science books include the Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (1964; revised 1982) and Asimov's New Guide to Science (1984), a revision of his widely acclaimed Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1960).

The author’s later works include Foundation and Earth (1986); Prelude to Foundation (1988); and Forward the Foundation (1992). Asimov wrote three volumes of autobiography: In Memory Yet Green (1979), In Joy Still Felt (1980), and the posthumously published I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994). Yours, Isaac Asimov: A Lifetime of Letters, was published in 1995.

Asimov died in 1992 of complications from the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). He contracted the disease from a blood transfusion during a 1983 triple-bypass operation.

W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden (1907-1973), Anglo-American poet, playwright, and literary critic, regarded by many as the most influential poet in English since T. S. Eliot.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, the son of a physician. At first interested in science, he soon turned to poetry. In 1925 he entered Christ Church College, University of Oxford, where he became the center of a group of literary intellectuals that included Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. After graduating in 1928, he was a schoolmaster in Scotland and England for five years.

In London, in the early 1930s, Auden belonged to a circle of promising young poets who were strongly leftist (people who advocate liberal or radical measures to effect change in the established order, especially in politics). His book Poems (1930), which helped to establish his reputation, focused on the breakdown of English capitalist society but also showed a deep concern with psychological problems. He subsequently wrote three verse plays with Isherwood: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F-6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). In 1937 he drove an ambulance for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. In the same year he was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry, a major honor. Trips to Iceland and China—the first with MacNeice, the second with Isherwood—resulted in two jointly written books, Letter from Iceland (1937) and Journey to a War (1939).

In 1939 Auden moved to the United States, where he became a citizen and was active as a poet, reviewer, lecturer, and editor. His Double Man (1941) and For the Time Being (1944) reflect an increasing concern with religion. The Age of Anxiety (1947), a long dramatic poem that begins in a New York City bar, won him the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and provided an apt and convenient name for his era. His numerous other works include Collected Poetry (1945), The Shield of Achilles (1955), Collected Longer Poems (1969), and several opera librettos written with the American Chester Kallman, his friend and companion. From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford, and in 1972 he returned to Christ Church as a writer in residence.

As a poet, Auden bore some resemblance to T. S. Eliot. Like him, he had a cool, ironic wit, yet was deeply religious. He was concerned to a greater degree than Eliot, however, with social problems. Possessed of probing psychological insight, Auden also had a supremely lyric gift. Auden's influence on the succeeding generation of poets was immense. Many critics consider Auden a master of verse; his intellectual rigor and social conscience combined with his fluid mix of styles and expert craftsmanship make him a paragon of modern poetics. Paul Auster

Paul Auster, born in 1947, American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, best-known as a chronicler of New York City. He first achieved popular and critical acclaim with the collection of short stories The New York Trilogy (1987). Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey. After receiving his bachelor of arts degree in 1969 and his M.A. degree in 1970, both from Columbia University in New York City, Auster lived in France for four years, during which time he worked as a writer and translator. He returned to New York City in 1974.

Auster began his writing career by producing poetry and essays for the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and Saturday Review, but it was not until 1978, when he received an inheritance from his father, that he was financially able to become a full-time writer. After the success of The New York Trilogy, Auster turned to writing novels. His fiction is characterized by an often unnerving blend of realism and fantasy that surprises the reader and confounds expectations. Auster’s novels include In the Country of Last Things (1988); Moon Palace (1989); The Music of Chance (1991), which was made into a motion picture in 1993; Leviathan (1992); Mr. Vertigo (1994); and Timbuktu (1999), which was written from the viewpoint of a dog.

Auster has collaborated on two film projects with director Wayne Wang, adapting his own short story “Augie Wren’s Christmas Story” for the film Smoke (1995) and co-directing its improvised companion piece Blue in the Face (1995). He also wrote and directed the film Lulu on the Bridge (1998). Auster has also written the autobiographical works The Invention of Solitude (1982) and Hand to Mouth (1997), and a collection of poems and essays, Groundwork (1990). His Collected Prose was published in 2003.

Auster’s most recent novels are The Book of Illusions (2002), which explores his familiar themes of chance and coincidence; the multi-layered mystery Oracle Night (2003); The Brooklyn Follies (2005), in which a retired insurance man diagnosed with lung cancer is rejuvenated when he returns to his native Brooklyn; and Travels in the Scriptorium (2007), in which a disoriented man tries to piece together his past.

Irving Babbitt

Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), American critic and educator, born in Dayton, Ohio, and educated at Harvard University and in Paris. Babbitt was appointed professor of French literature at Harvard in 1912. Through his books and articles he became known as one of the leaders of the new humanism in literature. In the 1920s the intellectually conservative new humanists reacted against naturalism and its tenets of biological and economic determinism. Instead, the new humanists reemphasized the power of human will and attempted to restore traditional cultural values concerned with the unique place of human beings in the natural world. Babbitt's books include Literature and the American College (1908), The New Laokoön (1910), Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912), Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), and On Being Creative (1932).

Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey

Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey (1863-1948), American ornithologist and nature writer. Florence Merriam was born in Locust Grove, New York. As a child, she developed an interest in nature. After enrolling at Smith College (1882-1886) in Northampton, Massachusetts, in a nondegree course of study, she discovered a passion for ornithology. In 1886, while still a student, she published her first articles in Audubon magazine. These formed the basis for her first book, Birds Through an Opera Glass (1889), a guide to common birds written for young people and laypeople.

In 1893 Merriam traveled to the Western United States to recover from tuberculosis. She stayed first in Utah; that period is memorialized in her book My Summer in a Mormon Village (1894). She then traveled to Palo Alto, California, and attended Stanford University for six months. Subsequent time spent in Twin Oaks, California, and the mountains of Arizona was devoted to birding and resulted in two more books: A-Birding on a Bronco (1896) and Birds of Village and Field (1898). The latter became a popular guide to American birds.

In 1896 Merriam then returned to the East Coast of the United States, to Washington, D.C., to live with her brother, Clinton Hart Merriam, the first chief of the U.S. Biological Survey, which merged with the Bureau of Fisheries to eventually become the current U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1899 she married Vernon Bailey, a naturalist with the Survey. The Baileys traveled throughout the country, observing wildlife and birds. Over the next 30 years, Florence published numerous articles in birding magazines, as well as several additional books, including the Handbook of Birds of the Western United States (1902)—a counterpart to American ornithologist Frank M. Chapman's Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America—and Birds of New Mexico (1928), the first detailed study of birds of the Southwestern United States. The latter work was published by the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. She also contributed articles about birds to several of her husband's works, including Wild Animals of Glacier National Park (1918) and Cave Life of Kentucky (1933). The National Park Service (NPS) published the final important work of her career in 1939: Among the Birds in the Grand Canyon National Park.

While at Smith College Bailey had founded a local chapter of the Audubon Society; in 1897 she helped start the Washington, D.C., chapter of the society. She was also a longtime member of the American Ornithologists' Union, becoming its first woman associate member in 1885, the first woman regular member in 1901, and the first woman fellow in 1929.

In 1931 Bailey was the first woman to receive the union's prestigious Brewster Medal. It was awarded for her 1928 book Birds of New Mexico. Smith College presented her with a bachelor's degree in 1921 in recognition of her four years there as a nontraditional scholar. The University of New Mexico bestowed an honorary doctor of law degree on Bailey in 1933.

Perhaps the highest honor received by Bailey during her lifetime was having a subspecies of the mountain chickadee named after her: Parus gambeli baileyae. James Baldwin

James Baldwin (1924-1987), American writer, whose focus on issues of racial discrimination made him a prominent spokesperson for racial equality, especially during the civil rights movements of the 1960s. He is best known for his semiautobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and for The Fire Next Time (1963), a powerful collection of essays in which he expressed his belief that racial discrimination is a disease of white society, curable only by white society’s acknowledgement of the illness.

James Arthur Baldwin was born in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City to a single mother, Emma Birdis Jones. When he was still young, his mother married a preacher, David Baldwin, who adopted James. The family was poor, and James and his adopted father had a difficult relationship. Baldwin attended the prestigious De Witt Clinton Public High School in New York. At the age of 14 he joined the Pentecostal Church and became a Pentecostal preacher.

When he was 17 years old, Baldwin turned away from religion and moved to Greenwich Village, a New York City neighborhood famous for its freethinking artists and writers. Supporting himself with odd jobs, he began to write short stories, essays, and book reviews, many of which were later collected in the volume Notes of a Native Son (1955). During this time Baldwin began to recognize his own homosexuality. In 1948, disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks and homosexuals, Baldwin left the United States for Paris, France. He would live in Paris for most of his later life.

In Paris, with the support of fellowship grants and literary supporters such as American novelist Richard Wright, Baldwin wrote his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. The book describes a boy’s religious conversion, and Baldwin tells the story through a series of prayers that serve as flashbacks. He weaves the history of the boy’s family and community into the novel’s narrative. While in France, Baldwin came to accept his homosexuality and began work on Giovanni’s Room (1956), a novel about a man exploring his sexual identity. In 1957, impressed by the growing strength of the civil rights movement in the United States, Baldwin returned to the country briefly in order to participate.

He published his observations of the United States in the essay collections Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time. The latter, a study of the Black Muslim movement led by Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, predicted violence and political upheaval if American whites did not face up to the country’s racial problems. The success of The Fire Next Time made Baldwin a prominent figure in the civil rights movement. He spoke out in interviews and gave impassioned speeches about racial justice.

Baldwin continued to address racial issues in his novels as well. Another Country (1962) describes the tortured relationships within a group of black and white friends. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) is about a Harlem boy’s rise to fame as an actor. If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) depicts the struggles of a young African American couple hemmed in by racism and an unsympathetic legal system. In Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head (1979), the brother of a dead gospel singer reflects on his brother’s life.

In 1964 Baldwin collaborated with American photographer Richard Avedon on Nothing Personal, a collection of photographs and essays about the United States. Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka, born in 1934, American playwright, poet, and political activist, whose poems, novels, plays, and essays were a major force throughout the late 1960s in pushing African American literature away from themes of integration toward a focus on the black experience. Originally named Everett LeRoi Jones, he changed his name to Imamu Ameer Baraka in 1967. In the 1970s he altered this name to Amiri Baraka.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Baraka earned a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1951 but transferred a year later to Howard University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1954. After serving three years in the Air Force, he settled in New York City's Greenwich Village, where he befriended several prominent Beat Generation poets, including Allen Ginsberg.

In 1958 Baraka and his wife, Hettie Cohen, founded Yugen, an influential Beat literary journal. In 1964 his first major play, Dutchman, opened in New York and won an Obie Award (an off-Broadway award given by the Village Voice newspaper). Both Dutchman and Baraka's second major play, The Slave (1964), dealt with the corrosive effects of racism. In 1964 he also founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater.

During the early 1960s Baraka slowly distanced himself from the Beats and white culture in general, and after black Muslim leader Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, Baraka turned his back on the white world entirely. He divorced his wife (who was white), changed his name, became a black nationalist, moved to Harlem, and dedicated himself to creating black culture through art. In the 1970s he turned more toward politics, founding the Congress of African People and organizing the Black National Political Convention in 1972. In 1974 he abandoned the black nationalist movement in favor of Marxism and Leninism. Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995) was published in 1995. Eulogies (1996) is a collection of his essays.

Margaret Ayer Barnes

Margaret Ayer Barnes (1886-1967), American novelist, who wrote about privileged women of society in the early 20th century. Barnes advocated traditional values and conventional roles for women.

Barnes was born and raised in Chicago, the setting for most of her works. She attended Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1907 and returning to Chicago, where she married an attorney in 1910. Barnes was an active alumna of Bryn Mawr and helped set up the school's Working Women's College, intended to extend the privileges of education to financially disadvantaged students. Barnes was also an active speaker about women's issues.

Barnes began writing fiction in 1926 during her recuperation from injuries suffered in an automobile crash in France. Her first book, Prevailing Winds (1928), was a volume of short stories. Her second book, the novel Year of Grace (1930), won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1931. It tells of the passages a woman experiences, marked by her relationships with a series of men, from her adolescence to the age of 54.

During Barnes's writing career, which lasted only a decade, she wrote four more novels, all about women of her time and social class. They are: Westward Passage (1931), about a woman torn between the aesthetic sensibility of her first husband and the wealth of her second; Within This Present (1933), about the effects of social changes between 1914 and 1933 on the consciousness of a middle-class woman; Edna, His Wife (1935), about a woman who rises from poverty by marrying a successful man from whom she feels alienated; and Wisdom's Gate, about a woman who comes to terms with her husband's infidelity (1938).

Barry

Barry, Dave, born in 1947, American humorist and writer best known for his weekly newspaper column, which is syndicated to more than 500 newspapers. He has also written more than 20 books, a number of which have been bestsellers.

Dave Barry was born in Armonk, New York, where his father was a Presbyterian minister. Barry was voted Class Clown of his high school in Pleasantville, New York, when he graduated in 1965. He then majored in English at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. After graduating with a B.A. in 1969 he worked as a reporter for The Daily Local News, a small newspaper in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Barry also taught business writing for eight years. In 1983 he began reporting for The Miami Herald in Florida and soon after launched his humor column.

Barry’s writing is a mixture of pointed commentary and zany satire. He will often bring out the silly side of a serious news event or find the hidden humor in life’s everyday trials. Some of Barry’s favorite topics include aging, rock music, politicians and government, cyberspace, and parenting. Despite exhibiting what some consider an adolescent style, Barry has cultivated a broad fan base and his writing is extremely popular. Many of his columns have been collected and republished as books over the years. Dave Barry Turns 50 (1999) is one such book, offering a humorous retrospective of the cultural history of the baby-boom generation from 1947 to 1974, including commentary on popular music, television shows, consumer products, and the Cold War. Other books by Barry include Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits (1988), Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need (1991), and Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys (1997).

In 1988 Barry’s column won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. His writing has also inspired the TV series Dave’s World, which ran from 1993 to 1997. His first novel, Big Trouble (1999), is a fast-paced, satirical crime story set in South Florida. The book was made into a film released in 2002. Philip Barry

Philip Barry (1896-1949), American dramatist, born in Rochester, New York, and educated at Yale and Harvard universities. At Harvard he studied drama with the American educator George Pierce Baker. Barry wrote many plays, including You and I (1922), In a Garden (1925), White Wings (1926), Paris Bound (1927), Holiday (1929), The Philadelphia Story (1939), and Without Love (1942). A number of his plays were made into motion pictures, most notably The Philadelphia Story.

John Barth

John Barth, born in 1930, American writer, whose sprawling allegorical novels, employing fantasy, ribald humor, and satiric wit, are actually built around serious themes of existentialism. John Simmons Barth was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and educated at Johns Hopkins University. His first novel, The Floating Opera (1956), concerns a nihilist (see Nihilism) who can find no reason for suicide. His book The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a long burlesque both of formal history and the picaresque novel, is also a parody of its own creation.

In Barth's best-received novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), the central image is the world conceived as an enormous computer-run university. Barth's other works include Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (1968); Chimera (1972), three novellas that attempt to relate mythology to contemporary life; Letters (1979), a comic epic about modern life; Sabbatical: A Romance (1982); The Tidewater Tales: A Novel (1987); The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991); and Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994), an autobiographical novel. The Friday Book (1984) and Further Fridays (1995) are collections of Barth's essays and other nonfictional writing.

Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme (1931-1989), American novelist and short-story writer, one of the most experimental authors in contemporary American fiction. Barthelme was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His interest in art led him to become a museum director in Houston, Texas, in the 1950s, and he later served as managing editor of the art and literary periodical Location. Critics have noted that one of the main influences on Barthelme’s writing, both in form and theme, is the collage, an art of fragmentation, which he saw as the key to modern art (see Modern Art; Architecture). His novels include Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), and Paradise (1986). His numerous collections of short stories include Come Back Dr. Caligari (1964); Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968); City Life (1970); Sadness (1972); Great Days (1979); Sixty Stories (1981); Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983); and Forty Stories (1987).

Barthelme’s works do not reflect a concern with plot, character, or theme, but rather have more to do with form. The author constructs a formal design in his works that is playful, inventive, and self-contained. For example, in one story he transforms the traditional fairy tale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” so that the conventional notions of heroism and salvation are inverted. The Snow White of Barthelme’s story, rather than living happily ever after, never develops personally or finds happiness.

In many of his short stories—'On Angels,' 'Brain Damage,' 'A Shower of Gold,' 'Daumier'—Barthelme virtually changes our conception of the short story form, including drawings, 'sermons,' and descriptions of figures from popular culture. 'On Angels' is one of Barthelme’s most characteristic stories. It begins with a telling statement; 'The death of God left the angels in a strange position.' The angels of the story, like Snow White in the other story, are outcasts, unsure of their position in the universe. Jacques Martin Barzun

Jacques Martin Barzun, born in 1907, American historian and educator, born near Paris. In 1920 he went to the United States and began his long association with Columbia University, first as a student and later as teacher and administrator. Barzun became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1933. At Columbia he served as dean of the graduate faculties (1955- 1958), dean of faculties and provost (1958-1967), and university professor and special adviser to the president on the arts (1967-1975). Among his many influential works are Teacher in America (1945); Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950); The House of Intellect (1959), an analysis of culture in a democracy; Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1964); The American University (1968); and The Use and Abuse of Art (1974).

Katharine Lee Bates

Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929), American educator and author, born in Falmouth, Massachusetts. She was educated at Wellesley College and was professor of English there from 1891 to 1925. She wrote travel books, textbooks, books for children, short stories, and poetry. Her most famous work is the patriotic poem “America the Beautiful,” written in 1893 and adapted in 1910 to the tune “Materna,” by the American composer Samuel Augustus Ward.

L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919), American writer. Lyman Frank Baum was born in Chittenango, New York. From 1880 to 1902 he was a newspaperman and began a series of books in which he created an original fairyland, the land of Oz, a world of fantastic characters and lighthearted adventure. The most famous of these books was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). In 1901 Baum adapted it as a musical extravaganza entitled The Wizard of Oz, and before his death Baum wrote 13 more books about Oz. After his death various writers continued the series, producing scores of volumes. A musical film, The Wizard of Oz (1939), based on the original books by Baum, has become a classic.

Charles Beard

Charles Beard (1874-1948), educator and historian. Charles Austin Beard was born in Knightstown, Indiana, and educated at DePauw and Columbia universities. He was a professor of political science at Columbia University from 1907 to 1917, when he resigned to protest the dismissal, during World War I, of several professors at Columbia who held pacifist views. In 1918 Beard helped found the New School for Social Research, an institution for adult education in New York City. In his teaching and writing he stressed the part played by economic forces in the development of American institutions. His many writings include The Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915), Public Policy and the General Welfare (1941), and American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940 (1946). He also collaborated on several books with his wife, Mary Ritter Beard.

James Beard

James Beard (1903-1985), American chef, cookbook writer, columnist, and critic, noted as one of the nation's foremost authorities on food and drink. His exuberant passion for fine food and its preparation helped inspire a gastronomic movement beginning in the 1940s that stimulated thousands of Americans to develop an interest in gourmet cooking and dining. Over the course of a career that spanned five decades, he authored two dozen books, pioneered the first cooking show on television, founded an influential culinary school, and served as a consultant for some of the finest restaurants in the country. Many prominent contemporary food writers, chefs, and restaurant critics credit Beard as one of their most important influences. In the words of American master chef Julia Child, “Beard is as important to food people as Beethoven is to the music world.”

Born in Portland, Oregon, Beard developed a fascination for food early in life. His mother had an unusual knowledge of gourmet foodstuffs and international cuisine, and his affluent family traveled and dined out frequently. He never attended a formal cooking school. As a young man, Beard pursued an interest in drama and music in his studies at Reed College in Portland; the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington; and Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. To further his acting ambitions, Beard spent two years in Europe, which gave him an opportunity to sample the elite restaurants of London, Paris, and various cities in Italy.

Beard established himself in the New York City cooking world in the 1930s. He helped run a gourmet catering business until the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945). After a stint in the army, in 1946 Beard was hired to demonstrate his cooking techniques on a network television show called 'Elsie Presents.' The popular program, which was the first to feature a chef at work, remained on the air for two years. By the end of the 1940s, Beard was busy giving lectures, leading classes, and writing cookbooks.

Buoyed by these successes, Beard opened The James Beard Cooking School in New York City in 1955. Geared toward professionals in other fields, his courses covered breadmaking; the preparation of quick main courses and full dinner parties; and the cuisines of France, Italy, and other countries. Beard also strove to instill in his students a passion, as well as a critical eye, for food.

Although an expert in gourmet cooking, Beard often expressed a preference for simply prepared American fare over trendy international cuisine. In the same vein, his cookbooks urged readers to ignore culinary fads and focus instead on using fresh ingredients, learning basic techniques, and cultivating a love for food. In his cookbooks, Beard presented himself as an outspoken and eccentric character and wrote with passionate language and strong opinions. Among his best-selling titles are The James Beard Cookbook (1959), Beard on Bread (1973), and Jim Beard's Barbecue Cookbook (1956). Cook It Outdoors, which Beard wrote in 1941, was the first serious book ever published on preparing food outdoors. Although the portly Beard dismissed diet cookbooks as an unfortunate fad for most of his career, in 1981 he wrote The New James Beard, which featured low- fat, low-salt recipes that reflected his new dietary restrictions. As a tribute to this master chef’s legacy, beginning in 1991 the nonprofit James Beard Foundation has given annual awards for excellence in restaurants, cookbooks, and culinary journalism.

Beat Generation

Beat Generation, group of American writers of the 1950s whose writing expressed profound dissatisfaction with contemporary American society and endorsed an alternative set of values. The term sometimes is used to refer to those who embraced the ideas of these writers. The Beat Generation's best-known figures were writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who met as students at Columbia University in the 1940s, and San Francisco-based poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, in the North Beach section of San Francisco, became a center of Beat culture and remained an enduring symbol of alternative literature into the 1990s. Another center of Beat activity was New York City’s East Village, where Ginsberg made his home.

The first book generally characterized as a Beat Generation work was Go (1952), a novel by John Clellon Holmes about a group of young, disenchanted writers in New York City who closely resembled the Beats. The first discussion of the Beat Generation in a national forum was an article entitled “This is the Beat Generation,” also written by Holmes, which was featured in the Sunday magazine section of the New York Times in November 1952. But it was not until 1956, when the publication of Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl provoked an obscenity trial, that the Beat Generation achieved broad national recognition.

A poem in three sections, Howl is written in free verse, unrhymed lines with no fixed meter. Verging at times on stream of consciousness, the poem appears to follow Ginsberg’s unedited train of thought, its sequence dictated by free association rather than logic. In the poem, Ginsberg likens the sacrifices Americans make in their cultlike worship of material goods to the worship of the pagan deity Moloch, which demanded ritual sacrifice of children. Soon after the publication of Howl, government authorities declared the book obscene and seized it, but in the trial that followed, a judge found the book to have literary merit and ordered its release. Ginsberg’s other important works include the poems Kaddish (1954), “A Supermarket in California” (1955), and “America” (1956).

Perhaps the best-known Beat novel is Kerouac’s semiautobiographical On the Road (1957). The book celebrates direct sensory experience, freedom from conventional responsibilities, and the emotional intensity of a life of hitchhiking, casual sex, and recreational drug use. Warren Beatty

Warren Beatty, born in 1937, American motion-picture actor, producer, screenwriter, and director, many of whose works focus on the values of American society. He was born Henry Warren Beaty in Richmond, Virginia, the younger brother of actress Shirley MacLaine. (He later added a t to his last name.) After attending Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, for one year, Beatty left in 1956 to study with acting teacher Stella Adler in New York City. After working in television and theater for several years, Beatty made his motion- picture debut in Splendor in the Grass (1961), directed by Elia Kazan. Beatty subsequently appeared in such motion pictures as All Fall Down (1962) and Mickey One (1965). In Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which he also produced, he portrayed Clyde Barrow, an American criminal during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He was widely praised for his performance in the innovative Western drama McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), directed by Robert Altman.

In the mid-1970s Beatty assumed increased creative control over his projects. He produced, cowrote, and starred in the satire Shampoo (1975), and he produced, cowrote, codirected, and starred in Heaven Can Wait (1978), a comedy about a football player who is reincarnated. Beatty won the 1981 Academy Award for best director for Reds (1981), a detailed historical work in which he portrayed radical American journalist John Reed. Later Beatty produced, directed, and played the title role in Dick Tracy (1990), based on the comic strip of the same name, and he coproduced and starred in Bugsy (1991), about a Hollywood, California, gangster. In 1994 he starred with his wife, Annette Bening, in the romance Love Affair. A longtime political activist, Beatty played a United States senator in Bulworth (1998), portraying a depressed man who after years of compromise suddenly finds the freedom to say what he believes. Beatty also wrote, directed, and produced the film.

S. N. Behrman

S. N. Behrman (1893-1973), American playwright, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Clark College and Harvard and Columbia universities. At Harvard he was a member of the 47 Workshop, a playwriting class conducted by George Pierce Baker. Behrman wrote 21 Broadway plays. Almost all of them, from The Second Man (1927) through But for Whom Charlie (1964), are comedies of manners, noted for the sophistication and wit of their dialogue and the incisiveness of their characterizations. Within these comedies, however, Behrman also incorporated his concerns about the serious social and political matters of his time. Among his most popular dramatic works are Biography (1933) and No Time for Comedy (1939). Behrman also wrote numerous screenplays.

David Belasco

David Belasco (1859-1931), American playwright, theatrical producer, and manager, one of the first American producers to unify all elements of a theatrical production under the supervision of one person. Born in San Francisco, California, Belasco worked there as an actor, writer, and stage manager from 1874 to 1882. He then went to New York City, where he continued writing and working in theatrical management. In 1907 Belasco acquired his own theater, the Stuyvesant, renamed the Belasco in 1910.

Belasco permanently influenced American production techniques through his insistence on natural styles of acting, elaborate theater facilities, and, above all, minutely realistic stage settings and properties. He demanded absolute authenticity in his stage settings. For example, for a 1912 production of The Governor's Lady in New York, he purchased items from Child's Restaurant, a popular New York chain, to create an exact replica of the restaurant for the stage. Belasco's direction helped develop a number of popular actors.

A prolific writer, Belasco wrote, adapted, and collaborated on many plays. Among those that contributed to his popularity as a dramatist were The Girl I Left Behind Me (1893), Heart of Maryland (1895), Zaza (1899), and Madame Butterfly (1900).

Edward Bellamy

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), American essayist and journalist, born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, and educated at Union College. He worked briefly for the New York Evening Post and later joined the Springfield Union as editor and book reviewer. In 1880 he founded the Springfield Daily News, but he thereafter turned from journalism to literature. In 1888 Bellamy published his most important work, Looking Backward, 2000- 1887, a depiction of an ideal socialistic society in the year 2000. This best- selling novel inspired the formation of many socialistic clubs; in order to expound his views, Bellamy founded the journal New Nation in 1891. His other works include Dr. Heidenhoff's Process (1880), Mrs. Ludington's Sister (1884), Equality (1897), The Blind Man's World and Other Stories (1898), and The Duke of Stockbridge (1900).

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow (1915-2005), American novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976. Bellow’s novels depict the struggle of individuals to preserve their personal identities in an indifferent society. His Nobel Prize citation read, “For the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.”

Bellow was born in Lachine, Québec, Canada, and when he was a child his family moved to Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from Northwestern University in nearby Evanston, Illinois, Bellow taught at the University of Chicago and worked as an editor for Encyclopædia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World series. During World War II (1939-1945), Bellow served in the Merchant Marine of the United States. During the war he also published his first novel, Dangling Man (1944), which deals with the anxiety and discomfort of a young man waiting to be drafted in wartime. Bellow’s next book was The Victim (1947), a novel about anti-Semitism.

After winning a Guggenheim fellowship, Bellow lived for a time in Europe, where he wrote most of his novel The Adventures of Augie March (1953; National Book Award, 1954). A long, loosely structured narrative with a picaresque hero, the novel gives a vivid, often humorous picture of Jewish life in Chicago and of a young man’s search for identity.

Modern humanity, threatened with loss of identity but not destroyed in spirit, is the theme of Seize the Day (1956), about a man whose life is falling apart around him. Many critics regard Seize the Day as Bellow’s masterpiece. Henderson the Rain King (1959) is an account of an American millionaire’s search for peace and self-knowledge. Herzog (1964; National Book Award, 1965) is the story of a university professor who writes letters to the world at large in an attempt to correct personal and universal injustices. The hero of Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970; National Book Award, 1971) is an aged Jewish intellectual, a refugee from Nazi Germany living in New York City. As the embodiment of old European values, Sammler is dismayed by contemporary American life, but he manages to maintain perspective.

Bellow received the 1976 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his novel Humboldt’s Gift (1975), which concerns the relationship between an author and a poet who was his mentor. Three months later he won the 1976 Nobel Prize for literature. Ludwig Bemelmans

Ludwig Bemelmans (1898-1962), American writer and artist, born in Meran, Austria (now Merano, Italy). He immigrated to the United States in 1914. For about a decade he worked as a busboy and then as assistant banquet manager in a New York City hotel; his Life Class (1938) and Hotel Splendide (1939) are based on his experiences during this period. Among his other writings, satirical and humorous, are My War with the United States (1937) and On Board Noah's Ark (1962). He is also widely known for his books for children, notably Madeline (1939) and its numerous sequels, all tales in verse about a French girl. Bemelmans illustrated most of his works in a distinctive style using vivid watercolors and heavy black outlines.

Robert Benchley

Robert Benchley (1889-1945), American writer, editor, and actor, whose works showed an ability to find great humor in the pitfalls of everyday life. Robert Charles Benchley was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard University. He was a writer and editor with the magazines Vanity Fair (1919-1920), Life (1920-1929), and The New Yorker (1929-1940). Benchley was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and artists that gathered regularly during the 1920s and 1930s at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. The group included such American writers as Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, Robert E. Sherwood, and Heywood Broun and was known for witty conversation and verbal sparring. Benchley's books include Of All Things (1921), The Treasurer's Report (1930), From Bed to Worse (1934), and Benchley Beside Himself (1943). In addition to writing film scripts, he was a radio commentator, columnist, theater critic, and actor.

Stephen Vincent Benét

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943), American poet and novelist, born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and educated at Yale University. Among his works are the volume of poetry Heavens and Earth (1920), the novels Young People's Pride (1922) and Spanish Bayonet (1926), and the narrative poem John Brown's Body (1928), about the American Civil War (1861- 1865). For the latter work, Benét won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1929. Thirteen O'Clock (1937), a collection of short stories, includes “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” which he adapted into a libretto for a folk opera in 1939 and which was made into a motion picture, All That Money Can Buy, in 1941. For Western Star (1943), an unfinished narrative poem on the settling of America, Benét won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1944. Benét's works are remarkable in their imaginative evocation of the American scene.

Bernard Berenson

Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), American art critic and writer, regarded during his lifetime as the world's foremost expert on Italian Renaissance art. He was often employed by prominent art collectors, galleries, and museums to evaluate prospective acquisitions.

Born in a Jewish village near Vilnius, Lithuania, Berenson was taken as a child by his parents to Boston. After attending Boston and Harvard universities, he studied art history in Europe on a fellowship. In 1900 he married and settled at Settignano, near Florence, in the Villa I Tatti (willed at his death to Harvard as an art research center). His first book, Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (1894), was followed by others on the painters of Florence and central and northern Italy. In about 1906 he became consultant to the English art dealer Lord Joseph Duveen. This association and others, which utilized his skill in authenticating paintings, brought him substantial earnings. Although most famed for his expertise in Italian Renaissance art, he was one of the first to recognize the significance of such modern French artists as Pierre Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne. A prolific writer on art, Berenson was also the author of Sketch for a Self-Portrait (1949) and Rumor and Reflection (1952). Sunset and Twilight, a collection of his diaries (1947-58), was published in 1963.

John Berryman

John Berryman (1914-1972), American poet, noted for asserting the importance of the personal element in poetry. Born in McAlester, Oklahoma, and educated at Columbia University, Berryman gained a national reputation with his long poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), which took the form of conversations with the ghost of Anne Bradstreet, the first female poet of the American colonies. For his book of verse, 77 Dream Songs (1964), Berryman received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1965. This work was continued and completed with His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968). The poems in these two books were collected in The Dream Songs (1969).

In his verse Berryman often sought to turn an experience or feeling into “… something that is coherent, directed, intelligible.” His work bears some relation to confessional poetry (see American Literature: Poetry: After Modernism) in that he dealt frankly with his father's suicide and his own alcoholism. Berryman also used humor to a great extent, often counterbalancing it against melancholy for a complex effect.

His other books of poetry include Poems (1942), The Dispossessed (1948), and Delusions (1972). Berryman also wrote well-crafted short stories, the critical biography Stephen Crane (1950), and the novel Recovery (published posthumously 1973). In 1989 the volume Collected Poems, 1937-1971 was published.

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?), American satirist, short-story writer, and journalist. Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born in Meigs County, Ohio. He served in the Union army during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and as a result of distinguished service went west with a military expedition. He settled in San Francisco and wrote brief, witty political pieces and a column for the News-Letter; by 1868 he had become editor of the paper. He moved to London in 1872 and the caustic sketches and stories he wrote for the magazines Fun and Figaro, under the pen name of Dod Grile, were published as Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874).

Bierce returned to San Francisco in 1877, writing for the Argonaut, editing the Wasp, and writing a column for the Sunday Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst. Bierce's wit and fascination with death and horror earned him the nickname Bitter Bierce; his mastery of the short story was compared favorably with that of the American writers Edgar Allan Poe and Bret Harte. From 1899 until 1913 he worked for the Hearst interests in Washington, D.C., and revised his own works. In 1913 he went to Mexico and disappeared; he is presumed to have died there. His Collected Works were published in 12 volumes (1909-1912) and include The Devil's Dictionary (1911), first published in 1906 under the title The Cynic's Word Book.

Josh Billings

Josh Billings, pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818-85), American humorist, born in Lanesboro, Massachusetts. After roaming about the country for more than 20 years, he settled in Poughkeepsie, New York, as an auctioneer and realtor. He began to write sketches in a rural dialect using intentional misspellings and the literary device of anticlimax. The humorist Charles Farrar Browne (see Ward, Artemus) arranged the publication of the sketches as Josh Billings, His Sayings (1865). From 1870 to 1880 Billings published a popular annual called Josh Billings' Farmer's Allminax.

Robert Montgomery Bird

Robert Montgomery Bird (1806-1854), American playwright and novelist, born in New Castle, Delaware. He wrote several successful tragedies for the American actor and producer Edwin Forrest. The first, The Gladiator (1831), was based on the life of the Roman slave Spartacus. Bird's acknowledged masterpiece, The Broker of Bogota (1834), is a domestic tragedy.

In his most popular novel, Nick of the Woods (1837), Bird portrays the Native American as a savage, in sharp contrast to the idealized aborigine made popular during the same period by the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Bird's other novels include Calavar (1834), a tale of the conquest of Mexico, and The Hawks of Hawk-Hollow (1835), a romance of the American Revolution (1775- 1783).

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), American poet, best known for her poems that examine the physical world in minute detail. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop grew up in New England and in Nova Scotia. She was educated at Vassar College, where she founded a literary magazine with Mary McCarthy, who would become a novelist. Bishop's first book, North & South, was published in 1946; it was later expanded and reprinted as North & South—A Cold Spring (1955). For this revised edition she received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1956. Bishop traveled extensively throughout her life and at various times lived in New York City, Florida, Mexico, and Brazil. She also taught at Harvard University from 1970 to 1977. She was influenced and admired by the American poets Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Bishop's Complete Poems (1969) won the National Book Award in 1970.

Commonplace objects and occurrences had unusual symbolic meanings for Bishop, and many of her poems take the form of meditations on external objects and events. Her linguistic precision and focus on the external world notwithstanding, Bishop's work carries strong emotions. Travel is a major theme in her verse, and in many of her poems, Bishop highlights the sense of strangeness that can underlie even ordinary events. She also wrote short stories, many for The New Yorker magazine. Bishop's works include Questions of Travel (1965), a volume of poetry; Brazil (1967), a travel book; An Anthology of 20th Century Brazilian Poetry (1972), which she edited; and Geography III (1976), her last collection of poems.

Judy Blume

Judy Blume, born in 1938, American author, known for her fiction for young people. Blume is one of the bestselling children’s authors of all time, with more than 75 million copies of her books in print and editions published in more than 20 different languages.

She was born Judy Sussman in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and attended New York University. Blume (her married name) began writing and illustrating children's stories in the mid-1960s. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (1970), her first book to win a wide following, deals humorously and realistically with the physical, emotional, and religious preoccupations of a 12-year-old girl; written in the first person, it shows characteristic frankness of language and subject matter.

Blume's other popular novels for young people include Then Again, Maybe I Won't (1971), It's Not the End of the World (1972), Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), Blubber (1974), Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself (1977), Superfudge (1980), Tiger Eyes (1981), Deenie (1982), Just as Long as We’re Together (1987), Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson (1993), and Double Fudge (2002).

Blume also published a novel for young adults, Forever... (1975), which describes an adolescent girl's first sexual experience. Among her writings for adults are the novels Wifey (1977), Smart Women (1984), and Summer Sisters (1998).

Blume is an outspoken critic of literary censorship, and she edited the collection Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers (1999). She received an honorary National Book Award in 2004 for her life’s work. See also Children’s Literature.

Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly, pseudonym of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman (1864-1922), American journalist, born in Cochran's Mills, Pennsylvania. Noted for her enterprise in news reporting, she served at various times on the editorial staffs of the Pittsburgh Dispatch, the New York World, and the New York Journal. In 1888 she spent ten days posing as a patient in the mental hospital on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt Island), New York City, to gather information about the treatment of the inmates. She recorded her findings in the book Ten Days in a Madhouse (1888). In 1889 Bly made a well-publicized trip around the world by train and steamboat in an attempt to make the journey in less time than the fictional character Phileas Fogg in the novel Around the World in Eighty Days, by the French writer Jules Verne. Bly completed her trip in the record time of 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes, and she chronicled her adventures in Nellie Bly's Book: Around the World in Seventy-two Days (1890).

Steven Bochco

Steven Bochco, born in 1943, American television producer and writer, noted for innovative dramatic television series that were both critically praised and popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Bochco was born in New York City to artistic parents (his father was a musician and his mother was a painter). He studied theater at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Bochco began his career in the entertainment industry collaborating on two motion-picture screenplays for Universal Studios, The Counterfeit Killer (1968) and Silent Running (1971). He then wrote episodes for television series and in the early 1970s produced such short-lived detective shows as “Sarge” (1971-1972), “Griff” (1973-1974), “Delvecchio” (1976-1977), and “Paris” (1979-1980). Through these he mastered the pacing of dramatic television and developed the realistic and complex storytelling style that was to become his hallmark.

Bochco achieved national prominence with his production of the novel television series “Hill Street Blues” (1981-1987). The series used an ensemble cast (a format in which no single character dominates an episode), and it considered difficult social and ethical issues. Bochco's production “L.A. Law,” which aired from 1986 to 1994, used a similar format. With these two series Bochco became one of the most praised and successful television producers in the United States.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Bochco also worked in television genres other than the realistic drama. He created and produced “Doogie Howser, M.D.” (1989-1993), “Hooperman” (1987-1989), and the musical police drama, “Cop Rock” (1990). He again achieved success with the police drama “NYPD Blue” (1994- ), a return to his hallmark realistic style. Bochco developed a series for American Broadcasting Companies (see ABC, Inc.) in 1995, “Murder One,” which followed the course of a single homicide courtroom case over 23 episodes. Maxwell Bodenheim

Maxwell Bodenheim (1893-1954), American writer. Best known as a poet, he followed the imagists in writing on a wide range of subjects, presenting sharp pictures in free verse of various, sometimes shocking, aspects of bohemian life. Minna and Myself (1918) was his first volume of poetry. His Selected Poems 1914-1944 appeared in 1946. In his novels he alleviated cynicism and startling realism with humor and a vigorous style. One of his best novels is Blackguard (1923).

Louise Bogan

Louise Bogan (1897-1970), American poet and critic. Life often appeared tragic in her poetic vision, as shown in her first book, Body of This Death (1923). Like England's metaphysical poets of the 17th century, she produced intense verses by expressing deep, personal emotions. In 1955 she was one of the recipients of the Bollingen Prize—awarded by Yale University for achievement in American poetry—for her Collected Poems 1923-53 (1954). As poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine in the 1930s and after, and as a critic, she had much influence on young American poets. Many of her articles are collected in Selected Criticism (1958) and A Poet's Alphabet (1970).

Erma Bombeck

Erma Bombeck (1927-1996), American newspaper columnist and author, known for dealing humorously with the mundane matters of everyday life in the home. Born Erma Louise Fiste in Dayton, Ohio, she worked for a daily newspaper while in high school and also wrote a humorous column for the school newspaper. She spent a year as a copywriter on the local paper before going to college in 1944. During her four years at the University of Dayton she held part-time editing and writing jobs with small newspapers and with advertising and public relations firms. After graduating she became a reporter with the Dayton Journal-Herald, where she also wrote feature stories and a housekeeping column for the women's page. She married William Lawrence Bombeck in 1949 and continued writing until the birth of her first child in 1953. By 1964 she had become the mother of three, and she began to publish a humor column in a small suburban weekly. She moved her column to the Journal-Herald, writing two and then three columns a week. Her work was soon syndicated. She became America's most popular female humor columnist, with her column appearing in more than 800 newspapers. Bombeck's columns have been collected in the book At Wit's End (1967) and in such bestsellers as The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank (1976), If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries—What Am I Doing in the Pits? (1978), When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home (1991), A Marriage Made in Heaven—or, Too Tired for an Affair (1993), and All I Know About Animal Behavior I Learned in Loehmann's Dressing Room (1995). Her serious book I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise: Children Surviving Cancer (1989) won the American Cancer Society's Medal of Honor in 1990.

Robert Bork

Robert Bork, born in 1927, American lawyer, author, and federal judge. After playing a relatively minor role during the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, Bork leapt to prominence in 1987 when the United States Senate rejected his nomination to the Supreme Court following heated debates about his conservative ideology and judicial philosophy.

Robert Heron Bork was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1948 and a law degree from the same university in 1953. He was an associate partner in a Chicago law firm from 1955 until 1962, when he joined the faculty of Yale Law School. Bork served as a legal adviser to the administration of President Richard M. Nixon (1969-1974), and in 1973 he became solicitor general—the lawyer who represents the U.S. government before the Supreme Court.

In the summer of 1973 former presidential assistant Alexander Butterfield disclosed the existence of a secret taping system in Nixon's White House offices that had recorded all of the president's conversations there. Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox insisted that President Nixon turn over the tapes as evidence in the onging Watergate investigations. Nixon refused, and, on October 20, 1973, he ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order, as did the next in line, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Bork was next in succession and agreed to fire Cox, saying that to step down would destroy the Justice Department. Public reaction to the firing and resignations, which became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, forced Nixon to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, and begin releasing the audio tapes.

Bork served as acting attorney general until 1974 and then resumed his position as solicitor general until 1977. He returned to Yale to teach from 1977 to 1979, worked in a Washington, D.C., law firm from 1981 to 1982, and then served as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge from 1982 to 1988. In 1987 President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) nominated Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court. Liberal groups across the nation protested the nomination, pointing to Bork's well-known positions against abortion, affirmative action, and First Amendment protection for nonpolitical speech.

Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles (1910-1999), American writer and composer, born in New York City. While in high school Bowles published two surrealist poems (see Surrealism) in Transition, an international literary review. After a trip to Paris he returned to New York and studied under the American composer Aaron Copland in the 1930s. For the next 20 years Bowles wrote scores for several ballets and furnished the incidental music for numerous plays and movies. In 1938 he married Jane Auer, a playwright and novelist. She urged him to return to writing, and Bowles began to produce short stories and music criticism for various publications.

In 1947 the couple traveled to North Africa and eventually settled in Tangier. Bowles's first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949), became a best-seller and was made into a film in 1990. That publication was followed by the novels Let It Come Down (1952) and The Spider's House (1955). In these works Bowles placed Americans in the North African landscape to dramatize the increasing alienation of his characters, who succumb to drugs and violence in the desert climate, exemplifying the degeneration of private life in the modern world. Bowles's later life in North Africa was chronicled in Days, Tangier Journal: 1987-89 (1991). He also published several volumes of short stories, including The Delicate Prey (1950), The Time of Friendship (1967), and The Collected Stories of Paul Bowles (1979); books of poems; and translations of African folk tales. A collection of his correspondence, In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles, was published in 1993.

Kay Boyle

Kay Boyle (1903?-1992), American novelist and short-story writer, born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. From 1922 to 1941 she lived in Europe, writing for American magazines published abroad. After World War II she was a correspondent for The New Yorker in Germany (1946-53) and then taught at San Francisco State College. Intellectuality is the major characteristic of her work, and her recurrent theme is that of youth faced with disease and death. Her published works include the novels Plagued by the Nightingale (1931), a story of stifling French provincial family life; and The Underground Woman (1975), concerning a woman's awakening during the Vietnam War. Other works include Fifty Stories (1980); the autobiographical Being Geniuses Together: 1920-1930 (1968); a collection of poetry, Testament for My Students (1970); and Words That Must Somehow Be Said: The Selected Essays of Kay Boyle 1927-1984 (1985).

Ray Douglas

Ray Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois. He was an imaginative child prone to nightmares and frightening fantasies, many of which would later inspire some of his best work. A fan of motion pictures and the science fiction stories that appeared in magazines such as Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, Bradbury began writing regularly when he was 12 years old. His earliest work was published in small fan magazines, or fanzines, including one he produced himself. He sold his first story to a professional publication in 1941 and became a full-time writer in 1943.

Although Bradbury’s writing tends to be critical of technology, it also promotes the benefits of space travel and the creativity of science. One of his recurring themes is the clash between society and the individual in a technologically advanced civilization. His stories are also characterized by a poetic style and nostalgia for the simplicity of small-town life and the innocence of childhood.

Bradbury’s stories have been collected in numerous books. One of the best known is The Martian Chronicles (1950), a series of stories about humans colonizing Mars; many of the stories echo themes of the American frontier. Another well-known Bradbury collection is The Illustrated Man (1951), which uses the device of a man covered in tattoos to tell different stories.

Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is a dystopian vision of a future where television dominates society and books are illegal (the title refers to the temperature at which paper burns). A small group of dissidents resists the ban and sets about memorizing the great works of literature so they will not be lost to history. Along with Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by British writer George Orwell, Fahrenheit 451 is often cited by literary critics as an important portrayal of the potential for the all-encompassing governmental repression of individual freedoms.

Many of Bradbury’s works have been adapted for television and motion pictures, both by himself and by other writers. He also wrote the screenplay for Moby Dick (1956), a motion picture directed by John Huston and based on the Herman Melville novel. A 1967 film version of Fahrenheit 451 was directed by François Truffaut.

Among Bradbury’s other story collections are Dark Carnival (1947), The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), The October Country (1955), A Medicine for Melancholy (1959), I Sing the Body Electric (1969), and Long After Midnight (1976). His novels include the semi-autobiographical works Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), Death Is a Lonely Business (1985), A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990), From the Dust Returned (2002), and Let’s All Kill Constance (2003). The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1972) is a collection of Bradbury’s plays and Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines (1998) is a children’s novel.

Much of Bradbury’s later work moves away from the science-fiction genre in style and subject matter. His later story collections include Quicker Than the Eye (1996), Driving Blind (1997), and One More for the Road (2002).

Bradbury has received many awards during his career, including the National Book Foundation’s Distinguished Contribution to American Letters honor in 2000.

Anne Bradstreet

Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672), American poet, born in Northampton, England. She was a daughter of Thomas Dudley, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and in 1628 she married Simon Bradstreet, who later became governor of the colony. A housewife with eight children, she was also the first important poet in the American colonies. Her poems were published in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, which is generally considered the first book of original poetry written in colonial America. Through it she asserted the right of women to learning and expression of thought. Although some of Bradstreet's verse is conventional, much of it is direct and shows sensitivity to beauty.

Bradstreet's most deeply felt poetry concerns the arduous life of the early settlers, and her work provides an excellent view of the difficulties she and her fellow colonists encountered. She wrote several poems in response to the early deaths of her grandchildren, and her “Contemplations” (1678) explores her place in the natural world. Bradstreet also used her poetry to examine her religious struggles; she was unable to embrace Calvinism completely. “The Flesh and the Spirit” (1678) describes the conflict she felt between living a pleasant life and living a Christian life, and “Meditations Divine and Moral” (written 1664; published 1867) recounts to her children her doubts about Puritanism. Although Bradstreet addressed broad and universal themes, she is remembered best for her body of evocative poems that provide intimate glimpses into the home life of inhabitants of colonial New England.

Louis Bromfield

Louis Bromfield (1896-1956), American novelist and agrarian philosopher, whose works endorse individualism and attack the dehumanizing effect of industrialization. Early in his career, Bromfield was one of the most respected novelists of his time, but his reputation declined after he turned to nonfictional expressions of his belief that human values are rooted in a relationship to the land. His novel Early Autumn (1926) was awarded the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Bromfield was born in Mansfield, Ohio, the son of a farmer. He was educated at Columbia University in New York City, but before he graduated, he left to serve in the French Army when World War I broke out in 1914. He was given a French medal of honor for his two years of service as an ambulance driver. After the war, Columbia University awarded him an honorary degree for student-soldiers, and he began working as a journalist. Bromfield's best work is generally considered to be his first series of four novels collectively referred to as Escape and which he called panel novels, because they presented related characters, themes, and settings. The Green Bay Tree (1924), Procession (1925), the Pulitzer prize-winning Early Autumn, and A Good Woman (1927), all feature strong women who unsuccessfully oppose value systems based on materialism rather than individual worth.

In 1938 Bromfield, who had been working in France as a foreign correspondent since 1925, returned to his native Ohio and purchased three run-down farms, which he worked to revive. He gave up fiction and devoted his literary efforts to explaining his life as a farmer. In the opinion of literary critics, Bromfield's change of direction represented a failure to develop the talent that he had demonstrated in his early works of fiction, and he never again experienced his initial popular or critical success.

His other works of fiction include the novels The Farm (1933), chronicling a hundred years on an Ohio farm, and The Rains Came (1937), which is set on the coast of India. The most important of his nonfiction works are Pleasant Valley (1945), about his farming experiences, and A Few Brass Tacks (1946), a philosophical work that attacks materialistic values. Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), American poet, the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize. Born in Topeka, Kansas, Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College in Chicago, Illinois, in 1936. Her first book of poems, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), was praised by critics as a clear and moving evocation of life in an urban black neighborhood. For the collection Annie Allen (1949), Brooks was awarded the 1950 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Her other works include the novel Maud Martha (1953); the children's poetry book Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956); and the volumes of poetry The Bean Eaters (1960), Selected Poems (1963), In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970), Aloneness (1971), To Disembark (1981), The Near-Johannesburg Boy (1987), Blacks (1987), Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle (1988), and Children Coming Home (1991). Brooks also published two autobiographical works, Report from Part One (1972) and Report from Part Two (1995).

Brooks was noted for her adaptation of traditional forms of poetry and for her use of short verse lines and casual rhymes. Her work had always depicted black struggles, but after 1968 she became more active and outspoken in attacking racial discrimination. She also worked extensively to distribute and encourage black poetry. Brooks was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois in 1968, succeeding Carl Sandburg. In 1985 she was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and in 1988 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her many honors included the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1946) and a National Endowment for the Arts Senior Fellowship for Literature (1989), a lifetime achievement award. Brooks received the National Book Foundation's medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1994.

Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks, born in 1926, American motion-picture director and comedian, whose films are known for their madcap and slapstick verbal humor.

Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in New York City. He started out in the 1940s as a standup comic playing to audiences on the “borscht-belt circuit,” a Jewish resort area in the Catskill Mountains of New York state. In the 1950s he developed, along with comedian and writer Carl Reiner, the routine of the “2,000-year-old man” while they were both working with Sid Caesar on his weekly television variety program, “Your Show of Shows.” The sketch gained a wide audience when it was released as a record album, The 2,000-Year-Old Man (1960). He also worked as a writer on Caesar’s show and on the television series Get Smart.

Brooks’s first motion picture, The Producers (1968), was an instant success and won an Academy Award for its screenplay. The comedy involving a producer out to bilk old-lady investors by producing a Broadway flop starred Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. Brooks followed it up with the less-acclaimed The Twelve Chairs (1970), but was successful again with Blazing Saddles (1974), a spoof Western. The film spoofs continued with Young Frankenstein (1975), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World Part I (1981), and a remake of the 1942 Ernst Lubitsch classic To Be or Not to Be (1983).

Brooks brings a distinctive Jewish chutzpah—that is, an audacity and a willingness to offend—to his work, best expressed in the larger-than-life portrayal by Zero Mostel of the failed impresario Max Bialystok in The Producers, extracting high comedy from the lowest human factors—fear, disappointment, incompetence, and greed. In his later work—Spaceballs (1987), Life Stinks (1991), Robin Hood, Men in Tights (1993), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)—Brooks appeared to have departed from the robust satire of some of his earlier work in search of a more zany and commercial style.

In 2000 Brooks turned The Producers into a musical for the Broadway stage. Starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, it won a record 12 Tony Awards, including best musical. The production transferred to a theater in London’s West End in 2004, winning the Olivier Award for best new musical. Brooks followed with a musical version of Young Frankenstein, which opened on Broadway to less acclaim in 2007. Van Wyck Brooks

Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), American literary critic and editor, born in Plainfield, New Jersey, and educated at Harvard University. In The Wine of the Puritans (1908), Brooks contended that materialism severely restricts the growth of culture in the United States. Several later books, most notably America's Coming-of-Age (1915), expanded this theory. His most ambitious undertaking was the five-volume Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America (1800-1915) (published 1936-1952). The series, a pioneering attempt at interpreting American culture, examines the literary development of the United States. The first volume, The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (published 1936), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1937. In maintaining the importance of tradition in literature, Brooks was extremely critical of British writer T. S. Eliot, and he also criticized American writer Henry James for abandoning America for Europe. Brooks's autobiography, From the Shadow of the Mountain, was published in 1961.

Heywood Campbell Broun

Heywood Campbell Broun (1888-1939), American writer, journalist, and critic, and the first president of the American Newspaper Guild. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Broun was educated at Harvard University. From 1912 to 1920 he worked at the New York Tribune as drama critic and eventually as literary editor. In 1921 Broun began a daily column, “It Seems to Me,” in the New York World, but in 1928 his connection with that paper was terminated because of his support of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (see Sacco- Vanzetti Case). His column was syndicated by the Scripps-Howard chain of newspapers after 1928. Broun was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and artists that gathered regularly during the 1920s and 1930s at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. The group included such American writers as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly, and Robert E. Sherwood and was known for witty conversation and verbal sparring. Broun was also the author of 12 books and was a contributor to magazines.

Charles Brockden Brown

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), American novelist, born in Philadelphia. The first person in the United States to earn his living by writing, Brown is best known for Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), a powerful and ingeniously plotted tale of horror, in the style of the Gothic romance. Among his other novels in that genre are Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800), which contains an excellent description of the 1793 yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia, and Edgar Huntly (1799), in which the Native American first appears in American fiction. Brown's style is stilted and often unpolished, but his novels are extremely intense and genuinely original. He was a magazine writer and editor and also wrote political pamphlets.

William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), American poet and journalist, born in Cummington, Massachusetts, and trained in law. Bryant wrote his finest poetry in his youth. The first draft of “Thanatopsis,” his most famous poem, was written when he was 16 years of age, and he was only 27 years old when his first published volume, Poems, appeared in 1821. Poems included, in addition to “Thanatopsis,””Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood,””Green River,” and “To a Waterfowl.” From then until his death, Bryant was known as one of the most distinguished poets in the United States.

In 1825 he went to New York City, where he became coeditor of the New York Review, a literary periodical, and a year later an editor for the New York Evening Post. By 1829 he was editor in chief of the Post and later part owner. As a journalist he campaigned vigorously for free trade, free speech, the rights of workers, and the abolition of slavery. He was instrumental in organizing the Republican Party and was an ardent partisan of the Union cause during the American Civil War.

Poetry was largely an avocation for Bryant in his later years. He produced several volumes of verse, none of which is considered equal to the poems he wrote in his youth. Bryant is often called the American Wordsworth because, like the romantic poet William Wordsworth, he wrote about nature. Although Bryant's poetry was frequently didactic, he is best remembered for his beautiful descriptions of scenes in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. For Bryant, nature was a symbol of the power of God and a moral influence on humanity. Among his other works are translations of the Iliad (1870) and the Odyssey (1871), by Homer, still considered among the best in English verse.

Pearl Buck

Pearl Buck (1892-1973), American novelist, best known for her sympathetic portrayals of peasant life in China. Her residence in China, her study of classics of Chinese literature, and her understanding of Chinese character enabled her to make Chinese civilization understandable and significant to Western readers. Buck’s novel The Good Earth (1931) was the first widely read book to describe Chinese culture with accuracy and sympathetic insight. For her achievement she became, in 1938, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Buck’s interests extended beyond writing about the Chinese to active welfare work on behalf of children of Asian American ancestry.

Biographies of Buck’s mother and father followed, The Exile (1936) and Fighting Angel (1936). They were published together as The Spirit and the Flesh (1944). These early works won Buck the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938. Other novels with Asian settings included Dragon Seed (1942); Imperial Woman (1956), a fictionalized biography of the Empress Tz’u Hsi (see Cixi); and The Living Reed (1963).

Buck’s numerous other books include All Men Are Brothers (1933), a translation of the classic Chinese novel Shui Hu Chuan; The Chinese Novel (1939); The Promise (1943); China in Black and White (1946); and Big Wave (1948). Among her later works are Letter From Peking (1957), Command the Morning (1959), The Time Is Noon (1967), and The Three Daughters of Madame Liang (1969). American Triptych (1958) was one of five books published under the pseudonym of John Sedges. Buck also wrote dramatizations for television and a Broadway play, A Desert Incident, produced in 1959. She published two volumes of autobiography, My Several Worlds (1954) and A Bridge for Passing (1964). Her last works were The Kennedy Women (1970) and China As I See It (1970).

F. Buckley, Jr.

F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008), American editor, writer, and conservative political thinker, who gained a reputation as the most articulate spokesperson for conservatism in the United States. As the founder and editor of the weekly journal National Review, host of the television debate series Firing Line (1966-1999), author of the syndicated newspaper column On the Right, and a prolific author of books and magazine articles, he attracted a wide audience for his views. Essentially, he continued the H. L. Mencken tradition of social and political gadfly.

Conservative Party candidate for mayor of New York City, a campaign best remembered for his remark that if he won the election he would ask for a recount. His book The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966) recounts his experiences during the mayoral campaign.

Buckley’s other books include Up from Liberalism (1959), Quotations from Chairman Bill (1970), On the Firing Line (1989), The Culture of Liberty (1993), and Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography (2004). An avid sailor, he chronicled his adventures at sea in Racing Through Paradise: A Pacific Passage (1987) and Windfall: The End of the Affair (1992), an account of his attempt to repeat Christopher Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Buckley has also written novels, such as Brothers No More (1995) and Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton (2000), and a series of best-selling espionage thrillers. Among the thrillers, featuring secret agent Bradford Oakes, are Saving the Queen (1976), Marco Polo, If You Can (1981), Mongoose R.I.P. (1987), and Last Call for Bradford Oakes (2005).

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), American poet, short-story writer, and novelist, known for combining tales of excessive drinking and casual sex with critical observations about the sterility of mainstream American society. Most of Bukowski’s writings are based on his own experiences, and many chronicle the exploits of Henry Chinaski, a character who serves as Bukowski’s fictional alter ego.

Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, to a German mother and a father who was an American soldier. His family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1922. Dominated by his stern father, Bukowski’s childhood and adolescence were unhappy. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941.

Bukowski published a handful of poems and stories in small, alternative literary magazines during the early and mid-1940s. He was commonly called a “street poet,” a description referring to the fact that he drew his inspiration from what he saw on the streets and was not part of the literary establishment. Suffering from alcoholism, he spent much of the late 1940s and the 1950s wandering aimlessly around the United States; he published little during this period. In the mid-1950s Bukowski found employment with the United States Postal Service in Los Angeles. He soon resumed publishing poems and stories.

During his lifetime, Bukowski produced more than 60 books of poetry and prose, the majority of which were published by Black Sparrow Press. This was an independent press founded in Los Angeles in 1966 by John Martin, a fan and friend of Bukowski. Its specific mission was to publish Bukowski’s work.

In 1960 Bukowski published his first volume of poetry, Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail. Subsequent volumes of poetry, including Run with the Hunted (1962) and Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts (1965), won a small audience. During the late 1960s, Bukowski wrote a weekly column titled “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” for a Los Angeles alternative newspaper, Open City. A collection of these columns, published in 1969, was commercially successful, and Bukowski quit his post office job the following year. In 1971 he published Post Office (1971), a novel based on his life as a postal worker. Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, Bukowski’s first book of short stories, appeared in 1972.

Bukowski published steadily throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Ham on Rye (1982), a novel about the author’s unhappy childhood, won high praise from many critics. Bukowski also wrote and published a screenplay, Barfly, which was adapted into a motion picture in 1987. His other books include the poetry collection Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972), Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems 1974-1977 (1977), and Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970 (1993). Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems was published in 1996.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), American novelist. Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester, England. She immigrated to the United States at the close of the American Civil War. She was the author of the well-known children's books Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and The Secret Garden (1911). The latter, which she considered her best novel, is still popular today. Burnett's plays include Esmeralda (1881), which she wrote with the American playwright William H. Gillette.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), American novelist, born in Chicago, Illinois. Burroughs was a soldier, business executive, gold miner, cowboy, storekeeper, and policeman before he turned to writing as a career. He is known chiefly as the creator of the character of Tarzan, who first appeared in Tarzan of the Apes (1914). More than 20 novels depicting the adventures of Tarzan achieved widespread popularity. The Tarzan books have been translated into more than 50 languages, have sold more than 20 million copies, and have served as the basis for motion pictures, radio serials, television shows, and a comic strip. Burroughs also is known for his science fiction writing. More than 60 of his books have been published.

John Burroughs

John Burroughs (1837-1921), American naturalist and essayist, born in Roxbury, New York, and educated at Cooperstown Seminary. Beginning his career as a teacher, Burroughs subsequently worked as a clerk in the United States Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., from 1864 to 1873. He published poetry and nature essays during this period and also became close friends with the American poet Walt Whitman. Burroughs's first book, Notes on Walt Whitman, Poet and Person (1867), was the earliest serious public recognition Whitman received. In 1873 Burroughs moved to New York State, where he worked as a federal bank examiner. He devoted his spare time to writing, studying nature, and raising fruit. He wrote in the tradition of American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and Burroughs enjoyed the friendship of many important people of his day who also were nature lovers, including John Muir, Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, and Theodore Roosevelt. Burroughs lived in the Catskill Mountain area for the rest of his life, but traveled to many parts of the world recording his observations of the beauties of nature. His writings did much to promote popular interest in nature study. Among his best-known works are Wake Robin (1871), Locusts and Wild Honey (1879), Breath of Life (1915), and Bird and Bough (1906), his one volume of poetry.

William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), American writer, painter, and experimental artist. William Seward Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated from Harvard University in 1936. He also briefly attended medical school in Vienna, Austria, and graduate school in anthropology at Harvard. Burroughs took a series of odd jobs, and he served briefly in the United States Army before settling in New York City in 1943. In 1944 he met American writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, with whom he helped found the Beat Generation literary movement. In New York, Burroughs also met Joan Vollmer Adams, who became his common-law wife. They had one son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., also a writer. Burroughs's friendships and drug experimentation, in addition to the accidental shooting death of his wife in 1951, shaped his writing style. Starting in 1949, he led an expatriate artist's life in Mexico City, Mexico; Tangier, Morocco; Paris, France; and London, England. He returned to New York in 1974, and he settled in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1981.

Burroughs's literary experimentation is apparent in his novels, which combine visionary intensity, strong social satire, and the use of montage, collage, and improvisation. He was the inventor of the routine (a satirical fantasy the author composes through improvisation), the cutup (a collage technique applied to prose writing in which the writer literally cuts up and recombines text), and pop mythologies (mythologies the writer creates using material from popular culture). His novels include Junky (1953), Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), Nova Express (1964), The Wild Boys (1971), Exterminator! (1973), Port of Saints (1975), Cities of the Red Night (1981), Place of Dead Roads (1984), Queer (1985), and The Western Lands (1987). My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995), although a fictional work, mentions numerous events and people from Burrough's life. Ghost of Chance, also published in 1995, deals with drugs and paranoia. Nicholas Murray Butler

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862-1947), American educator and Nobel laureate, born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and educated at Columbia College (now Columbia University). In 1885 he became an assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia College. He organized the New York College for Training Teachers (now Teachers College of Columbia University) and served from 1886 to 1891 as its first president. He was president of Columbia College from 1902 to 1912 and of the newly created Columbia University from 1912 to 1945. He was largely responsible for the expansion and original organization of Columbia University.

In addition to his work as an educator, Butler was active in American politics, particularly between 1904 and 1936, when he served as a delegate to seven national conventions of the Republican Party. Butler received the votes of the Republican Party electors for vice president in the presidential election of 1912; the original candidate, James S. Sherman, had died during the campaign.

His interest in world peace, disarmament, and international understanding led Butler to serve as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1925 until 1945 and to advocate U.S. participation in the League of Nations. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 1931 with the American social worker Jane Addams.

Butler wrote a score of books on education and world affairs. Among them are The Meaning of Education (1898; revised ed., 1915), The World Today (1946), and his autobiography, Across the Busy Years (2 volumes, 1939-40).

Robert Olen Butler,

Robert Olen Butler, born in 1945, American writer, whose best-known works are drawn from his experiences in the Vietnam War (1959-1975). In 1993 Butler won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992).

Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois. He received a B.S. degree in drama from Northwestern University and an M.A. degree in playwriting from the University of Iowa. Butler then enlisted in the United States Army and attended a language school in Washington D.C., where he studied Vietnamese for a year. In 1971 he went to Vietnam, where he served as a language expert and a military intelligence specialist. His competency in Vietnamese allowed him to become familiar with the people and the land. After the war Butler moved to Long Island, New York, and worked in New York City as editor in chief of the business journal Energy User News. Butler wrote his first four novels while commuting by train to and from work.

Butler's first novel, The Alleys of Eden (1981), begins a loose trilogy on Vietnam and the Vietnamese people. In the book Butler portrays a deserter from the American army who falls in love with a Vietnamese prostitute. The next book in the trilogy was Sun Dogs (1982), about a Vietnam veteran living in Alaska. Butler then wrote Countrymen of Bones (1983), which was not part of the trilogy. Set in New Mexico during World War II (1939-1945), the book explores the conflict between an archaeologist and a scientist. Butler’s fourth novel, On Distant Ground (1985), completed the Vietnam trilogy and tells the story of an American soldier who returns to Vietnam to find his lover and his presumed son. In 1985 Butler moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he became professor of fiction writing at McNeese State University.

Butler is best known for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, his Pulitzer-winning collection of short stories set in a Louisiana community of Vietnamese émigrés. For this work Butler also received the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Prize and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. His other works include the novels Wabash (1987), The Deuce (1989), They Whisper (1994), The Deep Green Sea (1997), and Mr. Spaceman (2000), and the short-story collection Tabloid Dreams (1996).

Betsy Byars

Betsy Byars, born in 1928, American author of fiction for children, whose works are noted for their realism. She was born Betsy Cromer in Charlotte, North Carolina. She attended Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, from 1946 to 1948, and graduated in 1950 from Queens College in Charlotte, with a bachelor's degree in English. She began writing in the early 1960s while raising her children.

Byars first gained recognition with the novel The Summer of the Swans (1970), about a teenager, Sara, and her relationship with her mentally retarded younger brother, Charlie. The book received the 1971 Newbery Medal. Other notable books followed, including The 18th Emergency (1973), The Pinballs (1977), The Night Swimmers (1980), and The Two-Thousand Pound Goldfish (1982). In 1988, in the novel The Burning Questions of Bingo Brown, Byars introduced the character Bingo Brown, an endearing sixth-grader who faces both humorous and tragic events in his life with unerring instinct and sensitivity. Bingo returns in Bingo Brown and the Language of Love (1989) and Bingo Brown, Gypsy Lover (1990). Byars also wrote books for young children, such as The Golly Sisters Go West (1986) and Hooray for the Golly Sisters! (1990). In 1987 she received the Regina Medal from the Catholic Library Association for lifetime achievement.

Richard Byrd

Richard Byrd (1888-1957), American explorer, author, aviator, and naval officer, known for leading several air and land expeditions to Antarctica, and for discoveries there.

Richard Evelyn Byrd was born in Winchester, Virginia. He was graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1912. Designated a naval aviator in 1918, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant commander, and in 1925 he commanded the naval air unit of the expedition to Greenland led by American explorer Donald Baxter MacMillan.

Byrd received the Medal of Honor for being the first person to fly over the North Pole; he made the flight with American aviator Floyd Bennett; however, there is some evidence suggesting that he and Bennett may not have reached the pole. In 1927 Byrd flew the first transatlantic airmail from New York to France with Norwegian American Bernt Balchen and Americans Bertrand B. Acosta and George O. Noville.

During his first expedition to Antarctica, from 1928 to 1930, Byrd established a base, Little America, on the Bay of Whales. In the course of mapping 388,500 sq km (150,000 sq mi) of Antarctica, members of the expedition discovered the Edsel Ford Range and Marie Byrd Land. In 1929 Byrd made the first flight over the South Pole, together with Balchen and American pilots Harold I. June and Ashley C. McKinley. Byrd was promoted in 1930 to the rank of rear admiral, retired.

Byrd led a second expedition to the Antarctic from 1933 to 1935. During that expedition Byrd conducted meteorological and auroral research alone in a shack for five months 196 km (122 mi) south of Little America. The expedition party surveyed 1,165,500 sq km (450,000 sq mi) of territory and undertook research in many branches of science.

During his third expedition, from 1939 to 1940, four exploratory flights were made, resulting in many discoveries.

In a fourth Antarctic expedition from 1946 to 1947, Byrd explored and mapped approximately 2,188,500 sq km (845,000 sq mi) of territory, about one-third of it newly discovered. Byrd made his second flight over the South Pole before returning to the United States.

In 1955 Byrd was appointed head of “Operation Deep-Freeze,” an Antarctic expedition organized by the United States in connection with the International Geophysical Year (1957-1958). Early in 1956 Byrd made his third flight over the South Pole. He left the expedition shortly thereafter. Byrd wrote Skyward (1928), Little America (1930), Discovery (1935), Exploring with Byrd (1937), and Alone (1938).

James Branch Cabell

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958), American writer, born in Richmond, Virginia, and educated at the College of William and Mary. Before embarking on a literary career, he worked as a college teacher and newspaper reporter. In 1904 he published his first novel, The Eagle's Shadow, the first volume of the 18-volume series entitled The Biography of Manuel. The series relates the fantasies of a swineherd, Manuel, who becomes a nobleman in Poictesme, an imaginary medieval land. Two of the best-known books of the series are The Cream of the Jest (1917) and Jurgen, a Comedy of Justice (1919). Jurgen, temporarily suppressed as immoral, became very popular in the 1920s. Cabell, a member of a distinguished Virginia family, also wrote several genealogical studies of his family and other families. In addition to his more than 50 novels, he wrote two collections of autobiographical essays, Let Me Lie (1947) and Quiet Please (1952).

George Washington Cable

George Washington Cable (1844-1925), American writer and social reformer, born in New Orleans, Louisiana. After serving in the Confederate army during the American Civil War (1861-1865), he began to write for the New Orleans Picayune. Subsequently his sketches of Creole life, published in Scribner's Monthly, made him well known in the United States and Britain. His books include Old Creole Days (1879), The Creoles of Louisiana (1884), The Silent South (1885), The Negro Question (1890), The Cavalier (1901), and The Flower of the Chapdelaines (1918). In his writings and lectures he sought reforms in the convict labor system in the southern United States.

Abraham Cahan

Abraham Cahan (1860-1951), American editor and author, born in Vilnius, Lithuania. Arriving in the United States in 1882, Cahan joined the Socialist Labor Party which was led by Daniel De Leon and became editor of the party publications. In 1897 Cahan became one of the founders and the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. Under his direction the Forward became the leading Yiddish newspaper in the U.S. Cahan later became a leader of the Socialist Party. Cahan wrote in both English and Yiddish. His many works include Yekl, A Tale of the New York Ghetto (English, 1899), The Rise of David Levinsky (English, 1917), and an autobiography, Leaves from My Life (Yiddish, 5 volumes, 1926-31).

Erskine Caldwell

Erskine Caldwell (1903-1987), American novelist, best known for his novels and short stories that concern the poverty-stricken lives of black and white sharecroppers in rural Georgia. Erskine Preston Caldwell was born in White Oak, Georgia, and educated at the universities of Virginia and Pennsylvania. With vivid humor, an earthy indignation, and considerable profanity, Caldwell described the unforgettable family of Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road (1932), his most famous novel. Dramatized in 1933, the play had a seven-year run on Broadway; it was also made into a successful film in 1940. Caldwell's other works include the novel God's Little Acre (1933); You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), an illustrated documentary of the rural South which he wrote in collaboration with his wife, American photographer Margaret Bourke-White; and the autobiographical books Call It Experience (1951) and With All My Might (1987). Caldwell also worked as a journalist in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics during World War II (1939-1945) and later wrote screenplays in Hollywood, California. His books were read worldwide and were particularly admired in Europe.

Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell (author) (1904-1987), American writer, editor, and teacher, known for his writings on myths. Born in New York City, Campbell was educated at Columbia University. He specialized in medieval literature and, after earning a master's degree, continued his studies at the universities of Paris and Munich. While abroad he was influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann. These encounters led to Campbell's theory that all myths and epics are linked in that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need of the human psyche to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.

Campbell returned to New York in 1929 and joined the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College, where he taught comparative literature from 1934 to 1972. He also edited works by the German scholar Heinrich Zimmerman on Indian art, myths, and philosophy. In 1944, with Henry Morton Robinson, Campbell published A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake. His first original work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), became a classic. In this study of the “myth of the hero,” Campbell asserted that there is a single pattern of heroic journey and that all cultures share this essential pattern in their various heroic myths. In his book he also outlined the basic conditions, stages, and results of the archetypal hero's journey. Campbell's other works include the four-volume Masks of God (1959-1967), The Flight of the Wild Gander (1969), and The Mythic Image (1974).

Truman Capote

Truman Capote (1924-1984), American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright, most famous for his carefully crafted prose and innovative attempts to blend imaginative literature with nonfiction, a style known as New Journalism. Capote’s most famous work is In Cold Blood (1966), a book that mixes fact and fiction.

Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans, Louisiana, and spent much of his childhood living with a succession of relatives in various regions of the rural South. Following his mother's second marriage, he adopted his stepfather’s surname and attended schools in New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut. Abandoning formal education when he was 17, Capote found work at the New Yorker magazine and soon began to publish short stories.

Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), dealt with a boy coming to terms with his homosexuality in the Deep South. The controversial subject matter of the novel created a great deal of publicity and helped make the book a commercial success. Capote's next book, A Tree of Night and Other Stories (1949), ranged from tales of horror and psychological torment to warm-hearted stories about children.

After the publication of Tree of Night, Capote traveled in Europe, eventually settling in Sicily for two years. Local Color (1950), a collection of essays based on his travels in Europe, signaled Capote's growing interest in nonfiction. In 1951 Capote published The Grass Harp, a novel about three misfits who decide to take up residence in a tree house. For much of the 1950s, Capote concentrated on writing for the stage and motion pictures. He adapted The Grass Harp and a short story called “The House of Flowers” into plays that were performed in New York City's Broadway theater district. He also collaborated with American motion picture director John Huston on the film-noir spoof Beat the Devil (1954).

In late 1955 and early 1956 Capote toured the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) with an American theater troupe performing George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1926), an American folk opera depicting the lives of African Americans in South Carolina. He recorded the experience in the satirical work The Muses Are Heard (1956). His next book, Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Stories (1958), quickly found a wide readership. Eric Carle

Eric Carle, born in 1929, American writer and illustrator of books for young children, best known for The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969). Carle's books utilize bold color and innovative techniques to try and stimulate a child's imagination in order to facilitate the child's transition from home to school. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, for example, is designed with scalloped holes through the pages to demonstrate how a caterpillar eats through different materials.

Carle, an American of German descent, was born in Syracuse, New York, and was educated in Germany at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart. He returned to the United States in 1952, serving in the U.S. Army until 1954. Carle then worked as a graphic designer for the New York Times from 1954 to 1956, when he became a freelance writer and designer. In 1970 Carle received the American Institute of Graphic Arts Award twice, and the same year also won the Children's Literature prize in Germany.

Carle's work is strongly graphical. The illustrations, primitive in style, are compositions of boldly colored and textured tissue papers that Carle prepares himself, cut or torn into shapes and glued to board. Although the simple narratives and vocabulary serve mainly as a light framework for the graphic elements, the concepts of the stories are not necessarily simplistic. In addition to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Carle's works include: The Very Long Train (1972), a folding book; The Very Quiet Cricket (1990), in which an audio element mimics the sound of a cricket; and The Very Lonely Firefly (1995), in which the firefly character lights up in the final pages. Carle has also worked extensively on collaborative books with other artists and writers.

Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson (1907-1964), American marine biologist, author of widely read books on ecological themes. Rachel Louise Carson was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, and educated at the former Pennsylvania College for Women and Johns Hopkins University, she taught zoology at the University of Maryland from 1931 to 1936. She was aquatic biologist at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and its successor, the Fish and Wildlife Service, from 1936 to 1952. Her books on the sea, Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), for which she was awarded the 1952 National Book Award in nonfiction, and The Edge of the Sea (1955), are praised for beauty of language as well as scientific accuracy. In Silent Spring (1962), she questioned the use of chemical pesticides and was responsible for arousing worldwide concern for the preservation of the environment.

Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver (1939-1988), American writer, best known for his highly readable, intensely absorbing short stories. Carver’s background and the difficulties of his adult life provided much of the material for his writing, which frequently focuses on lost dreams, failed relationships, and disillusionment. He is recognized as one of the foremost short-story writers in the English language and is credited with reviving popular interest in the form in the 1980s.

Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, to working-class parents. He began writing in 1958 after studying creative writing at Chico State College in California. He eventually earned a B.A. degree in 1963 from Humboldt State College. Before the publication of his first collection of short stories, Put Yourself in My Shoes (1974), Carver wrote two volumes of poetry, Near Klamath (1968) and Winter Insomnia (1970).

In the late 1960s and the 1970s, Carver was repeatedly hospitalized as a result of alcoholism. By drawing on these experiences for his writing, he achieved much of his early success, and many of the characters in his stories deal with difficulties related to drinking. When developing his stories, Carver often reworked them several times—for instance, the story “The Bath” eventually became the award-winning “A Small, Good Thing,” although Carver himself thought of them as two very different stories.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) was Carver’s first commercially successful short- story collection. His other major collections are What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983), and Where I’m Calling From (1988). Elements of hope and redemption are incorporated into the stories in Cathedral, marking a notable transition in Carver’s work. Carver’s last work, the volume of poetry A New Path to the Waterfall, was published posthumously in 1989. Some of his prose is collected in Fires (1983). All of Us: The Collected Poems was published in 1998.

Willa Cather

Willa Cather (1873-1947), American writer, one of the country's foremost novelists, whose carefully crafted prose conveys vivid pictures of the American landscape and the people it molded. Influenced by the prose of the American regional writer Sarah Orne Jewett, Cather set many of her works in Nebraska and the American Southwest, areas with which she was familiar from her childhood.

Born near Winchester, Virginia, Cather moved with her family to Red Cloud, Nebraska, when she was ten years old. She graduated from the University of Nebraska before becoming a newspaperwoman and teacher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She moved to New York City in 1906 to work as an editor on McClure's Magazine.

From her college years on, Cather wrote short stories and poetry; her first published book was a collection of verse, April Twilights (1903); her first published prose was a group of stories, The Troll Garden (1905). Not until 1913, however, after having written her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), and having resigned from McClure's, did Cather devote herself solely to writing. Her subsequent novels, O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918), depict the resolute, dignified life of immigrant farm families on the Great Plains, in contrast to that of the native-born town dwellers. In these works Cather is noted for her skills in evoking the pioneer spirit. Cather also used the prairie setting in her novels One of Ours (1922; Pulitzer Prize, 1923) and A Lost Lady (1923). In these books her theme is the contrast between encroaching urbanization and the achievements of the pioneers. She also continued to create strong, determined female characters, many of whom encounter difficulty relating to a society that expects women to be dependent on others. In Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), considered by some critics to be Cather's greatest novel, she deals with the missionary experiences of a Roman Catholic bishop among the Native Americans of New Mexico. Several trips through the Southwest provided the stimulus for this work, as well as for sections of The Professor's House (1925) and The Song of the Lark. As early as 1909, however, in her haunting short story “The Enchanted Bluff,” the mesas and the ancient people who had dwelt there had captured Cather's imagination. In Shadows on the Rock (1931) Cather went further afield to describe French Roman Catholic life in 17th-century Québec. Cather's last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, was published in 1940. George Catlin

George Catlin (1796-1872), American painter and writer, born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, whose art was self-taught. In 1823 he gave up the practice of law and established himself as a portraitist in Philadelphia. From 1824 to 1829, Catlin painted portraits in Washington, D.C. and in Albany, New York. After meeting a tribal delegation of Native Americans from the Far West, he became eager to preserve a record of vanishing types and customs of the Native Americans, and traveled for years in North and South America, painting and sketching hundreds of portraits, and scenes of villages, religious rituals, games, and Native Americans at work. He stimulated popular interest in Native American culture by publicly exhibiting his work and by presenting groups of Native Americans to audiences in the United States and Europe. Most of his paintings are in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. The American Museum of Natural History in New York City owns about 700 of his sketches. Catlin also wrote and illustrated Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians (2 volumes, 1841), Catlin's North American Indian Portfolio (1844), and My Life Among the Indians (1867). His work is a valuable source of historical information.

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), American writer, known for his gritty tales of crime and detection. Chandler was one of the writers of the so-called hard-boiled school of detective fiction, which was characterized by a tough, realistic, and unsentimental point of view. He helped develop the genre into a sophisticated literary form. All of Chandler’s novels and many of his short stories focus on the exploits of private detective Philip Marlowe. Chandler’s works are mostly set in Los Angeles, California, in the 1930s and 1940s and depict a dark world of violence, corruption, and paranoia.

Chandler did not begin writing professionally until 1933, when he lost his job as an executive at a Los Angeles oil company. His first efforts were short stories published in magazines specializing in crime fiction, such as Black Mask. Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), chronicled Philip Marlowe’s search for a missing person through a shadowy underworld of blackmail, murder, and opium addiction. Subsequent novels included Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The High Window (1942), The Lady in the Lake (1944), and The Long Goodbye (1953). Chandler’s last complete novel, Playback, appeared in 1958. His short-story collections include Five Sinister Characters (1945) and The Simple Art of Murder (1950). Poodle Springs, a novel that Chandler left unfinished at his death, was completed by American crime writer Robert B. Parker and published in 1989.

In the 1940s and early 1950s Chandler occasionally wrote scripts for motion pictures. His most notable works included a 1944 collaboration with American director Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity and a 1951 collaboration with British director Alfred Hitchcock on Strangers on a Train. Chandler’s work on motion pictures increased public interest in his fiction, and film adaptations of his novels began to appear. A 1944 adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely starring Dick Powell appeared under the title Murder, My Sweet, and in 1946 American director Howard Hawks made a popular film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart.

Raymond Thornton Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois, and moved with his mother to England when he was still young. He studied at Dulwich College, London, and then worked as a teacher and journalist. In 1912 he moved to California. During World War I (1914-1918) Chandler served in the Canadian Army. After the war, he went to work for the Dabney-Johnston Oil Corporation in Los Angeles, eventually rising to an executive position. Paddy Chayefsky

Paddy Chayefsky (1923-1981), American dramatist, one of television's foremost writers during the 1950s. He was noted particularly for Marty (1953), a play about a lonely unattractive man falling in love with a lonely unattractive woman, considered by many the best American television (TV) program of all time.

Born Sidney Chayefsky in the Bronx, New York, he graduated from City College of New York in 1943. After serving in the armed forces in World War II (1939-1945), he began writing plays and found a ready market in the emerging medium of television, when the prevailing series in prime time (7 PM to 11 PM) were live anthologies of original drama.

Chayefsky wrote several dramas for various series before he gained national fame in 1953 with the broadcast of “Marty,” which in 1955 was made into a successful motion picture of the same name. Several of his other TV plays, including “Bachelor Party” (1954) and “The Catered Affair” (1955), also became popular feature films (1957 and 1956, respectively). When filmed melodrama began to replace live TV dramas, Chayefsky quit television and wrote plays for Broadway theater, including The Tenth Man (1959) and Gideon (1961), and screenplays for feature-length films such as The Americanization of Emily (1964), The Hospital (1971), and Network (1976), a commercially successful satire of the TV industry.

Chayefsky won Academy Awards in 1955, 1971, and 1976 for his screenplays for Marty,The Hospital, and Network, respectively. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1983.

John Cheever

John Cheever (1912-1982), American writer, best known for his short stories dealing with the ironies of contemporary American life. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, Cheever was expelled from preparatory school in 1929; rather than seek further formal education, he wrote a story, “Expelled,” about his expulsion and submitted it to the magazine The New Republic, which published it in 1930. Cheever lived in New York City during the 1930s. His stories typically are subtle and finely worked comedies of manners, concerned with middle-class suburbanites. His characters tend to be less specific than symbolic, although the situations in his narratives are realistic and detailed. Cheever's work often portrays individuals who yearn for self-expression within a society whose values make it difficult to achieve this freedom. He was skilled in using seemingly insignificant events in his characters' lives to expose their emotional complexities.

Beginning in the 1930s, Cheever's stories were originally published in various prominent magazines, notably The New Yorker, and were subsequently collected in several volumes: The Way Some People Live (1943), The Enormous Radio (1954), The Housebreaker of Shady Hill (1958), The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and The World of Apples (1973). An omnibus edition, The Stories of John Cheever (1978), won him the 1979 Pulitzer Prize in literature. As a novelist, Cheever is noted for The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and its sequel, The Wapshot Scandal (1964); the first volume received a National Book Award in 1958. These novels deal with the wealthy, eccentric Wapshot family in suburban Massachusetts and expand on themes that Cheever explored in his shorter fiction. Much more somber commentaries on modern family life are found in his later novels: Bullet Park (1969), which deals with a suburban family threatened with violence, and Falconer (1977), the story of a drug- addicted college professor imprisoned for fratricide. Julia Child

Julia Child (1912-2004), American cooking expert, author, and television personality. Child is credited with popularizing French cooking and cuisine in the United States through her books and television shows.

Born in Pasadena, California, Child graduated from Smith College and served with the Office of Strategic Services in East Asia during World War II (1939-1945). After the war she married diplomat Paul Child and lived for six years in Paris, where she attended the Cordon Bleu cooking school and acquired a wide knowledge of French cuisine.

Child first earned critical acclaim with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking (with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle; 2 volumes, 1961, 1970). Beginning in 1963 she hosted several award-winning cooking series on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television network, where she became known for her exuberant personality and flamboyant style in preparing food. Child also released cooking videos and served as a newspaper and magazine columnist. She wrote a number of other popular cookbooks, including The French Chef Cookbook (1968) and The Way to Cook (1989). See Cookery.

Lydia Maria Child

Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880), American writer and abolitionist. Born Lydia Maria Francis in Medford, Massachusetts, she published her first novel, Hobomok, in 1824; started the Juvenile Miscellany, the first monthly magazine for children in the United States, in 1826; and conducted a private school in Watertown, Massachusetts, from 1825 to 1828. After her marriage to David Child in 1828, she and her husband became ardent abolitionists. Her Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) was one of the first antislavery books published in the United States. She also was editor, and later coeditor with her husband, of the National Anti- Slavery Standard (1840-1849). As a result of their activities, which included using their home as a station in the Underground Railroad, the Childs were ostracized, and Lydia Child's children's magazine failed. Nevertheless, she continued her campaign for civil rights for blacks and women, writing many fictional and nonfictional works devoted to these subjects and editing American writer Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).

Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin (1850-1904), American writer, known for her depictions of culture in New Orleans, Louisiana, and of women's struggles for freedom. Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, a Creole cotton trader, and moved with him to New Orleans. After a business failure, the family moved to a plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana, where her husband died in 1882. In 1884 Chopin returned to St. Louis with her six children. There she maintained a literary salon and began her writing career.

For more than a decade following her first published story in 1889, Chopin depicted the manners, customs, speech, and surroundings of Louisiana's Creole and Cajun residents. Two collections of her short fiction were published in the 1890s: Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Both works were well-received as examples of “local-color” literature and helped establish Chopin's reputation as a major contributor to Southern regional literature. Chopin also produced a substantial body of poetry, reviews, and criticism. As her later stories, such as “The Story of an Hour,” began to emphasize women's need for independence and capacity for passion, editors became less receptive to her work.

Chopin published a novel, At Fault, in 1890 at her own expense. Several publishers rejected her second novel, and she destroyed the manuscript. The Awakening (1899), the novel now considered her masterpiece, attracted a storm of negative criticism for its lyrical depiction of a woman's developing independence and sensuality. Subsequently, her editors suspended publication of her third collection of stories, A Vocation and a Voice. The collection was not published until 1991. As a result of the negative criticism and social ostracism that followed The Awakening, Chopin produced few additional writings, and over the next half-century her work became obscure. It was rediscovered in the 1960s. John Ciardi

John Ciardi (1916-1986), American poet, teacher, and critic, born in Boston. He studied at Tufts University and the University of Michigan. From 1956 to 1972 he was poetry editor of Saturday Review/World, concurrently teaching at Harvard and Rutgers universities and lecturing at the annual Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont. Among some 40 volumes of criticism and poetry—including several acclaimed books of children's verse—are Homeward to America (1940); Other Skies (1947), a collection of war poems; In the Stoneworks (1961); and Manner of Speaking (1972). His widely respected translation of Dante's Divine Comedy into colloquial American verse (3 volumes, 1954-1970) is still used as a college text. His works of criticism include How Does a Poem Mean? (1950) and Dialogue with an Audience (1963). From 1980 on Ciardi, who had become particularly interested in English etymology, broadcast a witty weekly program on the subject, entitled “A Word in Your Ear.”

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros, born in 1954, American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and poet, whose works helped bring the perspective of Chicana (Mexican American) women into the literary mainstream. She was one of the first Hispanic American writers to achieve widespread commercial success.

Sandra Cisneros was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, in a family of seven children. She earned a B.A. degree from Loyola University in Chicago in 1976 and a M.A. degree from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. Cisneros then taught creative writing in a number of Chicago primary and secondary schools. During this time she began to read her poetry publicly, and several of her poems appeared in magazines. A poetry collection, Bad Boys, was published in 1980.

Cisneros's first novel, The House on Mango Street (1984), is her most critically acclaimed work. Loosely structured into a series of short, interconnected chapters, the book captures the hopes, desires, and disillusionments of a young female writer growing up in a large city. The character struggles to understand the roles created for women in Hispanic society. The childish narrative voice of the novel is also used by Cisneros in many of her subsequent works.

After the publication of The House on Mango Street, Cisneros began touring and reading her work to audiences. From 1983 to 1985 she directed a writing program at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas. In 1985 she was presented with the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for The House on Mango Street.

In 1987 Cisneros’s collection of poems My Wicked Wicked Ways was published, and in 1991 a collection of her essays and short stories appeared, titled Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Although these works were well received, neither surpassed the critical acclaim of The House on Mango Street, which had gained a secure place in college and high school curricula. Cisneros’s other works include the poetry book Loose Woman (1994); the children’s work Hairs/Pelitos (1994); and the novel Caramelo (2002). She won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (sometimes called the “genius grant”) in 1995.

Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy, born in 1947, American novelist, critically praised as the master of the techno-military thriller. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Clancy was educated at Baltimore's Loyola College. A successful career in insurance allowed him to pursue his original ambition of writing.

Intrigued by a news story about a mutiny aboard a frigate from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Clancy reworked the incident to produce his first novel, The Hunt for Red October (1984), in which the captain of a Soviet ballistic-missile submarine decides to defect to the United States, taking his ship with him. The book became an instant best-seller, winning the admiration of United States government officials and cooperation from the Pentagon with research on further books. Clancy’s second novel, Red Storm Rising (1986), described a fictional World War III fought with high-tech weaponry, and his third novel, Patriot Games (1987), dealt with the war against terrorism. Terrorism remained the focus in Clancy's The Sum of All Fears (1991), in which Middle Eastern terrorists nearly trigger a nuclear war. Without Remorse (1993) concerned the rescue of downed American pilots during the Vietnam War (1959- 1975). His other novels include Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), Clear and Present Danger (1989), Debt of Honor (1994), Tom Clancy's Op-Center (1995), Executive Orders (1996), and Rainbow Six (1998).

A nonfiction series begun by Clancy in the 1990s examined various components of the U.S. armed forces. Works in this series include Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit (1996) and Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force (1997) Beverly Cleary

Beverly Cleary, born in 1916, American author, known for writing humorous realistic fiction for children and young adults.

Beverly Atlee Bunn was born in McMinnville, Oregon. She grew up on a farm in Yamhill, Oregon, and later in Portland, Oregon. After graduating in 1938 from the University of California at Berkeley, she obtained a degree in library science in 1939 from the University of Washington and then worked as a children's librarian and as an Army post librarian. She also married and changed her name to Beverly Cleary.

Remembering her childhood frustration at the lack of humorous books about ordinary children, Cleary decided to write a book for young readers about the sort of children with whom she spent her childhood. The result was Henry Huggins (1950), an immediate success and the first of many books about the fictional children who lived on or near Klickitat Street in Portland, including Ellen Tebbits (1951); Otis Spofford (1953), one of the first children's books about a latchkey, single-parent child; and Beezus and Ramona (1955), the first in a series of books about the character Ramona Quimby.

Cleary also wrote a popular series of books about a mouse named Ralph, introduced in The Mouse and the Motorcycle (1965), and authored picture books for children and fiction for young adults. Cleary chronicled her childhood in A Girl from Yamhill: A Memoir (1988) and continued into her college years and early adulthood with My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (1995). In 1999 she added to the popular Ramona series with the book Ramona’s World.

Cleary's books are loved by children and recognized by critics for their insight into childhood. Her many awards include the 1984 Newbery Medal for Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983), about a boy who comes to terms with his parents' divorce by writing letters to his favorite author. Ramona and Her Father (1977) and Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (1981) were both named Newbery Honor books. For excellence in her entire body of work, Cleary received the American Library Association's 1975 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award and the 1980 Regina Medal from the Catholic Library Association. Several of Cleary's books have been adapted for motion pictures and television.

Irvin S. Cobb

Irvin S. Cobb (1876-1944), American humorist and journalist, born in Paducah, Kentucky. In 1911 he joined the staff of the Saturday Evening Post, and from 1922 to 1932 he contributed to Cosmopolitan magazine. His most popular character was the idealized American Civil War veteran, the courtly and garrulous title character of the novel Old Judge Priest (1915). Of his more than 60 books, this one is his most famous. His autobiography, Exit Laughing, was published in 1941.

George M. Cohan

George M. Cohan (1878-1942), American playwright, composer, producer, and actor, famous for his debonair, fast-paced style as a song and dance man and for his lively musicals, which set the trend on Broadway in the 1920s. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Cohan first appeared on the stage when he was nine years old. Later, with members of his family, he starred in The Four Cohans, one of the most popular vaudeville attractions. After managing and writing for the family act for several years, Cohan presented his first play on Broadway in New York City in 1901. His first success was the musical Little Johnny Jones in 1904, in which he played Yankee Doodle Boy, a role associated with him throughout his career. Thereafter Cohan wrote about 20 plays and musical comedies (book, lyrics, and music) and played the lead in many. His productions include Forty-five Minutes from Broadway (1905), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The Song and Dance Man (1923), and The Merry Malones (1927). Cohan also wrote many popular songs, including “I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,””Grand Old Flag,””Give My Regards to Broadway,” and the famous World War I song “Over There.”

Padraic Colum

Padraic Colum (1881-1972), Irish poet, playwright, and folklorist, whose work celebrates Irish culture. He was born in Longford and spent his early years among the country people of the Irish midlands, who furnished the subjects, characters, themes, and language for his work. Although Colum spent most of his adult life in the United States, his writing returned to his Longford roots over and over again.

When Colum was in his teens, his family moved to Dublin. Irish writer George Russell (who went by the pseudonym AE) read his first poems and pronounced him a genius. He included some of Colum's poetry in the collection New Songs (1904). Colum’s early poems, which include 'A Drover,' 'The Plougher,' 'An Old Woman of the Roads,' and 'A Poor Scholar of the Forties,' use regular meter, strong rhymes, and an authentic Irish language. His ballad 'She Moved Through the Fair,' which is sung to a haunting air, has passed into Irish folk song tradition.

Colum's earliest realistic peasant plays are set in the Irish countryside and are his most popular dramas. He wrote the 1905 play Land shortly after the Wyndham Act provided for state-assisted land purchase. Land examines the consequences of tenant ownership and the responsibilities that the younger generation assumed with the newly acquired land. Colum's The Fiddler's House (1907), a reworking of his earlier Broken Soil (1903), celebrates a musician who gives up a secure life on the land to play music for a living. Thomas Muskerry (1910) is a tragedy about a poorhouse warden who is betrayed by his family and left in the poorhouse as an inmate.

Colum and his wife, Molly, a literary critic and editor, moved to the United States in 1914. There Colum produced about 20 children's books—mainly stories and adaptations from literature and mythology, including two collections of Hawaiian stories for children. Conscious of American interest in Irish history and culture, Colum also wrote books about his home country, including The Road Round Ireland (1926) and Cross Roads in Ireland (1930), and edited a collection of folklore, A Treasury of Irish Folklore (1954). Colum and his wife collaborated on Our Friend James Joyce (1958). In his last years, Colum returned frequently to Ireland, where he was celebrated as the last survivor of the Irish literary revival that had begun in the late 19th century. See also Irish Literature.

James Bryant Conant

James Bryant Conant (1893-1978), American chemist, diplomat, and educator, born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Conant received his education at Harvard University and taught chemistry there from 1916 until he became president of Harvard in 1933. His administration was marked by the application of liberal theories in education, and he was instrumental in reorganizing the curriculum so that professional training was concentrated in postgraduate work, while in the undergraduate college stress was laid on general education. In 1953 he was named president emeritus of the university.

In 1941 Conant was appointed director of the National Defense Research Committee and deputy director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. He held both posts throughout World War II and thus played an important administrative part in the development of the atomic bomb. From 1953 to 1955 he served as U.S. high commissioner for Germany, and from 1955 to 1957 he was U.S. ambassador to West Germany. In 1957 he undertook a 2-year study, financed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, of public high schools in the United States; this research was followed by another report in 1967.

After 1957 Conant became one of the best-known critics of American secondary education, advocating higher academic standards and curricular reforms. Among his writings in the field of education are The American High School Today (1959), Slums and Suburbs (1961), and The Comprehensive High School: A Second Report to Interested Citizens (1967). He also wrote the autobiographical My Several Lives (1970).

Marc Connelly

Marc Connelly, full name Marcus Cook Connelly (1890-1980), American playwright, known for his satirical comedies. Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Connelly worked for several years as a columnist and reporter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Beginning in 1921 he collaborated with the American playwright George S. Kaufman on a series of highly successful comedies, including Dulcy (1921), Merton of the Movies (1922), and Beggar on Horseback (1924). Connelly's best- known work is The Green Pastures (1930, Pulitzer Prize), a dramatization of material from Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun (1928), a collection of folk tales by the American writer Roark Bradford. Connelly also wrote many motion-picture screenplays and worked in the New York City theater as a producer, director, and actor. He was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and artists that gathered regularly during the 1920s and 1930s at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. The group included such American writers as Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Robert E. Sherwood, and Heywood Broun and was known for witty conversation and verbal sparring.

James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), American novelist, travel writer, and social critic, regarded as the first great American writer of fiction. He was famed for his action-packed plots and his vivid, if somewhat idealized, portrayal of American life in the forest and at sea. Cooper began his writing career at the age of 30. He wrote his first book, Precaution (1820), primarily to demonstrate to his wife that he could write a better novel than the one he was reading to her at the time. Precaution was a conventional novel of English manners and was not a success. Cooper chose for his second book a subject closer to home, and the result, The Spy (1821), a novel about the American Revolution (1775- 1783) in New York State, was successful both in the United States and abroad. In 1823 Cooper wrote The Pioneers, the first of the five novels that make up the Leather- Stocking Tales. The remaining four books—The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841)—continue the story of Natty Bumppo, one of the most famous characters in American fiction. The Leather-Stocking Tales are noted for their portrayal of American subject matter in American settings. The hero of the tales, Natty Bumppo, embodies the conflict between preserving nature unspoiled and developing the land in the name of progress. He is a white frontiersman with ties to the settlers who nevertheless spends much of his time in the wilderness with Native Americans. The positioning of Natty Bumppo between two modes of living appealed to readers and contributed to Cooper's broad appeal, both in the United States and overseas. Cooper's popularity was also established with the publication during the 1820s and 1830s of a number of sea tales, the first of which was The Pilot (1823). During his seven years abroad in Europe from 1826 to 1833, Cooper produced a variety of novels, including The Bravo (1831), The Heidenmauer (1832), and The Headsman (1833), which form a trilogy intended to portray realistically the feudalism of medieval Europe. Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola, born in 1939, American motion-picture producer, director, and writer, born in Detroit, Michigan. Coppola was educated at Hofstra University, where he received a degree in theater in 1960, and at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) film school. While a student at UCLA he began working with Roger Corman, a noted producer of B movies; directed his first feature film, Dementia 13, in 1963; and began writing screenplays for Seven Arts Productions. Coppola won widespread recognition for his screenplays and direction of You're a Big Boy Now (1966) and The Rain People (1969). He won an Academy Award for his screenplay of Patton (1970; see Patton, George Smith).

From that time, usually working through his own production center—Zoetrope Studios—and in collaboration with major studios such as Universal and Paramount Pictures, Coppola became known as one of the most powerful American filmmakers of his day. At the time of its release, his brilliant and audacious portrait of an American Mafia family, The Godfather (1972), was the biggest box-office success in movie history, and it was soon acclaimed as a film masterpiece. Despite occasional critical or commercial failures, Coppola went on to win Academy Awards and international accolades for many of his motion pictures. His acclaimed films include The Conversation (1974), The Godfather, Part II (1974), the Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now (1979), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), The Godfather, Part III (1990), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992; see Stoker, Bram). Notable films that, while not directed by Coppola, were produced by either him or his production facility include American Graffiti (1973), the childhood classic The Black Stallion (1979), Hammett (1983), Mishima (1985), Wind (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994; see Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft). Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, was filmed by Coppola's wife, Eleanor Coppola, and was released in 1991.

James Gould Cozzens

James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978), American author, best known for his novels characterizing middle-class professional American men. His fiction examines the values, behavior, and moral dilemmas of the American middle class, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel Guard of Honor (1948).

Born in Chicago, Cozzens grew up on Staten Island, New York. He was educated at Harvard University, but following the publication of his first novel, Confusion (1924), he left the school after his second year. Cozzens wrote three more novels—Michael Scarlett (1925), Cock Pit (1928), and The Son of Perdition (1929)— before he published S.S. San Pedro (1931), which he considered his first mature work, and which earned him his first widespread critical success.

Cozzens's next book, The Last Adam (1933), is a novel about a small-town Connecticut doctor that combines the style, themes, objective tone, and subject that mark his best fiction. This novel was made into the motion picture Doctor Bull in 1933, starring American entertainer Will Rogers. Cozzens's Men and Brethren (1936) is considered by some to be the best American novel about a clergyman, while The Just and Unjust (1942), about a young lawyer, earned him a reputation as an important novelist.

The book Guard of Honor (1948) draws on Cozzens's military service in the United States during World War II (1939-1945), and his next novel, By Love Possessed (1957), about a successful lawyer, was a best-seller. Cozzens's reputation then went into decline. He completed one more novel, Morning Noon and Night (1967), before his death in 1978. Cozzens's works also include two short novels, Castaway (1934) and Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), and a collection of short stories, Children and Others (1964).

Hart Crane

Hart Crane (1899-1932), American lyric poet, known for his meticulous, disciplined craftsmanship and his celebration of the positive aspects of modern urban, industrial life.

Crane was born July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio. He had to live with his maternal grandmother in Cleveland from 1909 until his parents' divorce in 1916, when he quit high school and went to New York City. There he was stimulated by the literary world, but he was unable to support himself by writing. Finally, in 1921, he broke with his father, and from then on writing poetry came first. His personal life, however, was in the process of becoming a chaotic mixture of alcoholism and homosexuality.

Crane's first book, White Buildings (1926), while manifesting symbolist influence, showed him to be a strong, original poet of striking imagery and dense, free- associative metaphors. Notable poems in the collection include “Black Tambourines,””Voyages,” and “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” the latter of which was inspired, in part, by Crane's opposition to the “poetry of negation” of T. S. Eliot. Crane's greatest achievement, The Bridge (1930), which took as its central and unifying symbol the Brooklyn Bridge, was an even more explicit affirmation of modern civilization. In its complex, near-epic structure, the poet explored more deeply the theme that pervaded his work: the vital power of humanity's creative genius to reveal the links between the mythic past and the seemingly mundane present.

Crane received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931 and went to Mexico to write. He produced only one memorable poem in Mexico, “The Broken Tower,” and drank himself to the edge of insanity. Returning to New York City by boat, on April 27, 1932, he leaped overboard and presumably drowned. The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane appeared in 1966. Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1871-1900), American novelist and poet, one of the first American exponents of the naturalistic style of writing (see Naturalism). Crane is known for his pessimistic and often brutal portrayals of the human condition, but his stark realism is relieved by poetic charm and a sympathetic understanding of character.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Crane was educated at Lafayette College and Syracuse University. In 1891 he began work in New York City as a freelance reporter in the slums. From his work and his own penniless existence in the Bowery he drew material for his first novel, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), which he published at his own expense under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. The work, the story of a young prostitute who commits suicide, won praise from the American writers Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells but was not a popular success. Crane's next novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), gained international recognition as a penetrating and realistic psychological study of a young soldier in the American Civil War (1861-1865).

Although Crane had never experienced military service, the understanding of the ordeals of combat that he revealed in this work compelled various American and foreign newspapers to hire him as a correspondent during the Greco-Turkish War (1897) and the Spanish-American War (1898). Shipwrecked while accompanying an expedition from the United States to Cuba in 1896, Crane suffered privations that eventually brought on tuberculosis. His experience was the basis for the title story of his collection The Open Boat and Other Stories (1898). Crane settled in England in 1897; his private life, which included several extramarital affairs, had caused gossip in the United States. In England he was befriended by the writers Joseph Conrad and Henry James.

In addition to being a novelist, journalist, and short-story writer, Crane was also an innovator in verse techniques. His two volumes of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind and Other Poems (1899), are important early examples of experimental free verse. His other writings include Active Service (1899), Whilomville Stories (1900), and Wounds in the Rain (1900). Crane's collected letters were published in 1954.

Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley (1926-2005), American poet, best known for his association with the influential Black Mountain Poets. The group was centered at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, during the 1950s.

Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts. After completing his college preparatory studies at Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire, he attended Harvard University. He left school in 1944 to join the American Field Service, which sent him to India and Burma (now known as Myanmar) as a truck driver at the conclusion of World War II (1939-1945). In 1945 Creeley returned to Harvard, and he married in 1946. With only one term remaining, Creeley withdrew from Harvard in 1947. After a brief time on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, he and his wife moved to New Hampshire in 1948.

Creeley and his wife spent 1951 in Aix-en-Provence, France, and then moved to Mallorca, Spain, one of the Balearic Islands. Mallorca was the setting for Creeley's one novel, The Island (1963). While in Mallorca, Creeley established Divers Press to print his own books, a practice he continued after his return to the United States. In 1954 Creeley graduated with a B.A. degree from Black Mountain College. American poet, theorist, and scholar Charles Olson, leader of the Black Mountain Poets, then invited Creeley to join the faculty at the school. While there, Creeley founded and edited the Black Mountain Review. In 1955 Creeley and his wife were divorced and he left the college.

Creeley's early books of poems include Le Fou (The Madman, 1952), The Kind of Act (1953), All that is Lovely in Men (1955), and If You (1956). After several teaching jobs, including one as a tutor on a Guatemalan plantation, he established himself as a serious poet with For Love: Poems 1950- 1962 (1963). He then embarked on a distinguished academic career in the English departments of several universities. In 1966 he joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Concerned mainly with analysis of emotion, minimalist in style, and often syntactically disjointed, Creeley's work shows the influence of Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and William Carlos Williams, as well as jazz music. Creeley's collections include Poems 1950-1965 (1969), The Collected Poems 1945- 1975 (1982-1983), The Complete Prose (1984), Echoes (1994), and Life & Death (1998). Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur

Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813), French writer, known for his works in both French and English describing life in the American colonies around the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783). Born near Caen, and educated in both France and England, Crèvecoeur served in the French and Indian War (1754-1763) under French commander Marquis de Montcalm and traveled throughout the British colonies of North America. In 1765 he became a citizen of the colony of New York, and in 1769 he settled on a farm in Orange County, New York. He lived in France from 1780 to 1783, in the United States as French consul in New York City from 1783 to 1790, and in France again from 1790 until his death. Under the pseudonym J. Hector St. John he wrote, in English, the series of essays for which he is best known, Letters from an American Farmer (1782). The essays provide remarkable details about life in colonial America and during the early years of the United States. Crèvecoeur’s Sketches of Eighteenth Century America (1925), a collection of newspaper articles he wrote under the pseudonym Agricola, give further evidence of his vigorous insight into the distinctive character of the United States and the American people.

Hume Cronyn

Hume Cronyn (1911-2003), Canadian American stage and motion-picture actor, screenwriter, and theater director, best known for his half-century acting partnership with his wife, Jessica Tandy. Born in London, Ontario, Cronyn was educated at McGill University in Montréal, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, and the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. Cronyn and Tandy were married in 1942.

Cronyn was a decade-long Broadway veteran by the time he made his film debut in Shadow of a Doubt (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1943), playing a mousy next-door neighbor who enjoys dreaming up the perfect murder. With his wiry build, sharp elocution, and distinctive features, Cronyn credibly acted in a wide range of roles in Lifeboat (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Brute Force (1947), and People Will Talk (1951). Collaborations with Tandy included the Broadway productions The Fourposter (1951), The Gin Game (which he directed, 1978), and Foxfire (1982); the films The Seventh Cross (for which Cronyn was nominated for an Academy Award, 1944), Cocoon (1985), and Cocoon: The Return (1988); and the television series “The Marriage” (1954). Cronyn also appeared in the motion picture Sunrise at Campobello (1960), about the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and as Polonius in a filmed version of Hamlet (1964), which starred Richard Burton in the title role.

In addition, Cronyn enjoyed long-running collaborations with several notable filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Alan J. Pakula. Along with his acting roles in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt and Lifeboat, Cronyn helped Hitchcock write Rope (1948) and Under Capricorn (1949). Cronyn appeared in Mankiewicz's People Will Talk, Cleopatra (1963), and There Was a Crooked Man (1970). With Pakula, Cronyn appeared in The Parallax View (1974), Rollover (1981), and The Pelican Brief (1993).

Cronyn and Tandy were both awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1990. In 1994, the year Tandy died, she and Cronyn won the first Tony Award for lifetime theatrical achievement. The couple’s last film together, Camilla, was released the same year. Cronyn appeared in the film Marvin’s Room (1996) and several television movies during his final years. Rachel Crothers

Rachel Crothers (1878-1958), American playwright, born in Bloomington, Illinois. Her first professionally produced play was Nora, in New York City, in 1903. Her themes usually concern the social and domestic problems that confront women. Her notable successes include A Man's World (1909), When Ladies Meet (1932), and Susan and God (1937). She directed all her plays.

Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen (1903-1946), American poet, novelist, playwright, and educator. Cullen was one of the best-known black poets of the first half of the 20th century and an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Many details of Cullen’s early life, including his place of birth, are unknown. He was chiefly raised by Elizabeth Porter, who may have been his paternal grandmother, until her death in 1918. The teenager was then informally adopted into the family of Reverend Frederick Cullen, minister of the largest church in New York City’s predominantly black Harlem neighborhood.

Countee Porter Cullen attended the city’s prestigious De Witt Clinton High School, where he served as editor of the school newspaper and the literary magazine The Magpie. He earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1925. While in high school and college, Cullen won a number of poetry contests. Soon after graduating he published his first volume of poetry, Color (1925). After earning a master’s degree from Harvard University in 1926, Cullen became assistant editor of Opportunity magazine. In 1927 he published a second collection of verse, Copper Sun. That same year Cullen also compiled and edited The Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets.

Cullen’s carefully crafted poems were widely admired by both whites and blacks. Although the Harlem Renaissance—a flowering of African American arts and literature in the 1920s— had encouraged many black writers to experiment with new literary forms, Cullen’s poetry remained very traditional. He was heavily influenced by the work of English poet John Keats and other Romantics and liked sonnets, ballads, and other traditional forms. In 1928 Cullen received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. Before his departure he married Nina Yolande Du Bois, the daughter of African American sociologist and political leader W. E. B. Du Bois. While still in Paris Cullen published The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929), featuring the title poem, which compared the plight of contemporary African Americans to the suffering of Jesus Christ. His marriage ended in divorce in 1930.

Cullen’s only novel, One Way to Heaven (1932), examined the significance of class divisions in black society. In 1934 Cullen became a teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, a job that he kept until his death. The following year he published Medea and Other Poems, a book containing his translation of the ancient Greek poem by Euripides and a handful of original poems. He also collaborated with black writer Arna Bontemps on St. Louis Woman, a theatrical adaptation of her 1931 novel God Sends Sunday. Because the manuscript of the play was criticized for presenting unflattering images of the black community, St. Louis Woman was not produced until just after Cullen’s death in 1946.

Cullen published two books for children, The Lost Zoo (1940) and My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942), both of which he playfully claimed were written in collaboration with a house cat. Shortly before his death he compiled On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen, which was published posthumously in 1948. E. E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962), American poet, who was one of the most radically experimental and inventive writers of the 20th century. A distinctive feature of Cummings's poetry is the abandonment of uppercase letters.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Edward Estlin Cummings was educated at Harvard University. During World War I (1914-1918) he was an ambulance driver in France, ultimately spending three months in a French military detention camp on a false charge. The experience served as the basis for the autobiographical prose work The Enormous Room (1922). After World War I Cummings studied art in Paris. His first volume of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, appeared in 1923. During the 1920s and 1930s he lived alternately in France and in the United States, finally settling in New York City.

Cummings's poetic style is characterized by typographical nonconformity; distortions of syntax; unusual punctuation; new words; and a liberal use of jazz rhythms, elements of popular culture, and slang. Because of his style, Cummings's poetry appears complex to the eye, but the ideas expressed through the words and punctuation are often simple. Although the emotional content of his poetry appears at first glance to be cynical, it is basically lyrical and almost romantic, often speaking of the value of love. Cummings followed in the Emersonian tradition (see Ralph Waldo Emerson) of individuality and rejection of conformity.

Cummings's works include XLI Poems (1925); him (1927), a play in verse and prose; CIOPW (1931), a collection of drawings and paintings taking its title from the initial letters of the materials used—charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, and watercolor; Eimi (1933), a travel diary dealing with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; Collected Poems (1938); i: six nonlectures (1953); Poems, 1923-1954 (1954); 95 Poems (1958); and Complete Poems, 1904-1962 (published posthumously 1991).

Richard Henry Dana

Richard Henry Dana (1815-1882), American writer and lawyer, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His education was interrupted by an eye affliction, and he subsequently found employment on a sailing ship. His memoir Two Years Before the Mast (1840) told the story of his voyage from Boston, Massachusetts, around Cape Horn to California and back. It became popular as a tale of the sea and is believed to have influenced American author Herman Melville in his writing of Moby Dick (1851). In 1841 Dana wrote a handbook, The Seaman's Friend, which includes a section on maritime law, a field in which he became an authority. Dana was an antislavery activist, and in 1848 he helped found the Free Soil Party. Throughout the 1850s he provided free legal aid to blacks captured under the Fugitive Slave Law. In 1866 he published, with an original commentary, his edition of International Law by the American jurist and diplomat Henry Wheaton. A previous editor sued him for plagiarism, and as a result Dana was denied appointment as United States minister to Britain in 1876. In the intervening years he was a member of the Massachusetts legislature from 1867 to 1868 and a lawyer.

Josephus Daniels

Josephus Daniels (1862-1948), American editor, publisher, and statesman, born in Washington, North Carolina. He studied law at the University of North Carolina. In 1885 he became editor of the State Chronicle, a daily newspaper in Raleigh. Nine years later, he founded the Raleigh News and Observer, of which he was editor and publisher until his death. Long prominent in the affairs of the Democratic party, he was appointed (1913) secretary of the navy by President Woodrow Wilson, holding the position until 1921. Criticized as a pacifist, Daniels nevertheless effectively expanded the U.S. naval forces in World War I. From 1933 to 1941, he was ambassador to Mexico, where he improved relations despite Mexico's seizure of American oil and agricultural properties. His works include Life of Worth Bagley (1898), Our Navy at War (1922), and Life of Woodrow Wilson (1924). He also edited In Politics (1940) and The Wilson Era (1944).

H. L. Davis

H. L. Davis (1894-1960), American novelist, who wrote about life in the American West, particularly Oregon, during the first part of the 20th century. In many of his works he explores conflicts involving settlers and Native Americans.

Harold Lenoir Davis was born near Roseburg, Oregon. He attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, briefly in 1917, but was forced to withdraw for financial reasons. As a soldier during World War I (1914-1918), he wrote poetry about his home state, some of which was published in the prestigious Poetry magazine in 1919.

Davis later wrote short stories for Collier's Weekly, and he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship to Mexico in 1932. In Mexico he started work on his first novel, Honey in the Horn (1935), about a teenager who searches for the meaning of life as he wanders through Oregon. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1936, launching Davis's career as a fiction writer. The novel Winds of Morning (1952) is one of his most highly regarded works. The book tells of the quest of an Oregon deputy sheriff for love and acceptance in a community, as he investigates a murder and is guided by the wisdom of an old settler. Davis's stories are collected in Team Bells Woke Me and Other Stories (1953). In 1959 a collection of his essays and articles on the Pacific Northwest was published as Kettle of Fire.

Richard Harding Davis

Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916), American writer and journalist, born in Philadelphia, and educated at Lehigh and Johns Hopkins universities. He began as a reporter in Philadelphia. In 1890 he was managing editor of Harper's Weekly. He served as war correspondent for the London Times and the New York Herald during the Greco- Turkish (1897), Spanish-American (1898), South African (1899-1902), and Russo-Japanese (1904-5) wars; and he represented the New York Tribune in Mexico in 1914. During World War I he was correspondent with the French and British armies in Serbia. Among his most popular writings are Gallegher and Other Stories (1891), Soldiers of Fortune (1897), The Bar Sinister (1903), The Man Who Could Not Lose (1911); the plays Ranson's Folly (1904), The Dictator (1904), and Miss Civilization (1906); and many travel books.

Clarence Shepard Day

Clarence Shepard Day (1874-1935), American humorist and essayist, grandson of the publisher Benjamin Henry Day. Born in New York City and educated at Yale University, Day began his literary career as a book reviewer and as a writer of verse and magazine articles. His God and My Father (1932) and Life with Father (1935), stories and sketches of his own boyhood written with irony, realism, and affectionate humor, won extraordinary popular and critical acclaim. From these writings and from Life with Mother, published posthumously in 1937, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse fashioned the play Life with Father (1939), one of the greatest successes of the American stage.

Bernard Augustine De Voto

Bernard Augustine De Voto (1897-1955), American writer, born in Ogden, Utah, best known for his historical writings. He taught English at Northwestern University from 1922 to 1927 and at Harvard University from 1929 to 1936. From 1935 until his death de Voto wrote “The Easy Chair,” a column in Harper's Magazine that addressed contemporary topics. His major work was a trilogy on the American West—The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943); Across the Wide Missouri (1947; Pulitzer Prize in history, 1948); and The Course of Empire (1952)—and he also edited The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953). His other works include Mark Twain's America (1932), Forays and Rebuttals (1936), and The Literary Fallacy (1944). Because of his candid style and strong convictions, de Voto was a controversial figure. His strong nationalism and sound scholarship gained him a devoted audience, however, and he was widely read.

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo, born in 1936, American novelist, whose satiric writing focuses on the workings of individual minds and psychologies, often bizarre and pathological, in contemporary society, especially within the context of particular social movements or subcultures. Born in New York City, he was educated there at Fordham University, graduating in 1958 with a degree in communication arts.

DeLillo’s first book, Americana (1971), portrayed the disintegration of a young television executive on a cross-country journey and reflected the influence of such authors as John Dos Passos, Jack Kerouac, and Thomas Pynchon. In the allegorical novel End Zone (1972), DeLillo analyzed the vivid though reductive jargon used by American-football players, contrasting it with the seemingly mechanical brutality of the game itself. DeLillo’s next novel, Great Jones Street (1973), took on the rock- music industry, setting the ambitions of its corporate culture against the career of a burned-out rock singer.

White Noise (1985) won the National Book Award for fiction and established DeLillo as one of the foremost, and most readable, postmodern novelists in the United States. The novel examined the effect of an environmental catastrophe on the family of Jack Gladney, a professor who has introduced the field of Hitler studies (see Hitler, Adolf) to American universities. Libra (1988) merged fact and fiction to raise questions about the 1963 assassination of American President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. Mao II (1991) looked at the pervasive presence of the media and the tendency to follow the crowd in American society.

Underworld (1997) enhanced DeLillo’s reputation and enlarged his readership. This comic novel introduced a large cast of characters to capture the effects of the Cold War on American lives. Jonathan Demme

Jonathan Demme, born in 1944, American motion-picture director and screenwriter, who has directed a range of critically acclaimed dramas, comedies, and documentaries. Demme's films are distinguished by eccentric characters, unconventional plots, and the imaginative use of sound tracks.

Born in Baldwin, New York, Demme studied at the University of Florida and wrote film reviews for his college newspaper before moving to New York City, where he worked from 1966 to 1968 as a publicist for film production companies. In the early 1970s he wrote screenplays for low-budget action films, including Angles Hard as They Come (1971), Black Mama, White Mama (1972), and The Hot Box (1972). The first film he directed was Caged Heat (1974), set inside a women's prison.

Demme won critical acclaim for his directing work on Citizens Band (also known as Handle with Care, 1977), a comedy about a community transformed by the citizens band radio craze of the 1970s. More success followed with Melvin and Howard (1980), a fictionalized story of wealthy recluse Howard Hughes. Demme then directed the 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, featuring performances by the rock-and-roll group Talking Heads, before making the dark comedy Something Wild (1986). He switched genres again with Swimming to Cambodia (1987), which portrays American actor Spalding Gray delivering a long monologue on his experiences making the 1984 war film The Killing Fields. Demme followed this with the popular comedy Married to the Mob (1988).

In 1991 Demme’s thriller The Silence of the Lambs appeared. The film is a riveting and unsettling story starring Jodie Foster as a federal agent who tracks down one serial killer by consulting with another. The Silence of the Lambs won five Academy Awards in 1991. John Dewey

John Dewey (1859-1952), American philosopher, psychologist, and educator. Born in Burlington, Vermont, Dewey received a B.A. degree from the University of Vermont in 1879 and a Ph.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1884. Dewey’s long and influential career in education began at the University of Michigan, where he taught from 1884 to 1888. In 1888-1889 Dewey taught at the University of Minnesota, returning to the University of Michigan from 1889 to 1894. He continued his career at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1904 and at Columbia University from 1904 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1931. Dewey lectured, acted as an educational consultant, and studied educational systems in China, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, and the Soviet Union.

During his tenure at Chicago, Dewey became actively interested in the reform of educational theory and practice. He tested his educational principles at the famous experimental Laboratory School, the so-called Dewey School, established by the University of Chicago in 1896. These principles emphasized learning through varied activities rather than formal curricula and opposed authoritarian methods, which, Dewey believed, offered contemporary people no realistic preparation for life in a democratic society. Dewey felt, moreover, that education should not merely be a preparation for future life but a full life in itself. His work and his writings were largely responsible for the drastic change in pedagogy that began in the United States early in the 20th century as emphasis shifted from the institution to the student. Dewey’s theories have often been misinterpreted by the advocates of so-called progressive education; although Dewey opposed authoritarian methods, he did not advocate lack of guidance and control. He criticized education that emphasized amusing the students and keeping them busy, as well as education that was oriented toward pure vocational training.

As a philosopher, Dewey emphasized the practical, striving to show how philosophical ideas can work in everyday life. His sense of logic and philosophy was ever-changing, adaptive to need and circumstance. The process of thinking, in his philosophy, is a means of planning action, of removing the obstacles between what is given and what is wanted. Truth is an idea that has worked in practical experience. Dewey followed the American philosopher and psychologist William James as a leader of the pragmatic movement in philosophy; Dewey’s own philosophy, called either instrumentalism or experimentalism, stems from the pragmatism of James.

Dewey’s influence can be seen in many fields besides education and philosophy. A political activist, he advocated progressive and sometimes radical approaches to international affairs and economic problems. His voluminous writings include Psychology (1887), The School and Society (1899), Democracy and Education (1916), Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and Conduct (1922). Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), America’s best-known female poet and one of the foremost authors in American literature. Dickinson’s simply constructed yet intensely felt, acutely intellectual writings take as their subject issues vital to humanity: the agonies and ecstasies of love, sexuality, the unfathomable nature of death, the horrors of war, God and religious belief, the importance of humor, and musings on the significance of literature, music, and art.

Dickinson enjoyed the King James Version of the Bible, as well as authors such as English writers William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle. Dickinson’s early style shows the strong influence of Barrett Browning, Scottish poet Robert Browning, and English poets John Keats and George Herbert.

Dickinson often used variations of meters common in hymn writing, especially iambic tetrameter (eight syllables per line, with every second syllable being stressed). She frequently employed off-rhymes. Examples of off-rhymes include ocean with noon and seam with swim in the lines “Than Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam — / Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon / Leap, plashless as they swim” from the poem “A Bird came down the Walk.” Dickinson used common language in startling ways, a strategy called defamiliarization. This technique would, as she put it, “distill amazing sense / From ordinary Meanings” and from “familiar species.” Her poem “A Bird came down the Walk” also illustrates her use of defamiliarization: “A Bird came down the Walk— /...drank a Dew / ...stirred his Velvet Head” and then “unrolled his feathers / And rowed him softer home” while “Butterflies” leap “off Banks of Noon.” Dickinson’s short poetic lines, condensed by using intense metaphors and by extensive use of ellipsis (the omission of words understood to be there), contrasted sharply with the style of her contemporary Walt Whitman, who used long lines, little rhyme, and irregular rhythm in his poetry. E. L. Doctorow

E. L. Doctorow, born in 1931, American novelist, known for his fictional portrayals of the American historical experience, particularly immigration, class conflicts, politics, and urban life. Doctorow's novels are characterized by inventive form and radical social criticism.

Born in New York City, Edgar Laurence Doctorow was educated at Kenyon College. He worked as an editor in New York City from 1959 to 1969, serving as editor-in-chief of Dial Press from 1964 to 1969. In the 1970s and 1980s Doctorow was a writer-in-residence and a creative writing fellow at various colleges and universities, including Sarah Lawrence College and Yale and Princeton universities. His first novel was Welcome to Hard Times (1960). It was followed by Big as Life (1966).

Doctorow's novel The Book of Daniel (1971) is a fictionalization of the lives of the family of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American husband and wife who were executed in 1953 for transmitting atomic military secrets to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The book is narrated through the angry voice of Daniel Isaacson, a son of parents who were executed. Isaacson searches for the truth of his parents' lives and for his own emotional survival in the revolutionary atmosphere of the United States of the late 1960s. The novel cross-cuts between Daniel's meditations on American left-wing politics and conservative reactions and his poignant accounts of his family's destruction.

In Ragtime (1975; National Book Critics Circle Award, 1976) Doctorow melded United States history and fiction into a dazzling account of historical and imagined personages who mingle in the American social world of the early 20th century. Such figures as industrialist Henry Ford, magician Harry Houdini, financier J. P. Morgan, and actor Evelyn Nesbit are portrayed alongside fictional characters from the American upper-middle classes as well as from working-class immigrants and African Americans. The novel is narrated in a flat, declarative style that belies its anger and fascination with the relentless forces of American energy in the modern world.

Doctorow's later novels include Loon Lake (1980) and Billy Bathgate (1989; National Book Critics Circle Award, 1990), fictional accounts of American society during the 1920s and 1930s. The two books feature gangsters, labor and union strife, and fables of upward mobility—all depicted through Doctorow's vivid scenes and deep irony. Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass (1817?-1895), the most prominent African American orator, journalist, and antislavery leader of the 19th century. Douglass, an escaped slave, campaigned for the end of slavery and published three versions of his autobiography. In these works he described his experiences as a slave in the South and as a fugitive in the North. He also depicted life as a free black before the American Civil War (1861-1865) and his rise to national prominence during and after the war. In later life he continued to work for full civil rights for blacks and held several government positions.

Douglass, whose original name was Frederick Augustus Bailey, was born in 1817 in Talbot County, Maryland. The child of a slave, Harriet Bailey, and an unknown white man, Frederick also became a slave because by law children followed the status of their mothers. He was separated from his mother at a very early age and never knew her well. He initially lived with his grandparents and then was placed under the care of a woman called Aunt Katy, who raised slave children on the plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd.

At the age of seven or eight, Frederick was sent to Baltimore to the home of Hugh and Sophia Auld, who were relatives of his master, Thomas Auld. Sophia Auld began to teach Frederick to read from the Bible until her husband forbade such instruction. Frederick had already learned basic literacy skills and secretly used books belonging to Sophia Auld's son to teach himself. When he was about 13, he bought his first book, The Columbian Orator. By studying this work, Frederick became convinced of the injustice of slavery and the right of all people to be free. From the book he also learned public speaking techniques that would later make him one of the greatest orators of his age.

Allen Drury

Allen Drury (1918-1998), American novelist, journalist, and editor, known for his anti- Communist stance. He drew on his experience as a political correspondent in Washington, D.C., for his popular novels of political intrigue. Drury’s novel Advise and Consent (1959) won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Allen Stuart Drury was born in Houston, Texas, and educated at Stanford University, graduating with a B.A. degree in 1939. He worked briefly as an editor for two newspapers in California and served in the United States Army from 1942 to 1943. From 1943 to 1945 he worked with the U.S. Senate staff of United Press International. Drury was national editor for Pathfinder magazine from 1947 to 1953. He served on staff with the Washington Evening Star from 1953 to 1954; on the U.S. Senate staff of The New York Times from 1954 to 1959; and as a political contributor to Reader's Digest from 1959 to 1962.

Drury's Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, Advise and Consent, is the story of the Senate battle over confirmation of a liberal nominee for secretary of state. Controversy erupts when the nominee is discovered to have had Communist affiliations in his youth. The book was made into a motion picture in 1962 by American director Otto Preminger.

In his subsequent works Drury was more direct in expressing his conservative political beliefs. His novels use melodramatic plots and realistic detail to portray Washington politics. He was especially outspoken in his condemnation of what he called the “liberal press” and the “liberal establishment.” In Anna Hastings: The Story of a Newspaperwoman (1978) and Mark Coffin, U.S.S.: A Novel of Capitol Hill (1979), Drury offered his critique on 1970s liberalism. In The Hill of Summer (1981) and The Roads of Earth (1984), he focused on a conservative government and its dealings with a liberal press and a belligerent Soviet Union. His later works include Toward What Bright Glory (1990); its sequel, Into What Far Harbor (1992); and A Thing of State (1995).

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), American poet, the son of former slaves, born in Dayton, Ohio. Dunbar was one of the first black writers to gain national prominence. He published his first volume of verse, Oak and Ivy (1893), at his own expense. His second book of poetry was Majors and Minors (1895). In 1896 the best of his poems appeared in a single volume, Lyrics of Lowly Life, with an introduction by American writer William Dean Howells. Howells noted that Dunbar was the first black poet to express the lyrical qualities of black life and the black dialect. After the publication of Lyrics of a Lowly Life Dunbar gave readings in the United States and Britain. He subsequently worked at the Library of Congress. For most of his career Dunbar wrote for a white audience, and he generally avoided racial issues in his work. He wrote several more volumes of poetry, as well as four novels, the best known of which is The Sport of the Gods (1902), the story of a black family in a Northern city in the United States. Dunbar also wrote four collections of short stories. His Collected Poems appeared in 1913.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American essayist and poet, who asserted in his writings the belief that each person has the power to transcend the material world and to see and grasp the infinite. The philosophical movement of which he was a leader has been given the name transcendentalism. Influenced by such schools of thought as English romanticism, Neoplatonism, and Hindu philosophy (see Hinduism), Emerson is noted for his skill in presenting his ideas eloquently and in poetic language.

Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803. Seven of his ancestors were ministers, and his father, William Emerson, was minister of the First Church (Unitarian) of Boston. Emerson graduated from Harvard University at the age of 18 and for the next three years taught school in Boston. In 1825 he entered Harvard Divinity School, and the next year he was sanctioned to preach by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. Despite ill health, Emerson delivered occasional sermons in churches in the Boston area. In 1829 he became minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) of Boston. That same year he married Ellen Tucker, who died 17 months later. In 1832 Emerson resigned from his pastoral appointment because of personal doubts about administering the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. On Christmas Day, 1832, he left the United States for a tour of Europe. He stayed for some time in England, where he made the acquaintance of such British literary notables as Walter Savage Landor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and William Wordsworth. His meeting with Carlyle marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

After nearly a year in Europe Emerson returned to the United States. In 1834 he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, and became active as a lecturer in Boston. His addresses—including “The Philosophy of History,” “Human Culture,” “Human Life,” and “The Present Age”—were based on material in his Journals (published posthumously, 1909-1914), a collection of observations and notes that he had begun while a student at Harvard. His most detailed statement of belief was reserved for his first published book, Nature (1836), which appeared anonymously but was soon correctly attributed to him. The volume received little notice, but it has come to be regarded as Emerson’s most original and significant work, offering the essence of his philosophy of transcendentalism. This idealist doctrine opposed the popular materialist and Calvinist (see Calvinism) views of life and at the same time voiced a plea for freedom of the individual from artificial William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962), American novelist, known for his epic portrayal, in some 20 novels, of the tragic conflict between the old and the new South. Although Faulkner's intricate plots and complex narrative style alienated many readers of his early writings, he was a literary genius whose powerful works and creative vision earned him the 1949 Nobel Prize in literature.

Faulkner was a towering figure in American literature during the first half of the 20th century. With Ernest Hemingway, he is usually considered one of the two greatest American novelists of his era. Faulkner was particularly noted for the eloquent richness of his prose style and for the unique blend of tragedy and humor in his works. His novels have a stunning emotional impact and his characters are highly memorable. The dramatic force and vividness of Faulkner’s best work is unsurpassed in modern fiction.

Using the decay and corruption of the South after the American Civil War (1861- 1865) as a background, Faulkner portrayed the tragedy that occurs when the traditional values of a society disintegrate. Some of his chief concerns were the nature of evil and guilt and the relationship between the past and the present. Despite his preoccupation with depravity and violence, however, Faulkner also wrote of people’s capacity to perform acts of nobility and goodness.

Edna Ferber

Edna Ferber (1887-1968), American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, whose works serve as a chronicle of American life in the early 20th century. Her 1924 novel, So Big, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1925.

Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. After graduating from Ryan High School in Appleton, Wisconsin, she became the first female journalist for the Appleton Daily Crescent. She later worked for the Milwaukee Journal and the Chicago Tribune.

Ferber discarded the manuscript for her first novel, Dawn O'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed (1911), but her mother retrieved it and submitted it to a publisher. In Fanny Herself (1917) Ferber directly addresses the issue of anti-Semitism, showing her characters gaining strength through adversity.

The best-selling novel So Big (1924) chronicles the life of a hardworking, principled farm woman and her materialistic son. Many of Ferber's works were adapted as motion pictures, including Show Boat (1926), about a late-19th-century Mississippi river showboat (filmed in 1936, remade 1951); Cimarron (1929), set during the late-19th-century land boom in Oklahoma (filmed in 1931, remade 1960); Giant (1952), about a wealthy Texas rancher (filmed in 1956); and Ice Palace (1958), which is set in Alaska and credited with helping that territory gain statehood in 1959 (filmed in 1960).

Ferber also wrote stage plays, the majority in collaboration with American playwright George S. Kaufman. She was working on a novel about Native Americans when she died of cancer in 1968.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), American writer, whose novels and short stories chronicled changing social attitudes during the 1920s, a period dubbed The Jazz Age by the author. He is best known for his novels The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), both of which depict disillusion with the American dream of self-betterment, wealth, and success through hard work and perseverance.

The son of a well-to-do Minnesota family, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul and attended Roman Catholic schools. While at Princeton University, Fitzgerald befriended Edmund Wilson, later an important literary critic, and John Peale Bishop, later a noted poet and novelist. Both men became important lifelong influences on Fitzgerald’s work. In 1917 Fitzgerald left Princeton because of academic difficulties and joined the United States Army, which was then entering World War I. While in basic training near Montgomery, Alabama, he met high-spirited, 18-year-old Zelda Sayre. They married in 1920 and she became the model for many of the female characters in his fiction.

Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), captured a mood of spiritual desolation in the aftermath of World War I and a growing, devil-may-care pursuit of pleasure among the American upper classes. The book met with both commercial and critical success. Thereafter, Fitzgerald regularly contributed short stories to such diverse periodicals as the high-tone Scribner’s Magazine and the mass- market Saturday Evening Post. He wrote about cosmopolitan life in New York City during Prohibition (a ban on the sale of alcoholic drinks from 1920 to 1933) as well as the American Midwest of his childhood. His early short fiction was collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922).

Financial success as well as celebrity enabled the Fitzgeralds to become integral figures in the Jazz Age culture that he portrayed in his writing. Fitzgerald’s partly autobiographical second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), is the story of a wealthy young couple whose lives are destroyed by their extravagant lifestyle. In 1925 Fitzgerald reached the peak of his powers with what many critics think is his finest work, The Great Gatsby. Written in crisp, concise prose and told by Nick Carraway, a satiric yet sympathetic narrator, it is the story of Jay Gatsby, a young American ne’er-do-well from the Midwest. Gatsby becomes a bootlegger (seller of illegal liquor) in order to attain the wealth and lavish way of life he feels are necessary to win the love of Daisy Buchanan, a married, upper-class woman who had once rejected him. The story ends tragically with Gatsby’s destruction. Although the narrator ultimately denounces Daisy and others who confuse the American dream with the pursuit of wealth and power, he sympathizes with those like Gatsby who pursue the dream for a redeeming end such as love.

From 1924 until 1931 the Fitzgeralds made their home on the French Riviera, where they became increasingly enmeshed in a culture of alcohol, drugs, and perpetual parties. Fitzgerald began a battle with alcoholism that went on for the rest of his life, and Zelda experienced a series of mental breakdowns in the early 1930s that eventually led to her institutionalization. Tender Is the Night is generally regarded as Fitzgerald’s dramatization of Zelda’s slide into insanity. It tells of a young doctor who marries one of his psychiatric patients. The novel met with a cool reception.

Poor reviews of Tender Is the Night alienated Fitzgerald from the literary scene and Zelda’s disintegration left him personally distraught. In 1937 he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he worked as a scriptwriter. While there, he began The Last Tycoon, a novel set amid corruption and vulgarity in the Hollywood motion-picture industry. At the age of 44 Fitzgerald died of a heart attack.

An edited version of his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published in 1941. In 1945 Edmund Wilson edited The Crack-Up, a collection of Fitzgerald’s essays and letters from the 1930s. Other collections of Fitzgerald’s writings include All The Sad Young Men (1926), Afternoon of an Author (1958), The Pat Hobby Stories (1962), and Letters (1963). Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), American printer, author, diplomat, philosopher, inventor, and scientist. Franklin was one of the most respected and versatile figures in colonial America. An exceptionally well-rounded man, he worked in many fields and succeeded in all of them. He wrote a classic autobiography, made lasting contributions to scientific theory, and devised many practical inventions. His many contributions to the cause of the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the newly formed federal government that followed rank him among the country’s greatest statesmen.

Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963), American poet, who drew his images from the New England countryside and his language from New England speech. Although Frost’s images and voice often seem familiar and old, his observations have an edge of skepticism and irony that make his work, upon rereading, never as old- fashioned, easy, or carefree as it first appears. In being both traditional and skeptical, Frost’s poetry helped provide a link between the American poetry of the 19th century and that of the 20th century. See also American Literature: Poetry. language he used was the uncomplicated speech of that region. Although Frost concentrates on ordinary subject matter, he evokes a wide range of emotions, and his poems often shift dramatically from humorous tones to tragic ones. Much of his poetry is concerned with how people interact with their environment, and though he saw the beauty of nature, he also saw its potential dangers.

Frost disliked free verse, which was popular with many writers of his time, and instead used traditional metrical and rhythmical schemes. He often wrote in the standard meter of blank verse (lines with five stresses) but ran sentences over several lines so that the poetic meter plays subtly under the rhythms of natural speech. The first lines of 'Birches' (1916) illustrate this distinctive approach to rhythm: 'When I see birches bend to left and right/ Across the lines of straighter darker trees,/ I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.”

Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), Lebanese American writer, also known as Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān, leader of a school of Arab American writers known as al-Rābitḥat al-qalamiyyah (The Bond of the Pen). These writers contributed to the development of a romantic school in modern Arabic poetry that emphasized the role of imagination and emotion and the power of nature. The Prophet (1923), which Gibran wrote in English, is a collection of aphorisms (concise sayings) and philosophical musings that has proved popular among young adult readers for generations.

Born into a Christian family in the village of Bsharrī in Lebanon, Gibran emigrated to the United States in 1894 and settled initially in Boston. In 1897 he went back to Lebanon to go to school. After several trips in each direction, he returned to Boston in 1903, a year in which he lost his sister, brother, and mother to tuberculosis. The young Lebanese émigré was helped by a number of prominent Bostonians, most notably Mary Haskell, a schoolteacher who became his major benefactor. In 1912 Gibran moved to New York City, and it was there that he published some of his most famous works and exerted an enormous influence on fellow Arab intellectuals and poets in exile. Gibran was a devoted nurturer of his own poetic persona, which makes it difficult to sort through the details of his career, but the extent of his influence was clearly profound.

Among Gibran’s writings in Arabic is an early collection of highly moralistic stories, ‘Arā’is al-murūj (1906; translated as Nymphs of the Valley, 1948), which concentrates on oppressive practices often associated with the institution of marriage and on the corruption of the clergy. Two later collections of tales are partially autobiographical: al-Arwāḥ al- mutamarridah (1908; Spirits Rebellious, 1946) and al-Ajniḥah al-mutakassirah (1912; The Broken Wings, 1957). His prose and poetic writings in Arabic have a tone that today seems somewhat sentimental, and they reflect the cadences (rhythmic sequences) of a then-recent translation of the Bible into Arabic. His use of imagery and choice of words and phrases is a clear reaction against a less personal, more formal style that was much favored in the Arab world at the time Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni, born in 1943, American poet, essayist, and lecturer, whose work reflects her pride in her African American heritage. She was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr., in Knoxville, Tennessee. She received a bachelor's degree with honors from Fisk University in 1967 and studied further at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work and Columbia University's School of Fine Arts. In 1970 Giovanni founded Niktom Limited, a publishing company.

The focus of Giovanni's work has changed frequently, mirroring her view that life itself is fluid and that change is necessary for growth. Her poetic language and rhythms reflect jazz and blues music, and she is considered a leader in the black oral poetry movement. Her earliest collections of poetry, including Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968) and Black Judgment (1968), capture the militant attitude of the civil rights movement during that time. In later work, Giovanni began to look inward and focus on family and personal relationships. Her works from this period include Re: Creation (1970), My House (1972), The Women and the Men (1975), and Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978). She also wrote Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet (1971). Subsequent works have stressed a global outlook and include Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983) and Sacred Cows ... and Other Edibles (1988). Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the Harlem Renaissance Through Poems (1996), an anthology of African American poetry edited by Giovanni, includes her commentary on the poets and their work. Giovanni has also written children's books and poems and has made recordings of her poems and of her conversations with prominent African American writers James Baldwin and Margaret Walker. John Grisham

John Grisham, born in 1955, American novelist, one of the most commercially successful writers ever. Grisham, who practiced as a lawyer before he became an author, helped popularize the legal thriller. In this type of novel, a sympathetic main character is often caught in a sinister conspiracy, and lawyers and courtroom proceedings figure prominently. Many of Grisham’s works have been adapted as motion pictures.

Grisham was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and grew up in Southaven, Mississippi. He earned a B.A. degree in accounting at Mississippi State University in 1977 and a law degree from the University of Mississippi in 1981. Grisham established a law practice and won election to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1983. Writing in his spare time, he published the novel A Time to Kill in 1989. The book, which chronicles the trial of an African American man accused of murdering two white men who raped his daughter, originally met with poor sales.

Grisham’s second novel, The Firm (1991), tells the story of an ambitious junior lawyer who discovers corruption and crime at his law firm. Paramount Studios, a motion-picture production company, bought the film rights to The Firm even before the book was accepted for publication. Both the book and the movie (starring Tom Cruise and directed by Sydney Pollack) were huge successes, and Grisham abandoned his law practice and quit the state legislature to concentrate on writing.

Grisham’s next novel, The Pelican Brief (1992), concerns a law student and a newspaper reporter who trace the murders of two Supreme Court Justices to a vast conspiracy. The book immediately became a bestseller, and the movie adaptation starred Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. After these two successes, A Time to Kill was republished and quickly became a bestseller.

Most of Grisham’s subsequent novels were also big sellers, and several were adapted as motion pictures. His other novels include The Client (1993), The Chamber (1994), The Rainmaker (1995), The Runaway Jury (1996), The Partner (1997),. Alex Haley

Alex Haley (1921-1992), American author, whose books helped popularize the study of black history and genealogy. Born in Ithaca, New York, Haley was educated at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College and at Elizabeth City Teachers College. From 1939 to 1959 he served in the United States Coast Guard, where he worked as a journalist. After retiring from the Coast Guard, Haley moved to New York City to pursue a writing career. In 1962 he interviewed American trumpeter Miles Davis for Playboy magazine. Also for Playboy, Haley interviewed American political activist Malcolm X, with whom he later collaborated to write The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). The book, which recounts the life of Malcolm X and the evolution of his political and religious thought, had a strong influence on black nationalists. It also received praise from critics and was widely read in colleges and universities.

After the success of The Autobiography, Haley began to research and write what would become his best-known work, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976). The book, a mixture of fact and fiction, chronicles Haley's ancestral history and the methods he used to trace his lineage to a West African village. To write the work, Haley invented certain unknown details of his family history. The series of character portraits that he created caused many Americans to become interested in genealogy. Roots, for which Haley received special citations from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award committees in 1977, was translated into 26 languages and made into a television miniseries (1977). An estimated 130 million Americans viewed at least one episode of the eight-part series.

Moss Hart

Moss Hart (1904-1961), American playwright and stage director, born in New York City. His first successful play, Once in a Lifetime, was produced in 1930 after he had rewritten it in collaboration with George S. Kaufman. Through 1940 Kaufman and Hart together produced a series of comedies notable for witty dialogue and well-drawn, somewhat exaggerated characters. Among them are You Can't Take It with You (1936; Pulitzer Prize, 1937), which celebrates a family of amiable eccentrics, and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939), a caricature of the writer and raconteur Alexander Woollcott. Hart was the sole author of the libretto for the musical comedy Lady in the Dark (1941), which he also directed, and his serious drama Christopher Blake (1946) won critical acclaim. He wrote the screenplay for the film Gentleman's Agreement (1947). Act One, an account of Hart's early years in the theater, appeared in 1959.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), American novelist, whose works are deeply concerned with the ethical problems of sin, punishment, and atonement. Hawthorne's exploration of these themes was related to the sense of guilt he felt about the roles of his ancestors in the 17th-century persecution of Quakers (see Friends, Society of) and in the 1692 witchcraft trials of Salem, Massachusetts. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, into an old Puritan family, Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825. He subsequently returned to his Salem home, living in semi-seclusion and writing. His work received little public recognition, however, and Hawthorne attempted to destroy all copies of his first novel, Fanshawe (1828), which he had published at his own expense. During this period he also contributed articles and short stories to periodicals. Several of the stories were published in Twice-Told Tales (1837), which, although not a financial success, established Hawthorne as a leading writer. These early works are largely historical sketches and symbolic and allegorical tales (see Allegory) dealing with moral conflicts and the effects of Puritanism on colonial New England.

Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller (1923-1999), American novelist, whose comic absurdist novel Catch-22 (1961) is a leading example of the black-humor movement in American fiction. The book served as an antiwar rallying point during the 1960s. Heller is known for showing language to be a frustrating and undependable method of communication in public discourse— military, diplomatic, philosophical, religious, and political—and for creating characters who try to escape the traps and inconsistencies of language.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Heller was educated at New York University. During World War II, he flew more than 60 missions in 1943 and 1944 as a B-25 wing bombardier for the United States Army Air Forces in Europe, earning the rank of first lieutenant. In the 1950s he worked as an advertising writer for high-circulation magazines such as Time, Look, and McCall's while writing short fiction and Catch-22. Heller used his combat experiences as background material for Catch-22, which features the airman Yossarian as the hero and moral center of a satirical depiction of life in the army. Yossarian is portrayed as one of the last rational people in an insane war. In the novel, the absurdities of military life are represented by the regulation “Catch-22” (a phrase Heller introduced). The regulation, which prevents airmen from escaping service in bombing missions by pleading insanity, states that any airman rational enough to want to be grounded cannot possibly be insane and therefore is fit to fly. Catch-22 was dramatized as a motion picture in 1970.

The themes and style of Heller's writing have been compared to those of Jewish American writers such as Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, as well as to those of American satirist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Heller's grotesque renderings of moral crises are also reminiscent of the works of American author Nathanael West and European writer Franz Kafka, and of such European antiwar novels as All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque and The Good Soldier Schweik (1920-1923) by Jaroslav Hasek.

Heller's other novels include Something Happened (1974), a study of the fearfulness and anxiety of an American businessman; Good as Gold (1979); . Lillian Hellman

Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), American dramatist, whose plays are distinguished for the forcefulness of their subject matter, usually a condemnation of personal and social evil. They are also notable for character development and expert construction.

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Hellman was educated at New York and Columbia universities. Her plays include The Children's Hour (1934), in which a malicious child's accusations of lesbianism ruin the lives of two schoolteachers; The Little Foxes (1939), in which the members of a Southern family struggle unscrupulously with one another for the family wealth after the American Civil War (1861-1865); and The Watch on the Rhine (1941), in which a leader of an anti-Nazi movement visiting the United States is forced to kill a Nazi agent. This play won her a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1941. Hellman's other plays include The Searching Wind (1944); Another Part of the Forest (1946); and The Lark (1955), a story of Joan of Arc, adapted from the play L'Alouette, by the French dramatist Jean Anouilh. In 1960 Toys in the Attic (1960) won Hellman a second New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. All of these plays have been made into films.

Hellman was awarded the 1970 National Book Award in arts and letters for her autobiography An Unfinished Woman (1969). This work was continued with Pentimento (1973), a collection of prose portraits of herself and others whose lives influenced hers; the 1977 movie Julia was based on one of these sketches. The autobiography ended with Scoundrel Time (1976), an account of her experiences during the McCarthy-era investigations of Communism in the United States (see McCarthy, Joseph Raymond).

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), American novelist and short-story writer, whose style is characterized by crispness, laconic dialogue, and emotional understatement. Hemingway's writings and his personal life exerted a profound influence on many American writers, both during his lifetime and since his death. Many of his works are regarded as classics of American literature.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and attended public schools in the area. After graduating from high school in 1917 he became a reporter for the Kansas City Star, but he left his job within a few months to serve as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I (1914-1918). He later transferred to the Italian infantry and was severely wounded.

After the war Hemingway served as a correspondent for the Toronto Star and then settled in Paris. While there, he was encouraged in creative work by the American expatriate writers Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. After 1927 Hemingway spent long periods of time in Key West, Florida, and in Spain and Africa. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), he returned to Spain as a newspaper correspondent. In World War II (1939-1945) he again was a correspondent and later was a reporter for the United States First Army; although he was not a soldier, he participated in several battles. After the war Hemingway settled near Havana, Cuba, and in 1958 he moved to Ketchum, Idaho.

Hemingway drew heavily on his experiences as an avid fisherman, hunter, and bullfighting enthusiast in much of his writing. His adventurous life brought him close to death several times: in the Spanish Civil War when shells burst inside his hotel room; in World War II when he was struck by a taxi during a blackout; and in 1954 when his airplane crashed in Africa.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894), American writer and physician, whose wit and intellectual vitality are representative of cultivated Boston society of the era. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Holmes was educated at Harvard College. He also studied in Europe, and in 1836 he received a medical degree from Harvard Medical School and began to practice medicine in Boston, Massachusetts. From 1847 to 1882 he taught at Harvard Medical School. Holmes's essay “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever” (1843) advanced the use of aseptic techniques in obstetrics and surgery.

Holmes was one of the so-called Boston Brahmins, a circle of intellectually and socially cultivated Bostonians. His fame as a writer of light, witty verse and as a raconteur was purely local until 1857, when he began writing a series of papers, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, for The Atlantic Monthly. These essays, published in book form in 1858, achieved immediate popularity for their lively expression of ideas. Over the Teacups, another collection of The Atlantic Monthly essays, published when Holmes was 80 years old, shows the same wit and vitality.

Although Holmes was less successful as a novelist, his first novel, Elsie Venner (1861), achieved some measure of success. In this depiction of the New England character, Holmes attacked the stern Calvinistic dogmas (see Calvinism) of earlier days.

Many of Holmes's poems became well known, including “Old Ironsides” (1830), “The Chambered Nautilus,” and “The Deacon's Masterpiece; or, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay” (both 1858). Other writings by Holmes include the essays Pages from an Old Volume of Life (1883) and the biography Ralph Waldo Emerson (1885).

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (1902-1967), American writer, known for using the rhythms of jazz and of everyday black speech in his poetry. Hughes was one of the first writers to portray the urban black experience realistically. His poems typically express the tribulations and sometimes the joys of ghetto life in plain, spirited language resembling the colloquial speech of American blacks.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, and educated at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He published his first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in Crisis magazine in 1921 and studied at Columbia University from 1921 to 1922. He then lived for a time in Paris. After his return to the United States, he worked as a busboy in Washington, D.C. There, in 1925, his literary skills were discovered after he left three of his poems beside the plate of American poet Vachel Lindsay, who recognized Hughes’s abilities and helped him publish his first volume of verse, Weary Blues (1926). Lindsay subsequently helped publicize Hughes’s work.

Hughes wrote in many genres, but he is best known for his poetry, in which he disregarded classical forms in favor of musical rhythms and the oral and improvisatory traditions of black culture. The musical rhythms are evident in the first lines of “Weary Blues”: “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,/ Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, ...” Many of Hughes’s poems are written in free verse and are documentary in tone, as in “Florida Road Workers.”

Makin’ a road For the rich old white men To sweep over in their big cars And leave me standin’ here.

In the late 1920s, when Hughes lived in New York City, he became a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance and was referred to as the Poet Laureate of Harlem. His innovations in form and voice influenced many black writers. Hughes also wrote the drama Mulatto (1935), which was performed on Broadway 373 times. Beginning in the 1930s, Hughes was active in social and political causes, using his poetry as a vehicle for social protest. He traveled to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Haiti, and Japan, and he served as the Madrid correspondent for a Baltimore, Maryland, newspaper during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), American writer and folklorist, whose anthropological study of her racial heritage, at a time when black culture was not a popular field of study, influenced the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1930s. Hurston’s work also had an impact on later black American authors such as Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison.

Born in Notasulga, Alabama and raised from an early age in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston was educated at Howard University, at Barnard College, and at Columbia University, where she studied under German American anthropologist Franz Boas. Eatonville was the first incorporated all-black town in the United States, and Hurston returned there after college for anthropological field study that influenced her later output in fiction as well as in folklore. Hurston also collected folklore in Jamaica, Haiti, Bermuda, and Honduras. Mules and Men (1935), one of her best-known folklore collections, was based on her field research in the American South. Tell My Horse (1938) described folk customs in Haiti and Jamaica.

As a fiction writer, Hurston is noted for her metaphorical language, her story-telling abilities, and her interest in and celebration of Southern black culture in the United States. Her best-known novel is Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in which she tracked a Southern black woman's search, over 25 years and 3 marriages, for her true identity and a community in which she can develop that identity. Hurston's prolific literary output also includes such novels as Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948); short stories; plays; journal articles; and an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Hurston's work was not political, but her characters' use of dialect, her manner of portraying black culture, and her conservatism created controversy within the black community. Throughout her career she addressed issues of race and gender, often relating them to the search for freedom.

In her later years Hurston experienced health problems, and she died impoverished and unrecognized by the literary community. Her writings, however, were rediscovered in the 1970s by a new generation of black writers, notably Alice Walker, and many of Hurston's works were republished. In 1995 a two-volume set of her fiction and nonfiction writings was published. Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project appeared in 1999. John Irving

John Irving, born in 1942, American author, whose novels often involve colorful characters who face difficult personal situations. John Winslow Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, and attended the Universities of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), Vienna (Austria), and New Hampshire. Irving joined the Department of English at Mount Holyoke College in 1967, and two years later his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published. This was followed by The Water-Method Man (1972) and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974).

Irving's fourth novel, The World According to Garp (1978; motion picture, 1982), which follows the tumultuous life of a writer, was such a commercial success that Irving was able to leave teaching and devote full time to writing. The book was nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Irving's other works include The Hotel New Hampshire (1981; motion picture, 1984), The Cider House Rules (1985; motion picture, 1999), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), A Son of the Circus (1994), Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996), and A Widow for One Year (1998). He received an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for The Cider House Rules. His insights into the process of adapting a novel for the screen are recorded in the memoir My Movie Business (1999).

Henry James

Henry James (1843-1916), American expatriate writer, whose masterly fiction juxtaposed American innocence and European experience in a series of intense, psychologically complex works. James’s work is characterized by leisurely pacing and subtle delineation of character rather than by dramatic incidents or complicated plots. His major writings, highly sensitive examples of the objective psychological novel, deal with the world of leisure and sophistication he had grown to know intimately in Europe.

In his early novels and tales, James’s theme was the impact of European culture on Americans traveling or living abroad. For James, America and Europe each had both a positive and a negative side. The positive aspect of the American character was its vitality, reliability, and innocence. The negative side was a tendency to oversimplify life and to mistrust beauty, art, and sensuality. The European character, James felt, was positive in its appreciation of beautiful and pleasurable experience as well as in its sophisticated awareness of the complexities of human nature. Its negative side was its lack of moral standards and its expedience. For example, to get what they want—usually money—James’s European characters deceive their American friends, manipulating, betraying, and even destroying them.

The publication of Daisy Miller (1879), a novella about a naive American girl in conflict with the conventions of European society, brought James favorable critical attention. His novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881) established his reputation as a major literary figure.

The Portrait of a Lady concerns a young American woman, Isabel Archer, who comes to England after her father dies. Archer is ardent, vibrant, hungry for experience, and committed to her personal freedom. She forms a friendship with an older woman, Madame Merle, who introduces her to Gilbert Osmond, the man Archer marries. Archer believes Osmond to be a man of impeccable taste with whom she can share an intense but liberated life. Instead he turns out to be a cynical dilettante and totally conventional. Eventually Archer learns that Osmond and Merle have been lovers and have plotted her marriage to get hold of her fortune.

Helen Keller

Helen Keller (1880-1968), American author and lecturer, who was deaf and blind and who served as an inspiration for other people with disabilities. She was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of well-to-do parents: Arthur Keller, a former officer in the Confederate army, and Kate Adams, who was related to Robert E. Lee. When 19 months old, Helen was stricken with an acute illness that left her deaf and blind. In a short time she forgot the few words she knew and became silent. She made use of signs to get what she wanted, but when her parents or the family servants did not understand her, her frustration found an outlet in screaming and tantrums.

In the 1880s people who were both deaf and blind were classified in law as idiots. A doctor who examined Keller, however, thought that her intelligence could be developed. On the advice of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, who was also a teacher of deaf people, Keller’s parents sent for a teacher from the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts. Anne Mansfield Sullivan (later Macy), a 19-year-old orphan of Irish immigrants, was chosen for the task. Thus began an association that lasted until Sullivan’s death in 1936.

Sullivan’s first task was to break through the barrier of darkness and silence that surrounded the child. By means of a finger alphabet, Sullivan “spelled” onto the palm of Keller’s hand the names of familiar things, such as doll and puppy. The first big achievement came when Sullivan pumped water from a well onto Keller’s hand and spelled out the word for water, and Keller suddenly grasped that everything has its own name. Two years later she was reading and writing fluently using the Braille system. When Keller was ten, she begged to relearn how to speak. At first this seemed impossible, but Sullivan discovered that Keller could learn sounds by placing her fingers on her teacher’s larynx and sensing the vibrations. The moving account of how Sullivan taught her to speak is told in Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life (1902).

Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor, born in 1942, American writer and broadcaster, creator and host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” a popular syndicated series on public radio. Born in Anoka, Minnesota, Keillor graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1966. As a student, he wrote for a campus literary magazine and was staff announcer on the campus radio station. As a graduate, he continued with the station while working on short stories. In 1969 The New Yorker magazine accepted one of his stories. From 1968 to 1982 he was the host of a classical music program on Minnesota Public Radio. While there, he broadcast mock commercials for firms located in the mythical town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.

Keillor conceived the idea for his radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” while researching a 1974 article for The New Yorker on the Grand Ole Opry of Nashville, Tennessee. Like the Opry shows, “A Prairie Home Companion” blends music, comedy, and storytelling with a cast of rustic fictional characters. Keillor’s program was first broadcast in 1974 over a network of 30 public radio stations in the Midwest. It was broadcast nationally as a radio special in 1979 and subsequently was heard regularly on a few stations. With the creation of American Public Radio (now Public Radio International) in 1982, more than 200 stations began carrying the program. The show, which won a 1981 Peabody Award and a 1987 Grammy Award, ran until 1987, when Keillor announced his retirement. He returned, however, in 1989 with “American Radio Company of the Air,” a similar program broadcast from New York City. The program later moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, and in 1993 it resumed the name “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Keillor’s books include Happy to Be Here (1982); Lake Wobegon Days (1985); Leaving Home (1987); We Are Still Married (1989), a collection of stories and letters; WLT: A Radio Romance (1991); The Book of Guys (1993); the children’s book Cat, You Better Come Home (1995); and Wobegon Boy (1997). Later books include the romantic comedy Love Me (2003) and Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America (2004), a defense of liberalism. Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton (1895-1966), American motion-picture actor, director, and screenwriter, whose deadpan expressions, superb timing, acrobatic skills, and brilliantly cinematic gags made him one of the major figures of silent-film comedy.

Born Joseph Francis Keaton in Piqua, Kansas, he was the son of touring vaudeville performers, with whom he first appeared on stage at the age of three, continuing to perform with The Three Keatons for almost 20 years. He began his motion-picture career in 1917, supporting the established comedian Fatty Arbuckle in The Butcher Boy, and over three years he made more than 12 other short films. When Arbuckle signed with Paramount Pictures in 1920, his producer, Joseph Schenck, decided to set up a new production unit and make films with Keaton, whom he recognized as a rising talent. They completed 20 short films—many of great brilliance—in three years, and with freedom to write, develop, and direct his own films, Keaton flourished. He created the distinctive persona that would thereafter characterize his work: the quiet, undemonstrative, determined man with a blank countenance (he was sometimes called The Great Stone Face) who seemed oblivious to danger and stoically able to endure endless frustrations. Keaton acclimated himself to the film medium, mastering its techniques and reveling in the opportunities they offered for creating unique comic effects.

Keaton's first feature-length film was The Saphead (1920), but more notable early efforts were The Three Ages (1923) and Our Hospitality (1923). In 1924 he created the first of what are considered his masterpieces, Sherlock, Jr., a fantasy in which a projectionist falls asleep and dreams himself onto the screen. This was closely followed by The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1927), and Steamboat Bill (1927), among others. The General, with its mock-heroic plot and meticulously realized American Civil War setting, is often considered his greatest work. In 1928 Schenck sold Keaton's contract to Metro- Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), and Keaton's decline began. Although The Cameraman (1928) was a solid feature, studio demands, denial of autonomy, and Keaton's own alcoholism encroached steadily on the quality of his later films. Elia Kazan

Elia Kazan (1909-2003), American stage and motion-picture director and novelist. Kazan directed some of the most famous plays and movies of his time, but his career was plagued by controversy after he cooperated with the notorious anti-Communist congressional hearings that ruined the careers of many Hollywood screenwriters, directors, and actors.

Born Elia Kazanjoglous of Greek parents in Constantinople (now İstanbul), Turkey, he immigrated to the United States in 1913. A member of the Group Theatre and later of the Actors Studio, Kazan became known as a creative and sensitive stage director through his work on such Broadway plays as The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Death of a Salesman (Tony Award for direction, 1949), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). He was also the director of such successful films as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), Panic in the Streets (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952), East of Eden (1955), Baby Doll (1956), and Splendor in the Grass (1961).

Kazan was a proponent of the acting philosophy developed by Russian director and author Konstantin Stanislavsky. The Stanislavsky Method involves deep concentration and the arousing of emotions that allow the actor to become absorbed in the role. Known for his ability to work well with actors, Kazan received best director Academy Awards for Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and On the Waterfront (1954). The latter captured the best picture award and featured a memorable performance by a young Marlon Brando.

It was in the midst of directing some of his greatest films that Kazan was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952. He had been a member of the American Communist Party for a short time in the 1930s, but left the group after becoming disenchanted. Other figures in Hollywood refused to reveal any names to the committee and were blacklisted (informally barred from working in the industry). Kazan decided to preserve his career by giving the committee the names of those whom he had known in the Communist Party. The move created a rift between Kazan and many in the film industry.

When he had trouble finding good directing projects, Kazan turned to writing. He eventually made motion pictures out of two of his own novels about Greek immigrants, America America (1963) and The Arrangement (1969). Richard Wright

Richard Wright (author) (1908-1960), American writer, whose novels and short stories helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. Wright publicly opposed racial prejudice and was perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson in the United States for his generation of blacks. His most acclaimed works are the novel Native Son (1940) and the autobiographical memoir Black Boy (1945).

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born outside of Natchez, Mississippi. His father left the family when Wright was still young and his mother, a schoolteacher, was stricken with a paralyzing illness when he was a child. Raised mostly by relatives, Wright left school at the age of 17. He subsequently moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he worked at odd jobs and began to educate himself.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Wright worked on various writing and editing projects for the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago. Wright’s first book, Uncle Tom's Children (1938; revised 1940), consisted of four novellas that dramatize racial prejudice. The book won first prize in a writing competition sponsored by the Writers’ Project. In 1937 Wright moved to New York City. He worked there on a Writers’ Project guidebook to the city entitled New York Panorama (1938) and wrote the book’s essay on the Harlem neighborhood. Wright had joined the Communist Party while in Chicago, and once in New York he published reviews and political essays in Communist Party publications such as New Masses. Wright remained an active member of the party into the 1940s before leaving over ideological issues.

After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939, Wright completed his novel Native Son. The book explores the violent psychological pressures that drive Bigger Thomas, a young black man, to murder. In the story, Thomas, a 20-year-old from the largely black South Side of Chicago, takes a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family whose fortune is based on real estate dealings in black neighborhoods. The daughter of the family seduces Bigger, and he accidentally smothers her to death when he fears they will be discovered together in bed. The quick-paced melodrama of the first half of the novel then yields to a more deliberate treatment of Bigger’s trial for murder. In the second half of the book, Wright presents a careful psychological and social examination of the story’s events—and of American race relations. Native Son was an immediate sensation with white and black readers, and this wide appeal helped make Wright the first black American writer to have a Book-of-the-Month club selection. With dramatist Paul Green, Wright adapted the story for the stage in 1941. In 1950 he produced a film version.

Wright moved to France in the late 1940s. He published several more novels during his lifetime, including The Outsider (1953), which describes an African American character's involvement with the Communist Party in Chicago; and The Long Dream (1958), about a boy’s childhood in Mississippi. The short-story collection Eight Men (1961) and the novel Lawd Today (1963) were published after Wright’s death. Haiku: This Other World (published posthumously, 1998) is a collection of haiku poems that Wright wrote shortly before his death.

Wright also produced a considerable body of nonfiction. His first autobiographical work, Black Boy, reveals in bitter personal terms the devastating impact of racial prejudice on young black males in the United States. Black Boy points out the many psychological and cultural similarities between 20th-century racism and its predecessor, slavery.

Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), American writer, whose novels had an enormous impact on the readers of his own generation.

Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, on October 3, 1900, and educated at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. After a brief sojourn abroad, he served from 1924 to 1930 as an English instructor at New York University in New York City. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), was an immediate success, enabling Wolfe to devote himself entirely to writing. Strongly autobiographical in content and marked by an almost overwhelming emotional intensity, Look Homeward, Angel exhibits the stylistic influence of the American novelists Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and of the Irish writer James Joyce. A sequel, Of Time and the River, was published in 1935. The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) completed Wolfe's cycle of autobiographical novels. The central theme of the cycle is the search by an idealistic young man for enduring values. Despite the corruption he finds in the society around him, he retains a nostalgic, poetic faith in the essential goodness of the American people and the greatness of their land. Wolfe's writing is characterized by a fervent lyricism and expansiveness which has been compared to that of the American poet Walt Whitman. Wolfe wrote so unrestrainedly and at such great length that his works had to be cut drastically by his editor Maxwell Perkins. Although they continued to be read and studied, they were not really popular with young people of the post-World War II era.

Naomi Wolf

Naomi Wolf, born in 1962, American feminist writer, best known for her book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (1990). Wolf was born in San Francisco and educated at Yale University. She attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. While still in college, Wolf twice received an Academy of American Poets Prize for her poetry. Her poetry, journalism, and book reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Ms., Esquire, and The New Republic. She also gained recognition as a lecturer on women's issues. Wolf's two popular and controversial books, The Beauty Myth and Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It (1993), became international bestsellers and gained Wolf much attention, making her perhaps the youngest literary celebrity of the women's movement.

In The Beauty Myth, Wolf argued that the pressure to be beautiful had become contemporary culture's most effective form of control over women. According to Wolf, women flooded the workforce, thereby posing an economic threat to men. Society's expectation that women cultivate personal beauty served as the latest weapon against women, Wolf asserted, because it required that women spend so much time, money, and emotional effort trying to be beautiful that they were left with no energy to compete economically.

Whereas The Beauty Myth was an angry, militantly feminist book, Wolf's second work, Fire With Fire, made its appeal to a broader range of women. According to Fire With Fire, women already had political power but hadn't yet learned to use it. Wolf argued that the women's movement had erred by stressing “victim feminism” and alienating women who wanted, for example, to be attractive, to get married, to make money, or to wear cosmetics. P. G. Wodehouse

P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), Anglo-American writer. Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born in Guilford, England, and educated at Dulwich College. From 1903 to 1909 he edited the humorous “By the Way” column for the London Globe. His reputation as a humorous novelist was established with Psmith in the City (1910). He maintained his enormous popularity with nearly 100 novels depicting amusing characters in absurd and intricate situations. Among them are Very Good Jeeves (1930), The Butler Did It (1957), and Bachelors Anonymous (1974). Perhaps best known of his fictional creations are the hapless young gentleman Bertie Wooster and his efficient butler, Jeeves. Wodehouse was also the coauthor of numerous plays and musical comedies, including O, Kay (1926) and Rosalie (1928), produced mostly in America, where he did much of his early writing. During the 1940s he was interned in Germany. In 1955 he became an American citizen, and in 1975, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Margaret Wilson

Margaret Wilson (1882-1973), American writer, best known for her novels, set in the United States and India, that explore cultural issues such as the effects of religion on individuals and society's injustices to women. Her first novel, The Able McLaughlins (1923), was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Margaret Wilhemina Wilson was born into a family of Scottish Presbyterian farmers in Traer, Iowa. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1904, she became a missionary in the United Presbyterian Church and spent six years in India, where she taught in a girls' school and worked in a hospital. She entered the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1912, but she later left to care for her aging father. During this period she completed her first two novels: The Able McLaughlins and The Kenworthys (1925). The first, her most acclaimed work, details the experiences of a Scottish Presbyterian family living on the American frontier in the 1860s. It explores the harmful effects of rigid religious beliefs on individuals and communities. In 1923, after her father's death, Wilson moved to England and married Colonel G. D. Turner, an administrator in the British penal system. Her husband died in 1946 and she remained in England, but, due to poor health, she did not write in her later years.

Two of Wilson's novels, Daughters of India (1928) and Trousers of Taffeta (1929), draw on her years in India and are notable for the Christian and feminist fervor that Wilson brought to her observations of the poor conditions in which many Indians— particularly women—were forced to live. Wilson also wrote nonfiction books, including The Crime of Punishment (1931), in which she condemned contemporary ideas about prison systems. Her concerns about the legal system and social justice in the United States also found expression in her novel The Dark Duty (1931).

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson (author) (1895-1972), American author and critic, regarded by many as the foremost man of letters and molder of literary taste of his time in the United States. Wilson wrote about a variety of subjects and in many forms—including the novel, the short story, drama, verse, history, and biography—but he was preeminently a social and literary critic.

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, Wilson was educated at Princeton University. Later he was an editor with Vanity Fair and the New Republic and a book reviewer for The New Yorker. His lucid, elegant literary criticism was concerned with the social and psychological forces that influenced writers as well as with the literary aspects of their work. Wilson's books were often based on his reviews, which he wove together into continuous narratives. His first major work was Axel's Castle (1931), a critical examination of the symbolist influence on the English poet T. S. Eliot, the Irish writer James Joyce, and others (see Symbolist Movement). The Wound and the Bow (1941) dealt with the relationship between the emotional lives of writers and their work. Concerned with social problems, at the onset of the Great Depression Wilson wrote The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (1932). Attracted by radical political movements, he wrote To the Finland Station (1940), about the theoretical foundation of the Russian Revolution. His Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), a collection of short stories, was banned for a time as obscene. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) is considered one of his finest critical studies. Wilson's other works include the novel I Thought of Daisy (1929); The Dead Sea Scrolls (1955), an archaeological report; and the autobiographical Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York (1971). Wilson's notes were published posthumously as The Twenties (1975), The Thirties (1980), The Forties (1983), The Fifties (1986), and The Sixties (1993).

August Wilson

August Wilson (1945-2005), American playwright, whose plays chronicled black American life in the 20th century, with each play representing one decade. Many of Wilson’s dramas deal with conflict between African Americans who accept mainstream American culture and those who want to embrace their African heritage and their role in the black community.

Frederick August Kittel was born in a poor black neighborhood called The Hill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and most of his plays are set there. He later adopted his mother’s maiden name, Wilson. In the ninth grade Wilson dropped out of school after a teacher accused him of plagiarism because his work was considered “too good” for a black student. He continued his education independently through extensive reading.

During the 1960s Wilson became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1968 he founded the Black Horizons Theater Company, a community theater in Pittsburgh devoted to addressing issues of black Americans. A decade later he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and began writing plays for a small theater company there.

In 1985 Wilson’s first major work, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play. It portrays the exploitation of Ma Rainey—a real- life, early blues star—by white music executives. Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his play Fences (1985), in which an embittered ex-baseball player struggles to balance his family obligations with his desire for freedom. In 1990 Wilson won a second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson (1987), in which a brother and sister argue over whether to sell a piano that has tragic significance in their family history: The piano was once traded for their grandparents, who were slaves.

Wilson moved to Seattle, Washington, in the early 1990s and spent the rest of his life there. His other plays include Jitney (1982), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986), Two Trains Running (1990), Seven Guitars (1995), King Hedley II (1999), and Gem of the Ocean (2003). Just before his death Wilson completed his ten-play cycle with Radio Golf (2005). He also published poetry. William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American writer, whose use of simple, direct language marked a new course in 20th-century poetry. Unlike some other writers of his time, such as T. S. Eliot, Williams avoided complexity and obscure symbolism. Instead, he produced lyrics, such as this one from “January Morning” (1938), that contain few difficult references: “All this—/ was for you, old woman./ I wanted to write a poem/ that you would understand.” Williams’s greatest achievement as a writer was the epic Paterson (5 volumes, 1946-1958), which is a landmark of 20th-century poetry. Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His father, William George Williams, was from Britain, and his mother, Helene Raquel Williams, was a Puerto Rican-born woman of Basque and French descent. Williams grew up in a household that spoke French, Spanish, and British English. He entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1902, and while there formed friendships with several poets who would go on to great fame: Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Hilda Doolittle. After an internship in New York City, Williams studied pediatrics at the University of Leipzig in Germany. By late 1912, Williams had returned to Rutherford, set up a private practice, and married his fiancée of several years, Florence Hermann.

Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), American playwright and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, whose works are set largely in the American South.

Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911, and named Thomas Lanier Williams. He spent most of his youth in St. Louis, Missouri. After intermittent attendance at the University of Missouri and Washington University, he received a B.A. degree from the University of Iowa in 1938. He worked at a variety of odd jobs until 1945, when he first appeared on the Broadway scene as the author of The Glass Menagerie. This evocative “memory play” won the New York Drama Critics' Circle award as the best play of the season. It was filmed in 1950 and has been performed on the stage throughout the world. The emotion-charged A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) has been called the best play ever written by an American. It was successfully filmed (1951), and the play won Williams his first Pulitzer Prize in drama. He was awarded another Pulitzer for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (stage, 1954; film, 1958). All three of these plays contain the poetic dialogue, the symbolism, and the highly original characters for which Williams is noted and are set in the American South, a regional background which the author used to create a remarkable blend of decadence, nostalgia, and sensuality. Other successful plays by Williams are Summer and Smoke (1948), rewritten as Eccentricities of a Nightingale (produced 1964); The Rose Tattoo (1950); the long one-act Suddenly Last Summer (1958); Sweet Bird of Youth (1959); and Night of the Iguana (1961). Although Williams continued to write for the theater, he was unable to repeat the success of most of his early works. One of his last plays was Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), based on the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. Williams died in New York City, February 25, 1983.

Two collections of Williams's many one-act plays were published: 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946) and American Blues (1948). Williams's fiction includes two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) and Moïse and the World of Reason (1975) and four volumes of short stories—One Arm and Other Stories (1948), Hard Candy (1954), The Knightly Quest (1969), and Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974). Jody Williams

Jody Williams, born in 1950, American political activist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Williams shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize (see Nobel Prizes) with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), an organization she helped found. She led the ICBL’s efforts to promote the Mine Ban Treaty, an international agreement to ban the manufacture, sale, and use of land mines (see Mine). More than 120 nations signed the agreement in 1997.

Williams was born in Rutland, Vermont. She graduated in 1972 from the University of Vermont with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and in 1984 she received a master's degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. Shortly after receiving her master’s degree she became a coordinator of the Nicaragua-Honduras Education Project, for which she organized and led a series of private fact-finding missions in Central America for United States policymakers. From 1986 to 1992 she served as deputy director of Medical Aid for El Salvador, a humanitarian relief organization. Her work in Central America brought to her attention the devastating effects on civilians of land mines placed during civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s.

In 1991 Robert Mueller, head of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, asked Williams to coordinate the establishment of a coalition to ban land mines. In October 1992 Williams and representatives from Vietnam Veterans of America and five other organizations met to formally launch the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), American author, whose plays and novels, usually based on allegories and myths, have reached a worldwide audience through various versions. Thornton Niven Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and educated at Oberlin College and Yale University. While teaching, he achieved success as both a novelist and a playwright. In his compelling novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927; Pulitzer Prize, 1928), Wilder united the lives of a disparate group of travelers in colonial Peru through a single event, the disaster in which they die. His other novels include The Ides of March (1948), an epistolary work about the Roman statesman Julius Caesar, and The Eighth Day (1967), about the events surrounding a murder. For the latter work Wilder was awarded the 1968 National Book Award. Theophilus North (1973) is a group of short stories.

Wilder's direct, accessible style also works well in drama. His first full-length play, the allegorical The Trumpet Shall Sound (1926), preceded a long list of popular one-act plays and translations. An enduring work of American drama is Our Town (1938), a touching look at small-town American life that brought Wilder the 1938 Pulitzer Prize in drama. It was theatrically experimental for its time, performed on a stage without scenery or props, using stepladders to represent the upstairs of a house and folding chairs to indicate a graveyard. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), a comic view of human life through the ages, won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize in drama.

One of Wilder's most successful works, The Matchmaker (1954), derived ultimately from a 19th-century Austrian comedy, was made into a motion picture in 1958 and adapted in 1964 as the musical comedy Hello, Dolly!, which was filmed in turn in 1969.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), American writer, famous for a series of historical novels for children known collectively as the Little House books. Laura Ingalls was born near Pepin, Wisconsin. She trained to be a teacher and taught for several years before marrying farmer Almanzo Wilder in 1885. After enduring a series of hardships, they moved to Missouri in 1894 and settled on Rocky Ridge Farm near Mansfield.

When Wilder was in her sixties, her daughter urged her to write down her vivid childhood memories of growing up on the American frontier. The Little House series, loosely based on Wilder's life, gives a detailed and realistic portrayal of pioneer family life, full of warmth, humor, and drama. Beginning with Little House in the Big Woods (1932), the Wisconsin cabin in which she was born, Wilder chronicles her family's westward migration to the Little House on the Prairie (1935) in Kansas, to Minnesota On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), and finally to the Dakota Territory By the Shores of Silver Lake (1939). The Long Winter (1940), Little Town on the Prairie (1941), and These Happy Golden Years (1943) describe Laura's teenage years, her first teaching assignment, and her marriage to Wilder, whose childhood story is told in Farmer Boy (1933).

Three books were published after her death: The First Four Years (1971), the last in the Little House series, which tells of Laura and Almanzo's early married life; On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, with her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane (1962); and West from Home (1974), a collection of letters she wrote to Almanzo while visiting San Francisco in 1915. Roger Lea MacBride, editor of West From Home and Lane's adopted grandson, has written two books which continue the Wilders' story and which are told from Rose's perspective; Little House on Rocky Ridge (1993) and Little Farm in the Ozarks (1994).

Starting with On the Banks of Plum Creek, the last five Little House books published during Wilder's lifetime were named Newbery Honor Books (see Newbery Medal). In 1954 she was the recipient of the first Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, given by the American Library Association. Named in her honor, this award is presented every three years to an author or illustrator who has made a “substantial and lasting contribution” to literature for children. Wilder's Little House books were the inspiration for a popular television series, “Little House on the Prairie,” which aired in the 1970s and 1980s. Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder (1906-2002), American motion-picture director, writer, and producer, whose best films—usually comedies—employ his distinctive dialogue to elucidate a darkly satirical view of human nature. Born Samuel Wilder in Vienna, Austria, he later moved to Berlin, Germany, where he worked first as a journalist and then as a screenwriter. Wilder left Germany after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, and in 1934 he immigrated to the United States, later becoming a U.S. citizen. Beginning in 1937, Wilder found his initial niche in Hollywood, California, as a screenwriter. From 1938 he teamed with American screenwriter Charles Brackett, with whom he was to carry on a long and successful collaboration until 1950. Together they wrote such memorably sophisticated screenplays as those for Midnight (1939), Ninotchka (1939), Arise, My Love (1940), Hold Back the Dawn (1941), and Ball of Fire (1941). Although the screenplays were well received, Wilder was increasingly dissatisfied with the way they were directed, so, following in the footsteps of American director Preston Sturges (who had also begun as a writer), he succeeded in persuading the studio to let him direct his own scripts.

Wilder's American directorial debut, The Major and the Minor (1942), was a success, leading to a series of impressive films made by Wilder and Brackett in the 1940s: Five Graves to Cairo (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), A Foreign Affair (1948), and Sunset Boulevard (1950). The Lost Weekend won Academy Awards for best picture, best director, and best screenplay, and Sunset Boulevard won an Academy Award for best screenplay (which Wilder and Brackett shared with D. M. Marshman, Jr., their collaborator on the Sunset Boulevard script). Sunset Boulevard is often acclaimed as Wilder's greatest film, and it represented the culmination of his work with Brackett.

For a few years, Wilder wrote and directed his own screenplays (many of them adaptations of theatrical material), including The Big Carnival (1951), Stalag 17 (1953), Sabrina (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), and Witness for the Prosecution (1957; based on a courtroom drama by English writer Agatha Christie). For all of these films—and those that followed—he was his own producer. He then collaborated with screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond. After an homage to Wilder's idol, German-born director Ernst Lubitsch, with Love in the Afternoon (1957), the two created a series of brilliant comedies that continued to display Wilder's cynical, disenchanted view of both human nature and modern life in general: Some Like It Hot (1959). Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur, born in 1921, American poet and university professor, born in New York City, known for imbuing formal and traditional verse forms with urbanity and wit. The Beautiful Changes (1947) was Wilbur's first volume of verse; Things of This World (1956) won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Other volumes include Ceremony (1950), Advice to a Prophet (1961), Walking to Sleep (1969), The Mind Reader: New Poems (1976), and New and Collected Poems (1989), for which he won a second Pulitzer Prize. Loudmouse (1963) and Opposites (1973) are collections of poems for children. Wilbur also translated two plays, The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, both by French dramatist Molière, and he collaborated with American playwright Lillian Hellman on the libretto for a 1956 musical version of Candide, by French writer Voltaire. Wilbur's literary criticism has been collected in Responses: Prose Pieces 1953-1976 (1976). In 1987 he was appointed United States poet laureate, succeeding Robert Penn Warren. Wilbur was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 1994.

Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel, born in 1928, Jewish novelist, journalist, and lecturer, the most eloquent spokesperson for the survivors of the Nazi (see National Socialism) genocide during World War II (1939-1945). Although his concern for human suffering began with the Holocaust, it later encompassed the plight of other oppressed or persecuted peoples. Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his work in promoting human rights.

Wiesel was born in Sighet, Romania, on September 30, 1928. He received a Jewish religious education. In 1944 German Nazis deported Wiesel’s family and all other Jews in their community to concentration camps in Poland. Wiesel and his father went to Auschwitz. Both of Wiesel’s parents and his younger sister died in concentration camps during the war. After the war, Wiesel studied at the University of Paris and worked as a newspaper correspondent. He moved to the United States after a decade in France, and in 1957 became a staff member of the Yiddish-language newspaper Der Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) in New York City. In 1963 he became a U.S. citizen. From 1972 to 1976 Wiesel taught Judaic studies at City College in New York. He was appointed a professor of humanities at Boston University in 1976. From 1980 to 1986, Wiesel served as chairman of the U.S. President’s Commission on the Holocaust. He received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1985 and established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity in 1987.

On a writing assignment, Wiesel interviewed French novelist François Mauriac, who encouraged him to write about his experiences during the Holocaust. Wiesel’s first book, La Nuit (published in 1958; translated as Night, 1960), describes his experiences at Auschwitz, the inhumanity of the concentration camps, and the death both of his father and his God. Writing in French, Wiesel has also portrayed the Holocaust experience in fiction. Les Portes de la forêt (1964; The Gates of the Forest, 1966) depicts the extermination of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, the meaninglessness of this brutality, and the impossibility of understanding such events in religious terms. Yet if humanity is “hope turned to dust, … the opposite is equally true.”

Wiesel’s other novels also refer in some way to the horrors suffered by prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps. They include L’aube (1960; Dawn, 1961); Le jour (1961; The Accident, 1962); La ville de la chance: roman (1962; The Town Beyond the Wall, 1964). John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), American poet, born near Haverhill, Massachusetts, and largely self-educated. The young poet's earliest work attracted the attention of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Free Press newspaper in Newburyport, Massachusetts, who asked him to contribute articles. Thus Whittier began a long career as contributing editor, essayist, and poet. A deeply religious man, Whittier followed the Quaker faith of his parents and is often called the Quaker poet. As a Quaker deeply concerned with politics and social welfare, he served in the Massachusetts legislature, was founder of the Liberty party in 1839, and participated in the founding of the Republican party in 1854. For more than 30 years, Whittier devoted himself to the abolition of slavery in the United States.

Whittier's earliest works, including his Legends of New England in Prose and Verse (1831), were pastoral evocations of the rugged farm life of New England. With the end of the American Civil War, Whittier returned to his pastoral themes. Often considered his masterpiece and certainly his most popular work is the narrative poem Snow-Bound (1866). Based on the poet's childhood memories, this work is representative of his sincere, moralistic, yet emotional style.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman (1819-1892), American poet, whose work boldly asserts the worth of the individual and the oneness of all humanity. Whitman’s defiant break with traditional poetic concerns and style exerted a major influence on American thought and literature. Born near Huntington, New York, Whitman was the second of a family of nine children. His father was a carpenter. The poet had a particularly close relationship with his mother. When Whitman was four years old, his family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he attended public school for six years before being apprenticed to a printer. Two years later he went to New York City to work in printing shops. He returned to Long Island in 1835 and taught in country schools. In 1838 and 1839 Whitman edited a newspaper, the Long- Islander, in Huntington. When he became bored with the job, he went back to New York City to work as a printer and journalist. There he enjoyed the theater, the opera, and—always an omnivorous reader—the libraries. Whitman wrote poems and stories for popular magazines and made political speeches, for which Tammany Hall Democrats rewarded him with the editorship of various short- lived newspapers (see Tammany Society). For two years Whitman edited the influential Brooklyn Eagle, but he lost his position for supporting the Free-Soil party. After a brief sojourn in New Orleans, Louisiana, he returned to Brooklyn, where he tried to start a Free-Soil newspaper. After several years spent at various jobs, including building houses, Whitman began writing a new kind of poetry and thereafter neglected business.

E. B. White

E. B. White (1899-1985), American writer, famous for his essays and children's literature. His light verse is also notable for its wit and perfection of form. Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and educated at Cornell University. He joined the staff of the magazine The New Yorker in 1926, when it had just been founded, and remained a regular contributor for many years. In 1929 he married Katherine Angell, the magazine's first fiction editor. From 1938 to 1943 White was also associated with Harper's magazine, for which he wrote a widely read monthly column entitled “One Man's Meat.” White's elegantly written essays gently satirize the complexities and difficulties of modern civilization. Besides his verse, his writings include the collected essays One Man's Meat (1942) and The Points of My Compass (1962); the children's books Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte's Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970); and a tribute to New York City, Here Is New York (1949). His revised edition of The Elements of Style (1959, originally published, 1918) by his former professor William Strunk, Jr., has become a fundamental work on the use of the English language. The Letters of E. B. White, published in 1976, was followed by The Essays of E. B. White in 1977.

Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784), American poet, born in Africa, generally recognized as the first important black American poet. Captured by slave traders at the age of eight, she was brought to the American colonies and sold to the Wheatley family of Boston, Massachusetts. She began writing poetry at the age of 13, using as models English poets of the time, especially Alexander Pope and Thomas Gray. In 1773 she accompanied a member of the Wheatley family to England, where she gained widespread attention in literary circles. She subsequently returned to Boston. Wheatley's best-known poems are “To the University of Cambridge in New England” (1767) and “To the King's Most Excellent Majesty” (1768). Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was published in London.

Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty (1909-2001), American writer of novels and short stories set almost exclusively in the rural American South. She is noted for her subtle recreations of regional speech and thought patterns. Welty’s The Optimist's Daughter (1972), a novella (fictional work midway between a short story and a novel), won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In it a woman’s conflicted relationship with her father’s second wife leads her to reminisce about her parents’ marriage.

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Welty was the daughter of well-to-do parents who had moved to Mississippi from the North. She began college at Mississippi State College for Women (now Mississippi University for Women) in 1925, but received her B.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1929. After a brief stint in graduate school at Columbia University, she gave up an aspiration for a career in advertising, claiming it was 'too much like sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn't need.' After returning to Jackson, she began to write, publishing her first short story, 'Death of a Traveling Salesman,' in a small magazine in 1936.

Welty first gained critical acclaim with A Curtain of Green (1941). This collection of stories about Southern life demonstrated her extraordinary talent for expression of emotion and characterization through droll descriptions of eccentric behavior. Her exploration of the American South continued in the novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942), about a wealthy Southern planter’s daughter who is courted by a bandit.

After publishing a second collection of short stories, The Wide Net (1943), Welty completed her first full-length novel, Delta Wedding (1946). In this portrait of a Southern family, told from the perspective of a nine-year-old girl, Welty uses a family event to draw a large number of characters together. She then counterpoints the group dynamic and the girl’s interior monologue to depict human nature in rich detail. The novel Ponder Heart (1957), an often comic story of small-town life, includes one scene that epitomizes Welty's penchant for grotesque, almost surreal violence. A dim-witted character mistakenly suffocates his wife to death while tickling her as a thunderstorm rages outside.

Orson Welles

Orson Welles (1915-1985), American actor, producer, director, and writer, most noted for directing and starring in the landmark motion picture Citizen Kane (1941). He was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rejecting college for world travel, Welles began his acting career in Ireland in 1931 and 1932. He toured the United States with the company of American actor Katharine Cornell, and he then acted and directed with the Federal Theatre Project. In 1937 he was a founder of the Mercury Theatre, which produced innovative stage and radio drama. His 1938 radio version of The War of the Worlds by English author H. G. Wells was so realistic that thousands believed an alien attack was actually occurring.

Welles's first completed motion picture, Citizen Kane, is often cited as one of the finest films ever made. Welles, then 25 years old, coscripted, starred in, and directed this psychological study of an American newspaper tycoon. His innovative expressionistic use of sound and camera techniques greatly influenced later filmmakers. The film was not commercially successful, however, and Welles spent most of the next two decades in Europe, acting and directing and continuing to experiment. He directed films that range from thrillers to television documentaries to works of English playwright William Shakespeare.

After Kane, Welles's greatest films (nearly all of which he both directed and acted in) were The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Macbeth (1948), Othello (finished in 1952 but not shown in the United States until 1955; reissued in 1992), A Touch of Evil (1958), and Chimes at Midnight (1966). Other films he directed were Journey into Fear (1943), Mr. Arkadin (1955), The Trial (1963), The Immortal Story (1968; originally for French television), and the semidocumentary F Is for Fake (1974).

Two films that were never completed but which have been released in unfinished posthumous versions are Welles's adaptation of Don Quixote (1992), on which he labored from 1957 to 1960, and It's All True (1993), the South American film that occupied him in 1942 and 1943. Wendy Wasserstein

Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006), American playwright, noted for her bittersweet plays that focus on the struggles of contemporary American women. Her plays also reflect her Jewish heritage and the influence of Russian playwright and prose writer Anton Chekhov.

Wendy Wasserstein was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. She studied at Mount Holyoke College, City College of New York, and the Yale School of Drama. While she was studying at City College, Wasserstein’s play Any Woman Can’t (1973) was produced off-Broadway (see Broadway), prompting her to pursue a career as a playwright.

Wasserstein’s first major play, Uncommon Women and Others (1977), which she began writing while studying at Yale, was based on her years at the all-female Mount Holyoke College. The drama concerns a group of five women who reunite six years after their college graduation and consider whether they have achieved their goals and upheld their ideals. Wasserstein gained national recognition when the play was televised by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1978. Her play Isn’t It Romantic, which was first produced in 1981 and was revised in 1983, follows the lives of two women, one Jewish and one Protestant, contemplating marriage and motherhood.

Wasserstein’s best-known play, The Heidi Chronicles (1988), traces the life of art historian Heidi Holland from high school through the social change of the 1960s and 1970s to her life and career in New York in the 1980s. The work earned Wasserstein a Pulitzer Prize (1989), a Tony Award for best play (1989), and numerous other awards. In 1995 she adapted The Heidi Chronicles for television.

Wasserstein’s other plays include When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth (1975; written with American playwright Christopher Durang); The Sorrows of Gin (1979; adapted for PBS from a short story by American writer John Cheever); Tender Offer (1983); Miami (1986); The Man in a Case (1986; adapted from a short story by Chekhov); The Sisters Rosensweig (1993), which chronicles the story of three Jewish American sisters who gather in London, England; An American Daughter (1997), Wasserstein’s most directly political work, which portrays one woman’s experience after being nominated to a high political post; and Old Money (2000), about different generations of rich New Yorkers. Alice Walker

Alice Walker, born in 1944, American author and poet, most of whose writing portrays the lives of poor, oppressed African American women in the early 1900s. Born Alice Malsenior Walker in Eatonton, Georgia, she was educated at Spelman and Sarah Lawrence colleges. She wrote most of her first volume of poetry during a single week in 1964; it was published in 1968 as Once. Walker's experiences during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence, including undergoing an abortion and making a trip to Africa, provided many of the book's themes, such as love, suicide, civil rights, and Africa. She won the American Book Award (see National Book Awards) and the Pulitzer Prize for her best-known work, the novel The Color Purple (1982), which was praised for its strong characterizations and the clear, musical quality of its colloquial language. The novel was made into a motion picture in 1985, and Walker's book The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996) contains her notes and reflections on making the film.

Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) is about the emotional growth of an African American man. Meridian (1976) follows the life of an African American woman during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) explores the tradition of female circumcision still practiced in some places in Africa. By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998) portrays a Christian missionary family, focusing on the relationship between the father and the three daughters. The book also explores the relationship between Christianity and the spiritual traditions of the African community in which the family lives. Walker’s volumes of poetry include Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973) and Goodnight, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979). Her nonfiction works include the essay collections In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), Living by the Word (1988), and Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997). Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007), American novelist and short-story writer, best known for his irreverent satires of social and political trends and for his vision of life as an absurd, apocalyptic comedy. Vonnegut’s fable-like tales often use science-fiction or fantasy techniques, presenting fictional worlds that mirror reality in grotesque or exaggerated ways. Vonnegut insists that humans have no choice but to view modern civilization with a mixture of sadness and humor and that the cruelty of life must be countered with a genuine charity for human weakness.

Vonnegut’s novels often mix contrasting literary styles, intertwining philosophical speculation with homespun advice or incorporating his own crude line drawings into the narrative. Among his most consistent themes are the destructive powers of technology and the dehumanizing impersonality of modern society. Many of the same characters reappear in a number of Vonnegut’s works.

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal, born in 1925, American novelist and essayist, best known for his novels that focus on powerful people and the workings of powerful institutions, such as the United States government. His essays are characteristically critical of hypocrisy in contemporary American politics and culture.

Born at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, where his father was an aeronautics instructor, Vidal spent much of his childhood in Washington, D.C., with his paternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school in New Hampshire, after which he joined the U.S. Army Reserve Corps during World War II (1939-1945). His time in the reserves provided the background for his first novel, Williwaw (1946).

A prolific writer, Vidal published almost one book a year after Williwaw. His semiautobiographical The City and the Pillar (1948) is about a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality. Following a trip to Guatemala, Vidal wrote Dark Green, Bright Red (1950), in which an American military officer, having been court-martialed under obscure circumstances, becomes involved with a former dictator of a Central American republic who is attempting to regain power. Vidal also wrote a series of books that trace American political history, combining fact and fiction throughout. These books are Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), and Hollywood (1990). Vidal’s other well-known works include Julian (1964), purported to be the autobiography of the Roman emperor known as Julian the Apostate, and Myra Breckenridge (1968), a satire focusing on a transsexual. Vidal, who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress in 1960 and worked as a television commentator, was also a prolific essayist and critic. His essays are collected in A View from the Diner’s Club: Essays 1987-1991 and United States: Essays 1952-1992, both published in 1993. Palimpsest: A Memoir was published in 1995 and looks back on the first half of Vidal’s life. A second volume of memoirs, Point to Point Navigation, was published in 2006. The title refers to a form of navigation without a compass—presumably how Vidal viewed the course of his life. John Updike

John Updike, born in 1932, American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and critic. Updike is known for his well-crafted prose that explores the hidden tensions and problems of middle-class American life. His characters frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity.

Updike began his literary career as a poet. His first book, The Carpentered Hen (1958), was a collection of verse. Later collections include Facing Nature (1985) and Americana (2001). Collected Poems: 1953-1993 appeared in 1993. Updike has also published numerous collections of short stories, of which Bech: A Book (1970), Trust Me (1987), and The Afterlife (1994) are typical in their precise observation of both social milieu and psychological states. Two more collections of stories about the Jewish writer Bech followed: Bech Is Back (1982) and Bech at Bay (1998).

Updike’s collections of essays and reviews include Picked-Up Pieces (1975), Hugging the Shore (1983), Odd Jobs (1991), and More Matter (2000). Golf Dreams (1996) is an anthology of fiction and essays that deal with the “bliss and aggravation” of Updike’s favorite pastime. Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005) compile Updike’s astute observations on art and artists. His autobiography Self-Consciousness: Memoirs was published in 1989.

Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler, born in 1941, American novelist, highly regarded for her perceptive dissections of middle-class American life, especially marriage and family relationships. She often treats these social institutions through deftly drawn portraits of eccentric characters. Her major theme is the importance of endurance. Much of her work concerns the difficulty women face in achieving autonomy in what remains a male-dominated world. Tyler’s novel Breathing Lessons (1988) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1989.

Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her family moved several times before settling in a Quaker commune in North Carolina when she was seven years old. In 1952 the family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina. Tyler graduated from high school at the age of 16 and then entered Duke University, where she studied under American novelist Reynolds Price, earning a B.A. degree in 1961. In 1963 she married Taghi Mohammed Modarressi, an Iranian-born psychiatrist, and accompanied him to McGill University in Montréal, Québec, Canada. There she wrote her first two novels, If Morning Ever Comes (1964) and The Tin Can Tree (1965). In 1967 Tyler and her husband moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where she devoted her time to writing fiction and raising their two daughters.

Tyler’s fiction is firmly grounded by her sense of place. She began to claim the city of Baltimore as her own fictional territory with The Clock Winder (1972), the story of a young woman’s year off from college and the relationship she develops with the Baltimore family for whom she works. Searching for Caleb (1976) chronicles four generations of a Baltimore family while exploring the needs and choices of the individual. This, her sixth novel, brought Tyler widespread recognition. Baltimore also provides the settings for an examination of the passage through middle life in Morgan’s Passing (1980) and the reconstruction of shattered family bonds in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982).

Mark Twain

Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), American writer and humorist, whose best work is characterized by broad, often irreverent humor or biting social satire. Twain’s writing is also known for realism of place and language, memorable characters, and condemnation of hypocrisy and oppression.

Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, and moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, a port on the Mississippi River, when he was four years old. There he received a public school education and spent his childhood in contact with the people who made their living from the river. After the death of his father in 1847, Clemens was apprenticed to two Hannibal printers, and in 1851 he began setting type for and contributing sketches to his brother Orion’s Hannibal Journal. Subsequently he worked as a printer in Keokuk, Iowa; New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and other cities.

In 1857 Clemens set out for New Orleans by riverboat, with the intention of going on to South America in search of adventure. Talks with the boat’s pilot, however, revived Clemens’s boyhood dream of “learning the river,” and he was taken on as an apprentice. He received his license as a pilot in 1859 and worked as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River until the American Civil War (1861-1865) brought an end to travel on the river. In 1861 Clemens served briefly as a volunteer soldier in the Confederate cavalry. Later that year he accompanied Orion to the newly created Nevada Territory, where he tried his hand at silver mining.

Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Tuchman (1912-89), American author, self-trained historian, and Pulitzer Prize winner. Tuchman was born in New York City, and educated at Radcliffe College. After graduating from Radcliffe she took a job with the Institute for Pacific Relations in 1933. In 1935 her father, Maurice Wertheim, purchased The Nation, and she started writing for that magazine.

In 1937 she went to Madrid to cover the Spanish Civil War for The Nation and wrote passionately in support of the loyalist government. She deplored the failure of the United States to participate in the war, and thereafter the theme of how good is crushed or subverted ran throughout her work.

In 1943 she became an editor at the U.S. Office of War Information. In 1963 her book The Guns of August, a narrative history of the outbreak of World War I, won the Pulitzer Prize. She won the Pulitzer Prize again in 1972 for her book Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-45.

In her later years Tuchman was a lecturer at Harvard University and at the U.S. Naval War College. Her book The First Salute, about the American Revolution, was on The New York Times best-seller list when she died in 1989.

John Kennedy Toole

John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969), American novelist, best known for his first novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), a skillful and humorous rendering of life in New Orleans, Louisiana. Posthumously published, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981. Toole's fiction concentrates on the troubles of those who are unsuited for life in the modern world.

Born in New Orleans, Toole received a B.A. degree from Tulane University in 1958 and an M.A. degree from Columbia University in 1959. From 1959 to 1968, except for a year spent in the United States Army (1962-1963), Toole taught at various colleges in New York and Louisiana. While in the army and stationed in Puerto Rico, Toole wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. He spent the rest of his life trying to get the manuscript published, but he was unsuccessful in this endeavor. In 1969, despondent over his failure to sell the book, Toole committed suicide.

After his death Toole's mother continued efforts to place the book, finally persuading American novelist Walker Percy to read it. Percy, surprised at the book's quality, convinced Louisiana State University Press to publish it in 1980. The novel received positive reviews, achieved popular success, and won a Pulitzer Prize. The absurd and humorous characters of the book represent the racial and cultural diversity of New Orleans and at the same time can be seen as a satire of modern American society. Another novel by Toole, The Neon Bible, is the story of a young Southern boy's coming of age in a dysfunctional family and society. It was published in 1989.

Alice B. Toklas

Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967), American writer, born in San Francisco. She lived most of her life in Paris as the companion of her compatriot Gertrude Stein; together they presided over a renowned literary salon. Ostensibly she was the subject of Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), but this is actually a volume of Stein's memoirs. Toklas's autobiography, begun in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954)—which intersperses haute cuisine recipes with reminiscences—was continued in What Is Remembered (1963). A collection of her letters, Staying on Alone, was issued in 1973.

James Thurber

James Thurber (1894-1961), American cartoonist and author, whose writings, which range from gentle whimsy to irony, gained him a place as one of America's greatest 20th-century humorists. Thurber's cartoons, often depicting melancholy-looking animals or oversized wives bedeviling undersized husbands, are also much admired.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, James Grover Thurber was educated at Ohio State University. He later worked as a code clerk for the State Department and subsequently went to France, where he worked for the French edition of the Chicago Tribune. He moved to New York City in 1926 and worked as a reporter for the Evening Post. In 1927, Thurber became staff writer and managing editor of The New Yorker; he continued to contribute stories and cartoons long after he left the magazine in 1933. Thurber was the author of many successful books that focus on the frustrations of average men faced with the overwhelming pressures of everyday modern life. Is Sex Necessary? (1929) was written with the American writer E. B. White. It was followed by The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities (1931), My Life and Hard Times (1933), The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), Let Your Mind Alone! (1937), and Fables for Our Time (1940). The Male Animal (1940) is a play written with the American actor and playwright Elliott Nugent. Thurber's best-known story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1942), is about an ordinary man who imagines himself as a hero. The Thirteen Clocks (1950) and The Wonderful O (1957) are two popular books for children. The Years with Ross (1959) is an account of Thurber's life on The New Yorker. Failing eyesight caused him to give up cartooning in the last decade of his life.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American writer, philosopher, and naturalist who believed in the importance of individualism. Thoreau’s best- known work is Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), which embodies his philosophy and reflects his independent character. The book records Thoreau’s experiences in a hand-built cabin, where he spent two years in partial seclusion, at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts.

Born in Concord, Thoreau was educated at Harvard University. In the late 1830s and early 1840s he taught school and tutored in Concord and on Staten Island, New York. From 1841 to 1843 Thoreau lived in the home of American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was one of the leaders of the school of transcendentalism. Transcendentalists believed that God is inherent in nature and in human beings and that each individual has to rely on his or her own conscience and intuition for spiritual truths. Consequently, the transcendentalists encouraged a free attitude toward authority and tradition, and they helped release American thought and writing from European conventions. While living at Emerson’s house, Thoreau met other American transcendentalists, such as educator and philosopher Bronson Alcott, social reformer Margaret Fuller, and literary critic George Ripley.

Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux, born in 1941, American novelist and travel writer, known for works based on his experiences abroad. Theroux punctuates much of his fiction with personal commentary.

Born in Medford, Massachusetts, Theroux traveled to Italy after graduating from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1963. For the next few years, Theroux taught English at the University of Urbino in Urbino, Italy, and was a member of the faculty of English at Soche Hill College in the southeast African country of Malawi. In 1965 he left Malawi to work in Uganda, where he met Trinidadian-born writer V. S. Naipaul, whose depressed but comic view of the world made a significant impression on the young Theroux. In Uganda, Theroux published his first novel, Waldo (1966), which tells a surreal story of a boy’s journey after leaving a school for delinquents.

In 1968 Theroux joined the Department of English at the University of Singapore, where he worked for three years. During this time he wrote a number of novels, including Fong and the Indians (1968) and Girls at Play (1969). Soon after the publication of Jungle Lovers (1971), which was based on his experiences in Malawi, Theroux moved with his wife and two children to England.

While living in England, Theroux wrote several highly praised works, including V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Works (1972) and the novels Saint Jack (1973), The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), The Family Arsenal (1976), and The Mosquito Coast (1982). In 1986 The Mosquito Coast was made into a motion picture starring American actor Harrison Ford and British actor Helen Mirren. Theroux remained in England for several years, dividing his time between households there and in the United States, a situation that served as the subject of the novel My Secret Life (1989). Millroy the Magician (1993) tells the story of a magician and health-food sage through the eyes of a young girl whose slow sexual awakening provides much of the narrative drive of the novel. Kowloon Tong (1997) portrays two British citizens living in Hong Kong in 1997, when the British government returned the territory to the Chinese government. In 1998 Theroux published the controversial Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a sometimes bitter memoir about his longtime friendship with V. S. Naipaul and their falling-out. Theroux’s later fiction includes the Hotel Honolulu (2001), a collection of tales about the visitors and staff at a rundown resort hotel, and The Elephanta Suite (2007), three short novels that take place in modern-day India. Edward Taylor

Edward Taylor (1642?-1729), American poet, considered by most critics to be the finest verse writer of the colonial period. Born near Coventry, England, Taylor immigrated to America in 1668, after refusing to take the oath required by the Act of Uniformity of 1662 (see Church of England). He attended Harvard College and, after his graduation in 1671, moved to Westfield, Massachusetts. He lived in Westfield, serving as the town's minister, until his death.

Taylor wrote poetry his entire life, but he left strict instructions for his heirs not to publish his verse. In 1883, however, one of his descendants gave Taylor's writings to Yale University, and in 1939The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, edited by the scholar Thomas H. Johnson, appeared. Taylor's most important works are considered to be “Preparatory Meditations” and “God's Determinations Touching His Elect.” The former is a collection of more than 200 poems discussing several religious themes. It puts forth Taylor's concept of “blessed theantropy,” the perfect union of the human and the divine in Christ. “God's Determinations” is a dramatic poem that celebrates God's power in the triumph of good over evil in the human soul. Most of Taylor's poetry is in the metaphysical tradition (see Metaphysical Poets), and he often used extravagant rhetorical devices. Taylor's poetry was one of the major literary discoveries of the 20th century, and since the publication of his work Taylor's reputation has steadily increased.

Amy Tan

Amy Tan, born in 1952, American author, whose novels depict the tensions between mothers and daughters as well as the relationship between Chinese American women and their immigrant parents. Influenced by the style of American author Louise Erdrich, Tan’s work has become emblematic of other American works of fiction that give particular attention to ethnicity, family history, and the articulation of female voices.

Born in Oakland, California, to parents who immigrated to the United States from China, Tan was educated at San Jose State University and the University of California at Berkeley. She worked as a consultant to programs for disabled children from 1976 to 1981 and as a reporter, editor, and freelance technical writer from 1981 to 1987.

Tan’s first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), examines the relationships between four Chinese-born women and their American-born daughters. Narrated in 16 stories, the book alternates the voices of the mothers with those of the daughters. The mothers’ stories, tinged with ghosts and superstitions, describe the women’s struggles in China against traditional female roles and family domination. The daughters’ tales are those of young professional women in the United States who strive for equality in their personal relationships and careers. The novel portrays the Chinese mothers’ difficulties in sharing their wisdom and experiences with their American daughters. The Joy Luck Club was made into a motion picture in 1993.

John Szarkowski

John Szarkowski (1925-2007), American museum curator, photohistorian, writer, and photographer. Szarkowski was born in Wisconsin and received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1948. He worked as a photographer at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from 1948 to 1951. His teaching career included positions at the University of Minnesota in 1950 and at the Albright Art School in Buffalo, New York, from 1951 to 1953. In the ensuing years he published several books, including The Idea of Louis Sullivan (1956) and The Face of Minnesota (1958). He succeeded Edward Steichen as director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1962. Through the exhibitions he produced and the excellent catalogs that accompanied them, Szarkowski worked to broaden and define concepts of art photography. Under his direction, the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art presented more than 100 photography exhibitions. With such exhibits as New Documents (1967) and Mirrors and Windows (1978), Szarkowski presented group shows that addressed a wide range of theoretical and aesthetic issues in art photography. He also produced individual shows that featured groundbreaking artists such as Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus. He retired from his position at the museum in 1991 and was named director emeritus of the department of photography. See also History of Photography.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), American writer and abolitionist, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a forceful indictment of slavery and one of the most powerful novels of its kind in American literature.

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher was the daughter of the liberal clergyman Lyman Beecher and the sister of five clergymen, including the popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher. In 1832 she moved to Cincinnati, where her father had been made president of Lane Theological Seminary. Here she gained her first direct knowledge of slavery. Here, also, in 1836 she married scholar and educator Calvin Ellis Stowe, who had encouraged her writing. Her first published work, a textbook called A New Geography for Children (1833), was cowritten with her sister, Catharine Esther Beecher. Her next book, The Mayflower, or Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims, appeared in 1843. Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone, born in 1946, American director and screenwriter, whose motion pictures examine various aspects of American society. Stone has raised controversy with the interpretations of history in his works.

Born in New York City, Stone attended Yale University in the mid-1960s but did not graduate. After working as a teacher in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) and as a merchant seaman, Stone enlisted in the United States Army in 1967. He served and was wounded during the Vietnam War (1959-1975). After leaving the army in 1968, Stone took film courses at New York University, graduating from the school in 1971. He also made the independent films Street Scenes (1970) and Seizure (1974). In 1978 Stone won an Academy Award for best screenplay for Midnight Express (1978), a film based on the true story of a young American arrested and imprisoned in Turkey for attempting to smuggle hashish out of the country.

After writing and directing the horror film The Hand (1980), Stone wrote screenplays for Conan the Barbarian (1982), Scarface (1983), Year of the Dragon (1985), and 8 Million Ways to Die (1986). He then gained recognition as an important director with two motion pictures set in war zones. Platoon (1986), a realistic look at combat during the Vietnam War, was inspired by Stone’s own experiences. The motion picture won an Academy Award for best picture, and Stone won the Oscar for best director. Salvador (1986), a film based on the experiences of an American journalist in El Salvador, criticizes U.S. military and political involvement in Central America.

Stone subsequently wrote and directed Wall Street (1987), about insider trading and other misdealing in the world of high finance; Talk Radio, about a controversial talk-show host (1988); and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), the story of a man paralyzed in the Vietnam War, for which Stone won another Academy Award as best director. The Doors (1991) is about 1960s rock music star Jim Morrison. JFK (1991), which examines the investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American poet, whose works deal mainly with the individual’s interaction with the outside world. Stevens used sensuous, elaborate imagery and elevated, precise word choice to express subtle philosophical themes. He frequently contrasted the bleakness and monotony of modern industrialized life with the richness of nature.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Stevens was educated at Harvard University. He then worked as a journalist in New York City before attending New York Law School. Stevens was admitted to the bar in 1904 and in 1909 married Elsie Moll, who was also from Reading. In 1916 Stevens joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, an insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut, and he became a vice president at the firm in 1934. He worked there, despite his increasing success as a poet, until his death.

Stevens's first published work appeared in 1914 in Poetry magazine. Harmonium (1923) was his first collection of verse. It contains some of his best known poems, including “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” 'Sunday Morning,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Later works of poetry included Ideas of Order (1935), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), which is often considered his masterpiece, and The Auroras of Autumn (1950). In 1955 Stevens’s Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in poetry. Opus Posthumous (1957) appeared after his death, containing previously unpublished prose and poetry. Many of Stevens’s critical essays are included in The Necessary Angel (1951). The Letters of Wallace Stevens appeared in 1966.

Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem, (1934- ), American writer and political activist, a leading figure in the women's rights movement. Born in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem graduated from Smith College in 1956. She also studied in India at the universities of Delhi and Calcutta (now Kolkata). Seeking work in journalism, in 1960 she got a job with Help!, a political-satire magazine in New York City. In 1963, after the success of her article “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” about working undercover in the Playboy Club in Manhattan, New York City, her articles began to appear in such chic magazines as Vogue, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan. From 1964 to 1965 she also wrote scripts for the popular television show “That Was the Week That Was.”

In 1968 Steinem began writing about politics in a weekly column for New York Magazine. She soon became involved in feminism and the women's movement. In 1971, with author Betty Friedan and politicians Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, Steinem helped found the National Women's Political Caucus. That same year Steinem helped produce the first issue of the feminist Ms. magazine. From that time, Steinem became a role model for young women, espousing her belief that when women are liberated, men will become whole people as well. Her publications include the collection of essays and articles Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983) and Marilyn (1986), a biography of American film star Marilyn Monroe. Steinem's Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992) examined her feelings about herself within the context of the women's movement. In 1994 Moving Beyond Words, a collection of her essays on women's issues, was published.

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck (1902-1968), American writer and Nobel laureate, who described in his work the unremitting struggle of people who depend on the soil for their livelihood.

Born in Salinas, California, Steinbeck was educated at Stanford University. As a youth, he worked as a ranch hand and fruit picker. His first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), romanticizes the life and exploits of the famous 17th-century Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan. In The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a group of short stories depicting a community of California farmers, Steinbeck first dealt with the hardworking people and social themes associated with most of his works. His other early books include To a God Unknown (1933), the story of a farmer whose belief in a pagan fertility cult impels him, during a severe drought, to sacrifice his own life; Tortilla Flat (1935), a sympathetic portrayal of Americans of Mexican descent dwelling near Monterey, California; In Dubious Battle (1936), a novel concerned with a strike of migratory fruit pickers; and Of Mice and Men (1937), a tragic story of two itinerant farm laborers yearning for a small farm of their own.

Steinbeck's most widely known work is The Grapes of Wrath (1939; Pulitzer Prize, 1940), the stark account of the Joad family from the impoverished Oklahoma Dust Bowl and their migration to California during the economic depression of the 1930s. The controversial novel, received not only as realistic fiction but as a moving document of social protest, is an American classic.

Steinbeck's other works include The Moon Is Down (1942), Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and America and Americans (1966). In 1962 he wrote the popular Travels with Charley, an autobiographical account of a trip across the United States accompanied by a pet poodle. Steinbeck was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in literature. His modernization of the Arthurian legends, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was published posthumously in 1976.

A major literary figure since the 1930s, Steinbeck took as his central theme the quiet dignity he saw in the poor and the oppressed. Although his characters are often trapped in an unfair world, they remain sympathetic and heroic, if defeated, human beings.

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), American writer, whose impact on 20th-century culture derives perhaps as much from the influence of her personality and her role as a patron of the arts as from her own creative writings. Her experiments with prose were frequently misunderstood and erroneously construed as meaningless.

Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Stein was educated at Radcliffe College and the medical school of Johns Hopkins University. In 1903 she settled in Paris, France, where she lived the rest of her life. In 1907 she met American writer Alice B. Toklas, and two years later Toklas moved in with Stein. Stein's most celebrated early works were Three Lives (1909), character studies of three women; and The Making of Americans (1925), a novel dealing with the social and cultural history of her own family. For each she devised an unconventional narrative form marked by a simplification and fragmentation of plot. To evoke feeling and atmosphere she made radical innovations in syntax and punctuation, including the employment of a flowing, rhythmic repetition of words to explore the consciousness of her characters. Throughout her life Stein experimented with the uses of language. She explains some of her theories of composition in Lectures in America (1935), a collection of talks on literature, painting, and music that she delivered while on a brief tour in the United States in 1934 and 1935.

Stein's other writings before World War II (1939-1945) include Tender Buttons (1914), a book of experimental verse; Lucy Church Amiably (1930), a novel; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which was actually Stein's own autobiography; Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), an opera with a score by the American composer Virgil Thomson; and Paris France (1940), an appreciation of her adopted country. Wars I Have Seen (1945) is the story of her daily life in France under the German occupation during World War II, and Brewsie and Willie (1946) is a sympathetic study of American servicemen in France whom she befriended. Posthumously published writings include The Mother of Us All (1947), an opera based on the life of the American social reformer Susan B. Anthony, again with music by Virgil Thomson; Last Operas and Plays (1949); and Two and Other Early Portraits (1951).

For years, the Stein-Toklas apartment in Paris was the center of an important literary group, where American writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder were encouraged by Stein in the development of their own literary styles. Also frequenting her salon were such 20th-century masters as the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and the French painter Henri Matisse. Stein was one of the earliest patrons of early 20th-century painting, beginning with the cubist movement (see Cubism). Through her writings and representative personal collection of innovative contemporary works, she was instrumental in bringing modern art to the attention of a wide international circle.

Stein's papers were bequeathed to Yale University. Her art collection, however, became the subject of years of litigation by her family and eventually was dispersed in several U.S. collections.

Lincoln Steffens

Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), American journalist, one of the founders of the muckraking movement of the early 20th century. He was born in San Francisco and educated at the University of California and in Germany and France. Between 1902 and 1911 he wrote articles exposing corruption in business and in city government for McClure's Magazine, American Magazine, and Everybody's Magazine. These articles, published under the titles The Shame of the Cities (1904), The Struggle for Self-Government (1906), and Upbuilders (1909), created a sensation. Steffens, along with such other crusading journalists as Samuel Hopkins Adams, Ray Stannard Baker, Upton Sinclair, and Ida Tarbell, created the so-called muckraking movement of the first decade of the 20th century. They aroused America's social consciousness and created the necessary support for reform movements. An account of this and other liberal and radical movements of Steffens's time and of the evolution of his own political ideas is contained in The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931). The work is noteworthy for its literary value and as a sociological study.

Sylvester Stallone

Sylvester Stallone, born in 1946, American motion-picture actor, noted for his portrayals of heroes in action-adventure movies. Stallone was born in New York City and educated in Switzerland and at the University of Miami. He began his acting career by appearing off-Broadway in an adaptation of Rain (1969-1970) and in the short-lived Score (1970). He had a small part in the Woody Allen movie Bananas (1971) and a featured role in No Place to Hide (1973). Stallone first won critical attention in the film The Lords of Flatbush (1974). Subsequently he appeared in The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), Capone (1975), and Death Race 2000 (1975).

During the 1970s Stallone also wrote screenplays, but he was unable to sell his writing until 1975, when United Artists agreed to back Rocky (1976; Academy Award winner for best picture), in which he played the title role, a small-time prizefighter who gets a chance at fame and self-respect. Stallone wrote, directed, and starred in four of the film's five sequels—1979 (Rocky II), 1982 (Rocky III), 1985 (Rocky IV), and 2006 (Rocky Balboa), as well as writing and starring in Rocky V (1990). He portrayed a similarly brawny loner, this time an army Green Beret, in the series that included First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), and Rambo III (1988).

Among other action movies in which Stallone appeared were F.I.S.T. (1978); Paradise Alley (1978), which he also wrote and directed; Nighthawks (1981); Tango and Cash (1989); and Cliffhanger (1993). Stallone played comedy in such films as Rhinestone (1984), Oscar (1991), and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992). In 1997 he appeared in Cop Land, gaining praise for his portrayal of a passive town sheriff who ultimately summons the strength to stand up to a group of corrupt police officers.

Cornelia Otis Skinner

Cornelia Otis Skinner (1901-1979), American actor and writer, most acclaimed for her performances of dramatic monologues that she wrote herself. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of the noted Shakespearean actor and author Otis Skinner. She studied acting with the French actor, director, and critic Jacques Copeau and in 1921 made her debut in Chicago with her father's company. With her friend Emily Kimbrough she wrote Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1942), a witty volume of European travel memoirs. She was coauthor with Samuel Taylor of the play The Pleasure of His Company, in which she starred (1958-1960). In addition, Skinner wrote two books on the fashionable world of Paris in the 1890s: Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals (1962) and Madame Sarah (1967), a biography of the French actor Sarah Bernhardt.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), Polish-born American writer in the Yiddish language, whose work features passion for life and despair at the passing of tradition. He drew heavily on his Polish background and on the stories of Jewish and medieval European folklore. Singer translated many of his works into English himself. In 1978 he won the Nobel Prize in literature for an “impassioned narrative art” that is rooted in Polish-Jewish culture.

Singer was born in Radzymin, Poland, and immigrated to the United States in 1935. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1943. He was educated at the Warsaw Rabbinical Seminary. Shortly after his arrival in the United States, he became associated with the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper in New York City.

Singer’s first published novel, Der Sotn in Gorey (1935; Satan in Goray, 1955), deals with religious hysteria and the 17th-century pogroms, raids in which Jews in Poland were brutally massacred by Cossacks, a people of southern Russia. His other well-known novels include The Family Moskat (1950; translated 1965), the only one of his fictional works with no element of fantasy; The Manor (1967); and The Estate (1969). Singer also wrote many imaginative short stories, including those published in Gimpl tam un andere dertseylungen (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, 1957). He won National Book Awards for the children’s book A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1969) and for A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1973).

In 1983 Singer’s short story Yentl the Yeshiva Boy (1962) was made into a popular motion picture produced by and starring Barbra Streisand. His Collected Stories was published in 1982, and Stories for Children was published in 1984. Meshuge (Meshugah, 1994) and Shotns baym Hodson (Shadows on the Hudson, 1998), which was originally serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward in 1957, deal with Jewish Holocaust survivors living in New York City. Both were published posthumously. Singer’s autobiographical works include In My Father's Court (1966), A Little Boy in Search of God (1976), A Young Man in Search of Love (1978), Lost in America (1981), and Love and Exile: A Memoir (1984).

Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), American writer and social and economic reformer. Upton Beall Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and educated at the College of the City of New York and Columbia University. Although he was unsuccessful as a Socialist Party candidate for political office, his vigorous criticism of abuses in American economic and social life helped lay the groundwork for a number of reforms. In the 1920s he helped found the American Civil Liberties Union.

The author of 90 books, Sinclair became well known after the publication of his novel The Jungle (1906), which exposed the unsanitary and miserable working conditions in the stockyards of Chicago, Illinois, and led to an investigation by the federal government and the subsequent passage of pure food laws. Sinclair wrote other social and political novels and studies advocating prohibition and criticizing the newspaper industry. His well-known series of 11 novels concerned with Lanny Budd, a wealthy American secret agent who participates in important international events, includes World's End (1940) and Dragon's Teeth (1942), which dealt with Germany under the Nazis and won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. He also wrote The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962).

Neil Simon

Neil Simon, born in 1927, American playwright, and winner of two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. Simon was born in the Bronx, a borough of New York City. He entered the United States Army at the age of 16 and studied briefly at New York University and at the University of Colorado. Discharged from the army in 1946, he worked in the mail room at Warner Bros., where his brother, Danny, worked for the publicity department. The two brothers also wrote comedy sketches for radio and television comedy stars. Some of their collaborations were displayed in the Broadway shows Catch a Start (1955) and New Faces of 1956. Simon left the duo to write on his own, winning Emmy nominations for his work on the “Sid Caesar Show” (1957) and the “Garry Moore Show” (1959). He adapted Broadway shows into television specials and then wrote his first play, Come Blow Your Horn (1961), which ran for two years on Broadway.

Simon attracted attention with Barefoot in the Park (1963). He won a Tony Award for The Odd Couple (1965), which became a long-running television comedy. His three autobiographical plays— Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), Biloxi Blues (1985), and Broadway Bound (1986)—were praised for their compassion and deeper character development. Brighton Beach Memoirs won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play (1983). That year a Broadway theater was named for Simon, the first time such an honor was awarded to a living playwright. Lost in Yonkers won a Tony Award as the best play of 1991, and the Pulitzer Prize in drama that same year. Simon decided to open his play London Suite (1994) off-Broadway, citing the untenable financial conditions imposed by Broadway theater owners. Simon has also written original screenplays and motion-picture versions of many of his plays.

Shel Silverstein

Shel Silverstein (1930-1999), American writer, cartoonist, illustrator, and musician, best known for his poetry and fiction for children. Silverstein was born in Chicago and began drawing cartoons as a child. During the 1950s, while serving with the United States armed forces in Japan and Korea, he drew cartoons for the Pacific edition of the military's official newspaper The Stars and Stripes. In 1956 he began working as a writer and cartoonist for Playboy magazine.

In 1963 Silverstein published his first book for children, Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back, about a lion who practices shooting a rifle and joins the circus. He both wrote and illustrated, as he would with all his books, the story of Lafcadio. The following year Silverstein achieved fame with The Giving Tree, about a tree that gives what it can for one person's happiness. Two other notable stories are The Missing Piece (1976) and its sequel The Missing Piece Meets the Big O (1981). Silverstein also wrote humorous poetry for children. Two classic collections of his poetry, Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974) and The Light in the Attic (1981), remain popular. He published a third poetry collection, Falling Up, in 1996. Despite renown, Silverstein's work has met with controversy, and some critics consider his work superficial and commercial.

Throughout his career, Silverstein has composed and performed music, and has written lyrics for songs that are usually humorous or satirical. His recordings include Dirty Feet (1968), The Great Conch Train Robbery (1980), and Bigfoot (1994). In addition, he composed scores for motion pictures, and in the 1980s he began writing for adults again, including the play The Lady or the Tiger (1981) and the screenplay, cowritten with American playwright David Mamet, for the motion picture Things Change (1988).

Leslie Marmon Silko

Leslie Marmon Silko, born in 1948, American author whose emergence in the 1970s coincided with a revival of interest in Native American culture in North America. Silko is of mixed white, Hispanic, and Native American ancestry.

Silko was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and grew up at Laguna Pueblo, a Native American Pueblo community in New Mexico where her family had lived for generations. She first attended schools managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and later she went to Catholic schools in Albuquerque. She earned a B.A. degree in English from the University of New Mexico in 1969 and then taught for two years at Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona. She later spent two years in Ketchikan, Alaska, before returning to teach at the University of New Mexico from 1976 to 1978. In 1978 Silko moved to Tucson, Arizona. From 1980 to 1986 she was a professor of English at the University of Arizona.

Many of Silko’s early short stories and poems were collected in anthologies of Native American writing. Her first book, the poetry collection Laguna Woman (1974), combined meditations on Native American traditions with vivid descriptions of the natural landscape. Silko’s first novel, Ceremony (1977), is about a young Laguna man and his struggles as he rejoins the Pueblo community after serving in the United States military during World War II (1939-1945). The book’s publication established Silko as a prominent Native American author.

Storyteller, an anthology of poetry, short fiction, traditional stories, and photographs, appeared in 1981. That same year, Silko received a MacArthur Foundation Grant and secured funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to make films documenting Laguna oral traditions.

Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard, born in 1943, American playwright and actor, whose plays deal with modern social concerns such as individual alienation and the destructive effects of family relationships in an ailing American society. Born Samuel Shepard Rogers, Jr., in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, he attended San Antonio Junior College, located in California, but did not graduate. In 1963 he moved to New York City, where he wrote the one-act plays Cowboys and The Rock Garden, which were produced in 1964 as part of the off-off-Broadway theater movement. Other short plays were produced by La Mama Experimental Theater Club in 1964 and 1965, and by the Cherry Lane's New Playwrights series in 1965 and 1966.

Shepard's first full-length play, La Turista (1967), won an Obie Award (given for off- Broadway theater productions) for distinguished play. It was followed by Operation Sidewinder (1970), Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978; Pulitzer Prize, 1979; rewritten by Shepard, 1995), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1983), A Lie of the Mind (1985), and Simpatico (1994), among others. Shepard became known for his oblique story lines, slightly mysterious characters, verbal skills, and use of surreal elements with images of popular culture. He also worked on motion pictures, coauthoring the screenplay for Zabriskie Point (1970) and writing the screenplay for Paris, Texas (1984); and wrote two short-story collections, Motel Chronicles (1982) and Cruising Paradise (1996). Shepard acted in a number of motion pictures, including Days of Heaven (1978), Frances (1982), The Right Stuff (1983), Fool for Love (1985), Baby Boom (1987), Crimes of the Heart (1987), Thunderheart (1992), and Safe Passage (1994).

Michael Shaara

Michael Shaara (1929-1988), American novelist and short-story writer, whose writing on military matters is known for its historical accuracy and realism. His fiction examines the behavior of men faced with difficult circumstances.

Shaara was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. After working as a merchant seamen, he was a paratrooper in the United States Army from 1946 to 1949, and eventually attained the rank of sergeant. While serving in the U.S. Army Reserve from 1949 to 1953, Shaara received his B.A. degree in 1951 from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. From 1952 to 1954 he pursued graduate studies at Columbia University and the University of Vermont. Between 1954 and 1955 he worked as a police officer in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

From 1955 to 1961 Shaara wrote many science-fiction short stories. He began teaching English at Florida State University in Tallahassee in 1960. His first novel, The Broken Place (1968), is about a soldier who boxes. After leaving Florida State in 1973, Shaara completed The Killer Angels (1974), a novel about the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War (1861-1865). The book re-creates the battle from the points of view of both Northern and Southern officers. Praised for its attention to detail and its historical accuracy, the book won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Shaara's volume Collected Short Stories was published in 1983. In 1993 The Killer Angels was adapted as the motion picture Gettysburg. Shaara also wrote one other novel, The Herald (1981), and a collection of stories, Soldier Boy (1982).

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton (1928-1974), American poet, known for her frank treatment of intimate and taboo subjects. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, Sexton attended Garland Junior College in Boston, Massachusetts, from 1947 until 1948, when she married. In 1955 she suffered a suicidal breakdown after the birth of her second child. During the course of psychiatric treatment, Sexton wrote poetry, an effort she had tried in school. In 1957 she joined a poetry workshop in Boston, which brought her into contact with American poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, both of whom became influences. Sexton's poetry soon developed a confessional style, in which she used images of incest, adultery, and madness to reveal the depths of her deeply troubled life.

Her first book of poetry, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), was an account of her mental breakdown. Sexton's other early books of poetry include All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Live or Die (1966; Pulitzer Prize, 1967). Sexton taught at Boston University from 1970 to 1971 and at Colgate University from 1971 to 1972, wrote children's books, and performed in a musical group, but interspersed with her periods of productivity were numerous hospitalizations for suicidal depression and self-loathing. She became addicted to sleeping pills and alcohol, and by the early 1970s her poetry was engaged in a continuing discussion of death and suicide. Her books from this period include The Death Notebooks (1974) and The Awful Rowing Toward God (posthumously published 1975). In 1974 Sexton committed suicide. The Complete Poems was published in 1981, and Selected Poems of Anne Sexton appeared in 1988. In 1991 it was revealed that Sexton's psychiatrist of eight years had given a biographer his complete therapy files, which included more than 300 audiotapes of sessions with the poet. This act was endorsed by Sexton's daughter, who was also her literary executor, but it created a furor over the posthumous revelation of patient-doctor confidences.

Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak, born in 1928, American writer and illustrator, born in Brooklyn, New York, creator of the children's classic Where the Wild Things Are. After completing high school, Sendak worked as a display artist at F.A.O. Schwarz, a famous New York City toy store, from 1948 to 1951, and in 1949 began to attend the Art Students League at night. While still a student there, he was asked by publisher Harper & Brothers to illustrate the children's book The Wonderful Farm (1951), a translation from the French of selected stories by Marcel Aymé. Sendak established his reputation as an illustrator with his drawings for A Hole Is to Dig (1952), by Ruth Krauss. Kenny's Window, which Sendak both wrote and illustrated, was published in 1956.

Sendak's career reached a turning point with Where the Wild Things Are (1963), the first part of a trilogy that also includes In the Night Kitchen (1970) and Outside Over There (1981). Where the Wild Things Are, in which a child creates a fantasy world to deal with anger, won the Caldecott Medal in 1964. It became a bestseller and was adapted as an opera, with sets and costumes by Sendak. Sendak has also designed sets and costumes for Mozart's Magic Flute (1980; Houston Grand Opera) (see Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus) and E. T. A. Hoffmann's Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1983, Pacific Northwest Ballet) (see Hoffmann, E(rnst) T(heodor) A(madeus)).

Sendak won the Hans Christian Andersen International Medal in 1970 and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 1983. Many of his stories are inspired by Jewish tales, and his characters are often modeled on his own relatives.

Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg, (1878-1967), American poet and biographer, known for his unrhymed free verse which uses precise and vivid images to portray the energy and brutality of American urban industrial life. Sandburg also wrote what is generally considered the definitive biography of United States president Abraham Lincoln.

Sandburg was born and raised in Galesburg, Illinois. Both of his parents were Swedish immigrants. In his late adolescence, Sandburg worked odd jobs and spent a year traveling in the Midwest. He served with a company of volunteers in Puerto Rico during the Spanish- American War (1898). After the war, he attended Lombard College (now Knox College) in Galesburg. Sandburg left college without a degree in 1902. He subsequently undertook newspaper and advertising work. He also became an organizer for the Social Democratic Party in Wisconsin and served as secretary to the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from 1910 to 1912. In 1908, Sandburg married Lillian Steichen, sister of photographer Edward Steichen.

In 1913 Sandburg moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he worked as a journalist, writing editorials for the Chicago Daily News from 1918 to 1933. In 1914 Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” was published in the magazine Poetry, and he was awarded the magazine’s Levinson prize that same year. Sandburg’s first full-sized volume, Chicago Poems (1916), established him as the poet of that industrial city. He joined Sherwood Anderson, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters as a central figure in the flowering of literature in Chicago from 1912 to 1925. In its opening lines, the poem 'Chicago' addressed and described the city:

“Hog Butcher for the World, /Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,/ Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;/ Stormy, husky, brawling,/ City of the Big Shoulders . . . ”

J. D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger, born in 1919, American novelist and short-story writer, known for his stories dealing with the intellectual and emotional struggles of adolescents who are alienated from the empty, materialistic world of their parents. Salinger's work is marked by a profound sense of craftsmanship, a keen ear for dialogue, and a deep awareness of the frustrations of life in America after World War II (1939-1945).

The Catcher in the Rye is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old boy who has just flunked out of his third private boarding school. Unwilling to remain at school until the end of the term, Holden runs away, returning to New York City, his hometown. He does not contact his parents there, but instead drifts around the city for two days. The bulk of the novel is an account, at once hilariously funny and tragically moving, of Holden's adventures in Manhattan. These include disillusioning encounters with two nuns, a suave ex- schoolmate, an old girlfriend, a prostitute named Sunny, and a sympathetic former teacher. Finally, drawn by his affection for his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe, Holden abandons his spree and returns home.

Salinger's depiction of Holden Caulfield is considered one of the most convincing portrayals of an adolescent in literature. Intelligent, sensitive, and imaginative, Holden desires acceptance into the adult world even as he is sickened and obsessed by what he regards as its 'phonies,' including his teachers, parents, and his older brother, who is a screenwriter in California. For all his surface toughness, Holden is painfully idealistic and longs for a moral purpose in life. He tells Phoebe that he wants to be “the catcher in the rye”—the defender of childhood innocence—who would stand in a field of rye where thousands of children are playing and “catch anybody if they start to go over the cliff.” The book remains a popular bestseller.

Many of Salinger’s early short stories have never been published in book form. Nine Stories, a 1953 anthology of his stories, won great critical acclaim. Reviewing it for the New York Times, novelist Eudora Welty praised Salinger's writing as “original, first-rate, serious and beautiful.” In one of the stories, 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish,' the author introduces the fictional Glass family, an Irish-Jewish New York family with seven children. The family's saga, colored by the suicide of the precocious eldest son, Seymour, and informed by Salinger's growing interest in Zen Buddhism, would become the center of the writer's work during the next decade.

Will Rogers

Will Rogers (1879-1935), American humorist, actor, and writer, born on Oologah, Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma).

Born William Penn Adair Rogers to parents of Cherokee heritage, he made his vaudeville debut with a rope-throwing act in New York City in 1905. Later he achieved wide popularity through the humorous monologues with which he accompanied his rope tricks. After 1914 Rogers appeared in several of the annual Ziegfeld Follies in New York City. He also acted in numerous motion pictures and wrote a series of syndicated newspaper articles in which he poked fun at the great figures of the day and expounded his homespun philosophy.

His film career began in 1918 and encompassed more than 60 short and feature films. After the advent of sound in films, Rogers found a wide audience in such pictures as A Connecticut Yankee (1931), Down to Earth (1932), State Fair (1933), David Harum (1934), Life Begins at Forty (1935), and his three films under the direction of John Ford— Doctor Bull (1933), Judge Priest (1934), and Steamboat 'Round the Bend (released posthumously, 1935).

Rogers was killed when an airplane in which he was flying with celebrated American aviator Wiley Post crashed in Alaska. His writings include The Cowboy Philosopher on Prohibition (1919), Illiterate Digest (1924), and Will Rogers' Political Follies (1929).

Philip Roth

Philip Roth, born in 1933, American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, whose works reflect the problems of assimilation and identity among American Jews. Like Nobel Prize-winning writer Saul Bellow, who also interprets the Jewish American experience, Roth is a major figure in contemporary psychological realism. Yet he also borrows techniques from fantasy and the grotesque world of Czech novelist Franz Kafka, as in his surrealistic novel The Breast (1972), in which a man turns into a large female breast.

Robbins, Tom

Robbins, Tom, born in 1936, American writer, best known for comical novels with outlandish characters and plots. His highly imaginative and playful language is a vehicle for philosophical musings that challenge dominant Western values.

He was born Thomas Eugene Robbins in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and grew up in several small Virginia towns. Robbins was creative and rebellious as a youth, and his parents finally sent him to military school in the early 1950s. He later attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where he studied journalism but failed to finish his degree. In the mid-1950s Robbins lived in New York City and tried to write poetry but had little success. A few years later he joined the United States Air Force and, while stationed in the Far East, studied Eastern philosophy.

In 1961 Robbins earned an art degree from Richmond Professional Institute in Virginia, and a year later moved to Seattle, Washington. There he worked as a newspaper copyeditor and arts critic, and also tried hallucinogenic drugs for the first time. He later said the experience motivated him to explore different levels of consciousness in his writing.

In the late 1960s Robbins attracted a publisher with an idea for a novel. He then wrote Another Roadside Attraction (1971), a book in which the mummified body of Jesus Christ is stolen from the Vatican catacombs and reappears in an American carnival. The work was critically praised for its humor and precise use of language. Although popular acclaim was slow in coming, the book eventually attracted a cult following and recorded significant sales after its paperback release. His second novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976; filmed 1993), is the equally bizarre story of a nomadic young woman with abnormally large thumbs. Despite the disjointed plots and strange asides common to his books, Robbins became a bestselling author with a dedicated fan base. After the success of Cowgirls, he continued to produce a new novel every four to six years, including Still Life with Woodpecker (1980), Jitterbug Perfume (1984), Skinny Legs and All (1990), Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994), and Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000).

Robbins’s work seeks to undermine some of Western civilization’s key institutions, such as powerful governments and organized religion. His books reveal the influence of Eastern mystical philosophy and a belief in language as an “agent of liberation” that can expand an individual’s consciousness. Villa Incognito (2003), Robbins’s eighth novel, tells the story of three U.S. military deserters in Laos. Gene Roddenberry

Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991), American scriptwriter and producer, and creator of the television series Star Trek (1966–1969). Born Eugene Wesley Roddenberry in El Paso, Texas, he was raised in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from Los Angeles City College in 1941 and served in the Army Air Corps from 1941 to 1945. After leaving the Army, Roddenberry worked as a pilot and a police officer before becoming a television writer.

In the mid-1960s Roddenberry began developing the television series Star Trek, a science- fiction drama set in the 23rd century. The program chronicles the adventures of a starship crew as they travel through space. As the executive producer of the series, Roddenberry guided its plots, often exploring the strengths and weaknesses of human character. The series, noted for its diverse cast, gained an extremely loyal base of fans and was widely syndicated after its cancellation in 1969.

In 1979 Roddenberry served as producer of the motion picture Star Trek, which features the characters from the television series. He was less involved with the five additional Star Trek motion pictures that were made in his lifetime, but in the late 1980s he created the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). Set 80 years after the original series, The Next Generation features a different cast but continues to portray human concerns and dilemmas in a space-based science-fiction setting.

Roddenberry's original concept inspired other spin-offs, including the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001), and Enterprise (2001- 2005); many books incorporating the characters of various Star Trek programs; and the motion pictures Star Trek: Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), and Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), which feature the cast of The Next Generation.

Whitelaw Reid

Whitelaw Reid (1837-1912), American journalist and diplomat, born near Xenia, Ohio, and educated at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In 1861 Reid joined the Cincinnati Gazette as a war correspondent. His descriptions of the Battle of Gettysburg, of the city of Richmond, Virginia, after its capture by federal troops (see Civil War, American), and of the funeral of President Abraham Lincoln were widely hailed as examples of distinguished journalism. Reid became managing editor of the New York Tribune in 1869 and owner and editor in chief in 1872. He augmented the high journalistic reputation of the Tribune and increased its circulation.

In 1889, Reid was appointed minister to France, and in 1892 he was the vice- presidential candidate in the losing campaign of Benjamin Harrison. In 1898 Reid served on the commission that negotiated the treaty ending the Spanish- American War. From 1905 until his death, Reid was ambassador to Great Britain. His writings include Our New Duties (1899), Problems of Expansion (1900), and The Greatest Fact in Modern History (1906).

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), German American novelist, born in Osnabrück, Germany, and educated at the University of Münster. He served in the German army during World War I (1914-1918). He set down his recollections of his war service in Im Westen nichts Neues (1929; All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929). This grimly realistic work, depicting with relentless clarity and warm compassion the sufferings, courage, and comradeship of the common soldiers, and embodying a bitter condemnation of militarism, became one of the most widely read novels of all time. Three film versions of the book were made (see All Quiet on the Western Front). In a sequel, Der Weg zurück (1931; The Road Back, 1931), Remarque presented a vivid picture of postwar Germany. An opponent of National Socialism, he left Germany in 1932 and went to the United States in 1939; he became a U.S. citizen in 1947. His other books include Arc de Triomphe (1946; Arch of Triumph, 1946), Zeit zu leben, Zeit zu sterben (1954; A Time to Live and a Time to Die, 1954), and Die Nacht von Lissabon (1962; The Night in Lisbon, 1964).

Anne Rice

Anne Rice, born in 1941, American writer, known for her best-selling novels about the supernatural. Rice was born Howard Allen O'Brien in New Orleans, Louisiana, but in her youth she changed her first name to Anne. She married Stan Rice in 1961 and was educated at Texas Woman's University, San Francisco State College, and the University of California at Berkeley.

In Rice's first novel, Interview with the Vampire (1976; motion picture, 1994), a vampire tells his life story to a boy, thereby introducing the reader to vampire history and culture. The book begins a saga of vampires that continues in several other books, which together constitute the Vampire Chronicles, a series noted for its sympathetic portrayal of vampires as romantic individuals who live outside mainstream society. The other Vampire Chronicles books include The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned (1988), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), and The Vampire Armand (1998). These novels are told from the point of view of vampires rather than that of victims. Through graphically described scenes, Rice's supernatural characters search for their own identities in a vampire subculture in which death and sexuality are often intertwined. The Vampire Chronicles books also draw on such themes as homoeroticism, atheism, immortality, and the essential nature of good and evil. Rice began a second series of vampire stories in 1998. This second series included Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires (1999) and Vittorio the Vampire (1999).

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich, born in 1929, American poet and essayist, best known for her examination of the experiences of women in society. She won the National Book Award in 1974 for Diving into the Wreck, a collection of poems that explored such subjects as language, myth, and the historical development of women's roles in society.

Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1951 she graduated from Radcliffe College and received the Yale Younger Poets award for her first collection of poems, A Change of World. Her other poetry books include Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Dream of a Common Language (1978), Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1992), Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995), and Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 (1999). Her prose books include Of Woman Born (1976; 1986); Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986); and What Is Found There (1993).

During her career, Rich has been active in the women's movement and other movements for social and economic justice. Much of her poetry reflects these concerns.

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon, born in 1937, American novelist, known for his experimental writing techniques that involve extremely complicated plots and themes. His most famous novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), won the National Book Award.

Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York. He studied engineering at Cornell University, left to serve in the United States Navy, and returned to complete a degree in English in 1958. He worked in the aircraft industry for two years before publishing his first novel, V., in 1963. His other novels include The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006).

Pynchon’s books generally portray a vast network made up of the industrial, military, mass-communication, and entertainment systems that developed during World War II (1939-1945). He traces the development of this network from the European roots of free enterprise, throughout the founding of the United States, to modern times. Mason & Dixon is his only work not to be set in the 20th century; it focuses on the work and friendship of 18th-century British surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon as they travel across pre-Revolutionary America.

Pynchon’s novels are broad in scope and use scientific theories, historical facts, and details of popular culture with great accuracy. He leads readers through a fantasia of actual and imagined events, in which mystery, rather than solution, is elevated. The reader must unscramble the interwoven and often incomplete plots, through which large casts of characters drift. Pynchon uses a variety of narrative techniques, including satire, humor, and suspense, to paint a dark, but not hopeless, picture of society.

Much of Pynchon’s personal life remains a mystery. He has lived in seclusion for many years, and his academic and military records have been lost. Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle, full name Ernest Taylor Pyle (1900-1945), American journalist, born near Dana, Indiana. He attended the University of Indiana but left before graduating. Pyle was a reporter, copy editor, and aviation editor until 1932, when he began to write a daily column as a roving reporter for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. His simple, warm, human writing style was widely popular, especially during World War II (1939-1945). In 1944 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in reporting for his distinguished reports from the European battlefront. On April 18, 1945, on the island of Ie Shima in the southwestern Pacific Ocean near Okinawa, he was killed by Japanese machine-gun fire. His columns, which eventually appeared in 200 newspapers, were published in book form as Ernie Pyle in England (1941), Here Is Your War (1943), Brave Men (1944), and Last Chapter (1946).

Richard Pryor

Richard Pryor (1940-2005), American comedian, actor, director, and screenwriter, known for dealing candidly with controversial topics and bringing African American issues and idioms to mainstream audiences. He raised stand-up comedy to the level of performance art and influenced a generation of performers.

Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III was born into a poor family in Peoria, Illinois. He grew up in a ghetto brothel, dropped out of high school at the age of 14, and later served in the United States Army for two years. Pryor honed an instinctive talent for humor into a proficient, if conventional, stand-up comedy act while touring nightclubs during the early 1960s, eventually gaining national exposure through appearances on television talk and variety shows. During this period he was often compared to the African American comedian Bill Cosby.

Responding to the social ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pryor departed from the conventions of stand-up comedy. He began to draw freely on his experiences as an African American, treating issues such as racism, sex, and street life, often in a confrontational manner. The resulting routines, recorded on such Grammy Award-winning albums as That Nigger’s Crazy (1974) and …Is It Something I Said? (1975), were hilarious, insightful, and often moving.

Pryor made his movie debut in 1967 and subsequently appeared in several low-budget films. After his first major screen role, as a pianist in Lady Sings the Blues (1972), he went on to become one of the biggest box-office attractions of the 1970s and 1980s with roles in such films as Car Wash (1976), The Wiz (1978), and Brewster’s Millions (1985). Pryor also teamed with actor Gene Wilder in a number of popular comedies, including Silver Streak (1976), Stir Crazy (1980), and See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989). However, he did his most critically acclaimed screen work in the political drama Blue Collar (1978) and in two films of his biting solo comedy shows, Richard Pryor Live in Concert (1979) and Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip (1982).

Pryor contributed to a number of screenplays during his career, including the hit film Blazing Saddles (1974). He also wrote regularly for television, winning an Emmy Award in 1974 for his work on a Lily Tomlin TV special. His own television series, The Richard Pryor Show, was cancelled after a short run in 1977.

Pryor struggled with drug abuse and health problems during the last several decades of his life. He suffered severe burns in 1980 when he set himself on fire while using cocaine. Although Pryor’s career subsequently revived, he was forced to retire from regular performing and acting in the early 1990s due to multiple sclerosis. His autobiography, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences, was published in 1995.

Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), American writer, generally regarded as one of the leading modern writers of short stories. Born in Indian Creek, near San Antonio, Texas, Porter was educated at private schools. In the 1920s and 1930s, she contributed articles to various newspapers while living in the United States, Europe, and Mexico. Porter's first collection of short stories, Flowering Judas (1930), was quickly acclaimed. These stories, some with Mexican settings, were praised for their psychological insight and technical excellence. Porter's other story collections include Hacienda (1934); Noon Wine (1937); Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939); and Collected Stories (1965), which was awarded the 1966Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Porter's meticulous construction of complex situations and feelings established her as a leading stylist of her time. Many of her works portray an individual's search for understanding and freedom in an oppressive world. Porter was particularly noted for her ability to universalize individual experience. Although she did not write confessional fiction, many of her stories were based in part on her own experiences, and in several of her stories she reinvented herself as the character Miranda. Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter appeared in 1970. Porter's only novel, Ship of Fools (1962), depicting a voyage on an ocean liner on the eve of World War II (1939-1945), was made into a motion picture in 1965.

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound (1885-1972), American poet, critic, editor, and translator, considered one of the foremost American literary figures of the 20th century. Pound was a chief architect of English and American literary modernism, a movement characterized by experimentation in literary form and content, exploration of the literary traditions of non-Western and ancient cultures, and rejection of the traditions of the immediate past. As a poet, Pound experimented with various verse forms, from short poems focusing on concrete images to his epic masterpiece, the Cantos, a wide- ranging series of poems combining ancient and modern history with Pound’s personal reflections and experiences. As a critic and editor, Pound discovered and encouraged many experimental authors, including Irish writer James Joyce, English poet T. S. Eliot, and American writers Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. As an essayist, he wrote manifestos establishing influential principles of style and theme.

E. Annie Proulx

E. Annie Proulx, born in 1935, American novelist, whose poetic fiction chronicles the lives of characters coping with tragic events in harsh surroundings. One of her major concerns has been the individual's relationship to the land. Her novel The Shipping News (1993) was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Edna Annie Proulx was born in Norwich, Connecticut. Her family moved often during her childhood, living in various parts of New England and in North Carolina. Proulx earned a B.A. degree from the University of Vermont in 1969 and an M.A. degree from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montréal, Québec, Canada, in 1973.

Settling in rural Vermont in the mid-1970s Proulx supported herself by writing nonfiction articles and books, mostly about gardening and cooking. From 1984 to 1986 she also published her own newspaper, the Vershire Behind the Times. She wrote a few short stories but did not fully devote her writing to fiction until the 1980s. Her collection Heart Songs and Other Stories, about the inhabitants of rural Vermont and New Hampshire, was published in 1988.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), American writer, known as a poet and critic but most famous as the first master of the short-story form (see Short Story), especially the psychological horror tale. Both his poems and his tales of the mysterious and macabre produce a haunting effect, often reflecting Poe’s obsession with death. Many of the stories express abnormal states of mind and are constructed in terms of a single mad obsession. Poe is also important for his literary theories and for his invention of the modern detective story. Many major American and European writers have professed their artistic debt to him. His influence can be seen in the work of such diverse writers as Charles Baudelaire, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Poe was orphaned in his early childhood and taken to Richmond, Virginia, to be raised by John Allan, a successful merchant, and his wife. From the Allans, Poe acquired his middle name. At the age of six Poe went to England with the Allan family and was placed in a private school. After returning to the United States in 1820, he continued to study in private schools. He attended the University of Virginia for a year, but in 1827 Allan, displeased by Poe’s drinking and gambling, refused to pay his debts and forced him to work as a clerk.

Poe, disliking his new duties intensely, quit the job, thus alienating Allan, and went to Boston. There his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), was published anonymously. Shortly afterward Poe enlisted in the United States Army and served a two-year term. In 1829 his second volume of verse, Al Aaraaf, was published, and he achieved a reconciliation with Allan, who secured him an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. After only a few months at the academy, Poe was expelled for neglect of duty, and Allan disowned him permanently.

Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), American poet and prose writer, noted for her intensely personal and brutally honest poems. Plath’s work has grown in influence and popularity since her suicide at age 30. She is widely regarded as one the first feminist poets and an icon of the women’s movement (see Women’s Rights).

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, where she grew up. Her father, a German immigrant, was a professor of biology at Boston University and a specialist in bees. His death when Plath was eight years old profoundly affected her later life, marriage, and poetry. Plath began writing at a young age, and she published her poems in magazines and won literary prizes as a teenager.

Plath earned a scholarship to Smith College in Massachusetts and entered the school in 1950. In addition to her studies, she continued to write and publish poems and short stories.

In 1953, while still in college, Plath suffered a nervous breakdown and tried to commit suicide. She spent six months in a private hospital, where she received electroconvulsive therapy. This treatment became a recurrent image in her later writing.

Walker Percy

Walker Percy (1916-1990), American essayist and novelist best known for The Moviegoer (1961), which won the 1962 National Book Award for fiction. Percy believed that fiction was intended above all to be read for pleasure, and his writing was noted for its entertaining yet intellectual exploration of the culture of the American South.

Percy was born to an affluent family in Birmingham, Alabama. His father committed suicide in 1929 and his mother died in an automobile accident a few years later, leaving him orphaned in his teens. Thereafter Percy and his two brothers were raised in Greenville, Mississippi, by their father’s cousin, William Alexander Percy. The elder Percy was a poet and essayist best remembered for Lanterns on the Levee (1941), an autobiographical view of Southern politics and culture. Walker Percy later credited his 'Uncle Will' with instilling in him a knowledge of Southern tradition and a lifelong passion for the art of writing.

After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1937, Percy attended medical school at Columbia University and received his M.D. degree in 1941. Less than a year later, he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. During his recuperation in a sanatorium in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state, he turned his attention toward a literary career and converted to Roman Catholicism. Percy had recovered sufficiently by 1946 to marry Mary Bernice Townsend, with whom he had two daughters. The couple spent most of their life together in Covington, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans.

During the 1950s Percy emerged as an essayist, publishing articles on literature and on philosophical issues surrounding psychiatry, such as the relationship between language and the human mind. His work appeared in intellectual journals such as The Partisan Review and Thought. He had difficulty, however, writing fiction and completed two unpublished novels before writing The Moviegoer. As Percy’s first published novel, The Moviegoer received relatively little attention upon its release, but it surprised the literary world by winning the National Book Award for fiction. The award committee commended the book for its 'truthful … shocks of recognition.' The Moviegoer is the story of a New Orleans stockbroker who finds escape from the emptiness of his acquisitive life in the fantasy world of cinema. The focus of the action takes place during the festival of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, when a sexual encounter with a distant female cousin reminds the stockbroker of the possibilities of human compassion.

Percy wrote five more novels over the next 25 years. The Last Gentleman (1966) and The Second Coming (1980) share a main character, Will Barrett, an amnesia victim who becomes obsessed with the relationship between memory and reality. Love in the Ruins (1971) and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987) also share a protagonist, Dr. Tom More. Set in the not-too- distant future, Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome speculate about changes in American life and consciousness. Lancelot (1977) is about a man who kills his wife’s lover. Percy's essays were published in two major collections, The Message in the Bottle (1975) and Lost in the Cosmos (1983).

Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967), American writer, whose poems and short stories are characterized by a bitingly humorous and sardonic style. Born in West End, New Jersey, Parker was educated at the Blessed Sacrament Convent, in New York City. From 1916 to 1920 she was a drama and literary critic for the magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair in New York City, after which she became a free-lance writer. Parker was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers and artists that gathered regularly during the 1920s and 1930s at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. The group included such American writers as George S. Kaufman, Robert E. Sherwood, Marc Connelly, Heywood Broun, and Robert Benchley and was known for witty conversation and verbal sparring.

Parker's writings are concerned mainly with love and with the frustrations and contradictions of modern life. Her books of verse include Death and Taxes (1931) and Not So Deep as a Well (1936); she also wrote the short story collections Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933). Constant Reader (posthumously published, 1970) comprises book reviews she wrote for the New Yorker magazine from 1927 to 1933 under the pseudonym Constant Reader.

Clifford Odets

Clifford Odets (1906-1963), American playwright, regarded as the most gifted of the American social-protest playwrights of the 1930s. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he was reared in New York City. He left school at the age of 15 to become an actor. In 1931 Odets helped found the Group Theatre in New York City. Most of his plays were produced by the Group Theatre, including Waiting for Lefty (1935), a one-act play about a taxi drivers' strike that established his fame; Awake and Sing! (1935), about a Jewish family in the Bronx during the Great Depression; and Till the Day I Die (1935). After the unsuccessful production of his play Paradise Lost (1935), Odets went to Hollywood, California, where he wrote the screenplay for the motion picture The General Died at Dawn (1936). He then returned to New York City, where he wrote more plays for the Group Theatre, including Golden Boy (1937), Silent Partner (1938), Rocket to the Moon (1938), Night Music (1940), and Clash by Night (1941), all concerned with the frustration of individual potential by economic insecurity and the materialistic ideals of middle-class society. Odets subsequently spent several years in Hollywood and wrote many screenplays, including None but the Lonely Heart (1944) and The Story on Page One (1959). He also wrote the plays The Big Knife (1949) and The Country Girl (1950).

Eugene O’Neill

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), American playwright, whose work dramatizes the plight of people driven by elemental passions, by memory and dream, and by an awareness of the forces that threaten to overwhelm them. His early plays, appearing between 1916 and 1920, helped initiate American theater’s shift away from elegant parlor dramas and toward gritty naturalistic plays.

O’Neill’s later plays covered varied ground, leaping from expressionism—an attempt to depict subjective feelings or emotions rather than objective reality—to comedy, and finally to modern reworkings of classical myth. His best tragic plays reflect his statement that he was “always conscious of the Force behind—Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it—Mystery certainly—and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle….”

O’Neill won Pulitzer Prizes in drama for his plays Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1921), Strange Interlude (1928), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). In 1936 he became the first American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

John O’Hara

John O’Hara (1905-1970), American writer of novels and short stories, born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Believing that all good fiction is good social history, O'Hara set many of his novels and short stories in realistically described but fictionally named Pennsylvania towns. His main themes are class conflict, status, and sexual mores. O'Hara's ability to create characters and his ear for dialogue are shown in Appointment in Samarra (1934), his acclaimed first novel; Butterfield 8 (1935; filmed 1960), a story of New York City life; A Rage to Live (1949); Ten North Frederick (1955), which won the National Book Award; From the Terrace (1958; filmed 1960); The Lockwood Concern (1965); and The Good Samaritan and Other Stories (pub. posthumously 1974).

A gifted short-story writer, O'Hara began writing for The New Yorker in 1928; during his lifetime he sold 225 stories to the magazine, more than any other writer. His first collection, The Doctor's Son and Other Stories (1935), was followed by 12 more, one of which—Pal Joey (1940)—was made into a successful Broadway musical by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.

Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), American writer, whose novels and short stories focusing on humanity's spiritual deformity and flight from redemption earned her a unique place in 20th-century American fiction.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O'Connor was educated at the Georgia State College for Women and the State University of Iowa (now called the University of Iowa). Most of her life was spent in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she raised peacocks and wrote. O'Connor's work, essentially two novels and two volumes of short stories, has been described as an unlikely mixture of southern Gothic, prophecy, and evangelistic Roman Catholicism. The novels are Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960); the short-story collections are A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything that Rises Must Converge (published posthumously, 1965). O'Connor is frequently compared to the American novelist William Faulkner for her portrayal of southern character and milieu and to the Austrian writer Franz Kafka for her preoccupation with the grotesque. A basic theme of her work is the individual's vain attempt to escape the grace of God, and her work is profoundly and pervasively religious. She died of lupus, a disease that crippled her for the last ten years of her life.

Petroleum V. Nasby

Petroleum V. Nasby, pseudonym of David Ross Locke (1833-1888), American humorist, whose letters in support of the abolition of slavery reportedly prompted President Abraham Lincoln to say, “For the genius to write these things I would gladly give up my office.” Born in Vestal, New York, Locke attracted attention in 1861 when he published the first of his letters in the Findlay (Ohio) Jeffersonian. In his letters Locke satirized the proslavery position by assuming the persona of Nasby, a vulgar racist. Nasby's opinions, presented as representative of the mostly Democratic supporters of slavery, allowed Locke to show the worst aspects of that movement. The mocking letters greatly helped the efforts of the North during the American Civil War (1861-1865). After the war ended, Locke continued writing letters that, through the use of the reprehensible Nasby, supported various causes, including temperance and women's rights. From 1865 to 1871 Locke was editor of the Toledo (Ohio) Blade, which gained national circulation under his direction, and the Nasby letters continued in the Blade until Locke's death. Several collections of the letters were published, the first of which was The Nasby Papers (1864).

Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian American novelist, poet, and critic, whose highly inventive writings earned him critical acclaim as a major 20th-century literary figure. Nabokov's novels demonstrate great stylistic and compositional virtuosity, and his astonishing imagination often took a morbid or grotesque turn. He is best known for his novel Lolita (1955).

Most of Nabokov's early works in Russian show a strong inclination toward parody, punning, and hoax. These qualities later carried over to his writing in English. Most of his Russian books were translated into English under his personal supervision. They include Mashen'ka (1926; Mary, 1970), Korol', dama, valet (1928; King, Queen, Knave, 1968), Zashchita (1930; The Defense, 1964), Podvig (1933; Glory, 1972), and Camera obscura (1933; revised and translated as Laughter in the Dark, 1938). Other Russian works were Otchayaniye (1936; Despair, 1937), Dar (1937; The Gift, 1963), and Priglashenie na kazu' (1938; Invitation to a Beheading, 1959).

Nabokov's first full-length English work was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), about a young Russian man’s relationship to his half-brother, a British writer. Lolita, a brilliantly detailed, unconventional story, recounts the intense and obsessive involvement of a middle-aged European man with a sexually precocious young American girl, whom Nabokov termed a nymphet. The controversial book caused a sensation in Europe, and when it was published in the United States in 1958, it received a similar reception.

Nabokov wrote several other novels in English. Pnin (1957) focuses on a Russian professor living in the United States. Pale Fire (1962) is a satire on academic pretentiousness consisting of a 999-line poem and commentary by a demented New England scholar who is the exiled king of a mythical country. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) is a complicated work that is, in part, an inquiry into the nature of time. Transparent Things (1972) is another meditation on time, and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) is the autobiography of a fictional Russian émigré writer whose life parallels Nabokov’s. Nabokov’s short-story collections include Nabokov's Dozen (1958), Tyrants Destroyed (1975), and The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (1995). Cynthia Jane Moss

Cynthia Jane Moss, born in 1940, American wildlife biologist and author, director of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, the longest-running study of elephants in the wild. Founded by Moss in 1972, the project tracks elephant populations in southern Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, providing scientists with a wealth of information about the complex social organization of these enormous, intelligent animals. Moss’s groundbreaking research revealed that elephants live in families consisting of calves and adult females, called cows, and that within a family, the oldest cow is typically the leader. In addition, Moss has observed and documented the mating habits of elephants, their reactions to the deaths of other elephants, and the education of younger elephants by older family members.

Moss was born in Ossining, New York. She received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Smith College in 1962. In 1964 she accepted a position as a reporter and researcher at Newsweek magazine in New York City. A visit to Tanzania’s Lake Manyara National Park in 1967 marked her first contact with elephants in the wild, an experience that changed her life forever. She moved to Tanzania in 1968 to work with British zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who was studying the elephants of Lake Manyara. When the research project ended, Moss stayed in Africa, working in Kenya as a research assistant to projects studying mammals on the Athi Plains and elephants in Tsavo National Park. She also worked as a freelance journalist and became editor of Wildlife News, a publication of the African Wildlife Foundation.

In 1972 Moss began to study the elephants of Amboseli National Park on a part-time basis. Three years later, the African Wildlife Foundation agreed to fund the project full-time. Since then Moss has studied more than 1,600 elephants, identifying each by its ears, which are as unique to elephants as fingerprints are to humans.

African elephants have long been hunted for their ivory tusks, and that practice escalated in the 1970s as the global demand for elephant ivory increased. As a result of extensive poaching, in which hunters illegally kill elephants and then remove their ivory tusks to sell, the elephant population in Africa declined by half between 1970 and 1985. During the 1980s, Moss led a successful campaign to designate the African elephant as endangered in an effort to provide the animal with stronger legal protection from harm by humans. She also contributed to lobbying that led to an international ban on the trade of ivory in 1989.

Moss has written extensively about her experiences with animals in Africa in Portraits in the Wild: Behavior Studies of East African Mammals (1975); Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family (1988); Echo of the Elephants: The Story of an Elephant Family (1992); and Little Big Ears: The Story of Ely (1997). In addition, she has contributed articles to scientific journals and popular magazines, including Nature, Smithsonian, and International Wildlife.

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison, born in 1931, American writer, whose works deal with the black experience and celebrate the black community. Morrison’s work features mythic elements, sharp observation, compassion, and poetic language and is often concerned with the relationship between the individual and society. In 1993 she won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Born in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison was christened Chloe Anthony Wofford and grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s in a poor and close-knit family. In 1949 she entered Howard University, where she became interested in theater and joined a drama group, the Howard University Players. Morrison went on to earn an M.A. degree in English at Cornell University in 1955. She subsequently taught at Texas Southern University from 1955 to 1957 and then at Howard University from 1957 to 1964. While at Howard she met and married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. The couple had two children and then divorced in 1964.

While teaching at Howard, Morrison began to write fiction. After leaving teaching she worked as an editor at Random House, first in Syracuse, New York, then in New York City. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, an expansion of an earlier short story, was published in 1970, and she attracted immediate attention as a promising writer. This was followed by the novel Sula (1973), about a woman who refuses to conform to community mores. Morrison's next novel, Song of Solomon (1977), was hailed by critics as a major literary achievement. It tells the story of a character named Milkman Dead, who in his search for his family's lost fortune discovers instead his family history. Tar Baby (1981), about a tense romance between a man and a woman, was equally well received.

Beloved (1987; Pulitzer Prize, 1988) is regarded by many as Morrison's most successful novel. It is the story of Sethe, a mother who kills her daughter Beloved rather than have her grow up as a slave. The book explores many complex themes, including black Americans' relationship to slavery. Morrison's use of multiple time frames and fantastic occurrences (such as the reappearance of Beloved) demonstrate her lyric storytelling abilities. The novels Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998) and the nonfiction book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) were also well received. Morrison’s seventh novel, Paradise (1998), focuses on an all-black town called Ruby, and a violent attack that a group of men make on a small, all-female community at the edge of town. In Love (2003), she describes life and love in a black seaside resort during the 1940s and 1950s.

Michael Moore

Michael Moore, born in 1954, American filmmaker and writer. Moore’s documentaries and books about political issues have been both controversial and critically acclaimed, often incorporating dark humor to appeal to a broader audience.

Moore was born in Davison, a suburb of Flint, Michigan. Politically active as a teenager, he was elected to the Flint school board at the age of 18. He briefly attended the University of Michigan but left to pursue social and political causes.

Moore started a weekly alternative newspaper in the mid-1970s called the Flint Voice (later the Michigan Voice) and also hosted a radio show. In 1986 Moore was hired to edit the liberal magazine Mother Jones but was fired after a few months over differences with the magazine’s publisher.

Moore moved back to Flint, where he became disturbed by massive layoffs in the city’s automobile factories, especially at General Motors Corporation. Although he never worked for the company, many of his relatives had in the past. Angered by the company’s decision to lay off thousands of U.S. employees and move jobs to foreign countries with cheaper labor, Moore decided to make a film about the high unemployment and resulting social problems in Flint.

That movie, Roger & Me (1989), chronicled Moore’s many fruitless attempts to confront General Motors executive Roger Smith and persuade him to visit Flint. The film earned numerous awards and became the highest grossing documentary film up to that time.

Moore followed up Roger & Me by writing and directing a comedy, Canadian Bacon (1995), starring Alan Alda and John Candy. Influenced by the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the film is the story of an American president who attempts to boost his sagging popularity ratings by declaring Canada a military threat to the United States. Most critics felt that Canadian Bacon was a disappointment compared to the originality of Roger & Me.

At the same time Moore began working in television. He produced and starred in his own television series, TV Nation (1994-1995), which continued his approach of attacking corporate misdeeds with often-humorous confrontations. The controversial show won an Emmy Award in 1995 but was canceled that same year. Moore later hosted a similar show, The Awful Truth (1999). Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore (1887-1972), American poet, noted for using the stanza as the basic unit of her poetry. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Moore was educated at Bryn Mawr College. From 1925 to 1929 she edited the literary magazine The Dial. She was associated at first with the imagist movement (see Imagism), but she later developed her own rhyme patterns and verse forms using the arrangement of syllables, rather than conventional stress patterns, as the base for her meter (see Versification). In her poetry Moore embedded crystalline references to a vast array of subjects. She was, for example, an ardent baseball fan, especially of the Brooklyn Dodgers team, and frequently celebrated this interest in her verse. Her work is descriptive and reflective, rather than lyric or dramatic, and it often gives minutely detailed descriptions of landscapes, animals, or objects.

Moore's first collection of verse was Poems (1921). This book was followed by Observations (1924), Selected Poems of Marianne Moore (1935, with an introduction by the poet T. S. Eliot), The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936), What Are Years? (1941), Nevertheless (1944), Collected Poems (1951; Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1952), Like a Bulwark (1956), O to Be a Dragon (1959), The Arctic Ox (1964), and Tell Me, Tell Me (1966). Moore's translation of Fables by the French author Jean de la Fontaine appeared in 1954, and Predilections (a book on her favorite writers) appeared in 1955. A Marianne Moore Reader was published in 1961, and The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore was published in 1967.

Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949), American author, who wrote Gone With the Wind (1936), one of the most popular novels of all time. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, she attended Smith College. She was a reporter and feature writer for the Atlanta Journal from 1922 until 1926, when she began writing Gone With the Wind, which she completed ten years later. This romantic picture of life in the South during the American Civil War became a best-seller almost immediately and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. It was made into a motion picture that, after its release in 1939, became one of the most popular and praised of all films. In 1995 the manuscript for Lost Laysen, a short novel Mitchell had written in 1916, was discovered. It was published in 1996.

Henry Miller

Henry Miller (1891-1980), American writer, whose antipuritanical books did much to free the discussion of sexual subjects in American writing from both legal and social restrictions. Born in New York City, Miller tried a variety of jobs and attended the City College of New York briefly before going to Paris in 1930. He lived there for almost ten years, leading a bohemian existence that he wrote about in three loosely autobiographical erotic novels, Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). These books, prohibited in the United States on grounds of obscenity, were frequently smuggled into his native country, building Miller an underground reputation. In 1940 he returned to the United States settling at Big Sur, California. There he continued to produce his vividly written, semiphilosophical, and often ribald works, which attacked contemporary American cultural values and moral attitudes. His books include The Colossus of Maroussi (1941); The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945-1947); a trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion, comprising Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus (1960); Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957); and the critical work The World of Lawrence (1980).

The publication of Miller's two “Tropics” novels in the United States led to a series of obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography and ended, in 1964, in a victory for him when the Supreme Court overruled state court findings of obscenity. Miller also earned recognition as a watercolorist.

Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller (1915-2005), American dramatist, whose works are concerned with the responsibility of each individual to other members of society. Simply and colloquially written, Miller’s plays sprang from his social conscience and from his compassion for those who are vulnerable to the false values imposed on them by society. Some critics regard Miller’s work as the most serious attempt in recent American drama to achieve the tragic force of ancient Greek plays.

Born in New York City, Miller was the son of a coat manufacturer who suffered financial ruin in the Great Depression of the 1930s. After graduating from high school, Miller worked and saved money for college. From 1934 to 1938, he studied at the University of Michigan. As a student, Miller won awards for his comedy The Grass Still Grows. After graduation, he returned to New York City to write.

Miller’s first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), opened to poor reviews and closed after four performances. His first successful play was All My Sons, which the New York Drama Critics’ Circle chose as the best play of 1947. All My Sons revolves around Joe Keller, the family patriarch, who has sold defective parts for war planes and allowed his partner to take the blame. A study of the effect of opportunism on family relationships, it foreshadowed much of Miller’s later work. Another of Miller’s early achievements was the novel Focus (1945), an attack on anti- Semitism that was well received.

H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), American journalist, critic, and essayist, whose perceptive and often controversial analyses of American life and letters made him one of the most influential critics of the 1920s and 1930s. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Henry Louis Mencken began his career as a journalist in 1899 with the Baltimore Morning Herald; in 1906 he switched to the Baltimore Sun, where he remained in various editorial capacities for most of his life. With American drama critic George Jean Nathan he coedited Smart Set, a satirical monthly magazine, from 1914 to 1923. Again with Nathan, in 1924, Mencken founded the American Mercury, the literary heir to their previous joint endeavor; Mencken remained as its editor until 1933. The shortcomings of democracy and middle-class American culture were the targets of Mencken's wit and criticism. (He called the American public the “booboisie.”) A six-volume collection of his essays and reviews, entitled Prejudices, was published between 1919 and 1927. Mencken's most important piece of scholarship was The American Language (1919; revised editions, 1921, 1923, 1936, 1963; supplements, 1945 and 1948), which traced the development and established the importance of American English. Happy Days (1940), Newspaper Days (1941), and Heathen Days (1943) are Mencken's autobiographies.

Beginning in 1971, Mencken's letters, diaries, papers, and unpublished manuscripts were periodically released under the terms of his will. Their contents revealed the complexities of his personality and raised allegations of anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny. The books published from Mencken's posthumously released writings include Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters (1987), correspondence between Mencken and his wife; The Diary of H. L. Mencken (1989), from the journal Mencken kept from 1930 to 1948; and My Life as Author and Editor (1993), an autobiographical volume. Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819-1891), American writer whose novel Moby Dick is one of the towering literary achievements in the history of fiction. Based on a detailed knowledge of the sea, ships, and whaling, Moby Dick reveals Melville's profound insight into human nature and his preoccupation with human fate in the universe. It also contains one of the most fascinating characters in fiction, the obsessed, tormented Captain Ahab. Melville is also known for the short novel Billy Budd, in which he explores the tragic conflict between good and evil and the limitations of human justice.

Melville was born in New York City. Both his mother and father were descended from prominent colonial families. One grandfather had participated in the Boston Tea Party, and the other had been a general in the colonial army during the American Revolution (1775-1783). However, the family’s fortunes had declined by Melville’s time. His father’s importing business failed in 1830, and the family moved to Albany, New York.

After his father’s death in 1832, when Melville was 12, he worked for a time as a bank clerk, a helper on his uncle’s farm, and an assistant in his older brother’s fur factory. That business collapsed during the depression of 1837. Melville, having studied briefly at the Albany Classical School, then tried school teaching for a few weeks near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He returned to his family’s home after some difficulties about salary and studied surveying in anticipation of gaining a position on the Erie Canal project.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819-1891), American writer whose novel Moby Dick is one of the towering literary achievements in the history of fiction. Based on a detailed knowledge of the sea, ships, and whaling, Moby Dick reveals Melville's profound insight into human nature and his preoccupation with human fate in the universe. It also contains one of the most fascinating characters in fiction, the obsessed, tormented Captain Ahab. Melville is also known for the short novel Billy Budd, in which he explores the tragic conflict between good and evil and the limitations of human justice.

Melville was born in New York City. Both his mother and father were descended from prominent colonial families. One grandfather had participated in the Boston Tea Party, and the other had been a general in the colonial army during the American Revolution (1775- 1783). However, the family’s fortunes had declined by Melville’s time. His father’s importing business failed in 1830, and the family moved to Albany, New York.

After his father’s death in 1832, when Melville was 12, he worked for a time as a bank clerk, a helper on his uncle’s farm, and an assistant in his older brother’s fur factory. That business collapsed during the depression of 1837. Melville, having studied briefly at the Albany Classical School, then tried school teaching for a few weeks near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He returned to his family’s home after some difficulties about salary and studied surveying in anticipation of gaining a position on the Erie Canal project.

James Alan McPherson

James Alan McPherson, born in 1943, American writer, whose fiction and journalism offer a powerful critique of prejudice in America. His collection of short stories, Elbow Room (1977), was awarded the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, at a time when segregation was still in force, McPherson was educated at Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1965 he was recruited by Harvard Law School. His writing career was launched when one of his short stories was awarded a prize by the editors of The Atlantic Monthly. In 1968, the year McPherson earned his L.L.B. degree from Harvard, The Atlantic awarded him its so-called First Award, presented to promising writers for their first publication in a major magazine, and in 1969 the magazine gave him a writer's grant. McPherson began serving as a contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly in 1969. He has taught literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Virginia. He became a professor of English at the University of Iowa in 1981.

All the stories in McPherson's first collection of short stories, Hue and Cry (1969), are indictments of social injustice based on race, class, and sex discrimination. His Pulitzer Prizewinning collection, Elbow Room, also depicts characters who struggle against social limits imposed by others. Unlike the characters in his first book, however, those in Elbow Room seem optimistic about the possibility of bringing about positive change, at least in their own lives.