WORLD GREAT WRITERS Contents Preface vii 1. Adams, Henry 1 2. Ambler, Eric 5 3. Anand, Mulk Raj 10 4. Andersen, Hans Christian 17 5. Asimov, Isaac 23 6. Austen, Jane 31 7. Balzac, Honoré de 35 8. Beckett, Samuel 40 9. Camus, Albert 48 10. Canetti, Elias 54 11. Carroll, Lewis 58 12. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 65 13. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich 70 14. Chaucer, Geoffrey 77 15. Christie, Agatha 82 16. Clarke, Arthur C. 92 17. Defoe, Daniel 98 18. Dickens, Charles 102 19. Eliot, T. S. 111 20. Fitzgerald, F. Scott 117 21. Hammett, Dashiell 122 22. Hugo, Victor 125 23. James, Henry 134 24. Kafka, Franz 141 25. Lawrence, D. H. 147 26. Miller, Arthur 157 27. Naipaul, V.S. 164 28. O. Henry 171 29. Orwell, George 176 30. Pope, Alexander 183 31. Pushkin, Aleksandr 187 32. Russell, Bertrand 193 33. Rushdie, Salman 203 34. Salinger, J.D. 211 35. Seth, Vikram 216 36. Shakespeare, William 223 37. Shaw, George Bernard 232 38. Singh,Khushwant 239 39. Tolstoy, Leo 244 40. Twain, Mark 252 41. Verne, Jules 260 42. Voltaire 267 43. Wilde, Oscar 274 (vii) Preface A world without books is hard to imagine. From childhood onwards man is greatly influenced by books. Blessed are the men who can pen down their thoughts. Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Vikram Seth and so many more, all of these has influenced us in one way or another. This book is dedicated to these man and women. It was not easy to decide whom to include in our volume. We have tried to span the breadth of civilizations to identify writers from various cultures and perspectives who influenced the shape of our present world. We have left out some individuals, but we hope the reader will forgive such omissions. We have tried to be as accurate as possible, but some mistakes are sure to come in. The entries are arranged alphabetically. Each entry contains a brief biography and a concise, detailed discussion of the author’s major works and themes. In preparation of this book, the author has freely consulted large number of books and journals so no authenticity is claimed. Author is especially thankful to Anmol Publications Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi for shaping this book in its final form. Suggestions for further improvement of this book are not only welcome but also greatly appreciated. Author About the Book A world without books is hard to imagine. From childhood onwards man is greatly influenced by books. Blessed are the men who can pen down their thoughts. Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Vikram Seth and so many more, all of these has influenced us in one way or another. This book is dedicated to these man and women. This book covers writers from various cultures and perspectives who influenced the shape of our present world. Bashu Mitra Ghosh (Author) Adams, Henry Henry Adams, who was perhaps the first American cosmopolitan, came from the most prominent family of the country — a grandfather and a great-grandfather had been presidents, and the father was Congressman and Minister to Britain. After graduating from Harvard, Henry spent most of his twenties in Europe and never grew sedentary, even if, after living as a Harvard professor in Boston for seven years, he eventually made Washington his winter home (residing in Lafayette Square, just behind the White House) and built a summer house in Beverly Farms, a resort on the shore north of Boston. Aside from travels in America (like the expedition in 1872 to the Rockies in Colorado and Utah), he returned to the old world for extended visits on his honeymoon trip (which in 1874 led him across Europe and up the Nile to Abu Simbel) and the archival tour of Britain, France, and Spain in 1879/80 (when he also crossed to Ceuta). 2 World Great Writers After Marian Adams committed suicide in December 1886, the widower became a compulsive traveler. Having been to Japan and Cuba, and on a swing of the American Far West, Henry embarked, in 1890, in San Francisco on an eighteen-month journey across the globe, to Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, Fiji, Australia, Java, Ceylon, Aden, Paris, London, and back to Washington. He could claim, had he been inclined to do so other than tacitly, that he had seen all five continents and more of the United States than almost anybody else. (For a more detailed account of Adams’s travels There always were exceptions, when there were no rails. In Cuba and Mexico, Adams would resort, grumbling, to horses and mules; for he would opt for as much comfort as could be obtained under the circumstances. A case in point is the 1894 expedition on horseback to Yellowstone, undertaken with John and Del Hay—conceivably because they wanted to inspect their friend Theodore Roosevelt’s hobbyhorse. Adams’s ruminations, the tours of the ways and by-ways of America and the world, became significant because they formed the backdrop of much of his writing, whether in extended travel letters from the South Seas or in Tahiti, the oral history he recorded following the notes he took as Marau Taaroa, the last queen of the island, told him her memoirs. When Adams wrote of his travels, they always became journeys in time as much as in space. In Jefferson and Madison the historian scholar presents, on a broad canvas, a large epic in lively detail. In Mont Saint Michel and Chartres the historian whom the critic Gregory S. Jay calls “Outlaw Virgin” tells a more intimate story of his views of Norman culture between the 10th and the 13th century. The letters Adams wrote around the turn of his century — and there was no better letter writer in American literature than Henry Adams — reveal him to be an advocate of politics on a global scale, enjoying and exploiting the privileges of an inside observer. John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge, all three close friends of Adams, were running American foreign Adams, Henry 3 politics as the United States bumptiously entered the global race for imperialist glory and colonialist exploitation. By 1902, Adams withdrew from politics. A convert to the amenities of an 18 horse-power Mercedes-Benz, he spent more and more time away from Washington; instead, he explored France in his new motor car, inviting friends like Edith Wharton and Bernard Berenson to join him on his cultural peregrinations. After he had seen the mural paintings in the caves of Dordogne, his money made possible the systematic investigation of the caves. Henry Adams summarized his notions of travel in a 1902 letter to one of his nieces: “My idea of paradise is a perfect automobile going thirty miles an hour on a smooth road to a twelfth-century cathedral.” In 1868, Henry Adams returned to the United States and settled down in Washington, D.C., where he started working as a journalist. Adams saw himself as a traditionalist longing for the democratic ideal of the 17th and 18th centuries. Accordingly, he was keen on exposing political corruption in his journalistic pieces. In 1870 Adams was appointed Professor of Medieval History at Harvard, a position he held until his early retirement in 1877, aged only 39. That year he returned to Washington, where he continued working as a historian. In the 1880s Adams also wrote two novels: Democracy was published anonymously in 1880 and immediately became popular. (Only after Adams’s death did his publisher reveal Adams’s authorship.) His other novel, published under the nom de plume of Frances Snow Compton, was Esther (1884). In 1885 Marian Adams, his wife, committed suicide. Upon her death Adams took up a restless life as a globetrotter, traveling extensively and, for years, spending summers in Paris and winters in Washington, where he erected an elaborate memorial at her grave site. In 1907 he published his Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. The work concerned the birth of 4 World Great Writers forces Adams saw as replacing Christianity. For Adams, the Virgin Mary had shaped the old world, as the dynamo represented the new. The book is agreed by many to be the most important non-fiction work of the 20th century. In 1912 Adams suffered a disabling stroke; in 1918 he died at his home in Washington. As a historian, Adams is considered to have been the first (in 1874 -1876) to conduct historical seminar work in the United States. His magnum opus is The History of the United States of America (1801 to 1817) (9 vols., 1889-1891). It is particularly notable for its account of the diplomatic relations of the United States during this period, and for its essential impartiality. Garry Wills’s book Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005) examines Adams’s History, and proclaims it a neglected masterpiece. Adams also published Life of Albert Gallatin (1879), John Randolph (1882), and Historical Essays (1891), besides editing The Writings of Albert Gallatin (3 volumes, 1879) and, in collaboration with Henry Cabot Lodge, Ernest Young and J. L. Laughlin, Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law (1876). Ambler, Eric 5 Ambler, Eric English author, widely regarded with Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene as one of the pioneers of politically sophisticated thrillers. Ambler published 19 novels under his own name and collaborated on four novels with Charles Rodda under the pseudonym Eliot Reed. Among Ambler’s best works is The Mask of Dimitros (1939), where a complex series of discoveries leads the hero, Charles Latimer, a British detective-story writer, to the realization that the man named Dimitrios is still alive and dangerous.