An American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Harry Sinclair Lewis became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of humour characters." In the Academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In hi... Read More
The highest paid author during the 1930s William Somerset Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle after both of his parents died before he was ten. For five years he studied medicine at the medical school of St Thomas's Hospital in Lambeth. The initial run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. During the First World War, he ser... Read More
Wuthering Heights is now a classic of English literature, but back in the Victorian era it was controversial because of its unusually stark depiction of mental and physical cruelty, and it challenged strict Victorian ideals regarding religious hypocrisy, morality, social classes and gender inequality. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was first published in London in 1847 by Thomas Cautley Newby... Read More
The three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne each published works during the Victorian era. Villette uses the biographical structure commonly seen in traditional Victorian literature but deviates somewhat due to its autobiographical nature. Many of the events that happen to the protagonist of the story mirror the events in the author's life. Like Lucy, Charlotte Brontë experienced family... Read More
Most famous for her passionate novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë also published poems and three other novels. She was the third of six children of Patrick Brontë, an Irish crofter’s son who rose via a Cambridge education to become, in 1820, a perpetual curate at Haworth, in Yorkshire. Jane Eyre first published in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, with Currer Bell listed as the editor. It is... Read More
French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement Victor Marie Hugo was born in 1802 in Besançon in the eastern region of Franche-Comté. Hugo is considered to be one of the greatest and best-known French writers. He was at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and drama Hernani. In 1831, Victor Hugo published his most famous novel, “The Hunchback of... Read More
You definitely shouldn’t put The Garden of Eden on the back-burner in favour of Hemingway’s more famous works. The novel was published posthumously in a much-abridged form in 1986. Hemingway began The Garden of Eden in 1946 and wrote 800 pages. For 15 years, he continued to work on the novel which remained uncompleted. During that time he also wrote The Old Man and the Sea, The Dangerous Summer... Read More
Ernest Miller Hemingway was the outstanding author, journalist, novelist, and short-story writer. His economical and understated style - which he termed the iceberg theory - had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established him as one of the greatest literary lights of the 20th century. His classic novella The Old Ma... Read More