“Catch-22” is a satirical novel by American author Joseph Heller, the son of poor Jewish parents. Heller wanted to be a writer from an early age. His experiences as a bombardier during World War II inspired Catch-22. While sitting at home one morning in 1953, Heller thought of the lines, "It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, fell madly in love with him." Within the ne... 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
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
Sir William Gerald Golding, a British novelist, playwright, and poet, won a Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage. But he is best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. In September 1953, after many rejections from other publishers, Golding sent a manuscript to Faber & Faber. Monteith asked for some changes to the text... Read More
Walter Scott noted Austen's "resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of modern fiction - 'the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries'". Yet her rejection of these genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger Abbey and Emma. Northanger Abbey was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed for publication, in 1803. However... Read More
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish writer, poet, theatre director, and literary translator. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which - in new forms for the novel and drama - in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". Murphy, Samuel Beckett's first published novel, was written in English and published in London in 1938. Beckett himself subsequentl... Read More
Erich Maria Remarque was a German novelist who created many works about the horrors of war. During World War I, Remarque was conscripted into the German Army at the age of 18. On 31 July, he was wounded by shrapnel in the left leg, right arm and neck, and was repatriated to an army hospital in Germany where he spent the rest of the war. With All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque emerged as a... Read More
H. G. Wells was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His writing career spanned more than sixty years, and his early science fiction novels earned him the title of "The Father of Science Fiction". Wells’ first, The Time Machine, is a critique of utopian ideas, set in the year 802701. The story reflects Wells's own socialist political views, his view on life and abundance, and the... Read More
Marcel Proust was born in the Paris Borough of Auteuil on 10 July 1871, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. He was born during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponded with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particular... Read More
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. was an American author, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustic... Read More
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was not widely known until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel”, for which he became the only Mississippi-b... Read More
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born American writer of novels, short stories, and essays in Yiddish. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He was also awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw and one in Fiction for his collection A Cr... Read More
Colleen Margaretta McCullough was an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being The Thorn Birds and The Ladies of Missalonghi. Before her tertiary education, McCullough earned a living as a teacher, librarian and journalist. In her first year of medical studies at the University of Sydney, she suffered dermatitis from surgical soap and was told to abandon her dreams of be... Read More
Joseph Conrad wrote numerous full-length novels. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced numerous authors. A writer of complex skill and striking insight, but above all of an intensely personal vision, he has been increasingly regarded as one of the greatest English novelists. Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote that Heart of Darkness had been analysed more than any other... Read More
Kenneth Grahame was a British writer, most famous for The Wind in the Willows, one of the classics of children's literature. Orphaned at an early age, Grahame went to live with his grandmother in England and attended St. Edward’s School, Oxford. Money was lacking for him to go to university. Hence, his family guided him into a career at the Bank of England, with which he stayed until ill health... Read More
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer of world-famous children's fiction, notably Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He published Phantasmagoria and Other Poems in 1869, The Hunting of the Snark in 1876 and Sylvie and Bruno in 1889. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in 1865. With its... Read More
Lewis Carroll is a pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, English logician, mathematician, photographer, and novelist, especially remembered for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. His poem The Hunting of the Snark is nonsense literature of the highest order. He died of pneumonia following influenza on 14 January 1898 at his sisters' home, "The Chestnuts"... Read More
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who brought us Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll came from a family of high church Anglicans and developed a long relationship with Christ Church, Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar and teacher. Charles's father was an active and highly conservative cleric of the Church of England who later became the Arch... Read More
Daphne du Maurier was a famous English writer and playwright. Her best-known works are Rebecca and The Birds, both of which have been adapted into films by Alfred Hitchcock. She was a prominent literary name in England and was the grand-daughter of the famed cartoonist, George du Maurier. Given her exposure to literary and artistic accomplishments during childhood, it is no surprise that du Mau... Read More
John Updike, in full John Hoyer Updike, was an American writer of novels, short stories, and poetry, known for his careful craftsmanship and realistic but subtle depiction of “American, Protestant, small-town, middle-class” life. Updike grew up in Shillington, Pennsylvania, and many of his early stories draw on his youthful experiences there. He graduated from Harvard University in 1954. In 195... Read More