“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
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
American novelist and short-story writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 Ernest Hemingway’ was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he was leaving for the Italian Front in World War I. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1929, Ernest Hemingway’s classic A Farewell to Arms wa... Read More
The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. The Old Man and the Sea became a Book of the Month Club selection and made Hemingway a celebrity. Published in book form on September 1, 1952, the first edition print run was 50... 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
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
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
There's a reason why Pygmalion's been turned into a movie, a musical, and a movie musical. Shaw wrote the play in early 1912 and read it to famed actress Mrs Patrick Campbell in June. She came on board almost immediately, but her mild nervous breakdown contributed to the delay of a London production. Pygmalion premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913, in a German translatio... Read More
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. Since Shaw's death scholarly and critical opinion has varied about his works, but he has regularly been rated as second only to Shakespeare among British dramatists; analysts recognise his extensive influe... 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
English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain. Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex. An Imaginative Woman was first published as a serial in Pall Mall Magazine in... Read More
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. Hardy's first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher. He then showed it to his mentor and friend, the Victorian poet and novelist, George Meredith, who felt that The Poor Man and the Lady would be too politically controversial and might damage Hardy's ability to publish in the future. So Hardy followed his ad... Read More
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. During his long life of 88 years, he wrote fifteen novels and one thousand poems. Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England, and criticises those beliefs, especially those relating to marriage, education and religion, that limited people's lives and caused unhappiness. Ha... Read More
Thomas Hardy is one of Britain’s greatest authors. Among his most famous works are Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. For a long time Thomas Hardy's short stories have suffered from critical indifference, perhaps, in part, because of the influence of assessments such as Irving Howe's that Hardy "seems to have regarded the writing of stories as mere journeyman's work by which to ear... Read More
Thomas Hardy is one of Britain’s greatest authors. Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England. Wessex Tales, a collection of short stories including The Three Strangers, The Withered Arm and Fellow Townsmen, deal with a number of timeless themes seen so often in Hardy’s work, including marriage, class, revenge and disa... Read More
Thomas Hardy, an English novelist and poet, failed to find a publisher for his first novel. He then showed it to his mentor and friend, the Victorian poet and novelist, George Meredith, who felt that The Poor Man and the Lady would be too politically controversial and might damage Hardy's ability to publish in the future. So Hardy followed his advice and he did not try further to publish it. He... Read More
English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain. Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England. Also, Hardy wrote a number of significant war poems that relate to both the Boer Wars and World War I, including "Drummer Ho... Read More
Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891. The “fine and handsome” daughter of a poor country peddler, with evidently little more than her brimming emotions and her “large innocent eyes” to distinguish her from the other gi... Read More