O. Henry is best known for his witty short stories with unexpected endings. Born William Sydney Porter, this author decided to use a pen name for his writings while he was in prison and afterwards. O. Henry brought his own information about prison and “the life of crime” into his stories. This paired with wit and plot twists is what made him such a renowned author. While O.Henry’s style is to u... Read More
William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American short story writer. O. Henry's stories frequently have surprise endings. In his day he was called the American answer to Guy de Maupassant. Actually, the reputation of O. Henry never accepted in serious literary criticism. But only he could write stories that could make people laugh as much as they do and feel speechl... Read More
We grow up hearing the phrase ''Love conquers all.'' O. Henry's short story ''A Service of Love'' is a great example of how love drives two people to sacrifice their ambitions for the sake of each other. O. Henry wrote about this kind of sacrifices before. In his story "The Gifts of the Magi”, a tale about a young couple, who are short of money but desperately want to buy each other Christmas g... Read More
An American short story writer William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry, was born on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina. Porter used a number of pen names in the early part of his writing career. Nevertheless, the name "O. Henry" seemed to garner the most attention from editors and the public, and was used exclusively by Porter for his writing by about 1902. A... 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
Of all the English-language modernists, Samuel Beckett's work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He opened up the possibility of theatre and fiction that dispense with conventional plot and the unities of time and place in order to focus on essential components of the human condition. Molloy, the first of the three masterpieces which constitute Samuel Beckett’s famou... Read More
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist and playwright, who 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". Also, he was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. During the 15 years following the WWII, Beckett produced four major full-length stage plays: En attendant Godot, Fin... 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
Before Francis Scott Fitzgerald died at the age 44, he thought he was a failure. His obituaries described him as an obscure writer who never fulfilled his early promise. Twenty years later, Fitzgerald was universally recognized as one of the great literary figures of the century and The Great Gatsby was widely acclaimed as one of the greatest novels of the modern era. Tender Is the Night is the... 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
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. was an American author. He has been called "a giant of American letters," and many of his works are considered classics of Western literature. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that Of Mice and Men was one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools. Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of Our Dis... Read More
John Steinbeck's first posthumously published work, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights is a reinterpretation of the Arthurian legend, based on the Winchester Manuscript text of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. This book by Sir Thomas Malory was the first book that John Steinbeck ever loved. In the latter half of the 1950s, having already won lasting fame as the author of Of Mic... Read More
John Ernst Steinbeck was an American author. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." During his writing career, he authored 27 books, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. Ironically he is more popular with critics abroad than in his own... Read More
John Ernst Steinbeck was an American author, who wrote 27 books, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, and epic East of Eden. In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast... Read More
East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s passionate and exhilarating epic, re-creates the seminal stories of Genesis through the intertwined lives of two American families. Spanning the period between the American Civil War and the end of World War I, the novel highlights the conflicts of two generations of brothers, the first being the kind, gentle Adam Trask and his wild brother Charles. Adam eventuall... Read More
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a Nobel Prize-winning British novelist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, but his family moved to the UK in 1960 when he was five. Never Let Me Go is a 2005 dystopian science fiction novel. The novel's title comes from a song on a cassette tape called Songs After Dark, by fictional singer Judy Bridgewater. Kathy bought the tape during a... Read More
John Griffith London, born John Griffith Chaney, was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The He... Read More
Jack London was an American author best known for writing The Call of the Wild. Jack London was his pen name, likely born in San Francisco, California as John Griffith Chaney. Like the restive characters in his works, London sought a variety of experiences as a young man including sailor, hobo and an agitator for jobs during the depression. He also wrote some of the earliest Dystopian Fiction,... Read More
Jack London, pseudonym of John Griffith Chaney, American novelist and short-story writer whose best-known works - among them The Call of the Wild and White Fang - depict elemental struggles for survival. During the 20th-century, he was one of the most extensively translated American authors. A self-taught professional deeply committed to his art and a supremely self-disciplined writer who churn... Read More
Jack London was born on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco. He was a voracious reader as a child, borrowing book after book from the public library. By age 14 he left home and became a wanderer. He worked aboard a ship for a while and also spent time hopping trains. By continuing his childhood practice of reading library books, he educated himself and eventually enrolled at the University of Ca... Read More