The Noble Prize winner American Writer, William Faulkner has written many critically acclaimed short stories, plays, screenplays, essays and novels. He is considered to be one of the most important writers of the American southern literature and ranked shoulder to shoulder with other significant writers such as Robert Penn, Harper Lee, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams of the same genre. Sur... 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
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books. He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century. Evelyn Waugh’s most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust, the novel Brideshead Revisited, and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour. Waugh’s novels, although t... Read More
John Champlin Gardner Jr. was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic and university professor. As a child, Gardner attended public school and worked on his father's farm, where, in April 1945, his younger brother Gilbert was killed in an accident with a cultipacker. Gardner, who was driving the tractor during the fatal accident, carried guilt for his brother's death throughout his life... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet, philosopher and writer. He is considered to be one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation during the 1950s and the counterculture that soon followed. Listen online to free English audiobook "Reading at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University” on our website to experience Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, New... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a high school teacher father who published poetry and a Russian-born mother who retained her communist roots. Both her sympathy for the labour class and her gradual mental decay deeply affected Ginsberg in his youth. Intending to study law, Ginsberg enrolled at Columbia University in 1943, but he soon turned to literature, taking classes f... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a high school teacher father who published poetry and a Russian-born mother who retained her communist roots. Ginsberg's willingness to talk about taboo subjects made him a controversial figure during the conservative 1950s and a significant figure in the 1960s. In the mid-1950s, no reputable publishing company would even consider publishi... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a high school teacher father who published poetry and a Russian-born mother who retained her communist roots. Ginsberg’s public breakthrough came in San Francisco, in 1955, when he read the first part of “Howl” before an audience as part of an event that launched the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who... Read More
Ginsberg first came to public attention in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other Poems. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992. “Howl,” a long-lined poem in the tradition of Walt Whitman, is an outcry of rage and despair against a destructive, abusive society. Ginsberg is strongly identified with the literary and cultural phenom... Read More
Howl, Ginsberg’s first published book, laments what he believed to have been the destruction by the insanity of the “best minds of the generation.” The inspiration for "Howl" was Ginsberg's friend, Carl Solomon, and "Howl" is dedicated to him. Solomon was a Dada and Surrealism enthusiast who suffered bouts of clinical depression. Solomon wanted to commit suicide, but he thought a form of suicid... Read More
Best known for her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing's life work spans more than a half century. She was born in Persia to British parents in 1919. Her family then moved to Southern Africa, where she spent her childhood on her father's farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia. When her second marriage ended in 1949, she moved to London, where her first novel, The Grass is Singing, wa... Read More
Doris May Lessing was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. She is now widely regarded as one of the most important post-war writers in English. Her novels, short stories and essays have focused on a wide range of twentieth-century issues and concerns, from the politics of race - which she confronted in her early novels set in Africa... Read More
Doris May Lessing was a British writer, author of novels including The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook. Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the oldest person e... Read More
Doris Lessing, in full Doris May Lessing, was a British writer whose novels and short stories are largely concerned with people involved in the social and political upheavals of the 20th century. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a l... Read More
British writer Doris Lessing felt that “a writer’s job is to provoke questions.” Her first published book, The Grass Is Singing, is about a white farmer and his wife and their African servant in Rhodesia. Among her most substantial works is the series Children of Violence, a five-novel sequence that centres on Martha Quest, who grows up in southern Africa and settles in England. The Golden Note... Read More
Jostein Gaarder is a Norwegian school teacher and author of books that examined the history of philosophy and religion for an audience of young readers. Gaarder studied the history of ideas, religion, and Nordic literature at the University of Oslo. After graduating in 1976, he worked as a secondary-school teacher of philosophy, religion, and literature in Oslo and Bergen. He began his literary... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer who is best known for his James Bond series of spy novels. He was born on 28 May 1908, at 27 Green Street in the wealthy London district of Mayfair. His mother was Evelyn, and his father was Valentine Fleming, the Member of Parliament for Henley from 1910 to 1917. As an infant, he briefly lived, with his fami... Read More
Ian Fleming, in full Ian Lancaster Fleming, was a suspense-fiction novelist whose character James Bond, the stylish, high-living British secret service agent 007, who became one of the most successful and widely imitated heroes of 20th-century popular fiction. The son of a Conservative MP and the grandson of a Scottish banker, Fleming was born into a family of wealth and privilege. He was educa... Read More
There's nothing like a good spy thriller to get your imagination running wild. And perhaps no one was better able to give his readers such a trip as the legendary Ian Fleming. Indeed, the titular hero of his James Bond series of books started out as an intentionally flat character, someone onto whom readers could project a more complex identity. Fleming said of his work, "while thrillers may no... Read More
Ian Lancaster Fleming was an English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer. Born on May 28, 1908, Ian Fleming would go on to create the most enduring literary figure since Sherlock Holmes. Rare book collectors are fascinated with the legacy of Ian Fleming and James Bond. Ian Fleming named James Bond after an ornithologist because it was the ‘dullest name’ he’d ever heard. The origin... Read More