“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
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
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 secret of Hemingway's endurance as a storyteller is that he invites the active participation of the reader in the creation of the story. The short story In Another Country was first published in 1927. Many of the characters grapple with a loss of function, a loss of purpose, and a loss of faith. This story is about an ambulance corps member in Milan during World War I. Although unnamed, he... Read More
Ernest Hemingway's novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was originally published in 1940 and follows a young American guerrilla fighter. Throughout 1937 and 1938, Hemingway travelled between Spain and America promoting the Loyalist cause. He helped in the production of a short film about the effects of the war in Spain on its people, The Spanish Earth, and made many publicity and fund-raising appear... Read More
When you hear the phrase "spy fiction," two words slide into your mind: James Bond. Yet some of our very finest literary writers, such as Joseph Conrad, Norman Mailer and W. Somerset Maugham, also have been drawn to the moral ambiguity of the cloak-and-dagger world. Ashenden, or the British Agent is a 1928 collection of loosely linked stories. The British Agent is founded on Maugham's experienc... 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
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
Herbert George Wells was an English writer. He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called a "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. The World Set Free is a remarkable example of... Read More
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, known as Marcel Proust, was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental novel In Search of Lost Time. In Search of Lost Time follows the narrator's recollections of childhood and experiences into adulthood during the late 19th century to early 20th century aristocratic France, while reflecting on the loss of time and lack of... 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
Henry Patterson, known by his pen name Jack Higgins, is a British writer, born on 27 July 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. In 1959, Higgins began writing novels. One of his aliases was James Graham. The growing success of his early work allowed him to take time off from his teaching, and he eventually left the classroom to become a full-time novelist. The Eagle Has Landed is a classic of t... Read More
Henry Patterson, known by his pen name Jack Higgins, is a British writer, born on 27 July 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. In 1959, Higgins began writing novels. Patterson's early novels, written under his own name as well as under the pseudonyms James Graham, Martin Fallon, and Hugh Marlowe, are thrillers that typically feature hardened, cynical heroes, ruthless villains, and dangerous lo... 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
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist, author, translator and activist. Gessen writes primarily in English but also in her native Russian. In addition to being the author of several non-fiction books, she has been a prolific contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, G... Read More
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist, author, and activist who has been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. Gessen is a Moscow native who understands the culture and psychology of Russia. Her family left Russia when she was a teenager, but she returned for a 10-year stay as an independent journalist. In The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, Gessen's analysis o... Read More