Ernest Hemingway Biography
Author (1899–1961)
Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway is seen as one of the great
American 20th century novelists, and is known for works like A Farewell
to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea.
Synopsis
Born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois, Ernest
Hemingway served in World War I and worked in journalism before
publishing his story collection In Our Time. He was renowned for novels
like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls,
and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the 1953 Pulitzer. In 1954,
Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. He committed suicide on July 2, 1961,
in Ketchum, Idaho.
Early Life and Career
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in
Oak Park), Illinois. Clarence and Grace Hemingway raised their son in
this conservative suburb of Chicago, but the family also spent a great deal
of time in northern Michigan, where they had a cabin. It was there that
the future sportsman learned to hunt, fish and appreciate the outdoors.
In high school, Hemingway worked on his school newspaper, Trapeze
and Tabula, writing primarily about sports. Immediately after graduation,
the budding journalist went to work for the Kansas City Star, gaining
experience that would later influence his distinctively stripped-down
prose style.
He once said, "On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple
declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not
harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time."
Military Experience
In 1918, Hemingway went overseas to serve in World War I as an
ambulance driver in the Italian Army. For his service, he was awarded the
Italian Silver Medal of Bravery, but soon sustained injuries that landed
him in a hospital in Milan.
There he met a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky, who soon accepted
his proposal of marriage, but later left him for another man. This
devastated the young writer but provided fodder for his works "A Very
Short Story" and, more famously, A Farewell to Arms.
Still nursing his injury and recovering from the brutalities of war at the
young age of 20, he returned to the United States and spent time in
northern Michigan before taking a job at the Toronto Star.
It was in Chicago that Hemingway met Hadley Richardson, the woman
who would become his first wife. The couple married and quickly moved
to Paris, where Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent for
the Star.
Life in Europe
In Paris, Hemingway soon became a key part of what Gertrude Stein
would famously call "The Lost Generation." With Stein as his mentor,
Hemingway made the acquaintance of many of the great writers and
artists of his generation, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Pablo
Picasso and James Joyce. In 1923, Hemingway and Hadley had a son,
John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway. By this time the writer had also begun
frequenting the famous Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain.
In 1925, the couple, joining a group of British and American expatriates,
took a trip to the festival that would later provided the basis of
Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises. The novel is widely
considered Hemingway's greatest work, artfully examining the postwar
disillusionment of his generation.
Soon after the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway and Hadley
divorced, due in part to his affair with a woman named Pauline Pfeiffer,
who would become Hemingway's second wife shortly after his divorce
from Hadley was finalized. The author continued to work on his book of
short stories, Men Without Women.
Critical Acclaim
Soon, Pauline became pregnant and the couple decided to move back to
America. After the birth of their son Patrick Hemingway in 1928, they
settled in Key West, Florida, but summered in Wyoming. During this
time, Hemingway finished his celebrated World War I novel A Farewell
to Arms, securing his lasting place in the literary canon.
When he wasn't writing, Hemingway spent much of the 1930s chasing
adventure: big-game hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain, deep-sea
fishing in Florida. While reporting on the Spanish Civil War in 1937,
Hemingway met a fellow war correspondent named Martha Gellhorn
(soon to become wife number three) and gathered material for his next
novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which would eventually be nominated
for the Pulitzer Prize.
Almost predictably, his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer deteriorated and the
couple divorced. Gellhorn and Hemingway married soon after and
purchased a farm near Havana, Cuba, which would serve as their winter
residence.
When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Hemingway
served as a correspondent and was present at several of the war's key
moments, including the D-Day landing. Toward the end of the war,
Hemingway met another war correspondent, Mary Welsh, whom he
would later marry after divorcing Martha Gellhorn.
In 1951, Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, which would
become perhaps his most famous book, finally winning him the Pulitzer
Prize he had long been denied.
Personal Struggles and Suicide
The author continued his forays into Africa and sustained several injuries
during his adventures, even surviving multiple plane crashes.
In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even at this peak of his
literary career, though, the burly Hemingway's body and mind were
beginning to betray him. Recovering from various old injuries in Cuba,
Hemingway suffered from depression and was treated for numerous
conditions such as high blood pressure and liver disease.
He wrote A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his years in Paris, and retired
permanently to Idaho. There he continued to battle with deteriorating
mental and physical health.
Early on the morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway committed
suicide in his Ketchum home.
Legacy
Hemingway left behind an impressive body of work and an iconic style
that still influences writers today. His personality and constant pursuit of
adventure loomed almost as large as his creative talent.
When asked by George Plimpton about the function of his art,
Hemingway proved once again to be a master of the "one true sentence":
"From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from
all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make
something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole
new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if
you make it well enough, you give it immortality."
poet
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882 , Boston , MA
American poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was
born on May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. After studying at
Harvard and teaching for a brief time, Emerson entered the ministry. He
was appointed to the Old Second Church in his native city, but soon
became an unwilling preacher. Unable in conscience to administer the
sacrament of the Lord’s Supper after the death of his nineteen-year-old
wife of tuberculosis, Emerson resigned his pastorate in 1831.
The following year, he sailed for Europe, visiting Thomas Carlyle
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Carlyle, the Scottish-born English writer,
was famous for his explosive attacks on hypocrisy and materialism, his
distrust of democracy, and his highly romantic belief in the power of the
individual. Emerson’s friendship with Carlyle was both lasting and
significant; the insights of the British thinker helped Emerson formulate
his own philosophy.
On his return to New England, Emerson became known for challenging
traditional thought. In 1835, he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson,
and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. Known in the local literary circle
as “The Sage of Concord," Emerson became the chief spokesman for
Transcendentalism, the American philosophic and literary movement.
Centered in New England during the 19th century, Transcendentalism
was a reaction against scientific rationalism.
Emerson’s first book, Nature (1836), is perhaps the best expression of his
Transcendentalism, the belief that everything in our world—even a drop
of dew—is a microcosm of the universe. His concept of the Over-Soul—a
Supreme Mind that every man and woman share—allowed
Transcendentalists to disregard external authority and to rely instead on
direct experience. “Trust thyself," Emerson’s motto, became the code of
Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and W. E.
Channing. From 1842 to 1844, Emerson edited the Transcendentalist
journal, The Dial.
Emerson wrote a poetic prose, ordering his essays by recurring themes
and images. His poetry, on the other hand, is often called harsh and
didactic. Among Emerson’s most well known works are Essays, First and
Second Series (1841, 1844). The First Series includes Emerson’s famous
essay, “Self-Reliance," in which the writer instructs his listener to
examine his relationship with Nature and God, and to trust his own
judgment above all others.
Emerson’s other volumes include Poems (1847),Representative Men, The
Conduct of Life (1860), and English Traits (1865). His best-known
addresses are The American Scholar (1837) and The Divinity School
Address, which he delivered before the graduates of the Harvard Divinity
School, shocking Boston’s conservative clergymen with his descriptions
of the divinity of man and the humanity of Jesus.
Emerson’s philosophy is characterized by its reliance on intuition as the
only way to comprehend reality, and his concepts owe much to the works
of Plotinus, Swedenborg, and Böhme. A believer in the “divine
sufficiency of the individual," Emerson was a steady optimist. His refusal
to grant the existence of evil caused Herman Melville, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Henry James, Sr., among others, to doubt his judgment.
In spite of their skepticism, Emerson’s beliefs are of central importance in
the history of American culture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson died of pneumonia on April 27, 1882.
Transcendentalism is a religious and philosophical movement that
developed during the late 1820s and '30s[1] in the Eastern region of the
United States as a protest against the general state of spirituality and, in
particular, the state of intellectualism atHarvard University and the
doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School.
Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the inherent goodness of
both people and nature. They believe that society and its institutions—
particularly organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupt
the purity of the individual. They have faith that people are at their best
when truly "self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real
individuals that true community could be formed.
Emerson's Nature[edit]
The publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1836 essay Nature is usually
considered the moment at which transcendentalism became a major
cultural movement. Emerson wrote in his 1837 speech "The American
Scholar": "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own
hands; we will speak our own minds... A nation of men will for the first
time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul
which also inspires all men." Emerson closed the essay by calling for a
revolution in human consciousness to emerge from the brand new idealist
philosophy:
So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the
endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, —
What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ...Build,
therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure
idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent
revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.
Individualism[edit]
Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions—particularly
organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupted the purity
of the individual. They had faith that people are at their best when truly
"self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that
true community could be formed. Even with this necessary individuality,
the transcendentalists also believed that all people possessed a piece of
the "Over-soul"[9] (God). Because the Over-soul is one, this also united all
people as one being.
Indian religions[edit]
Transcendentalism has been influenced by Indian religions.[10][11][note
1]
Thoreau in Walden spoke of the Transcendentalists' debt to Indian
religions directly:
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal
philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the
gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and
its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to
be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from
our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo!
there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest ofBrahma,
and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading
the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water-jug. I
meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it
were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled
with the sacred water of the Ganges.[12]
Edgar Allan Poe Biography
Writer (1809–1849)
American writer, critic and editor Edgar Allan Poe is famous for his tales
and poems of horror and mystery, including The Raven.
Synopsis
Born January 19, 1809, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. American shortstory writer, poet, critic, and editor Edgar Allan Poe's tales of mystery
and horror initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his
tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. His The Raven (1845)
numbers among the best-known poems in national literature.
Early Life
With his short stories and poems, Edgar Allan Poe captured the
imagination and interest of readers around the world. His creative talents
led to the beginning of different literary genres, earning him the nickname
"Father of the Detective Story" among other distinctions. His life,
however, has become a bit of mystery itself. And the lines between fact
and fiction have been blurred substantially since his death.
The son of actors, Poe never really knew his parents. His father left the
family early on, and his mother passed away when he was only three.
Separated from his siblings, Poe went to live with John and Frances
Allan, a successful tobacco merchant and his wife, in Richmond,
Virginia. He and Frances seemed to form a bond, but he never quite
meshed with John. Preferring poetry over profits, Poe reportedly wrote
poems on the back of some of Allan's business papers.
Money was also an issue between Poe and John Allan. When Poe went to
the University of Virginia in 1826, he didn't receive enough funds from
Allan to cover all his costs. Poe turned to gambling to cover the
difference, but ended up in debt. He returned home only to face another
personal setback—his neighbor and fiancée Elmira Royster had become
engaged to someone else. Heartbroken and frustrated, Poe left the Allans.
Career Beginnings
At first, Poe seemed to be harboring twin aspirations. Poe published his
first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems in 1827, and he had joined the
army around this time. Poe wanted to go to West Point, a military
academy, and won a spot there in 1830. Before going to West Point, he
published a second collection Al Aaraaf, Tamberlane, and Minor
Poems in 1829. Poe excelled at his studies at West Point, but he was
kicked out after a year for his poor handling of his duties. Some have
speculated that he intentionally sought to be court-martialed. During his
time at West Point, Poe had fought with his foster father and Allan
decided to sever ties with him.
After leaving the academy, Poe focused his writing full time. He moved
around in search of opportunity, living in New York City, Baltimore,
Philadelphia and Richmond. From 1831 to 1835, he stayed in Baltimore
with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. His young cousin,
Virginia, became a literary inspiration to Poe as well as his love interest.
The couple married in 1836 when she was only 13 (or 14 as some sources
say) years old.
Returning to Richmond in 1835, Poe went to work for a magazine called
the Southern Literary Messenger. There he developed a reputation as a
cut-throat critic, writing vicious reviews of his contemporaries. Poe also
published some of his own works in the magazine, including two parts of
his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. His tenure there
proved short, however. Poe's aggressive-reviewing style and sometimes
combative personality strained his relationship with the publication, and
he left the magazine in 1837. His problems with alcohol also played a
role in his departure, according to some reports. Poe went on to brief
stints at two other papers, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and The
Broadway Journal.
Major Works
In late 1830s, Poe published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a
collection of stories. It contained several of his most spine-tingling tales,
including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligeia" and "William
Wilson." Poe launched the new genre of detective fiction with 1841's
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue." A writer on the rise, he won a literary
prize in 1843 for "The Gold Bug," a suspenseful tale of secret codes and
hunting treasure.
Poe became a literary sensation in 1845 with the publication of the poem
"The Raven." It is considered a great American literary work and one of
the best of Poe's career. In the work, Poe explored some of his common
themes—death and loss. An unknown narrator laments the demise of his
great love Lenore. That same year, he found himself under attack for his
stinging criticisms of his fellow poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poe
claimed that Longfellow, a widely popular literary figure, was a
plagiarist, and this written assault on Longfellow created a bit of backlash
for Poe.
Continuing work in different forms, Poe examined his own methodology
and writing in general in several essays, including "The Philosophy of
Composition," "The Poetic Principle" and "The Rationale of Verse." He
also produced another thrilling tale, "The Cask of Amontillado," and
poems such as "Ulalume" and "The Bells."
Mysterious Death
Poe was overcome by grief after the death of his beloved Virginia in
1847. While he continued to work, he suffered from poor health and
struggled financially. His final days remain somewhat of a mystery. He
left Richmond on September 27, 1849, and was supposedly on his way to
Philadelphia. On October 3, Poe was found in Baltimore in great distress.
He was taken to Washington College Hospital where he died on October
7. His last words were "Lord, help my poor soul."
At the time, it was said that Poe died of "congestion of the brain." But his
actual cause of death has been the subject of endless speculation. Some
experts believe that alcoholism led to his demise while others offer up
alternative theories. Rabies, epilepsy, carbon monoxide poisoning are just
some of the conditions thought to have led to the great writer's death.
Shortly after his passing, Poe's reputation was badly damaged by his
literary adversary Rufus Griswold. Griswold, who had been sharply
criticized by Poe, took his revenge in his obituary of Poe, portraying the
gifted yet troubled writer as a mentally deranged drunkard and
womanizer. He also penned the first biography of Poe, which helped
cement some of these misconceptions in the public's minds.
While he never had financial success in his lifetime, Poe has become one
of America's most enduring writers. His works are as compelling today as
there were more than a century ago. A bright, imaginative thinker, Poe
crafted stories and poems that still shock, surprise and move modern
readers.
James Baldwin Biography
Writer (1924–1987)
James Baldwin was an essayist, playwright and novelist regarded as a
highly insightful, iconic writer with works like The Fire Next Time and
Another Country.
Synopsis
Born on August 2, 1924, in New York City, James Baldwin published the
1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, going on to garner acclaim for his
insights on race, spirituality and humanity. Other novels
included Giovanni's Room, Another Country and Just Above My Head as
well as essay works like Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time.
Having lived in France, he died on December 1, 1987 in Saint-Paul de
Vence.
Early Life
Writer and playwright James Baldwin was born August 2, 1924, in
Harlem, New York. One of the 20th century's greatest writers, Baldwin
broke new literary ground with the exploration of racial and social issues
in his many works. He was especially well known for his essays on the
black experience in America.
Baldwin was born to a young single mother, Emma Jones, at Harlem
Hospital. She reportedly never told him the name of his biological father.
Jones married a Baptist minister named David Baldwin when James was
about three years old. Despite their strained relationship, he followed in
his stepfather's footsteps—who he always referred to as his father—
during his early teen years. He served as a youth minister in a Harlem
Pentecostal church from the ages of 14 to 16.
Baldwin developed a passion for reading at an early age, and
demonstrated a gift for writing during his school years. He attended
DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he worked on the
school's magazine with future famous photographer Richard Avedon. He
published numerous poems, short stories and plays in the magazine, and
his early work showed an understanding for sophisticated literary devices
in a writer of such a young age.
After graduating high school in 1942, he had to put his plans for college
on hold to help support his family, which included seven younger
children. He took whatever work he could find, including laying railroad
tracks for the U.S. Army in New Jersey. During this time, Baldwin
frequently encountered discrimination, being turned away from
restaurants, bars and other establishments because he was AfricanAmerican. After being fired from the New Jersey job, Baldwin sought
other work and struggled to make ends meet.
Aspiring Writer
On July 29, 1943, Baldwin lost his father—and gained his eighth sibling
the same day. He soon moved to Greenwich Village, a New York City
neighborhood popular with artists and writers. Devoting himself to
writing a novel, Baldwin took odd jobs to support himself. He befriended
writer Richard Wright, and through Wright he was able to land a
fellowship in 1945 to cover his expenses. Baldwin started getting essays
and short stories published in such national periodicals as The
Nation, Partisan Review and Commentary.
Three years later, Baldwin made a dramatic change in his life, and moved
to Paris on another fellowship. The shift in location freed Baldwin to
write more about his personal and racial background. "Once I found
myself on the other side of the ocean, I see where I came from very
clearly...I am the grandson of a slave, and I am a writer. I must deal with
both," Baldwin once told The New York Times. The move marked the
beginning of his life as a "transatlantic commuter," dividing his time
between France and the United States.
Early Works and Sexuality
Baldwin had his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in
1953. The loosely autobiographical tale focused on the life of a young
man growing up in Harlem grappling with father issues and his religion.
"Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything
else. I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal, above all, with
my father," he later said.
In 1954, Baldwin received a Guggenheim fellowship. He published his
next novel, Giovanni's Room, the following year. The work told the story
of an American living in Paris, and broke new ground for its complex
depiction of homosexuality, a then-taboo subject. Love between men was
explored in a later Baldwin novel Just Above My Head (1978). The
author would also use his work to explore interracial relationships,
another controversial topic for the times, as seen in the 1962
novel Another Country.
Baldwin was open about his homosexuality and relationships with both
men and women. Yet he believed that the focus on rigid categories was
just a way of limiting freedom, and that human sexuality is more fluid
and less binary than often expressed in the U.S. "If you fall in love with a
boy, you fall in love with a boy," the writer said in a 1969 interview when
asked if gayness was an aberration, asserting that such views were an
indication of narrowness and stagnation.
Writing About Race
Baldwin explored writing for the stage a well. He wrote The Amen
Corner, which looked at the phenomenon of storefront Pentecostal
religion. The play was produced at Howard University in 1955, and later
on Broadway in the mid-1960s.
It was his essays, however, that helped establish Baldwin as one of the
top writers of the times. Delving into his own life, he provided an
unflinching look at the black experience in America through such works
as Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name: More
Notes of a Native Son(1961). Nobody Knows My Name hit the bestsellers
list, selling more than a million copies. While not a marching or sit-in
style activist, Baldwin emerged as one of the leading voices in the Civil
Rights Movement for his compelling work on race.
'The Fire Next Time'
In 1963, there was a noted change in Baldwin's work with The Fire Next
Time. This collection of essays was meant to educate white Americans on
what it meant to be black. It also offered white readers a view of
themselves through the eyes of the African-American community. In the
work, Baldwin offered a brutally realistic picture of race relations, but he
remained hopeful about possible improvements. "If we...do not falter in
our duty now, we may be able...to end the racial nightmare." His words
struck a cord with the American people, and The Fire Next Time sold
more than a million copies.
That same year, Baldwin was featured on the cover of Time magazine.
"There is not another writer—white or black—who expresses with such
poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in
North and South,"Time said in the feature.
Baldwin wrote another play, Blues for Mister Charlie, which debuted on
Broadway in 1964. The drama was loosely based on the 1955 racially
motivated murder of a young African-American boy named Emmett Till.
This same year, his book with friend Richard Avalon, entitled Nothing
Personal, hit bookstore shelves. The work was a tribute to slain Civil
Rights leader Medgar Evers. Baldwin also published a collection of short
stories, Going to Meet the Man, around this time.
In his 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, Baldwin
returned to popular themes—sexuality, family and the black experience.
Some critics panned the novel, calling it a polemic rather than a novel. He
was also criticized for using the first-person singular, the "I," for the
book's narration.
Later Works and Legacy
By the early 1970s, Baldwin seemed to despair over the racial situation.
He witnessed so much violence in the previous decade—especially the
assassinations of Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.—because
of racial hatred. This disillusionment became apparent in his work, which
employed a more strident tone than in earlier works. Many critics point
to No Name in the Street, a 1972 collection of essays, as the beginning of
the change in Baldwin's work. He also worked on a screenplay around
this time, trying to adapt The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
for the big screen.
While his literary fame faded somewhat in his later years, Baldwin
continued to produce new works in a variety of forms. He published a
collection of poems, Jimmy's Blues: Selected Poems, in 1983 as well as
the 1987 novelHarlem Quartet. Baldwin also remained an astute observer
of race and American culture. In 1985, he wrote The Evidence of Things
Not Seen about the Atlanta child murders. Baldwin also spent years
sharing his experiences and views as a college professor. In the years
before his death, he taught at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and
Hampshire College.
Baldwin died on December 1, 1987, at his home in St. Paul de Vence,
France. Never wanting to be a spokesperson or a leader, Baldwin saw his
personal mission as bearing "witness to the truth." He accomplished this
mission through his extensive, rapturous literary legacy.
Henry James Biography
Author (1843–1916)
Born on April 15, 1843, in New York City, Henry James became one of
his generation's most well-known writers and remains so to this day for
such works as The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw. Having
lived in England for 40 years, James became a British subject in 1915, the
year before his death. He died on February 28, 1916, in London, England.
Henry James (1843-1916), noted American-born English essayist, critic,
and author of the realism movement wrote The Ambassadors (1903), The
Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881);
"I always understood," he continued, "though it was so strange--so pitiful.
You wanted to look at life for yourself--but you were not allowed; you
were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the
conventional!"--Ch. 54
James's works, many of which were first serialised in the magazine The
Atlantic Monthly include narrative romances with highly developed
characters set amongst illuminating social commentary on politics, class,
and status, as well as explorations of the themes of personal freedom,
feminism, and morality. In his short stories and novels he employs
techniques of interior monologue and point of view to expand the readers'
enjoyment of character perception and insight. Often comparing the Old
World with the New, and influenced by Honore de Balzac, Henrik
Ibsen, Charles Dickens, and Nathaniel Hawthorne of whose work he
wrote "too original and exquisite to pass away" James would become
widely respected in North America and Europe, earning honorary degrees
from Harvard and Oxford Universities, in 1911 and 1912 respectively. He
was acquainted with many notable literary figures of the day
including Robert Browning, Ivan S. Turgenev, Emile Zola, Lord Alfred
Tennyson, and Gustave Flaubert. American-born and never married,
James would live the majority of his life in Europe, becoming a British
citizen in 1915 after the outbreak of World War I. Many of his works
have inspired other author's works and adaptations to the stage and
screen.
Henry James was born on 15 April 1843 in New York City, New York
State, United States, the second of five children born to theologian Henry James
Sr. (1811-1882) and Mary Robertson nee Walsh. Henry James Sr. was one of the
most wealthy intellectuals of the time, connected with noted philosophers and
transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as well
as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Carlyle, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;
fellow friends and influential thinkers of the time who would have a
profound effect on his son's life. Education was of the utmost importance
to Henry Sr. and the family spent many years in Europe and the major
cities of England, Italy, Switzerland, France, and Germany, his children
being tutored in languages and literature.
After several attempts at attending schools to study science and law, by
1864 James decided he would become a writer. He was always a
voracious reader and he now immersed himself in French, Russian,
English, and American classic literature. He ventured out on his own
travels to Europe, wrote book reviews, and submitted stories to
magazines such as the North American Review, Nation, North American
Tribune, Macmillan's, and The Atlantic Monthlywhich also serialised his
first novel Watch and Ward (1871). James left America and lived for a
time in Paris, France before moving to London, England in 1876. He
continued his prodigious output of short stories and novels
includingRoderick
Hudson (1875), The
American (1877), The
Europeans (1878),Confidence (1879), Washington
Square (1880), The
Pension Beaurepas (1881), and his extended critical critical
essay Hawthorne (1879). He also wrote the novella Daisy Miller (1879)
which he later based a play on; one of many that proved unsuccessful. A
Little Tour In France (1884) was followed by The Bostonians (1886), The
Aspern
Papers (1888), The
Reverberator (1888), The
Tragic
Muse (1890), The Pupil (1891), Sir Dominick Ferrand (1892), The Death
of the Lion (1894), The Coxon Fund (1894), and The Altar of the
Dead (1895).
In 1897 James retired from the hectic city of London to the quieter town
of Rye in East Sussex, where James bought "Lamb House" and continued
to writeWhat Maisie Knew (1897), In The Cage (1898), The Awkward
Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Beast in the
Jungle (1903), The Golden Bowl(1904), Italian Hours (1909), and The
Outcry (1911). Autobiographies include A Small Boy And
Others (1913), Notes Of A Son And Brother (1914), and The Middle
Years (1917).
In 1904 James travelled to America where he embarked on a crosscountry lecture tour, which inspired his series of essays first published
in North American Review, Harper's, The Fortnightly Review then in
1907 as The American Scene. When World War I broke out, being an
American ex-patriate, James was not happy with America's reluctance to
join the war and became a British Citizen in 1915. In 1916 he was
awarded the Order of Merit by King George V.
After several years of decline and a stroke a few months earlier, Henry
James died of pneumonia on 28 February 1916. His ashes were interred at
the Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts, United States, his stone
inscribed"Novelist, Citizen of Two Countries, Interpreter of His
Generation On Both Sides Of The Sea". A memorial stone was placed for
him in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, London, England in
1976.
"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you
do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that
what have you had?--from the Preface of The Ambassadors
Biography written by C. D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc.
2008. All Rights Reserved.
The above biography is copyrighted. Do not republish it without
permission.
Forum Discussions on Henry James
b. Oct. 16, 1888, New York, N.Y., U.S. d. Nov. 27, 1953, Boston,
Mass. in full EUGENE GLADSTONE O'NEILL foremost American
dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His
masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night (produced posthumously
1956), is at the apex of a long string of great plays, including Beyond
the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928),
Ah! Wilderness (1933), and The Iceman Cometh (1946).
Early life
O'Neill was born into the theatre. His father, James O'Neill, was a
successful touring actor in the last quarter of the 19th century whose
most famous role was that of the Count of Monte Cristo in a stage
adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas père novel. His mother, Ella,
accompanied her husband back and forth across the country, settling
down only briefly for the birth of her first son, James, Jr., and of
Eugene.
Eugene, who was born in a hotel, spent his early childhood in hotel
rooms, on trains, and backstage. Although he later deplored the
nightmare insecurity of his early years and blamed his father for the
difficult, rough-and-tumble life the family led--a life that resulted in
his mother's drug addiction--Eugene had the theatre in his blood. He
was also, as a child, steeped in the peasant Irish Catholicism of his
father and the more genteel, mystical piety of his mother, two
influences, often in dramatic conflict, which account for the high sense
of drama and the struggle with God and religion that distinguish
O'Neill's plays.
O'Neill was educated at boarding schools--Mt. St. Vincent in the
Bronx and Betts Academy in Stamford, Conn. His summers were
spent at the family's only permanent home, a modest house
overlooking the Thames River in New London, Conn. He attended
Princeton University for one year (1906-07), after which he left school
to begin what he later regarded as his real education in "life
experience." The next six years very nearly ended his life. He shipped
to sea, lived a derelict's existence on the waterfronts of Buenos Aires,
Liverpool, and New York City, submerged himself in alcohol, and
attempted suicide. Recovering briefly at the age of 24, he held a job
for a few months as a reporter and contributor to the poetry column of
the New London Telegraph but soon came down with tuberculosis.
Confined to the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium in Wallingford, Conn., for
six months (1912-13), he confronted himself soberly and nakedly for
the first time and seized the chance for what he later called his
"rebirth." He began to write plays.
Entry into theatre
O'Neill's first efforts were awkward melodramas, but they were about
people and subjects--prostitutes, derelicts, lonely sailors, God's
injustice to man--that had, up to that time, been in the province of
serious novels and were not considered fit subjects for presentation on
the American stage. A theatre critic persuaded his father to send him
to Harvard to study with George Pierce Baker in his famous
playwriting course. Although what O'Neill produced during that year
(1914-15) owed little to Baker's academic instruction, the chance to
work steadily at writing set him firmly on his chosen path.
O'Neill's first appearance as a playwright came in the summer of 1916,
in the quiet fishing village of Provincetown, Mass., where a group of
young writers and painters had launched an experimental theatre. In
their tiny, ramshackle playhouse on a wharf, they produced his one-act
sea play Bound East for Cardiff. The talent inherent in the play was
immediately evident to the group, which that fall formed the
Playwrights' Theater in Greenwich Village. Their first bill, on Nov. 3,
1916, included Bound East for Cardiff--O'Neill's New York debut.
Although he was only one of several writers whose plays were
produced by the Playwrights' Theater, his contribution within the next
few years made the group's reputation. Between 1916 and 1920, the
group produced all of O'Neill's one-act sea plays, along with a number
of his lesser efforts. By the time his first full-length play, Beyond the
Horizon, was produced on Broadway, Feb. 2, 1920, at the Morosco
Theater, the young playwright already had a small reputation.
Beyond the Horizon impressed the critics with its tragic realism, won
for O'Neill the first of four Pulitzer prizes in drama--others were for
Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and Long Day's Journey into Night-and brought him to the attention of a wider theatre public. For the next
20 years his reputation grew steadily, both in the United States and
abroad; after Shakespeare and Shaw, O'Neill became the most widely
translated and produced dramatist.
Period of the major works
O'Neill's capacity for and commitment to work were staggering.
Between 1920 and 1943 he completed 20 long plays--several of them
double and triple length--and a number of shorter ones. He wrote and
rewrote many of his manuscripts half a dozen times before he was
satisfied, and he filled shelves of notebooks with research notes,
outlines, play ideas, and other memoranda. His most-distinguished
short plays include the four early sea plays, Bound East for Cardiff, In
the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, and The Moon of the Caribbees,
which were written between 1913 and 1917 and produced in 1924
under the overall title S.S. Glencairn; The Emperor Jones (about the
disintegration of a Pullman porter turned tropical-island dictator); and
The Hairy Ape (about the disintegration of a displaced steamship coal
stoker).
O'Neill's plays were written from an intensely personal point of view,
deriving directly from the scarring effects of his family's tragic
relationships--his mother and father, who loved and tormented each
other; his older brother, who loved and corrupted him and died of
alcoholism in middle age; and O'Neill himself, caught and torn
between love for and rage at all three.
Among his most-celebrated long plays is Anna Christie, perhaps the
classic American example of the ancient "harlot with a heart of gold"
theme; it became an instant popular success. O'Neill's serious, almost
solemn treatment of the struggle of a poor Swedish-American girl to
live down her early, enforced life of prostitution and to find happiness
with a likable but unimaginative young sailor is his least-complicated
tragedy. He himself disliked it from the moment he finished it, for, in
his words, it had been "too easy."
The first full-length play in which O'Neill successfully evoked the
starkness and inevitability of Greek tragedy that he felt in his own life
was Desire Under the Elms. Drawing on Greek themes of incest,
infanticide, and fateful retribution, he framed his story in the context
of his own family's conflicts. This story of a lustful father, a weak son,
and an adulterous wife who murders her infant son was told with a
fine disregard for the conventions of the contemporary Broadway
theatre. Because of the sparseness of its style, its avoidance of
melodrama, and its total honesty of emotion, the play was acclaimed
immediately as a powerful tragedy and has continued to rank among
the great American plays of the 20th century.
In The Great God Brown, O'Neill dealt with a major theme that he
expressed more effectively in later plays--the conflict between
idealism and materialism. Although the play was too metaphysically
intricate to be staged successfully in 1926, it was significant for its
symbolic use of masks and for the experimentation with
expressionistic dialogue and action--devices that since have become
commonly accepted both on the stage and in motion pictures. In spite
of its confusing structure, the play is rich in symbolism and poetry, as
well as in daring technique, and it became a forerunner of avant-garde
movements in American theatre.
O'Neill's innovative writing continued with Strange Interlude. This
play was revolutionary in style and length: when first produced, it
opened in late afternoon, broke for a dinner intermission, and ended at
the conventional hour. Techniques new to the modern theatre included
spoken asides or soliloquies to express the characters' hidden thoughts.
The play is the saga of Everywoman, who ritualistically acts out her
roles as daughter, wife, mistress, mother, and platonic friend.
Although it was innovative and startling in 1928, its obvious Freudian
overtones have rapidly dated the work.
One of O'Neill's enduring masterpieces, Mourning Becomes Electra,
represents the playwright's most complete use of Greek forms, themes,
and characters. Based on the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, it was
itself three plays in one. To give the story contemporary credibility,
O'Neill set the play in the New England of the Civil War period, yet
he retained the forms and the conflicts of the Greek characters: the
heroic leader returning from war; his adulterous wife, who murders
him; his jealous, repressed daughter, who avenges him through the
murder of her mother; and his weak, incestuous son, who is goaded by
his sister first to matricide and then to suicide.
Following a long succession of tragic visions, O'Neill's only comedy,
Ah, Wilderness!, appeared on Broadway in 1933. Written in a
lighthearted, nostalgic mood, the work was inspired in part by the
playwright's mischievous desire to demonstrate that he could portray
the comic as well as the tragic side of life. Significantly, the play is set
in the same place and period, a small New England town in the early
1900s, as his later tragic masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night.
Dealing with the growing pains of a sensitive, adolescent boy, Ah,
Wilderness! was characterized by O'Neill as "the other side of the
coin," meaning that it represented his fantasy of what his own youth
might have been, rather than what he believed it to have been (as
dramatized later in Long Day's Journey into Night).
The Iceman Cometh, the most complex and perhaps the finest of the
O'Neill tragedies, followed in 1939, although it did not appear on
Broadway until 1946. Laced with subtle religious symbolism, the play
is a study of man's need to cling to his hope for a better life, even if he
must delude himself to do so.
Even in his last writings, O'Neill's youth continued to absorb his
attention. The posthumous production of Long Day's Journey into
Night brought to light an agonizingly autobiographical play, one of
O'Neill's greatest. It is straightforward in style but shattering in its
depiction of the agonized relations between father, mother, and two
sons. Spanning one day in the life of a family, the play strips away
layer after layer from each of the four central figures, revealing the
mother as a defeated drug addict, the father as a man frustrated in his
career and failed as a husband and father, the older son as a bitter
alcoholic, and the younger son as a tubercular, disillusioned youth
with only the slenderest chance for physical and spiritual survival.
O'Neill's tragic view of life was perpetuated in his relationships with
the three women he married--two of whom he divorced--and with his
three children. His elder son, Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (by his first wife,
Kathleen Jenkins), committed suicide at 40, while his younger son,
Shane (by his second wife, Agnes Boulton), drifted into a life of
emotional instability. His daughter, Oona (also by Agnes Boulton),
was cut out of his life when, at 18, she infuriated him by marrying
Charlie Chaplin, who was O'Neill's age.
Until some years after his death in 1953, O'Neill, although respected
in the United States, was more highly regarded abroad. Sweden, in
particular, always held him in high esteem, partly because of his
publicly acknowledged debt to the influence of the Swedish
playwright August Strindberg, whose tragic themes often echo in
O'Neill's plays. In 1936 the Swedish Academy gave O'Neill the Nobel
Prize for Literature, the first time the award had been conferred on an
American playwright.
O'Neill's most ambitious project for the theatre was one that he never
completed. In the late 1930s he conceived of a cycle of 11 plays, to be
performed on 11 consecutive nights, tracing the lives of an American
family from the early 1800s to modern times. He wrote scenarios and
outlines for several of the plays and drafts of others but completed
only one in the cycle--A Touch of the Poet--before a crippling illness
ended his ability to hold a pencil. An unfinished rough draft of another
of the cycle plays, More Stately Mansions, was published in 1964 and
produced three years later on Broadway, in spite of written
instructions left by O'Neill that the incomplete manuscript be
destroyed after his death.
O'Neill's final years were spent in grim frustration. Unable to work, he
longed for his death and sat waiting for it in a Boston hotel, seeing no
one except his doctor, a nurse, and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey.
O'Neill died as broken and tragic a figure as any he had created for the
stage.
Assessment
O'Neill was the first American dramatist to regard the stage as a
literary medium and the only American playwright ever to receive the
Nobel Prize for Literature. Through his efforts, the American theatre
grew up during the 1920s, developing into a cultural medium that
could take its place with the best in American fiction, painting, and
music. Until his Beyond the Horizon was produced, in 1920,
Broadway theatrical fare, apart from musicals and an occasional
European import of quality, had consisted largely of contrived
melodrama and farce. O'Neill saw the theatre as a valid forum for the
presentation of serious ideas. Imbued with the tragic sense of life, he
aimed for a contemporary drama that had its roots in the most
powerful of ancient Greek tragedies--a drama that could rise to the
emotional heights of Shakespeare. For more than 20 years, both with
such masterpieces as Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes
Electra, and The Iceman Cometh and by his inspiration to other
serious dramatists, O'Neill set the pace for the blossoming of the
Broadway theatre. (B.Ge.) (A.Ge.)
© 1999-2000 Britannica.com and Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Copyright
John Steinbeck Biography
Author (1902–1968)
© 1999-2013 eOneill.com
John Steinbeck was an American novelist whose Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel, The Grapes of Wrath, portrayed the plight of migrant workers during
the Great Depression.
Synopsis
Born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, John Steinbeck
dropped out of college and worked as a manual laborer before achieving
success as a writer. His 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about the
migration of a family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California, won a
Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Steinbeck served as a war
correspondent during World War II, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1962. He died in New York City in 1968.
Early Years
Famed novelist John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. was born on February 27, 1902,
in Salinas, California. His books, including his landmark work The
Grapes of Wrath (1939), often dealt with social and economic issues.
Steinbeck was raised with modest means. His father, John Ernst
Steinbeck, tried his hand at several different jobs to keep his family fed:
He owned a feed-and-grain store, managed a flour plant and served as
treasurer of Monterey County. His mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck,
was a former schoolteacher.
For the most part, Steinbeck—who grew up with three sisters—had a
happy childhood. He was shy, but smart, and formed an early
appreciation for the land, and in particular California's Salinas Valley,
which would greatly inform his later writing. According to accounts,
Steinbeck decided to become a writer at the age of 14, often locking
himself in his bedroom to write poems and stories. In 1919, Steinbeck
enrolled at Stanford University—a decision that had more to do with
pleasing his parents than anything else—but the budding writer would
prove to have little use for college.
Over the next six years, Steinbeck drifted in and out of school, eventually
dropping out for good in 1925, without a degree.
Early Career
Following Stanford, Steinbeck tried to make a go of it as a freelance
writer. He briefly moved to New York City, where he found work as a
construction worker and a newspaper reporter, but then scurried back to
California, where he took a job as a caretaker in Lake Tahoe. It was
during this time that Steinbeck wrote his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929),
and met and married his first wife, Carol Henning. Over the following
decade, with Carol's support and paycheck, he continued to pour himself
into his writing.
Steinbeck's follow-up novels, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a
God Unknown (1933), received tepid reviews. It wasn't until Tortilla
Flat (1935), a humorous novel about paisano life in the Monterey region,
was released that the writer achieved real success. Steinbeck struck a
more serious tone with In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and
Men (1937) and The Long Valley (1938), a collection of short stories.
Widely considered Steinbeck's finest and most ambitious novel, The
Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939. Telling the story of a
dispossessed Oklahoma family and their struggle to carve out a new life
in California at the height of the Great Depression, the book captured the
mood and angst of the nation during this time period. At the height of its
popularity, The Grapes of Wrath sold 10,000 copies per week. The work
eventually earned Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize in 1940.
Later Life
Following that great success, John Steinbeck served as a war
correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune during World War II.
Around this same time, he traveled to Mexico to collect marine life with
friend Edward F. Ricketts, a marine biologist. Their collaboration resulted
in the book Sea of Cortez(1941), which describes marine life in the Gulf
of California.
Steinbeck continued to write in his later years, with credits
including Cannery
Row (1945), Burning
Bright (1950), East
of
Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) and Travels with
Charley: In Search of America (1962). Also in 1962, the author received
the Nobel Prize for Literature—"for his realistic and imaginative
writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social
perception"
Steinbeck died of heart disease on December 20, 1968, at his home in
New York City.
Arthur Miller Biography
Playwright (1915–2005)
Arthur Miller was an American playwright whose biting criticism of
societal problems defined his genius. His best known play is Death of a
Salesman.
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quotes
“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home
to roost.”
—Arthur Miller
Synopsis
Born in Harlem, New York in 1915, Arthur Miller attended the
University of Michigan before moving back east to produce plays for the
stage. His first critical and popular success was Death of a Salesman,
which opened on Broadway in 1949. His very colorful public life was
painted in part by his rocky marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and his
unwavering refusal to cooperate with the House of Un-American
Activities Committee. He was married three times and died in 2005, at
the age of 89.
Early Life
Born in Harlem, New York on October 17, 1915, Arthur Miller was
raised in a moderately affluent household until his family lost almost
everything in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. They subsequently fired the
chauffeur and moved from the Upper East Side in Manhattan to
Gravesend, Brooklyn. After graduating high school, Miller worked a few
odd jobs to save enough money to attend the University of Michigan.
While in college, he wrote for the student paper and complete his first
play, No Villain. He also took courses with the much-loved playwright
professor Kenneth Rowe, a man who taught his students how to construct
a play in order to achieve an intended effect. Inspired by Rowe's
approach, Miller moved back east to begin his career.
Playwriting Career
Things started out a bit rocky: His 1940 play, The Man Who Had All the
Luck, garnered precisely the antithesis of its title, closing after just four
performances and a stack of woeful reviews. Six years later, however, All
My Sons achieved success on Broadway, and earned him his first Tony
Award (best author). Working in the small studio that he built in
Roxbury, Connecticut, Miller wrote the first act of Death of Salesman in
less than a day. It opened on February 10, 1949 at the Morosco Theatre,
and was adored by nearly everyone. Salesman won him the triple crown
of theatrical artistry: the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics'
Circle Award and a Tony.
In 1956, Miller left his first wife, Mary Slattery. Shortly thereafter, he
married famed actress Marilyn Monroe. Later that year, the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee refused to renew Miller's passport, and
called him in to appear before the committee—his play, The Crucible, a
dramatization of the Salem witch trials of 1692 and an allegory of
McCarthyism, was the foremost reason for their strong-armed summons.
However, Miller refused to comply with the committee's demands to
"out" people who had been active in certain political activities.
In 1961, Monroe starred in The Misfits, a film for which Miller supplied
the screenplay. Around the same time, Monroe and Miller divorced.
Within several months, Miller married Austrian-born photographer Inge
Morath. The couple had two children, Rebecca and Daniel. Miller
insisted that their son, Daniel, who was born with down syndrome, be
completely excluded from the family's personal life. Miller's son-in-law,
actor Daniel Day-Lewis, visited his wife's brother frequently, and
eventually persuaded Miller to reunite with his adult son.
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Final Years
In his final years, Miller's work continued to grapple with the weightiest
of societal and personal matters. His last play of note was The
Price (1968), a piece about family dynamics. In 2002, Miller's third wife,
Inges, died. The famed playwright promptly became engaged to 34-yearold minimalist painter
Agnes Barley. However, before the couple could walk down the aisle, on
February 10, 2005 (the 56th anniversary of Death of a Salesman's
Broadway debut), Arthur Miller, surrounded by Barley, family and
friends, died of heart failure. He was 89 years old.
Toni Morrison Biography
Writer (1931–)
Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning American
novelist. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of
Solomon and Beloved.
Synopsis
Born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison is a Nobel
Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor and
professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue and
richly detailed black characters. Among her best known novels are The
Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. Morrison has won nearly
every book prize possible. She has also been awarded honorary degrees.
Early Career
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio,
Toni Morrison was the second oldest of four children. Her father, George
Wofford, worked primarily as a welder, but held several jobs at once to
support the family. Her mother, Ramah, was a domestic worker. Morrison
later credited her parents with instilling in her a love of reading, music,
and folklore.
Living in an integrated neighborhood, Morrison did not become fully
aware of racial divisions until she was in her teens. "When I was in first
grade, nobody thought I was inferior. I was the only black in the class and
the only child who could read," she later told a reporter from The New
York Times. Dedicated to her studies, Morrison took Latin in school, and
read many great works of European literature. She graduated from Lorain
High School with honors in 1949.
At Howard University, Morrison continued to pursue her interest in
literature. She majored in English, and chose the classics for her minor.
After graduating from Howard in 1953, Morrison continued her education
at Cornell University. She wrote her thesis on the works of Virginia
Woolf and William Faulkner, and completed her master's degree in 1955.
She then moved to Texas to teach English at Texas Southern University.
In 1957, Morrison returned to Howard University to teach English. There
she met Harold Morrison, an architect originally from Jamaica. The
couple got married in 1958 and welcomed their first child, son Harold, in
1961. After the birth of her son, Morrison joined a writers group that met
on campus. She began working on her first novel with the group, which
started out as a short story.
Morrison decided to leave Howard in 1963. After spending the summer
traveling with her family in Europe, she returned to the United States
with her son. Her husband, however, had decided to move back to
Jamaica. At the time, Morrison was pregnant with their second child. She
moved back home to live with her family in Ohio before the birth of son
Slade in 1964. The following year, she moved with her sons to Syracuse,
New York, where she worked for a textbook publisher as a senior editor.
Morrison later went to work for Random House, where she edited works
for such authors as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones.
African-American Literary Star
Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. It told the
story of a young African-American girl who believes her incredibly
difficult life would be better if only she had blue eyes. The book received
warm reviews, but it didn't sell well. Morrison continued to explore the
African-American experience in its many forms and time periods in her
work. Her next novel,Sula (1973), explores good and evil through the
friendship of two women who grew up together. The work was
nominated for the American Book Award.
Song of Solomon (1977) became the first work by an African-American
author to be a featured selection in the book-of-the-month club
since Native Son by Richard Wright. It follows the journey of Milkman
Dead as he searches the South for his roots. Morrison received a number
of accolades for this work.
A rising literary star, Morrison was appointed to the National Council on
the Arts in 1980. The following year, Tar Baby was published. The novel
drew some inspiration from folktales, and it received a decidedly mixed
reaction from critics. Her next work, however, proved to be one of her
greatest masterpieces. Beloved (1987) explores love and the supernatural.
The main character, a former slave, is haunted by her decision to kill her
children rather than see them become slaves. Three of her children
survived, but her infant daughter died at her hand. For this spellbinding
work, Morrison won several literary awards, including the 1988 Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction. Ten years later, in 1998, the book was turned into a
movie starring Oprah Winfrey.
Branching Out
Morrison became a professor at Princeton University in 1989, and
continued to produce great works. In recognition of her contributions to
her field, she received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the
first African-American woman to be selected for the award. The
following year, she published the novel Jazz, which explores marital love
and betrayal.
At Princeton, Morrison established a special workshop for writers and
performers known as the Princeton Atelier in 1994. The program was
designed to help students create original works in a variety of artistic
fields. Outside of her academic work, Morrison continued to write new
works of fiction. Her next novel, Paradise (1998), which focused on a
fictional African-American town called Ruby, earned mixed reviews.
In 1999, Morrison branched out to children's literature. She worked with
her son Slade on The Big Box, The Book of Mean People (2002) and The
Ant or the Grasshopper? (2003). She has also explored other genres,
writing the play Dreaming Emmett in the mid-1980s and the lyrics for
"Four Songs" with composer Andre Previn in 1994 and "Sweet Talk"
with composer Richard Danielpour in 1997.
Her next novel, Love (2003), divides its narrative between the past and
present. Bill Cosey, a wealthy entrepreneur and owner of the Cosey Hotel
and Resort, is the center figure in the work. The flashbacks explore his
life, while his death casts a long shadow on the present part of the story.
A critic for Publisher's Weekly praised the work, stating that "Morrison
has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel whose mysteries are gradually
unearthed."
Later Works
In 2006, Morrison announced she was retiring from her post at Princeton.
That year, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best
novel of the past 25 years. She continued to explore new art forms,
writing the libretto for Margaret Garner, an American opera that
explores the tragedy of slavery through the true life story of one woman's
experiences. The opera debuted at the New York City Opera in 2007.
Morrison traveled back to the early days of slavery in the United States
for her next novel, A Mercy. Once again, a woman who is both a slave
and a mother must make a terrible choice regarding her child. As a critic
from theWashington Post described it, the novel is "a fusion of mystery,
history and longing." In addition to her many novels, Morrison has
written several works of non-fiction. She published collection of her nonfiction writings entitledWhat Moves at the Margin in 2008.
A champion for the arts, Morrison spoke out about censorship in October
2009 after one of her books was banned at a Michigan high school. She
served as editor for Burn This Book, a collection of essays on censorship
and the power of the written word, which was published that same year.
She told a crowd gathered for the launch of the Free Speech Leadership
Council about the importance of fighting censorship. "The thought that
leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of
unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being
overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing
underground, essayists' questions challenging authority never being
posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As
though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink," Morrison
said.
Recent Projects
Now in her 80s, Morrison continues to be one of literature's great
storytellers. She published her latest novel, Home, in 2012. She once
again explores a period of American history—this time the post-Korean
War era. In choosing this setting, "I was trying to take the scab off the
'50s, the general idea of it as very comfortable, happy, nostalgic. Mad
Men. Oh, please. There was a horrible war you didn't call a war, where
58,000 people died. There was McCarthy," Morrison explain to
the Guardian newspaper. Her main character, Frank, is a veteran who
suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
While writing the novel, Morrison experienced a great personal loss. Her
son Slade, an artist, died in December 2010. The pair had collaborated
together on a number of children's books, including Big Box (1999)
and Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010).
In addition to Home, Morrison also debuted another work in 2012: She
worked with opera director Peter Sellars and songwriter Rokia Traoré on
a new production inspired by William Shakespeare's Othello. The trio
focused on the relationship between Othello's wife Desdemona and her
African nurse, Barbary, in Desdemona, which premiered in London in the
summer of 2012.
John Updike Biography
Author (1932–2009)
Writer John Updike's works are known for their subtle depiction of
American middle-class life. His popular Rabbit series earned him two
Pulitzer
prizes.
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Synopsis
John Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania. His
famous Rabbit series—including Rabbit,
Run (1960); Rabbit
Redux (1971);Rabbit Is Rich (1981, Pulitzer Prize); Rabbit at Rest (1990,
Pulitzer Prize); and Rabbit Remembered (2001)—follows a very ordinary
American man through the decades of the late 20th century. The most
recent installment of the series, Rabbit Remembered, centers on
characters from the earlier books in the wake of Rabbit's death. Updike
died on January 27, 2009, in Danvers, Massachusetts.
John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and spent his first years
in nearby Shillington, a small town where his father was a high school
science teacher. The area surrounding Reading has provided the setting
for many of his stories, with the invented towns of Brewer and Olinger
standing in for Reading and Shillington. An only child, Updike and his
parents shared a house with his grandparents for much of his childhood.
When he was 13, the family moved to his mother's birthplace, a stone
farmhouse on an 80-acre farm near Plowville, eleven miles from
Shillington, where he continued to attend school.
At home, he consumed popular fiction, especially humor and mysteries.
His mother, herself an aspiring writer, encouraged him to write and draw.
He excelled in school and served as President and co-valedictorian of his
graduating class at Shillington High School. For the first three summers
after high school, he worked as a copy boy at the Reading
Eaglenewspaper, eventually producing a number of feature stories for the
paper. He received a tuition scholarship to Harvard University, where he
majored in English. As an undergraduate, he wrote stories and drew
cartoons for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine, serving as the
magazine's president in his senior year. Before graduating, he married
fellow student Mary E. Pennington. He graduated summa cum laude from
Harvard in 1954, and in that same year sold a poem and a short story
to The New Yorker magazine.
Updike and his wife spent the following year in England, where Updike
studied at Oxford's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. While they
were in England, their first daughter was born and Updike met the
American writers E. B. and Katharine White, editors at The New Yorker,
who urged him to seek a job at the magazine. On returning from England,
the Updikes settled in Manhattan, where John took a position as a staff
writer at The New Yorker. He worked at the magazine for nearly two
years, writing editorials, features and reviews, but after the birth of a son
in 1957, he decided to move his growing family to the small town of
Ipswich, Massachusetts. He continued to contribute to The New
Yorker but resolved to support his family by writing full-time, without
taking a salaried position. He maintained a lifelong relationship with The
New Yorker, where many of his poems, reviews and short stories
appeared, but he resided in Massachusetts for the rest of his life.
Updike's first book of poetry, The Carpentered
Hen and Other Tame Creatures, was published
by Harper and Brothers in 1958. When the
publisher sought changes to the ending of his
first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, he moved to
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The first novel was wellreceived, and with support from the
Guggenheim Fellowship, Updike undertook a
more ambitious novel, Rabbit, Run. The novel
introduced one of Updike's most memorable
characters, the small-town athlete, Harry
"Rabbit" Angstrom. Knopf feared that his frank
description of Rabbit's sexual adventures could
lead to prosecution for obscenity, and made a
number of changes to the text. The book was published to widespread
acclaim without legal repercussions. The original text was restored for the
British edition a few years later, and subsequent American editions of the
book have reflected the author's original intent. Updike's reputation as a
leading author of his generation was established.
After the birth of a third child, Updike rented a one-room office above a
restaurant in Ipswich, where he wrote for several hours every morning,
six days a week, a schedule he adhered to throughout his career. In 1963,
he received the National Book Award for his novel The Centaur, inspired
by his childhood in Pennsylvania. The following year, at age 32, he
became the youngest person ever elected to the National Institute of Arts
and Letters, and was invited by the State Department to tour eastern
Europe as part of a cultural exchange program between the United States
and the Soviet Union. In 1967, he joined the author Robert Penn Warren
and other American writers in signing a letter urging Soviet writers to
defend Jewish cultural institutions under attack by the Soviet government.
In 1968, Updike's novel Couples created a
national sensation with its portrayal of the
complicated relationships among a set of
young married couples in the suburbs. It
remained on the best-seller lists for over a
year and prompted a Time magazine cover
story featuring Updike. InBech: A
Book (1970), Updike introduced a new
protagonist, the imaginary novelist Henry
Bech, who, like Rabbit Angstrom, was
destined to reappear in Updike's fiction for
many years. Rabbit Angstrom reappeared
in Rabbit Redux(1971).
In the 1970s, Updike continued to travel as
a cultural ambassador of the United States, and in 1974 he joined authors
John Cheever, Arthur Miller and Richard Wilbur in calling on the Soviet
government to cease its persecution of dissident author Alexander
Solzhenitsyn. Updike separated from his wife Mary in 1974 and moved to
Boston where he taught briefly at Boston University. Two years later, the
Updikes were divorced, and in 1977 he married Martha Ruggles
Bernhard, settling with her and her three children in Georgetown,
Massachusetts.
Rabbit is Rich, published in 1981,
received numerous awards, including
the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1983
Updike's other alter ego, Harry Bech,
reappeared in Bech is Back, and
Updike
was
featured
in
a
second Time magazine cover story,
"Going Great at 50." Among his
novels of the 1980s and 1990s are a
trilogy retelling The Scarlet Letter from the points of view of three
different characters, and a prequel to Hamlet, entitled Gertrude and
Claudius. In 1991 he received a second Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit at Rest.
He was only the third American to win a second Pulitzer Prize in the
fiction category.
In an autobiographical essay, Updike famously identified sex, art, and
religion as "the three great secret things" in human experience. The
grandson of a Presbyterian minister (his first father-in-law was also a
minister), his writing in all genres has displayed a preoccupation with
philosophical questions. A lifelong churchgoer and student of Christian
theology, the Jesuit magazine Americaawarded him its Campion Award
in 1997 as a "distinguished Christian person of letters." He received the
National Medal of Art from President George H.W. Bush in 1989, and in
2003 was presented with the National Medal for the Humanities from
President George W. Bush. He was one of a very few Americans to
receive both of these honors. The same year saw the publication of a
comprehensive collection, The Early Stories, 1953-1975.
John Updike spent his last years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, in the
same corner of New England where so much of his fiction is set. His last
book was The Widows of Eastwick (2008), a sequel to his 1984 novel The
Witches of Eastwick. Updike succumbed to lung cancer the following
year at the age of 76.
William Faulkner Biography
Author (1897–1962)
William Faulkner was a Nobel Prize-winning novelist of the American
South who wrote challenging prose and created the fictional
Yoknapatawpha County. He is known for novels like The Sound and the
Fury and As I Lay Dying.
Synopsis
American writer William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi
in 1897. Much of his early work was poetry, but he became famous for
his novels set in the American South, frequently in his fabricated
Yoknapatawpha County, with works that included The Sound and the
Fury, As I Lay Dyingand Absalom, Absalom! His controversial 1931
novel Sanctuary was turned into two films, 1933's The Story of Temple
Drake as well as a later 1961 project. Faulkner was awarded the 1949
Nobel Prize in Literature and ultimately won two Pulitzers and two
National Book Awards as well. He died on July 6, 1962.
Younger Years
A Southern writer through and through, William Cuthbert Falkner (the
original spelling of his last name) was born in the small town of New
Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. His parents, Murry Falkner
and Maud Butler Faulkner, named him after his paternal greatgrandfather, William Clark Falkner, an adventurous and shrewd man who
seven years prior was shot dead in the town square of Ripley, Mississippi.
Throughout his life, William Clark Falkner worked as a railroad
financier, politician, soldier, farmer, businessman, lawyer and—in his
twilight years—best-selling author (The White Rose of Memphis).
The grandeur of the "Old Colonel," as almost everyone called him,
loomed large in the minds of William Clark Falkner's children and
grandchildren. The Old Colonel’s son, John Wesley Thompson, opened
the First National Bank of Oxford in 1910. Instead of later bequeathing
the railroad business to his son, Murry, however, Thompson sold it.
Murry worked as the business manager for the University of Mississippi.
Murry’s son, author William Falkner, held tightly to his greatgrandfather’s legacy, writing about him in his earliest novels set in the
American South.
As much as the older men in Faulkner's family made an impression on
him, so did the women. Faulkner's mother, Maud, and grandmother, Lelia
Butler, were voracious readers, as well as fine painters and
photographers. They taught him the beauty of line and color. Faulkner’s
"mammy," as he called her, was a black woman named Caroline Barr.
She raised him from birth until the day he left home and was fundamental
to his development. At her wake, Faulkner told the mourning crowd that
it was a privilege to see her out, that she had taught him right from wrong
and was loyal to his family despite having borne none of them. In later
documents, Faulkner points to Barr as the impetus for his fascination with
the politics of sexuality and race.
As a teenager, Faulkner was taken by drawing. He also greatly enjoyed
reading and writing poetry. In fact, by the age of 12, he began
intentionally mimicking Scottish romantics, specifically Robert Burns,
and English romantics, A.E. Housman and A.C. Swinburne. Despite his
remarkable intelligence, or perhaps because of it, school bored him. He
never earned a high school diploma. After dropping out, he worked in
carpentry and sporadically as a clerk at his grandfather’s bank.
During this time, Faulkner met Estelle Oldham. At the time of their
meeting, she was both popular and exceedingly effervescent. She
immediately stole his heart. The two dated for a while, but another man
named Cornell Franklin proposed to her before Faulker did. Estelle took
the proposal lightheartedly, partly because Franklin had just been
commissioned as a major in the Hawaiian Territorial Forces and was
leaving soon to report for duty. Estelle hoped it would dissolve naturally,
but several months later, he mailed her an engagement ring. Estelle’s
parents bid her to accept the offer, as Franklin was a law graduate of the
University of Mississippi and came from a family of high repute.
Afflicted by Estelle’s engagement, Faulkner turned to a new mentor Phil
Stone, a local attorney who was impressed by the his poetry. Stone
invited Faulkner to move and live with him in New Haven, Connecticut.
There, Stone nurtured Faulkner's passion for writing. While delving into
prose, Faulkner worked at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, a
distinguished rifle manufacturer. Lured by the war in Europe, he joined
the British Royale Flying Corps in 1918 and trained as a pilot in the first
Royal Canadian Air Force. He had earlier tried to enlist the U.S. Forces,
but they wouldn't admit him due to his height (he was a little under 5' 6").
To enlist in the Royal Air Force, he lied about several facts, changing his
birthplace and surname—from Falkner to Faulkner—to appear more
British.
Faulkner trained on British and Canadian bases, and finished his time in
Toronto just before the war ended, never putting him in harm's way. A
man of skilled exaggeration, Faulkner told embellished military stories,
and sometimes completely fabricated war stories, to his friends back
home. He even donned the uniform of a lieutenant to bolster his
reputation and wore it at home in Mississippi.
Early Writings
By 1919, he was enrolled in the University of Mississippi. He wrote for
the student newspaper, the Mississippian, submitting his first published
poem and other short works. After three semesters as an entirely
inattentive student, he dropped out. For the next few years, before going
on to become the Southern writer history reveres, he spent a few months
in New York City as a bookseller's assistant, two years as the postmaster
for the university, and a short stint as a scoutmaster for a local troop.
In 1924, Phil Stone escorted a collection of Faulkner’s poetry, The
Marble Faun, to a publisher. Shortly after its 1,000-copy run, Faulkner
moved in New Orleans. He published several essays for The Double
Dealer, a local magazine that served to unite and nurture the city’s
literary crowd. In 1925, Faulkner succeeded in having his first novel
published, Soldiers' Pay. As soon as it was accepted for print, he sailed
from New Orleans to Europe to live for a few months just outside of
Paris. During his stay, he wrote about the Luxembourg Gardens that were
a short walk from his apartment.
Back in Louisiana, American writer Sherwood Anderson, who had
become a friend, gave Faulkner some advice: He told the young author to
write about his native region of Mississippi—a place that Faulkner surely
knew better than northern France. Inspired by the concept, Faulkner
began writing about the places and people of his childhood. He developed
a great many colorful characters based on real people he had grown up
with or heard about, including his great-grandfather, William Clark
Falkner. For his famous 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, he
developed the fictional Yoknapatawpha County—a place nearly identical
to Lafayette County, in which Oxford, Mississippi, is located. A year
later, in 1930, Faulkner released As I Lay Dying.
Famed Author
Faulkner became known for his faithful and accurate dictation of
Southern speech. He also boldly illuminated social issues that many
American writers left in the dark, including slavery, the good old boys
club and Southern aristocracy. In 1931, after much deliberation, Faulkner
decided to publishSanctuary, a story that focused on the rape and
kidnapping of a young woman at Ole Miss. It shocked and appalled some
readers, but it was a commercial success and a critical breakthrough for
his career. Years later, in 1950, he published a sequel that was a mix of
conventional prose and play forms, Requiem for a Nun.
Personally, Faulkner experienced both elation and soul-shocking sadness
during this time in his career. Between the publishing of The Sound and
the Fury and Sanctuary, his old flame Estelle Oldham divorced Cornell
Franklin. Still deeply in love with her, Faulkner promptly made his
feelings known and the two were married within six months. Estelle
became pregnant, and in January of 1931, she gave birth to a daughter.
They named her Alabama. Tragically, the premature baby lived for just a
few days. Faulkner’s collection of short stories, titled These 13, is
dedicated to "Estelle and Alabama."
Faulkner's next novel, Light in August (1932) tells the story of
Yoknapatawpha County outcasts. In it, he introduces his readers to Joe
Christmas, a man of uncertain racial makeup; Joanna Burden, a woman
who supports voting rights for blacks and later is killed in the town
square; Lena Grove, an alert and determined young woman in search of
her baby's father; and Rev. Gail Hightower, a man besieged by
visions. Time magazine listed it in their 100 Best English-language novels
from 1923 to 2005, which also included The Sound and the Fury.
Screenwriting
After publishing several notable books, Faulkner turned to screenwriting.
He started with a six-weeks contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and cowrite 1933's Today We Live, starring Joan Crawford and Gary Cooper.
After Faulkner's father died, and in need of money, he decided to sell the
rights to film Sanctuary, later titled The Story of Temple Drake (1933).
That same year, Estelle gave birth to Jill, the couple's only surviving
child. Between 1932 and 1945, Faulkner traveled to Hollywood a dozen
times to toil as a scriptwriter. Uninspired by the task, he did it purely for
financial gain.
During this period he also published several novels, including the epic
family saga Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and the satirical The
Hamlet (1940).
Wins Nobel Prize
In 1946, Malcom Cowley published The Portable Faulkner, and interest
in Faulkner's work was revived. Two years later, Faulkner
published Intruder in the Dust, the tale of a black man falsely charged of
murder. He was able to sell the film rights to MGM for $50,000.
One of his greatest professional moments came when he was awarded the
1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, receiving the award the following year.
The committee deemed him one of the most important writers of
American letters. This attention brought him more awards, including the
National book Award for Fiction for Collected Stories and the Legion of
Honor in New Orleans. He also won the 1951 National Book Award
for The Collected Stories of William Faulkner. A few years later,
Faulkner was awarded the 1955 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction along with
another National Book Award for his novel A Fable, set in France during
WWI.
Death
In January 1961, he willed all his major manuscripts and many of his
personal papers to the William Faulkner Foundation at the University of
Virginia. On July 6, 1962, coincidentally the same date as the Old
Colonel's birthday, William Faulkner died of a heart attack. He received
another Pulitzer posthumously in 1963 for The Reivers.
Faulkner created a literary legacy globally revered and remains a revered
writer of the rural American South, having expertly captured the immense
complexities of both the region's beauty and dark past.
T.S. Eliot Biography
Writer (1888–1965)
T.S. Eliot was a groundbreaking 20th century poet who is known widely
for his work "The Waste Land."
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quotes
“April is the cruellest month.”
—T.S. Eliot
Synopsis
T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He published his first
poetic masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in 1915. In
1921, he wrote the poem "The Waste Land" while recovering from
exhaustion. The dense, allusion-heavy poem went on to redefine the
genre and become one of the most talked about poems in literary history.
For his lifetime of poetic innovation, Eliot won the Order of Merit and the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Part of the ex-pat community of the
1920s, he spent most of his life in Europe, dying in London, England, in
1965.
Early Years
Thomas Stearns "T.S." Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on
September 26, 1888. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis and then
the Milton Academy in Massachusetts, as his family was originally from
New England. Soon after the turn of the century, Eliot began seeing his
poems and short stories in print, and writing would occupy him for the
rest of his life.
Eliot began courses at Harvard University in 1906, graduating three years
later with a Bachelor of Arts degree. At Harvard, he was greatly
influenced by professors renowned in poetry, philosophy and literary
criticism, and the rest of his literary career would be shaped by all three.
After graduating, Eliot served as a philosophy assistant at Harvard for a
year, and then left for France and the Sorbonne to study philosophy.
From 1911 to 1914, Eliot was back at Harvard, where he deepened his
knowledge by reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit. He
finished his advanced degree at Harvard while in Europe, but due to the
onset of World War I, he never went back to Harvard to take the final oral
exam for his Ph.D. He soon married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and took a
job in London, England, as a school teacher. Not long after, he became a
bank clerk—a position he would hold until 1925.
The Poetry
It was around this time that T.S. Eliot began a lifelong friendship with
American poet Ezra Pound, who immediately recognized Eliot's poetic
genius and worked to publish his work. The first poem of this period, and
the first of Eliot's important works, was "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock," which appeared in Poetry in 1915. His first book of
poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, followed in 1917, and the
collection established Eliot as a leading poet of his day. While writing
poetry and tending to his day job, Eliot was busy writing literary criticism
and reviews, and his work in the criticism field would become as
respected as his poetry.
In 1919, Eliot published Poems, which contained "Gerontion." The poem
was a blank-verse interior monologue, and it was unlike anything that had
ever been written in the English language. As if that didn't garner enough
attention, in 1922 Eliot saw the publication of "The Waste Land," a
colossal and complex examination of postwar disillusionment. At the
time he wrote the poem, Eliot's marriage was failing, and he and his wife
were both experiencing "nervous disorders."
"The Waste Land" almost immediately developed a cult-like following
from all literary corners, and it is often considered the most influential
poetic work of the 20th century. The same year "The Waste Land" was
published, Eliot founded what would become an influential literary
journal called Criterion. The poet also edited the journal throughout the
span of its publication (1922-1939). Two years later, Eliot left his bank
post to join the publishing house Faber & Faber, where he would remain
for the rest of his career, shepherding the writing of many young poets.
(He officially became a British citizen in 1927.)
Whatever else was afoot, Eliot continued to write, and his major later
poems include "Ash Wednesday" (1930) and "Four Quartets" (1943).
During this period he also wrote The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934) and Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture (1940). For his vast influence—in poetry, criticism
and drama—T.S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.