Short biography
Download and read short biography of poets, writers and other persons.
-
Scott Adkins
Scott Edward Adkins was born in Sutton Coldfield, England on 17 June 1976 into a family of butchers. He has Spanish descent because of his grandmother. He first became interested in martial arts at the age of ten, when he visited a local Judo club with his father and older…
Подробнее » -
Biography of Mark Twain
His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but he is I better known by his pen name, Mark Twain. One of the important figures in American literary history, Twain holds a unique position in American literature. He was not only a great writer; he was also a famous humorist, a…
Подробнее » -
John Steinbeck and the 1930s
The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United States. Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable to harvest, transport, or sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms. Midwestern droughts turned the “breadbasket”…
Подробнее » -
William Faulkner and the Southern Tradition
The American south includes the southeastern states and the southern states along the Gulf of Mexico. American south is a unique region with its distinctive culture, tradition and history. Essentially speaking, American south was an agrarian society, where people had strong sense of the past, the tradition. They attached great…
Подробнее » -
Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald
Although American prose between the wars experimented with viewpoint and form, Americans wrote more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. Novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote of war, hunting, and other masculine pursuits in a stripped, plain style; William Faulkner set his powerful southern novels spanning generations and cultures firmly in…
Подробнее » -
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a well- to-do family with roots in the northeastern United States. He received the best education of any major American writer of his generation at Harvard College, the Sorbonne, and Merton College of Oxford University. He studied Sanskrit and Oriental…
Подробнее » -
Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of this century. From 1908 to 1920, he resided in London, where he associated with many writers, including William Butler Yeats, for whom he worked as a secretary, and T.S. Eliot, whose Waste Land he drastically edited…
Подробнее » -
Modern Poetry (Imagism)
Imagism flourished in Britain and in the United States for a brief period that is generally considered to be somewhere between 1909 and 1917. As part of the modernist movement, away from the sentimentality and moralizing tone of nineteenth-century Victorian poetry, imagist poets looked to many sources to help them…
Подробнее » -
The Emergence of Modernist Literature (Modern Poetry)
Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United States’ traumatic “coming of age,” despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes. John Dos Passos expressed America’s postwar disillusionment…
Подробнее » -
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, and baptized as Herman Theodore Dreiser. He was the ninth of ten surviving children (three others died as infants) of Säräh Schanab and Johann Dreiser. Dreiser’s childhood coincided with the family’s hard times. Consequently, his earliest memories included the joblessness of…
Подробнее » -
Jack London (John Griffith Chaney. 1876-1916)
Jack London, whose life symbolized the power of will, was the most successful writer in America in the early 20th Century. His vigorous stories of men and animals against the environment, and survival against hardships were drawn mainly from his own experience. An illegitimate child, London passed his childhood in…
Подробнее » -
Naturalism and Naturalistic Writers
Naturalism: Like Romanticism, naturalism first appeared in Europe. It is usually traced to the works of Balzac in the 1840s and seen as a French literary movement associated with Gustave Flaubert, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, È Zola, and Guy de Maupassant. It daringly opened up the seamy underside of society…
Подробнее » -
Henry James (1843-1916)
Henry James (1843-1916) once wrote that art, especially literary art, “makes life, makes interest, makes importance.” James’s fiction and criticism is the most highly conscious, sophisticated, and difficult of its era. With Twain, James is generally ranked as the greatest American novelist of the second half of the 19th century.…
Подробнее » -
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Frontier humor and realism Two major literary currents in 19th-century America merged in Mark Twain: popular frontier humor and local color, or “regionalism.” These related literary approaches began in the 1830s — and had even earlier roots in local oral traditions. In ragged frontier villages, on riverboats, in mining camps,…
Подробнее » -
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Slavery, and the Civil War
According to legend, when Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War!” The Civil War grew out of a mixture of causes including regional conflicts between North and South, economic trends, and humanitarian concerns…
Подробнее » -
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is best known today as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which helped galvanize the abolitionist cause and contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War. Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold over 10,000 copies in the first week and was a best seller of its day. After…
Подробнее » -
William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
A Brief Assessment A prolific writer, Howells is regarded as “the father of American Realism.” Although not an exciting writer, he broke new grounds which led to the achievements of Mark Twain and Henry James. In Howells’ view, writing should be “simple, natural, and honest” and should not delve into…
Подробнее » -
The Rise of Realism in America
The second half of the 19th century has been called the positivist age. It was an age of faith in all knowledge which would derive from science and scientific objective methods which could solve all human problems. In the visual arts this spirit is most obvious in the widespread rejection…
Подробнее »