prompt_front: Answer the question based on the given passages. Only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Which three-time Olivier Award winning English actress starred in the 1981 BBC television serial, Sons and Lovers?

The following are given passages.
Context 1: Passage 1:
Juliet Aubrey
Juliet Emma Aubrey (born 17 December 1966) is a British actress of theatre, film, and television  She won the 1995 BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for playing Dorothea in the BBC serial Middlemarch (1994)  She is also known for her role as Helen Cutter in the ITV series Primeval (2007–2011)  Her film appearances include Still Crazy (1998), The Constant Gardener (2005) and The Infiltrator (2016) 

Career
The youngest of three siblings, Aubrey was born and brought up in Fleet, Hampshire  Aubrey attended King's College London from 1984, where she studied Classics and Archaeology  While there, however, her love of acting grew, and during a year studying in Italy where she joined a travelling theatre company, Aubrey decided to apply for drama school on her return  She went on to train for three years at the Central School of Speech and Drama 
Her first job was with the Oxford Stage Company playing Miranda in The Tempest  Italian director Roberto Faenza gave Aubrey her first film role playing opposite Jean-Hugues Anglade in Look to the Sky, a film produced by Elda Ferri, and set during the Nazi Holocaust   Antony Page and Louis Marks then cast Aubrey as Dorothea in the BBC adaptation of Middlemarch opposite Rufus Sewell, for which she won a BAFTA award for Best Actress, and the Broadcasting Press Guild for Best Actress  She then joined Haris Pasovic's Sarajevo Theatre Company  She appeared in several plays with the company, all created through the actors' improvisation  She continued to build her career as a theatre actress, appearing next in Trevor Nunn's Summerfolk and Katie Mitchell's Ivanov at the National Theatre, Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree for Karl James at the Soho Theatre, and Three Sisters, Twelfth Night and The Collection, all for Chris White  Michael Winterbottom then cast her opposite Robert Carlyle and James Nesbitt in the television film Go Now 
Aubrey's subsequent films include Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, Stephen Poliakoff's Food of Love — for which she won Best Actress at La Baule European Film Festival — Faenza's Lost Lover, Giacomo Campiotti's Time to Love, Richard Eyre's Iris, Fernando Meirelles's Constant Gardener and Brian Gibson's Still Crazy, nominated for two Golden Globes  Other features include Matt Lipsey's Caught in the Act, and Mat Cod's Super Eruption  Television work includes The Village; The White Queen, Criminal Justice, Vera, Hunted, and Five Daughters   Her recent feature films are Scott Hicks's Fallen; Mitch Davis's Stuck; Fabio Guaglione's Mine; and Brad Furman's Infiltrator  Aubrey played Lily Hill in the 2017 web television series Snatch 

Personal life
In 2001, Aubrey married production designer Steve Ritchie, whom she had met several years earlier while filming in Newcastle upon Tyne  They have two daughters She is a cousin of David Howell Evans (a k a  "The Edge"), guitarist of the Irish band U2 

Filmography
Passage 2:
Paul Baker (actor)
Paul Baker (born April 26, 1966?) is an Olivier Award winning British musical theatre actor  He is noted for his roles in Taboo, for which he won his Olivier Award, and the 2000 West End Mega-flop Napoleon in the title role   He is featured on the cast recordings of these two musicals 
He won Best Supporting Actor in a Musical in the 2003 Olivier Awards for playing the character Philip Salon in the musical Taboo Baker last appeared in the concert version of A Tale of Two Cities as the evil Marquis St  Evermonde in Brighton, England  He can be seen in the DVD release of the concert 
Passage 3:
Michelle Terry
Michelle Terry is an Olivier Award–winning English actress and writer, known for her extensive work for Shakespeare's Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, as well as her television work, notably writing and starring in the Sky One television series The Café  Terry took up the role of artistic director at Shakespeare's Globe in April 2018 

Early life
Terry was born in Nuneaton, moving whilst still a child to grow up in Weston-super-Mare  She was raised in Kewstoke, and attended Priory Community School and Broadoak Sixth Form Centre Terry aspired to be an actress from an early age  She attended an amateur dramatic society and took LAMDA exams at school in poetry, prose and spoken verse  At the age of fourteen she joined the National Youth Theatre  She read English literature at Cardiff University before training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 2004 

Career
Theatre
Terry made her professional debut in the touring and subsequent West End production of Blithe Spirit, playing the Maid and understudying Elvira  Her other theatre credits include The War on Terror, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, The Man Who Had All the Luck, Tribes and As You Like It  Her work at the National Theatre includes London Assurance, All's Well That Ends Well and England People Very Nice  She also appeared in broadcast versions of London Assurance and All's Well That Ends Well as part of National Theatre Live  For the Royal Shakespeare Company, Terry has appeared in productions of Days of Significance, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Crucible and Love's Labour's Lost, playing Rosaline  She was among the writers of Sudden Loss of Dignity, staged at the Bush Theatre in 2009 Terry won critical acclaim for her work at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, for her performance of Rosalind in As You Like It   London's Financial Times wrote "I'm not sure it's possible to see Michelle Terry on a stage without falling a little in love with her  She has the intelligence, inventiveness and vivacity to play the character and the show simultaneously, not setting herself above the material but relishing her immersion in the role and inviting us to share it with her " She also appeared in productions of Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream at that venue, both of which were released on DVD  On 24 July 2017 she was announced as its fourth Artistic Director, to succeed Emma Rice in April 2018 

Hamlet 2018
Terry starred in the lead role in a 2018 gender fluid version of Hamlet   The Spectator said in their review "No one but Ms Terry would have hired Ms Terry for this role  She’s a decent second-tier actress without any special vocal or physical endowments "The Guardian called the play "A perfectly decent production and a welcome relief from the work of the previous Globe regime, which seemed to assume that the plays were a bit boring unless jazzed up "The Stage said "It's a production that places clarity of verse and emotion over directorial fireworks  One of the most striking elements is Terry's costume  When she assumes her antic disposition, she also dons a white clown suit with a jagged lipstick grin  By making Hamlet a jester, it licenses her to behave in different ways  It shifts her status in the family  It grants her power and marks her apart  Laughter can be a weapon after all  It's an interesting idea that is under-explored "

Macbeth 2018
Terry starred in the lead role of Lady Macbeth opposite her husband Paul Ready in Macbeth at the Globe's candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse 

Television
Her television credits include episodes of Extras, Law & Order: UK and the Mike Bullen pilot Reunited, playing "Sara"  She was co-writer, with Ralf Little, of the comedy drama TV series, The Café, which aired on Sky1 from 2011–13, in which she played "Sarah Porter"  The series was set and filmed in her own hometown, Weston-super-Mare 

Personal life
Terry is married to the actor Paul Ready  They have one daughter 

Theatre credits
Blithe Spirit Savoy Theatre: London (2005)
As You Like It New Vic Theatre: Newcastle-under-Lyme (2005)
The Crucible Royal Shakespeare Theatre: Stratford Upon Avon (2006)
Pericles Swan Theatre: Stratford Upon Avon (2006/7)
The Winter's Tale Swan Theatre: Stratford Upon Avon (2006/07)
Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare's Globe Theatre: London (2007)
The War on Terror Bush Theatre: London (2008)
50 Ways to Leave Your Lover Bush Theatre: London (2008)
The Man Who Had All the Luck Donmar Warehouse: London (2008)
Tribes Royal Court Theatre London (2010)
England People Very Nice National Theatre: London (2009)
All's Well That Ends Well National Theatre: London (2009)
London Assurance National Theatre: London (2010)
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire Arcola Theatre: London (2010)
The Comedy of Errors National Theatre: London (2011/12)
In The Republic of Happiness Royal Court Theatre: London (2012/13)
Before the Party Almeida Theatre: London (2013)
A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare's Globe Theatre: London (2013)
Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing (Love's Labour's Won) Royal Shakespeare Theatre: Stratford Upon Avon (2014)
Privacy Donmar Warehouse (2014)
As You Like It Shakespeare's Globe: London (2015)
Cleansed National Theatre: London (2016)
Henry V Regents Park Theatre: London (2016)
Hamlet Shakespeare's Globe: London (2018)
Macbeth Shakespeare's Globe: London (2019)
Henry IV, Part 1 Shakespeare's Globe: London (2019)

Filmography
Television
Awards
Terry won Best Actress in a Visiting Production at the 2008 Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards, for the Donmar Warehouse production of The Man Who Had All the Luck She won Best Actress in a Supporting Role at the 2011 Olivier Awards, for her portrayal of Sylvia in the Royal Court Theatre production of Tribes 
Passage 4:
Eileen Atkins
Dame Eileen June Atkins,  (born 15 June 1934) is an English actress and occasional screenwriter  She has worked in the theatre, film, and television consistently since 1953  In 2008, she won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress and the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie for Cranford  She is also a three-time Olivier Award winner, winning Best Supporting Performance in 1988 (for Multiple roles) and Best Actress for The Unexpected Man (1999) and Honour (2004)  She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1990 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2001 
Atkins joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1957 and made her Broadway debut in the 1966 production of The Killing of Sister George, for which she received the first of four Tony Award nominations for Best Actress in a Play in 1967  She received subsequent nominations for, Vivat! Vivat Regina! (1972), Indiscretions (1995) and The Retreat from Moscow (2004)  Other stage credits include The Tempest (Old Vic 1962), Exit the King (Edinburgh Festival and Royal Court 1963), The Promise (New York 1967), The Night of the Tribades (New York 1977), Medea (Young Vic 1985), A Delicate Balance (Haymarket, West End 1997) and Doubt (New York 2006) 
Atkins co-created the television dramas Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–1975) and The House of Elliot (1991–1994) with Jean Marsh  She also wrote the screenplay for the 1997 film Mrs Dalloway  Her film appearances include I Don't Want to Be Born (1975), Equus (1977), The Dresser (1983), Let Him Have It (1991), Wolf (1994), Jack and Sarah (1995), Gosford Park (2001), Cold Mountain (2003), Vanity Fair (2004), Scenes of a Sexual Nature (2006), Evening (2007), Last Chance Harvey (2008), Robin Hood (2010) and Magic in the Moonlight (2014) 

Early life
Atkins was born in the Mothers' Hospital in Lower Clapton, a Salvation Army maternity hospital in East London  Her mother, Annie Ellen (née Elkins), was a barmaid who was 46 when Eileen was born, and her father, Arthur Thomas Atkins, was a gas meter reader who was previously under-chauffeur to the Portuguese Ambassador  She was the third child in the family and when she was born the family moved to a council home in Tottenham  Her father did not, in fact, know how to drive and was responsible, as under-chauffeur, mainly for cleaning the car  At the time Eileen was born, her mother worked in a factory the whole day and then as a barmaid in the Elephant & Castle at night  When Eileen was three, a Gypsy woman came to their door selling lucky heather and clothes pegs  She saw little Eileen and told her mother that her daughter would be a famous dancer  Her mother promptly enrolled her in a dance class  Although she hated it, she studied dancing from age 3 to 15 or 16  From age 7 to 15, which covered the last four years of the Second World War (1941–45), she danced in working men's club circuits for 15 shillings a time as "Baby Eileen"  During the war, she performed as well at London's Stage Door canteen for American troops and sang songs like "Yankee Doodle " At one time she was attending dance class three or four times a week Once, when she was given a line to recite, someone told her mother that she had a Cockney accent  Her mother was appalled but speech lessons were too expensive for the family  Fortunately, a woman took interest in her and paid for her to be educated at Parkside Preparatory School in Tottenham  Eileen Atkins has since publicly credited the Principal, Miss Dorothy Margaret Hall, for the wise and firm guidance under which her character developed  From Parkside she went on to The Latymer School, a grammar school in Edmonton, London  By 12, she was a professional in panto in Clapham and Kilburn  One of her grammar school teachers who used to give them religious instruction, an Ernest J  Burton, spotted her potential and, without charge, rigorously drilled away her Cockney accent  He also introduced her to the works of William Shakespeare  She studied under him for two years  When she was 14 or 15 and still at Latymer's, she also attended "drama demonstration" sessions twice a year with this same teacher  At around this time (though some sources say she was 12), her first encounter with Robert Atkins took place  She was taken to see Atkins' production of King John at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre  She wrote to him saying that the boy who played Prince Arthur was not good enough and that she could do better  Atkins wrote back and asked that she come to see him  On the day they met, Atkins thought she was a shop girl and not a school girl  She gave a little prince speech and he told her to go to drama school and come back when she was older  Burton came to an agreement with Eileen's parents that he would try to get her a scholarship for one drama school and that if she did not get the scholarship he would arrange for her to do a teaching course in some other drama school  Her parents were not at all keen on the fact that she would stay in school until 16 as her sister had left at 14 and her brother at 15 but somehow they were persuaded  Eileen was in Latymer's until 16  Out of 300 applicants for a RADA scholarship, she got down to the last three but was not selected, so she did a three-year course on teaching at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama  But, although she was taking the teaching course, she also attended drama classes and in fact performed in three plays in her last year  This was in the early 1950s  In her third and last year she had to teach once a week, an experience she later said she hated  She graduated from Guildhall in 1953 As soon as she left Guildhall she got her first job with Robert Atkins in 1953: as Jaquenetta in Love's Labour's Lost at the same Regent's Park Open Air Theatre where she was brought to see Atkins' King John production years before  She was also, very briefly, an assistant stage manager at the Oxford Playhouse until Peter Hall fired her for impudence  She was also part of repertory companies performing in Billy Butlin's holiday camp in Skegness, Lincolnshire  It was there when she met Julian Glover 
It took nine years (1953–62) before she was working steadily 

Stage
Atkins joined the Guild Players Repertory Company in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland, as a professional actress in 1952  She appeared as the nurse in Harvey at the Repertory Theatre, Bangor, in 1952  In 1953 she appeared as an attendant in Love's Labours Lost at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre  Her London stage debut was in 1953 as Jaquenetta in Robert Atkins's staging of Love's Labour's Lost at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park Atkins has regularly returned to the life and work of Virginia Woolf for professional inspiration  She has played the writer on stage in Patrick Garland's adaptation of A Room of One's Own and also in Vita and Virginia, winning the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show and an Obie Award for A Room of One's Own in which she also played in the 1990 television version; she also provided the screenplay for the 1997 film adaptation of Woolf's novel Mrs  Dalloway, and made a cameo appearance in the 2002 film version of Michael Cunningham's Woolf-themed novel, The Hours 
Atkins joined the Stratford Memorial Theatre Company in 1957 and stayed for two seasons  She was with the Old Vic in its 1961–62 season (she appeared in the Old Vic's Repertoire Leaflets of February–April 1962 and April–May 1962) 

Film and television
She appeared as Maggie Clayhanger in all six episodes of Arnold Bennett's Hilda Lessways from 15 May to 19 June 1959, produced by BBC Midlands with Judi Dench and Brian Smith  In the 1960 Shakespeare production An Age of Kings she played Joan of Arc 
She helped create two television series  Along with fellow actress, Jean Marsh, she created the concept for an original television series, Behind the Green Baize Door, which became the award-winning ITV series Upstairs, Downstairs (1971–75)  Marsh played maid Rose for the duration of the series but Atkins was unable to accept a part because of stage commitments  The same team was also responsible for the BBC series The House of Eliott (1991–93) 
Her film and television work includes Sons and Lovers (1981), Smiley's People (1982), Oliver Twist (1982), Titus Andronicus (1985), A Better Class of Person (1985), Roman Holiday (1987), The Lost Language of Cranes (1991), Cold Comfort Farm (1995), Talking Heads (1998), Madame Bovary (2000), David Copperfield (2000), Wit (2001) and Bertie and Elizabeth (2002), Cold Mountain (2003), What a Girl Wants (2003), Vanity Fair (2004), Ballet Shoes (2005) and Ask the Dust (2006) 
In the autumn of 2007, she co-starred with Dame Judi Dench and Sir Michael Gambon in the BBC One drama Cranford playing the central role of Miss Deborah Jenkyns  This performance earned her the 2008 BAFTA Award for best actress, as well as the Emmy Award  In September 2007 she played Abigail Dusniak in Waking the Dead Yahrzeit (S6:E11-12) 
In 2009 Atkins played the evil Nurse Edwina Kenchington in the BBC Two black comedy Psychoville  Atkins replaced Vanessa Redgrave as Eleanor of Aquitaine in the blockbuster movie Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe, which was released in the UK in May 2010  The same year, she played Louisa in the dark comedy film Wild Target 
Atkins and Jean Marsh, creators of the original 1970s series of Upstairs, Downstairs, were among the cast of a new BBC adaptation, shown over the winter of 2010–11  The new series is set in 1936  Marsh again played Rose while Atkins was cast as the redoubtable Maud, Lady Holland  In August 2011, it was revealed that Atkins had decided not to continue to take part as she was unhappy with the scripts  In September 2011, Atkins joined the cast of ITV comedy-drama series Doc Martin playing the title character's aunt, Ruth Ellingham  She returned as Aunt Ruth for the show's sixth series in September 2013, the seventh in September 2015 and eighth in September 2017 
Atkins starred as Lady Spence with Matthew Rhys in an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's The Scapegoat, shown in September 2012 She has portrayed Queen Mary on two occasions, in the 2002 television film Bertie and Elizabeth and in the 2016 Netflix-produced television series The Crown 
Atkins portrayed graduate school professor Evelyn Ashford to Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson) in Wit, a 2001 American television movie directed by Mike Nichols  The teleplay by Nichols and Emma Thompson is based on the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same title by Margaret Edson  The film was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival on 9 February 2001 before being broadcast by HBO on 24 March  It was shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival and the Warsaw Film Festival later in the year 

Radio
Atkins had a guest role in BBC Radio 4's long-running rural soap The Archers in September 2016, playing Jacqui, the juror who persuades her fellow jurors to acquit Helen Titchener (née Archer) of the charge of attempted murder and wounding with intent of her abusive husband, Rob 

Personal life
Atkins was married to actor Julian Glover in 1957; they divorced in 1966  (A day after his divorce, Glover married actress Isla Blair ) She married her second husband, Bill Shepherd, on 2 February 1978  Shepherd died on 24 June 2016 In 1997, she wrote the screenplay for Mrs Dalloway, starring Vanessa Redgrave  The film received positive reviews but was a box-office failure  It was a financial disaster for Atkins and her husband, who had invested in it  She said of this incident: "I have to work  I was nearly bankrupted over Mrs Dalloway, and if you are nearly bankrupted, you are in trouble for the rest of your life  I don't have a pension  In any case, it doesn't hurt me to work  I think it's quite good, actually ""All through my career, I have tried to do new work, but there is a problem in the West End as far as new work is concerned  As a theatregoer, I get bored with seeing the same old plays again and again  I felt terrible the other night because I bumped into Greta Scacchi and she asked me if I was coming to see her in The Deep Blue Sea  I said, 'Greta, I'm so old, I've seen it so many times  I've seen it with Peggy Ashcroft, with Vivien Leigh, with Googie Withers, with Penelope Wilton and I played it myself when I was 19  I can't bring myself to see it again ' She was very sweet about it "In 1995, Atkins was diagnosed with breast cancer and treated for the condition  She has recovered  Living alone in widowhood during the COVID lockdown, Atkins (at age 87) completed her autobiography Will She Do?  She read an abridged version on BBC Radio 4 

Filmography
Film
Television
Theatre
Honours
Atkins was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1990 Birthday Honours  She was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) on her 67th birthday in the 2001 Queen's Birthday Honours "for services to Drama " On 23 June 2010, she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, by Oxford University  On 5 December 2005 she received the degree of Doctor of Arts, honoris causa, from City University London  She is a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame; she was inducted in 1998 

Awards and nominations
Theatre Awards
Tony Awards

Drama Desk Awards

Olivier Awards

Film and Television Awards
Notes
Passage 5:
Sons and Lovers (1981 TV serial)
Sons and Lovers is a 1981 BBC television serial based on D  H  Lawrence's 1913 book Sons and Lovers   It starred Eileen Atkins, Tom Bell, Karl Johnson, Lynn Dearth and Leonie Mellinger   It was adapted by Trevor Griffiths and directed by Stuart Burge, and originally shown as seven episodes   It aired in the US as part of the PBS's Masterpiece Theatre program in 1982 Writer Trevor Griffiths said in 1981, "I chose to do this work because, under all the incipient mysticism of the perception, under the incipient derogation of women, under the increasingly ugly politics, there is, in this Lawrence, and vibrantly so, a powerful and radical celebration of dignity in resistance within working-class culture in industrial class-societies; as well as a dark, tortured cry against the waste of human resources such societies require as part of their logic   It is no bad thing to be saying when unemployment has reached over three million ”
Passage 6:
Jessica Swale
Jessica Swale (born 27 February 1982) is a British playwright, theatre director and screenwriter  Her first play, Blue Stockings, premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in 2013  It is widely performed by UK amateur companies and is also studied on the Drama GCSE syllabus  In 2016, her play Nell Gwynn won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy, after it transferred from the Globe to the West End, starring Gemma Arterton as the eponymous heroine  She also wrote and directed the feature film Summerland (2020) 

Early life and education
Born in Reading, Berkshire, Swale completed her secondary education at Kendrick School, Reading, before studying drama at the University of Exeter  She completed her training at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (MA Advanced Theatre Practice), where she trained as a director 

Career
After drama school, she worked as Max Stafford-Clark's associate director at Out of Joint Theatre Company, on productions including The Overwhelming (2006) at the National Theatre and Andersen's English (2010) at Hampstead  In 2006, she set up Red Handed Theatre Company with Katie Bonna, to perform new works and revive lost classics  She was nominated for an Evening Standard Award for Best Director for her production of The Belle's Stratagem and received the Peter Brook Empty Space Award for Best Ensemble for Red Handed in 2012 Swale is also an associate artist with NGO Youth Bridge Global, using theatre as a development tool in war-torn countries, and the author of a series of drama games books, published by Nick Hern 

Stage directing
In 2010, Swale directed the first play by a woman ever to be staged at Shakespeare's Globe, Nell Leyshon's Bedlam  For Red Handed Theatre Company, she directed The Busy Body (2012), The Rivals (2010), Someone Who'll Watch Over Me (2012) at Southwark Playhouse, The School for Scandal (2013) at the Park Theatre and Palace of the End (2010) at Arcola Theatre  Other credits include Fallen Angels (Salisbury Playhouse), Winter (Theatre Newfoundland, Canada), Sleuth, Sense and Sensibility and Far from the Madding Crowd (Watermill Theatre) 

Playwriting
As a playwright, Swale's first play Blue Stockings premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in 2013 and won her an Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright nomination  Nell Gwynn premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in 2015, starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and transferred to the West End with Gemma Arterton in the title role  The production received four Olivier nominations, winning Best New Comedy, and is currently being developed as a feature film with Working Title Other plays includes All's Will that Ends Will (Bremen Shakespeare Company), Thomas Tallis (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse), The Playhouse Apprentice (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse) and The Mission about illegal adoptions in the 1920s  Her adaptations include Sense and Sensibility, Far from the Madding Crowd (Watermill), The Secret Garden and Stig of the Dump (Grosvenor Park, Chester) 

Film and television
Her first short film, the Time's Up movement-inspired comedy Leading Lady Parts, starring Catherine Tate, Gemma Arterton, Felicity Jones, Florence Pugh, Lena Headey, Emilia Clarke, Tom Hiddleston and Gemma Chan, premiered on BBC Four in 2018 and is available for free on YouTube  She then co-wrote the screenplay for Horrible Histories: The Movie – Rotten Romans (2019) In 2012, she won the BAFTA JJ Screenwriting Bursary for which she developed an original screenplay, Summerland  She also directed the film herself, and in 2020 it was released by IFC Films and Lionsgate  In 2022, she shot two episodes of Ten Percent for Amazon Prime Video, featuring guest stars Dominic West, Emma Corin, and Himesh Patel She is currently writing an original feature with Blueprint and StudioCanal and other projects for Fox Searchlight and Monumental Pictures 

Personal life
Swale lives in South London with a photographer, Michael Wharley 

Writing credits
Plays
The Playhouse Apprentice (2016)
Nell Gwynn (2015) premiered at Shakespeare's Globe and transferred to the Apollo Theatre, West End, in 2016
Thomas Tallis (2014): premiered at The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
All's Will that ends Will (2014): premiered at Bremer Shakespeare Company
Blue Stockings (2013): premiered at Shakespeare's Globe

Adaptations
Stig of the Dump (2016): adapted from the novel by Clive King and premiered at Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre
Far from the Madding Crowd (2015): adapted from the novel by Thomas Hardy and premiered at the Watermill Theatre
The Secret Garden (2014): adapted from the novel by Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett, premiered at Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre
Sense and Sensibility (2014): adapted from the novel by Jane Austen and premiered at the Watermill Theatre

Books
Drama Games: For Rehearsals (2016)
Drama Games: For Devising (2012)
Drama Games: For Classrooms and Workshops (2009)

Directing credits
Film and television
Plays
Fallen Angels (2015) at Salisbury Playhouse
Far from the Madding Crowd (2015): adapted from the novel by Thomas Hardy, premiered at The Watermill Theatre
Sense and Sensibility (2014): adapted from the novel by Jane Austen, premiered at The Watermill Theatre
Winter (2011) at Newfoundland Theatre, Canada
Bedlam (2010) at Shakespeare's Globe
For Red Handed Theatre Company: The Busy Body (2012), The Rivals (2010), Someone Who'll Watch Over Me (2012) at Southwark Playhouse, The School for Scandal (2013) at the Park Theatre and Palace of the End (2010) at Arcola Theatre
Passage 7:
Alex Jennings
Alex Michael Jennings (born 10 May 1957) is an English actor of the stage and screen, who worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre  For his work on the London stage, Jennings received three Olivier Awards, winning for Too Clever by Half (1988), Peer Gynt (1996), and My Fair Lady (2003)  He is the only performer to have won Olivier awards in the drama, musical, and comedy categories He is known for his film work, in particular for his performance as Prince Charles in Stephen Frears' film The Queen (2006) opposite Helen Mirren  His other film appearances include The Wings of the Dove (1997), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), Babel (2006), Belle (2013), and The Lady in the Van (2015) starring Maggie Smith 
Jennings won acclaim for his performances in television including for his portrayal of Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor, in the Netflix series The Crown acting opposite Claire Foy  He also starred in the ITV series Victoria (2016–2019) opposite Jenna Coleman, as well as Stephen Frears' A Very English Scandal (2018) alongside Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw, and most recently Steve McQueen's Small Axe: Mangrove (2020) starring Letitia Wright 

Early life
Jennings was born in Romford, Essex, the son of Peggy Patricia (née Mahoney) and Michael Thomas Jennings  He attended Abbs Cross Technical High School in Hornchurch and studied English and Theatre studies at the University of Warwick, graduating in 1978  He said he saw his first theatre while in high school and went to the Old Vic Theatre, which inspired him to be an actor He trained as an actor for two years at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School 

Career
1980s
In the early 1980s, Jennings began his career in regional repertory theatre  In 1985, playing a range of roles including Maximilien Robespierre in The Scarlet Pimpernel  Jennings met director Nicholas Hytner during this production and has worked with him many times since  For his performance as Gloumov in Too Clever by Half at the Old Vic, he won the Olivier Award for Best Comedy Performance in 1988  He was nominated in the same category the following year for portraying Dorante in The Liar  He has performed for the Royal National Theatre in a number of plays, including Leontes in The Winter's Tale and the title role in Albert Speer 
Jennings' work in television includes appearances in The State Within, Smiley's People, The Franchise Affair, Inspector Morse, Lewis, Alfonso Bonzo, the title role in Ashenden, Dead Poets Society, Inspector Alleyn, Hard Times, Bad Blood, and Peter Ackroyd's London  His many radio credits include Casino Royale, The Way of the World, Strange Meeting, Vorbis in Small Gods, and The Old Curiosity Shop 

1990s
His Royal Shakespeare Company roles include the title role in Peer Gynt (for which he won an Olivier Award 1995-06 for Best Actor), the title role in Richard II (opposite Anton Lesser as Henry Bolingbroke), Theseus/Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream (UK, American tour and Broadway), Angelo in Measure for Measure, and the title role in Hamlet He also appeared in War Requiem, the RSC's film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999)  Jennings also appeared as Lord Mark in the romantic drama film The Wings of the Dove starring Helena Bonham Carter, Elizabeth McGovern, Charlotte Rampling, and Sir Michael Gambon  The film received great acclaim and many awards nominations including four Academy Award nominations and five British Academy Film Award nominations 

2000s
In 2002, he appeared in the Cameron Mackintosh/Trevor Nunn revival of My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and won an Olivier Award as Best Actor in a Musical  He was an Associate Artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company  That year he also appeared in The Four Feathers (2002) as Colonel Hamilton alongside Heath Ledger, Kate Hudson, and Michael Sheen 
In 2006, Jennings' made his breakthrough film role as Charles, Prince of Wales opposite Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen  The film was directed by Stephen Frears, and written by Peter Morgan  The film depicts the death of Diana, Princess of Wales on 31 August 1997 and the reaction from the British public and the British royal family  The film was an immense critical and box office success after it premiered at the Venice Film Festival  The film received six Academy Award nominations including a win for Mirren's performance 
In 2007, he played the role of Garry Essendine in Noël Coward's Present Laughter at the NT  Also in 2007, he portrayed the Rev  Hutton in the BBC miniseries Cranford starring Judi Dench  He also played John Le Mesurier in the one-off BBC drama Hancock and Joan  In 2009, he appeared in The Habit of Art as Benjamin Britten 
In June 2008, he made his debut in the Operetta at the ENO in Robert Carsen's production of Bernstein's Candide, in which he played Voltaire and Doctor Pangloss 
He has recorded the audio versions of the books: Sins of the Father by Jeffrey Archer, The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham, The Horse and His Boy, Out of the Silent Planet, and Perelandra by C S  Lewis, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, and Attention All Shipping by Charlie Connelly, which was selected in June 2008 as one of the top 40 audiobooks of all time  In 2006, he recorded an abridgement of A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon  He is also a regular narrator on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime  He was also a member of the BBC's Radio Drama Company 

2010s
In 2010, he played Captain Shipshape in the CBeebies second series of Grandpa in my Pocket and starred in the film Belle  After that, he played Henry Tizard in Castles in the Sky 
In 2011, he played Mikhail Bulgakov in the National Theatre's production of Collaborators  In 2014, he played the role of Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the Musical, which was directed by Sam Mendes and was performed on London's West End theatre district  He took over the role from Douglas Hodge in 2014 From 2011 to 2014, Jennings played Alan Cowdrey QC in the BBC One legal drama Silk  He has also appeared in the PBS/Masterpiece Theatre television series Inspector Lewis (2012), and Foyle's War (2015) 
Jennings portrayed playwright Alan Bennett in the 2015 film The Lady in the Van opposite Academy Award winner Dame Maggie Smith in the title role  The film is directed by Nicolas Hytner, who is a long-time collaborator from the theatre  The film also featured performances from Jim Broadbent, Claire Foy, Frances de la Tour, and James Corden  The film premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival to great acclaim, specifically for Smith's performance  To promote the film Maggie Smith, and Jennings, appeared on The Graham Norton Show, this is Smith's first chat show appearance in over 40 years 
In 2016, he reprised his role as Professor Henry Higgins in the Australian 60th anniversary production of My Fair Lady, directed by Julie Andrews On television, from 2016 to 2017, he appeared in the Netflix series The Crown alongside Claire Foy and Jared Harris, as Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, uncle to Queen Elizabeth and great-uncle to Prince Charles (whom Jennings played in The Queen)  The series has received widespread acclaim from audiences and critics alike  Jennings also portrayed King Leopold I of Belgium in the ITV/PBS series Victoria (2016–2019) alongside Jenna Coleman 
In 2018 he played Liberal MP Peter Bessell in the BBC One series, A Very English Scandal alongside Hugh Grant, and Ben Whishaw, a miniseries about the Jeremy Thorpe affair directed by Stephen Frears  The film received widespread critical acclaim with a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes with the critics consensus reading, "Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw impress in A Very English Scandal, an equally absorbing and appalling look at British politics and society"  The series also received four Primetime Emmy Award nominations including a win for Whishaw for his performance 
In 2019, he played Andrew Aldridge, a Conservative MP, in the TV miniseries Four Weddings and a Funeral

2020s
In 2020, Jennings appeared in the Small Axe miniseries directed by Steve McQueen, specifically the television movie, Mangrove as Judge Edward Clarke alongside Letitia Wright as physician and British Black Panther Altheia Jones-LeCointe  In Mangrove, the story revolves around the true story based on the Mangrove Nine who were British black activists tried for inciting a riot at a protest, in 1970, against the police targeting of the Mangrove restaurant, Notting Hill, in West London  The film received widespread critical acclaim, with the critics consensus on Rotten Tomatoes reading, "Anchored by strong performances and an even stronger sense of conviction, Mangrove is a powerful indictment of institutional racism "

Work
Film
Television
Theatre
Filmed Theatrical Events

1999: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as Butler
2010: National Theatre Live: The Habit of Art as Henry / Benjamin Britten
2011: National Theatre Live: Collaborators as Mikhail Bulgakov
2013: National Theatre Live: 50 Years on Stage as Henry Higgins
2019: National Theatre Live: Hansard as Robin Hesketh

Awards and nominations
Passage 8:
Sarah Solemani
Sarah Solemani (born 4 September 1982) is an English actress, writer and activist  She is best known for starring in the BAFTA winning sitcom Him & Her and playing Renee Zellweger's best friend Miranda in Bridget Jones's Baby, for which she was nominated for an Evening Standard Best Actress Award  She also had roles in the British comedy TV series Bad Education and The Wrong Mans 

Early life
Solemani was born in the London Borough of Camden and grew up in Crouch End  Her father is a Persian Jewish mathematics lecturer (now retired)  After passing her A levels at the Henrietta Barnett School, she took a gap year before reading Social and Political Sciences (now the Human, Social and Political Sciences Tripos) at New Hall, Cambridge and graduating with an MA (Hons)  At Cambridge, she joined the Footlights performance troupe, becoming social secretary during her first year and later vice president 

Career
Theatre
Solemani was a member of the National Youth Theatre during her gap year, during which time she appeared as Elaine in the West End theatre production of The Graduate and as Ayesha in the critically acclaimed National Theatre production of Sanctuary  
She was a member of the Young Writer's Group attached to the Royal Court Theatre, and a writer at the Young Vic Theatre  Two plays she wrote were produced at Soho Theatre  Another of her works, The Cost of Things (2010), was presented at the Public Theater New York under the aegis of the Old Vic Theatre as part of the TS Eliot Project  In 2011, she wrote The Baron which received the Old Vic New Voices 'Ignite' award In 2009, Solemani appeared in Simon Stephens' play Pornography at the Tricycle Theatre in London and, in 2012, as Maryam in The House of Bernarda Alba at the Almeida Theatre  She wrote Up the Royal Borough, part of an evening of plays in response to Owen Jones' Chavs at the Lyric Hammersmith  It gained good reviews 

Television and film
Solemani's first film role was as a tableaux girl in Mrs Henderson Presents, which she performed during her third year of college  Her first major TV role was as Becky in BBC Three sitcom Him & Her, which was first broadcast in September 2010, and ran for four series, before ending in 2013 From 2012 until 2014, Solemani starred in the BBC Three comedy, Bad Education, including its spin off movie The Bad Education Movie and a one-off special in 2022  In 2013, she featured in the BBC and Hulu's The Wrong Mans alongside James Corden  She reprised the role for the show's second series  She wrote and starred in an episode of the Sky TV series Love Matters, titled "Aphrodite Fry", that aired in 2013  In 2014, she wrote the television film The Secrets  It aired on BBC One to critical acclaim 
In Hollywood, Solemani was chosen by Bill Hader and Alec Berg to be part of their writing team on Hader's new HBO show Barry  While working in the United States, she has found the American television industry has a more positive attitude towards commissioning work by women and featuring female characters in their series In 2019 it was announced she would adapt Jo Bloom's novel Ridley Road into a television drama  Published in 2014, Bloom's book was the result of research into the anti-Nazi London 62 Group and events involving it in the summer of 1962, with the group's activities serving as a backdrop, the title coming from the street in the East End where fascists held meetings and around which battles took place  It was broadcast by BBC One in October 2021  In 2022 she co-wrote and co-starred with Steve Coogan in Chivalry, a six episode comedy-drama  about "sexual politics in the wake of the #MeToo movement" for Channel 4 

Print
Solemani has contributed to the New Statesman, The Guardian, The Independent and Harper's Bazaar  She writes regularly for the publications Red and Glamour 

Awards and acclaim
Solemani was awarded third place in the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust/New Statesman Prize for New Political Writing on the subject: "Do women's rights remain the privilege of the developed world?" in 2005 In 2011, Solemani won the Royal Television Society award for best Comedy Performance for her role in Him & Her along with her co-star Russell Tovey  In 2012, Solemani was named one of the year's Broadcast Hot Shots 

Activism
Solemani is against the criminalisation of sex work, and has been a champion for sex worker rights since 2002  She was nominated by the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) to represent them in Parliament in order to halt further efforts to criminalise clients  She was an active supporter of former shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in the 2015 Labour leadership contest  She has introduced Cooper at various Labour Party events and has contributed to her speeches 

Personal life
Solemani married Daniel E  Ingram, a sustainable investment expert specialising in climate change, in Petah Tikva, Israel, on 3 June 2012  Their daughter was born in December 2013 and their son was born in May 2018  Raised by an Orthodox Jewish father and a Plymouth Brethren evangelical mother, Solemani has formally converted to Judaism along with her husband 

Filmography
Film and television
Stage
Passage 9:
Frances de la Tour
Frances J  de Lautour (born 30 July 1944), better known as Frances de la Tour, is an English actress  She is known for her role as Miss Ruth Jones in the television sitcom Rising Damp from 1974 until 1978  She is a Tony Award winner and three-time Olivier Award winner 
She performed as Mrs  Lintott in the play The History Boys in London and on Broadway, winning the 2006 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play  She reprised the role in the 2006 film  Her other film roles include Madame Olympe Maxime in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)  Television roles include Emma Porlock in the Dennis Potter serial Cold Lazarus (1996), headmistress Margaret Baron in BBC sitcom Big School and Violet Crosby in the sitcom Vicious 

Early life and family
De la Tour was born on 30 July 1944 in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, to Moyra (née Fessas) and Charles de la Tour (1909–1982)  The name was also spelled De Lautour, and it was in this form that her birth was registered in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, in the third quarter of 1944  She has French, Greek, and Irish ancestry  She was educated at London's Lycée Français and the Drama Centre London She is the sister of actor and screenwriter Andy de la Tour, and was briefly married to playwright Tom Kempinski  She has a son and a daughter An episode of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, first broadcast on 22 October 2015, revealed de la Tour to be a descendant of the aristocratic Delaval family 

Career
Theatre
After leaving drama school, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1965  Over the next six years, she played many small roles with the RSC in a variety of plays, gradually building up to larger parts such as Hoyden in The Relapse and culminating in Peter Brook's acclaimed production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which she played Helena as a comic "tour de force" In the 1970s, she worked steadily both on the stage and on television  Some of her notable appearances were Rosalind in As You Like It at the Playhouse, Oxford in 1975 and Isabella in The White Devil at the Old Vic in 1976  She enjoyed a collaboration with Stepney's Half Moon Theatre, appearing in the London première of Dario Fo's We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay (1978), Eleanor Marx's Landscape of Exile (1979), and in the title role of Hamlet (1980) In 1980, she played Stephanie, the violinist with MS in Duet for One, a play written for her by Kempinski, for which she won the Olivier for Best Actress  She played Sonya in Uncle Vanya opposite Donald Sinden at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in 1982  Her performance as Josie in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten won her another Olivier for Best Actress in 1983  She joined the Royal National Theatre for the title role in Saint Joan in 1984 and appeared there in Brighton Beach Memoirs in 1986  She again won the Olivier, this time for Best Supporting Actress for Martin Sherman's play about Isadora Duncan, When She Danced, with Vanessa Redgrave at the Globe Theatre in 1991 and played Leo in Les Parents terribles at the Royal National Theatre in 1994, earning another Olivier nomination 
In 1994, de la Tour co-starred with Maggie Smith in Edward Albee's Three Tall Women at the Wyndham's and with Alan Howard in Albee's The Play About the Baby at the Almeida in 1998  In 1999, she returned to the RSC to play Cleopatra opposite Alan Bates in Antony and Cleopatra, in which she did a nude walk across the stage  In 2004, she played Mrs  Lintott in Alan Bennett's The History Boys at the National and later on Broadway, winning both a Drama Desk Award and a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play  She would also later appear in the film version  In December 2005, she appeared in the London production of the highly acclaimed anti-Iraq War one-woman play Peace Mom by Dario Fo, based on the writings of Cindy Sheehan  In 2007, she appeared in a West End revival of the farce Boeing-Boeing  In 2009, she appeared in Alan Bennett's new play The Habit of Art at the National  In 2012, she returned to the National in her third Bennett premiere, People 

Film and television
Her many television appearances during the 1980s and 1990s include the 1980 miniseries Flickers opposite Bob Hoskins, the TV version of Duet for One, for which she received a BAFTA nomination, the series A Kind of Living (1988–89), Dennis Potter's Cold Lazarus (1996), and Tom Jones (1997)  Of all her TV roles, however, she is best known for playing spinster Ruth Jones in the successful Yorkshire Television comedy Rising Damp, from 1974 to 1978  De la Tour told Richard Webber, who wrote a 2001 book about the series, that Ruth Jones "was an interesting character to play  We laughed a lot on set, but comedy is a serious business, and Leonard took it particularly seriously, and rightly so  Comedy, which is so much down to timing, is exhausting work  But it was a happy time " Upon reprising her Rising Damp role in the 1980 film version, she won Best Actress at the Evening Standard British Film Awards 
In the mid-1980s, de la Tour was considered, along with Joanna Lumley and Dawn French, as a replacement for Colin Baker on Doctor Who  The idea was scrapped and the job was given to Sylvester McCoy 
In 2003, de la Tour played a terminally ill gay woman in the film Love Actually with the actress Anne Reid, although her scenes were cut from the film's theatrical release and appear only on the DVD In 2005, she portrayed Olympe Maxime, headmistress of Beauxbatons Academy, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire  In 2010, she reprised Maxime as a cameo in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1  Notable television roles during this time include Agatha Christie's Poirot: Death on the Nile (2004), Waking the Dead (2004), the black comedy Sensitive Skin (2005), with Joanna Lumley and Denis Lawson, Agatha Christie's Marple: The Moving Finger (2006) and New Tricks as a rather morbid Egyptologist, also in 2006 
She was nominated for the 2006 BAFTA Award for Actress in a Supporting Role for her work on the film version of The History Boys 
She later appeared in several well-received films, including Tim Burton's 2010 Alice in Wonderland as Aunt Imogene, a delusional aunt of Alice's, opposite Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, and Mia Wasikowska and a supporting role in the film The Book of Eli, directed by the Hughes brothers  In 2012, she appeared in the film Hugo 
Until 2012, she was also a patron for the performing arts group Theatretrain 
From 2013 to 2016, de la Tour played the role of Violet Crosby in ITV sitcom Vicious with Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi 
From 2013 to 2014, she portrayed headmistress Ms Baron in the BBC One sitcom Big School 
In April 2016, she joined the second series of Outlander as Mother Hildegarde 
In 2021, de la Tour appeared in an ITV production, initially released on BritBox - Professor T  - in which she played the mother of the titular character 

Personal life
Politically, de la Tour is a socialist and was a member of the Workers' Revolutionary Party in the 1970s 

Filmography
Awards and nominations
Stage
Context 2: Passage 1:
Finally (CeCe Peniston song)
"Finally" is a song by American singer-songwriter CeCe Peniston, released in September 1991 as her debut single from her first album, Finally (1992)  It received critical acclaim, becoming Peniston's first (and biggest) hit song, peaking at number five on the US Billboard Hot 100 in January 1992  It is also her only US top-ten hit to date  Prior to that, the track was a major success on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart, where it spent two weeks at number one in late 1991  In addition, a dance remix of the song, the "Choice Mix", peaked at number two on the UK Singles Chart in March 1992  The remix appeared on many dance music compilations in the early '90s  Its music video was directed by Claude Borenzweig 

Background and release
Peniston grew up in Phoenix and began writing pop songs during school  The words of "Finally"  were purportedly penned during a chemistry class, while thinking about dating in college  In 1989 and 1990, she won the Miss Black Arizona pageant, and took the Miss Galaxy pageant a short time later 
Her music career began in January 1991, when Felipe "DJ Wax Dawg" Delgado, her friend and a record producer based also in Phoenix, asked Peniston to record back-up vocals for Tonya Davis, a rapper known as Overweight Pooch  Though Overweight Pooch's album flopped on the market, Manny Lehman (a DJ and executive producer) had noticed the powerful voice of the back-up vocalist, Peniston  He offered Delgado a chance to produce a track for Peniston to cultivate her potential as a solo artist  Delgado called hometown friend and music producer, Rodney K  Jackson, to help co-produce Peniston's single, which would become "Finally" 

Peniston was 21 years old when "Finally" was released  When asked about the song in a 2012 interview, Peniston said, "It was actually a poem that I had turned into a song, and it was the very first song that I had written  I was doing backup for someone else, and they asked if I had something else and I was like yeah, something I’ve written, and I didn’t know if they’d like it  You know, you don’t really understand your gifts at that point, so when he said I have a hit, I was just like okay  At the time I didn’t understand what it means to have a number one song, I really had no idea  They said you have a hit on your hands and you’re going to have to go to Europe  All of a sudden I was traveling the world, one show turned into two, that little girl from Arizona was going everywhere! You know, I had been here and there, a couple of trips, but nothing at all like this  It was overwhelming "
New versions of "Finally" were released in 1997 and 2011 

Composition
The remix of this song is based on the piano riff from the house music classic "Someday" by CeCe Rogers from 1987  The song is performed in the key of B minor with a tempo of 120 beats per minute, following a chord progression of G(9) – G/A – Bm, and Peniston's vocals span from B3 to D5  In 2017, Peniston told about recording the song, "It was a great experience making this song  I remember being in the studio with producer Felipe Delgado, and we didn't have the second verse written  I had forgotten some of the lyrics and just ad-libbed some of them–that "yeah-yeah" part  They ended up sampling that, and it became a big part of the song  It's amazing how those raw moments happen "

Chart performance
The song was released in the fall of 1991, where it became an instant dance anthem, peaking in October at the top of the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart in the United States for two weeks, while achieving respectable chart success overseas the following year  The song was re-released in the United Kingdom, where it reached a new peak of number two in its second week at the UK Singles Chart, on March 22, 1992  It was held off reaching the top spot by Shakespears Sister's "Stay"  "Finally" also charted at number-one in Zimbabwe and on the RPM Dance/Urban chart in Canada, and number eight in Australia and New Zealand  In Europe, the song reached number three in Belgium and number five in the Netherlands and Ireland  Following the single's success, Peniston completed her first album, Finally, in two months  The album was critically acclaimed, and Peniston celebrated a year-long run of awards success including the Billboard Award for Best New Artist (dance), and three ASCAP awards amongst numerous others  The song "Finally" has sold over 3 million copies to date 

Critical reception
J D  Considine from The Baltimore Sun felt the song "is a delightful surprise, marrying a muscular, insinuating groove to Peniston's soulful, insistent vocals " Larry Flick from Billboard complimented it as "a delicious peak-hour houser that is in a vein similar to Alison Limerick's "Where Love Lives"  Peniston wraps her lovely alto around a hook that seeps into the brain and body and never lets go " He also remarked that Peniston "proves her potential as a future diva on this brain-embedding, spine-stirring house anthem " Amy Linden from Entertainment Weekly commented, "The slammin’ house/pop single of the moment? It's CeCe Peniston's "Finally," and its sheer joy and verve " She explained further, "Grooving in the fabulousness of her newfound Mr  Right, and sorta amazed that it all happened, she wails deliciously, making you believe that true love will conquer all and that someday your prince (or princess) will come " Dave Sholin from the Gavin Report described it as a "bright and infectious" debut release and concluded, "I had a preview of this song back in July and have been in love with it ever since!" Dennis Hunt from Los Angeles Times viewed it as "lively" Pan-European magazine Music & Media stated that "this newcomer gives further evidence that dance is still developing into a more song-oriented direction  The violins give the tune the ambiance of "Backstabbers" by the O'Jays " Andy Beevers from Music Week complimented it as an "extremely classy and catchy garage-styled debut"  A reviewer from People Magazine felt that it's "overflowing with verve and loaded up with joyous girlie glee", noting the "ecstatic, beat-heavy power" of the track  James Hamilton from the RM Dance Update labeled it as "cheerful wailing" and a "ex-Miss America's catchy Crystal Waters-type US pop smash"  Adam Higginbotham from Select declared "Finally" as "a superb slice of feel-good pop music  From its bassline – purloined from Ce Ce (no relation) Rogers' classic garage tune 'Someday' — to the inanely cheery lyrics " Tom Doyle from Smash Hits viewed it as a "rousing house song"  Steve Pick from St  Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that "this is a catchy disco number, building energy through repetition of the simple hookline and a solid bass/drum throb  Get on the dance floor to this one, and you'll move "

Retrospective response
Bill Lamb from About com featured "Finally" in their list of "The Top 100 Best Party Songs", describing it as an "upbeat, celebratory song about love"  Steven E  Flemming, Jr  from Albumism noted that it "skillfully melded the insistent grace of all that’s right about dance production values with grand vocals " AllMusic editor Craig Lytle felt that the song and its follow-up, "We Got a Love Thang", "employ that rapid dancehall groove better known as house music"  Stopera and Galindo from BuzzFeed remarked, "When it comes to ‘90s dance songs you’d be hard-pressed to find another song that so perfectly incorporates other music genres that made the decade so great — i e , R&B, house, and pop — which is what makes “Finally" the quintessential ‘90s dance song  And honestly, it's a feel-good hit! Just try being in a bad mood after listening to it!" A writer from Complex said that "this was the sound of the early 1990s, when everything was turning colorful and bright " Pop Rescue called it "a great track, with that fantastic hand-clap, bassline and piano opening", adding that Peniston's vocals are "sublime" 

Music video
A music video was made for "Finally", directed by Claude Borenzweig  It is very simple, showing Peniston performing the song within a variety of shapes and colors, sometimes with a guy dancing  The video was later published by Vevo on YouTube in 2009, remastered in HD, and had generated more than 40 million views as of January 2023 

Impact and legacy
DJ Magazine ranked "Finally" number 64 in their list of "Top 100 Club Tunes" in 1998 VH1 ranked it number 29 in their list of the "100 Greatest Dance Songs" in 2000  [1]
MTV Dance ranked the song number 28 in their list of "The 100 Biggest '90s Dance Anthems of All Time" in November 2011  Heart TV ranked "Finally" number three in their list of "55 Biggest '90s Club Classics" in March 2017  BuzzFeed ranked the song number one in "The 101 Greatest Dance Songs of the '90s" in 2017, writing, "When it comes to ‘90s dance songs you’d be hard-pressed to find another song that so perfectly incorporates other music genres that made the decade so great — i e , R&B, house, and pop — which is what makes “Finally" the quintessential ‘90s dance song " Slant Magazine ranked it number 37 in their list of "The 100 Best Dance Songs of All Time" in 2020  The Guardian ranked it number 66 in their "The 70 Greatest No 2 Singles – Ranked!" in 2022  Alexis Petridis wrote, "House music as pure pop-soul, "Finally" was a hymn to an idealised boyfriend sung by a former Miss Black Arizona " Same year, Pitchfork ranked it number 87 in their countdown of "The 250 Best Songs of the 1990s" in 2022 

Accolades
Music awards and nominations
Track listings and formats
Credits and personnel
Management

Executive producers – Manny Lehman, Mark Mazzetti
Recording studio – Aztec Studios, Phoenix, Arizona
Publishing – Wax Museum Music, Mainlot Music (BMI), Polygram Music

Charts
Certifications
Release history
Reissues
"Finally '97"
In 1997, "Finally" was remixed by Eric Kupper to enhance the overseas issue of Peniston's album Finally, which was re-released in Europe and Japan along with her greatest collection, The Best Of CeCe Peniston  
The new remixed version of the song titled "Classic Funk Mix" (a k a  "Finally '97") successfully re-entered the British charts, peaking on September 13 at number 26 on the UK Singles Chart, meaning Peniston had three chart entries with one and the same title (in March 92, in September 97) 

Additional credits
Recording studio – Hysteria Recording
Publishing – PolyGram Music
Producer, engineering, programming, keyboards, guitar and bass – Eric Kupper
Remixing – Kupper, George Mitchell and Steven Doherty (as Sharp)
Design – Alex

Track listings and formats
Charts
Finally 2008
In the summer of 2008, the song was remixed by Kam Denny, an Australian DJ and producer, and Paul Zala, an electrohouse DJ based in Melbourne  Subtitled as "Kam Denny & Paul Zala Remix", or rather "Vandalism Remix", the promotional single was released in Australia on Bimbo Rock, a local indie dance/electro label formed by TV Rock  The new adaptation gained underground house music popularity and entered the local Club Tracks Chart, topping for four weeks at number one 

Additional credits
Producers and remixing – Kam Denny and Paul Zala

Charts
Finally 2011
On the twentieth anniversary of "Finally," Peniston made a number of additional remixes of the song for Paul Oakenfold, featuring Joyriders, and supported also by music video  Originally, the song was to be attached to her cancelled studio album CeCe 

Additional credits
Executive producer – Paul Oakenfold
Vocals – Peniston (re-recorded)
Performer – Joyriders
Producers and remixing – Roman Hunter, Digitalchord, Zen Freeman, Remy Le Duc, Mikael Nordgren (as Tiger Stripes), Chuckii Booker (as DJ Cii)
Vocal production – Kevin Lewis

Track listings and formats
Release #1

"Finally" (Roman Hunter Airplay Mix) – 2:58Release #2

"Finally" (Roman Hunter Remix) – 7:03
"Finally" (Digitalchord Remix) – 7:00
"Finally" (Zen Freeman & Remy Le Duc Remix) – 6:03
"Finally" (Tiger Stripes Remix) – 7:22
"Finally" (DJ Cii Remix) – 2:31Deep House Selection, Volume 6 (The Finest Deep House Tunes)

"Finally" (Tiger Stripes Radio Edit) – 3:15

In popular culture
The song features in the 1998 film Bimboland produced by Ariel Zeitoun  The 7-inch Choice Mix was used in the 1994 film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and featured on its soundtrack album  The song is also featured in the stage musical based on the film For her ninth tour Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour that resumed on November 11, 2006, at Sydney Entertainment Centre (ended on January 23, 2007), Kylie Minogue used elements of Peniston's song when performing her 2000 comeback single "Spinning Around", co-written by Paula Abdul In November 2009, pop musician Lady Gaga used excerpts of "Finally" (Vandalism Remix) for the opening of The Monster Ball Tour in her song "Dance in the Dark" In July 2014, British singer Matt Fishel included a cover version of the song on his virtual EP Cover Boy  The accompanying video won the category for Best Lyric Video at the 2014 LGBT-based RightOutTV Music & Video Award In 2015, the song was also used in an advertisement for Ariel detergent in the Philippines, along with modified lyrics to promote the product  The commercial has since spawned numerous parodies poking fun at the campy nature of the commercial and the song used, with numerous people and fictional characters lip-syncing to the tune The song was used as a lip-sync song during the ninth season of RuPaul's Drag Race  On the seventh episode contestants Nina Bo'nina Brown and Aja had to lip-sync to avoid elimination; Aja was eliminated The song was also briefly featured in Season 2 Episode 9 of Dear White People In 2021, a remixed version used for a commercial for the dating app Bumble  American supermarket chain Kroger, along with its subsidiary supermarket names, uses the song for its animated commercials, promoting grocery delivery at home 

See also
The Best Dance Album in the World    Ever!
List of number-one dance singles of 1991 (U S )
List of top 10 singles in 1992 (UK)
List of Dance Dance Revolution songs
List of songs that made the biggest jump in the top 50 on the ARIA Singles Chart
Passage 2:
Y R N  (Young Rich Niggas)
Y R N  (Young Rich Niggas) is the third mixtape by American hip hop group Migos  It was released on June 13, 2013  The album features notable guest appearances from rappers Gucci Mane, Trinidad James, Riff Raff and Soulja Boy  This mixtape is notable for the single "Versace", the single reached number 99 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, number 31 on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, number 23 on the US Hot Rap Songs chart and number 11 on the US Top Heatseekers chart  "Versace" was placed in multiple year-end lists of 2013  Diplo included it in his 2013 round-up set on BBC Radio 1  XXL named it one of the top five hip hop songs of 2013  The official music video, directed by Gabriel Hart, was released on September 30, 2013  It shows Migos and Zaytoven at a luxurious mansion, wearing Versace clothes and accessories  The video also features a snippet of Migos second single off the mixtape "Hannah Montana"  As of April 2021, it has gained over 36 million views on YouTube  Y R N  later reached number 74 on the US Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, their first mixtape to do so on the Billboard charts  The mixtape was premiered on LiveMixtapes com, on 06/13/2013 and has over 7 million views and 500,000 downloads   Offset only appears on some of the tracks, he was incarcerated in 2013 when Y R N  (Young Rich Niggas) came out 

Critical reception
Y R N  received favorable reviews from critics and was ranked as the third best mixtape of 2013 by Rolling Stone 

Track listing
Charts
Passage 3:
Tyga discography
The discography of American rapper Tyga consists of seven studio albums, three compilation albums, twenty mixtapes, sixty-seven singles (including thirty-four as a featured artist) and forty-six music videos  In 2008, Tyga released his first studio album, No Introduction, on the record label Decaydance Records  The album included the single "Coconut Juice" (featuring Travie McCoy), the song peaked at number 94 on the US Billboard Hot 100, becoming Tyga's first song to appear on the chart  In 2010, Tyga and Virginia singer Chris Brown released the collaborative mixtape Fan of a Fan (2010), which included their hit single "Deuces": the song peaked at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became Tyga's first song to chart on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, peaking at number one The release of Tyga's second studio album (and his first to be released on the record label Young Money Entertainment), Careless World: Rise of the Last King (2012), was preceded by the release of the singles "Far Away", "Still Got It", "Rack City" and "Faded", with all four appearing on the Billboard Hot 100  "Rack City" was the most commercially successful single from the album, become Tyga's first single to reach the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, and also charting in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom  Following several delays to its release date, Careless World: Rise of the Last King debuted at number 4 on the US Billboard 200 and at number one on both the US Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and Top Rap Albums charts  His third studio album, Hotel California, was released on April 9, 2013 As of February 2017, Tyga has sold 600,000 albums and 12 2 million digital singles as a solo artist  His 2018 song "Taste" later became the best selling single of his career 

Albums
Studio albums
Collaboration albums
Compilation albums
Mixtapes
Singles
As lead artist
As featured artist
Promotional singles
Other charted and certified songs
Guest appearances
Music videos
Notes
Passage 4:
Wobble (song)
"Wobble" is the second single by rapper V I C  from his debut album Beast  The single was produced by Mr  Collipark  Before recording this song, he made a track called "Wobble (Skit)" to introduce the song "Wobble"  Both tracks are on the album  Atlanta's V-103 former radio personality Frank Ski is featured on the song on the intro and bridge, but isn't credited as a featured artist  The song grew in popularity after inspiring a dance  "Wobble" finally made its debut on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart at number 89 on June 2, 2011, almost three years after its release, and has since peaked at number 77  It went on to debut at number 94 on the US Billboard Hot 100 on January 7, 2012  In 2020, the song made a resurgence after trending on the video sharing platform TikTok 

Track listing
Promo CD single
"Wobble (Skit)" (Main)
"Wobble" (Song)
"Wobble" (Instrumental)
"Wobble" (Acapella)

Charts
Certifications
Passage 5:
Finally (CeCe Peniston album)
Finally is the debut album by American singer CeCe Peniston, released on January 30, 1992, by A&M Records  Prior to the release of this album, Peniston released her debut single "Finally", which topped the US Billboard Hot Dance Music Club Play chart on October 26, 1991, peaking eventually at number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and at number two in the UK Singles Chart  The album yielded two additional singles which achieved dance number one status in the US; "We Got a Love Thang", co-written by Chantay Savage, and "Keep On Walkin'", written in collaboration with Kym Sims  Both songs entered the UK Singles Chart top 10 and the Billboard Hot 100 top 20 in the US  Despite the success of the singles, the album itself climbed only to number seventy on the US Billboard 200  However, during its thirty-six weeks long presence in the chart it sold over 554,000 copies in the US  The album peaked at number ten on the UK Albums Chart
Context 3: Passage 1:
Noah's Compass
Noah's Compass is a novel by Anne Tyler first published in 2009 about a solitary 60-year-old man trying to come to terms with his own life  Critics agree that in this, Tyler's 18th novel, the author again treads familiar territory by setting her novel in Baltimore and by following the life of an inconspicuous man who has never realised his full potential 

Plot summary
On the surface, Liam Pennywell leads an ordered, decent life  Once widowed and once divorced, with three grown-up daughters, he has just been dismissed from his teaching job and, for lack of funds, has moved to a smaller apartment on the outskirts of Baltimore  Toying with the idea of retiring altogether rather than going job hunting at his age, Pennywell is assaulted by a burglar on the very first night he stays at his new place  When he wakes up in hospital with a bandaged head, he cannot remember a thing about the attack 
The loss of memory disturbs him more than the crime itself  In a neurologist's waiting room he observes 38-year-old Eunice accompanying an ageing entrepreneur to his doctor's appointment and finds out that she is working for him as a "rememberer" or, as she herself puts it later, the old man's "external hard drive " Intrigued by this occupation, Pennywell contrives a chance encounter with her, and eventually they strike up a relationship with each other 
Complications in their love affair arise when his youngest daughter, 17-year-old Kitty, decides to move in with him, obviously because she expects to be enjoying more freedom than if she stayed with her mother; and when his middle daughter Louise makes a habit of dumping his four-year-old grandson Jonah at Pennywell's apartment for him to babysit  On top of that, Eunice turns out to be a married woman who, after Pennywell has found out, still does not want to let go of him 
In the end the police arrest the burglar—a juvenile delinquent whose mother has the cheek to ask Pennywell to serve as a character witness at her son's forthcoming trial  By then, Pennywell has made up with his eldest daughter Xanthe, who was bearing an old grudge against her father, has got rid of Eunice, and has got settled in at his new apartment  Also, he has started working as a zayde for Jewish preschool children 

Title
The novel takes its title from a discussion Pennywell has with his grandson about whether Noah was steering his ark, or just bobbing up and down in the flood  "Noah didn't need to figure out directions, because the whole world was underwater and so it made no difference," he tells Jonah  “There wasn't anywhere to go  He was just trying to stay afloat "

Reviews
William Boot: "Do I Have to Read Noah's Compass?", www thedailybeast com (23 January 2010) 
Kathleen Byrne: "Families, They Suck You Up",  The Globe and Mail (29 January 2010) 
Elizabeth Day: "Anne Tyler's Noah's Compass, The Observer (16 August 2009) 
Kathryn Harrison: "The Memory Thief", The New York Times (3 January 2010) BR10 
Yvonne Zipp: "Noah's Compass", The Christian Science Monitor (5 January 2010) 
Links to more reviews at  www reviewsofbooks com 

See also
2009 in literature
Passage 2:
Stanley Elkin
Stanley Lawrence Elkin (May 11, 1930 – May 31, 1995) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist  His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships 

Biography
Elkin was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Chicago from age three onwards  He did both his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, receiving a bachelor's degree in English in 1952 and a Ph D  in 1961 for his dissertation on William Faulkner  During this period he was drafted and served in the U S  Army from 1955 to 1957  In 1953 Elkin married Joan Marion Jacobson  He was a member of the English faculty at Washington University in St  Louis from 1960 until his death, and battled multiple sclerosis for most of his adult life  In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War During his career, Elkin published ten novels, two volumes of novellas, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, and one (unproduced) screenplay  Elkin's work revolves about American pop culture, which it portrays in innumerable darkly comic variations  Characters and especially prose style take full precedence over plot  His language is extravagant and exuberant, baroque and flowery, taking fantastic flight from his characters' endless patter  "He was like a jazz artist who would go off on riffs," said critic William Gass  In a review of George Mills, Ralph B  Sipper wrote, "Elkin's trademark is to tightrope his way from comedy to tragedy with hardly a slip " About the influence of ethnicity on his work Elkin said he admired most "the writers who are stylists, Jewish or not  Bellow is a stylist, and he is Jewish  William Gass is a stylist, and he is not Jewish  What I go for in my work is language "
Although living in the Midwest, Elkin spent his childhood and teenage summers in a bungalow colony called West Oakland, on the Ramapo River in northern New Jersey not far from Mahwah, the home of Joyce Kilmer  This was a refuge for a close-knit group of several score families, mostly Jewish, from the summer heat of New York City and urban New Jersey  Elkin's writings placed in New Jersey were informed by this experience Elkin won the National Book Critics Circle Award on two occasions: for George Mills in 1982 and for Mrs  Ted Bliss, his last novel, in 1995  The MacGuffin was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award for Fiction  However, although he enjoyed high critical praise, his books have never enjoyed popular success  The 1976 Jack Lemmon film Alex & the Gypsy was based on Elkin's novella "The Bailbondsman" 
Elkin died May 31, 1995, of a heart attack, twenty days after his 65th birthday  His manuscripts and correspondence are archived in Olin Library at Washington University in St  Louis  Elkin's literary legacy is represented by the literary agency headed by Georges Borchardt 
He has a star on the St  Louis Walk of Fame 

Works
Novels
Boswell: A Modern Comedy (1964)
A Bad Man (1967)
The Dick Gibson Show (1971)
The Franchiser (1976)
The Living End (novella) (1979) ISBN 978-0525070207
George Mills (1982)
The Magic Kingdom (1985)
The Rabbi of Lud (1987)
The MacGuffin (1991) ISBN 978-0671673246
Mrs  Ted Bliss (1995)

Story collections
Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966)
Early Elkin (1985)

Novella collections
Searches and Seizures (1973) (U K  title: Eligible Men (1974))
Van Gogh's Room at Arles (1993)

Other works
"A Prayer for Losers", from the Why Work Series (edited by Gordon Lish) (1966)
Stanley Elkin's Greatest Hits (anthology; foreword by Robert Coover) (1980)
The Six-Year-Old Man (screenplay) (1987)
Pieces of Soap (collected essays) (1992)

Limited editions
The First George Mills  (Part One of George Mills; 376 copies, all signed by Elkin and the illustrator, Jane E  Hughes) (1980)
Why I Live Where I Live (essay; 30 unnumbered copies) (1983)
The Coffee Room (radio play; 95 copies, all signed by Elkin and the illustrator, Michael McCurdy) (1987)

Audio
"A Poetics for Bullies", read by Jackson Beck, with comments by Elkin, in New Sounds in American Fiction, Program 10  (edited by Gordon Lish) (1969)

As editor
Stories From the Sixties (1971)
The Best American Short Stories 1980 (with Shannon Ravenel) (1980)

Awards
1995 – National Book Critics Circle Award for Mrs  Ted Bliss
1994 – PEN Faulkner Award finalist for Van Gogh's Room at Arles
1991 – National Book Award finalist for Fiction for The MacGuffin
1982 – National Book Critics Circle Award for George Mills
Passage 3:
Earthly Possessions (novel)
Earthly Possessions is a 1977 novel by Anne Tyler   This, Tyler's seventh novel, followed Celestial Navigation and Searching for Caleb and preceded her award-winning novels Morgan's Passing, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, and Breathing Lessons 

Plot
Thirty-five-year-old Charlotte Emory has felt trapped her whole life in Clarion, Maryland—first by her embarrassingly eccentric parents, then by her preacher-husband whom she married too young, and eventually by "his variously afflicted brothers, a daughter who won't answer to her own name, a house full of refugees, an impossible clutter "  She finally decides to run away from it all, rid herself of her "earthly possessions," and start over   When she goes to the bank to withdraw funds for her escape, she gets taken hostage during a holdup   Prison escapee Jake Simms forces Charlotte into a stolen car and they head for Florida 
"Earthly Possessions…contains a chilling portrait of a habitual criminal, Jake Simms, Jr , who blames every destructive and chaotic act of his own on someone else   He kidnaps our heroine, the surpassingly amiable Charlotte Emory because while he was robbing a bank a bystander happened to produce a gun   "I could be clean free," he tells his victim, "and you safe home with your kids by now if it wasn't for him   Guy like that ought to be locked up "  As the chase continues, and the kidnapping lengthens into a kind of marriage, he persuades himself, "it ain't me keeping you it's them   If they would quit hounding me then we could go our separate ways…"  This is perfect loser psychology, the mental technology of digging a bottomless pit; but Anne Tyler would have us believe that Jake is saved from falling in by the doll-like apparition of a wee seventeen-year-old girl he has impregnated, Mindy Callender "Jake Simms' mission—besides avoiding arrest—is to "rescue" Mindy from a "home for wayward girls" where she is preparing to have his child   If Mindy is the essence of pure innocence, then Charlotte Emory is the earthbound mooring for this homeless couple—at least for a time   One irony here is that, when she was taken hostage, Charlotte herself was in the process of withdrawing her savings to run away from her own family and home  This is not the first time Charlotte has intended to run away, with no real plan or expectations   Charlotte has escaped one trap to find herself in another, but perhaps this "adventure" will provide her a new perspective 

Reviews
In 1977, John Leonard wrote, "That part of Earthly Possessions spent on the road--gas stations and junk food--amounts to a Rabbit, Run without the Updike epiphanies  The rest is skillful flashback    I admit not being entirely sympathetic to the wry fatalism she proposes, to the notion that we travel enough in our heads to make leaving home almost redundant  Celestial Navigation (1974) and Searching for Caleb (1976) were more satisfying novels  But a taste of Anne Tyler, once acquired, is a splendid addiction "John Updike reviewed the novel in The New Yorker: "Anne Tyler, in her seventh novel, 'Earthly Possessions', continues to demonstrate a remarkable talent and, for a writer of her acuity, an unusual temperament    Small towns and pinched minds hold room enough for her; she is at peace in the semi-countrified, semi-plasticized northern-Southern America where she and her characters live   Out of this peace flow her unmistakable strengths—serene firm tone; her smoothly spun plots; her apparently inexhaustible access to the personalities of her imagining; her infectious delight in "the smell of beautiful, everyday life"; her lack of any trace of intellectual or political condescension—and her one possible weakness: a tendency to leave the reader just where she found him    Charlotte Emory   belongs to what is becoming a familiar class of Anne Tyler heroines: women admirably active in the details of living yet alarmingly passive in the large curve of their lives—riders on male-generated events, who nevertheless give those events a certain blessing, a certain feasibility "

Adaptation for TV
Earthly Possessions (TV) (1999) stars Susan Sarandon, Stephen Dorff, and Elisabeth Moss   "The eventual romance [between Jake and Charlotte is] an element invented for the movie  [It] doesn't disrupt the original sentiment of the story, but could easily have been left out without compromising the emotional development of the characters "
Passage 4:
Searching for Caleb
Searching for Caleb is Anne Tyler's sixth novel   It was originally published by Alfred A  Knopf in 1975 

Book Description
From The Boston Globe
Duncan Peck has a fascination for randomness and is always taking his family on the move  His wife, Justine, is a fortune teller who can't remember the past  Her grandfather, Daniel, longs to find the brother who walked out of his life in 1912, with nothing more than a fiddle in his hand  All three are taking journeys that lead back to the family's deepest roots   to a place where rebellion and acceptance have the haunting power to merge into one    

From the back of the April 1983 Berkley paperback edition
"Here is the heartbreaking and hilarious story of the Peck family - and a young woman's search for freedom, which leads her to the family's deepest roots   From the ragtime era at the end of the 19th century to the years of change in the mid-1970s, it is about growing up and breaking away, rebellion and acceptance   It is a haunting, human story that will live in your heart forever   "

From a 1976 review by Katha Pollitt in the New York Times
"When Duncan marries his cousin Justine, hitherto an ardent Peck, she begins to discover her own thirst for adventure   For years the two careen through the small towns of Maryland and Virginia as Duncan quits one makeshift job for another…  Justine is pulled both forward and back: an amateur teller of fortunes who advises her clients always to go along with change, she remains in thrall to her own childhood   And so, when Daniel decides to find his lost brother, Justine is the one who joins him   For the old man the quest is a way of recapturing the past, but for Justine it becomes a search for the self she has mislaid   The outcome is marvelously ironic, since the answers to her questions are themselves enigmatic   Yet she emerges triumphant, her own woman at last "

Reviews
In his 1976 review in The New Yorker, John Updike wrote, “Funny and lyric and true, exquisite in its details and ambitious in its design…This writer is not merely good, she is wickedly good ”Katha Pollitt praised: "Less perfectly realized than Celestial Navigation, her extraordinarily moving and beautiful last novel,Searching for Caleb is Tyler’s sunniest, most expansive book   While etching with a fine, sharp wit the narrow-mindedness and pettishness of the Pecks, she lavishes on them a tenderness that lifts them above satire… Reading “Searching for Caleb,” one is constantly being startled by…gestures, words, wrinkles of thought and feeling that are at once revelatory and exactly right   But at the center of Tyler’s characters is a private, mysterious core which is left, wisely, inviolate   Ultimately this wisdom is what makes Tyler more than a fine craftsman of realistic novels   Her complex, crotchety inventions surprise us, but one senses they surprise her too "
Passage 5:
Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler (born October 25, 1941) is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic   She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988)   All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989   She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award   In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence   Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020  She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail", her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language "Tyler has been compared to John Updike, Jane Austen, and Eudora Welty, among others 

Early life and education
Early childhood
The oldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota  Her father, Lloyd Parry Tyler, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker   Both her parents were Quakers who were very active with social causes in the Midwest and the South  Her family lived in a succession of Quaker communities in the South until they settled in 1948 in a Quaker commune in Celo, in the mountains of North Carolina near Burnsville  The Celo Community settlement was populated largely by conscientious objectors and members of the liberal Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends   Tyler lived there from age seven through eleven and helped her parents and others care for livestock and organic farming   While she did not attend formal public school in Celo, lessons were taught in art, carpentry, and cooking in homes and in other subjects in a tiny school house   Her early informal training was supplemented by correspondence school Her first memory of her own creative story-telling was of crawling under the bed covers at age three and "telling myself stories in order to get to sleep at night "  Her first book at age seven was a collection of drawings and stories about "lucky girls     who got to go west in covered wagons " Her favorite book as a child was The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton   Tyler acknowledges that this book, which she read many times during this period of limited access to books, had a profound influence on her, showing "how the years flowed by, people altered, and nothing could ever stay the same " This early perception of changes over time is a theme that reappears in many of her novels decades later, just as The Little House itself appears in her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant   Tyler also describes reading Little Women 22 times as a child  When the Tyler family left Celo after four years to move to Raleigh, North Carolina, eleven-year-old Tyler had never attended public school and never used a telephone   This unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view "the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise "

Raleigh, North Carolina
Tyler felt herself to be an outsider in the public schools she attended in Raleigh, a feeling that has followed her most of her life   She believes that this sense of being an outsider has contributed to her becoming a writer: "I believe that any kind of setting-apart situation will do [to become a writer]   In my case, it was emerging from the commune     and trying to fit into the outside world " Despite her lack of public schooling prior to age eleven, Anne entered school academically well ahead of most of her classmates in Raleigh   With access now to libraries, she discovered Eudora Welty, Gabriel García Márquez, F  Scott Fitzgerald, and many others   Eudora Welty remains one of her favorite writers, and The Wide Net and Other Stories is one of her favorite books; she has called Welty "my crowning influence " She credits Welty with showing her that books could be about the everyday details of life, not just about major events   During her years at Needham B  Broughton High School in Raleigh, she was inspired and encouraged by a remarkable English teacher, Phyllis Peacock  "Mrs  Peacock" had previously taught the writer Reynolds Price, under whom Tyler would later study at Duke University   Peacock would also later teach the writer Armistead Maupin   Seven years after high school, Tyler would dedicate her first published novel to "Mrs  Peacock, for everything you've done "

Duke and Columbia Universities
When Tyler graduated from high school at age sixteen, she wanted to attend Swarthmore College, a school founded in 1860 by the Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends   However, she had won a full AB Duke scholarship to Duke University, and her parents pressured her to go to Duke because they needed to save money for the education of her three younger brothers   At Duke, Tyler enrolled in Reynolds Price's first creative writing class, which also included a future poet, Fred Chappell   Price was most impressed with the sixteen-year-old Tyler, describing her as "frighteningly mature for 16," "wide-eyed," and "an outsider " Years later Price would describe Tyler as "one of the best novelists alive in the world,     who was almost as good a writer at 16 as she is now " Tyler took an additional creative writing course with Price and also studied under William Blackburn, who also had taught William Styron, Josephine Humphreys, and James Applewhite at Duke, as well as Price and Chappell As a college student, Tyler had not yet determined she wanted to become a writer   She loved painting and the visual arts   She also was involved in the drama society in high school and at Duke, where she acted in a number of plays, playing Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Mrs  Gibbs in Our Town  She majored in Russian Literature at Duke—not English—and graduated in 1961, at age nineteen, having been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa   With her Russian Literature background she received a fellowship to graduate school in Slavic Studies at Columbia University Living in New York City was quite an adjustment for her   There she became somewhat addicted to riding trains and subways: "While I rode I often felt like I was     an enormous eye taking things in, turning them over and sorting them out     writing was the only way" [to express her observations]  Tyler left Columbia graduate school after a year, having completed course work but not her master's thesis   She returned to Duke, where she got a job in the library as a Russian bibliographer  It was there that she met Taghi Modarressi, a resident in child psychiatry in Duke Medical School and a writer himself, and they were married a year later (1963) 

Career
Early writing and first publications
While an undergraduate at Duke, Tyler published her short story "Laura" in the Duke literary journal Archive, for which she won the newly created Anne Flexner award for creative writing  In college and prior to her marriage, she wrote many short stories, one of which impressed Reynolds Price so that he later stated that it was the "most finished, most accomplished short story I have ever received from an undergraduate in my thirty years of teaching "  "The Saints in Caesar's Household" was published in Archive also and won her a second Anne Flexner award   This short story led to her meeting Diarmuid Russell, to whom Price had sent it with kudos   Russell, who was an agent for both Reynolds Price and for Tyler's "crowning influence" Eudora Welty, later became Tyler's agent While working at the Duke library—before and after marrying Modarressi—Tyler did continue to write short stories and started work on her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes   During this period her short stories appeared in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, and Harpers   After the couple moved to Montreal—Modarressi's U  S  visa had expired and they moved there so he could finish his residency—Tyler continued writing while looking for work   Her first novel was published in 1964 and The Tin Can Tree was published the next year   Years later she disowned both of these novels, as well as many of the short stories she wrote during this period   She has even written that she "would like to burn them "  She feels that most of this early work suffers from the lack of thorough character development and her failure to rework material repeatedly 

A hiatus from writing: having babies, raising children—1965 to 1970
In 1965 (age 24), Tyler had her first child, a daughter they named Tezh   Two years later a second daughter, Mitra, was born   About this time, the couple moved to Baltimore, MD as Taghi had finished his residency and obtained a position at the University of Maryland Medical School  With the moves, the changes in jobs, and the raising of two young children, Tyler had little time or energy for writing and published nothing between 1965 and 1970  She settled comfortably in the city of Baltimore where she has remained and where she has set most of her subsequent novels   Baltimore is generally considered to have a true mix of Southern and Northern culture  It also is an area of considerable Quaker presence, and Tyler eventually enrolled both her daughters in a local Friends school   During this period she began writing literary reviews for journals, newspapers, etc  to provide the family with additional income; she would continue this employment until the late 1980s, writing approximately 250 reviews in total   While this period was not productive for her writing career, Tyler does feel that this time enriched her spirit and her experience and in turn gave her subsequent writing greater depth, as she had "more of a self to speak from "

Growing recognition as a novelist—1970 to 1980
Tyler began writing again in 1970 and had published three more novels by 1974—A Slipping-Down Life, The Clock Winder, and Celestial Navigation   In her own opinion, her writing improved considerably during this period; with her children entering school, she was able to devote a great deal more focus to it than had been possible since she graduated from Duke   With Celestial Navigation, Tyler began to get national recognition: Gail Godwin gave it a very favorable review in the New York Times Review of Books  While she is not proud of her first four novels, Tyler considers this fifth novel one of her favorites   It was a difficult book to write she notes, since it required rewriting draft after draft to truly develop her understanding of the characters  John Updike gave a favorable review to her next novel, Searching for Caleb, writing: "Funny and lyric and true, exquisite in its details and ambitious in its design     This writer is not merely good, she is wickedly good " Afterwards he proceeded to take an interest in her work and reviewed her next four novels as well  Morgan's Passing (1980) won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction and was nominated for both the American Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Award  Joyce Carol Oates gave it good review in Mademoiselle: "Fascinating     So unconventional a love story that it appears to take its protagonists themselves by surprise "

National recognition achieved
With her next novel, Tyler truly arrived as a recognized artist in the literary world  Tyler's ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which she considers her best work, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, PEN/Faulkner Award, and the American Book Award for Fiction in 1983   In his review in The New Yorker, John Updike wrote, "Her art needed only the darkening that would give her beautifully shaped sketches solidity     In her ninth novel, she has arrived at a new level of power " Her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985, the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1986, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986  It was also made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis  The critical and commercial success of the film further increased the public awareness of her work   Her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was Time magazine's "Book of the Year"   It was adapted into a 1994 TV movie, as eventually were four other of her novels Since her Pulitzer Prize with Breathing Lessons, Tyler has written 13 more novels; many have been Book of the Month Club Main Selections and have become New York Times Bestsellers  Ladder of Years was chosen by Time as one of the ten best books of 1995   A Patchwork Planet was a New York Times Notable Book (1999)   Saint Maybe (1991) and Back When We Were Grownups (2001) were adapted into TV movies in 1998 and 2004, respectively  In her 2006 novel Digging to America, she explored how an immigrant from Iran, who has lived in the U  S  for 35 years, deals with her "outsiderness," perspectives with which Tyler is familiar due to her marriage to Iranian psychiatrist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi 
In addition to her novels, Tyler has published short stories in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, McCall's, and Harper's, but they have never been published as a collection   Her stories include "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters" (1977), "Holding Things Together" (1977), and "Teenage Wasteland" (1983)   Between 1983 and 1996, she edited three anthologies: The Best American Short Stories 1983, Best of the South, and Best of the South: The Best of the Second Decade 

Personal life
In 1963, Tyler married Iranian psychiatrist and novelist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi  Modarressi, 10 years her senior, had left Iran and his family as a political refugee at age 25  After a year and a half internship in Wichita, Kansas, he obtained a residency in child psychiatry at Duke University Medical School  There he met Tyler and discovered their common interest in literature  Modarressi had written two award-winning novels in Persian and so was quite an accomplished writer himself  He later wrote three more novels, two of which Tyler helped to translate to English (The Book of Absent People and The Pilgrim's Rules of Etiquette)  In the 1980s, Modarressi founded the Center for Infant Study in Baltimore and the Cold Spring Family Center Therapeutic Nursery in Pimlico, Maryland, which dealt with children who had experienced emotional trauma   Modarressi died in 1997 at the age of 65, from lymphoma 
Tyler and Modarressi had two daughters, Tezh and Mitra  Both share their mother's interest in, and talent for, painting  Tezh is a professional photographer, and an artist who works primarily in oils,  who painted the cover of her mother's novel, Ladder of Years  Mitra is a professional illustrator working primarily in watercolors  She has illustrated seven books, including two children's books co-authored with Tyler (Tumble Tower and Timothy Tugbottom Says No!) Tyler resides in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, where most of her novels are set   Today tourists can even take an "Anne Tyler tour" of the area   For some time she was noteworthy among contemporary best-selling novelists, for she rarely granted face-to-face interviews nor did book tours nor made other public appearances   In 2012 she broke with this policy and gave her first face-to-face interview in almost 40 years; subsequently, Mark Lawson interviewed her on BBC Radio in 2013 about her approach to writing  In 2015, she discussed her 20th novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, in a live radio interview with Diane Rehm and callers on The Diane Rehm Show 

Writing style, influences, and philosophy
Tyler's novels have been reviewed and analyzed by numerous fellow authors, scholars and professional critics  The summary that follows of the nature of her work relies upon selected descriptions and insights by a limited number of the many distinguished literati who have reviewed her works   Also Tyler herself has revealed much about her own writing through interviews   Although she has refused to participate in face-to-face interviews until very recently, she has participated in numerous e-mail interviews over the years   These e-mail interviews have provided material for biographies, journal articles, reader's guides, and instructional materials 

Classification of her literature
Tyler has occasionally been classified as a "Southern author" or a "modern American author "  The Southern category apparently results from the fact that she grew up and went to college in the South   Also she admired and/or studied under well-known Southern authors Eudora Welty and Reynolds Price  In a rare interview with The New York Times, Tyler cited Eudora Welty as a major literary influence: "Reading Eudora Welty when I was growing up showed me that very small things are often really larger than the large things"   However, poet and author Katha Pollitt notes, "It is hard to classify Anne Tyler's novels   They are Southern in their sure sense of family and place but lack the taste for violence and the Gothic that often characterizes self-consciously southern literature   They are modern in their fictional techniques, yet utterly unconcerned with contemporary moment as a subject, so that, with only minor dislocations, her stories could just as well have taken place in twenties or thirties "It is also difficult to classify Tyler in terms of themes; as she herself notes, "I don't think of my work in terms of themes   I'm just trying to tell a story "  Tyler goes on to say, "Any large 'questions of life' that emerge in my novels are accidental—not a reason for writing the novel in the first place but either (1) questions that absorb my characters, quite apart from me, or (2) on occasion, questions that may be thematic to my own life at the moment, even if I'm not entirely aware of them  Answers, if they come, come from the characters' experiences, not from mine, and I often find myself viewing those answers with a sort of distant, bemused surprise "

Characters and detailed descriptions
In Tyler's works, the characters are the driving forces behind the stories and the starting point for her writing:  "I do make a point of writing down every imaginable facet of my characters before I begin a book, trying to get to know them so I can figure out how they'll react in any situation     My reason for writing now is to live lives other than my own, and I do that by burrowing deeper and deeper     till I reach the center of those lives "The magic of her novels starts with her ability to create those characters in the reader's mind through the use of remarkably realistic details   As early as 1976, Pollitt described her skill in this way: "Tyler [is] polishing brighter and brighter a craft many novelists no longer deem essential to their purpose: the unfolding of character through brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail "  Twelve years later, Michiko Kakutani, in her review of Breathing Lessons, extolled "her ability to select details that reveal precisely how her characters feel and think" and her "gift for sympathy, for presenting each character's case with humor and compassion "  Kakutani later went on to note that "each character in Saint Maybe has been fully rendered, fleshed out with a palpable interior life, and each has been fit, like a hand-sawed jigsaw-puzzle piece, into the matrix of family life " Carol Shields, also writing about her characters, observes: "Tyler has always put her characters to work  Their often humble or eccentric occupations, carefully observed and threaded with humor, are tightly sewn to the other parts of their lives, offering them the mixed benefit of tedium and consolation, as well as a lighted stage for the unfolding of their dramatic selves  She also allows her men and women an opportunity for redemption "Tyler has clearly spelled out the importance of her characters to her stories:  "As far as I'm concerned, character is everything  I never did see why I have to throw in a plot, too "  In an earlier (1977) interview, she stated that "the real joy of writing is how people can surprise one  My people wander around my study until the novel is done  It's one reason I'm very careful not to write about people I don't like  If I find somebody creeping in that I'm not really fond of, I usually take him out "  Pollitt had even earlier noted how Tyler's characters seem to take on a life of their own that she doesn't seem to totally control: "Her complex, crotchety inventions surprise us, but one senses they surprise her too "

Realism through details
Just as Tyler is difficult to categorize as a novelist, it is also challenging to label her style  Novelist Cathleen Schine describes how her "style without a style" manages to pull the reader into the story: "So rigorous and artful is the style without a style, so measured and delicate is each observation, so complex is the structure and so astute and open the language, that the reader can relax, feel secure in the narrative and experience the work as something real and natural -- even inevitable "  The San Francisco Chronicle made a similar point: "One does not so much read a Tyler novel as visit it  Her ability to conduct several conversations at once while getting the food to the table turns the act of reading into a kind of transport "  Reviewer Tom Shone put it this way: "You're involved before you ever notice you were paying attention " Joyce Carol Oates, in her review of The Amateur Marriage, perhaps described the phenomenon best: "When the realistic novel works its magic, you won't simply have read about the experiences of fictitious characters, you will have seemed to have lived them; your knowledge of their lives transcends their own, for they can only live in chronological time  The experience of reading such fiction when it's carefully composed can be breathtaking, like being given the magical power of reliving passages of our own lives, indecipherable at the time of being lived "

Focus on family and marriage
While Tyler herself does not like to think of her novels in terms of themes, numerous reviewers and scholars have noted the importance of family and marriage relationships to her characters and stories  Liesl Schillinger summarized: "Taken together, the distinct but overlapping worlds of her novels have formed a Sensurround literary record of the 20th century American family—or, at least, of the proud but troubled archetypal families that     interested her most " New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani has been reviewing Tyler's novels for over 25 years  She has frequently noted Tyler's themes with regard to family and marriage  Reviewing Noah's Compass, Kakutani states that "the central concern of most of this author's characters has always been their need to define themselves in terms of family — the degree to which they see themselves as creatures shaped by genetics, childhood memories and parental and spousal expectations, and the degree to which they are driven to embrace independent identities of their own "  This is an example of where Anne Tyler got some of her characteristics from, being able to be independent and get to know herself through her writing 
Reviewing Saint Maybe, Jay Parini describes how Tyler's characters must deal with "Ms  Tyler's oddball families, which any self-respecting therapist would call 'dysfunctional'      An inexplicable centripetal force hurls these relatives upon one another, catches them in a dizzying inward spiral of obligation, affection and old-fashioned guilt—as well as an inexpressible longing for some perfect or "normal" family in a distant past that never really was   Almost every novel by Anne Tyler begins with a loss or absence that reactivates in the family some primordial sense of itself " Larry McMurtry wrote, "in book after book, siblings are drawn inexorably back home, as if their parents or (more often) grandparents had planted tiny magnets in them which can be activated once they have seen what the extrafamilial world is like      sooner or later a need to be with people who are really familiar – their brothers and sisters – overwhelms them "Novelist Julia Glass has similarly written about Tyler's characters' families: "What makes each story distinctive is the particular way its characters rebel against hereditary confines, cope with fateful crises or forge relationships with new acquaintances who rock their world "  In the same way, Glass mentions the frequent role of marriage struggles in her work: "Once again, Tyler exhibits her genius for the incisive, savory portrayal of marriage, of the countless perverse ways in which two individuals sustain a shared existence "  McMurtry puts it this way, "The fates of [Tyler's] families hinge on long struggles between semiattentive males and semiobsessed females  In her patient investigation of such struggles, Miss Tyler has produced a very satisfying body of fiction 

Passage of time and the role of small, chance events
The role of the passage of time and its impact on Tyler's characters is always present   The stories in many of her novels span decades, if only by flashbacks   Joyce Carol Oates emphasized the role of time in this manner: "[Tyler's novels] move at times as if plotless in the meandering drift of actual life, it is time itself that constitutes "plot": meaning is revealed through a doubling-back upon time in flashes of accumulated memory, those heightened moments which James Joyce aptly called epiphanies  The minutiae of family life can yield a startling significance seen from the right perspective, as Tyler shows us "  With regard to those minutiae, Tyler herself comments: "As for huge events vs  small events: I believe they all count   They all reveal character, which is the factor that most concerns me     It does fascinate me, though, that small details can be so meaningful "Kakutani described Saint Maybe in a similar manner: "Moving back and forth among the points of view of various characters, Ms  Tyler traces two decades in the lives of the Bedloes, showing us the large and small events that shape family members' lives and the almost imperceptible ways in which feelings of familial love and obligation mutate over the years "  Again in her review of Breathing Lessons, Kakutani perceives that "she is able, with her usual grace and magnanimity, to chronicle the ever-shifting covenants made by parents and children, husbands and wives, and in doing so, to depict both the losses – and redemptions – wrought by the passage of time "
Tyler herself further weighs in upon how small events can impact relationships: "I love to think about chance -- about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe     The real heroes to me in my books are first the ones who manage to endure "

Criticism
Tyler is not without her critics   The most common criticism is that her works are "sentimental," "sweet," and "charming and cosy "  John Blades, literary critic for the Chicago Tribune, skewered The Accidental Tourist (as well as all her earlier novels) as "artificially sweet" and "unrealistic "  The Observer's Adam Mars-Jones stated, in his review of The Amateur Marriage: "Tyler seems to be offering milk and cookies "  Kakutani has also occasionally bemoaned a "cloying cuteness," noting that "her novels—with their eccentric heroes, their homespun details, their improbable, often heartwarming plots—have often flirted with cuteness "In a 2012 interview, Tyler responded to such criticisms: "For one thing I think it is sort of true  I would say piss and vinegar for [Philip] Roth and for me milk and cookies  I can't deny it     [However] there's more edge under some of my soft language than people realize "  Because almost all of Tyler's work covers the same territory—family and marriage relationships—and are located in the same setting, she has come under criticism for being repetitive and formulaic   Reviewing The Patchwork Planet, Kakutani states: "Ms  Tyler's earlier characters tended to be situated within a thick matrix of finely nuanced familial relationships that helped define both their dreams and their limitations; the people in this novel, in contrast, seem much more like lone wolves, pulled this way and that by the author's puppet strings     Ms  Tyler's famous ability to limn the daily minutiae of life also feels weary and formulaic this time around     As for the little details Ms  Tyler sprinkles over her story     they, too, have a paint-by-numbers touch  They add up to a patchwork novel that feels hokey, mechanical     and yes, too cute Tyler has also been criticized for her male characters' "Sad Sack" nature and their "lack of testosterone "  Tyler has disagreed with this criticism: "Oh that always bothers me so much   I don't think they are wimps   People are always saying we understand you write about quirky characters, and I think, isn't everybody quirky? If you look very closely at anybody you'll find impediments, women and men both "

Work habits
Over the last couple of decades, Tyler has been quite forthcoming about her work habits—both in written articles and in interviews   She is very disciplined and consistent about her work schedule and environment   She starts work in the early morning and generally works until 2 pm   Since she moved to the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore, she has used a small, orderly corner room in her house, where the only distractions are the sounds of "children playing outside and birds "  She has noted that at the beginning of her day, taking the first step—that is, entering her corner room—can be difficult and daunting   She begins her writing by reviewing her previous days' work and then by sitting and staring off into space for a time   She describes this phase of writing as an "extension of daydreaming," and it focuses on her characters Over the years Tyler has kept files of note cards in which ideas and observations have been recorded   Characters, descriptions, and scenes often emerge from these notes   She says the act of putting words to paper for her is a "very mechanical process," involving a number of steps: (1) writing first in long hand on unlined paper, (2) revising long hand versions, (3) typing the entire manuscript, (4) re-writing in long hand, (5) reading into a tape-recorder while listening for "false notes," (6) playing back into a stenographer's machine using the pause button to enter changes   She can be quite organized, going so far as to map out floor plans of houses and to outline the chronology of all the characters in a given novel In 2013, Tyler gave the following advice to beginning writers: "They should run out and buy the works of Erving Goffman, the sociologist who studied the meaning of gesture in personal interactions   I have cause to think about Erving Goffman nearly every day of my life, every time I see people do something unconscious that reveals more than they'll ever know about their interiors   Aren't human beings intriguing? I could go on writing about them forever "

Bibliography
Novels
If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
The Tin Can Tree (1965)
A Slipping-Down Life (1970)
The Clock Winder (1972)
Celestial Navigation (1974)
Searching for Caleb (1975)
Earthly Possessions (1977)
Morgan's Passing (1980)
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Breathing Lessons (1988)
Saint Maybe (1991)
Ladder of Years (1995)
A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Digging to America (2006)
Noah's Compass (2009)
The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)
Vinegar Girl (2016)
Clock Dance (2018)
Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020)
French Braid (2022)

Other
Tumble Tower (1993) A children's book illustrated by her daughter Mitra Modarressi
Timothy Tugbottom Says No! (2005) A children's book illustrated by Mitra Modarressi

Uncollected stories
Although Tyler's short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, McCall's, and Harper's, they have not been published as a collection  Her stories include:

"A Street of Bugles," The Saturday Evening Post, November 30, 1963
"Dry Water," The Southern Review, Spring 1965
"I'm Not Going to Ask You Again," Harper's, September 1965
"As the Earth Gets Old," The New Yorker, October 29, 1966
"The Genuine Fur Eyelashes," Mademoiselle, January 1967
"The Tea-Machine," The Southern Review, Winter 1967
"The Feather Behind the Rock," The New Yorker, August 12, 1967
"Who Would Want a Little Boy?" Ladies Home Journal, May 1968
"The Common Courtesies," McCall's, June 1968—and The O  Henry Prize Stories 1969
"With All Flags Flying," Redbook, June 1971—and The O  Henry Prize Stories 1972
"Spending," Shenandoah, Winter 1973
"The Base-Metal Egg," The Southern Review, Summer 1973
"Neutral Ground," Family Circle, November 1974
"Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles," Cosmopolitan, December 1974
"A Knack for Languages," The New Yorker, January 13, 1975
"The Artificial Family," The Southern Review, Summer 1975
"The Geologist's Maid," The New Yorker, July 28, 1975
"Some Sign That I Ever Made You Happy," McCall's, October 1975
"Your Place Is Empty," The New Yorker, November 22, 1976—and Best American Short Stories 1977
"Holding Things Together", The New Yorker, January 24, 1977
"Average Waves in Unprotected Waters," The New Yorker, February 28, 1977
"Foot-Footing On," Mademoiselle, November 1977
"Uncle Ahmad," Quest, November–December 1977
"Teenage Wasteland," Seventeen, (1983)

Film adaptations
The Accidental Tourist (1988)
Breathing Lessons (TV) (1994)
Saint Maybe (TV) (1998)
A Slipping-Down Life (1999)
Earthly Possessions (TV) (1999)
Back When We Were Grownups (TV) (2004)

Awards
Tyler has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1983 for Morgan's Passing (1980):

Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction
nominated, American Book Award for Fiction
nominated, National Book Critics Circle Award for Fictionfor Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982):

Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Finalist, PEN/Faulkner Award
Finalist, American Book Award for Fictionfor The Accidental Tourist (1985):

1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
1986 Ambassador Book Award for Fiction
Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Fictionfor Breathing Lessons (1988):

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1989)
Time's "Book of the Year"for Ladder of Years (1995):

Finalist, The Orange Prize for Fiction 1996for Digging to America (2006):

Finalist, The Orange Prize for Fiction 2007for A Spool of Blue Thread (2015):

Finalist, The Man Booker Prize 2015
Finalist, The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015for Redhead By the Side of the Road (2020):

Longlist, The Man Booker Prize 2020for Lifetime achievement:

Finalist, The Man Booker International Prize 2011
The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence 2012
Passage 6:
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a 1982 novel by Anne Tyler, set in Baltimore, Maryland  It is Tyler's ninth novel  In 1983 it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award  Tyler considers it her best work 
The book follows the lives of three siblings: Cody, Ezra, and Jenny, and explores their experiences and recollections of growing up with their mother, Pearl, after the family is deserted by their father, Beck  The novel ends with Pearl's funeral, and a surprise occurrence 
The novel examines how siblings may share the same events yet experience them differently; e g  Cody remembers his childhood as a harsh time  He blames himself for his father abandoning him and considers himself left to the mercy of an angry mother who favors Ezra  Meanwhile, Ezra remembers his childhood fondly and creates a nostalgic family-themed restaurant 

Plot
Pearl Tull is a rigid perfectionist  She has three children with her husband, traveling salesman Beck, who abandons the family  After Beck leaves, Pearl struggles to maintain a front as if nothing is wrong at all  Cody, the oldest, is wild and adventurous, but is envious of his brother Ezra, who he believes is Pearl's favorite  As they grow up, this plays out in endless pranks  Ezra is passive, and never tries to get back at Cody  He is nurturing and sweet, traits that often interest Cody's girlfriends, furthering Cody's resentment  Ezra goes to work at a restaurant, which he later manages and ultimately inherits, while Cody becomes a wealthy and successful efficiency expert  When Ezra becomes engaged to Ruth, his star cook, Cody becomes obsessed with luring her away, and ultimately succeeds, but his marriage to Ruth is not easy  Ezra never recovers, and remains at home with Pearl; he is a caregiver, both for Pearl and his customers, but this is underlain by sadness 
Jenny is the third child and the most scholarly of the Tulls, but in college, she marries on an impulse with unhappy results  Only in her third marriage to a man with six children whose wife has abandoned him does she find stability in family life and in her successful, if harried, career as a pediatrician 
A recurring scene in the novel involves Ezra's unsuccessful attempts to bring the family together for a meal at his "Homesick Restaurant", reflecting his desire to unite and mend the family  At Pearl's funeral, Beck returns to the family for the first time  However, they  never seem to be able to get through a single dinner without conflict, this time with Cody facing down his father, causing Beck to leave in the middle of the dinner  Ultimately, the entire family searches the town to find Beck, eventually bringing him back to the restaurant to finish their meal together 

Reviews
Benjamin DeMott, wrote in his 1982 New York Times book review:  "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a book to be settled into fully    Funny, heart-hammering, wise, it edges deep into truth that's simultaneously (and interdependently) psychological, moral and formal - deeper than many living novelists of serious reputation have penetrated, deeper than Miss Tyler herself has gone before  It is a border crossing    
"On its face Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a book about the costs of parental truancy  None of the three Tull children manages to cut loose from the family past; each is, to a degree, stunted; each turns for help to Pearl Tull in an hour of desperate adult need; and Pearl's conviction that something's wrong with each of them never recedes from the reader's consciousness  But no small measure of the book's subtlety derives from its exceptional - and exceptionally wise, the word bears repeating - clarity about the uselessness of cost accounting in human areas such as these    The behavior and feelings of all three are linked somehow with the terrible, never-explained rupture: their father's disappearance    But it's also the case that what is best in each of these people, as in their mother, has its roots in the experience of deprivation that they jointly despise   We arrive at an understanding that the important lessons taught by adversity never quite make themselves known to the consciousness of the learners - remain hidden, inexpressible 
"What one wants to do on finishing such a work as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is maintain balance, keep things intact for a stretch, stay under the spell as long as feasible    We're speaking, obviously, about an extremely beautiful book "John Updike, in his 1982 review in The New Yorker, wrote, “[Anne Tyler's] art needed only the darkening that would give her beautifully shaped sketches solidity    In her ninth novel, she has arrived at a new level of power ”Margaret Manning of The Boston Globe thought that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is "a book that should join those few that every literate person should read    You surface from this marvelous novel as if from the bends, lungs nearly bursting, tears rattling on the page "
Passage 7:
Steven Zwicker
Steven Nathan Zwicker (born June 4, 1943) is an American literary scholar and the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St  Louis 

Biography
Zwicker is an expert on Restoration-era English literature and politics and is the author of Dryden's Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation (1972), Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (1984), and Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (1993)  He has edited six volumes and published more than two dozen essays in journals and volumes in the United States and abroad 
Zwicker was born in San Diego, California  He received his BA from the University of California, Los Angeles (1965) and his MA (1966) and PhD (1969) from Brown University  He was a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at Brown University when he earned his PhD  He has been a member of the Washington University faculty since 1969 

Bibliography
Works
Dryden's Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation  Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1972 
Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984 
Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993 

As editor or contributor
Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England  Edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N  Zwicker  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987 
The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740  Edited by Steven N  Zwicker  Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998 
Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution  Edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N  Zwicker  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998 
John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany  Edited by Susan Green and Steven N  Zwicker  San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2001 
Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England  Edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N  Zwicker  Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003 
The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden  Edited by Steven N  Zwicker  Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004 
Passage 8:
Gwyn Avenue–Bridge Street Historic District
Gwyn Avenue–Bridge Street Historic District is a national historic district located at Elkin, Surry County, North Carolina  The district encompasses 124 contributing buildings and 1 contributing site in a predominantly residential section of Elkin   They were primarily built between about 1891 and 1955 and include notable examples of Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, and Bungalow / American Craftsman architecture  Notable buildings include the Elkin Presbyterian Church (1937, 1944, 1950, 1955, 1961), First Baptist Church (1955, 1968), Alexander Martin Smith House (1893–1897) designed by George Franklin Barber, the Gwyn-Chatham-Gwyn House (c  1872, 1911, 1936), Richard Gwyn Smith House (c  1918), and Mason Lillard House (c  1910) It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007 
Passage 9:
Mrs  Ted Bliss
Mrs  Ted Bliss is a 1995 novel by American author Stanley Elkin, published by Hyperion Books  It concerns the last eventful years in the life of an old widow  Elkin won the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award in the fiction category for this work 

Plot
Mrs  Dorothy Bliss is an old woman in her early 80s living alone in a retirement community near Miami Beach, Florida, after her husband's death due to cancer  She was born in Russia and is Jewish  Her mother bribed an immigration officer and added three years to her age on legal documents in order that she could start working in Manhattan's Lower East Side after their immigration  Her husband, Ted Bliss, had a butcher shop in Chicago and together they had three kids  Her oldest son dies of cancer at a young age and after her husband's retirement, the couple moved to Florida  She is obsessed with cleaning and also keeps records of the gifts given to her grandchildren in order to keep track and stay impartial with everyone The single life of Mrs  Bliss is now filled with expectations of finding a romance or a partner but eventually she is disappointed and heartbroken  She gets involved with Alcibiades Chitral, a drug lord who operates in her neighborhood, and starts using her and her husband's car as a front for his activities  The story keeps introducing various new men in her life, such as Hector Camerando, a jai alai pro who helps Mrs  Bliss with some tips on dogs, and Tommy Auveristas, an imposter  Junior Yellin, a once upon a time lover with whom Mrs  Bliss had had a passionate encounter in her husband's butcher shop, also makes a re-entry into her life  She eventually dies when Hurricane Andrew hits Miami and brings massive destruction 

Publication
Following Elkin's death on 31 May 1995 at age 65, the novel was released posthumously on 7 September 1995  Elkin had published ten novels, five short-story collections, and various novellas and non-fiction articles in various magazines and papers during the course of his writing career, which began in the 1950s 

Review and reception
Kirkus Reviews writes that Elkin makes readers believe that the novel has a plot when drug dealers are introduced in it  However, "there isn't so much a plot as an accumulation of detail about Mrs  Bliss"  Elkin's "long poetic sentences about seemingly mundane minutiae" later bring substance to the character of Mrs  Bliss  Walter Goodman, a television critic for The New York Times, mentions in his review that "[the book] may not be Stanley Elkin's best, but it is a smart, generous, melancholy, funny, even elegiac work by a prodigious practitioner"  Publishers Weekly writes that "Elkin is at his best here, blessed with the gift of one-liner insight and a definite, if reluctantly exercised, ability to tug on a reader's heartstrings" 

Awards
Elkin won the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award in the fiction category for the novel  The book was nominated along with Independence Day (by Richard Ford),  Galatea 2 2 (by Richard Powers), Moo (by Jane Smiley), and The Tent of Orange Mist (by Paul West)  Elkin had earlier won in the same category for his 1982 novel George Mills 
Passage 10:
George Mills (novel)
George Mills is a 1982 novel by American author Stanley Elkin, published by E  P  Dutton  The novel, set in five parts, tells the family history of succeeding generations of characters named George Mills  The story covers more than 1,000 years from the First Crusade in Europe to the Ottoman Empire to present-day America  Elkin won the 1982 National Book Critics Circle Award in the fiction category for the novel  Elkin mentioned George Mills as one of his favorite novels  The novel is considered Elkin's "longest and most complexly organized work" : 189

Plot
The first George Mills sets out on a journey with his lord on the First Crusade  But he eventually gets lost in the Netherlands and reaches a salt mine in Poland  His lord at the mines is Guillalume, who teaches him some life lessons  Mills becomes aware of what is written in his fate and this helps him understand the walks of life in this world in a better manner  Despite having the knowledge of what would happen in the future, his timidity and powerlessness does not bring out any situation-changing effects  
The novel covers the history of succeeding family members named George Mills and all of them are aware of their fates and equally feeble and ineffective in changing their circumstances  The 43rd Mills encounters King George IV and is assigned on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, where he first joins the Janissaries but later ends up in the Ottoman Sultan's harem doing household chores  He escapes from there and reaches America  The present-day Mills in America is a caretaker of an old woman named Judith Glazer in St  Louis, who is in the final stages of terminal cancer  Mills accompanies Glazer to Mexico and upon her death participates in her funeral together with her family 

Publication
Elkin worked for over seven years writing George Mills and by the end of its completion, he felt exhausted and insisted this would be his last fictional work  But after watching a British news report of how terminally ill children had a memorable experience at Disneyland, he wrote his next novel, The Magic Kingdom (1985), and dedicated it to his son who had died young from a medical ailment after lengthy treatments George Mills was published on 25 October 1982  In 1989, Elkin mentioned that several sections of George Mills had been adapted from the 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner  He also mentioned that in writing the novel, he came to realise "that I was a novelist, that anything I say is a part of this novel is a part of this novel" : 194

Review and reception
Kirkus Reviews called the novel "a leaky collection of parts rather than one whole strong book" but said it was required reading for connoisseurs of comic fiction  The New York Times reviewer Leslie Epstein complimented "the novel's fine writing, flashes of humor and memorable heroine", but felt that the plot was "out of control"  Brad Owens of The Christian Science Monitor praised the novel for its "energetic entertainment" and said that it "sometimes overpowers its more serious intentions" 

Awards
Elkin won the 1982 National Book Critics Circle Award in the fiction category for the novel   The novel was nominated along with Levitation: Five Fictions (by Cynthia Ozick), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (by Anne Tyler),  The Color Purple (by Alice Walker), and Shiloh and Other Stories (by Bobbie Ann Mason)  Elkin also won the award in 1995 for his novel Mrs  Ted Bliss 



ground_truth: Dame Eileen June Atkins

prompt_front: Answer the question based on the given passages. Only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Finally includes the song that peaked at what on the US Hot 100

The following are given passages.
Context 2:  The total worldwide sales of the album surpassed 3,000,000 units  Two further tracks were released from the album which were more in the R&B field; "Inside That I Cried" charted at number ten in the US R&B chart and at number forty-two in the UK, while "Crazy Love" peaked at number thirty-one in the US and at number forty-four in the UK  The album was part of the resurgence of dance music in the United States during the mid-1990s 

Critical reception
Finally received generally mixed to positive reviews from music critics  Craig Lytle from AllMusic lauded the album in his review as "outstanding", and it being a "solidly produced collection"  Giving the set four out of five stars, he wrote that the album warranted an additional single release  Amy Linden from Entertainment Weekly stated that Peniston has "a good enough voice" (which she stressed as a novelty among dance-music dollies), but apart from its title single, plus the funky ode "Virtue", she ranked the rest of album a B− for being "mainly standard issue and pretty dull"  Elena Oumano from Los Angeles Times wrote, "Like Patti LaBelle, CeCe Peniston scales a broad range of vocal peaks with electrifying ease, but where LaBelle stoops to played-out histrionics, Peniston’s operatic soul vibrates with freewheeling, youthful gusto on this debut album  While this exuberance works best when matched to a hammering house mix, Peniston’s heroic gymnastics ring genuine even in ballads  She just seems to feel more than ordinary folk  But that astonishing voice demands exceptional material; “Lifeline” and other pedestrian vehicles seem all the weaker for Peniston’s formidable gift "

Accoladees
Finally was nominated for Best R&B/Soul Album – Female at the 1993 Soul Train Music Awards, but lost to What's the 411? by Mary J  Blige 

Chart performance
Initially, Finally entered the albums charts overseas  On February 2, 1992, the album debuted in the UK Albums Chart at number ten, its peak, spending nineteen weeks in total on the chart  On February 15, the album appeared for the first time in the Canadian Albums Chart at number sixty, as well as on the US Billboard 200 at number ninety-nine  In both countries, the album reached its peak position in its fourth week on the chart; number twenty in Canada, where it spent twenty-two weeks in the chart, and number seventy in the US, where it spent thirty-six weeks on the chart, of which eighteen were within the Top 100  In the Dutch MegaCharts, the album began its twelve-week run on February 22 at number ninety, reaching number thirty-one  In Billboard's component chart, the album debuted on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart on March 7 at number eighty-eight, and climbed to number thirteen on August 8, spending fifty-two weeks in the chart  In addition, the album charted for two weeks in Austria, peaking there at number thirty-eight, its debut, on March 8 

Track listing
Notes

^[a]  signifies an additional producer

Personnel
Technical

Producers: Daniel Abraham, Felipe Delgado, R K  Jackson, Steve Lindsey, Brian Malouf, David Morales, DeVante Swing
Engineers: Craig Marcus, Tony Maserati, Rob Paustian, John Poppo, Larry Stur
Assistant engineers: Lolly Grodner
Mixing: Daniel Abraham, Terry Burrus, David Morales, DeVante Swing, Elliot Peters
Re-mixing: Brian MaloufPerformers and musicians

Arrangers: Steve Lindsey, DeVante Swing
Vocal arrangements: Danny Madden
Drums: Ed Greene
Percussion: Lenny Castro, Bashiri Johnson, David Morales, Steve Lindsey
Drum programming: Felipe Delgado, R K  Jackson, Peter "Ski" Schwartz
Keyboards, synthesizers: John Barnes, Robbie Buchanan, Terry Burrus, Claude Gaudette, Khris Kellow, Eric Kupper, Steve Lindsey, Peter "Ski" Schwartz
Guitars: Charles Fearing, Grant Geissman, Dean Parks
Saxophone: Brandon Fields

Charts
Promo EP
Along with the release of Peniston's single "Keep On Walkin'", a four-track promo EP titled The Heart and Soul of CeCe Peniston (Four Selections from Finally) was issued in the United States in support of Finally 
Apart from her third US Dance number-one hit "Keep On Walkin'", the EP also featured "Crazy Love", which was also promoted with a single, as well as two other songs from Finally—"I See Love", and "You Win, I Win, We Lose" (with background vocals by Malaika) 
The artwork of the EP included altered pictures on its front and back cover 

Track listing
Personnel
CeCe Peniston – lead vocals
Steve Hurley – production
Daniel Abraham – production
DeVanté Swing – production, arrangement
Darryl Pearson – co-production, arrangement
Felipe Delgado – production
Rodney K  Jackson – production
Rusty D'Agnolo – additional production, engineering
Brian Malouf – additional production, remixing
Larry Sturm – engineering
Tony Maserati – engineering
Lolly Grodner – engineering assistanceRecording details

Songs recorded and mixed at Tangle Wood Studios, Chicago; Right Track Studios, NYC; Chung King Studios, NYC
Songs published by Last Song Inc, George You've Got It Music/O'Hara Music/Music Corp (BMI)/IDG (ASCAP), Big Arm Music (ASCAP), and Urban Tracks Music/Mainlot Music (Broadcast Music Incorporated)
Administration by Third Coast Music (ASCAP)
Passage 6:
Light Poles and Pine Trees
Light Poles and Pine Trees is the third album from the southern hip hop duo Field Mob, and their first, and only, under the Disturbing tha Peace imprint  It was released in stores on June 20, 2006  Originally, the premiere single from the album was to be the track Friday Night but did not make the final album cut, although it was still released in early 2006 as a radio promo and appeared on international editions as an extra bonus track  Instead the first official single from the album was the Jazze Pha produced song "So What" featuring R&B singer Ciara  This has become the duo's most successful hit to date, climbing to #10 on the US Billboard Hot 100, and #3 and #4 on the US Hot Rap Tracks and US Hot R&B/Hip Hop Songs charts, respectively The album itself achieved #1 on the US Billboard Top Rap Albums and #7 on the US Billboard 200  It has sold over 200,000 copies The track "Georgia" is a reprise, originally appearing on the compilation Disturbing tha Peace 
The track "Baby Bend Over" is believed to be the original source of the infamous Chop snare, a widely used electronic snare drum sample 

Track listing
"1, 2, 3" – 4:18
"My Wheels" – 4:11
"So What" (featuring Ciara) – 3:36
"Baby Bend Over" (featuring Polow da Don) – 3:48
"Smilin'" (featuring Ludacris) – 4:18
"Area Code 229" – 4:35
"Blacker the Berry (Skit)" - 1:09
"Blacker the Berry" – 4:25
"I Hate You" – 3:43
"At the Park" – 3:40
"Eat 'Em Up, Beat 'Em Up" – 4:59
"Pistol Grip" – 4:14
"Sorry Baby" (featuring Bobby V) – 3:26
"It's Over" – 3:32
"Georgia" (featuring Jamie Foxx & Ludacris) – 4:23
"Friday Night" (International Editions Only) - 3:45

Charts
Passage 7:
Sam Hunt discography
American singer Sam Hunt has released two studio albums, one mixtape, three extended plays, ten singles, and ten music videos  Hunt signed a record deal with MCA Nashville and launched his musical career with the release of the single "Raised on It" in 2013; it received moderate chart success, peaking at number 49 on Hot Country Songs  Then came the launch of his debut studio album Montevallo in October 2014  It topped the Top Country Albums chart and peaked at number three on the Billboard 200  It was certified 2× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and reached a million sales in the country by February 2016  The album also peaked at number two on the Canadian Albums Chart and received a Gold certification from Music Canada  Montevallo spawned five singles, including the international hit "Take Your Time", which peaked at number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped Hot Country Songs; it was later certified 4× Platinum by the RIAA 

Albums
Studio albums
Mixtapes
Extended plays
Singles
As lead artist
As featured artist
Promotional singles
Other charted songs
Music videos
Writing credits
Notes
Passage 8:
Finger Eleven
Finger Eleven is a Canadian rock band from Burlington, Ontario, formed in 1990  They have released seven studio albums (six as Finger Eleven and one as Rainbow Butt Monkeys), with their album The Greyest of Blue Skies bringing them into the mainstream  Their 2003 self-titled album achieved Gold status in the United States and Platinum in Canada, largely from the success of the single "One Thing", which marked the band's first placing on the US Hot 100 Chart at number 16  Their 2007 album, Them vs  You vs  Me launched the single "Paralyzer", which went on to top the Canadian Hot 100 and both US rock charts, as well as reaching No  6 on the US Hot 100 and No  12 on the Australian Singles Chart  They won the Juno Award for Rock Album of the Year in 2008  The same album was later certified gold in the US and multi-platinum in Canada  They released their sixth studio album, Life Turns Electric, on October 5, 2010; it was nominated as Best Rock Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2011  Five Crooked Lines, their 7th studio album, was released in 2015  Between 1995 and 2016, Finger Eleven was among the top 75 best-selling Canadian artists in Canada and among the top 25 best-selling Canadian bands in Canada 

History
Letters from Chutney (1990–1996)
Finger Eleven first formed at Lester B  Pearson High School in Burlington, Ontario as Stone Soul Picnic, then changed their name to Rainbow Butt Monkeys  One of their first shows was at a school Christmas concert in 1990, and they won the 97 7 CHTZ (Hits) HTZ FM's Rock Search competition  At the time, the band's lineup consisted of Scott Anderson (vocals), James Black (guitar, vocals), Rick Jackett (guitar), Sean Anderson (bass), and Rob Gommerman (drums) 
They were signed by Mercury Records and, after releasing four EPs, they issued the album Letters from Chutney (1995), which received generally favourable reviews  In 1996, they were taken on by the management company Coalition Entertainment 

Tip (1997–1999)
In 1997, the band changed its name to Finger Eleven, which came from a demo of their song "Thin Spirits"  Their first album under the new name was Tip, produced by Arnold Lanni (Our Lady Peace)  Mercury dropped the band after the album's release; they were then signed to Wind-up Records, which re-released the record in 1998  During this period, the band toured heavily, as part of Edgefest, the Vans Warped Tour and, several times, opening for Creed and Fuel  In 1999, the track "Quicksand" was used in the TV series Roswell (uncredited) Following the release of Tip, drummer Rob Gommerman left the band  He was replaced by Rich Beddoe, whom James Black had met at an Alice in Chains concert in Toronto several years earlier 

The Greyest of Blue Skies (2000–2002)
In 2000, Finger Eleven released The Greyest of Blue Skies, again produced by Arnold Lanni  The album was commercially successful in Canada and was certified Gold  This was another period of heavy touring, with the band playing X-Fest, Edgefest, K-Rockathon, and the four-city Canadian festival Summersault 2000  Finger Eleven also began appearing on its own, and headlining concerts with other bands A song from this album, "Suffocate", was used in the 2000 film Scream 3  In 2001, the song "Drag You Down" was used in the animated sitcom Daria  In 2002, Finger Eleven covered and remixed the entrance theme for wrestler Kane, a song they called "Slow Chemical", which was recorded and mixed at Metalworks Studios in Mississauga, Ontario  Kane used the song from 2002 to 2008  It was also used in WrestleMania 20 (2004), WrestleMania 22 (2006), WWE Backlash (2006), WrestleMania 23 (2007), and in the video game WWE SmackDown vs  Raw 2008, as well as on the soundtrack for 2004's film The Punisher 

Finger Eleven (2003–2006)
The band's 2003 self-titled album, Finger Eleven, was produced by Johnny K  This album, characterized by screamed vocals over repetitive rock guitar rhythms, included the hit single "One Thing", which earned them their first US Gold and Canadian Platinum albums  "One Thing" reached No 16 on Billboard's U S charts, and appeared in the TV shows Scrubs, Smallville, and Third Watch (uncredited)  It was also used on World Wrestling Entertainment's 2007 edition of Raw, during a tribute video for Chris Benoit, who had killed himself and his family on June 25  In 2004, Finger Eleven won the MuchMusic Video Award for Best Video for "One Thing" and performed the song on Live with Regis and Kelly and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno In 2003, the Finger Eleven song "Good Times" was used in the soundtrack for the snowboard racing game SSX 3  "Good Times" and "Conversations" were used in the Nintendo video game 1080° Avalanche  In 2004, the song "Stay in Shadow" was used in the video game Burnout 3: Takedown  In 2005, "Thousand Mile Wish" was used in the soundtrack of the superhero film Elektra The band followed this success with a tour of North America, Europe, and Australia, from 2003 to 2005  They played numerous festivals and opened for Evanescence, Nickelback, and The Tragically Hip 

Them vs  You vs  Me (2007–2009)
Finger Eleven's fifth studio album, Them vs  You vs  Me, was released on March 6, 2007, with Johnny K returning as producer  The style on this album was more mellow than previous work  The lead single, "Paralyzer", became the band's biggest hit; it spent fifty weeks on the charts and reached No  6 on the U S  Hot 100 in November 2007, as well as attaining the No  1 spot in Canada and on U S  rock charts  The album also featured the singles "Falling On", "I'll Keep Your Memory Vague", and "Talking to the Walls" 
"Paralyzer" was included in the soundtrack of the 2007 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, in a 2008 episode of the TV series Gossip Girl and, in 2009, in the soundtrack of the video game Band Hero 
In December 2007, the DVD Us-vs-Then-vs-Now was released, with footage spanning the band's career up to that point Them vs  You vs  Me was certified Gold in the U S  in March 2008, peaking at No  14 on the Hot 100  The album also won Rock Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2008  At the ceremony, the band performed live on national television with the Calgary Youth Orchestra During this period, Finger Eleven continued to tour heavily, playing various festivals and numerous concerts with Seether, 3 Doors Down, and Kid Rock  They also performed at the 2007 NHL Awards Show in Toronto and, in 2009, played a show for Canadian and US troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan

Life Turns Electric (2010–2012)
Finger Eleven's sixth album, Life Turns Electric, was released in October 2010  The first single from the record, "Living in a Dream", was released on iTunes in July of that year; it added elements of funk rock and dance rock  A music video for the second single, "Whatever Doesn't Kill Me", was released in January 2011  The video was directed by Alon Isocianu  The remaining singles, "Stone Soul" and "Pieces Fit", were released without music videos  The album received mixed reviews  It peaked at No 88 on the Billboard Charts Finger Eleven toured in support of the record throughout 2011 and 2012, again playing numerous festivals and concerts with Seether, Papa Roach, and Three Days Grace 

Five Crooked Lines (2013–2016)
At the end of 2013, drummer Rich Beddoe left the band; he was replaced by Steve Molella the following year  In the interim, Finger Eleven recorded their next album with session drummer Chris Powell  Also in 2013, Wind-Up Records' catalogue was sold to the Bicycle Music Company which, in 2015, merged with Concord Music Group, so that Finger Eleven's new label became Concord Bicycle Music 
The band toured during the summer of 2015 with Three Days Grace 
(In 2015, former Three Days Grace frontman Adam Gontier would team up with Beddoe, Staind guitarist Mike Mushok, and bassist Corey Lowery to form the supergroup Saint Asonia) Finger Eleven issued their seventh album, Five Crooked Lines, on July 31, 2015, and released the lead single "Wolves and Doors" to Canadian radio  The album received favourable reviews, charted for one week, and reached No 44 on the charts  They set out on their cross-Canada Fall of the Hammer Tour in support of the release  In some markets, the band participated with media partners in an opening-act contest 

Twentieth anniversary of Tip and Rainbow Butt Monkeys reunion (2017–present)
Finger Eleven scheduled three shows in southern Ontario to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Canadian release of Tip, on March 23 in Burlington, March 24 in St  Catharines, and March 31 in Toronto  All three of these shows had a similar format: there was an exclusively acoustic set, with Q&A before the show  For the main event, the band played Tip in its entirety; this was followed by an encore of Best of the Rest, a selection of band favourites from their other albums On June 9, 2018, the rockers performed as Rainbow Butt Monkeys for the first time since 1997, playing at Burlington's Sound of Music Festival and showcasing songs from their debut album, Letters from Chutney  They have since played festivals and concerts throughout North America On May 10, 2023, the band released a music video for their song "Together Right", their first new material in over seven years, from their upcoming compilation album 

Band members
Current
Scott Anderson – lead vocals (1990–present)
James Black – lead guitar, backing vocals (1990–present)
Rick Jackett – rhythm guitar (1990–present)
Sean Anderson – bass (1990–present)
Steve Molella – drums (2014–present)Past

Rob Gommerman – drums (1990–1998)
Rich Beddoe – drums (1998–2013)Session musicians

Chris Powell – drums (2014)

Timeline
Discography
Studio albums

Letters from Chutney (1995) (as Rainbow Butt Monkeys)
Tip (1997)
The Greyest of Blue Skies (2000)
Finger Eleven (2003)
Them vs  You vs  Me (2007)
Life Turns Electric (2010)
Five Crooked Lines (2015)

Awards and nominations
See also
Canadian rock
Music of Canada
Passage 9:
Nu Nu
"Nu Nu" is the second single of Chicago house-musc artist Lidell Townsell,which featured duo M T F  The song was released from his 1992 Mercury/PolyGram Records album release Harmony 

Chart performance
"Nu Nu" reached #1 on the US Hot Dance Music/Maxi Singles chart and #2 on the US Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart  It was #26 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #44 on the US Hot Hip-Hop & R&B Singles 

FannyPack version
New York's hip hop/electronica group FannyPack covered the song, renaming it "Nu Nu (Yeah Yeah)," in 2005  The Double J & Haze Extended Mix of this version appeared on the soundtrack of the 2006 film "Stick It" and on the soundtrack of the 2009 film "Fired Up!"This version was used in promos by American television network NBC on its weeknight talk show Late Night with Jimmy Fallon during 2010 

Austin Mahone/Pitbull Mmm Yeah sampled version
The 2014 song “Mmm Yeah,” sung by Austin Mahone and featuring Pitbull, heavily samples the lyrics and verses from “Nu Nu” and most notably samples the chorus 
Passage 10:
Birdman discography
The discography of American rapper Birdman consists of 5 studio albums (4 as a solo artist, and 1 collaborative album with rapper Lil Wayne), 2 mixtapes, 23 music videos, 48 singles, including 23 as a featured artist, and 7 promotional singles  In 2002, Birdman released his debut studio album Birdman (also known under the title Baby aka the #1 Stunna) under the recording name Baby  It peaked at number 24 on the US Billboard 200, spending 23 weeks on the chart  Three singles were released from the album; the first, "Do That   ", reached number 33 on the US Billboard Hot 100, and the second, "What Happened to That Boy", reached number 45 on the same chart  The third single, "Baby You Can Do It", only charted on the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles Sales chart  In 2003, Birdman collaborated with singer Ginuwine on the single "Hell Yeah" and rapper Bow Wow on the single "Let's Get Down", which reached numbers 17 and 14 respectively on the Hot 100 In 2005, Birdman released his second album Fast Money  It peaked at number 9 on the Billboard 200, and the album's two singles, "Get Your Shine On" and "Neck of the Woods", both charted in the top 75 of the US Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart  In 2006, Birdman released Like Father, Like Son, a collaboration album with fellow rapper Lil Wayne  It peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 and topped the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and Top Rap Albums charts  Like Father, Like Son produced four singles, including "Stuntin' Like My Daddy", which peaked at number 21 on the Hot 100  Birdman's third studio album 5 * Stunna was released in 2007, and included the singles "Pop Bottles" – which peaked at number 38 on the Hot 100 – "100 Million" and "I Run This" 
Birdman's fourth studio album Priceless was released in 2009  It peaked at number 33 on the Billboard 200, number 5 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and number 3 on the Top Rap Albums chart  Priceless included four singles; "Always Strapped", which peaked at number 54 on the Hot 100, "Written on Her", "Money to Blow", which peaked at number 26 on the Hot 100 and was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and "4 My Town (Play Ball)", which peaked at number 92 on the Hot 100  In 2010, Birdman, Lil Wayne and singer Jay Sean appeared on the Kevin Rudolf single "I Made It (Cash Money Heroes)", which reached number 21 on the Hot 100 and charted in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom  Since 2010, Birdman has also released the singles "Loyalty", "Fire Flame", "I Get Money", "Y U  Mad" and "Born Stunna", all of which have reached the top 65 of the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart 

Albums
Studio albums
Collaboration albums
Mixtapes
Collaborative mixtapes
Singles
As lead artist
As featured artist
Promotional singles
Other charted and certified songs
Guest appearances
Music videos
As lead artist
See also
Big Tymers discography
Cash Money Millionaires discography

Notes



ground_truth: number five

prompt_front: Answer the question based on the given passages. Only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: Are Stanley Elkin and Anne Tyler from the same country?

The following are given passages.
Context 4:  bite off " Robert Christgau gave Chapter II a "C" rating in his review for The Village Voice, calling it a "pathologically modest follow-up " PopMatters from Maurice Bottomley assured that "Chapter 2 is not going to feature as any scribe's R&B album of the year "

Commercial performance
In the United States, Chapter II debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 326,000 units sold  While it became Ashanti's second chart topper, it was a considerable decline from her previous effort Ashanti, which had opened to sales of 502,500 units in April 2002  In total, it remained on the Billboard 200 chart for 30 consecutive weeks  In addition, it reached the top position on Billboard's Top R&B/Hip Hop Albums chart, where it stayed at the top spot for two consecutive weeks  On August 14, 2003, The album was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)  Towards the end of 2003, Billboard ranked the album at number 54 and 27 respectively on its Billboard 200 and Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums year end chart lists  By January 2005, Chapter II had sold 1 5 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan Elsewhere, Chapter II reached the top five on the Canadian and UK Singles Chart  It was certified gold by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), indicating sales in excess of 100,000 copies, and also went gold in Japan  In Switzerland, it reached the top ten, debuting and peaking at number nine on the Swiss Albums Chart, making it Ashanti's highest-charting album to date  Chapter II also entered the top 20 in Australia and Germany  To date, the album has sold 3 million copies worldwide 

Track listing
Samples
"Intro (Medley)" contains samples of Ashanti tracks "Foolish", "Happy", "Down 4 U" (with Ja Rule, Charli Baltimore & Vita), "Baby" and "Mesmerize" (with Ja Rule) 
"Breakup 2 Makeup" contains a sample of "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby" by Barry White 
"Rain on Me" contains a sample of "Look of Love" by Isaac Hayes 
"Then Ya Gone" contains samples of "Ain't I Been Good to You" by The Isley Brothers, and "One Day" by UGK 
"Feel So Good" contains a sample of "Playing Your Game, Baby" by Barry White 
"The Story of 2" contains a sample of "Dream Maker" by Rick James 
"Sweet Baby" contains a sample of "I'm Glad You're Mine" by Al Green 
"U Say I Say" contains a sample of "Never Enough" by Groove Theory 
"I Found Lovin'" is a cover of the same-titled song by Fatback Band 

Personnel
Charts
Certifications
See also
List of Billboard 200 number-one albums of 2003
List of Billboard number-one R&B albums of 2003
Passage 3:
Chapter II (Benga album)
Chapter II is the third studio album by British record producer Benga  The album was released on 6 May 2013 through Sony Music  It entered the UK Albums Chart at number 93 

Background and development
The album was produced from late 2011 to 2013  On 30 November 2011, Benga and Youngman performed at 1Xtra Live  They premiered "Running" live from Bristol  The first official single from the album was "I Will Never Change", released in March 2012  In June 2012, Benga and P Money performed a live version of "High Speed" on BBC Radio 1Xtra in Maida Vale Studios  Benga himself provided vocoded vocals  Several singles released throughout 2012 were omitted from the album: "Icon", "Pour Your Love", "We're Coming Out" and "Open Your Eyes"  However, "Pour Your Love" (released on 24 August 2012) is the only song so far to chart in the United Kingdom, charting at number 189 in the UK Singles Chart 
A series of three heavier songs advertised as "club singles" were released throughout December 2012: "We're Coming Out", "Open Your Eyes" and "To Hell and Back"  The latter is the only one to feature on the album  The album's initial release date was set to be 22 April 2013, but it was delayed by two weeks  Benga supported Example on his 2013 arena tour around the United Kingdom, with Youngman providing vocals for his "Benga Live" sets  Several songs from the album were performed on tour, including "Choose 1"; "Smile"; "Getting 42"; "To Hell and Back"; "I Will Never Change"; and "Forefather", which got its live debut at the Manchester Arena on March 1 with a live PA from Kano  "Smile" features uncredited vocals from Charli XCX 

Singles
"I Will Never Change" is the album's lead single  It was released on 16 March 2012  The track was the first to be written on the album, and its upload on UKF has over one and a half million YouTube views  The official video premiered on Benga's Vevo on 5 April 2013 at a total length of two minutes and one second  The video features the song's waveform being created in stop motion out of 960 differently sized vinyls 
"To Hell and Back" is the second single from the album  It was released on 17 December 2012  On Example's 2013 arena tour, P Money performed a live PA which doesn't feature on the studio version of the track 
"Forefather" with Kano is the third single from the album  It was released on 7 March 2013 and entered the UK Singles Chart at number 123  The official video premiered on Benga's Vevo on 10 March 2013 at a total length of three minutes and thirty-eight seconds  The video compares Benga and Kano's lifestyles in 2003, 2008 and 2013: showing that although their success has changed their surroundings, their music is still "sounding like some old-school KA"  It is the only explicit track on the album 

Track listing
Personnel
Credits adapted from Chapter II album liner notes 
Adegbenga "Benga" Adejumo – mixing, engineering, producer (all tracks), vocals (11)
Autumn Rowe - vocals (8)
Ayo Simpson - engineering (14)
Charlotte Emma "Charli XCX" Aitchison - vocals (2)
Daniel "Danny C" Caim - vocal recording (11)
Daniel Ledinsky - backing vocals (14)
Jack Tarrant - mixing, engineering (8, 14)
Kane "Kano" Robinson - vocals (4)
Michael "Mikey J" Asante - vocal recording, vocal mixing (4)
Paris "P Money" Moore-Williams - vocals (11)
Rowan "Route 94" Jones - co-producer (2)
Rudie Edwards - vocals (14)
Sam Frank - vocals, saxophone (10)
Simon "Youngman" Smith - vocals (6, 13)
Stuart Hawkes - mastering (all tracks)

Chart performance
Weekly charts
Release history
Passage 4:
Rock wit U (Awww Baby)
"Rock wit U (Awww Baby)" is a song by American R&B singer Ashanti  Written by her along with Irv Gotti and Chink Santana for her second studio album, Chapter II (2003), and produced by Gotti and Santana, the song was released by Murder Inc  on May 19, 2003, as the lead single from Chapter II, peaked at number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 for one week and became her first international hit from her second album, reaching number 7 in the UK and number 19 in Australia 

Music video
Directed by Paul Hunter and filmed in Miami in early May 2003, the music video for "Rock wit U (Awww Baby)" features Ashanti at a beach with her boyfriend while they flirt in bed together and driving down the road in a Jeep  In some scenes, the boyfriend watches Ashanti dance for him in the house and behind some trees at night  There is also a scene where she rides on an elephant in the water  The video was nominated at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards for Best R&B Video 

Samples
The song was sampled for British rapper Aitch's single "Baby"  The single was released on 10 March 2022  It debuted on the UK Official Singles Top 100 on 18 March 2022, placing at number 2 

Track listings
Notes

^[a]  denotes additional producer

Credits and personnel
Credits lifted from the liner notes of Chapter II 

Charts
Certifications
Release history
Passage 5:
Guillotine IV (The Final Chapter)
"Guillotine IV (The Final Chapter)" is the second single from Falling in Reverse's third album Just Like You  It is the fourth and final installment of the Guillotine series that was started by Ronnie Radke when he was the frontman of Escape the Fate  Ronnie Radke sang the first song, "The Guillotine", from Escape the Fate's Dying Is Your Latest Fashion; and Craig Mabbit sang "This War Is Ours (The Guillotine II)" and "The Aftermath (The Guillotine III)" from Escape the Fate's This War Is Ours and their self-titled album, respectively 

Personnel
Falling in ReverseRonnie Radke – lead vocals
Jacky Vincent – lead guitar, backing vocals
Derek Jones – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Ryan Seaman – drums, percussion, backing vocalsAdditionalCharles Kallaghan Massabo – bass
Passage 6:
Capítulo II: Brinca
Capítulo II: Brinca (English: Chapter II: Jump) is the second studio album by Mexican-American recording artist DJ Kane  It was released on September 13, 2005 by EMI Latin 

Track listing
Passage 7:
Ashanti (singer)
Ashanti Shequoiya Douglas (born October 13, 1980) is an American singer, songwriter and actress  She was first discovered as a teenager and later signed to Murder Inc  Records in 2002  That year, she was featured on Fat Joe's "What's Luv?" and Ja Rule's "Always on Time", both of which became two of the biggest hit songs of 2002  She became the first female artist to occupy the top two positions on the U S  Billboard Hot 100 chart simultaneously with "Foolish" and "What's Luv?" at numbers one and two, respectively 
In 2002, Ashanti released her eponymous debut album, which sold over 505,000 copies throughout the U S  in its first week of release  The album earned her many awards, including eight Billboard Music Awards, two American Music Awards, and a Grammy Award in 2003 for Best Contemporary R&B Album  The album has since been certified triple platinum in the United States and sold six million copies worldwide by the end of 2003  The lead single for the album, "Foolish", was a critical and commercial success; it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100  With "Foolish", she became the second artist (after The Beatles) to have their first three chart entries in the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously  Ashanti wrote and provided background vocals for Jennifer Lopez's "Ain't It Funny (Murder Remix)", which also reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 In 2003, Ashanti released her second album, Chapter II, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, with first-week sales of 326,000 copies in the U S  The album went platinum, selling over 1 5 million copies in the U S  since its release  The album's singles, "Rock wit U (Awww Baby)" and "Rain on Me", were both commercial successes, peaking at number two and number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, respectively  Chapter II was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary R&B Album, and "Rock wit U (Awww Baby)" and "Rain on Me" were each nominated in the categories of Best R&B Song and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance  In November 2003, Ashanti released a Christmas album titled Ashanti's Christmas, which was a modest commercial success 
In 2004, Ashanti released her third studio album, Concrete Rose, the title of which took on Tupac Shakur's pseudonym "The Rose That Grew from Concrete"  The album debuted at number seven in the U S , with first-week sales of 254,000 copies, and became her third platinum-certified album  The first single, "Only U", reached number thirteen on the Billboard Hot 100 and became her biggest hit in the United Kingdom, peaking at number two  A second single, the ballad "Don't Let Them", garnered little chart success after Def Jam refused to fund a music video due to Irv Gotti's legal troubles during his money laundering trial  Her subsequent albums include The Declaration (2008) and Braveheart (2014), the latter of which was released independently, on Ashanti's record label, Written Entertainment 
Aside from music, Ashanti has also acted in various productions  In 2005, she made her feature film debut in Coach Carter alongside Samuel L  Jackson  She also starred as Dorothy Gale in the made-for-television film The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, which attracted nearly 8 million viewers when it premiered  She has since appeared in the films John Tucker Must Die (2006) and Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)  Throughout her career, Ashanti has sold nearly 15 million records worldwide 

Early life
Ashanti Douglas was born on October 13, 1980 in Glen Cove, New York  Her mother, Tina Douglas, is African-American and a former dance teacher, her father, Ken-Kaide Thomas Douglas, is also African-American and a former singer  She is the oldest of her parents' children, with a younger sister named Kenashia "Shia" Douglas  Ashanti's mother named her after the Ashanti Empire in Ghana; in this nation, women had power and influence, and Tina wanted Ashanti to follow that model  Her grandfather, James, was a civil rights activist who was associated with Martin Luther King Jr  in the 1960s Ashanti's mother discovered her full singing potential when she overheard Ashanti singing Mary J  Blige's "Reminisce" at age 12 (after the song was released on Ashanti's birthday)  While attending high school, she began to write songs  As a teenager, she performed in a local talent show and at several small festivals  She got her first taste of acting as a child extra in Spike Lee's Malcolm X (1992) and in Ted Demme's Who's the Man?  She also had a couple of minor appearances in music videos, such as KRS-One's "MC's Act Like They Don't Know" as well as 8-Off's "Ghetto Girl" Ashanti struggled to find success as a singer after being courted by several record labels, including Bad Boy and Jive  Despite this, she continued to perform in and around New York and began hanging out at the Murder Inc  recording studio, hoping for a big break 

Career
2001–2003: Ashanti, Chapter II and Ashanti's Christmas
Ashanti was first noticed by Irv Gotti because of her vocal skills  He asked her to pen hooks for his rap artists and to perform with them in duets  Ashanti provided the melodic response to their call  Ashanti was first featured as a background vocalist on rapper Big Pun's song "How We Roll"  In the same year, Ashanti was featured on fellow labelmate Cadillac Tah's singles "Pov City Anthem" and "Just Like a Thug"  She also appeared on the 2001 The Fast and the Furious soundtrack as a featured artist on Vita's 2001 hip hop remake of Madonna's "Justify My Love" and on the solo track "When a Man Does Wrong"  She was then featured on Fat Joe's "What's Luv?" and Ja Rule's "Always on Time"  "What's Luv?" and "Always on Time" were released simultaneously and became two of the biggest hit songs of 2002  Ashanti became the first female to occupy the top two positions on the U S  Billboard Hot 100 chart simultaneously when "Always on Time" and "What's Luv?" were at numbers one and two, respectively 
Following the success of her collaborations with Ja Rule and Fat Joe, Ashanti released her debut single, "Foolish", which contains a sample of the 1983 song "Stay with Me" by DeBarge (also used by The Notorious B I G  in his 1995 single "One More Chance", and by Big L in "MVP")  This is her biggest success to date, spending ten weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100  She became the second artist (after The Beatles) to have their first three chart entries in the top ten of the Hot 100 simultaneously  Ashanti's self-titled debut album, Ashanti, was released on Irv Gotti's Murder Inc  record label in April 2002  It debuted at number one on the U S  Billboard 200 albums chart  The album has been certified triple platinum in the United States and sold six million copies worldwide  Ashanti wrote the album's twelve tracks, most of which were written on the spot in the studio  Ashanti's follow-up singles, "Happy" and "Baby", were not as successful as her debut single but peaked inside the top ten and top twenty in the U S , respectively  Ashanti's debut album earned her many awards, including eight Billboard Music Awards, two American Music Awards, and a Grammy Award in 2003 for Best Contemporary R&B Album  Ashanti was the first artist to win Best Contemporary R&B Album before the category was last awarded in 2011  She was nominated as Best New Artist and "Foolish" was nominated in the Best Female R&B Vocal Performance category  She also received a Comet Award and two Soul Train Music Awards that same year 
Ashanti became the subject of controversy when it was announced that she would receive the Soul Train Aretha Franklin Award for "Entertainer of the Year", a high school student took offense and started an online petition against her, explaining to The Seattle Times that she was too new to deserve the award  Nearly 30,000 people agreed with him, signing the petition  Many said that established artists such as Mary J  Blige and Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott or critically acclaimed singers like Alicia Keys and India Arie were more deserving of an award that carries the name of a musical legend  Despite the petition, the Soul Train committee and Don Cornelius stuck by their decision  Ashanti was applauded by her musical peers as she entered the Pasadena Civic Auditorium to accept her award and she was supported onstage by Patti LaBelle, who stated "she's a baby and we have to support our babies "Just before the release of her second album, Ashanti headlined VH1 Divas Duets alongside Whitney Houston, Chaka Khan, Beyoncé and Lisa Marie Presley  During the concert, she performed duets with the Isley Brothers and Stevie Wonder, and participated in the all-star finale performance of Wonder's "Higher Ground "In July 2003, Ashanti released her second album, Chapter II, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, with first-week sales of 326,000 copies in the U S  The album went platinum, selling over 1 5  a million copies in the U S  Chapter II's first single, "Rock wit U (Awww Baby)", became a hit, peaking at number two on the Billboard Hot 100  Its video, which showed Ashanti in a bikini frolicking on a beach and riding an elephant, was nominated for two 2003 MTV Video Music Awards  A remix of the song contains interpolations of Michael Jackson's "Rock with You"  The second single, "Rain on Me", reached the number seven spot on the Hot 100 and number two on the Hot 100 R&B Songs chart  Chapter II was nominated for a 2004 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary R&B Album, and "Rock wit U (Awww Baby)" and "Rain on Me" were nominated in the categories of Best R&B Song and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, respectively  In the "Rain on Me," mini-movie music video—directed by Hype Williams and co-starring Larenz Tate—Ashanti portrays a troubled young woman in an abusive relationship  She received a Lifetime Channel Achievement Award for her message speaking out against domestic violence  That same year, she began dating rapper Nelly In November 2003, Ashanti released a Christmas album titled Ashanti's Christmas  It contained 10 Christmas songs and was a modest commercial success and sold just around 100,000 units in the U S  The album peaked at No  160 in the Billboard charts 

2004–2007: Concrete Rose, Collectibles by Ashanti and acting
Before Concrete Rose was released, Ashanti did some major promotion for her single "Only U", when she premiered it at the 2004 Vibe Music Awards  She featured on "Wonderful"—with Ja Rule and R  Kelly—that year, which peaked at number five in the U S  and at number one in the UK  In December 2004, Ashanti released her third studio album, Concrete Rose, the title of which took on Tupac Shakur's pseudonym "The Rose That Grew from Concrete"  The album debuted at number seven in the U S , with first-week sales of 254,000 copies, and eventually became her third platinum-certified album  The first single, "Only U", reached number thirteen on the Billboard Hot 100 and became her biggest hit in the United Kingdom, peaking at number two  A second single, the ballad "Don't Let Them", garnered little chart success after Def Jam refused to fund a music video due to Irv Gotti's legal troubles during his money laundering trial  The single was released only in the U S , where it failed to chart, and the UK, where it reached the lower end of the top forty  After the release of Concrete Rose, Ashanti released the DVD Ashanti: The Making of a Star, which was available only for a limited time  The deluxe DVD includes an exclusive photo and video shoot footage, music from the albums Ashanti, Chapter II and Concrete Rose, special concert footage, unreleased childhood school performances, and behind-the-scenes interviews with family, friends, and fans 
In 2005, Ashanti focused more on her acting career, making her feature film acting debut in the film Coach Carter alongside Samuel L  Jackson, as well as starring as Dorothy Gale in the made-for-television film The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, which pulled in nearly 8 million viewers when it premiered  She sang "When I'm with You" for the film which was nominated for a Primetime Emmy in the Outstanding Music and Lyrics category  In Coach Carter, she played a pregnant teenager named Kyra who has to decide whether or not to abort her unborn child  The movie opened at number-one at the U S  box office, eventually grossing $67  million domestically  Later in 2005, Ashanti was invited to Oprah Winfrey's Legends Ball, which honored some of the most influential and legendary African American women of the twentieth century in the fields of art, entertainment, and civil rights  In December 2005, Ashanti released a remix album of Concrete Rose titled Collectables by Ashanti  The album was an opportunity for her to fulfill her contract with Def Jam (and have the option of working with another label)  It did not fare well on the charts 
In 2006, she starred in the teen comedy John Tucker Must Die, which opened and peaked at number three at the U S  box office (competing with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Miami Vice) and grossed $68,818,076 worldwide  In 2007, she played a supporting role in the action film Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) 

2008–2010: The Declaration, departure from The Inc  and The Wiz
Her fourth studio album, The Declaration, was released on June 3, 2008,  and sold 86,000 units its first week of release, which were the lowest first-week sales for any of Ashanti's studio albums  In mid-2007, MTV News reported that the first single from The Declaration was "Switch", which was produced by Shy Carter and released digitally in the United States on July 24, 2007  It was later reported that "Switch" may not be included on the album's track listing, and that the first single would be "Hey Baby (After the Club)" it was released to radio and digital outlets on October 16  The song, which does not appear on the U S  editions of the album, peaked at number eighty-seven on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart  "The Way That I Love You", was released to radio and digital outlets in January 2008, and was referred to as the "first single" in press material and media reports  It reached number two on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and number thirty-seven on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Ashanti's first song to reach the top forty since "Only U" in 2004  "Body On Me" was recorded not only for Ashanti's The Declaration, but also for Nelly's fifth studio album Brass Knuckles  The track is produced by Akon and Giorgio Tuinfort  It went to number one on Billboard's Hot Videoclip Tracks chart in its first week, becoming the first number-one single from Nelly's album "Good Good" was released to urban radio stations on July 16, 2008  The song contains elements of Elton John's 1974 single "Bennie and the Jets", and has the same melody arrangement as Michael Jackson's "The Girl Is Mine"  In July 2008, Ashanti was named an ambassador of tourism for Nassau County, Long Island 
In May 2009, Irv Gotti announced that he was officially releasing Ashanti from The Inc  Records, stating that "The relationship has run its course  The chemistry of what's needed — we're in two totally different places  You're talking to somebody that took her and shaped and molded her and put her out there for the world, and it blew up  We [hold the record] for the [fastest] selling debut by a female R&B artist — 503 [thousand]  We did it! My views and philosophies and her views and philosophies are not meeting up " Gotti also admitted that he and Ashanti have not spoken to each other in a long time  A representative for Ashanti did not respond  On September 24, 2009, Ashanti announced her fifth studio album would be released from her new label, Written Entertainment 
Ashanti headlined the cast of The Wiz in the New York City Center Encores! Summer Stars staging from June 12 to July 5, 2009  Ashanti's role as Dorothy has since received mixed reviews from critics as most praised her vocals but was less pleased with her acting ability  BET and Entertainment Weekly both praised the singer's performance as The New York Post and New York Times gave lukewarm reviews  Though the first night was sold out, some of the other shows were unable to follow its success  On October 27, 2008, Ashanti took part in The Yellow Brick Road Not Taken, a one night only concert to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Wicked, featuring songs written by Stephen Schwartz, that were cut from the show 

2011–2014: Hiatus and Braveheart
After a four-year hiatus, Ashanti released the song "Never Too Far Away", which was featured in Morgan Creek's film Dream House starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz with Naomi Watts  The lead single from her fifth studio album, "The Woman You Love" featuring American rapper Busta Rhymes, was released online on December 15, 2011  Ashanti teamed up with Meek Mill and French Montana for the second single "No One Greater", which was produced by 7 Aurelius, Irv Gotti and Chink Santana  In April 2013, she released another single called "Never Should Have", which later won "Best Independent R&B/Soul Performance" at the 2013 Soul Train Awards  A music video for the track was also released In November 2012, it was reported that she had landed her first series regular role in the seventh season of Army Wives, playing Latasha Montclair  The series was canceled on September 24, 2013  In the fall of 2013, she appeared in a guest spot on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit alongside Clay Aiken and Taylor Hicks  She also starred in the Lifetime film Christmas in the City which premiered on December 7, 2013 In August 2013, Ashanti announced her plans to once again work with Ja Rule, who'd been released from prison in July of that year following a six-year sentence stemming from a gun charge  On January 8, 2014, she revealed the official cover art and release date for Braveheart, her fifth album, which was released on March 4, 2014  In January 2014, Ashanti shot the video for the official first single from Braveheart titled "I Got It" featuring Rick Ross  The video was shot in Miami, Florida, and was directed by Eif Rivera  In July, Ashanti announced that the second official single from BraveHeart would be "Early in the Morning" featuring French Montana  Upon release, the album garnered favorable reviews, with music critics describing Braveheart's sound as an "evolution of R&B" and praising the themes of empowerment but criticizing the romantic clichés and lack of interesting moments on the album  On the charts, Braveheart opened at number ten in the U S  Billboard 200, becoming Ashanti's fifth consecutive top-ten album, as well as her first Independent Albums chart-topper  It also debuted in the top thirty of the UK R&B Albums Chart and top-forty of the UK Indie Albums Chart 

2015–present: Current activities and upcoming seventh studio album
In 2015, she announced that she had worked on new music for her seventh album, with an unknown release date  Ashanti collaborated with Michelle Obama for her #Let'sMove campaign to spread awareness of drinking water with her new video and song "Let's Go" released in 2015  In 2016, she collaborated on the song "Seven Day Love" included in the album "Inzombia" by Canadian singer Belly  She has also worked with numerous artists, including Sia, Alicia Keys, John Legend, Queen Latifah, Usher and Kelly Clarkson to interpret the songs of the Broadway musical "Hamilton" for the compilation "The Hamilton Mixtape" In 2017, Ashanti announced her seventh studio album, revealing it would be released in 2018  She denied this in June 2018, confirming the future release of an album in collaboration with rapper Ja Rule  Between 2017 and 2018 she returned to the music scene with several collaborations including the single "Say Less" with Ty Dolla Sign, the track "The Road" by Machel Montano, and the song "Start This Shit Off Right" with Mack Maine, from the album "Tha Carter V" by Lil Wayne Ashanti released the collaboration "Pretty Little Thing" with Afro B in August 2019  She also featured on the soundtrack of the film Stuck, which she produced  In November, Ashanti guest-starred as herself in two episodes of the third season of The CW's Dynasty reboot: "Mother, I'm At La Mirage" and "Something Desperate" In January 2021, Ashanti released her single "2:35 (I Want You)" On March 10, 2022, Ashanti's single "Rock wit U (Awww Baby)" was heavily sampled for British rapper Aitch's single "Baby" In October 2022, Ashanti was featured on Diddy’s “Gotta Move On” remix which also features Bryson Tiller and Yung Miami 

Artistry
Ashanti has a lyric soprano voice type  Critics have referred to her voice as "pretty" and her soprano as "sultry" and "sweet but slight"  Jason Birchmeier of AllMusic noted her reputation for using her "swooning voice" in duets with Big Pun, Fat Joe, and Ja Rule  As a young girl, Ashanti was influenced by Ella Fitzgerald, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Tupac Shakur, but she cites Mary J  Blige as the main reason she wanted to pursue a singing career  Further musical influences include Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Madonna, Smokey Robinson, Donna Summer, and Blue Magic 

Philanthropy
In 2003, Ashanti partnered with LidRock and the San Francisco-based Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF) to raise awareness about the issue of domestic violence during National Domestic Violence Awareness Month and to distribute the "Rain on Me" mini-movie using LidRock's unique platform  Proceeds from the $5 mini-disc went towards helping to stop domestic violence  Ashanti also recorded a public service announcement that appeared in more than 4,000 film screens and reached millions of people  Ashanti also gives back by raising money for sickle cell research and she is active in helping the Make-A-Wish Foundation stating, "I'll go and do just about anything for them " In 2005, Ashanti helped by recording public service announcement and raising money for the Southeast Asia tsunami disaster  Later that year, she helped raise money for the Hurricane Katrina victims and storm evacuees In 2008, Ashanti, along with others celebrities, taped a PSA to help stop violence and discrimination towards the LGBT community in response to the death of Lawrence King, an eighth-grader at E O  Green Junior High School, who was shot because of his sexual orientation and gender expression  That same year, she launched a special on-line campaign called "I Declare Me   " with Wal-Mart  The campaign's core is a very personal focus on the self-definition and empowerment of women across the United States, with its home base at Ashanti's official website  The campaign creates a safe and inclusive on-line space to for women to share testimonies on the site  Participants are able to openly declare their own breakthroughs, revelations, struggles and victories in every life area they choose: career, birth, death, relationships, and personal situations  "I Declare Me   " also invites women to a virtual discussion with Ashanti on such issues as voter registration, teen obesity, and other concerns facing women today 
In September 2009, Ashanti, along with other artists such as Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, Mary J  Blige, Rihanna, Fergie, Sheryl Crow, Miley Cyrus, Melissa Etheridge, Natasha Bedingfield, Keyshia Cole, Ciara, Leona Lewis, LeAnn Rimes and Carrie Underwood, teamed up for the song "Just Stand Up!"  The charity tune for cancer was conceived by Antonio "L A " Reid, who produced it with longtime creative colleague Babyface  All 15 singers (along with Nicole Scherzinger) shared the stage to perform the song live on September 5, 2008, during the "Stand Up to Cancer" television special, which aired simultaneously on ABC, NBC and CBS, and helped raise $100 million for cancer research  As a result of SU2C fund raising endeavors, the SU2C scientific advisory committee, overseen by the American Association for Cancer Research, was able to award 73 6 million dollars towards novel, groundbreaking cancer research in 2009 In November 2009, Ashanti joined the crew of ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition  In the episode, which aired on January 24, 2010, the singer assisted in the rebuilding of the Powell Family home in Buffalo, New York   The efforts from the show expanded significantly to include not just the family home but the entire neighborhood surrounding it  In 2013, Ashanti featured on the 19-track compilation album Songs for a Healthier America, a collaborative project by the Partnership for a Healthier America, whose honorary chair is Michelle Obama, and Hip Hop Public Health  Her song "Just Believe" also featured Artie Green, Gerry Gunn, Robbie Nova and Chauncey Hawkins  Additionally, she is affiliated with the Jumpstart reading program, the Tupperware Brand and the Boys and Girls Club of America 

Personal life
On January 1, 2003, Ashanti met rapper Nelly at a press conference for the 2003 Grammy Awards, and the two later began dating  They ended their relationship after a decade together  In 2023, they reunited and got back together 

Discography
Studio albumsAshanti (2002)
Chapter II (2003)
Ashanti's Christmas (2003)
Concrete Rose (2004)
The Declaration (2008)
Braveheart (2014)

Filmography
Film
Television
Theater
See also
List of awards and nominations received by Ashanti



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