bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
L
owry,
M
alcolm
Authors: Mccarthy Patrick A.
Published: August 2017

Malcolm Lowry (born July 28, 1909) was the youngest son of Arthur O. Lowry, a cotton broker, and his pious wife Evelyn. Raised in the Wirral town of Caldy, he was then sent to the Caldicott School and the Leys School, where he wrote stories under the pseudonym CAMEL, for Clarence Malcolm Lowry (he despised the name Clarence and soon abandoned it). In 1927, aged 17, he secured his father's permission to sail to the Far East and back as a deckhand on a freighter, the SS
Pyrrhus
, before entering Cambridge. The experience proved far less romantic than he expected, but he nonetheless mined it for the first of his many autobiographical fictions,
Ultramarine
(1933), whose protagonist Eugene Dana Hilliott is resented by much of the ship's crew but eventually earns their respect by joining the firemen who stoke the ship's furnaces.
Ultramarine
draws not only on Lowry's own experience but also on two other sea voyage novels that he read while at Cambridge: Conrad Aiken's
Blue Voyage
, which influenced his handling of dialogue and perspective, and Nordahl Grieg's
The Ship Sails On
, with whose protagonist and author Lowry identified himself. He also met both writers, arranging for Aiken to serve as his tutor (and father figure) during summer 1929 and later traveling to Oslo to meet Grieg.
M
anning,
O
livia
Authors: Steinberg Theodore L.
Published: August 2017

Olivia Manning, born in 1908 (sometimes listed as 1911), while not the most important novelist of the twentieth century, produced fine work, which has been largely overlooked by critics and general readers, probably for two reasons: she was not personally popular with her peers and therefore was treated as an outsider, and she handles narrative in traditional ways, with none of the modernist innovations favored by her contemporaries. Another factor that cannot be discounted is her gender, although many of Manning's novels focus on men's lives rather than women's. Her earlier novels contain few memorable scenes, but they leave strong overall impressions and provide valuable perspectives on mid‐twentieth‐century British life. Manning's novels reflect the places she lived in: she was born in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England, but lived as a child in Ireland and then with her husband in Bucharest, Egypt, and Jerusalem. She died in London in 1980.
M
antel,
H
ilary
Authors: Zlosnik Sue
Published: August 2017

British journalist and fiction writer Hilary Mantel is the author of nine novels, a range of short stories, and an autobiography as well as numerous essays and articles. Her fiction is characterized by a combination of acute social observation, mordant wit, and intimations of another reality just beyond the range of normal perception. Born in 1952 near Manchester, Mantel draws upon various phases of her life to provide settings for her fiction: domestic disruption and relocation, a Catholic education, the London School of Economics, a brief residency in Saudi Arabia, social work, living in East Anglia, and suburban life in Greater London, where she now lives and works. Her fiction constantly returns to familiar gothic motifs: monstrosity, female identity, family secrets, religion and repression, paranoia, liminality, metamorphosis, and the haunting of the past by the present. In her autobiography,
Giving up the Ghost
(2003), she describes an encounter with a nameless terror at the age of 7, “something intangible … some formless, borderless evil” (107); this presence lurks in the pages of her novels.
McL
iam
W
ilson,
R
obert
Authors: Mcguire Matthew
Published: August 2017

Robert McLiam Wilson was born in 1964 in Belfast. He attended Cambridge University for a period before dropping out and temporarily becoming homeless, an incident that had a significant impact on his subsequent artistic development. Alongside fellow novelist Glen Paterson, McLiam Wilson is generally regarded as heralding a new generation of Northern Irish writers, which grew up amid the Troubles, and offers a different perspective to that of older figures like Seamus Heaney. McLiam Wilson has published three novels, a non‐fiction book about poverty in Britain and Ireland entitled
The Dispossessed
(1992), and made a number of television documentaries for the BBC. In 2003 he was declared one of
Granta's
“Best of Young British Novelists” despite not having published anything since 1996. While his second novel
Manfred's Pain
(1992) details the life of an elderly Jewish man living London, McLiam Wilson is most highly regarded for his Northern Irish fiction.
Ripley Bogle
(1989) and
Eureka Street
(1996) address a number of themes including the supersaturation of identity politics in the North, the problematic nature of traditional Nationalist and Unionist ideologies, and the dubious nature of aesthetic representations of the Troubles. The author's interest in muddling the conventional thinking about Northern Irish loyalties is evinced through his own pseudonym, playfully constructed from the Irish (“McLiam”) and English (“Wilson”) versions of the same name.
O
'Connor,
F
rank
Authors: Storey Michael L.
Published: August 2017

Frank O'Connor is acclaimed as one of Ireland's greatest short story writers and an international master of the genre. Influenced by nineteenthcentury Russian and French realists, especially Turgenev and Maupassant, O'Connor worked exclusively within the realistic mode, restricting his fictional world to that of working‐ and middle‐class Irish Catholics. Out of that world he created masterpieces of the short story.
Politics and the Novel
Authors: Houen Alex
Published: August 2017

British and Irish political novels in the twentieth century are incredibly varied in form, voice, and content. This is hardly surprising given the numerous political upheavals in this period, along with the changes in approach to the novel as a genre. The best political novels are notable for exploring (1) the limits of what “the novel,” “Britain” and/or “Ireland,” and “politics” are, and (2) how those entities relate to each other. For several critics, the realist forms that predominated in the nineteenth century were inextricably linked to bourgeois liberalism in emphasizing the views and voice of an individual. Such novels could also present wider purviews: nineteenth‐century naturalism, in particular, examined ways in which “character” might be socially and biologically determined. Usually, though, the nineteenth‐century investment in individualism was evidenced by the use of an omniscient narrator and by a linear narrative as development of a main character. In the twentieth century, novelists fashioned alternative forms of characterization and narrative voice so as to engage with changes in the political landscape. Plotting affairs of state thus frequently meant plotting new states of mind and body.
Postcolonial Fiction of the
B
ritish
S
outh
A
sian Diaspora
Authors: Mallot J. Edward
Published: August 2017

Multicultural fiction writers have been highly visible in the United Kingdom for several years, but no group has received more popular success and critical attention than the South Asian diaspora. Following the 1981 publication of Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children
, author after author has garnered mass acclaim, record‐breaking advances, and prestigious awards – so much so that an alleged “Booker backlash” emerged by the late 1990s, even as some claimed that “the future of English Literature is Indian” (Ranasinha 63). Ruvani Ranasinha notes that these Anglophone writers “become highly visible as mediators, cultural translators, and spokespersons” (10) – despite their sometimes dubious, tenuous claims on “authenticity,” or their often professed reluctance to represent entire ethnic communities.
Postmodernist Fiction
Authors: Crosthwaite Paul
Published: August 2017

“Postmodernism” is a term commonly associated with fiction published since the 1960s that revives, contests, or reformulates the legacy of formal and stylistic innovation inherited from the “modernist” writers of the early twentieth century. Postmodernism has been perhaps the most significant concept in critical discussions of the novel over the last three decades.
P
riestley,
J. B.
Authors: Cullingford Alison
Published: August 2017

Essayist, playwright, and broadcaster, J. B. (John Boynton) Priestley was one of the most popular English authors of the mid twentieth century, publishing 29 novels and novellas between 1927 and 1976.
Science Fiction
Authors: Ruddick Nicholas
Published: August 2017

Science fiction of the literary kind was invented in Britain and there has been a lot of British science fiction. More than 3,000 significant science fiction novels and story collections by authors born or long resident in the UK were published in Britain in the twentieth century. Yet science fiction in general and British science fiction in particular are problematic concepts. “Science fiction” was not used as a genre label until the 1930s in the USA, long after works now considered to be science fiction first appeared in Britain. There is still no generally accepted academic definition of science fiction, and there remains an academic reluctance to take seriously what is thought to be a popular literature for the immature. Those who do take British literary science fiction seriously are often anxious to disassociate it from “sci‐fi” Hollywood blockbusters and their spin‐offs.
S
inclair,
I
ain
Authors: Murray Alex
Published: August 2017

Iain Sinclair is one of the most challenging and innovative contemporary British novelists, with his Beat‐inspired explorations of London, both past and present, having changed the face of “city writing” in the twentieth century.
Spark,Muriel
Authors: Carruthers Gerard
Published: August 2017

Muriel Spark is one of the most important Catholic novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. An elegant stylist and a sophisticated manipulator of the novel form, she is a writer of clinical, often cruel, comedy while diagnosing a deeply deficient materialism in the contemporary human condition. Spark has enjoyed both a wide readership as well as great critical acclaim.
S
wift,
G
raham
Authors: Malcolm David
Published: August 2017

Graham Swift is one of the most highly regarded contemporary British novelists. Since the publication of his first novel,
The Sweet‐Shop Owner
, in 1980, he has won numerous literary prizes (
Last Orders
took the Booker Prize in 1996) and widespread critical acclaim. His fictions have been translated into many languages, and films have been made of three of his novels. His work receives long and usually positive reviews in major journals. Above all, critics and scholars pay attention to his 1983 novel
Waterland
, which can be seen as one of the central British novels of the last two decades of the twentieth century. Although its success has overshadowed Swift's seven other novels, they, too, have won serious critical consideration. In a review of
Tomorrow
(2007), Alvarez writes:
“Waterland
is an extraordinary work, and there was even better to come” (36). Despite some negative commentary, especially with regard to
The Light of Day
(2003) and
Tomorrow
, Swift's fictions, especially
Last Orders
(1996), are seen as important and powerful novels. In 1996, the eminent Irish novelist John Banville wrote that “Book for book, Swift is surely one of England's finest living novelists” (8).
T
óibín,
C
olm
Authors: Johnsen William A.
Published: August 2017

Colm Tóibín is one of the most recognized and influential writers in Ireland in that he serves a public role as a commentator on current events, as a reviewer and editor, and as a presence at conferences and festivals, yet he preserves against this publicity a prose true to his characters rather than his own biography. Toibín has admitted to an early admiration for Hemingway, although his prose is unclouded by Hemingway's plainer‐than‐thou bravado. There are of course Irish influences on the author as well (he has edited a magisterial anthology of Irish fiction from Jonathan Swift to Emma Donoghue (1999c) for Penguin), yet his tone is markedly different from the ironic deadpan of Joyce's
Dubliners
or the deadbeat of Beckett's prose.
T
revor,
W
illiam
Authors: Storey Michael L.
Published: August 2017

William Trevor's numerous, highly acclaimed novels and stories are distinguished by their moral vision, psychological complexity, comic and tragic insights, and detached, ironic perspectives. Having lived in Ireland and England, Trevor is adept at setting his fiction in both countries, writing insightfully about English and Irish life and – in his Irish fiction – about both Anglo‐Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics. Best known for his novels and stories, Trevor has also written plays, children's fiction, essays, and reviews, and he has both adapted his fiction and created original dramas for radio and television. Two of his novels,
Fools of Fortune
and
Felicia's Journey
, have been made into major films. He has been the recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the prestigious Whitbread Award, which he has won three times.
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction
Authors: Ferns Chris
Published: August 2017

The title of Thomas More's
Utopia
(2002 [1516]) involves a play on words, deriving from both the Greek
eu‐topos –
“good place” and
ou‐topos –
“no place.” Utopia may be defined as both a good place, an ideal (or at least significantly improved) society, and at the same time one that does not exist, an ambiguity that is reflected in the term's usage. To describe something as “utopian” may be to applaud it as a desirable goal or to denounce it as hopelessly impractical.
W
eldon,
F
ay
Authors: Russell Lorena
Published: August 2017

Fay Weldon, CBE, is a prolific British writer of novels, screenplays, and short stories. Since her premier as a novelist with
The Fat Woman's Joke
in 1967, she has penned some 28 novels, seven short story collections, seven works of non‐fiction, and 16 screenplays (including
Upstairs, Downstairs
and a 1985 BBC adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice)
. Her memoir,
Auto da Fay
, was written in 2002. Her writings exhibit a persistent interest in sexual politics, which she explores with a sardonic sensibility, punchy prose, and dry wit. Her satire is marked by a dark, ironic tone that questions social inequalities and their often irrational and unexpected consequences.
W
elsh,
I
rvine
Authors: Morace Robert
Published: August 2017

Even in an age of hyper‐consumerism accustomed to an endless supply of instant classics by new writers, Irvine Welsh's
Trainspotting
(1993) stands out as much for creating a cultural phenomenon as for launching an individual career, for appealing to postliterate youth as well as broadsheet reviewers, for helping put contemporary Scottish fiction on the world literary map, and for creating a sense of national self‐confidence that played a part in the passage of the 1997 referendum on devolution.
W
orld
W
ar
I
in Fiction
Authors: Freedman Ariela
Published: August 2017

The literary response to World War I in prose fiction and memoir was prolific, multifaceted, and extended. From the memoirs and combat novels contemporary to the war, to the autobiographies and postwar novels that began to appear with more frequency after a decade's delay, to the modernist masterpieces of the 1920s that took the war's civilian impact as their subject, to the celebrated late twentieth‐century World War I novels of Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker, the Great War has long been a traumatic preoccupation and source of inspiration for British writers. War writers wrote from the home front and from the front lines; they wrote in the heat of the war and decades after it had finished; they wrote in familiar genres and they broke conventions to explore new traumas and experiences; they fictionalized their autobiographies and drew on their lives for their fictions. In his memoir
Blasting and Bom‐badiering
Wyndham Lewis wrote “we say pre‐war and post‐war as we say BC or AD” (1967 [1937], 1). While both writers and critics may have at times overstated the degree of the break both with prewar life and with prewar forms of writing occasioned by the war, it is clear that World War I prompted a vast reconsideration both of Britain and of British writing in response to what was seen as an unprecedented and unique catastrophe that demanded, in Katherine Mansfield's terms, “new expressions, new moulds for our thoughts & feelings” (1991, 204–5).
A
lexie,
S
herman
Authors: Peterson Nancy J.
Published: August 2017

From the moment his first collection of poems and stories appeared in 1992, Spokane–Coeur d'Alene writer Sherman Alexie was hailed as an original voice among Native American writers. In fact, James Kincaid (1992), writing for the
New York Times Book Review
, recognized Alexie as “one of the major lyric voices of our time.” Since that auspicious review, Alexie has written and published four novels, three collections of short stories, two feature‐length films, as well as several mixed‐genre collections and volumes of poetry. His work has been acclaimed by Native and non‐Native readers, reviewers, and scholars for its realistic portrayal of reservation life, its critique of stereotypes and identity politics, as well as its brilliant deployment of Indian humor.
A
naya,
R
udolfo
Authors: Hunt Alex
Published: August 2017

Rudolfo Anaya is known as the “godfather” of Chicano literature. Since his 1972 novel
Bless Me, Ultima
, he has been a prolific writer of fiction, non‐fiction, drama, and poetry as well as an editor and scholar. Anaya's magical realist fiction is set in and deeply engaged with the US Southwest and features Chicano characters, creating a powerful sense of place. Thematically and stylistically, Anaya's fiction strives for a hybrid fusion of European and indigenous American ideas and forms. While his efforts in this respect occasionally go too far in search of Jungian‐style universal archetypes, at his best Anaya balances the experience of common humanity with the culturally and politically specific concerns of Chicanos of the American Southwest.
B
arth,
J
ohn
Authors: Ziegler Heide
Published: August 2017

John Barth's role in defining and shaping literary postmodernism has been essential: the epoch may be conceived as having begun with the publication of his third novel,
The Sot‐Weed Factor
(1967 [1960]). This novel contains all the elements that later critics have listed as marking the transition from late modernism to a new (American) period in the old art of storytelling: rewriting history in ironic fashion (in the case of
The Sot‐Weed Factor
, the history of colonial Maryland), parodying the American quest for identity (through the hero's literal preservation of his innocence), and transcending the boundaries between different genres (in this case, between the poem “The Sot‐Weed Factor” of one Ebenezer Cooke, first published in 1708, and Barth's mid‐twentieth‐century novel of the same title). To be an exponent of this new era in which self‐reflexivity increasingly came to pervade all traditional narrative devices has been Barth's self‐appointed mission ever since. Despite his indebtedness to non‐US writers like Lawrence Sterne, Gustave Flaubert, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino, Barth's stance is nevertheless that of a decidedly contemporary American writer who mainly works his own corner of the land: Maryland, its Eastern Shore, and Chesapeake Bay. Here he writes and rewrites his fictions in order to create his own great narrative cycle.
B
oyle,
K
ay
Authors: Austenfeld Thomas C.
Published: August 2017

Kay Boyle (1902–92) considered writing, personal integrity, and political activism as inseparable. A modernist who helped revolutionize literary style, she was also a woman who chose sexual freedom but embraced motherhood. An expatriate in France and Austria from 1923 to 1941 and a keen observer and critic of totalitarianism in Austria and Germany, she also became a historically thoughtful chronicler of the American occupation of Germany after 1945. She was victimized by loyalty‐security hearings in 1952, taught at San Francisco State University from 1962 to 1979, and protested against the Vietnam War. Boyle wrote short fiction, novels, essays, poems, and memoirs. By revising Robert McAlmon's
Being Geniuses Together 1920–1930
and interspersing her own chapters to reissue the book in 1968, she became one of the historiographers of modernism. Among her close literary associates were William Carlos Williams, Emanuel Carnevali, Samuel Beckett, Harry and Caresse Crosby, Eugene Jolas, Marianne Moore, Robert Carlton Brown, and Howard Nemerov. “Artist and activist” (in Sandra Spanier's words) through eight decades, Boyle embodies many of the contradictions of the twentieth century but also helped write its literary history.
B
rautigan,
R
ichard
Authors: Madden David W.
Published: August 2017

Richard Brautigan is a controversial figure – remembered by some as a symbol of the hippie movement, by scholars as a serious literary figure, and by many critics as a benign mediocrity. He published 11 novels, nine volumes of poetry, and one collection of short stories and developed a distinctive style that was unmistakably his own.
B
uck,
P
earl
S.
Authors: Harker Jaime
Published: August 2017

Pearl S. Buck continues to inhabit a kind of critical purgatory. A beloved, bestselling novelist whose writing career spanned over 40 years and 100 books, Buck has remained in print, and refused to fade away into hellish obscurity like so many interwar popular novelists. Her 1938 Nobel Prize keeps her just on the edge of critical acceptability. Critics, however, refuse to accept her into paradise, insisting that, for her literary sins (melodrama, sentimentality, popularity, and activism) she continue in limbo, neither art nor trash. This critical ambivalence is unfortunate, because Buck's literary, cultural, and political significance is unparalleled in twentieth‐century letters.
B
ukowski,
C
harles
Authors: Dobozy Tamas
Published: August 2017

Charles Bukowski, author of novels, poetry, short stories, journalism, drama, comic books, travel writing, and screenplays, emerged to prominence in the 1960s, and was a counterculture figure who wrote about urban life in southern California, notably Los Angeles. Variously identified as an heir of the Beats, a “dirty realist,” and even an author in the transcendentalist tradition, Bukowski plays with a generic ambiguity between fiction and autobiography to present a fatalistic but comic view of the American underclass. His work is associated with the stereotype, portrayed in the film
Barfly
(Schroeder 1987), of the chronically and unrepentantly drunk, unemployed, street‐fighting, iconoclastic author, an image promoted by Bukowski's work, though not without irony, especially in the novel
Hollywood
(1987) and the poems of
Septuagenarian Stew
(1990), which treat the disparity between the myth and reality of Bukowski, particularly his later financial and commercial success.
C
arver,
R
aymond
Authors: Raabe David M.
Published: August 2017

Raymond Carver, whose tightly controlled, compelling style gripped readers and inspired writers, provided the main impetus for the revitalization of the short story in English during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Resisting critical categorizing, he rose from humble beginnings to national acclaim and international fame.
C
handler,
R
aymond
Authors: Madden David W.
Published: August 2017

Although he came to writing novels accidentally, Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett, proved that fictional entertainments could rise to the level of serious art. Chandler wrote in the hard‐boiled style of the day, but extended the idiom's possibilities through sharp wit, exaggerated metaphors, and subjective narration. Chandler also brought an astringent social criticism to his works that revealed a sharp intellect and probing insight. All of this was accomplished in only seven novels, two dozen short stories, and some articles and screenplays.
Cheever,John
Authors: Wilhite Keith
Published: August 2017

Hailed as the “Ovid of Ossining” and the “Chekhov of the Suburbs,” John Cheever emerged as one of America's most popular writers after World War II. Though an accomplished novelist, Cheever made his name as a short story writer, best exemplified by his long association with theNew Yorker. His fiction embraces the absurdity and irresistible allure of a pastoral vision in the modern era of alienation and dispossession.
The City in Fiction
Authors: Simpson Tyrone
Published: August 2017

Challenging the romantic precept that only nature affords the tranquility hospitable to the artist's muse, many writers of the past century have found an aesthetic resource in the built environment of the city. So different from the rural and agrarian spaces that gave it raw materials to process, and from the suburban tracts that would give its middle managers refuge, the twentieth‐century city, and its dynamic impact on American character, demanded comprehension. By making the metropolis their central preoccupation, twentieth‐century writers described the profound change that industrial modernity wrought upon city life, and the ways a renewed infrastructure gave birth to the agoraphobia that organizes postmodern urbanity. In limning the impact of either market regime, these artists captured the crisis of a new urban order: the extent to which city life enabled or frustrated a functional social order and facilitated the urban dweller's belonging to or alienation from the American mainstream.
Dixon,Stephen
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

Even though he did not publish his first volume of stories until he was 40, Stephen Dixon (b. 1936) is the prolific author of 14 novels and 13 collections of short stories; has been twice nominated for a National Book Award; and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards, and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Prize for Fiction. Despite that, he is not as well‐known as comparable contemporary writers such as Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme, perhaps because much of his work requires readers invested in the complexities of Dixon's intricate monologues, often going on for hundreds of pages without breaks, as well as in the ironies and mordant humor of his work.
D
ucornet,
R
ikki
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

The prolific author of seven novels, four short fiction collections, and several volumes of poetry, essays, and children's books, Rikki Ducornet is one of the most inventive of contemporary American writers. Like fellow travelers John Hawkes, Robert Coover, and Angela Carter, she is fascinated with the play, eroticism, and origins of language throughout her work. Born in Canton, New York in 1949 and raised in an academic environment, she received a degree in fine arts from Bard College in 1964; in addition to being a writer, Ducornet is an artist who has illustrated a number of books by such figures as Robert Coover and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as her own. Ducornet taught for many years at the University of Denver, and is currently writer‐in‐residence at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette. She is the winner of several writing awards, including the prestigious Lannan Literary Award in Fiction and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Dybek,Stuart
Authors: Savage Bill
Published: August 2017

Stuart Dybek has taken what many people dismiss as the dull gray lead of Chicago's post‐industrial landscape and transmuted it into fictional and poetic gold. Raised in Chicago's South Side Pilsen neighborhood, as its dominant population shifted from Eastern European immigrants and their descendants to Latin American immigrants and theirs, Dybek attended Catholic schools, graduated from Loyola University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and served in the Peace Corps. He has had a distinguished career teaching creative writing at Western Michigan University, its Prague Summer Program at Charles University, and Northwestern University.
E
llroy,
J
ames
Authors: Allamand Carole
Published: August 2017

James Ellroy's panoptic study of corruption far exceeds the boundaries of noir fiction. Beginning with
Brown's Requiem
in 1981, his novels have gradually broadened in scope, moving away from the inner world of psychopaths to reveal the underworld of twentieth‐century America. Born on March 4, 1948 in Los Angeles, Lee Earle Ellroy is no stranger to society's darkest corners. When he was 10, his mother's partially undressed body was found in a bush near their home in El Monte, a stocking wrapped around her neck. After his father's death in 1965 and successive expulsions from high school, the Army, and his apartment, Ellroy drifted into vagrancy and petty crime. His twisted journey through LA parks, slums, rehab clinics, and jails, from Jean Ellroy's unsolved murder to a career as a crime fiction writer, is depicted in his memoir
My Dark Places
.
Expatriate Fiction
Authors: Hart Matthew
Published: August 2017

At its simplest, the term “expatriate fiction” identifies narratives written by Americans who happen to live overseas; more narrowly, it refers to fiction in which the fact of an author's residence abroad is matched by a concern with how modern life is shaped by the crossing of national borders and the interaction of diverse cultures. An example of the first type is Edith Wharton's
Ethan Frome
(1911), which despite its New England setting was written in France (and begun as a French‐language composition). The second group is nicely illustrated by Djuna Barnes's
Nightwood
(1936) – a work of American fiction, largely composed in an English country house, which finds its subject matter in the world of the Parisian avant garde. Indeed, the formal and linguistic estrangement of a novel like
Nightwood
is partly due to the way that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, cities like Paris and London were home to a bewildering array of different languages and peoples. In the artistic quarters of such cities, not only was the expatriate artist an increasingly common social type, but also the experience of a foreign person in an unfamiliar city becomes a metaphor for our encounter with the deeper alienations of modern literature (Williams 1989, 37–48).
F
aulkner,
W
illiam
Authors: Matthews John T.
Published: August 2017

William Faulkner's signature novel –
The Sound and the Fury
(1929) – captures the tumult of a collapsing world giving way to a new. Set across the first quarter of the twentieth century, in the fictional town of Jefferson, center of the imaginary Mississippi county Faulkner called Yoknapatawpha,
The Sound and the Fury
displays in four isolated segments the breakdown of the once distinguished Compson family. Descendants of planter gentry, the present generation of Compsons has been reduced to three hopeless brothers – a mental deficient (Benjy), a melancholic suicide (Quentin), and a resentful failure (Jason) – and their sister Caddy, a renegade from Southern decorum. The reader inhabits the mentalities of one pitiable martyr to lost causes after the next. Even the most “innocent” Compson brother proves a monster of selfish incomprehension, while another dwells in fantasies of a defunct past, and the last can't figure out how to translate former privilege into the future. The novel bursts open in its final section, with the servant Dilsey celebrating new hope in precincts unappreciated by the Compsons: the black church where faith grows from a collective determination to be free. Faulkner's great subject was the realization that the plantation South's “eternal verities,” finally surrendering to the upheavals of modernity, had never been other than illegitimate; his great artistry, an experimental method that slowed things down to comprehend change.
F
oer,
J
onathan
S
afran
Authors: Varvogli Aliki
Published: August 2017

Jonathan Safran Foer is a young Jewish American novelist who is already establishing himself as an important voice in American letters. His first novel,
Everything Is Illuminated
(2002), was published to critical acclaim when he was only 25, and five years later he was selected as one of
Granta
magazine's “Best of Young American Novelists.” In addition to his two novels to date, he has also published numerous stories as well as edited anthologies of new writing and introduced reissues of classic works of literature.
G
aines,
E
rnest
J
.
Authors: Hebert‐Leiter Maria
Published: August 2017

With his attention to storytelling techniques and the verisimilitude of his characters’ voices, Ernest J. Gaines has effectively captured the realities of rural African American life in his fiction. Through his use of regional dialect and tragicomedy, he offers insight into the world of a twentieth‐century American South still in need of change and African American men still in search of pride and justice.
G
ardner,
J
ohn
Authors: Morace Robert
Published: August 2017

During a career that spanned over a dozen years, John Gardner went from being one of the most versatile and highly regarded “new fictionists” of the early 1970s to one of the most controversial and reviled by decade's end. As protean as he was prolific, “the Lon Cheney of contemporary fiction” became a John the Baptist railing against the decadent literature of his time while zealously advocating the straight and narrow road of “moral fiction,” based on heroic action and eternal verities.
H
agedorn,
J
essica
Authors: Ana Jeffrey Santa
Published: August 2017

Jessica Hagedorn is a Philippine‐born American novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and editor. She is best‐known for writing fiction and poetry depicting the consequences of Spanish and US colonialisms in the Philippines and among Philippine immigrants. Major themes in her work include the hybrid culture and “colonial mentality” of Philippine people, blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Hollywood fantasies and Third World realities, political corruption and class society, colonialism and Catholicism, and the innocence and exploitation of the poor. Hagedorn's best‐known works include
Dangerous Music
(1975), a volume of stories and poems about her youth in the Philippines and life as an immigrant in America;
Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions
(1981), a collection of vignettes and poems that won the American Book Award;
Dogeaters
(1990), her debut novel nominated for the National Book Award about social disorder and corruption in modern Philippine society;
Danger and Beauty
(1993), a volume that combines the poetry and prose from her two previous collections;
The Gangster of Love
(1996), a narrative about a Philippine immigrant struggling to succeed as a rock ‘n’ roll musician; and
Dream Jungle
(2003a), a novel that associates the discovery of a lost tribe of natives in Mindanao with the filming of a Hollywood Vietnam War movie in the Philippines.
H
awkes,
J
ohn
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

A writer of remarkable stylistic gifts who offers alternately comic and nightmarish portrayals of psychic life, John Hawkes famously said in an interview, “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme” (Enck 141). In the same interview, he noted that his literary ancestry runs from “Quevado, the Spanish picaresque writer, and Thomas Nashe, at the beginnings of the English novel, down through Lautréamont, Celine, Nathanael West, Flannery O'Connor, James Purdy, Joseph Heller” (Enck 143). During his lifetime, Hawkes published 14 novels, several novellas and short stories, and a collection of plays. Born in 1925, Hawkes spent his childhood in Connecticut, Alaska, and New York; after graduating from high school, he served for a year as an American Field Service ambulance driver in Germany and Italy in the final months of World War II. Following the war, he married Sophie Goode Tazewell and entered Harvard University, where he studied creative writing with Albert Guerard. Hawkes taught creative writing at Harvard and Brown (where he spent the bulk of his career), with visiting stints at Stanford, MIT, and the City College of CUNY. The winner of Guggenheim, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller fellowships, he died in Providence, Rhode Island in 1998.
H
imes,
C
hester
Authors: Raczkowski Christopher T.
Published: August 2017

Chester Bomar Himes's extraordinary life and writing resist categorization. Born in Jefferson City, Missouri in 1909 to a black bourgeois family one generation removed from slavery, Himes attended the Ohio State University in 1926 with the intention of studying medicine. Instead, he received his first education in institutionalized racism from the university's Jim Crow student facilities and was expelled two semesters later. Within a year, Himes had reinvented himself as a minor figure in Cleveland's black underworld and was arrested for armed robbery in 1928. As prisoner 59623 at the Ohio State Penitentiary, Himes began his unlikely literary career.
H
oward,
M
aureen
Authors: Madden David W.
Published: August 2017

Maureen Howard is an elegant stylist and incisive social critic. Each of her novels intricately explores post‐World War II American life and represents a new fictional departure in terms of technique. Her works abound in various, competing voices with multiple first‐person narrators, including the author herself, presenting and representing the narrative.
H
ughes,
L
angston
Authors: Hofer Matthew
Published: August 2017

A populist and extraordinarily popular African American author, Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902 and died in New York City in 1967. His very first published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” printed in the leading black journal
The Crisis
in 1921, helped to position him as a pivotal figure of the New Negro Renaissance of the later 1920s. Fueled by the prevalence of racial and class inequities in the US, Hughes's revolutionary tendencies intensified during the Depression, resulting in his persecution as a fellow traveler of the Communist Party by the House Un‐American Activities Committee in 1953. However, despite any apparent inconsistencies in his beliefs or values, Hughes was a lifelong supporter of the ideals of American democracy, even when those ideals were being shamefully neglected in practical terms. Throughout his prolific and sometimes controversial career, his contributions to American literature – in addition to the poems that justly made him famous – extend to novels, short stories, biographies, translations, plays, and even musical scores, including a libretto. His texts commonly examine relations between privileged and disenfranchised people in twentieth‐century America, emphasizing what it means to be human in difficult if not exceptional circumstances.
H
urston,
Z
ora
N
eale
Authors: Lamothe Daphne
Published: August 2017

Folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama in 1891, but she claimed to be born 10 years earlier in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black community in America. In fact, her family moved to Eatonville when she was a toddler. Her upbringing there would play a formative role in Hurston's fiction because she sought to capture its vital culture in her writing.
J
ohnson,
D
enis
Authors: Juengel Scott J.
Published: August 2017

Alternately blessed and burdened by the sobriquet of “a writer's writer,” Denis Johnson is a contemporary novelist, poet, and playwright of astonishing imaginative range and nearly Kierkegaardian vision. While his early stories of addicts and drifters, and con men and raconteurs, garnered Johnson a cultish following among those looking for the heir to Burroughs and Bukowski, his work has also subtly explored the spoils and savagery of the American empire. With
Tree of Smoke
, which won the 2007 National Book Award, the worlds of the confidence game and military intelligence were shown to overlap in the tragedy of the Vietnam War.
J
ones,
E
dward
P
.
Authors: Saunders James Robert
Published: August 2017

Edward P. Jones creates fiction that focuses on the circumstances of the most underprivileged in society, particularly poor blacks in the Washington, DC area, a group to which he belonged for a significant period of his own life. His two short story collections –
Lost in the City
(2003b) and
All Aunt Hagar's Children
(2006) – fit into this vein, recapitulating the lives of inner‐city DC blacks. His one novel,
The Known World
(2003a), does not venture far from that city, set as it is in the fictional Manchester County, Virginia, where the underprivileged this time are black slaves, especially intriguing because their owners also are black. Wherever he might have traveled in his life, the author always returns to this general venue, providing, when his work is taken as a whole, a penetrating look at this geographical and emotional landscape.
K
ennedy,
W
illiam
Authors: Gillespie Michael Patrick
Published: August 2017

William Kennedy was born in Albany, New York in 1928. He grew up in a predominately Irish Catholic neighborhood, attended Sienna College, and worked briefly as a sportswriter for the
Post Star
in Glen Falls, New York. He was drafted into the Army in 1950, where he worked as a journalist in Europe, and after his discharge became a reporter for the
Times‐Union
newspaper in Albany. In 1956 he relocated to Puerto Rico and became managing editor of the
San Juan Star
in 1959. There he met Saul Bellow, who encouraged his literary aspirations, and Dana Sosa, whom he married and with whom he had three children.
Kingston,MaxineHong
Authors: Mix Deborah M.
Published: August 2017

Best‐known for her first work,The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts(1976), Maxine Hong Kingston has published seven books in 30 years. In her memoirs as well as in her other works, Kingston enacts a politics of righting wrongs – particularly those produced by racism and sexism – by writing them: “The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar… What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are ‘report a crime' and ‘report to five families.' The reporting is the vengeance – not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words” (1976, 62). Her unique genre‐crossing aesthetic, blending memoir, myth, and fictional narrative, has made her both a celebrated author and a figure of some controversy.
L
ee,
C
hang‐Rae
Authors: Jerng Mark C.
Published: August 2017

Chang‐rae Lee has emerged as one of the most important voices in contemporary ethnic American literatures. His three critically acclaimed novels are marked by his distinctive voice; his subtle use of language, tone, and lyricism; and his emotionally embattled narrator‐protagonists. Often mixing and casting anew the conventions of immigrant fiction, detective stories, and the suburban novel through the lens of language, Lee's fiction highlights the varied and often conflicting uses of language in the process of telling one's story. From this engagement with how we tell stories, Lee perceptively attends to the difficulties of belonging and assimilation; the formations of community, family, nation, and race; and the intersection of private choices and collective histories. Lee picks up his characters' lives in the midst of settling down after a tragic death, a traumatic memory, or even a deceptively comfortable existence.
The Little Magazines
Authors: McKible Adam
Published: August 2017

Modernist fiction developed in tandem with the rise and proliferation of little magazines. These periodicals, which tended to have small circulations, short lifespans, and limited funds, encouraged both established and emerging authors to challenge the traditional forms, themes, and expectations of the short story and the novel; indeed, many significant works of fiction were originally published and/or serialized in little magazines. According to Hoffman et al.'s standard history,The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography, these journals stood “defiantly in the front ranks of the battle for a mature literature,” ultimately publishing “about 80 percent” of what is now canonical modernism (1). Hoffman's martial metaphor for the conjoined development of modernism and little magazines – a metaphor used throughoutThe Little Magazine –underscores the often antagonistic relationship between little magazines and their mainstream counterparts, each of which established their identity in contradistinction to the other. The experimentalism and radicalism of the fiction of little magazines, therefore, can be better understood in comparison with contemporaneous commercial fiction.
L
ondon,
J
ack
Authors: Pease Donald E.
Published: August 2017

Jack London took up a career in writing at a time when innovative printing technologies made magazines quite inexpensive to publish. Perhaps best known for the trilogy of Wolf books –
The Call of the Wild
(1903),
White Fang
(1906), and
The Sea Wolf
(1904) – London was also one of the first Americans to make a lucrative career exclusively from writing. Along with his contemporaries in the newly emergent literary genres of realism and naturalism, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris, London freely borrowed from the discourses which described the industrial technologies of Taylorization and scientific engineering, as well as from cultural anthropology and the
faits divers
of the daily newspaper to endow his literary constructions with the formal authority of literal reality. The shift from romanticism to realism and naturalism was part of a more pervasive social transformation in which innovative industrialization processes had accelerated the profitability of the commercial system.
M
ailer,
N
orman
Authors: Meyer Sheree L.
Published: August 2017

Norman Mailer was one of the most protean writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. In both his fiction and non‐fiction, regardless of its setting or time period, Mailer mapped the conflicts and concerns of contemporary history. Indeed, from his first published novel,
The Naked and the Dead
(1948), to his final novel, The
Castle in the Forest
(2007), Mailer probes society's and his characters’ spiritual, psychological, and physical wounds.
Malamud,Bernard
Authors: Aarons Victoria
Published: August 2017

Bernard Malamud is a central post‐World War II American writer whose novels and short stories capture the texture of life for the Jewish immigrant, the increasing socio‐economic pressures of a developing urban milieu, and the ambiguous and precarious conditions faced by a rising middle class in America. Malamud's expertly crafted fiction is widely applauded for its animated dialogue and vivid, extraordinary characterizations.
M
arkson,
D
avid
Authors: Tabbi Joseph P.
Published: August 2017

Author of
The Last Novel
(2007), David Markson (born in Albany, New York in 1927) might better be thought of as the last modernist author. Even the justifiable claim to have created with this book “his own personal genre” reinforces the modernist compulsion to “make it new” with each and every project. At the same time, Markson in this self‐declared “last book” makes a point of including, among the literary and art‐historical citations that comprise his late works, a list of plagiarisms, repetitions, direct quotations, and reported misquotations. The “new” appears in a context of rewritings, bowdlerization, anticipation, and recycling throughout the literary canon.
M
arshall,
P
aule
Authors: Lee‐Keller Hellen
Published: August 2017

Paule Marshall is one of the most important US writers addressing the legacy of the African diaspora in the Americas in the second half of the twentieth century. Spanning nearly 50 years, beginning with the short story “The Valley Between” (1954), Marshall's works consistently focus on the daily lives of working‐class and middle‐class minority women, the difficulties facing West Indian immigrants to the United States, and the legacy of the slave trade in the Americas. In addition to five novels, Marshall has published several collections of novellas and short stories, a memoir, and many speeches and lectures. Her short stories are regularly included in literary anthologies.