bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Kelman,James
Authors: Bernstein Stephen
Published: August 2017

A central figure in contemporary Scottish literature, James Kelman is the author of plays, polemics, and essays, but his most important work is found in his short stories and novels. Since his earliest work, Kelman has focused his fiction on the characters, dialogue, and events of everyday working‐class life. In the process he has created a version of literary realism that makes revolutionary use of point of view and free indirect speech to limn the psyches of its narrators and protagonists, a group whose central condition is alienation. Kelman's approach to plot is spare, with the small, yet personally meaningful, events of daily experience standing in for larger, potentially melodramatic, drama. Along with downplaying major events, he shuns traditional strategies of closure and resolution, so that his narratives typically break off rather than end. Taken together, these tactics govern a body of work that refuses to engage in the practices by which the great majority of stories and novels are written. Yet Kelman's fiction is composed in a pioneering mode replete with interest, conviction, and feeling. Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, and Ernest Hemingway are all important influences on his work, but his achievement is uniquely his own, and has in turn become an important touchstone for a generation of younger Scottish writers such as Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, and Duncan McLean.
McCabe,Patrick
Authors: Storey Michael L.
Published: August 2017

Patrick McCabe, popular and award‐winning Irish writer, is best known for his dark and gruesome, yet humorous novels about the dysfunctional state of Irish life. Like the plays of his contemporary, Martin McDonagh, McCabe's works unrelentingly demythologize small‐town Irish life, portraying it in such a way as to disabuse readers of any sentimental notions they might have about Ireland and its people. His novels depict domestic and sectarian violence, alcoholism, childhood trauma, psychopathic behavior, various kinds of abuse including sex abuse by clergy, madness, and suicide.
Mystery/Detective/Crime Fiction
Authors: Johnsen Rosemary Erickson
Published: August 2017

Crime fiction in the twentieth century underwent dramatic shifts in generic structure, thematic foci, and critical reception. In many ways a young genre as the century began, it matured into a form capable of exploring significant social issues; what has sometimes been critiqued as crime fiction's unreflective replication of dominant social groups and cultural norms altered almost beyond recognition by the century's end to a genre that privileges minority groups of all kinds and critical, even subversive, ideologies. The genre has been remarkably fluid, yet it has also retained some of the key elements that appeal to readers. Early twentieth‐century crime writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers remain popular with twenty‐first‐century readers and have achieved a new life through television and film adaptations. Critical approaches to the genre have kept pace with developments within crime fiction but, unsurprisingly, also reflect scholarly trends; theoretical approaches of particular prominence in the last quarter century have been structuralist (especially narrative theory), psychoanalytic, and feminist. During the twentieth century, there was considerable interplay between English writers and those from other national traditions, especially writers of American crime fiction, but it is possible to delineate the main developments in British crime fiction over the course of the century.
Sinclair,May
Authors: Pease Allison
Published: August 2017

May Sinclair was one of the most respected, intellectually connected, and widely read English novelists and critics of the early twentieth century. Comprising 21 novels, a novel in verse, numerous short stories, two books on idealist philosophy, a book on the Brönte sisters, a journal about assisting an ambulance during World War I, and dozens of literary reviews, Sinclair's vast oeuvre encompasses realist and experimental styles as well as thematic concerns with philosophical idealism, the loss of faith, the literary marketplace, new women, psychology, patriarchy, and the restraints of social convention that reflect her unique longevity as late Victorian, Edwardian, and modernist female writer. Sinclair's fiction engages the literary innovations of her time, beginning with novels that were socially rebellious in a realist mode and moving toward novels that experimented with narrative point of view and stream of consciousness, a phrase she famously used to describe Dorothy Richardson's style inPilgrimage(1915–38), thus creating a new critical vocabulary for understanding modernism. Most consistently, her fiction explores the social conditions and psychological conflicts that impede individual self‐realization.
U
pward,
E
dward
Authors: Hopkins Chris
Published: August 2017

Edward Upward was closely associated with W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood in the 1930s. However, his literary reputation has sometimes been seen as minor in comparison to those of such contemporaries. Certainly he lived much less in the public eye, and his writing career features a large hiatus between 1939 and 1962. However, his fiction is often distinctive and innovative, driven by its exploration of politics and aesthetics.
Warner,Alan
Authors: Hames Scott
Published: August 2017

Alan Warner won overnight fame with his debut novel in 1995, and was immediately linked to a fashionable grouping of young male Scottish writers including Irvine Welsh and Duncan McLean. Though he was involved in the small literary counterculture from which Welsh'sTrainspotting(1993) sensationally emerged, situating Warner within this urban Scottish “school” can be misleading. While these writers took confidence from 1980s Scottish fiction by James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, and shared an enthusiasm for hedonistic youth culture, Warner's fiction has little in common with the urban realism ofTrainspottingand its imitators. Distinct from that novel's stark naturalism, masculine bravado, and punk ethic, Warner's highly lyrical fiction typically centers on the lives and voices of laconic young people, particularly women, in remote Highland settings. Landscape and the atmosphere of small‐town legend are central to his work, in which every place name and nickname evokes an outlandish anecdote, whose retelling becomes a vital ceremony of belonging.
Wells,H. G
Authors: James Simon J.
Published: August 2017

H. G. Wells was born in Bromley, Kent in 1866, the son of a servant and a shopkeeper and cricketer. He escaped from apprenticeship as a draper to become a pupil‐teacher in Midhurst, and then a student at the Normal School of Science (now Imperial College) in London; his first books were biology textbooks. The importance of education and of scientific method were to become significant themes in Wells's subsequent career as a writer of fiction.
W
est,
R
ebecca
Authors: Schweizer Bernard
Published: August 2017

Born Cicely Isabel Fairfield in London, in 1892, Rebecca West changed her name (inspired by Ibsen's heroine in
Rosmersholm)
in 1911, at the cusp of what was to become a stellar writing career. She was awarded Britain's highest honor in 1959, Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE), in recognition of her importance as an accomplished woman of letters. Coming from an impoverished family (her father was financially irresponsible and squandered money on stockmarket gambles), West approached the task of writing with a professionalism seldom seen in one so young. By the time she was 20, she had already made a name for herself by writing bold, unsparing critical articles and book reviews on women's issues, suffrage, socialism, colonialism, and literature in newspapers and magazines in England and America. And she would go on to write in the genres of literary criticism, biography, journalism, cultural anatomy, short story, and novel.
Winterson,Jeanette
Authors: Roessner Jeffrey
Published: August 2017

Jeanette Winterson has written some of the most provocative and original fiction to emerge in con‐temporaryBritish literature. Her relentlesslyinventive and magical imagination, along with a limpid prose style and her keen sense of romance, has won her a host of devoted fans. As she has taken her place in the contemporary literary landscape, it has become easy to overlook the striking quality of her early work, particularly the trio of novels through which most readers first encountered her –Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit(1985b),The Passion(1987), andSexing the Cherry(1989). These works sounded a new note in fiction, transmuting the influence of Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, and the magic realists into an original voice through which Win‐terson relentlessly assaulted restrictive social roles and heterosexist notions of identity.
Working‐Class Fiction
Authors: Kelly Aaron
Published: August 2017

To consider working‐class fiction is almost to confront an anomaly. The time and leisure necessary to think and create is nominally the preserve of social classes other than those consigned to function only as workers. But the history of working‐class writing is a continual contestation of this division between who has the right to think and articulate the world and those whose role is onlyto labor in order to produce the privilege by which others create culture. A key early twentieth‐century example of such a proletarian author is Patrick MacGill, an itinerant manual laborer who migrated from Donegal in Ireland to Scotland, and who eventually became a journalist, a writer, and fought for Britain in World War I. MacGill's autobiographical novel,
Children of the Dead End: The Autobiography of a Navvy
(1914) centers on Dermod Flynn, a hired laborer or “hand,” whose hands are so dirty that he is told he is not meant to touch books when he first encounters them. This highly symbolic moment discloses a great deal about access to literature and education in capitalist society, about who has the leisure of time to think and write and who does not. Against the odds, Flynn, as with his creator, does become a writer. But it is not that Dermod betrays his class so much as that he radically redefines what it is, what it is capable of, what it can say and think.
B
aker,
N
icholson
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

Born in New York City in 1957, Nicholson Baker is the author of seven novels that explore the minutiae of daily life, sexual eroticism, and bodily functions in writing that is recognized for its detail and capacity to explore the intricacies of the interior life.
The Mezzanine
(1988) is a meticulous description of the thoughts and actions of an ordinary office worker during a single lunch hour as he rides up an escalator in a crowded building. Taking place over a mere 20 minutes,
Room Temperature
(1990) records the perceptions and small actions of a man who is bottle‐feeding his infant daughter. In these minimalist narratives, Baker is not so much interested in portraying “stream of consciousness” in the manner of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf as he is in clinically observing the most subtle movements of the body and the rich associative logic of the mind. In
The Mezzanine
, for example, the narrator records that he is carrying a small paper bag that contains his lunch: this leads to a pages‐long reflection on the history of paper bags, paper versus plastic straws, and the mom‐and‐pop grocery industry, complete with footnotes. The impact of these early novels comes about through the accumulation of details and the presentation of a complete world made up entirely of minute particulars.
Baldwin,James
Authors: Scott Lynn Orilla
Published: August 2017

James Baldwin (1924–87) was a great twentieth‐century American essayist, novelist, and public intellectual. His work explores the relationship between racism and sexual inequalities, prefiguring developments in gender theory and queer studies. In addition to six novels, seven collections of essays, two plays, two collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories, Baldwin co‐authored a phototext, a children's story, and a screenplay. In addition, his extraordinary speaking ability is captured in numerous published and recorded interviews and dialogues.
B
arthelme,
D
onald
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

Donald Barthelme (1931–89) is, along with writers such as John Barth and Robert Coover, one of the founders of postmodernist American writing. Working primarily, but certainly not exclusively, in the genre of the short story, Barthelme's fictions, while sometimes considered to be elaborate conceptual constructions, are better conceived as jazz riffs on a theme or idea, even a single word, that layer discourses and images from an encyclopedic realm of disciplines and knowledge. Barthelme's narratives are often examples of post‐modern pastiche, in which a single story can reference dozens of previous works across the range of Western literature through parodic citation. The son of a professor of architecture, Barthelme's stories can be thought of as architectural experiments on the levels of form and genre that contain, at times, noisy, multidiscursive linguistic forays that challenge the boundaries of form.
B
ellow,
S
aul
Authors: Cronin Gloria L.
Published: August 2017

Saul Bellow's fiction dominated the American literary scene during the 1960s and 1970s, as Jewish American literature came into the literary mainstream. Novelist, short story and novella writer, essayist, playwright, and memoirist, he set most of his works in Chicago, and wrote out of the Midwestern realist tradition of Theodore Dreiser and Ernest Hemingway. Nearly all of his works feature male personae (only one female) who anguish over the legacy of early modernist nihilism, reflect on the immigrant Jewish American experience, explore the fraught issues of twentieth‐century American masculinities, depict the high comedy of failed heterosexual romance, and wrangle incessantly with the religious issue of transcendence. By 1976, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, he had created what critics identified as the quintessential modern American urban literary voice.
C
habon,
M
ichael
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

The author of seven novels, two short story collections, and a collection of essays, Michael Chabon is a writer committed to exploring genres and writing entertaining, serious fiction that contains protagonists who are experiencing complex personal and social conflicts at various stages of life. Born in Washington, DC in 1963 of Jewish parents and growing up as a teenager in Pittsburgh, Chabon now lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, who is also a novelist, and four children. Chabon's first novel,
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
(1988), which he began as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, was originally written as his MFA thesis at the University of California, Irvine. It is the story of Art Bechstein, a recent college graduate who engages in affairs with both male and female partners, thus confronting his own sexual and social identity in ways reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel of the youth generation in the wake of World War I,
This Side of Paradise
(1920). Chabon's next work,
Wonder Boys
, reflects his own difficulties in writing a second novel: its protagonist, Grady Tripp, a novelist and college professor suffering from writer's block, is at a crossroads in his life. Having spent seven years attempting to complete a follow‐up to his prizewinning first novel, Tripp discovers that his mistress, the chancellor of the college at which he teaches, is pregnant; meanwhile, his wife has walked out on him, his 2,500‐plus‐page unfinished manuscript sits unattended, and he is compelled to deal with one of his students, a budding author with deep personality problems, who has stolen an armful of Marilyn Monroe collectibles from the chancellor's house and accidentally killed her dog in the process. The comic action of the novel takes place over a weekend, and portrays the interwoven personal and professional crises of a character whose life is chaotic and unresolved. A successful film version of the novel starring Michael Douglas, Francis McDormand, and Toby McGuire was released in 2000.
C
isneros,
S
andra
Authors: Brackett Virginia M.
Published: August 2017

The protagonist of Sandra Cisneros's
The House on Mango Street
reflects Cisneros's childhood experience, moving often within the poverty of the barrio. The novel's popularity and adoption in countless classrooms allowed many readers to discover for the first time a voice with which they identified. With that novel, Cisneros captured an enormous audience and led a group of Chicana/o voices that would greatly affect the landscape of reading in the English language.
C
oover,
R
obert
Authors: O'Donnell Patrick
Published: August 2017

A leading member of the group of “high postmodernists” of the 1970s and 1980s which includes John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William H. Gass, and Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover has continued for over 40 years to write fictions that challenge the conventions of form and genre while serving as sharp critiques of social norms, religious piety, and political hegemony. Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa on February 4, 1932; raised in the Midwest, he received a BA in Slavic studies from Indiana University, served in the US Navy for several years, then studied for the MA in the humanities from the University of Chicago. Coover has held a number of teaching positions at Bard College, the University of Iowa, and Princeton; since 1980, he has taught in the distinguished creative writing program at Brown University, and is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment of the Arts. His first novel,
The Origin of the Brunists
(1966), features a small‐town prophet and a religious cult; it won the prestigious William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel. Since then, Coover has published over 20 novels and novellas, and has been a strong advocate for experimental writing and hypertext fiction.
D
ahlberg,
E
dward
Authors: Solomon Bill
Published: August 2017

Though his status remains that of a minor figure in the history of American letters, Edward Dahlberg's fictional practice and critical ideas inspired several prominent writers in the periods before and after World War II. He began his career in the Depression era as an autobiographical novelist, and was classified somewhat inaccurately at this time as a participant in the left‐wing movement known as proletarian literature. By the early 1940s, he had started to devote his energies exclusively to criticism, ultimately producing a fascinatingly idiosyncratic though infrequently read body of critical work. Toward the end of his career, having returned to narrative prose, he received considerable praise for a highly stylized memoir of his youthful experiences.
DeLillo,Don
Authors: Duvall John N.
Published: August 2017

Don DeLillo is one of the most significant contemporary American novelists. Depicting an age of media and advertising saturation in which politics have been reduced to sound bites and images, his fiction has often felt eerily prescient about contemporary crises. Published in 1985 just after the environmental disaster in Bhopal, India,White Noiseseemed to many like an uncanny commentary on the event. SincePlayers(1977), which imagines a plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange, DeLillo's fiction repeatedly has explored the possibilities of terrorism on American soil, so much so that his fiction almost seems to have foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. But to see DeLillo merely as a kind of contemporary Nostradamus is to miss what is central to his work. His most important fiction invites the reader to think historically. DeLillo may write about American postmodernity, but in his belief that the novel may help the engaged reader to think historically there remains a decidedly high modernist belief in the power of art to create a critical purchase on the present. This modernist undercurrent to DeLillo's postmodernism is not surprising given his admiration for William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and especially James Joyce.
D
ick,
P
hilip
K.
Authors: Wright Greg
Published: August 2017

Philip K. Dick was a popular and prolific writer of science fiction, and many of his critically acclaimed novels are associated with California's leftist counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. During his lifetime, he published 36 novels and over 100 short stories. Nine of Dick's novel manuscripts were published posthumously.
D
octorow,
E. L.
Authors: Wutz Michael
Published: August 2017

E. L. Doctorow has the honor of being among a small cadre of American novelists admired by a wide international readership and scholars. Thoroughly anchored in a post‐World War II American context, and often investigating the popular myths and self‐constructions of America, Doctorow's literary sensibilities address current global political and cultural concerns: the intersection of official and unofficial history, the relays between print culture and post‐print media, literature and the discourses of science and technology, as well as the notion of narrative as “a system of knowledge” (Morris 1999, 172). While Doctorow understands the novelist as an archaeologist of unacknowledged knowledge, the novelist him‐ or herself transmutes such leftovers into forms of telling knowledge that speak volumes about a culture's historical moment.
D
u
B
ois,
W. E. B.
Authors: Wagers Kelley
Published: August 2017

During a career that spanned much of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in nearly every genre while aiming each of his varied texts at solving the vast social problem he identified in 1900: “The problem of the twentieth century,” he said, “is the problem of the color line.” Taken as a whole, Du Bois's 22 monographs, countless essays, and multiple editorial and collaborative projects outline the major questions, methods, and debates that continue to comprise black cultural history and theory. Du Bois researched and represented African and African American experiences within international frames; investigated the material and psychological causes and effects of racism; reflected – and, at times, upheld – gender and class divisions; and traversed the lines between social theory and practice. He interrogated the boundaries between science and art, employed textual and musical modes of communication, and sought, especially by way of education and intellectual work, justice and redress for people of color worldwide. Du Bois's description of “double‐consciousness,” a condition of and response to racist society, is central to twentieth‐century literary history even as it continues to shape psychological and sociological studies of race.
F
arrell,
J
ames
T
.
Authors: Savage Bill
Published: August 2017

Despite that fact that James T. Farrell wrote 27 novels, scores of short stories and essays, and more than a dozen collections of literary criticism, he is at once remembered and forgotten primarily for one work, the
Studs Lonigan Trilogy
(1932–5).
F
ranzen,
J
onathan
Authors: Wilhite Keith
Published: August 2017

Named one of “Twenty Writers for the 21st Century” by the
New Yorker
, Jonathan Franzen has published critically acclaimed works of fiction and non‐fiction since his debut novel,
The Twenty Seventh City
(1988), earned the Whiting Writer's Award. His non‐fiction essays effectively unite the genres of memoire and cultural critique, while his fiction, though decidedly postmodern in influence and ambition, draws on longstanding traditions of narrative realism and naturalism. To date, he has published three novels and two collections of non‐fiction.
G
addis,
W
illiam
Authors: Tabbi Joseph P.
Published: August 2017

An encyclopedia entry on William Gaddis, himself a foremost “encyclopedic” author (Burn 2007), had better begin by narrowing the range. The field Gaddis set out to explore at length, in
The Recognitions
(1955), can be said to have been roughly congruent with the contemporary “wasteland” delineated a generation earlier in poetry by T. S. Eliot, namely, the entire heritage of literary, visual, musical, and religious arts that were being reconsidered, reformed, and to some extent used to “shore up the ruins” of postwar society. What was formulated for the first time, by Eliot and his modernist compeers, became redoubled, and partly parodied, in
The Recognitions
, which became a reference point for a post‐World War II generation of US writers and an important precursor to an emerging, postmodernist aesthetic in literature.
Gordon,Mary
Authors: Madden David W.
Published: August 2017

With the publication of her first novel, Mary Gordon emerged as a serious, confident, outspoken voice in contemporary American fiction. An impeccable stylist, she explores the twisted coils of familial and domestic experience. Although she shuns the attention, she is one of the most incisive writers of Catholic life in America, as well as being an important feminist voice.
The
H
arlem
R
enaissance
Authors: English Daylanne K.
Published: August 2017

The Harlem Renaissance was a 1920s flourishing of African American arts and letters centered in the Harlem section of New York City. Literature has long been considered the heart of the movement, with writers such as Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, and Jean Toomer among its major figures. The writers of the New Negro Movement, the period's more common nomenclature for the Renaissance, were consciously representing black people in new ways. They sought to counter received, racist, and stereotypical images of African Americans and to forge, through art, new versions of black identity. Howard philosophy professor and Harlem Renaissance proponent Alain Locke produced what comes closest to being a manifesto for the movement, a 1925 essay entitled “The New Negro” that appeared in the
Survey Graphic
, a progressive journal of social analysis. Locke sounded the death knell for “the Old Negro,” a “stock figure” that “had long become more of a myth than a man.” Locke argued for “a new psychology” among younger black Americans, who possessed, he said, “renewed self‐respect and self‐dependence.” Locke associated the New Negro with “creative expression” in the belief that “cultural recognition” would lead to improved social and political conditions for black people.
H
eller,
J
oseph
Authors: Buehrer David
Published: August 2017

Joseph Heller was one of post‐World War II's most popular and critically acclaimed writers, whose first and best‐known novel,
Catch‐22
(1961), became a counterculture classic. His career spanned some 40 years and included seven novels, three dramas, two memoirs, and a posthumously published collection of short fiction. He is best known for his black humor and scathing satire to critique those bureaucratic forces of modern society determined to defeat the individual and undermine humanistic values.
H
erbst,
J
osephine
Authors: Ehrhardt Julia
Published: August 2017

Josephine Herbst (1892–1969) was a novelist, journalist, and memoirist best known for the radical fiction she composed during the 1930s. Her literary reputation declined in subsequent decades, but the resurgence of academic interest in the literature of the American Left along with the rise of feminist literary criticism have revitalized interest in her work.
H
ighsmith,
P
atricia
Authors: Nieland Justus
Published: August 2017

A poet of disquiet and obsessive desire, Patricia Highsmith (1921–95) specialized in psychological thrillers staged in an amoral, irrational, Cold War universe. Her best‐known literary creation is Tom Ripley, the cheery, charismatic psychopath and consummate performance artist who debuted in
The Talented Mr. Ripley
(1955), the first in a series of five Ripley novels (the Ripleiad) that spanned Highsmith's career. Highsmith's literary output was prodigious: 22 novels, seven short story collections, and a meditation on her generic bread‐and‐butter,
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
(1966). Her first published novel,
Strangers on a Train
(1950), was quickly adapted in Alfred Hitchcock's famous 1952 film, and Highsmith's cold and fascinating fictional world has spawned a host of cinematic adaptations by prestigious European auteurs like Claude Chabrol, René Clement, and Wim Wenders. Recently, Highsmith has been rediscovered not just as a quintessential noir novelist but also as a shrewd analyst of “perverse” desire and its Cold War production, and an unsparing explorer of the fluidity of modern identity at mid‐century.
Historiographic Metafiction
Authors: Butter Michael
Published: August 2017

The term “historiographic metafiction” was coined by Linda Hutcheon in her essay “Beginning to Theorize the Postmodern” in 1987 and then further developed in her seminal studyA Poetics of Postmodernism(1988) to describe “those well‐known and popular novels which are both intensely self‐reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages.” According to Hutcheon, novels such as E. L. Doctorow'sRagtime(1975) or William Kennedy'sLegs(1975) display “a theoretical self‐awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographicmetafiction)[that] is made the grounds for [a] rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (1988 5). Historiographic metafiction thus constitutes a specific form of metafiction, which Patricia Waugh, in an equally influential study, has defined as “fictional writing which self‐consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (1984 2). However, historiographic metafiction adds a further dimension to such reflections: texts that can be subsumed under the heading not only explore the workings of literature and lay bare its ontological status as fiction. They additionally engage and unveil the parallels between writing literature and historiography – the practice of writing history – suggesting that both are acts of construction that do not reflect or naively represent reality or the past, but (re)invent and shape them from necessarily subjective and ideologically laden perspectives.
K
osinski,
J
erzy
Authors: Blaim Ludmiła Gruszewska
Published: August 2017

For Polish‐born novelist Jerzy Kosinski, the thin line separating fact from fiction was never significant. Born of Jewish parents in 1933, Kosinski survived World War II, sheltered by Polish peasants. In 1957, he arrived in the United States, where he published two well‐received monographs on communist Russia and his first novel,
The Painted Bird
(1965), deemed a masterpiece of Holocaust literature. Encouraged by initial success, Kosinski became a recognized writer whose works, praised for evocative representations of totalitarianism, collective mind, and victimization, were listed beside those of Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, and Ken Kesey. His glittering career of an “eccentric but important writer‐thinker in the existentialist mode of Sartre and Camus” (Sloan 1996) was ruined in 1982, when two reporters from the
Village Voice
insinuated that his account of himself and his Holocaust experience was based on fiction rather than fact. In the wake of further publications portraying him as an impostor, plagiarist, and pathological liar, Kosinski's literary status rapidly deteriorated.
McC
ullers,
C
arson
Authors: Gleeson‐White Sarah
Published: August 2017

Carson McCullers has been described as one of the United States’ greatest living writers (Williams (1986 [1950])) and as “a minor writer” (Fiedler 142). Although her reputation today lies somewhere between these two poles, she remains one of the most significant writers of the Southern Renaissance. McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia on February 19, 1917 to Lamar and Marguerite Smith. In 1930, Lula dropped her first name to become Carson, to better reflect what she believed was her proper boyish identity. Two years later, she developed rheumatic fever; left undiagnosed, it led to the many cerebral strokes she suffered throughout her life, eventually paralyzing one side of her body, and causing her death in Nyack, New York on September 29, 1967. McCullers's imaginative engagement with untenable gender positions, queer sexualities, and physical “freakishness” in her writings was thus rehearsed in her own life. Similarly, her support of the Civil Rights Movement enabled “a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race” (Wright 195). McCullers's elegant prose and her conviction that “[n]ature is not abnormal, only lifelessness is abnormal” (1971, 282) have ensured that her writing resonates with such force and freshness today.
McE
lroy,
J
oseph
Authors: Dewey Joseph
Published: August 2017

The construction of identity centers the narratives of Joseph McElroy. The novels themselves are cutting edge – they confront first‐time readers with their rich excess, layerings of associational symbols, improvisational feel, and unapologetic scale; these are novels so imposing that they create their own kind of reading dynamic (much like those of others of his generation, most notably Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo). Reading McElroy requires diligence, an intellectual curiosity about a range of disciplines (including economics, mathematics, linguistics, biology, cybernetics, and history), a fascination with the sheer volume of data offered by the material world, and, supremely, a love of word play.
N
abokov,
V
ladimir
Authors: De La Durantaye Leland
Published: August 2017

Vladimir Nabokov is one of the most brilliant, original, and complex writers of the twentieth century. Though best known for his novels, he is the author of works in a variety of genres, ranging from verse to memoir, biography to translation. No writer of the last half century has had so broad or so decisive an influence on American – as well as non‐American – fiction, from his student Thomas Pynchon to his early advocate John Updike, from Martin Amis to W. G. Sebald, Aleksandar Hemon to Jhumpa Lahiri, Don DeLillo to Jeffrey Eugenides, Zadie Smith to Michael Chabon.
O
zick,
C
ynthia
Authors: Alkana Joseph
Published: August 2017

Cynthia Ozick is a major voice in contemporary American literature whose short stories, novels, and essays have consistently elicited high critical regard. Her fiction is often considered challenging for raising difficult intellectual matters that frequently are situated in the dynamics of her characters. Ozick's novels and shorter fiction recall literary and cultural tradition in their attention to moral issues, yet they are also at times stylistically innovative. Her five novels, five volumes of shorter fiction, and five collections of essays have generated many honors, such as a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Strauss Living Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
P
rice,
R
eynolds
Authors: Strandberg Victor
Published: August 2017

In 1963 Reynolds Price won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for his first novel,
A Long and Happy Life
, a book that has now sold over a million copies. From that spectacular beginning, he went on to compose three volumes of short stories, 13 novels, six plays, four volumes of poetry, three collections of essays, three memoirs, and enough religious writing to feature him on the cover of
Time
(Dec. 6, 1999). In addition to such versatility, Price has published countless book reviews and interviews that disclose a vast array of literary interests and relationships.
P
roulx,
A
nnie
Authors: Varvogli Aliki
Published: August 2017

Annie Proulx arrived late on the literary scene but soon caught up with her contemporaries. Since the publication of her first book of stories in 1988, she has produced three further story collections and four novels. Both popular and critically acclaimed, she has been awarded numerous literary prizes: the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (1993) and both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1994). Her work is often associated with regional writing, and most of her books are set away from cities in rural areas underrepresented in American fiction. Proulx dislikes being categorized as a “woman writer,” preferring her work to be read and assessed for literary merit rather than for the author's gender.
R
echy,
J
ohn
Authors: Moreno Michael P.
Published: August 2017

A prolific writer from the gay and Chicano communities, John Rechy has redefined the American narrative of the late twentieth century by crossing literary genres and challenging cultural perceptions. His many novels, which often blur autobiography with fiction, possess a cinematic quality that reveals the underside of urban spaces and the search for one's identity. Since the late 1950s, Rechy has actively transformed and articulated the way outsiders, particularly homosexuals, have been perceived throughout the United States.
R
eed,
I
shmael
Authors: Strombeck Andrew
Published: August 2017

An innovative, prolific, and always interesting writer, Ishmael Reed is as famous for his fusions of postmodern metafiction and African American culture as for his clashes with African American feminists over the question of a persecuted African American male. He has been equally influential, though, as a promoter of multicultural literature of all stripes, lending support to younger writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Toni Cade Bambara.
The Road Novel
Authors: Gross Andrew S.
Published: August 2017

The road novel is the automotive version of the journey narrative, borrowing elements from its two major variants: the romance or noble quest and the picaresque with its chance encounters and roguish characters. American automobilists recall pioneer figures like Leatherstocking and Huck Finn who seek to escape civilization by “lighting out for the Territory”; they also follow in the footsteps of the peripatetic speaker in Whitman's “Song of the Open Road” who finds freedom, companionship, and insight on the highway. Sinclair Lewis's
Free Air
(1919), the first road novel, draws on these traditions in establishing the defining theme of the genre: the technologized escape from the constraints of civilization to the freedom of the open road. This flight is also the central paradox of the genre since drivers, in their dependence on automotive technology, bring with them the civilization they flee.
Roth,Henry
Authors: Kellman Steven G.
Published: August 2017

Henry Roth was a pioneering figure in American Jewish literature. Despite initial neglect, his first novel,Call it Sleep(1934), was eventually recognized as a classic of immigrant fiction, a brilliant adaptation of Joycean and Freudian techniques to American urban experience, and a harbinger of the flowering of American Jewish culture after World War II. After a legendary hiatus of several decades, Roth recovered his literary ambitions, producing in the final decade of his long life a massive cycle of autobiographical fiction. Two volumes were carved out of it and published before his death at the age of 89, two appeared posthumously, and approximately 1,000 manuscript pages remained unpublished.
Social‐Realist Fiction
Authors: Duck Leigh Anne
Published: August 2017

The term “social realism” is typically associated with the art and literature of the 1930s, a time when poverty, unemployment, and exploitative working conditions received unprecedented attention in the United States. Shaped by the circumstances of the Great Depression, these debates nonetheless reflect ongoing concerns about social realism's task of portraying society in a way that both reveals injustice and stimulates transformative impulses or action.
The Southern Novel
Authors: Matthews John T. , Hinrichsen Lisa
Published: August 2017

The US South's modern literary culture reflects the region's fitful, often violent struggle to modernize following the Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War. Loss in 1865 left a devastated country: a generation of white males decimated, slaves having deserted, an agricultural economy in ruins, widespread poverty, physical destruction, and explosive racial rage. The region's future was difficult to imagine. Former elites bid to regain power, provoking the federal government to take control of ex‐Confederate states and enforce Reconstruction. When occupying forces withdrew in the 1870s, the region was left to figure out what a “New South” might look like.
Speculative Fiction
Authors: Lucas Gerald R.
Published: August 2017

Most frequently, “speculative fiction” is a synonym for science fiction. Since its genesis as an adventure narrative, science fiction has alwaysspeculatedabout what isbeyond –from across the sea, space, and time – based on contemporaneous worldviews and technologies. Historically situated, like other incarnations of science fiction, “speculative fiction” was coined in 1948 by Robert Heinlein and represents the concerns of the increasingly fragmented world of high technology evident after World War II. Speculative fiction often poses a “What if?” question that challenges assumptions of empirical experience or reality. Speculative fiction includes all of the characteristics of science fiction, but often has a broader scope, including alternate histories, magic realism, contemporary fantasy, and so on. As part of its more inclusive purview, speculative fiction also breaks with the traditional concerns of a white, male‐dominated readership and authorship to include marginalized voices and concerns like those of differing class, race, gender, and sexuality.
S
tegner,
W
allace
Authors: Hartman Steven
Published: August 2017

In a career spanning more than half a century Wallace Stegner produced some 30 books, including 15 volumes of fiction. He undertook his literary work with an unyielding belief in the writer's duty to expose the erasures and distortions of history promoted by an increasingly throwaway popular culture, emerging as the most prominent literary mediator and public intellectual of the American West in his time. Believing that modern transformations of American landscapes, no less than American culture and society, occurred more rapidly and visibly beyond the 100th meridian, Stegner turned to the West of present and past as the setting, inspiration, and site of reflection for his most enduring fiction.
S
teinbeck,
J
ohn
Authors: Gladstein Mimi Reisel
Published: August 2017

John Steinbeck is a major American novelist of the mid twentieth century whose sympathetic portrayals of the plight of migrant workers are enduring classics. Translated worldwide, Steinbeck's works garnered serious national and international recognition during his lifetime: he received a Drama Critics' Circle Award for the stage version of his novel
Of Mice and Men
(1937); the Pulitzer Prize for his epic Dust Bowl exodus,
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939); and the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964. Steinbeck's international status was acknowledged in 1962 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In a writing career characterized by diversity of genre and tone, Steinbeck moved easily from the sweep of the epic and historical novel to light comic satire; playnovelettes, screenplays, and serious studies of marine biology attest to his willingness to experiment with new techniques and subject matters.
T
hompson,
J
im
Authors: Lukin Josh
Published: August 2017

James Myers Thompson was an Oklahoman novelist, journalist, and screenwriter whose violent and pessimistic work achieved prominence in the noir fiction of the 1950s, sank into obscurity for 20 years thereafter, and was revived to great posthumous acclaim in the mid‐1980s. Thompson's novels reflect his lifelong socialism and alcoholism along with an interest in psychoanalysis and the contrast between Americans' public personae and their authentic selves. His work is distinguished for its intellectual depth, its suspicion of gender norms, its bleak satirical vision, and its tendency toward experimental narrative. Thompson numbered Faulkner and Dos Passos among his influences as well as more traditional stylists such as Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, and Dorothy Canfield. Born on September 27, 1906, Thompson became a novelist in middle age, writing 30 books and co‐authoring two screenplays (The
Killing
in 1956 and
Paths of Glory
in 1957) between 1940 and 1972, and killing himself on April 7, 1977.
Toomer,Jean
Authors: Baldanzi Jessica S.
Published: August 2017

Author Jean Toomer is most commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the literary and cultural movement centered in Harlem, New York City, in the 1920s and 1930s. Toomer is seen by most critics past and present to have contributed, with his most famous workCane(1988 [1923]), the first artistic representation of African American life to what Alain Locke dubbed the “New Negro” movement. However, Toomer himself saw his heritage as a uniquely American mix of races and ethnicities, and resisted his association with the movement, deeming its racial categorizations oversimplified and restrictive to the potential of the human race as a whole.
U
pdike,
J
ohn
Authors: Price Jonathan L.
Published: August 2017

John Updike was a tireless novelist, a transcriber of the individual consciousness in contemporary culture as well as history. His protagonists constantly confront in dramatic and explicit ways the topology and emotions of adulterous sexuality – but at the same time are drawn to a dialectical religiosity influenced by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and the Protestant theologian Karl Barth. Writing until his death at the age of 76, Updike was a former
New Yorker
staffer who began his literary career with a short story in the early 1950s and continued to produce works in nearly all genres, though focusing on fiction. His oeuvre includes more than 20 novels, 12 collections of short stories, six books of poetry, a memoir, anthologies of prose essays, and a book on golf.
V
onnegut,
K
urt
Authors: Mattox Jake
Published: August 2017

Kurt Vonnegut was a prolific, uniquely inventive, and bestselling fiction writer, essayist, humorist, and public presence. His writing combines ironic dark humor, postmodern techniques, and antiestablishment politics to offer an intensely humanist critique of the twentieth century, especially the brutality and destruction of war and the abuses or excesses associated with technological advancement, capitalist individualism, and political and corporate power. His oeuvre includes short stories, drama, drawings, and 14 novels, and his work was frequently transferred into television and film.
W
elch,
J
ames
Authors: Palmer Linda
Published: August 2017

Novelist and poet James Welch (Blackfeet‐Gros Ventre) is a major voice of the Native American Literary Renaissance, a movement that began with N. Scott Momaday's 1969 novel
House Made of Dawn
and includes notable American writers Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Simon Ortiz, Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo, and Gerald Vizenor. Since 1969, these novelists, poets, memoirists, and critics have added significantly to an understanding of American literature and culture as they portray Native American experience in contemporary society, explore the results of loss of land and culture, and demonstrate the lifesustaining role of native traditions such as storytelling, ceremony, ritual, and myth, as well as revealing the potency of trickster and absurdist humor in the face of cultural destruction. James Welch's internationally acclaimed literature places him at the heart of the Native American Renaissance and of contemporary American literature.
A
brahams,
P
eter
Authors: Goyal Yogita
Published: August 2017

Though often neglected by scholars of African fiction, Peter Abrahams is one of the earliest voices in black South African fiction and an important theorist of nationalism, transnationalism, and exile. His works reveal the competing and complementary intersections of liberal humanism, Marxism, and Black Nationalism.