bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
L
ehmann,
R
osamond
Authors: Simons Judy
Published: August 2017

Rosamond Lehmann writes fiction that chronicles a shifting society fractured by war, loss, political change, and class antagonism. Predominantly she tells the story of early twentieth‐century womanhood, reworking the traditional subjects of “the woman's novel” – romance, marriage, family, and the fabric of domestic existence – to invest them with new meaning. Lehmann's love stories expose the bitterness of passion, her families are minefields of jealousy and resentment, her domestic scenes contain unspoken danger zones, and her well‐brought‐up young women are framed against a background of social upheaval that mirrors their own internal traumas. No writer has more painfully exposed the subterfuges or the self‐abasement of the female psyche and none matches Lehmann's delicacy and lyricism in expressing the rapturous intensity of apparently inconsequential experience. The
New York Times
called her prose “a continual harmony of glancing, glowing colors” (Chamberlain 3), and the author Anita Brookner, in many respects her literary successor, commented that “she succeeds in giving a unique account of the world seen through feminine eyes, and this she manages better than Virginia Woolf, whom she knew, ever did” (Brookner 20).
L
ively,
P
enelope
Authors: Davies Alistair
Published: August 2017

In a long and prolific literary career (she has written over more than 40 works for adults and children), Penelope Lively has excelled in a number of genres: the ghost story, the romance, the historical novel, even science fiction. Her work for adults has been marked by a consistent spirit of experiment subtle enough to win the admiration of critics while never alienating a wider readership. Absorbing modernist and postmodernist modes, she is predominantly a realist writer whose work, both for children and for adults, questions our experience of time, memory, and history and challenges the codes and expectations of the “real.”
M
augham,
W.
S
omerset
Authors: Holden Philip
Published: August 2017

W. Somerset Maugham is perhaps best known as an accomplished writer of short stories in which craft outweighs formal innovation, yet, in one of the longest literary careers of any British writer, he was most notable for his endless capacity for self‐reinvention. Commencing as a late Victorian writer of realist fiction concerning class and gender, Maugham also dabbled in the gothic and adventure romance. As an Edwardian he became one of the most popular playwrights of his generation. Growing weary of the limits imposed by conventional dramatic forms, he returned to fiction, publishing his greatest novel,
Of Human Bondage
(1915). His experiences during World War I and after took his writing in two further directions. Through his Ashenden short stories, relying on personal experience as an intelligence agent, he pioneered espionage fiction. Travels in the South Pacific and later East and Southeast Asia resulted in the exotic fiction for which he is best known. Yet we should also not forget that much of Maugham's fictional production in his later career is concerned with domestic issues, reflecting particularly on the world of Anglophone literary production and authorial celebrity in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Maugham's greatest fictional work is surely himself. Through thin fictionalization, autobiographical self‐representation, destruction of documents, and outright disinformation, Maugham created himself as perhaps the quintessential cosmopolitan English man of letters, an image that has slowly been picked apart by scholars and biographers after his death in 1965.
McE
wan,
I
an
Authors: Wells Lynn
Published: August 2017

Rising above his early reputation as an author fixated on the grotesque and perverse, Ian McEwan has established himself as one of the world's most celebrated prose fiction writers in English, enjoying both critical approbation and commercial success. While he frequently employs the self‐conscious and experimental techniques associated with the postmodern period, he also prides himself on his work's compellingly readable quality and strong moral sensibility, characteristics familiar to his readership from the tradition of the great English novels of the nineteenth century. His writing has won many awards, and several of his texts have been adapted for the screen, the most famous being the Oscar‐winning film of
Atonement
.
McG
ahern,
J
ohn
Authors: Storey Michael L.
Published: August 2017

The fiction of John McGahern, the often acclaimed (and once banned) Irish author, appears to be written in an understated, realistic style. But his realism – like that of James Joyce, perhaps McGahern's strongest literary influence – is subtly enhanced by poetic imagery and symbolism that bring a romantic and metaphysical quality to his writing. His fiction is almost always set in the rural Irish midlands where McGahern grew up, and his themes of oppressed, impoverished country life, circumscribed by conservative Catholic doctrine and ritual, are drawn from life in that part of Ireland. While his fiction has been read as a social critique of mid‐twentieth‐century Ireland, it is renowned more for its timeless, existential themes of family (including Oedipal) relationships, growing up, the search for meaning, and the confrontation with death. McGahern is best known for his six novels and four collections of stories (including
The Collected Stories
(1992)), but he also wrote a memoir, a play, and several radio and television adaptations of his fiction, as well as numerous reviews and essays. Internationally recognized, he is especially admired in France.
Modernist Fiction
Authors: Randall Bryony
Published: August 2017

While the parameters of the terms “modernist” and “modernism” are constantly under debate, there is a broad critical consensus that “modernist fiction,” in the Western Anglophone world, usually denotes experimental narrative works produced between 1890 and 1940, and the major figures in British and Irish modernist fiction would include Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Prose fiction falling within this category is identified by its breaking with literary norms; being “modern,” in the sense of new, different, unprecedented. And while experimentation in terms of form is most widely seen as identifying modernist literature – breaking up linear narrative, using non‐normative syntax, inventing new forms of narrator, and so on – modernist texts are also characterized by their willingness to address new and sometimes controversial subject matter. Modernist fiction has often been caricatured as holding “real life” at a distance, interested only in its own formal and stylistic innovations. But much modernist fiction is characterized by a direct, often antagonistic, engagement with the lived realities of its rapidly changed, and changing, social and political world, influencing and influenced by the contemporaneous developments in other art forms, as well as presenting complex responses to intellectual developments in every field, from politics and philosophy to physics and biology.
M
oore,
B
rian
Authors: Maher Eamon
Published: August 2017

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1921, Brian Moore spent the majority of his life in Canada and the US. The author of some 20 novels, he is characterized as a talented storyteller as well as someone with a keen understanding of the female psyche (O'Donoghue, 1991). By the time of his death in January 1999, Moore's standing was extremely high: a lucrative book contract signed with Bloomsbury in 1988 made him financially secure and many of his novels were successfully adapted for the screen (most notably
Catholics, Black Robe, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
, and
Lies of Silence)
. While many of the earlier novels have a distinctively Irish flavor, others are situated in France, the US, Canada, and South America.
O
'Brien,
E
dna
Authors: D'Hoker Elke
Published: August 2017

As the author of 16 novels, six collections of short stories, a dozen plays, and several works of nonfiction, Edna O'Brien is one of the most prolific Irish writers. Yet, in spite of this steady flow of writing and her wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic, critical recognition has been slow in coming. Until the mid‐1990s critics relegated her work to the realm of “women's fiction” and analyzed it for what it revealed of the author's own life and love affairs. More recently, however, critical reinterpretation of her work has led to its recognition as an important testimony to sociopolitical realities in twentieth‐century Ireland and as a powerful representation of universal human desires and obsessions.
O
'Brien,
F
lann
Authors: Nugent Joseph
Published: August 2017

Flann O'Brien, born Brian O'Nolan (Irish
Brian ‘O Nuallain)
, aka Myles na gCopaleen (or na Gopaleen), is as dazzling a writer as Ireland has produced. Whether we take him as an accomplished modernist or prescient postmodernist, his critical significance is now confirmed, his reputation and popularity assured. O'Brien's best novels are intricately plotted, brilliantly executed, often morbidly funny experiments that entice the reader into an alternative universe of dark absurdity. During his lifetime he was celebrated mainly as a newspaper columnist, his journalistic pyrotechnics transcending the squalid Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s to strike, Swift‐like, at our pretensions and pomposities even today.
O
'Flaherty,
L
iam
Authors: Friberg‐Harnesk Hedda
Published: August 2017

Among Irish writers, Liam O'Flaherty is one of the major analysts of “post‐revolutionary disillusion in the mid‐1920s” and one of the leaders, with Sean O'Casey and James Joyce, of “a counter‐Revival realism in art” (Kiberd 491, 498). Sean O'Faolain, for one, placed O'Flaherty “at the head of the realistic school of his day” (173). Not only the realist, O'Flaherty is also master of the lyrical mode, “a poet in prose, who chose the short story as a medium” (Kennelly 1994, 198). As a short story writer, O'Flaherty belongs with such other giants of his generation as Mary Lavin, Frank O'Connor, and O'Faolain. Some critics have seen him “accordingto the Irish measure – as a naturalist, a realist, a social critic or historian, or a voice of things Irish, an acquaintance of Yeats, George Russell, and Sean O'Casey” – others as a European writer, belonging to the tradition of “Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, or the film‐maker Ingmar Bergman” (Zneimer, p. vii), as well as to an Irish one.
Phillips,Caryl
Authors: Gunning Dave
Published: August 2017

Caryl Phillips has established himself as one of the foremost chroniclers of what he calls the “new world order”: the late twentieth‐ and early twenty‐first‐century global relationships that colonial and postcolonial frameworks seem increasingly unable fully to explain. His drama, fiction and travel writing engage consistently with people searching for ways to belong to societies that are often hostile to their presence, and his work is throughout marked by his refusal to accept simple answers to the complicated question of where, and how, home might be found. He has been the recipient of such prestigious literary awards as the James Tait Black and Commonwealth Writers' prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the PEN/ Faulkner Award. In 1993 he featured as one ofGranta's20 “Best of Young British Novelists.”
Postcolonial Fiction of theAfrican Diaspora
Authors: Su John J.
Published: August 2017

The phrase “postcolonial fiction of the African diaspora” typically refers to those works written since the 1950s by African immigrants and their descendants. The era of decolonization on the African continent began in 1957 with the independence of Ghana, and the political turmoil across Africa during the next two decades, combined with the need in Great Britain for cheap labor in the aftermath of World War II, led to significant waves of migration through the 1960s. Writing by so‐called “black Britons” has gained increasing prominence and prestige since the 1960s, and has played a crucial role in a rethinking of what constitutes Britishness in a post‐imperial context.
Postcolonial Fiction of theWestIndian/Caribbean Diaspora
Authors: Weiss Timothy
Published: August 2017

In the Caribbean, one emigré writer recollects, “you grow up knowing that you're going to leave” (Philip 230). That seems to be a given for writers‐to‐be of the West Indies/Caribbean basin, whose diaspora includes the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. For the Anglophone Caribbean, London has long served as a de facto cultural capital, and with the post‐World War II surge of migration, its West Indian population grew significantly. By 1961 an estimated 172,000 West Indians had immigrated to the UK, and by 1981 500,000 people of West Indian background lived there. Diasporic literature begins as a literature of immigration, later becoming a migrating literature constantly reformulating its sense of place and identity. “Migration creates the desire for home, which in turn produces the rewriting of home” (Condé & Lonsdale 1999). In its beginnings, diasporic literature exists on the margins of national literatures, whether British, American, or Canadian; as it evolves from one generation of writers to the next it redefines national spaces and imagines transnational ones.
The Publishing Industry: The Rise of the Paperback
Authors: Squires Claire
Published: August 2017

The paperback book is an intrinsically twentieth‐century literary and publishing phenomenon, and the story of its rise is central to the modern publishing industry. Portable, disposable, and contemporary, the paperback is more than simply a book published within paper or card covers. It is a mass‐market commodity: cheap, accessible, and rendered iconic by the British company Penguin. The paperback is also associated with pulp publishing of sometimes dubious quality, but has been at the vanguard of bringing education and entertainment to a mass readership, overturning censorship and promoting bestseller culture. By the mid‐1960s, the Beatles would aspire to be a “Paperback Writer,” in the words of their number one song.
P
ym,
B
arbara
Authors: Cotsell Michael
Published: August 2017

The English novelist Barbara Pym was born in 1913 and was brought up in Oswestry, a small town in Shropshire. Her childhood was happy. The family was church‐going and the Church of England, both in its inhibitions and absurdities, is a presence in all her work.
Queer/Alternative Sexualities in Fiction
Authors: Booth Howard J.
Published: August 2017

The twentieth century in Britain and Ireland saw dramatic changes for homosexuals and those who did not identify with traditional gender roles. Initially the law, medicine, and culture defined such people in predominantly negative ways. In time more positive views of sexual and gender difference began to circulate, and reform campaigns gathered force. The closing decades of the century saw male homosexual behavior largely decriminalized and non‐normative gender and sexual identities gaining new legal rights. Further, the framework that had come into being in the second half of the Victorian period began to be dismantled. Fiction reflected the changes through this whole period, with many authors seeking to use their writing to influence debates on sexuality and gender identity.
S
cott,
P
aul
Authors: Haswell Janis
Published: August 2017

Two decades before the publication of Edward Said's
Orientalism
(1978), Paul Mark Scott examined in 13 successive novels the colonial relationship between England and India. Scott is best known for the Raj Quartet, produced as a drama series by Granada Television in 1984 and aired on PBS under the title
The Jewel in the Crown
. His contribution to the postcolonial assessment of the imperial experience is nothing less than groundbreaking.
Scottish Fiction
Authors: Goldie David
Published: August 2017

In an essay of 1896 the quixotic Scottish writer R. B. Cunninghame Graham railed against contemporary trends in Scottish fiction, arguing that, because of their pernicious influence, “to‐day a Scotchman stands confessed a sentimental fool … oppressed with the tremendous difficulties of the jargon he is bound to speak, and above all weighted down with the responsibility of being Scotch” (Nash 45). Many of the Scottish writers who followed him in the next century were very conscious of this “responsibility of being Scotch” and the need to answer to its particular demands. For some it was a source of pride, and a duty of care they took on willingly; for others it was an unwelcome historical burden that impeded the free travel of their minds. But whether they liked it or not, they shared in Scotland an often problematic common ground. At the beginning of the twentieth century Scotland was a small nation on the periphery of Europe; a nation without statehood, locked as it was into a political union dominated by a partner, England, that was almost 10 times its size. It was weak as a political entity but strong economically, having gained enormously from the British imperial project for which it had provided much of the heavy engineering as well as merchants, administrators, and soldiers. Added to this, it was a country that had difficulty in coming to a settled view of itself: a country of three languages (English, Scots, and Gaelic) and two distinct cultures (Lowland and Highland); a nation renowned for its beautiful landscapes that had some of the most heavily industrialized and squalid cities on the planet; a place that set a high value on education, with more ancient universities than England, but which lost many of its best minds to London.
S
elf,
W
ill
Authors: Hayes M. Hunter
Published: August 2017

The author of 18 books and recipient of praise from novelists such as J. G. Ballard and Martin Amis, Will Self has earned a reputation as one of England's more provocative writers. A caustic satirist and deconstructionist of political and popular cultures, Self has developed a distinctive prose style that combines lyrical precision with verbal agility while offering unique perceptions on contemporary life, a style he terms “dirty magical realism.”
Storey,David
Authors: Hutchings William
Published: August 2017

Uniquely among working‐class writers of his generation, David Storey has been acclaimed in England and America as both a novelist and a playwright. Born in 1933 in Yorkshire, the son of a coalminer, Storey draws quite specifically on his varied life experience as a professional athlete, an artist (educated at London's prestigious Slade School of Fine Art), a teacher, a construction worker, a writer, and a son whose education, talents, and parental ambitions elevated him – however uneasily – from the working class to the middle class.
T
homas,
D. M.
Authors: Nicol Bran
Published: August 2017

The novelist, poet, and translator Donald Michael Thomas is the author of nearly 20 collections of poetry, translations of the Russian poets Pushkin, Akhmatova, and Yevtushenko, a biography of Solzhenitsyn, and 13 novels, of which the most famous is
The White Hotel
(1981). His fiction has been considered a significant example of postmodernist writing in that it is anti‐realist or experimental in form and frequently uses the techniques of pastiche and what Linda Hutcheon has termed “historiographic metafiction” (5).
Waugh,Evelyn
Authors: Schweizer Bernard
Published: August 2017

Born in 1903, in London, Evelyn Waugh grew up in an upper‐middle‐class home, in which literature formed a integral part of daily life. His father, Arthur Waugh, was head of the publishing house Chapman and Hall and also an amateur literary critic. His only sibling, Alec Waugh, was a successful novelist at the age of 18, and Waugh doubtlessly learned some tricks of the trade from him, although he went on to eclipse his elder brother's reputation. After attending an Anglican boys school, Evelyn Waugh studied history at Hertford College, Oxford. But being more interested in socializing and drinking than in academic pursuits, he left the university prematurely in 1924, with only a third‐class degree, after which he had two unsuccessful teaching stints. He was dismissed from his second post as a teacher for alleged sexual misconduct, but he had accumulated enough experience by then to write his fictional account of a failed student turned novice teacher,Decline and Fall(1928). This comic novel is widely admired for its hilarious rendering of the naive protagonist's education at the hands of an unscrupulous society. Expelled from Oxford for a prank others had played onhim, the luckless Paul Pennyfeather embarks on a teaching career that only enmeshes him further in conflict and scandal, as his naivety acts as a foil to point up the ruthlessly selfish nature of a pleasure‐driven, decadent society composed equally of ill‐behaved pupils and their shameless parents. At the time of its publication, the book's indecorous treatment of social anarchy and sex caused a stir.
Wilson,Angus
Authors: Mackay Marina
Published: August 2017

Although in his own lifetime (1913–91) he was considered one of the most important British novelists of the postwar period, Angus Wilson is nowhere near as widely read as he was. So to say that he is very much a writer of his time may seem faint praise, but perhaps his most obvious claim on our attention is the extraordinary archive of mid‐century morals and manners represented by the eight novels and three collections of short stories that he produced in a career that ran from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the early 1980s. But what makes this oeuvre more than just a social record, albeit a more nuanced record than most of his contemporaries left behind, is Wilson's sense, partly fascinated and partly appalled, of the ways in which those slick surfaces of everyday social interaction that he reproduces so meticulously are continuously jeopardized by the private and public sadisms they attempt to conceal. Concerns with the inau‐thenticity of social relations and the intractable reality of moral evil give Wilson's fiction its primary themes and its characteristically edgy, theatrical forms.
W
odehouse,
P. G
Authors: Olson Kirby
Published: August 2017

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born on October 15, 1881 to Henry Ernest Wodehouse and Eleanor Deane. He was the third of the couple'sfourchildren. Wodehouse'sparentslived in Hong Kong, but his father insisted that the children be raised in England and receive an English education. Young Wodehouse and his siblings were raised in Bath and Croydon by surrogate parents. After enduring a series of boarding schools in his teens, Wodehouse attended and graduated from Dulwich College. He then survived a short stint as a banker, while writing in the evenings. In less than a year Wodehouse's articles, stories, and eventually books caught on with the British public and he was able to spend the rest of his life as a full‐time writer. He met Ethel Rowley on Long Island, New York in 1914 and, after a brief courtship, the two were married. She was a widow with a daughter from a previous marriage. The couple lived on Long Island in luxurious circumstances, although Wodehouse preferred to spend his days writing and only regretfully attended the lavish dinner parties that his wife loved to throw. When possible, his work days exceeded 10 hours.
Woolf,Virginia
Authors: Wall Kathleen
Published: August 2017

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) wrote experimental novels notable for their expressive form and poetic language. While her primary reputation is that of an experimental novelist, her collected essays and her two book‐length essays,A Room of One's Own(1929) andThree Guineas(1938), establish her importance as a feminist and cultural critic. Her experimental aesthetic, her founding of the Hogarth Press (along with her husband, Leonard Woolf), and her membership in the Bloomsbury Group, place her at the center of British modernism in the first 40 years of the twentieth century.
A
nderson,
S
herwood
Authors: Brown Judith
Published: August 2017

Sherwood Anderson's writing career took off with the 1919 publication of his third book,
Winesburg, Ohio
, when he was 43. From that moment, he exerted a profound influence over a generation of young writers, including Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, who looked to his small‐town sketches as a model for modern American writing. Anderson offered a fresh approach to characterization, plot, and the frank depiction of sexuality, and his work expressed something of the anxiety and loneliness brought about by an increasingly mechanized twentieth century. Anderson's position in the literary world, however, would not be evenly sustained throughout his lifetime or after. Despite his seven novels, six volumes of essays, two plays, two collections of poetry, three published collections of stories, and three memoirs, Anderson's enduring legacy remains that of his short story cycle,
Winesburg, Ohio
.
A
uster,
P
aul
Authors: Coughlan David
Published: August 2017

Paul Auster is a poet, essayist, filmmaker, and, above all, novelist whose philosophical and frequently metafictional works have won popular and critical acclaim for the restrained beauty of their storytelling. Auster was born February 3, 1947 in Newark, New Jersey, the grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. After graduating from Columbia University, he lived in France for over three years, returning to New York in July 1974. Later that same year, he married Lydia Davis, also a writer, with whom he has a son, Daniel. Accounts of these times, and of the extreme financial difficulties which marked them, are given in autobiographical writings in the collections
The Art of Hunger
(1997a) and
Hand to Mouth
(1997b), while autobiographical allusions appear often in Auster's fiction as well.
B
arnes,
D
juna
Authors: Caselli Daniela
Published: August 2017

Born in 1892, Djuna Barnes was active as a writer between 1913 and 1982, the date of her death. Her most famous work is the now classic modernist novel,
Nightwood
(2007 [1936]), first published with an enthusiastic introduction by T. S. Eliot. Her experimental oeuvre spans a dazzling range of genres and media. Her first collection of “rhymes and rhythms,” which she illustrated, was published in 1915 (1994 [1915]), and a collection of short stories, plays, and portraits entitled
A Book
appeared in 1923, and was later republished as
A Night Among the Horses
(1929). Her illustrated picaresque novel
Ryder
(1928) was briefly a bestseller, while the same year she privately distributed in Paris her illustrated
Ladies Almanack
(2006 [1928]). A sample of her artwork can be accessed in the volume
Poe's Mother
(1995), while a larger number of originals are available in the Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park. In 1958 Faber and Faber published her verse play,
The Antiphon
. Most of her poems were published posthumously, in 1982 and in 2005.
B
urroughs,
W
illiam
Authors: Harris Oliver
Published: August 2017

William Burroughs (1914–97) is widely recognized as one of the most original, innovative, and culturally influential writers of the twentieth century. At the same time, his place in the academy and within American literary history has remained highly problematic and controversial, a position that has three principal causes. First, while Burroughs initially emerged in the late 1950s as part of the Beat generation, even that context was more apparent than real and became increasingly tenuous as a result of his longstanding expatriation, which lasted for a quarter of a century until the mid‐1970s. Second, both the uncompromising sexual and political content of Burroughs's writing and the sensational drama of his personal life brought him in conflict with the law, which guaranteed his status as a countercultural icon while deterring serious academic attention. And third, Burroughs's relationship to American literary history has been complicated by the radical experimental methods in several media that he developed during the decade he lived in Paris and London, and that came largely out of European avant garde art traditions. Significantly, the first book‐length critical studies appeared not in America but in England and France.
B
utler,
O
ctavia
Authors: López Tiffany Ana
Published: August 2017

Octavia Butler is heralded as the first African American female writer of science fiction and fantasy, also termed speculative fiction. Her published works include 12 novels, a novelette, and one collection of stories; only two of her novels (
Kindred
and
Fledgling)
were written to stand alone, with all others envisioned as part of a collection of books: the Xenogenesis trilogy, the five‐volume Patternist series, and
Parable of the Talents
and
Parable of the Sower
. Butler began writing science fiction out of frustration with the genre's glaring lack of female protagonists and ethnic minorities. Her work is acclaimed for its bold projections of future worlds driven by complex explorations of race, sexuality, spirituality, and violence as foundational in shaping people and building community.
Cain,JamesM.
Authors: Madden David W.
Published: August 2017

Remembered for his early novels and tough‐guy style, James M. Cain was a prolific author whose career spanned 58 years as a journalist, playwright, screenwriter, short story writer, and novelist. Although he suffered from obscurity in his last 25 years, Cain's novels and the film adaptations of his works have continually fascinated audiences and spawned imitators. Key elements of this popularity are his swift‐paced plotting, “hard‐boiled” dialogue, and commonplace characters whose worlds change radically when confronted with the possibility of the fulfillment of their dreams.
C
anfield,
D
orothy
Authors: Parchesky Jennifer
Published: August 2017

From the 1910s to the 1950s, Dorothy Canfield was a leading figure in American literature and culture, authoring 11 novels, 18 non‐fiction books (published under her married name, Dorothy Canfield Fisher), and hundreds of stories and essays. Her fiction focuses on individual psychological and moral development within realistic social settings. Although she explored controversial issues – gender roles, industrialization, war, and civil rights – her accessible style and ability to connect new ideas with traditional values of family, community, and democracy appealed to mainstream audiences. As a long‐time member of the Book of the Month Club Board of Selection and spokesperson for a variety of progressive organizations, she helped shape American taste and opinion: Eleanor Roosevelt praised her in 1935 as one of the 10 most influential women in America.
C
astillo,
A
na
Authors: Carson Benjamin D.
Published: August 2017

Since the publication of
The Mixquiahuala Letters
in 1986, Ana Castillo has become one of the most recognized Chicana voices in American literature. While Castillo has not been afraid to experiment stylistically, the central concerns of her work have remained constant. In her six novels, one collection of short stories, five poetry collections, and two plays, and her seminal collection of essays on Xicanisma, Castillo consistently addresses racial, social, and economic injustice; the consequences of environmental degradation; the plight of immigrants; the inescapable pull of sexual desire and love; and the importance of family and traditions and the equally abiding need for individual autonomy.
Cather,Willa
Authors: Homestead Melissa J.
Published: August 2017

Willa Cather is known primarily for her novels representing the experiences of women immigrants on the Nebraska prairies in the late nineteenth century, but Cather's 10 novels and scores of short stories produced over a career spanning 50 years actually range widely over space and time, from seventeenth‐century Quebec to twentieth‐century New York. A social conservative who proudly identified herself as one of the backward‐looking, her experiments with fictional form and her approach to culture nevertheless ally her with modernism. It is, perhaps, the depth and diversity of Cather's body of work and the impossibility of reducing her achievement to a single descriptive formula that have secured her reputation as a major American novelist.
C
hesnutt,
C
harles
W.
Authors: Simmons Ryan
Published: August 2017

Charles W. Chesnutt is widely regarded as the most significant African American fiction writer between the end of slavery and the Harlem Renaissance. The author of five books published between 1899 and 1905, and the recipient of accolades from William Dean Howells and other important contemporaries, Chesnutt's literary career nonetheless failed to meet his expectations. While his two short story collections (both published in 1899) were critically well received and commercially promising, his subsequent novels were marked by mixed reviews and increasingly disappointing sales. Moreover, more of Chesnutt's books were rejected than accepted by publishers during his lifetime, leaving the bulk of his short fiction uncollected, and six of his novels unpublished, at his death. Most of these writings have been brought into print during a late‐twentieth‐century renaissance of Chesnutt scholarship instigated by books such as William L. Andrews's
The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt
(1980) and Eric J. Sundquist's
To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature
(1993). These critics built Chesnutt's reputation by demonstrating his effectiveness in using literature as a tool for political advocacy. His most lasting legacy, however, may arise from a characteristic explored by later critics such as Dean McWilliams and SallyAnn H. Ferguson: Chesnutt's very contemporary perspective on race, which not only decries racism (or, according to critics such as Ferguson, fails sufficiently to decry racism) but also regards racial categories themselves as constructed and deeply political.
D
anticat,
E
dwidge
Authors: Lee‐Keller Hellen
Published: August 2017

Edwidge Danticat has earned critical acclaim writing about the Haitian diaspora in the United States. By focusing on intimate stories of the lives of poor and working‐class families, Danticat calls attention to the profound impact that international political events have on individual lives. Since publishing her first book in 1994 at 25 years old, she has added three novels, one collection of short stories, two children's books, and two non‐fiction works. In addition to editing two volumes of collected stories, she has had her short stories published in numerous magazines and anthologies. She has co‐produced one documentary and acted in two films.
D
avenport,
G
uy
Authors: Furlani Andre
Published: August 2017

By the time he started publishing fiction in the late 1960s, Guy Davenport (1927–2005) had already made a career as a scholar, translator, and editor of modern and classical literature. As a typesetter he had produced the first edition of Ezra Pound's Canto 110 and illustrated several books and periodicals. It was by assimilating this versatility to fiction that Davenport pioneered a hybrid form eluding classification. A typical story, laid out as a collage, combines realist and documentary narrative with scholarship, visual imagery, captions, and decontextualized citation. It is the collage method of Ezra Pound's
The Cantos
transposed to fiction, and it yielded eight volumes of fiction, including some of the finest and most original of postwar American stories.
D
elany,
S
amuel
R.
Authors: Lukin Josh
Published: August 2017

Samuel R. Delany is a radical gay black New York critic and novelist who has written, famously and influentially, on the role of race, sexual orientation, New York City, and semiotics in his life and in US society. Styling himself a Marxist but deeply influenced by Michel Foucault and deconstruction, he has brought a poststructuralist and class‐conscious sensibility to works of science fiction and fantasy. Outside of those genres, he has published three volumes of pornography, four of memoir, three of literary fiction, and eight of criticism. Delany was born on April 1, 1942 and lived as a professional writer from the mid‐1960s until 1988; since then, he has earned his living as a university professor.
D
idion,
J
oan
Authors: Madden David W.
Published: August 2017

Joan Didion established her initial literary reputation as an avatar of the “new journalism,” and the techniques she developed in her essays, particularly her elliptical, minimalist style, she applied to her fiction. Didion is known for her jaundiced eye, penetrating insights, and general dissatisfaction with the direction of modern American life and politics. She has been labeled a provincialist, existentialist, and arch‐conservative, but she is first and foremost her own person, a writer with a distinctive style and vision.
D
os
P
assos,
J
ohn
Authors: Nieland Justus
Published: August 2017

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) published 13 novels over the course of his life, and more than a dozen non‐fictional works, including histories, biographies, books of social and political criticism, and travel writing. Dos Passos is best known today as the author of the novel trilogy
U.S.A
. (1930–6), a dazzling combination of modernist technique, Popular Front politics, Whitmanian epic vision, and sharp social satire that put him on the cover of
Time
magazine in 1936. But Dos Passos is equally notorious for the transformation of his political sentiments and its impact on his art. Arguably the most visible US left‐wing novelist in the 1930s – his radical vision shaped by international vanguards across the arts – by the end of his life, Dos Passos was a gentleman farmer and Gold‐water Republican. He died nostalgic for America's vanished colonial past, skeptical of collectivism‐as‐bureaucracy, receptive to his father's theories of Anglo‐Saxon supremacy (set forth in Dos Passos, Sr.'s 1903 political treatise
The Anglo‐Saxon Century and the Unification of the English Speaking People)
, and despairing of the future of democracy in America's mediated‐image culture. Yet the themes and preoccupations of his major work from the 1920s and 1930s – the destruction of idealistic individuals by wartime bureaucracies, the power of modern mass culture to shape and deform historical truth and reality, the imperial ambitions of finance capital, and the hollowness of citizenship in a nation pervaded by seekers of “the big money” – are as germane to Dos Passos's early anarchic democratic vision as they are to his fiery late libertarianism. While his version of the US national epic today seems narrow and old‐fashioned in light of more recent, hemispheric approaches like those of Leslie Marmon Silko's
Almanac of the Dead
or Eduardo Galleano's
La Memoria Del Fuego
trilogy, his self‐aware technical mastery of the “historical novel” decisively influenced the historiography of the postmodern novel, and played a central part in recent critical attempts to embed literary modernism in the heady visual cultures of the early twentieth century.
D
reiser,
T
heodore
Authors: Mulligan Roark
Published: August 2017

Born into an immigrant family that suffered financial hardships, Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) brought a new perspective to American letters, realistically depicting a changing urban landscape. As the author of eight novels, including
Sister Carrie
(1900) and
An American Tragedy
(1925), Dreiser was a pioneer of literary naturalism, graphically capturing the monetary and cultural forces that transformed American cities.
Ellison,Ralph
Authors: Ridley Chauncey
Published: August 2017

Despite a distinguished and vastly more prolific career as an essayist, Ralph Ellison is best known as a novelist. Rarely in any tradition has an author's first and only novel achieved the enduring eminence ofInvisible Man. Published in March 1952, it won the 1953 National Book Award. In 1965, aBook Weekpoll voted it the post‐World War II novel most likely to endure: Vladimir Nabokov'sLolitatook second, followed by J. D. Salinger'sThe Catcher in the Rye;Saul Bellow was voted the most important novelist. In 1978, aWilson Quarterlypoll affirmed theBook Weekresults by votingInvisible Manthe most distinguished American novel since World War II. By 2002, it had been translated into 20 languages, and over a million copies had been sold since Ellison's death on April 16, 1994.
Ethnicity and Fiction
Authors: Bascara Victor
Published: August 2017

Ethnicity, as an idea, forms a productive through‐line for the literary history of twentieth‐century American fiction. The changing fate of ethnicity, whether it is celebrated, assimilated away, or futilely eschewed, charts the cultural politics of the American century. In terms of literary movements, ethnicity is commonly associated with realism, naturalism, and regionalism, that is, with literary movements that are presumed to emphasize content over form. Ethnicity, in this way of thinking, functions as a source from which content emanates via an otherwise transparent text. And so various elements become visible in the form of ethnic traces – distinct cultural markers and practices that set off an identifiably ethnic group from other groups. A list of those traces would include everything from food, religion, language, and fashion choices to aesthetic priorities, architecture, and kinship structures. But ethnicity is also a vital component of modernist and postmodernist experiments in representation, for ethnicity can be appreciated not only as a source of material but also as an epistemological standpoint that makes manifest the heterogeneity of perspectives that twentieth‐century fiction has drawn upon to give critical expression to America.
Everett,Percival
Authors: Tissut Anne‐Laure
Published: August 2017

Percival Everett is a novelist whose varied work escapes categories. It is formally inventive, is intellectually challenging, and abounds in cross‐cultural references, from Greek antiquity to European philosophers via American music, pop culture, history, and current events. He is first and foremost a storyteller whose narratives offer deftly created suspense, often unresolved endings, as well as fully realized figures. His recurring concerns are intolerance, cruelty, the uncertainties of identity, and, more recently, creation and the production of meaning. His canon includes 17 novels, three collections of short stories, a children's book, and a collection of poems, and has been translated into four languages.
Fauset,JessieRedmon
Authors: Tomlinson Susan
Published: August 2017

Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961) was a novelist, essayist, and poet who, as literary editor ofThe Crisismagazine, helped shape the Harlem Renaissance.
F
erber,
E
dna
Authors: Gleason William
Published: August 2017

One of the most popular writers of the first half of the twentieth century, Edna Ferber succeeded in multiple genres, including the short story, the novel, and drama. Her fictions, which typically feature strong, hardworking female characters and are often set within vibrant American regional landscapes, were also frequently adapted to stage and screen, giving her a cultural presence like few writers of her era.
Fitzgerald,F.Scott
Authors: Curnutt Kirk
Published: August 2017

Best known forThe Great Gatsby(1925) andTender Is the Night(1934) – two keystones of modernist fiction – Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was the poet laureate of the “jazz age,” a term he popularized to convey the post‐World War I era's newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores. Fitzgerald first rose to fame at 23 by chronicling those changes inThis Side of Paradise(1920b). Before the age of 30 he published his masterpiece,The Great Gatsby, but his artistic maturity was stymied for a decade by alcoholism, financial problems, and the mental illness of his wife, Zelda Sayre (1900–48). By the time he completedTender Is the Night, the Depression had rendered the Roaring Twenties irrelevant, and Fitzgerald was considered a has‐been. A half‐decade later, he died in semi‐obscurity, considered a failure, despite publishing 160 short stories in his 20‐year career. Only posthumously would critics appreciate his merits, although understanding of his talent would compete with popular interest in his life and marriage. Fitzgerald's main themes are ambition and loss, discipline versus self‐indulgence, love and romance, and money and class. Much like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, his work is instantly recognizable due to its distinctive prose style. Whereas Hemingway's is sparse and Faulkner's veers toward psychological abstraction, Fitzgerald's is intensely poetic to the point of rhapsodic, elevating his laments into veritable threnodies for the sureties and stable values that he felt modernity superannuated.
F
rank,
W
aldo
Authors: Pfeiffer Kathleen
Published: August 2017

As novelist, playwright, cultural critic, social commentator, editor, and mentor to younger writers, Waldo Frank sought to influence the development of a more organic, democratic American literature in the twentieth century. Though he longed for recognition as a novelist, particularly in relation to his pioneering efforts to develop the “lyric novel” in his early fiction, Frank will probably best be remembered for the clarity and insight of his critical writing about American culture and for his passionate advocacy of Latin American writers to US audiences.
Gender and the Novel
Authors: Clarke Deborah
Published: August 2017

It is hard to say anything about the twentieth‐century American novel without talking about gender. Whether one is looking at the alleged machismo of Ernest Hemingway or Norman Mailer; at Edith Wharton, purported to have welcomed the label of a “self‐made man”; at William Faulkner's deft maneuvering between male and female and black and white; at Toni Morrison's rewriting of Ralph Ellison; or at Jane Smiley's revision of
King Lear
, it becomes clear that the twentieth‐century American novel is shaped by gender. It's not surprising, given the tumultuous battles of the sexes that raged throughout the century, to see sexual tension dominate the literary landscape. But twentieth‐century American fiction is marked by more than sexual tension; it is engaged with nothing less than the redefinition of how gender is constructed and what it means. This struggle is energized by the increasing number of increasingly respected women writers who emerge onto the scene. The “damned mob of scribbling women” who showed up Hawthorne's limited marketability evolve into the formidable talent – and popularity – of a Wharton or a Cather. Once American women writers break into the ranks of the elite, the novel will never be the same again. And the explosion of non‐white writers, particularly in the latter part of the century, reminds us that gender is also always raced.
G
lasgow,
E
llen
Authors: Matthews Pamela R.
Published: August 2017

Although Ellen Glasgow had her quarrels with the twentieth century, her long and productive career in American letters contributed to defining its literary and social character by attending to literary form and to issues such as regionalism and nationalism, gender and feminism, and class and race. Glasgow's published work spans the decades from the end of the nineteenth century's realism and naturalism through high modernism to the complexities of post‐World War II prosperity in the US. Beginning with her first story to appear in print (1895) and ending with posthumous publications, her work includes 20 novels, more than a dozen short stories, poems, essays on her own novels, an autobiography, and many newspaper and magazine articles. Glasgow collected several prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for
In This Our Life
(1941) in 1942. Twice, her novels appeared in collected editions. Despite her common lament that her work was never adequately valued, in fact, Glasgow was a staple of twentieth‐century American literature by the late 1920s.
H.D
. (
H
ilda
D
oolittle)
Authors: Debo Annette
Published: August 2017

Widely known for her poetry, H.D. also wrote an impressive body of fiction, demonstrating her virtuosity in multiple genres, including memoirs, non‐fiction essays, and translations. Her fiction, or prose poems as H.D. sometimes called them, echo autobiographically and are preoccupied with narrative experimentation, applying modernist techniques like stream of consciousness, montage, repetition, and fragmentation.