Jos Rizal

Early life - Jos Rizal was born in 1861 to Francisco Mercado

and Teodora Alonso in the town of Calamba in Laguna
province. He had nine sisters and one brother. His parents
were leaseholders of a hacienda and an accompanying rice
farm by the Dominicans. Both their families had adopted the
additional surnames of Rizal and Realonda in 1849, after
Governor General Narciso Clavera y Zalda decreed the
adoption of Spanish surnames among the Filipinos for census
purposes
Education - Rizal first studied under Justiniano Aquino Cruz in
Bian, Laguna, before he was sent to Manila.[18] As to his
father's request, he took the entrance examination in Colegio
de San Juan de Letran but he then enrolled at the Ateneo
Municipal de Manila and graduated as one of the nine
students in his class declared sobresaliente or outstanding. He
continued his education at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila to
obtain a land surveyor and assessor's degree, and at the
same time at the University of Santo Tomas where he did take
up a preparatory course in law.[19] Upon learning that his
mother was going blind, he decided to switch to medicine at
the medical school of Santo Tomas specializing later in
ophthalmology.
Works and writings
Rizal wrote mostly in Spanish, the lingua franca of the Spanish
Philippines, though some of his letters (for example Sa Mga
Kababaihang Taga Malolos) were written in Tagalog. His works
have since been translated into a number of languages
including Tagalog and English.

Rizal's Letters is a compendium of Dr. Jose Rizal's letters to

his family members, Blumentritt, Fr. Pablo Pastells and other
reformers

"Come se gobiernan las Filipinas" (Governing the Philippine

islands)

Filipinas dentro de cien aos essay, 188990 (The

Philippines a Century Hence)

La Indolencia de los Filipinos, essay, 1890 (The indolence of

Filipinos)[48]

Makamisa unfinished novel

Sa Mga Kababaihang Taga Malolos, essay, 1889, To the

Young Women of Malolos

Annotations to Antonio de Moragas, Sucesos de las Islas

Filipinas (essay, 1889, Events in the Philippine Islands)

Poetry

A La Juventud Filipina

El Canto Del Viajero

Briayle Crismarl

Canto Del Viajero

Canto de Mara Clara

Dalit sa Paggawa

Felicitacin

Kundiman (Tagalog)

Me Piden Versos

Mi primera inspiracion

Mi Retiro

Mi Ultimo Adis

Por La Educacin (Recibe Lustre La Patria)

Sa Sanggol na si Jesus

To My Muse (A Mi Musa)

Un Recuerdo A Mi Pueblo

A Man in Dapitan

Works and writings

Rizal wrote mostly in Spanish, the lingua franca of the Spanish
Philippines, though some of his letters (for example Sa Mga
Kababaihang Taga Malolos) were written in Tagalog. His works have
since been translated into a number of languages including Tagalog
and English.
Novels and essays

Noli Me Tngere, novel, 1887 (literally Spanish for 'touch me

not', from John 20:17)[46]
El Filibusterismo, (novel, 1891), sequel to Noli Me Tngere
Alin Mang Lahi" ("Whate'er the Race"),
a Kundiman attributed to Dr. Jos Rizal[47]
The Friars and the Filipinos (Unfinished)
Toast to Juan Luna and Felix Hidalgo (Speech, 1884), given
at Restaurante Ingles, Madrid
The Diaries of Jos Rizal

Plays

El Consejo de los Dioses (The council of Gods)

Junto Al Pasig (Along the Pasig)[49]:381

San Euistaquio, Mrtyr (Saint Eustache, the martyr)[50]

William Shakespeare
Early life
William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an
alderman and a successful glover originally from Snitterfield,
and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning
farmer.[8] He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon and baptised
there on 26 April 1564. His actual date of birth remains
unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint
George's Day.[9] This date, which can be traced back to an
18th-century scholar's mistake, has proved appealing to
biographers, because Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616.[10]
He was the third child of eight and the eldest surviving son.
[11]

Influence
Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later
theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic
potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre.[160]
Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been
viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.[161] Soliloquies had
been used mainly to convey information about characters or
events; but Shakespeare used them to explore characters'
minds.[162] His work heavily influenced later poetry. The
Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse
drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner
described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to
Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean
themes."[163]

Mark Twain
Early life
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on
November 30, 1835. He was the son of Jane (ne Lampton;
18031890), a native of Kentucky, and John Marshall Clemens
(17981847), a Virginian. His parents met when his father
moved to Missouri and were married in 1823.[7][8] Twain was
the sixth of seven children, but only three of his siblings
survived childhood: Orion (18251897), Henry (18381858),
and Pamela (18271904). His sister Margaret (18331839)
died when he was three, and his brother Benjamin (1832
1842) died three years later. Another brother, Pleasant (1828
1829), died at six months.[9] Twain was born two weeks after
the closest approach to Earth of Halley's Comet. His ancestors
were of Scots-Irish, English, and Cornish extraction.
Writing

Overview
Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse, but
evolved into a chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and
murderous acts of mankind. At mid-career, with Huckleberry
Finn, he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social
criticism. Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech
and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American
literature built on American themes and language. Many of
Twain's works have been suppressed at times for various
reasons. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly
restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent
use of the word "nigger", which was in common usage in the
pre-Civil War period in which the novel was set.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Biography[edit]
18821904: Dublin[edit]
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882
to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane "May" Murray, in the
Dublin suburb of Rathgar. He was baptised according to the
Rites of the Catholic Church in the nearby St Joseph's Church
in Terenure on 5 February by Rev. John O'Mulloy. His
godparents were Philip and Ellen McCann. He was the eldest
of ten surviving children; two of his siblings died of typhoid.

His father's family, originally from Fermoy in County Cork, had

once owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's father and
paternal grandfather both married into wealthy families,
though the family's purported ancestor, Sen Mr Seoighe (fl.
1680) was a stonemason from Connemara.[3] In 1887, his
father was appointed rate collector (i.e., a collector of local
property taxes) by Dublin Corporation; the family
subsequently moved to the fashionable adjacent small town
of Bray 12 miles (19 km) from Dublin. Around this time Joyce
was attacked by a dog, which engendered in him a lifelong
cynophobia. He also suffered from astraphobia, as a
superstitious aunt had described thunderstorms to him as a
sign of God's wrath.[4]
Legacy[edit]

Early life[edit]
Born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to an upper-middleclass family, Fitzgerald was named after his famous second
cousin, three times removed on his father's side, Francis Scott
Key,[1] but was always known as plain Scott Fitzgerald. He
was also named after his deceased sister, Louise Scott
Fitzgerald,[2] one of two sisters who died shortly before his
birth. "Well, three months before I was born," he wrote as an
adult, "my mother lost her other two children ... I think I
started then to be a writer."[3]
Legacy[edit]
Fitzgerald's work has inspired writers ever since he was first
published.[51] The publication of The Great Gatsby prompted
T. S. Eliot to write, in a letter to Fitzgerald, "It seems to me to
be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry
James ...".[52] Don Birnam, the protagonist of Charles
Jackson's The Lost Weekend, says to himself, referring to The
Great Gatsby, "There's no such thing ... as a flawless novel.
But if there is, this is it."[53] In letters written in the 1940s, J.
D. Salinger expressed admiration of Fitzgerald's work, and his
biographer Ian Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself
for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor".[54] Richard Yates, a
writer often compared to Fitzgerald, called The Great Gatsby
"the most nourishing novel [he] read ... a miracle of talent ... a
triumph of technique".[55] It was written in a New York Times
editorial after his death that Fitzgerald "was better than he
knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a
generation ... He might have interpreted them and even
guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and
nobler freedom threatened with destruction."

Bronze statue of Joyce standing in a coat and broadbrimmed

hat. His head is cocked looking up, his left leg is crossed over
his right, his right hand holds a cane, and his left is in his
pants pocket, with the left part of his coat tucked back.
Statue of James Joyce on North Earl Street, Dublin.
Joyce's work has been an important influence on writers and
scholars as diverse as Samuel Beckett,[76] Sen Rordin,
[77] Jorge Luis Borges,[78] Flann O'Brien,[79] Salman Rushdie,
[80] Robert Anton Wilson,[81] John Updike,[82] David
Lodge[83] and Joseph Campbell.[84] Ulysses has been called
"a demonstration and summation of the entire [Modernist]
movement".[85] French literary theorist Julia Kristva
characterised Joyce's novel writing as "polyphonic" and a
hallmark of postmodernity alongside poets Mallarm and
Rimbaud.[86]

Leo Tolstoy

Life and career

James Joyce

Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana, a family estate 12

kilometres (7.5 mi) southwest of Tula, Russia and 200
kilometers (120 mi) south of Moscow. The Tolstoys were a
well-known family of old Russian nobility, tracing their
ancestry to a mythical Lithuanian noble Indris.[4][5] He was
the fourth of five children of Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, a
veteran of the Patriotic War of 1812, and Countess Mariya
Tolstaya (Volkonskaya). Tolstoy's parents died when he was
young, so he and his siblings were brought up by relatives. In
1844, he began studying law and oriental languages at Kazan
University. His teachers described him as "both unable and

unwilling to learn."[6] Tolstoy left the university in the middle

of his studies, returned to Yasnaya Polyana and then spent
much of his time in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In 1851,
after running up heavy gambling debts, he went with his older
brother to the Caucasus and joined the army. It was about this
time that he started writing.

Dostoyevsky's works of fiction include 15 novels and novellas,

17 short stories, and 5 translations. Many of his longer novels
were first published in serialised form in literary magazines
and journals. The years given below indicate the year in which
the novel's final part or first complete book edition was
published. In English many of his novels and stories are known
by different titles.

Personal life
On September 23, 1862, Tolstoy married Sophia Andreevna
Behrs, who was 16 years his junior and the daughter of a
court physician. She was called Sonya, the Russian diminutive
of Sofia, by her family and friends.[16] They had 13 children,
eight of whom survived childhood:[17]
Novels and fictional works
Tolstoy is one of the giants of Russian literature; his works
include the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina and
novellas such as Hadji Murad and The Death of Ivan Ilyich. His
contemporaries paid him lofty tributes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
thought him the greatest of all living novelists. Gustave
Flaubert, on reading a translation of War and Peace,
exclaimed, "What an artist and what a psychologist!" Anton
Chekhov, who often visited Tolstoy at his country estate,
wrote, "When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and
pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have
achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this
is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy
achieves for everyone. What he does serves to justify all the
hopes and aspirations invested in literature." The 19thcentury British poet and critic Matthew Arnold opined that "a
novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece of life"

Lewis Carroll
Education[edit]
Home life[edit]
During his early youth, Dodgson was educated at home. His
"reading lists" preserved in the family archives testify to a
precocious intellect: at the age of seven, he was reading
books such as The Pilgrim's Progress. He also suffered from a
stammer a condition shared by most of his siblings[12]
that often influenced his social life throughout his years. At
the age of twelve, he was sent to Richmond Grammar School
(now part of Richmond School) at nearby Richmond.
Works[edit]

The Principles of Parliamentary Representation (1884)

Literary works[edit]

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Childhood (18211835)[edit]
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, born on 11 November [O.S. 30 October]
1821, was the second child of Dr. Mikhail Dostoyevsky and
Maria Dostoyevskaya (ne Nechayeva). He was raised in the
family home in the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the
Poor, which was in a lower class district on the edges of
Moscow.[9] Dostoyevsky encountered the patients, who were
at the lower end of the Russian social scale when playing in
the hospital gardens.[10]

La Guida di Bragia, a Ballad Opera for the Marionette Theatre (around 1850)

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Rhyme? And Reason? (1869; also published as Phantasmagoria)

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (includes "Jabberwoc

The Hunting of the Snark (1876)

A Tangled Tale (1885)

Sylvie and Bruno (1889)

Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893)

Pillow Problems (1893)

What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (1895)

Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)

Career[edit]
Early career (18441849)[edit]

Dostoyevsky, 1847
Dostoyevsky completed his first novel, Poor Folk, in May 1845.
His friend Dmitry Grigorovich, with whom he was sharing an
apartment at the time, took the manuscript to the poet
Nikolay Nekrasov, who in turn showed it to the renowned and
influential literary critic Vissarion Belinsky. Belinsky described
it as Russia's first "social novel".[33] Poor Folk was released
on 15 January 1846 in the St Petersburg Collection almanac
and became a commercial success.[34][35]
Works[edit]

later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His

mother's attempts to become a published writer impressed
the young Updike. "One of my earliest memories", he later
recalled, "is of seeing her at her desk... I admired the writer's
equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper.
And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off
inand come back in."[7]
Personal life and death[edit]

Henry James

Updike married Mary E. Pennington, an art student at Radcliffe

College, in 1953, while he was still a student at Harvard. She
accompanied him to Oxford, England, where he attended art
school and where their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1955.
The couple had three more children together: writer David
(born 1957), artist Michael (born 1959) and Miranda (born
1960). They divorced in 1974. Updike had seven grandsons,
Anoff, Kwame, Wesley, Trevor, Kai, Sawyer and Seneca.

Life[edit]
Early years[edit]

Henry James, age 11, with his father, Henry James Sr.1854
daguerreotype by Mathew Brady
James was born at 2 Washington Place in New York City on 15
April 1843. His parents were Mary Walsh and Henry James Sr.
His father was intelligent, steadfastly congenial, and a lecturer
and philosopher who had inherited independent means from
his father, an Albany banker and investor. Mary came from a
wealthy family long settled in New York City, and her sister
Katherine lived with the family for an extended period of time.
Henry, Jr. had three brothers, William who was one year his
senior and younger brothers Wilkinson and Robertson. His
younger sister was Alice.
Works[edit]

In 1977 Updike married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, with whom

he lived for more than thirty years in Beverly Farms,
Massachusetts. He died of lung cancer at a hospice in
Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at the age of
76
Career as a writer[edit]
1950s[edit]
Updike stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer for only
two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting
poetry and short stories to the magazine. In New York, Updike
wrote the poems and stories that came to fill his early books
like The Carpentered Hen (1958) and The Same Door (1959).
These works were influenced by Updike's early engagement
with The New Yorker.[8] This early work also featured the
influence of J. D. Salinger ("A&P"); John Cheever ("Snowing in
Greenwich Village"); and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Henry
Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.[8]

Main article: Henry James bibliography

Style and themes[edit]
James is one of the major figures of trans-Atlantic literature.
His works frequently juxtapose characters from the Old World
(Europe), embodying a feudal civilization that is beautiful,
often corrupt, and alluring, and from the New World (United
States), where people are often brash, open, and assertive
and embody the virtuesfreedom and a more highly evolved
moral characterof the new American society. James explores
this clash of personalities and cultures, in stories of personal
relationships in which power is exercised well or badly. His
protagonists were often young American women facing
oppression or abuse, and as his secretary Theodora
Bosanquet remarked in her monograph Henry James at Work:

John Updike
Early life and education[edit]
Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of
Linda Grace (ne Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike, and was
raised in the nearby small town of Shillington.[6] The family

Marcel Proust
Biography[edit]
Proust was born in Auteuil (the south-western sector of Paris's
then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his greatuncle on 10 July 1871, two months after the Treaty of
Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth
took place during the violence that surrounded the
suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood
corresponded with the consolidation of the French Third
Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast
changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and
the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during
the Third Republic and the fin de sicle.
Early writing
Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early
age. In addition to the literary magazines with which he was
associated, and in which he published, while at school, La
Revue verte and La Revue lilas, from 1890 to 1891 Proust

published a regular society column in the journal Le Mensuel.

[6] In 1892 he was involved in founding a literary review
called Le Banquet (also the French title of Plato's Symposium),
and throughout the next several years Proust published small
pieces regularly in this journal and in the prestigious La Revue
Blanche.

The Flannery O'Connor Book Trail is a series of Little Free

Libraries stretching between O'Connor's homes in Savannah and
Milledgeville.[41]

The Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home is a historic house

museum in Savannah, Georgia where Flannery O'Connor lived
during her childhood.[42] In addition to serving as a museum, the
house hosts regular events and programs.[42]

Personal life[edit]
Proust was homosexual, and his sexuality and relationships
with men are often discussed by his biographers.[14]
Although his housekeeper, Cleste Albaret, denies this aspect
of Proust's sexuality in her memoirs,[15] her denial runs
contrary to the statements of many of Proust's friends and
contemporaries, including his fellow writer Andr Gide[16] as
well as his valet Ernest A. Forssgren.[17]

Toni Morrison
Early life and career[edit]

Flannery O'Connor
Early life and education[edit]

O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia,

the only child of Edward Francis O'Connor, a real estate agent,
and Regina Cline.[1] As an adult, she remembered herself as a
"pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-mealone-or-I'll-bite-you complex."[2]
Career[edit]
Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said:
"anything that comes out of the South is going to be called
grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in
which case it is going to be called realistic."[15] Her texts
usually take place in the South[16] and revolve around
morally flawed characters, while the issue of race often
appears in the background. Most of her works feature
disturbing elements, though she did not like to be
characterized as cynical. "I am mighty tired of reading reviews
that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic," she wrote.[17]
"The stories are hard but they are hard because there is
nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism ...
when I see these stories described as horror stories I am
always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the
wrong horror."[17]

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah (ne Willis)

and George Wofford. She is the second of four children in a
working-class family.[2] Her parents moved to Ohio to escape
southern racism and instilled a sense of heritage through
telling traditional African American folktales.[3] She read
frequently as a child; among her favorite authors were Jane
Austen and Leo Tolstoy.[4] According to a 2012 interview in
The Guardian, she became a Catholic at the age of 12 and
received the baptismal name "Anthony", which later became
the basis for her nickname "Toni".[5]
Writing career[edit]
Morrison began writing fiction as part of an informal group of
poets and writers at Howard University who met to discuss
their work. She attended one meeting with a short story about
a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. She later
developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970).
She wrote it while raising two children and teaching at
Howard.[8]
Novels[edit]

The Bluest Eye. 1970. ISBN 0-452-28706-5.

Sula. 1973. ISBN 1-4000-3343-8.

Song of Solomon. 1977. ISBN 1-4000-3342-X.

Tar Baby. 1981. ISBN 1-4000-3344-6.

Legacy, awards, and tributes[edit]

Beloved. 1987. ISBN 1-4000-3341-1.

Jazz. 1992. ISBN 1-4000-7621-8.

Paradise. 1997. ISBN 0-679-43374-0.

Love. 2003. ISBN 0-375-40944-0.

A Mercy. 2008. ISBN 978-0-307-26423-7.

Home. 2012. ISBN 0307594165.

God Help the Child. 2015. ISBN 0307594173.

O'Connor's Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National

Book Award for Fiction[35] and, in a 2009 online poll, was named
the best book ever to have won the National Book Awards.[36]
In June 2015, the United States Postal Service honored
O'Connor with a new postage stamp, the 30th issuance in the
Literary Arts series.[37] Some criticized the stamp as failing to
reflect O'Connor's character and legacy.[38][39]
The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, named in
honor of O'Connor by the University of Georgia Press, is a prize
given annually since 1983 to an outstanding collection of short
stories.[40]

Joyce Carol Oates

Margaret Atwood

Early life and education[edit]

Early life[edit]

Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She is the eldest of

three children of Carolina (ne Bush), a homemaker of
Hungarian descent,[3][4] and Frederic James Oates, a tool and
die designer.[3][5][not in citation given] She was raised
Catholic but is now atheist.[6] Her brother, Fred Jr., was born
in 1943, and her sister, Lynn Ann, who is severely autistic, was
born in 1956.[3] Oates grew up in the working-class farming
community of Millersport, New York,[7] and characterized hers
as "a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our
time, place and economic status"[3] but her childhood as "a
daily scramble for existence."[8] Her paternal grandmother,
Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was "very close"
to Joyce.[7] After Blanche's death, Joyce learned that
Blanche's father had killed himself, and Blanche had
subsequently concealed her Jewish heritage; Oates eventually
drew on aspects of her grandmother's life in writing the novel
The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007).[7]

Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Atwood was the second of

three children[11] of Margaret Dorothy (ne Killam), a former
dietitian and nutritionist from Woodville, Nova Scotia[12] and
Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist.[13][self-published
source?] Because of her fathers ongoing research in forest
entomology, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the
backwoods of northern Quebec and travelling back and forth
between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, and Toronto. She did not
attend school full-time until she was eight years old. She
became a voracious reader of literature, Dell pocketbook
mysteries, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and
comic books. She attended Leaside High School in Leaside,
Toronto, and graduated in 1957.[13] Atwood began writing
plays and poems at the age of six.[14]

Career[edit]
The Vanguard Press published Oates' first novel, With
Shuddering Fall (1964), when she was 26 years old. In 1966,
she published "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?",
a short story dedicated to Bob Dylan and written after
listening to his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."[16] The
story is loosely based on the serial killer Charles Schmid, also
known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson".[17] It has been
anthologized many times and adapted as a film, Smooth Talk
starring Laura Dern (1985). In 2008, Oates said that of all her
published work, she is most noted for "Where Are You Going,
Where Have You Been?".[18] Another early short story, "In a
Region of Ice" (The Atlantic Monthly, August 1966[19]),
features a young, gifted Jewish-American student. It
dramatizes his drift into protest against the world of education
and the sober, established society of his parents, his
depression, and eventually murder-cum-suicide. It was
inspired by a real-life incident (as were several of her works)
and Oates had been acquainted with the model of her
protagonist. She revisited this subject in the title story of her
collection Last Days: Stories (1984). "In the Region of Ice" won
the first of her two O. Henry Awards.[19] Her second novel
was A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), first of the so-called
Wonderland Quartet published by Vanguard 1967 to 1971. All
were finalists for the annual National Book Award.

Career[edit]
In 1965, she taught at the University of British Columbia, the
Sir George Williams University in Montreal from 1967 to 1968,
the University of Alberta from 1969 to 1970, York University in
Toronto from 1971 to 1972, the University of Alabama in
Tuscaloosa in 1985, where she was visiting M.F.A. Chair, and
New York University, where she was Berg Professor of English.
[citation needed]
Personal life[edit]
In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk; they were divorced in 1973.
[47] She formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme
Gibson soon after and moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario,
north of Toronto, where their daughter Eleanor Jess Atwood
Gibson was born in 1976.[17] The family returned to Toronto
in 1980.[48]
Atwood is a noted humanist, and, in 1987, she was named
Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.
[49]
Awards and honours[edit]
Atwood holds honorary degrees from Oxford University,
Cambridge University, and the Sorbonne.[citation needed]
She has won more than 55 awards in Canada and
internationally, and received numerous honorary degrees

Teaching career[edit]
Oates taught in Beaumont, Texas, for a year, then moved to
Detroit in 1962, where she began teaching at the University of
Detroit. Influenced by the Vietnam war, the 1967 Detroit race
riots, and a job offer, Oates moved in 1968 with her husband
across the river to Ontario, and to a teaching position at the
University of Windsor.[3] In 1978, she moved to Princeton,
New Jersey, and began teaching at Princeton University.

Ernest Hemingway

Life

head of an established firm, to act as godfather to Charles.

Huffam is thought to be the inspiration for Paul Dombey, the
owner of a shipping company in Dickens's eponymous
Dombey and Son (1848).

Early life
photograph of an infant
Hemingway was the second child and first son born to
Clarence and Grace Hemingway.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak
Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.[1] His father, Clarence
Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician, and his mother, Grace
Hall Hemingway, was a musician. Both were well-educated
and well-respected in Oak Park,[2] a conservative community
about which resident Frank Lloyd Wright said, "So many
churches for so many good people to go to".[3] For a short
period after their marriage,[4] Clarence and Grace
Hemingway lived at first with Grace's father, Ernest Hall, their
first son's namesake.[note 1] Later, Ernest Hemingway would
say that he disliked his name, which he "associated with the
naive, even foolish hero of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance
of Being Earnest".[5] The family eventually moved into a
seven-bedroom home in a respectable neighborhood with a
music studio for Grace and a medical office for Clarence.
Writing style
The New York Times wrote in 1926 of Hemingway's first novel,
"No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also
Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic
narrative prose that puts more literary English to
shame."[162] The Sun Also Rises is written in the spare, tight
prose that made Hemingway famous, and, according to James
Nagel, "changed the nature of American writing."[163] In
1954, when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature, it was for "his mastery of the art of narrative, most
recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for
the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."
Influence and legacy

Philanthropy
In May 1846 Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking
fortune, approached Dickens about setting up a home for the
redemption of fallen women of the working class. Coutts
envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of
existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive
to education and proficiency in domestic household chores.
After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home,
named "Urania Cottage", in the Lime Grove section of
Shepherds Bush, which he managed for ten years,[69] setting
the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing
prospective residents.[70] Emigration and marriage were
central to Dickens's agenda for the women on leaving Urania
Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women
graduated between 1847 and 1859.
Influence and legacy
Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works
exist in many places with which Dickens was associated, such
as the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the
house in which he was born. The original manuscripts of many
of his novels, as well as printers' proofs, first editions, and
illustrations from the collection of Dickens's friend John Forster
are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.[162] Dickens's
will stipulated that no memorial be erected in his honour;
nonetheless, a life-size bronze statue of Dickens entitled
Dickens and Little Nell, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell,
stands in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Another life-size statue of Dickens
is located at Centennial Park, Sydney, Australia.[163] In 2014,
a life-size statue was unveiled near his birthplace in
Portsmouth on the 202nd anniversary of his birth; this was
supported by the author's great-great grandsons, Ian and
Gerald Dickens.[164][165]

Hemingway's legacy to American literature is his style: writers

who came after him emulated it or avoided it.[194] After his
reputation was established with the publication of The Sun
Also Rises, he became the spokesperson for the postWorld
War I generation, having established a style to follow.[163] His
books were burned in Berlin in 1933, "as being a monument of
modern decadence", and disavowed by his parents as "filth".
[195] Reynolds asserts the legacy is that "[Hemingway] left
stories and novels so starkly moving that some have become
part of our cultural heritage."

Virginia Woolf
Early life[edit]

Charles Dickens

Early years
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, at
1 Mile End Terrace (now 393 Commercial Road), Landport in
Portsea Island (Portsmouth), the second of eight children of
John Dickens (17851851) and Elizabeth Dickens (ne Barrow;
17891863). His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and
was temporarily stationed in the district. He asked Christopher
Huffam,[12] rigger to His Majesty's Navy, gentleman, and

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen at 22 Hyde

Park Gate in Kensington, London.[2] Her parents were Sir
Leslie Stephen (18321904) and Julia Prinsep Duckworth
Stephen.[2] Leslie Stephen was a notable historian, author,
critic and mountaineer.[3] He was a founding editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography, a work that would influence
Woolf's later experimental biographies. Julia Stephen was born
in British India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson. She was
the niece of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and
first cousin of the temperance leader Lady Henry Somerset.
Julia moved to England with her mother, where she served as
a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward BurneJones.[4] Julia named her daughter after the Pattle family:
Adeline after Lady Henry's sister, Adeline Marie Russell,
Duchess of Bedford; and Virginia, the name of yet another
sister (who died young) but also of their mother, Julia's aunt
Legacy[edit]

Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The

Hours focused on three generations of women affected by
Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. In 2002, a film version of the
novel was released starring Nicole Kidman as Woolf, a role for
which she won the 2002 Academy Award for Best Actress. The
film also starred Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep and featured
an award-winning score by the American composer Philip
Glass. Susan Sellers' novel Vanessa and Virginia (2008)
explores the close sibling relationship between Woolf and her
sister, Vanessa Bell. It was adapted for the stage by Elizabeth
Wright in 2010 and first performed by Moving Stories Theatre
Company. Priya Parmar's 2014 novel Vanessa and Her Sister
also examined the Stephen sisters' relationship during the
early years of their association with what became known as
the Bloomsbury Group.[47] Virginia is portrayed by both Lydia
Leonard and Catherine McCormack in the BBC's three-part
drama series Life in Squares.[48]
Work[edit]
Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. The first of her
writings to be accepted for publication, "Haworth, November
1904", a journalistic account of a visit to the Bront family
home at Haworth, was published anonymously in a women's
supplement to a clerical journal, The Guardian in December
1904.[2] From 1905 she wrote for The Times Literary
Supplement.[20] Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was
published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald
Duckworth and Company Ltd. This novel was originally titled
Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An
earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by
Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the
public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of
the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to
changes in her own life.[21]

During most of his career, Orwell was best known for his
journalism, in essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and
magazines and in his books of reportage: Down and Out in
Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these
cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the living
conditions of the poor in northern England, and class division
generally) and Homage to Catalonia. According to Irving
Howe, Orwell was "the best English essayist since Hazlitt,
perhaps since Dr Johnson."
Personal life[edit]
Childhood[edit]
Jacintha Buddicom's account Eric & Us provides an insight into
Blair's childhood.[126] She quoted his sister Avril that "he was
essentially an aloof, undemonstrative person" and said herself
of his friendship with the Buddicoms "I do not think he needed
any other friends beyond the schoolfriend he occasionally and
appreciatively referred to as 'CC'". She could not recall his
having schoolfriends to stay and exchange visits as her
brother Prosper often did in holidays.[127] Cyril Connolly
provides an account of Blair as a child in Enemies of Promise.
[23] Years later, Blair mordantly recalled his prep school in the
essay "Such, Such Were the Joys", claiming among other
things that he "was made to study like a dog" to earn a
scholarship, which he alleged was solely to enhance the
school's prestige with parents. Jacintha Buddicom repudiated
Orwell's schoolboy misery described in the essay, stating that
"he was a specially happy child". She noted that he did not
like his name, because it reminded him of a book he greatly
disliked Eric, or, Little by Little, a Victorian boys' school story.

Maya Angelou
Life and career
George Orwell
Life[edit]
Early years[edit]
Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903, in Motihari, Bengal
Presidency (present-day Bihar), in British India.[6] His greatgrandfather Charles Blair was a wealthy country gentleman in
Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the Earl of
Westmorland, and had income as an absentee landlord of
plantations in Jamaica.[7] His grandfather, Thomas Richard
Arthur Blair, was a clergyman.[8] Although the gentility
passed down the generations, the prosperity did not; Eric Blair
described his family as "lower-upper-middle class".[9] His
father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium
Department of the Indian Civil Service.[10] His mother, Ida
Mabel Blair (ne Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma,
where her French father was involved in speculative ventures.
[7] Eric had two sisters: Marjorie, five years older, and Avril,
five years younger. When Eric was one year old, his mother
took him and his older sister to England.[11][n 1] His
birthplace and ancestral house in Motihari has been declared
a protected monument of historical importance
Literary career and legacy[edit]

Early years
Marguerite Annie Johnson[4] was born in St. Louis, Missouri,
on April 4, 1928, the second child of Bailey Johnson, a
doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian (Baxter) Johnson, a
nurse and card dealer.[5][note 1] Angelou's older brother,
Bailey Jr., nicknamed Marguerite "Maya", derived from "My" or
"Mya Sister".[6] When Angelou was three and her brother
four, their parents' "calamitous marriage"[7] ended, and their
father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas, alone by train, to live
with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. In "an
astonishing exception"[8] to the harsh economics of African
Americans of the time, Angelou's grandmother prospered
financially during the Great Depression and World War II
because the general store she owned sold needed basic
commodities and because "she made wise and honest
investments"
Personal life
Evidence suggests that Angelou was partially descended from
the Mende people of West Africa.[96][note 13] A 2008 PBS
documentary found that Angelou's maternal greatgrandmother Mary Lee, who had been emancipated after the
Civil War, became pregnant by her white former owner, John
Savin. Savin forced Lee to sign a false statement accusing
another man of being the father of her child. After Savin was

indicted for forcing Lee to commit perjury, and despite the

discovery that Savin was the father, a jury found him not
guilty. Lee was sent to the Clinton County poorhouse in
Missouri with her daughter, Marguerite Baxter, who became
Angelou's grandmother. Angelou described Lee as "that poor
little Black girl, physically and mentally bruised."
Works
Angelou wrote a total of seven autobiographies. According to
scholar Mary Jane Lupton, Angelou's third autobiography
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas marked
the first time a well-known African-American autobiographer
had written a third volume about her life.[125] Her books

"stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and

back to the U.S., and take place from the beginnings of World
War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.[126] She
published her seventh autobiography Mom & Me & Mom in
2013, at the age of 85.[127] Critics have tended to judge
Angelou's subsequent autobiographies "in light of the first",
[128] with Caged Bird receiving the highest praise. Angelou
wrote five collections of essays, which writer Hilton Als called
her "wisdom books" and "homilies strung together with
autobiographical texts".[38] Angelou used the same editor
throughout her writing career, Robert Loomis, an executive
editor at Random House; he retired in 2011[129] and has
been called "one of publishing's hall of fame editors."[130]
Angelou said regarding Loomis: "We have a relationship that's
kind of famous among publishers".