Portal:Literature/Biography archive/2006 archive
This is an archive of biographical article summaries that have appeared in the Biography section of Portal:Literature in 2006. For past archives, see the complete archive page.
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William Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was a Nobel Prize-winning novelist from Mississippi. He is regarded as one of America's most influential fiction writers.
Faulkner was known for using long, serpentine sentences and meticulously chosen diction, in stark contrast to the minimalist style of his longtime rival, Ernest Hemingway. Some consider Faulkner to be the only true American Modernist prose fiction writer of the 1930s, following in the experimental tradition of European writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. His work is known for literary devices like stream of consciousness, multiple narrations or points of view, and narrative time shifts.
Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish pronunciation: [miˈɣel ðe θerˈβantes saˈβe(ð)ra]) (September 29, 1547 – April 23, 1616), was a Spanish novelist, poet and playwright. He is best known for his novel Don Quixote de la Mancha, which is considered by many to be the first modern novel, one of the greatest works in Western literature, and the greatest in the Spanish language. It is one of the Encyclopædia Britannica's "Great Books of the Western World" and the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky called it "the ultimate and most sublime word of human thinking". Cervantes is so well regarded that his face is depicted on most Spanish Euro coins, and his image is common in Spanish book stores. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion learned the Spanish language so that he could read Don Quixote in the original.
Mário de Andrade (October 9, 1893 – February 25, 1945) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism, he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his Paulicéia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) in 1922. He has had an enormous influence on Brazilian literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, and as a scholar and essayist—he was a pioneer of the field of ethnomusicology—his influence has reached far beyond Brazil.
Douglas Adams (March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001) was a cult British author, comic radio dramatist, and amateur musician. He is known most notably as author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Hitchhiker's began on radio, and developed into a "trilogy" of five books (which sold more than fifteen million copies during his lifetime) as well as a television series, a towel, a comic book series, a computer game and a feature film that was completed after Adams's death.
In addition to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote or co-wrote three stories of the science fiction television series Doctor Who, and served the series as Script Editor during the seventeenth season. His other written works include the Dirk Gently novels, and co-author credits on two Liff books and Last Chance to See, itself based on a radio series. Adams also originated the idea for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was realized by a company that Adams co-founded, and adapted into a novel by Terry Jones. A posthumous collection of essays and other material, including an incomplete novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.
Ivan Turgenev (Russian: Ива́н Серге́евич Турге́нев) (November 9 [O.S. October 28] 1818 – September 3 [O.S. August 22] 1883) was a major Russian novelist and playwright. His novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as a defining work of 19th-century fiction. Turgenev made his name with A Sportsman's Sketches (Записки охотника), also known as Sketches From a Hunter's Album or Notes of a Hunter. Based on the author's own observations while sport hunting birds and hares in his mother's estate of Spasskoye, the work appeared in a collected form in 1852. Turgenev is considered one of the great Victorian novelists, ranked with Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Henry James, though his style was much different from these American and British writers. Turgenev has often been compared to his Russian contemporaries, Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky, who wrote novels about some of the same issues. A melancholy tone pervades his writings, a morbid self-analysis.
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André Chénier (October 30, 1762 – July 25, 1794) was a French poet and is associated with the events of the French Revolution of which he was an innocent victim. His sensual, emotive poetry marks him as one of the precursors of the Romantic movement. His career was brought to an abrupt end when he was guillotined for alleged "crimes against the state", just three days before the end of the Reign of Terror. Chenier's life has been the subject of Umberto Giordano's opera Andrea Chenier and novels such as Dickens' Tale of Two Cities.
During his lifetime only his Jeu de paume (1791) and Hymne sur les Suisses (1792) had been given to the world. The Jeune Captive appeared in the Decade philosophique, Jan. 9, 1795; La Jeune Tarentine in the Mercure of March 22, 1801. Chateaubriand quoted three or four passages in his Genie du christianisme.
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (November 18, 1836 – May 29, 1911) was an English dramatist, librettist and illustrator best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan.
Gilbert's most popular collaborations with Sullivan, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado (one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre) and most of their other Savoy operas continue to be performed regularly today throughout the English-speaking world and beyond by opera companies, repertory companies, schools and community theatre groups. Lines from these works have permanently entered the English language, including "short, sharp shock", "What never? Well, hardly ever!", and "let the punishment fit the crime".
Gilbert also wrote the Bab Ballads, an extensive collection of light verse accompanied by his own comical drawings. His creative output included over 75 plays and libretti, numerous stories, poems, lyrics and various other comic and serious pieces. His plays and realistic style of stage direction inspired other dramatists, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.
Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850 – December 3, 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov and others. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and didn't write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon.
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Selma Lagerlöf (November 20, 1858 – March 16, 1940) was a Swedish author, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909.
Known internationally for Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (a story for children, in translation The wonderful adventures of Nils Holgersson), and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909 (the first woman and the first Swedish person ever so honored) "in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings." Other important works of hers include Gösta Berling's Saga and The Treasure.
Her portrait has been featured on the Swedish 20 krona bill since 1991.
C. S. Lewis (29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963), was an Irish author and scholar. Lewis is known for his work on medieval literature, Christian apologetics and fiction. He is best known today for his children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia.
Lewis was close friends with J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, and both were leading figures in the Oxford literary group the Inklings. Due in part to Tolkien's influence, Lewis converted to Christianity, becoming "a very ordinary layman of the Church of England". His conversion would have a profound effect on his work and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.
Lewis' works have been translated into over 30 languages and continue to sell over a million copies a year; the books that comprise The Chronicles of Narnia have sold over 100 million copies. A number of stage and screen adaptations of Lewis' works have also been produced, the most notable of which is the 2005 Disney film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which grossed US$745,000,000 worldwide.
Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926) is generally considered the German language's greatest 20th century poet. His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. His two most famous verse sequences are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.
Subramanya Bharathi (Tamil: சுப்பிரமணிய பாரதி) (December 11, 1882 - September 11, 1921) was a Tamil poet from Tamil Nadu, India. Known as Mahakavi Bharathiyar (the laudatory epithet Maha Kavi meaning Great Poet in Tamil), he is celebrated as one of India's greatest poets. Bharathi was prolific and adept in both the prose and poetry forms, and his rousing compositions helped rally the masses to support the Indian independence movement in South India. Bharathi lived during an eventful period of Indian history; his contemporaries included other prominent leaders of the Indian independence movement such as Mahatma Gandhi, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Aurobindo and V.V.S.Aiyar.
Heinrich Böll (December 21, 1917 – July 16, 1985) was one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers. Böll was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.
His first novel, Der Zug war pünktlich (The Train Was on Time), was published in 1949. Many other novels, short stories, radio plays and essay collections followed. He was the first German to receive this award since Hermann Hesse in 1946. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages. His best-known works are Billiards at Half-past Nine, The Clown, Group Portrait with Lady, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, and The Safety Net.
Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was a British author and poet best known today for his children's books: The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Just So Stories (1902), and Puck of Pook's Hill (1906); his many-sided novel, Kim (1901); his poems: Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), and "If—" (1895); and his early short stories of life in British India. He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story and his best work—written before age 40—reveals a remarkable and precocious literary talent, though one clouded today by his real or perceived prejudice.
Kipling was one of the most popular writers in English, in both prose and verse, in the early 20th century. In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize, and he remains today the youngest-ever recipient. Later in life, his political opinions turned him into a controversial figure and, in death, he remained controversial for much of the 20th century.