Biography by Pericles Lewis Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was in fact the author of only a few plays, but he exerted a great influence on theater after the second world through his theoretical writings, which took up a position sharing some intellectual concerns with Bertolt Brecht but proposing a “theater of cruelty” that sharply contrasted with… Continue Reading Antonin Artaud
Tag: Biography
William Butler Yeats
Biography by Anthony Domestico W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) is the figure most associated with the Irish Literary Revival of the early 20th century; his poetry, prose, and drama helped earn him the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was a complex amalgam of influences and interests, deeply engaged with the political issues of Home Rule yet equally… Continue Reading William Butler Yeats
Virginia Woolf
Biography by Jessica Svendsen and Pericles Lewis Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. Woolf was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel.[1] Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. Woolf represents a historical moment… Continue Reading Virginia Woolf
Oscar Wilde
by Elyse Graham Born in Dublin in 1854, Oscar Wilde was the son of prominent and affluent parents; when he was nine, his father received a knighthood. Wilde’s social class would be strongly determining not only of his targets for satire, but of a casual extravagance in matters of romance that would contribute to his… Continue Reading Oscar Wilde
Rebecca West
Biography by Jessica Svendsen Novelist, journalist, critic, and feminist, Rebecca West (1892-1983) is considered one of the finest prose writers in twentieth-century England. Born Cicely Isabel Fairfield, she wrote under the penname Rebecca West. She has since become legendary, not only as an outspoken feminist and mistress of H.G. Wells, but also as the prolific… Continue Reading Rebecca West
H.G. Wells
Biography by Anthony Domestico and Pericles Lewis H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was one of the most prolific, popular, and varied writers of the early twentieth century. His numerous works crossed genres, from science fiction to socialist treatises, from Edwardian satire to sweeping histories, from short stories to Utopian novels. He loomed large in the popular and… Continue Reading H.G. Wells
Lytton Strachey
by Sam Alexander Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) was a historian, literary critic, and Bloomsbury wit whose ironic prose style and sense of rupture with the Victorian past helped to define English literary modernism. Giles Lytton Strachey was born on March 1, 1880, at Stowey House, Clapham Common, to General Richard Strachey, a former colonial administrator who… Continue Reading Lytton Strachey
May Sinclair
Biography by Anthony Domestico May Sinclair (1863-1946) is one of the forgotten modernists. Close friends with Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, and others, Sinclair was the first British writer to praise T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations, the first critic to use the term “stream-of-consciousness” to describe a literary technique, and the creator of a… Continue Reading May Sinclair
George Bernard Shaw
Biography by Pericles Lewis The Irish-born playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the leading playwright of modern Britain, wrote frankly and satirically on political and social topics such as class, war, feminism, and the Salvation Army, in plays such as Arms and the Man (1894), Major Barbara (1905), and, most famously, Pygmalion (1913). His… Continue Reading George Bernard Shaw
Dorothy Richardson
Biography by Anthony Domestico Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957), now largely ignored but once regarded as one of the most important of modernist novelists, was a pioneer of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Her thirteen-novel project, Pilgrimage, is a prime example of modernism at its finest and most maddening: dilatory in its pacing, challenging in its form, and concerned… Continue Reading Dorothy Richardson