The Best Writers Ever!
Points from my "The Best Films Ever Made"-Lists. Vol. 1 = 100%, Vol. 2 = 50%, Vol. 3 = 33%, Vol. 4 = 25%, Vol. 5 = 20 %, Vol. 6 = 17%
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William Shakespeare's birthdate is assumed from his baptism on April 25. His father John was the son of a farmer who became a successful tradesman; his mother Mary Arden was gentry. He studied Latin works at Stratford Grammar School, leaving at about age 15. About this time his father suffered an unknown financial setback, though the family home remained in his possession. An affair with Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and a nearby farmer's daughter, led to pregnancy and a hasty marriage late in 1582. Susanna was born in May of 1583, twins Hamnet and Judith in January of 1585. By 1592 he was an established actor and playwright in London though his "career path" afterward (fugitive? butcher? soldier? actor?) is highly debated. When plague closed the London theatres for two years he apparently toured; he also wrote two long poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". He may have spent this time at the estate of the Earl of Southampton. By December 1594 he was back in London as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company he stayed with the rest of his life. In 1596 he seems to have purchased a coat of arms for his father; the same year Hamnet died at age 11. The following year he purchased the grand Stratford mansion New Place. A 1598 edition of "Love's Labors" was the first to bear his name, though he was already regarded as England's greatest playwright. He is believed to have written his "Sonnets" during the 1590s. In 1599 he became a partner in the new Globe Theatre, the company of which joined the royal household on the accession of James in 1603. That is the last year in which he appeared in a cast list. He seems to have retired to Stratford in 1612, where he continued to be active in real estate investment. The cause of his death is unknown.6916 points- Writer
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Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital in Portland. His parents were Nellie Ruth (Pillsbury), who worked as a caregiver at a mental institute, and Donald Edwin King, a merchant seaman. His father was born under the surname "Pollock," but used the last name "King," under which Stephen was born. He has an older brother, David. The Kings were a typical family until one night, when Donald said he was stepping out for cigarettes and was never heard from again. Ruth took over raising the family with help from relatives. They traveled throughout many states over several years, finally moving back to Durham, Maine, in 1958.
Stephen began his actual writing career in January of 1959, when David and Stephen decided to publish their own local newspaper named "Dave's Rag". David bought a mimeograph machine, and they put together a paper they sold for five cents an issue. Stephen attended Lisbon High School, in Lisbon, in 1962. Collaborating with his best friend Chris Chesley in 1963, they published a collection of 18 short stories called "People, Places, and Things--Volume I". King's stories included "Hotel at the End of the Road", "I've Got to Get Away!", "The Dimension Warp", "The Thing at the Bottom of the Well", "The Stranger", "I'm Falling", "The Cursed Expedition", and "The Other Side of the Fog." A year later, King's amateur press, Triad and Gaslight Books, published a two-part book titled "The Star Invaders".
King made his first actual published appearance in 1965 in the magazine Comics Review with his story "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber." The story ran about 6,000 words in length. In 1966 he graduated from high school and took a scholarship to attend the University of Maine. Looking back on his high school days, King recalled that "my high school career was totally undistinguished. I was not at the top of my class, nor at the bottom." Later that summer King began working on a novel called "Getting It On", about some kids who take over a classroom and try unsuccessfully to ward off the National Guard. During his first year at college, King completed his first full-length novel, "The Long Walk." He submitted the novel to Bennett Cerf/Random House only to have it rejected. King took the rejection badly and filed the book away.
He made his first small sale--$35--with the story "The Glass Floor". In June 1970 King graduated from the University of Maine with a Bachelor of Science degree in English and a certificate to teach high school. King's next idea came from the poem by Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." He found bright colored green paper in the library and began work on "The Dark Tower" saga, but his chronic shortage of money meant that he was unable to further pursue the novel, and it, too, was filed away. King took a job at a filling station pumping gas for the princely sum of $1.25 an hour. Soon he began to earn money for his writings by submitting his short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier.
On January 2, 1971, he married Tabitha King (born Tabitha Jane Spruce). In the fall of 1971 King took a teaching job at Hampden Academy, earning $6,400 a year. The Kings then moved to Hermon, a town west of Bangor. Stephen then began work on a short story about a teenage girl named Carietta White. After completing a few pages, he decided it was not a worthy story and crumpled the pages up and tossed them into the trash. Fortunately, Tabitha took the pages out and read them. She encouraged her husband to continue the story, which he did. In January 1973 he submitted "Carrie" to Doubleday. In March Doubleday bought the book. On May 12 the publisher sold the paperback rights for the novel to New American Library for $400,000. His contract called for his getting half of that sum, and he quit his teaching job to pursue writing full time. The rest, as they say, is history.
Since then King has had numerous short stories and novels published and movies made from his work. He has been called the "Master of Horror". His books have been translated into 33 different languages, published in over 35 different countries. There are over 300 million copies of his novels in publication. He continues to live in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, and writes out of his home.
In June 1999 King was severely injured in an accident, he was walking alongside a highway and was hit by a van, that left him in critical condition with injuries to his lung, broken ribs, a broken leg and a severely fractured hip. After three weeks of operations, he was released from the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.3885 points- Writer
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Marcel Pagnol was born on 28 February 1895 in Aubagne, Bouches-du-Rhône, France. He was a writer and producer, known for The Well-Digger's Daughter (1940), Jean de Florette (1986) and Le schpountz (1938). He was married to Jacqueline Pagnol and Simone Collin. He died on 18 April 1974 in Paris, France.3458 points- Writer
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Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov was a part-time assistant in his father's business and also a singer in a church choir. At age 15, he was abandoned by his bankrupt father and lived alone for 3 years while finishing the Classical Gymnazium in Taganrog. Chekhov obtained a scholarship at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879, from which he graduated in 1884 as a Medical Doctor. He practiced general medicine for about ten years.
While a student, Chekhov published numerous short stories and humorous sketches under a pseudonym. He reserved his real name for serious medical publications, saying "medicine is my wife; literature - a mistress." While a doctor, he kept writing and had success with his first books, and his first play "Ivanov." He gradually decreased his medical practice in favor of writing. Chekhov created his own style based on objectivity, brevity, originality, and compassion. It was different from the mainstream Russian literature's scrupulous analytical depiction of "heroes." Chekhov used a delicate fabric of hints, subtle nuances in dialogs, and precise details. He described his original style as an "objective manner of writing." He avoided stereotyping and instructive political messages in favor of cool comic irony. Praised by writers Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov, he was awarded the Pushkin Prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1888.
In 1890, Chekhov made a lengthy journey to Siberia and to the remote prison-island of Sakhalin. There, he surveyed thousands of convicts and conducted research for a dissertation about the life of prisoners. His research grew bigger than a dissertation, and in 1894, he published a detailed social-analytical essay on the Russian penitentiary system in Siberia and the Far East, titled "Island of Sakhalin." Chekhov's valuable research was later used and quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his "Gulag Archipelago." In 1897-1899, Chekhov returned to his medical practice in order to stop the epidemic of cholera.
Chekhov developed special relationship with Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theater. He emerged as a mature playwright who influenced the modern theater. In the plays "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "Seagull," and "Cherry Orchard," he mastered the use of understatement, anticlimax, and implied emotion. The leading actress of the Moscow Art Theater, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, became his wife. In 1898, Chekhov moved to his Mediterranean-style home at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in the Crimea. There he was visited by writers Lev Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, and artists Konstantin Korovin and Isaac Levitan.3277 points- Writer
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Tennessee Williams met long-term partner Frank Merlo in the summer of 1948 (Merlo died of lung cancer in the fall of 1963). Though separated briefly in 1961 and again in 1962, the two were partners for 15 years. Merlo acted as his personal manager/secretary.
Williams spent much of his most prolific years in Rome, Italy, and his enduring friendship with Italian stage and screen legend Anna Magnani lasted 24 years and inspired both "The Rose Tattoo" and "Orpheus Descending". Magnani realized the lead parts of these two plays, which were written for her, in their film versions. The turbulent and inspirational friendship shared between Williams and Magnani is the subject of the internationally acclaimed play "Roman Nights" by Franco D'Alessandro.
Aside from his published "Memoirs", the only authorized biographical book on Williams is by Bruce Smith, entitled "Costly Performances - Tennessee Williams; The Last Stage." This book deals with the last four years of Williams' life (1979-1983).2972 points- Writer
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Charles Dickens' father was a clerk at the Naval Pay Office, and because of this the family had to move from place to place: Plymouth, London, Chatham. It was a large family and despite hard work, his father couldn't earn enough money. In 1823 he was arrested for debt and Charles had to start working in a factory, labeling bottles for six shillings a week. The economy eventually improved and Charles was able to go back to school. After leaving school, he started to work in a solicitor's office. He learned shorthand and started as a reporter working for the Morning Chronicle in courts of law and the House of Commons. In 1836 his first novel was published, "The Pickwick Papers". It was a success and was followed by more novels: "Oliver Twist" (1837), "Nicholas Nickleby" (1838-39) and "Barnaby Rudge" (1841). He traveled to America later that year and aroused the hostility of the American press by supporting the abolitionist (anti-slavery) movement. In 1858 he divorced his wife Catherine, who had borne him ten children. During the 1840s his social criticism became more radical and his comedy more savage: novels like "David Copperfield" (1849-50), "A Tale of Two Cities" (1959) and "Great Expectations" (1860-61) only increased his fame and respect. His last novel, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood", was never completed and was later published posthumously.2646 points- Writer
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Ferenc Molnár was born on 12 January 1878 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary [now Hungary]. He was a writer and actor, known for Carousel, Tales of Manhattan (1942) and I'll Be Yours (1947). He was married to Lili Darvas, Sári Fedák and Margit Vészi. He died on 1 April 1952 in New York City, New York, USA.2629 points- Writer
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Georges Simenon was a Belgian novelist, writing in the French language. He published nearly 500 different novels, and a large number of short stories. He became internationally famous for creating the French police detective Jules Maigret, as the protagonist in a celebrated series of mystery novels. Between 1931 and 1972, Simenon published 75 novels and 28 short stories about Maigret and his supporting cast. The Maigret stories have often been adapted into films, television series, and radio shows.
In 1903, Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium. His parents were the accountant Désiré Simenon and his wife Henriette Brüll. His father worked as an accountant for an insurance company. They were members of the wider Simenon family, a line of peasants from Limburg whose history had been recorded since the 1580s. Simenon's maternal ancestry was primarily German and Dutch. His mother was reputedly a distant descendant of the famed robber Gabriel Brühl (died in 1743). Simenon would later use the family name "Brühl" as one of his pen names.
In 1905, the Simenon family moved to the Outremeuse neighborhood of Liège, where Simenon would spend most of his childhood. In 1911, they moved to a larger house in the same neighborhood. The family started taking in lodgers to supplement their income. The young Simenon regularly interacted with these lodgers, who were apprentices and students of various nationalities. These interactions gave him his first taste of cosmopolitanism.
In September 1914, Simenon started attending the Collège Saint-Louis, a Jesuit high school. He dropped out of high school in June 1918, deciding against taking his year-end exams. He supported himself through a series of odd-jobs. In January 1919, the adolescent Simenon was hired as a journalist by the newspaper "Gazette de Liège". His assignments consistent of "human interest" stories, which were thought to be of trivial importance. Simenon grew interested in the seamier side of life in Liège, and started to frequent bars and cheap hotels in search of information. He also grew interested in police investigations, and attended lectures on police technique by the famed criminologist Edmond Locard (1877-1966).
Simenon wrote his first novel in June 1919, but it was not published in book form until 1921. During the early 1920s, Simenon started hanging out with members of "La Caque", a group of Bohemian artists. He was introduced by them to Régine "Tigy" Renchon, who became his girlfriend. In 1922, Simenon's father died. Simenon took the decision to move with Tigy to Paris, where he got acquainted with ordinary working-class Parisians. The city's bistros, cheap hotels, bars and restaurants would later become settings for his novels.
In 1928, Simenon took an extended sea voyage for a journalistic assignment. He discovered that he liked water travel. In 1929, he had a boat house constructed for himself and his wife, called the "Ostrogoth". They used it to travel through the French canal system. Joining them in their travels was their housekeeper Henriette "Boule" Liberge, who became Simenon's mistress. Their romantic relationship lasted for decades, unlike Simenon's previous short-lived affairs.
In 1930, Simenon wrote the first Maigret story during a boat trip in the Netherlands. It was published the following year. In 1932, Simenon's journalistic assignments caused him to travel across Africa, eastern Europe, Turkey, and the Soviet Union. In 1933, Simenon interviewed the exiled politician Leon Trotsky in Istanbul. Simenon took a trip around the world from 1934 to 1935. For much of the 1930s, Simenon was a permanent foreign resident in France.
During World War II, Simenon lived in Vendée, France. He maintained decent relationships with the German occupation authorities, and negotiated film rights of his books with German studios. Following the end of the war, Simenon was accused of being a German collaborator, but with little apparent evidence. In 1950, the French authorities temporarily forbid him to publish new works as punishment for his supposed collaboration, but the sentence was not enforced.
In 1945, Simenon left France with his wife for an extended stay in Quebec, Canada. He wrote three novels in the local city of Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson. For the following decade, Simenon and his family moved constantly across Canada and the United States. He learned to speak English with relative ease, and so did his mistress Boule. In 1949, Simenon divorced Tigy, but continued living in close proximity with her, in accordance with the divorce agreement. In 1950, Simenon married his second wife Denyse Ouimet (a French-Canadian) in Reno, Nevada. She was 17 years younger than Simenon himself. Denyse was his former secretary, and they had been romantically involved since 1945.
In 1952, Simenon briefly returned to Belgium, as he was made a member of the "Académie Royale de Belgique" (Royal Academy of Belgium). He had not actually lived in Belgium since 1922, but he remained a Belgian citizen and had become the country's most famous writer. Simenon permanently left the United States in 1955. He initially settled back in France, but then decided to move to Switzerland. In 1963, he had a new house constructed for himself in Épalinges, Vaud.
In 1964, Simenon and his wife Denyse separated permanently. His housekeeper Teresa had become his new long-term mistress. In 1978, Simenon was shocked when his daughter Marie-Jo committed suicide at the age of 25. In 1984, Simenon underwent surgery for a brain tumor. He recovered well, but his health further deteriorated during the last years of his life. In September 1989, he died in his sleep while staying in Lausanne,. He was 86-years-old at the time of his death, and had not published any major work for several years.
Simenon's works have remained popular into the 21st century. According to the 2019 version of the Index Translationum by UNESCO, Simenon was the 17th most translated writer on a global scale. In the Index, Simenon outranked the likes of of Astrid Lindgren (18th) and Pope John Paul II (19th). He ranked just below Fyodor Dostoevsky (16th) and Mark Twain (15th).2564 points- Writer
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The German novelist Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabrück in 1898. His first novel, the famous anti-war epic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), was written based on his experiences as a soldier in WWI, and published in 1929. He moved to Switzerland until 1939 and later emigrated to the US. He died in 1970 in Locarno, Switzerland.2440 points- Writer
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Graham Greene was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century and his influence on the cinema and theatre was enormous. He wrote five plays and almost all of his novels, including "Brighton Rock", "The Ministry of Fear" and "The End of the Affair", have been brought to the screen. A superb storyteller, he also wrote the screenplays for such classics as The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
A colorful and larger-than-life figure, Greene traveled widely throughout the world, from the jungles of Liberia to the Mexican desert to the Far East and the Soviet Union. In World War Two was a member of MI-6 (the British intelligence service) working with the double-agent Kim Philby, and he numbered among his friends such diverse personalities as Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward and Panamanian dictator Gen. Omar Torrijos. A notorious womanizer, he married only once but had a string of extra-marital affairs and confessed he was "a bad husband and a fickle lover." During the 1920s and 1930s he confessed that he had had relationships with over 50 prostitutes.
Born in Hertforshire, England, in 1904, the son of the headmaster of Berkhamstead School, Greene was educated at Berkhamstead and later Oxford. At Oxford he published more than 60 poems and stories and soon after graduation converted to Roman Catholicism. "I had to find a religion to measure my evil against" he said. His first novel, "The Man Within", came out in 1929, to public and critical acclaim. "Stamboul Train" (1934), a topical political thriller, was the first to reach the screen (as Orient Express (1934)) and a string of other taut suspense dramas followed: "This Gun For Hire" (1942), "The Ministry of Fear" (1943) and "The Confidential Agent" (1945). It was his novel "Brighton Rock", however, which depicted Pinkie, a teenage gangster with demonic spirituality, that eventually became a milestone in British cinema. Originally a successful stage play starring Richard Attenborough as Pinkie, Greene co-wrote the 1947 screenplay Brighton Rock (1948)) with Terence Rattigan.
Greene's collaboration with director _Carol Reed' produced three distinctive films: The Fallen Idol (1948), starring Ralph Richardson, The Third Man (1949) and Our Man in Havana (1959). One of the peaks in British filmmaking, "The Third Man", starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime, was a skillful tale of deception and drug trafficking. Greene developed the screenplay from a single sentence: "I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, amongst a host of strangers in the Strand". The character of Harry Lime later inspired an American radio series starring Orson Welles, short stories published by the News of the World and the TV series The Third Man (1959), starring Michael Rennie. In Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994). Kate Winslet fantasizes about Harry.
As well as writing novels, Greene reviewed films for "The Spectator", then for the short-lived "Night and Day", which folded after he was accused of a "gross outrage" on 'Shirley Temple (I)'--then nine years old--in his review of Wee Willie Winkie (1937). He wrote that "her admirers--middle-aged men and clergymen--respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality". In the view of the prosecuting counsel it was "one of the most horrible libels one could well imagine."
Greene was an intelligent and sophisticated playwright. His first play written directly for the stage was "The Living Room" (1953), a powerful drama of suicide and despair which starred Dorothy Tutin. It was followed by "The Potting Shed" (1957), a drama about an atheist's pact with God, and "The Complaisant Lover" (1959), a comedy of manners in which a husband and lover knowingly share a wife's favors, which starred Michael Redgrave. Many of his played were televised.
Greene's work continues to fascinate actors, filmmakers and cinema goers throughout the world. In 1973 Maggie Smith and Alec McCowen starred in "Travels With My Aunt" (Smith's role had originally been offered to Katharine Hepburn), Nicol Williamson and Ann Todd starred in The Human Factor (1979) and Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore starred in a remake of The End of the Affair (1999).
Greene said of his writing: "When I describe a scene . . . I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer's eye--which leaves it frozen. In this precise domain I think the cinema has influenced me."
Towards the end of his life Greene lived in Vevey, Switzerland, with his companion Yvonne Cloetta. He died there peacefully on April 13, 1991.2404 points- Writer
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John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 without a degree. He was variously employed as a sales clerk, farm laborer, ranch hand and factory worker. In 1925, he traveled by freight from Los Angeles to New York, where he was a construction worker. From 1926-1928, he was a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, CA. His first novel, "Cup of Gold," was published in 1929. During the 1930s, he produced most of his famous novels ("To a God Unknown," "Tortilla Flat," "In Dubious Battle," "Of Mice and Men," and his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Grapes of Wrath"). In 1941, he moved with the singer who would become his second wife to New York City. They had two sons, Thom (b. 1944) and John IV (b. 1946). In 1948, his close friend Ed Ricketts died, he went through a divorce, he took a a tour of Russia, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His wrote the screenplay for Viva Zapata! (1952), and 17 of his works have been made into movies. He received three Academy Award nominations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. US President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964, and he was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on what would have been his 75th birthday. His ashes lie in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.2269 points- Writer
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James M. Cain was a 'Film Noir' author. His father was a professor, and president, of 'Washington College'. His mother was an opera singer in Maryland.
James graduated from the same college in 1910, and became a writer for 'Baltimore American', then 'Baltimore Sun' [still being published] by 1914. He was drafted in 1916, and spent 1918 in France as a writer for the 'Army Times'. When released, he did writing for various publications, and by 1934, his first novel,"The Postman Always Rings Twice", was published. Of Course, a very popular movie in 1946.
With adaptations of his novels[credit only as 'story contributor'],he was much in demand in the 40's in the 'Film Noir' category. But, in 1946, he formed a 'Cain Plan' ["American Authors' Authority"]whereby The writers would have authority of copyrights, and be the representative for them in negotiations with the movie producers and court disputes. Resembling 'S.A.G.', it was opposed by an org. called, "The American Writers' Assoc.". There was a debate carried on in the 'Saturday Review'.
He was married 4 times.2210 points- Writer
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Although Hugo was fascinated by poems from childhood on, he spent some time at the polytechnic university of Paris until he dedicated all his work to literature. He was one of the few authors who were allowed to reach popularity during his own lifetime and one of the leaders of French romance.
After the death of his daughter Leopoldine in 1843, he started a career in politics and became member of the Paris chamber where he fought for leftist ideas. After the re-establishing of monarchy, he had to go into exile to Guernesey (1851-1870) where his literary work became more important, e.g. "Les Miserables" was written during that period. After his return to Paris he did not join politics anymore.2046 points- Writer
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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Russia. He was the second of seven children of Mikhail Andreevich and Maria Dostoevsky. His father, a doctor, was a member of the Russian nobility, owned serfs and had a considerable estate near Moscow where he lived with his family. It's believed that he was murdered by his own serfs in revenge for the violence he would commit against them while in drunken rages. As a child Fyodor was traumatized when he witnessed the rape of a young female serf and suffered from epileptic seizures. He was sent to a boarding school, where he studied sciences, languages and literature. He was devastated when his favorite writer, Alexander Pushkin, was killed in a duel in St. Petersburg in 1837. That same year Dostoevsky's mother died, and he moved to St. Petersburg. There he graduated from the Military Engineering Academy, and served in the Tsar's government for a year.
Dostoevsky was active in St. Petersburg literary life; he grew out of his early influence by Nikolay Gogol, translated "Eugenia Grande" by Honoré de Balzac in 1844 and published his own first novel, "Poor Folk", in 1845, and became friends with Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai A. Nekrasov, but it ended abruptly after they criticized his writing. At that time he became indirectly involved in a revolutionary movement, for which he was arrested in 1849, convicted of treason and sentenced to death. His execution was scheduled for a freezing winter day in St. Petersburg, and at the appointed hour he was blindfolded and ordered to stand before the firing squad, waiting to be shot. The execution was called off at the last minute, however, and his sentence was commuted to a prison term and exile in Siberia, where his health declined amid increased epileptic seizures. After serving ten years in prison and exile, he regained his title in the nobility and returned to St. Petersburg with permission from the Tsar. He abandoned his formerly liberal views and became increasingly conservative and religious. That, however, didn't stop him from developing an acute gambling problem, and he accumulated massive gambling debts.
In 1862, after returning from his first major tour of Western Europe, Dostoevsky wrote that "Russia needs to be reformed, by learning the new ideas that are developing in Europe." On his next trip to Europe, in 1863, he spent all of his money on a manipulative woman, A. Suslova, went on a losing gambling spree, returned home flat broke and sank into a depression. At that time he wrote "Notes from Underground" (1864), preceding existentialism in literature. His first wife died in 1864, after six years of a childless marriage, and he adopted her son from her previous marriage. Painful experiences caused him to fall further into depression, but it was during this period that he wrote what many consider his finest work: "Crime and Punishment" (1866).
After completion of "The Gambler" (1867), the 47-year-old Dostoevsky married his loyal friend and literary secretary, 20-year-old Anna Snitkina, and they had four children. His first baby died at three months of age, causing him to sink further into depression and triggering more epileptic seizures. At that time Dostoevsky expressed his disillusionment with the Utopian ideas in his novels "The Idiot" (1868) and "The Devils" (aka "The Possessed") (1871), where the "devils" are destructive people, such as revolutionaries and terrorists. Dostoevsky was the main speaker at the opening of the monument to Alexander Pushkin in 1880, calling Pushkin a "wandering Russian, searching for universal happiness". In his final great novel, "The Brothers Karamazov" (1880), Dostoevsky revealed the components of his own split personality, depicted in four main characters; humble monk Alyosha, compulsive gambler Dmitri, rebellious intellectual Ivan, and their cynical father Fyodor Karamazov.
Dostoevsky died on February 9, 1881, of a lung hemorrhage caused by emphysema and epileptic seizures. He lived his entire life under the pall of epilepsy, much like the mythical "Sword of Damocles", and was fearless in telling the truth. His writings are an uncanny reflection on his own life - the fate of a genius in Russia.1923 points- Writer
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James Jones was born on 6 November 1921 in Robinson, Illinois, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Thin Red Line (1998), From Here to Eternity (1953) and The Longest Day (1962). He was married to Gloria Jones. He died on 9 May 1977 in Southampton, New York, USA.1872 points- German playwright and novelist Hermann Sudermann was born into a poor family in Matziken, East Prussia, in 1857. His father was a brewer and descended from a line of very strict fundamentalist Mennonite Christians; one of his ancestors, Daniel Sudermann, was a Protestant clergyman who played a major role in fomenting the religious wars that wracked Europe in the 18th century.
As a young boy Hermann was apprenticed to a pharmacist but he detested the smell of the medicines and formulas in the pharmacy and ran away. He attended Konigsburg University, where he studied history and philology. However, he chafed at the restrictions and conventions of academic life at the time, and one day just stood up in the middle of a class and left, never to return.
He next showed up in Berlin, attempting to break into legitimate theatre as a writer, but met with such little success that he was forced to take a job as a private tutor in order to survive. He managed to get a job as an editor on a small political weekly, but eventually turned out a few novels that met with some success, "Frau Sorge" and "Geschwister", and in 1889 his play "Die Ehre" was produced in Berlin. In 1890 his novel "Katzensteg" (aka "Regina") attracted attention for its sympathetic portrayals of the poor and downtrodden.
His 1891 novel "Sodoms Ende" was declared "immoral" and temporarily banned by court order. His next work, however, is undoubtedly his most famous: the play "Heimat" (aka "Magda"), a major hit on stage (and a favorite of such stage luminaries as Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora Duse ad Mrs. Patrick Campbell).
Apart from the occasional novel, Sudermann concentrated on writing plays for the next several years, but not entirely successfully. He actually achieved more success as a novelist than as a playwright, although the modern perception of him is generally exactly the opposite.
He died in Berlin, Germany, in 1928.1827 points - Mario Puzo was born October 15, 1920, in "Hell's Kitchen" on Manhattan's (NY) West Side and, following military service in World War II, attended New York's New School for Social Research and Columbia University. His best-known novel, "The Godfather," was preceded by two critically acclaimed novels, "The Dark Arena" and "The Fortunate Pilgrim." In 1978, he published "Fools Die," followed by "The Sicilian" (1984) and "The Fourth K" (1991). Mario Puzo has also written several screenplays, including Earthquake (1974), Superman (1978), and all three "Godfather" movies, for which he received two Academy Awards. Mario's latest novel, 1996's "The Last Don," was made into a CBS television miniseries in May 1997, starring Danny Aiello, Kirstie Alley and Joe Mantegna. In 1997, Part II was aired. Also in 1997, Mario's "The Fortunate Pilgrim" was re-released by Random House. Mario passed away July 2, 1999, at his home in Bay Shore, Long Island. His last novel, "Omerta," will be published July, 2000. He is survived by his companion of 20 years, Carol Gino, and five children.1774 points
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Truman Capote was born on 30 September 1924 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Murder by Death (1976), The Innocents (1961) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). He died on 25 August 1984 in Los Angeles, California, USA.1772 points- Writer
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Alberto Moravia was born on 22 November 1907 in Rome, Lazio, Italy. He was a writer and actor, known for Contempt (1963), The Conformist (1970) and From a Roman Balcony (1960). He was married to Carmen Llera and Elsa Morante. He died on 26 September 1990 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.1680 points- Vilhelm Moberg is considered to be one of the greatest writers in Sweden of all time. He is most known for The Immigrants-series about the Swedish emigration to the United States in the 19th century. Moberg was also a journalist, author, historian and political debater. He struggled with depression and drowned in an apparent suicide.1635 points
- Ernest Hemingway was an American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954) for his novel The Old Man and the Sea, which was made into a 1958 film The Old Man and the Sea (1958).
He was born into the hands of his physician father. He was the second of six children of Dr. Clarence Hemingway and Grace Hemingway (the daughter of English immigrants). His father's interests in history and literature, as well as his outdoorsy hobbies (fishing and hunting), became a lifestyle for Ernest. His mother was a domineering type who wanted a daughter, not a son, and dressed Ernest as a girl and called him Ernestine. She also had a habit of abusing his quiet father, who suffered from diabetes, and Dr. Hemingway eventually committed suicide. Ernest later described the community in his hometown as one having "wide lawns and narrow minds".
In 1916 Hemingway graduated from high school and began his writing career as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. There he adopted his minimalist style by following the Star's style guide: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." Six months later he joined the Ambulance Corps in WWI and worked as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, picking up human remains. In July 1918 he was seriously wounded by a mortar shell, which left shrapnel in both of his legs causing him much pain and requiring several surgeries. He was awarded the Silver Medal. Back in America, he continued his writing career working for Toronto Star . At that time he met Hadley Richardson and the two married in 1921.
In 1921, he became a Toronto Star reporter in Paris. There he published his first books, called "Three Stories and Ten Poems" (1923), and "In Our Time" (1924). In Paris he met Gertrude Stein, who introduced him to the circle that she called the "Lost Generation". F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson and Ezra Pound were stimulating Hemingway's talent. At that time he wrote "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), "A Farewell to Arms" (1929), and a dazzling collection of Forty-Nine stories. Hemingway also regarded the Russian writers Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov as important influences, and met Pablo Picasso and other artists through Gertrude Stein. "A Moveable Feast" (1964) is his classic memoir of Paris after WWI.
Hemingway participated in the Spanish Civil War and took part in the D-Day landings during the invasion of France during World War II, in which he not only reported the action but took part in it. In one instance he threw three hand grenades into a bunker, killing several SS officers. He was decorated with the Bronze Star for his action. His military experiences were emulated in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940) and in several other stories. He settled near Havana, Cuba, where he wrote his best known work, "The Old Man and the Sea" (1953), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. This was adapted as the film The Old Man and the Sea (1958), for which Spencer Tracy was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor, and Dimitri Tiomkin received an Oscar for Best Musical Score.
War wounds, two plane crashes, four marriages and several affairs took their toll on Hemingway's hereditary predispositions and contributed to his declining health. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and insomnia in his later years. His mental condition was exacerbated by chronic alcoholism, diabetes and liver failure. After an unsuccessful treatment with electro-convulsive therapy, he suffered severe amnesia and his physical condition worsened. The memory loss obstructed his writing and everyday life. He committed suicide in 1961. Posthumous publications revealed a considerable body of his hidden writings, that was edited by his fourth wife, Mary, and also by his son Patrick Hemingway.1631 points - Jack London was the best-selling, highest paid and most popular American author of his time.
He was born John Griffith Chaney, on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco. He was raised by his mother Flora Wellman and his stepfather John London (he didn't know who his father was until his adulthood). After graduation from a grammar school he worked 12 to 18 hours a day at a cannery. Jack had a special relationship with his black foster mother, Virginia (Jenny) Prentiss. She loaned him some money and in 1891 he bought a sloop and became an oyster pirate. A few months later he joined the California Fish Patrol. In 1893 he joined the crew of a sealing schooner, bound for Japan. His first story, "Typhoon off the Coast of Japan", based on his sailing experiences, was published in November of 1893. Still unemployed, he became a tramp and hoboed around the country. In 1894 he was arrested for vagrancy and spent a month in jail, where he was a witness to "awful abysses of human degradation." His entire life, after these events, became a race to erase the traumatizing memories of his childhood and youth.
He continued his self-education at the Oakland Public Library. Among his readings were works by Gustave Flaubert and Lev Tolstoy. In 1896 he was admitted to the University of California, but after a year was forced to leave due to financial reasons. In 1897 he went to the Canadian Yukon and joined the Klondike Gold Rush. There he experienced all the hardships of uncivilized life and suffered from--among other things--severe frostbite, scurvy, malaria and dysentery. This left his health seriously impaired. London's struggles for survival inspired "To Build a Fire" (1902), which is considered his best short story. Writing became his ticket out of poverty; a way, in his words, to "sell his brains". His first marriage to Bess Maddern began as a friendship, not love, and ended 3 years later, leaving her with two daughters. His second marriage to Charmian Kittrdge, an editor, lasted until his death.
"The Call of the Wild" (1903) was his biggest success. "The Sea-Wolf" (1904) was turned into the first full-length American movie. Later came "The Iron Heel" (1908), a premonition of the Orwellian world, and the autobiographical "Martin Eden" (1909). The highest-paid writer of his time, he earned over $2 million yet he was always broke. In 1905 he bought a ranch in California, where he designed the first concrete silo in the state. His books provided operating income. He once said, "I would write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate." His ecological approach and effort to adapt the ideas of Asian sustainable agriculture was ahead of his time. In 1913 his Big House was ruined by a devastating fire and Jack was financially and mentally hurt. He built a small cottage and made big plans, but he lived only 3 more years. His 1400-acre ranch is now a National Historic Landmark, named Jack London State Historic Park. The writer's cottage was preserved by his wife Charmian, who lived there until her death in 1955.
His changing views and philosophy were often misunderstood as he grew out of his own mistakes. At one time he wrote, "I have been more stimulated by [Friedrich Nietzsche] than by any other writer in the world." Later London disregarded the "superman" theory of Nietzsche, calling himself Nietschze's "intellectual enemy." His readings of Carl Jung contributed to his complex philosophy. His other influences ranged from Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Darwin, Aldous Huxley and Karl Marx. While sympathizing with the Mexican revolution in "The Mexican", he wrote differently about it when he was sent to Mexico as a reporter in 1914. By age 40, somewhat disillusioned, he resigned from the Socialist party and from various clubs. During his last years London was in extreme pain, caused by complications from kidney failure (uremia is recorded on his death certificate). He was laid to rest at his ranch according to his will: "And roll over me a red boulder from the ruins of the Big House."1572 points - Daphne Du Maurier was one of the most popular English writers of the 20th Century, when middle-brow genre fiction was accorded a higher level of respect in a more broadly literate age. For her services to literature, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1969, the female equivalent of a knighthood. Thus, she achieved a trifecta of sorts, as her father and her husband were both knights.
She was born on May 13, 1907 in London, the second daughter of the famous actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, who himself was knighted in 1922, and the actress Muriel Beaumont. Her grandfather was the famous anglo-French writer George L. Du Maurier, the creator of Svengali in his 1894 novel "Trilby". (She was also cousin to the Llewelyn Davies boys, through her grandfather Gerald. The boys were the inspiration for the boys in J.M. Barrie' Peter Pan (1924) and his Neverland works.) Her husband was also famous: Frederick A. M. Browning, the WWII Commander "Boy" Browning renowned as the "father of the British airborne forces." He helped plan and execute Operation Market Garden, an airborne operation that put Allied troops into Germany and the Netherlands, an ultimately unsuccessful venture chronicled in Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far (1977). During the Second World War, Boy Browning achieved the rank of Lieutenant General and a knighthood. Browning's quote that Arnheim was a bridge too far later became famous as a book title and ultimately a movie title. Daphne published her first short story in 1928; her first novel, "The Loving Spirit", was published in 1931, and her last, "Rule Britannia", forty-one year later. In between, she achieved her greatest success with the novel Rebecca (1940), which was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into a classic film that won the Best Picture Oscar for 1940. Another novel, Don't Look Now (1973), adapted by Nicolas Roeg, is also considered a classic film in Britain.
Along with "Rebecca", she had great successes with her novels Jamaica Inn (1939) and Frenchman's Creek (1944), both of which were adapted into movies. The three novels were set in Cornwall, where she lived. In addition to multiple non-fiction books, Daphne Du Maurier also wrote three plays (including an adaptation of "Rebecca").
She died on April 19, 1989, in Par in her beloved Cornwall, five weeks shy of her 82nd birthday.1508 points - Writer
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Jean Cocteau was one of the most multi-talented artists of the 20th century. In addition to being a director, he was a poet, novelist, painter, playwright, set designer, and actor. He began writing at 10 and was a published poet by age 16. He collaborated with the "Russian Ballet" company of Sergei Diaghilev, and was active in many art movements, but always remained a poet at heart. His films reflect this fact. Cocteau was also a homosexual, and made no attempt to hide it. His favorite actor was his close friend Jean Marais, who appeared in almost every one of his films. Cocteau made about twelve films in his career, all rich with symbolism and surreal imagery. He is now regarded as one of the most important avant-garde directors in cinema.1489 points- Writer
- Soundtrack
Here he grew up in the educated Jewish middle class, together with his brother Alfred. The Zweig family was not religious. He passed his high school diploma at the Wasagymnasium in Vienna. Zweig wrote his first poems here. At that time he was influenced by writers such as Hugo von Hofmannstahl and Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1901, Stefan Zweig's first volume of poetry entitled "Silberne Saiten" was published. He also began translating works by French writers at this time. In 1904 he completed his doctorate in German and Romance studies. Until 1910 he traveled extensively through Europe. The focus here was on exchanges with other writers and artists, with whom he mostly maintained friendship through intensive correspondence. By 1911, works such as "Tersites", "The House by the Sea" and "Burning Secret" as well as his first biography "Émile Verhaeren" had been created.
With his work "First Experience. Four Stories from Kinderland," Zweig approached an intuitive psychological style. At the beginning of the First World War, Stefan Zweig signed up as a volunteer. Here he was employed in the war press quarters until 1917. To demonstrate against war in any form, he wrote the drama "Jeremiah", which premiered in Zurich in 1918. From 1918 onwards, Zweig also worked as a journalist and correspondent for the Swiss newspaper "Neue Freie Presse". He also uses this medium to publish his non-partisan views. After the end of the war he settled in Salzburg. His idea was to found a spiritually, holistically and humanistically motivated alliance in Europe. So he began, initially in numerous lectures and essays, to warn against radicalization through nationalism and to call for calm, diplomacy and patience.
In 1920, Zweig published the writings "Fear", "The Compulsion" and, from 1920, three essays about master builders of the world: "Three Masters", in 1925 "The Fight with the Demon" and in 1928 "Three Poets of Their Life". Zweig enjoyed great stage success in 1926 with his adaptation of Ben Jonson's "Volpone". The publication of the book "Star Hours of Humanity" in 1927 was equally successful. In 1928 he traveled to the Soviet Union, where his books were also published in Russian at the instigation of Maxim Gorki, with whom he corresponded. After the NSDAP came to power in Germany, Stefan Zweig fled to London for fear of persecution. The book "Impatience of the Heart" was written here. From 1934 onwards, his works were no longer published in Germany and with the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich in 1938, production in his homeland also stopped. In 1935, Zweig wrote the libretto for the opera "Die schweigsame Frau" for Richard Strauss.
In 1936 the NSDAP immediately banned the sale of all of his works. His first marriage ended in divorce in 1938, and his second marriage was to Charlotte Altmann in 1939. In 1940 he received English citizenship from Great Britain. Nevertheless, he left Europe and traveled on to New York. In 1942 his chess novella and the monograph Brazil were published. After a short stay he visited Argentina and Paraguay. He then settled in Brazil. Here Stefan Zweig fell into deep sadness and depression.
Stefan Zweig committed suicide on February 22, 1942 in Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro. In 1944 his autobiography was published posthumously under the title "The World of Yesterday".1426 points- Émile Zola was born on April 2, 1840, in Paris, France. His father was an Italian engineer. Young Zola studied at the Collége Bourbon in Provence, where his schoolmate and friend was Paul Cezanne. In 1858 Zola returned to Paris and became a student at the Lycée Saint-Louis, from which he graduated in 1862. After working at clerical jobs, he began to write a literary column for a Parisian newspaper. Zola's main literary work was "Les Rougon-Macquart", a monumental cycle of twenty novels about Parisian society during the French Second Empire under Napoleon III and after the Franco-Prussian War.
Zola was the founder of the Naturalist movement in 19th-century literature. His medicinal approach in scrupulous description of the lives of ordinary people was based on the contemporary theory of hereditary determinism, which he used to demonstrate how genetic and environmental factors influence human behavior. His most notable novels, "L'assommoir" (1877), "Nana" (1880) and "Germinal" (1885), displayed Zola's concerns of both scientific and artistic nature, as well as his stances on social reform. His life in the Parisian intellectual elite was that of a statesman and a bon vivant. He lived in a villa in Medan on the Seine and had a home in Paris. He was a political apprentice and follower of Victor Hugo in his stand against the corrupt monarchy of Napoleon III. Zola was among the strongest proponents of the Third Republic and was elected to the Legion of Honour. At the same time he was an important figure in the Parisian cultural milieu. He entered a circle of realist writers such as Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Ivan Turgenev and Gustave Flaubert, his literary mentor and a close friend. After his novels brought him critical and financial success, Zola himself became surrounded by such followers as Guy de Maupassant and Paul Alexis, among others.
Zola shook the Parisian art world with his novel "L'Oevre" ("The Masterpiece") in 1886. Its protagonist, named Claude Lantier, was actually an amalgam of several artists including Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet and Claude Monet. Zola also portrayed himself and his friend and mentor Gustave Flaubert. However, the personality and artistic career of painter Paul Cezanne was shown with a closer resemblance, especially when it came to intimate personal characteristics. Zola and Cezanne were schoolmates and close friends from childhood, which gave the writer a wealth of material for the novel. Cezanne's reticent personality, his self-doubt, his artistic anxieties and his more hidden sexual anxieties all came out in Zola's narrative. He revealed Cezanne's "passion for the physical beauty of women, and insane love for nudity desired but never possessed", his almost misogynistic perception of the "satanic female beauty", which affected his sexuality, and sublimated in his brush-strokes that he laid on his paintings. He showed Cezanne's work on his numerous sketches of nudes and impressionistic bathers as an outlet to artist's masculinity. He also hinted on Cezanne's countless depictions of apples as a sublimation and displacement of the artist's erotic interests. Zola used Cezanne's inner struggles of artistic and sexual nature and the interdependence of his sexual and artistic anxiety, to show some intricate parts of an eternal conundrum where lies one of the mysterious sources of creativity. In Zola's novel the artist fails to depict a perfectly beautiful nude, his wife has a baby that has a disfigured head and dies, then artist presents a painting of his dead child to the Salon, then artist commits suicide. In real life Cezanne, as a highly sensitive and refined individual, took Zola's novel too personally. The book ended their life-long friendship. Even the wise and friendly comments by Claude Monet and Camille Pisarro failed to help their reconciliation. Zola's powerful literary image had formed a lasting perception of Cezanne among his fellow artists, as well as among critics and public. Cezanne fled from the Parisian art world into a self-imposed isolation.
Zola risked his career in February of 1898, when he defended army Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer who was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for treason. Zola accused the French government of anti-Semitism in an open letter to François Félix Faure, the President of France. Zola's "J'Accuse" was published on the front page of the Paris daily "L'Aurore". Zola declared that Dreyfus' conviction was based on false accusations and forged "evidence" of espionage, which the court that convicted him knew was false, and was a misrepresentation of justice. Zola was brought to trial for libel for publishing "L'Accuse" and was convicted two weeks later, sentenced to jail, and removed from the Legion of Honour. Zola managed to escape to England. He returned during the collapse of the government and continued defending Dreyfus, who was imprisoned on the hellish penal colony in South America called Devil's Island. France became deeply divided by the case, known as the Dreyfus affair. Zola stood together with the more liberal commercial society opposite the reactionary army and Catholic church. Zola's open letter formed a major turning point in the Dreyfus affair. The case was reopened and Dreyfus was acquitted, then convicted again, but ultimately freed and completely exonerated by the French Supreme Court.
Zola's strange and tragic death from carbon monoxide poisoning was caused by a stopped chimney and remained an unresolved mystery. His enemies were blamed, but nothing was proved. He died on September 29, 1902, in Paris, and was initially laid to rest in the Cimetiere de Montmartre in Paris. On June 4, 1908, Zola's remains were laid to rest in the Pantheon in Paris, France.1414 points - Writer
- Actor
- Music Department
Noel Coward virtually invented the concept of Englishness for the 20th century. An astounding polymath - dramatist, actor, writer, composer, lyricist, painter, and wit -- he was defined by his Englishness as much as he defined it. He was indeed the first Brit pop star, the first ambassador of "cool Britannia." Even before his 1924 drugs-and-sex scandal of The Vortex, his fans were hanging out of their scarves over the theater balcony, imitating their idol's dress and repeating each "Noelism" with glee. Born in suburban Teddington on 16 December 1899, Coward was on stage by the age of six, and writing his first drama ten years later. A visit to New York in 1921 infused him with the pace of Broadway shows, and he injected its speed into staid British drama and music to create a high-octane rush for the jazz-mad, dance-crazy 1920s. Coward's style was imitated everywhere, as otherwise quite normal Englishmen donned dressing gowns, stuck cigarettes in long holders and called each other "dahling"; his revues propagated the message, with songs sentimental ("A Room With A View," "I'll See You Again") and satirical ("Mad Dogs and Englishmen," "Don't Put Your Daughter On the Stage, Mrs. Worthington"). His between-the-wars celebrity reached a peak in 1930 with "Private Lives," by which time he had become the highest earning author in the western world. With the onset of World War II he redefined the spirit of the country in films such as This Happy Breed (1944), In Which We Serve (1942), Blithe Spirit (1945) and, perhaps most memorably, Brief Encounter (1945). In the postwar period, Coward, the aging Bright Young Thing, seemed outmoded by the Angry Young Men, but, like any modern pop star, he reinvented himself, this time as a hip cabaret singer: "Las Vegas, Flipping, Shouts "More!" as Noel Coward Wows 'Em in Cafe Turn" enthused Variety. By the 1960s, his reappraisal was complete -- "Dad's Renaissance", called it -- and his "Hay Fever" was the first work by a living author to be produced at the National Theatre. He was knighted -- at last -- in 1970, and died in his beloved Jamaica on 26 March 1973. Since his death, his reputation has grown. There is never a point at which his plays are not being performed, or his songs being sung. A playwright, director, actor, songwriter, filmmaker, novelist, wit . . . was there nothing this man couldn't do? Born into a musical family he was soon treading the boards in various music hall shows where he met a young girl called Gertrude Lawrence, a friendship and working partnership that lasted until her death. His early writings were mainly short songs and sketches for the revue shows popular in the 1920s, but even his early works often contained touches of the genius to come ("Parisian Pierrot" 1923). He went on to write and star (with Gertie) in his own revues, but the whiff of scandal was never far away, such as that from the drug addict portrayed in "The Vortex." Despite his obvious homosexual lifestyle he was taken to the hearts of the people and soon grew into one of the most popular writer/performers of his time.1354 points- Writer
- Additional Crew
Bram Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1847, and gained fame for his novel "Dracula" about an aristocratic vampire in Transylvania. The sequel, "Dracula's Guest," was not published for 17 years after the publication of "Dracula," two years after Stoker's death. Stoker also wrote "The Mystery of the Sea" and "Famous Imposters." He was the stage manager for actor Sir Henry Irving and wrote "Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving," after Irving's death.1255 points- Bohumil Hrabal was born on 28 March 1914 in Brünn, Austria-Hungary. He was a writer and actor, known for Closely Watched Trains (1966), Larks on a String (1969) and Krasosmutnení. He was married to Eliska Hrabalová. He died on 3 February 1997 in Prague, Czech Republic.1198 points
- Nikos Kazantzakis was born in Heraklion, Crete (Greece). He studied Law in Athens and in Paris, but soon he studied philosophy and literature. He travelled almost everywhere; he learnt many foreign languages and left his scientific research for Nitsche. At philosophy: "Ascetics" (Salvatores Dei, 1927), script that expresses the writer's belief for metaphysics. At poetry: "The Odyssey" (1938) "Tertsines" and also some poetic works for theatre: "Protomastoras" (=foreman) "Melissa" (=Bee) "Julian" "Prometheus" etc. His novels are: "Alexis Zorbas" (1946) "O Xristos xanastavronetai" (=Christ is recrucified) (1948) "O ftoxoulis tou Theou" (=The God's poor man) (1952-3) "Anafora ston Greco (=Reference to Greco) (1961) He died in 1957.1194 points
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Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was a colossus of American letters in the first half of the last century. Arguably, he is the first major "modern" writer of the 20th century, as there is American literature before "Main Street" (1920) and after that seminal novel, which revolutionized writing in the US. His eminence as a great American writer was eclipsed by Ernest Hemingway, who although more influenced by Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein, owes a debt to Lewis, as do most realists in 20th-century American letters.1192 points- Writer
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The Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, acquired a reputation as the greatest dramatist in the English language during the first half of the 20th Century for the plays he had written at the height of his creativity from "Mrs. Warren's Profession" in 1893 to "The Apple Cart" in 1929. His works have been revived on Broadway from 1894 to 2010. His most famous work in the 21st Century is My Fair Lady (1964), the musical adaptation of Pygmalion (1938).
A Shavian drama (his reputation was so great, he had his own adjective ascribed to his works) had a biting social critique leavened by humor. According to his Nobel Prize citation, "His ideas were those of a somewhat abstract logical radicalism; hence they were far from new, but they received from him a new definiteness and brilliance. In him these ideas combined with a ready wit, a complete absence of respect for any kind of convention, and the merriest humor - all gathered together in an extravagance which has scarcely ever before appeared in literature."
He was a major international celebrity and a force in British politics, being a charter member of the Fabian Society. The Fabians were committed to democratic socialism, that is, using parliamentary mechanisms to encourage a gradual adoption of socialist policies through political reform rather than revolution.1183 points- Jane Austen was born on December 16th, 1775, to the local rector, Rev. George Austen (1731-1805), and Cassandra Leigh (1739-1827). She was the seventh of eight children. She had one older sister, Cassandra. In 1783 she went to Southampton to be taught by a relative, Mrs. Cawley, but was brought home due to a local outbreak of disease. Two years later she attended the Abbey Boarding School in Reading, reportedly wanting to follow her sister Cassandra, until 1786.
Jane was mostly educated at home, where she learned how to play the piano, draw and write creatively. She read frequently and later came to enjoy social events such as parties, dances and balls. She disliked the busy life of towns and preferred the country life, where she took to taking long walks.
In 1801 Jane, her parents and sister moved to Bath, a year after her father's retirement, and the family frequented the coast. While on one of those coastal holidays she met a young man, but the resulting romantic involvement ended tragically when he died. It is believed by many astute Austen fans that her novel, "Persuasion", was inspired by this incident.
Following her father's passing in January of 1805--which left his widow and daughters with financial problems--the family moved several times until finally settling into a small house, in Chawton, Hampshire, owned by her brother Edward, which is reminiscent of "Sense and Sensibility". It was in this house that she wrote most of her works.
In March of 1817 her health began to decline and she was forced to abandon her work on "Sanditon", which she never completed. It turned out that she had Addisons disease. In April she wrote out her will and then on May 24th moved with Cassandra to Winchester, to be near her physician. It was in Winchester she died, in the arms of her sister, on Friday, 18 July 1817, at the age of only 41. She was buried the 24th of July at Winchester Cathedral. Jane never married.
During her formative years, Jane wrote plays and poems. At 14 she wrote her first novel, "Love and Freindship [sic]" and other juvenilia. Her first (unsuccessful) submission to a publisher, however, was in 1797 titled "First Impressions" (later "Pride and Prejudice"). In 1803 "Susan" (later "Northanger Abbey") was actually sold to a publisher for a mere £10 but was not published until 14 years later, posthumously. Her first accepted work was in 1811 titled "Sense and Sensibility", which was published anonymously as were all books published during her lifetime. She revised "First Impressions" and published it entitled "Pride and Prejudice" in 1813. "Mansfield Park" was published in 1814, followed by "Emma" in 1816, the same year she completed "Persuasion" and began "Sanditon", which was ultimately left unfinished. Both "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey" were published in 1818, after her death.1171 points - Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Kiev Province, now the Ukraine, to Polish parents Apollo Korzeniowski and Ewa Bobrowska. His father was a political activist and he and his family were exiled after he was suspected of involvement with revolutionary activities. Conrad had no friends as a child and rarely associated with boys or girls. His mother had always been a sickly person and died of tuberculosis in 1865. Conrad's father sent him to live with his uncle and pursue his education in France. Conrad's father died in 1869, also of tuberculosis. Conrad became an officer on British ships and spent two decades on various ships. Conrad was inspired to write "Heart of Darkness" after voyaging to Congo in 1890. In 1894, Conrad published his first novel and in 1896 he married Jessie George, an on-again off-again girlfriend. Conrad had few friends in adulthood, mainly fellow authors such as Stephen Crane and Henry James. Conrad died of a heart attack in 1924.1158 points
- Thomas Harris was born in 1940 in Jackson, Mississippi, USA. He was raised in the town of Rich where his father worked as a farmer. He earned his bachelor's degree in English from Baylor University in Texas in 1964. While attending school, he also worked for the local newspaper.
After graduating, Harris traveled Europe for a time. Back in the USA, he worked for the Associated Press out of New York. Not coincidentally, his duties for the press included covering murders and other crimes. This helped fuel his imagination in the fictional world, and he began to write macabre stories for magazines that began to show his attention for detail that would make his subsequent novels so popular.
In 1975, he wrote his first novel, Black Sunday, about a diabolical plot to kill thousands with a blimp during the Superbowl. Perhaps ahead of his time, the terrorism of 11 September, 2001, led to many stadiums being turned into no-fly zones due to fears of a similar attack. The book was turned into a film -- Black Sunday (1977) -- a very short two years after being published. Following its success, he devoted his career entirely to fictional novelization.
In 1981, Harris wrote his first book in the Hannibal Lecter trilogy, Red Dragon. Though the character of Lecter did not become famous (or infamous, as the case may be) for another decade, the book did spark a loosely-based movie, Manhunter (1986), which was quickly dismissed at first, grossing back only about half its cost. Then, in 1988, Harris wrote another novel about the character Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs. This time, he gave the character more of a presence, although he still did not dominate the book. When this was turned into a film three years later as The Silence of the Lambs (1991), it became an instant hit and swept the "Big 5" at the Academy Awards, becoming only the third movie to do so.
After the success of The Silence of the Lambs in both movie and book form, there became a growing demand among fans - and film producer Dino De Laurentiis -- for there to be another chapter in the Hannibal Lector series. It took 11 years between novels, but Harris finally delivered again in 1999 with the best-selling novel Hannibal. It was made into a film two years later in Hannibal (2001) and, although dismissed by some critics and fans for straying from the book in parts (as well as Jodie Foster's non-appearance as Agent Clarisse Starling), it set opening records in box office sales for an R-rated film.
Because of the large box office take and the fact that Anthony Hopkins, who won an Oscar for his role in the second Lecter film, did not play Lecter in Manhunter (1986), De Laurentis and Harris came to terms to make a second version of the first book, this time properly titled Red Dragon (2002). This film version was more in keeping with the book than the first film was.
Unable to escape from being known as the man who created Lecter, Harris again agreed to make not only another novel on the character, but to write the material for the film adaption as well. The current working title is Behind the Mask. As of 2005, Harris resides in Miami, Florida, and Sag Harbor, New York, USA.1152 points - Writer
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Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, in his ancestral estate Yasnaya Polyana, South of Moscow, Russia. He was the fourth of five children in a wealthy family of Russian landed Gentry. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his elder brothers and relatives.
Leo Tolstoy studied languages and law at Kazan University for three years. He was dissatisfied with the school and left Kazan without a degree, returned to his estate and educated himself independently. In 1848 he moved to the capital, St. Petersburg, and there passed two tests for a law degree. He was abruptly called to return to his estate near Moscow, where he inherited 4000 acres of land and 350 serfs. There Tolstoy built a school for his serfs, and acted as a teacher. He briefly went to a Medical School in Moscow, but lost a fortune in gambling, and was pulled out by his brother. He took military training, became an Army officer, and moved to the Caucasus, where he lived a simple life for three years with Cossacs. There he wrote his first novel - "Childhood" (1852), it became a success. With writing "Boyhood" (1854) and "Youth" (1857) he concluded the autobiographical trilogy. In the Crimean War (1854-55) Tolstoy served as artillery commander in the Battle of Sevastopol, and was decorated for his courage. Between the battles he wrote three stories titled "Sevastopol Sketches", that won him wide attention, and a complement from the Czar Aleksandr II.
After the war, Tolstoy returned to St. Petersburg, where he enjoyed the friendship of Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai A. Nekrasov, Ivan Goncharov, and other writers. On his trips to Europe, he had discussions with Gertsen in London, and attended Darwin's lectures. In Brussels he had meetings with philosophers Prudhon and Lelewel. Tolstoy undertook a research of schools in Europe, and later he built and organized over 20 schools for poor people in Russia. At that time the secret police began surveillance, and searched his home. In 1862 he married Sofia Andreevna Bers, and fathered 13 children with his wife. Four of their babies died, and the couple raised the remaining nine children. His wife was also his literary secretary, and also contributed to his best works, "War and Peace" (1863-69) and "Anna Karenina" (1873-77). In his "Confession" (1879) Tolstoy revealed his own version of Christianity, blended with socialism, that won him many followers. Tolstoyan communities sprang up in America and Europe, and he assisted the Russian non-Orthodox Christians (Dukhobors) in migrating to USA and Canada. He split from aristocratic class and developed an ascetic lifestyle, becoming a vegetarian, and a farmer. He sponsored and organized free meals for the poor. He transfered his copyright on all of his writings after 1880 to public domain. In his later age Tolstoy was pursuing the path of a wandering ascetic. He corresponded with Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was directly influenced by Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1894), which was praised by many nonviolent movements.
In 1900 Tolstoy criticized the Tsar's government in a series of publications, calling for separation of Chuch and State. Tsar Nicholas II retaliated through the Church, by expulsion of Tolstoy from Orthodox Cristianity as a "heretic". He fell ill, and suffered from a severe depression; he was suicidal and even had to eliminate all hunting guns from his home, because of his suicidal mode. He was treated by the famous doctor Dahl, and was visited by composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and basso Feodor Chaliapin Sr., who performed for Tolstoy on many occasions. Later he went to convalesce in Yalta, in Crimea, where he spent time with Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. Tolstoy was an obvious candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but was initially omitted by the Nobel Committee for his views. The omission caused a strong response from a group of Swedish writers and artists. They sent an address to Tolstoy, but the writer answered by declining any future prize nomination.
In 1902 Tolstoy wrote a letter to the Tsar, calling for social justice, to prevent a civil war, and in 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War, Tolstoy wrote a condemnation of war. The Tsar replied by increasing police surveillance on Tolstoy. In November of 1910 he left his estate, probably taking the path of a wandering ascetic, which he had been pursuing for decades. He left home without explanations and took a train, in which he caught pneumonia, and died at a remote station of Astapovo. He was laid to rest in his estate of Yasnaya Polyana, which was made a Tolstoy National Museum.
His youngest daughter, named Alexandra Tolstoy, was the director of the Tolstoy Museum, and was arrested by the Communists five times. She emigrated from Russia to the United States, where she founded the Tolstoy Foundation. She helped many prominent Russian intellectuals, such as Vladimir Nabokov and Sergei Rachmaninoff among many others.1141 points- Agatha was born as "Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller" in 1890 to Frederick Alvah Miller and Clara Boehmer. Agatha was of American and British descent, her father being American and her mother British. Her father was a relatively affluent stockbroker. Agatha received home education from early childhood to when she turned 12-years-old in 1902. Her parents taught her how to read, write, perform arithmetic, and play music. Her father died in 1901. Agatha was sent to a girl's school in Torquay, Devon, where she studied from 1902 to 1905. She continued her education in Paris, France from 1905 to 1910. She then returned to her surviving family in England.
As a young adult, Agatha aspired to be a writer and produced a number of unpublished short stories and novels. She submitted them to various publishers and literary magazines, but they were all rejected. Several of these unpublished works were later revised into more successful ones. While still in this point of her life, Agatha sought advise from professional writer Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960). Meanwhile she was searching for a suitable husband and in 1913 accepted a marriage proposal from military officer and pilot-in-training Archibald "Archie" Christie. They married in late 1914. Her married name became "Agatha Christie" and she used it for most of her literary works, including ones created decades following the end of her first marriage.
During World War I, Archie Christie was send to fight in the war and Agatha joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a British voluntary unit providing field nursing services. She performed unpaid work as a volunteer nurse from 1914 to 1916. Then she was promoted to "apothecaries' assistant" (dispenser), a position which earned her a small salary until the end of the war. She ended her service in September, 1918.
Agatha wrote "The Mysterious Affair at Styles", her debut novel ,in 1916, but was unable to find a publisher for it until 1920. The novel introduced her famous character Hercule Poirot and his supporting characters Inspector Japp and Arthur Hastings. The novel is set in World War I and is one of the few of her works which are connected to a specific time period.
Following the end of World War I and their retirement from military life, Agatha and Archie Christie moved to London and settled into civilian life. Their only child Rosalind Margaret Clarissa Christie (1919-2004) was born early in the marriage. Agatha's debut novel was first published in 1920 and turned out to be a hit. It was soon followed by the successful novels "The Secret Adversary" (1922) and "Murder on the Links" (1923) and various short stories. Agatha soon became a celebrated writer.
In 1926, Archie Christie announced to Agatha that he had a mistress and that he wanted a divorce. Agatha took it hard and mysteriously disappeared for a period of 10 days. After an extensive manhunt and much publicity, she was found living under a false name in Yorkshire. She had assumed the last name of Archie's mistress and claimed to have no memory of how she ended up there. The doctors who attended to her determined that she had amnesia. Despite various theories by multiple sources, these 10 days are the most mysterious chapter in Agatha's life.
Agatha and Archie divorced in 1928, though she kept the last name Christie. She gained sole custody of her daughter Rosalind. In 1930, Agatha married her second (and last) husband Max Mallowan, a professional archaeologist. They would remain married until her death in 1976.Christie often used places that she was familiar with as settings for her novels and short stories. Her various travels with Max introduced her to locations of the Middle East, and provided inspiration for a number of novels.
In 1934, Agatha and Max settled in Winterbrook, Oxfordshire, which served as their main residence until their respective deaths. During World War II, she served in the pharmacy at the University College Hospital, where she gained additional training about substances used for poisoning cases. She incorporated such knowledge for realistic details in her stories.
She became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1956 and a Dame Commander of the same order in 1971. Her husband was knighted in 1968. They are among the relatively few couples where both members have been honored for their work. Agatha continued writing until 1974, though her health problems affected her writing style. Her memory was problematic for several years and she had trouble remembering the details of her own work, even while she was writing it. Recent researches on her medical condition suggest that she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease or other dementia. She died of natural causes in early 1976.1139 points - Guy de Maupassant was born on 5 August 1850 in Château de Miromesnil, France. He was a writer, known for La criada de la granja (1953), Pierre & Jeanne and Black Sabbath (1963). He died on 6 July 1893 in Paris, France.1133 points
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Popular British novelist, playwright, short-story writer and the highest-paid author in the world in the 1930s, Somerset Maugham graduated in 1897 from St. Thomas' Medical School and qualified as a doctor, but abandoned medicine after the success of his first novels and plays. During World War I he worked as a secret agent and in 1928 settled in Cap Ferrat in France, from where he made journeys all over the world. Maugham's spy novel "Ashenden; or The British Agent" (1928) is partly based on his own experiences in the secret service. In making the transition from secret agent to writer, Maugham carried on in the tradition of such classic writers as Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson and Daniel Defoe to such contemporary writers as Graham Greene, John le Carré, John Dickson Carr, Alec Waugh and Ted Allbeury. Maugham's skill in handling plot is compared by critics to that of Guy de Maupassant. In many of Maugham's novels the surroundings are international and the stories are told in a clear, economical style with a cynical or resigned undertone. Although Maugham was successful as an author he was never knighted and his relationship with Gerald Haxton, his secretary, has been subject to speculation.1098 points- Arthur Schnitzler was born on 15 May 1862 in Vienna, Austrian Empire [now Austria]. He was a writer, known for Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Late Fame and The Affairs of Anatol (1921). He was married to Olga Gussmann. He died on 21 October 1931 in Vienna, Austria.1089 points
- Patricia Highsmith was born on 19 January 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas, USA. She was a writer, known for The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Strangers on a Train (1951) and The Two Faces of January (2014). She died on 4 February 1995 in Locarno, Switzerland.1078 points
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Dashiell Hammett was born May 27, 1894, in St. Mary's County, Maryland, to Richard Hammett and Mary Bond. He joined the Baltimore branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1915. He enlisted in the US Army's Ambulance Corps in June 1918 and was posted to a camp 20 miles from Baltimore, where he caught the flu, which developed into tuberculosis. He was invalided out of the army in July 1919 and returned to Pinkerton's. Hammett entered the veterans hospital near Tacoma, Washington, with tuberculosis in 1920. Upon his release he worked at Pinkerton's Spokane branch. Hospitalized again with tuberculosis, he met and courted a nurse, Josephine Dolan. In February 1921 he was moved to an army hospital near San Diego. After he was released he married a now-pregnant Josie in San Francisco. Hammett worked for the San Francisco branch of Pinkerton's, but left the agency in 1921 or 22 due to ill health. He took a writing course and sold droll vignettes to "The Smart Set" magazine during 1922, and some short stories to other magazines. He began to sell detective stories to "The Black Mask" from 1923. After the birth of the couple's second daughter in 1926, Hammett gave up freelance writing and became an advertising copy writer for the jeweler Albert Samuels, but left after six months due to ill health. Forced by his tuberculosis to live apart from Jose and the children, the marriage eventually broke up. Hammett supported himself through writing, chiefly for "The Black Mask", now under editor Joe Shaw. Hammett's long short stories were republished in novel form by Alfred Knopf. In 1929 Hammett moved to New York. After the success of his novel "The Maltese Falcon", he was engaged as a screenwriter by Paramount Pictures and moved to Hollywood, where he met Lillian Hellman. He returned to New York in 1931, where he wrote "The Glass Key". "The Thin Man" was published as a magazine serial in 1933. Hammett was encouraged by Hearst to write the "Secret Agent X9" comic strip, which ran from 1934-35, his last original work. In 1942 he re-enlisted in the army and was posted to the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska, where he edited The Adakian. When discharged in 1945, he returned to New York and became President of the NY Civil Rights Congress. In July 1951 Hammett was subpoenaed to testify on the Civil Rights Congress' bail fund, and was jailed for refusing to answer questions. Upon his release from jail, he was presented with a bill by the Internal Revenue Service for $111,000 in back taxes. In failing health, he lived off and on with Hellman. In 1961 he was admitted to New York's Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, where he died on January 10.1071 points- Writer
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James Maxwell Anderson was born in Atlantic, Pennsylvania, on December 15, 1888 to William Lincoln Anderson and Charlotte Perrimela (Stephenson) Anderson. The second child born to the couple, Anderson spent his formative years on his maternal grandmother's farm in Atlantic before the family moved to Andover, Ohio when he was three years old. His father attended a seminary at night to study for the ministry while he supported the family as a railroad fireman.
His father took up the life of a traveling minister, moving his family frequently until Anderson was in his late teens. Anderson attended schools in Ohio, Iowa, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania. The Anderson family's life was a vagabond one until they settled in Jamestown, North Dakota in 1907.
After graduating from Jamestown High School, Anderson went to the University of North Dakota in 1908. He worked his way through college as a waiter and serving on the night copy desk of the newspaper "The Grand Forks Herald." He was a member of the literary society Ad Altiora at UND and helped put together the "Dacotah" Annual. He also participated in college theatrics, serving as assistant director for the Sock and Buskin Dramatic Society.
Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature in June 1911, Anderson married his UND classmate Margaret Haskett, a farmer's daughter, on August 1, 1911. They eventually had three sons, Quentin, Alan, and Terence.
His first job after college was serving as the principal of the Minnewaukan, North Dakota high school, where he doubled as an English teacher. After making pacifist comments to his students, his contract was not renewed, and he moved to Palo Alto, California, where he enrolled in a master's program in English Lit at Stanford University. After graduating from Stanford in 1914, he spent three years as a high school English teacher in San Francisco before accepting an offer to become chairman of Whittier College's English Department in 1917. Once again he got in trouble with his pro-pacifist statements, and he was fired after his first year for speaking out publicly on behalf of a student seeking conscientious objector status during World War I.
Moving back to San Francisco, he worked as a journalist on the "San Francisco Chronicle" and the "San Francisco Bulletin," then moved to New York City to take an editorial position on the liberal periodical "The New Republic." He continued his work as a newspaperman, becoming a stringer for the "New York Globe" and the New York World." He also found time to help launch the poetry magazine "Measure."
Turning his interest to the theater, he wrote his first play in 1923. Written in verse, "White Desert" was a flop, lasting only 12 performances, but it attracted the attention of "New York World" critic Laurence Stallings. Stallings chose Maxwell as his collaborator on his World War One play "What Price Glory?" Opening on September 3, 1924, the play was one of the stage sensations of the decade, earning kudos and running for 430 performances. The financial rewards of helping create such a big boffo box office blockbuster enabled Anderson to retire from journalism and become a full-time dramatist.
Many of his plays were written in verse, and they typically touch on social and moral problems, such as "Winterset" (1935), which addressed the Sacco & Vanzetti trials in fictional form. The play, which won the first New York Critics Circle Award, is about a gangster who visits the children of the anarchists executed for the murder he himself committed. Anderson won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play "Both Your Houses," and repeated as the New York Critics Circle Award winner for "High Tor" in 1936. He wrote many historical dramas and two librettos for Kurt Weill, "Knickerbocker Holiday" (1938) and "Lost in the Stars" (1940). He was also a lyricist, his most famous creation being "September Song" from "Knickerbocker Holiday."
His plays included "Elizabeth the Queen" (1930), "Mary of Scotland " (1933), "Key Largo" (1939); "Truckline Café" (1945), "Joan of Lorraine" (1946), "Anne of the Thousand Days" (1947), and "The Bad Seed" (1954). Anderson also worked on numerous screenplays, including All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), for which he received an Academy Award nomination, Washington Merry-Go-Round (1932), Rain (1932) , Death Takes a Holiday (1934), and So Red the Rose (1935).
Plays of his that were turned into movies were "Mary of Scotland (1936), "Saturday's Children," which was filmed three times (once as "Maybe It's Love"), Winterset (1936), "Elizabeth the Queen", which became The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), The Eve of St. Mark (1944), Knickerbocker Holiday (1944). Key Largo (1948), "Joan of Lorraine," which became Joan of Arc (1948), The Bad Seed (1956), "The Devil's Hornpipe", which became Never Steal Anything Small (1959), and Anne of the Thousand Days (1969). "What Price Glory?" was made into a silent film in 1926 and was remade by John Ford in 1952.
He published two books of poetry, "You Who Have Dreams" in 1925, and "Notes on a Dream," published posthumously in 1972. Anderson also published two collections of essays, "The Essence of Tragedy and Other Footnotes and Papers" (1939) and "Off Broadway Essays About the Theatre" (1947).
His wife Margaret died on February 26, 1931, and he remarried in 1933, taking Gertrude "Mab" Higger as his second wife. They had a daughter, Hesper, born on August 12, 1934, and when Gertrude died on March 21, 1953, he married Gilda Hazard on June 6, 1954.
Among his many honors were honorary Doctor of Literature degrees from Columbia University in 1946 and the University of North Dakota in 1958, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal in Drama in 1954.
Maxwell Anderson had a stroke on February 26, 1959 and died two days later in Stamford, Connecticut. His oeuvre included over thirty published plays and over a dozen unpublished ones.1071 points- Alice Munro was born on 10 July 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, Canada. She is a writer, known for Julieta (2016), Free Radicals and Away from Her (2006). She has been married to Gerald Fremlin since 1976. She was previously married to James Munro (I).1068 points
- Henri-Pierre Roché was born on 28 May 1879 in Paris, France. He was a writer, known for Jules and Jim (1962), Two English Girls (1971) and La grande collection (1990). He was married to Denise Renard and Germaine Bonnard. He died on 9 April 1959 in Meudon, Hauts-de-Seine, France.1064 points
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An American novelist, writer of crime fiction featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe, Raymond (Thornton) Chandler was born in Chicago of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother. He moved to England when his parents divorced. He attended Dulwich College and studied languages in France and Germany before returning to England in 1907 and becoming a naturalized British subject. He took a civil service job in the Admiralty, which he left in 1912 to return to America, settling in California. After the US entered World War I he enlisted in the Canadian Army, then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. After the armistice he returned to California and got a series of bookkeeping jobs, finally becoming a vice-president with the Dabney Oil syndicate.
All along, however, he had been submitting stories, poems, sketches and essays to a number of periodicals, but when the Depression hit and the bottom fell out of the oil business, he lost his job and turned to writing full-time. He found a niche with stories of the "hard-boiled" school popularized by Dashiell Hammett, and had many of his early stories accepted by Black Mask, the same mystery magazine that had first published Hammett. His first four novels--"The Big Sleep" (1939, filmed 1946 [The Big Sleep (1946)] and 1978 [The Big Sleep (1978)]); "Farewell My Lovely" (1940, filmed 1944 [Murder, My Sweet (1944)] and 1975 [Farewell, My Lovely (1975)]); "The High Window" (1942, filmed 1947 [The Brasher Doubloon (1947)]); and "The Lady in the Lake (1943, filmed 1946 [Lady in the Lake (1946)])--which reworked plots from some of his short stories, were his most successful.
He spent some time in Hollywood as a screenwriter, contributing to Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), the film noir classic The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951). He wrote realistically, in stark contrast to the English style of drawing-room puzzle mysteries where an amateur detective always knows more than the police and clues turn up at just the right moment. Chandler dismissed these plots as "having God sit in your lap."1060 points- Writer
Maksim Gorky is a pseudonym of Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov, who was born into a poor Russian family in Nizhnii Novgorod on Volga river. Gorky lost his father at an early age, he was beaten by his stepfather and became an orphan at age 9, when his mother died. He was brought up by his grandmother, who helped his development as a storyteller.
He was blessed with a brilliant memory, but failed to enter a University of Kazan. At age 19 he survived a suicide attempt, because the bullet missed his heart. After that Gorky traveled on foot for 5 years all over Central Russia, worked as a sailor on a Volga steamboat, then a salesperson, a railway worker, a salt miller, and a lawyer's clerk. At that time he was arrested for his public criticism of the Tsar and social injustices in Russia. He started writing for newspapers and published his first 'Sketches and Stories' in 1890s. Later he wrote an autobiographic book "My Universities" based on impressions from his travels and jobs. Gorky wrote with sympathy about the simple folks, the outcasts, the gypsies, the hobos and dreamers in the context of social decay in the Russian Empire. He became friends with Anton Chekhov and Lev Tolstoy. His play 'The Lower Depths' (1892) was praised by Chekhov and was successfully played in Europe and the United States. His political activism resulted in cancellation of his membership in the Russian Academy. Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Korolenko left the Academy in protest and solidarity with Gorky. He went to live in Europe and America in 1906-13. In America he started his classic novel, 'The Mother', about a Russian Christian woman and her imprisoned son, who both joined revolutionaries under the illusion that revolution follows Christ's messages.
After the Russian revolution in 1917, Gorky criticized Lenin and communists for their "bloody experiments on the Russian people". He wrote, 'Lenin and Trotsky are corrupted with the dirty poison of power. They are disrespectful of human rights, freedom of speech and all other civil liberties". Soon Gorky received a handwritten warning letter from Lenin. Later his friend Nikolai Gumilev, ex-husband of Anna Akhmatova was executed by communists. In 1921 Gorky emigrated to Europe and settled in Capri. He became careful in his critique of communism. In 1932 after a series of brief visits, he returned to Soviet Russia. He was placed in a rich Moscow mansion of the former railroad tycoon Ryabushinsky. His return from the fascist Italy was a victory for Soviet propaganda. He was made the Chairman of the Soviet Writer's Union, and a figurehead of "socialist realism" . After the murder of Kirov in 1934 Gorky was under a house arrest. His son died in 1935. The following year Gorki Gorky died suddenly at the Lenin's dacha in Moscow.1048 points- Stieg Larsson's three novels (collectively known as "The Millennium Series") were published posthumously, and each became a feature film. They were entitled (for the American market) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (originally published in 2005), The Girl Who Played with Fire (originally published in 2006), and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (originally published in 2007). The feature films retained the same titles for the American market.1045 points
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His paternal grandparents were Marie Cessete Dumas (a Haitian slave) and Marquis Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie. Antoine disapproved of their son, Thomas-Alexandre, joining the French army under the "Davy de la Pailleterie" name, so Thomas-Alexandre used his mother's surname instead. He became a valued general of Napoleon, and after he married the daughter of a local tavern owner, Thomas-Alexandre had a son of his own. This son was Alexandre Dumas, who became world-famous as the author of "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo".1039 points- Stanislaw Lem was a visionary Polish author known for Solaris (1972).
He was born on September 12, 1921, in Lwów, Poland. His father, Samuel Lem, was a wealthy laryngologist who served in the Austrian army. His mother, Sabina Woller, was a homemaker. Although he was born into a Polish-Jewish family, Lem was raised a Catholic and later became an atheist. He graduated from the Lwów Gymnazium in 1939, then studied medicine at the Lvov Medical Institute in 1940-1941. During WWII, he survived the Nazi occupation of Lwów and worked as a mechanic and welder for a German firm until 1944.
After World War II Lem escaped from the Soviet occupation of Germany and moved to Krakow, Poland, as a repatriate. There he completed his medical studies at Jagellonian University, without taking the doctor's degree. He worked at the Konserwatorium Naukoznawcze as a research assistant for psychologist Dr. Choynowski. From 1946-1949 Lem was involved in medical research in psychology, which became a turning point in his life. He started writing poetry and science fiction in 1946, but his first serious novel, "Hospital of the Transfiguration", was suppressed by the Polish government for eight years. It was released only in 1956, when freedom of speech was earned after the "Polish October" popular uprising.
Lem quit medicine in 1949, because he did not want to be drafted into the army. He married a doctor instead of being one. In 1949 he became a professional writer and continued creating his increasingly unusual novels: "The Investigation", "Eden", "Return from the Stars". The 1960s and 1970s were the most productive for Lem. At that time he wrote 'Solaris', 'The Invincible', 'The Cyberiad', 'His Master's Voice', 'The Star Diaries', 'The Futurological Congress', and 'Tales of Pirx the Pilot'. His gift of a visionary materialized in 'Summa Technologiae' (Sum of Technologies, 1964), which tackled problems of virtual reality. Lem showed his talent for premonition in "Katar" (1975), which predicted international terrorism, and in "Observations on the Spot"' (1982), which showed absurdity of a conflict between two civilizations.
His novel 'Solaris' was adapted into eponymous films twice. First came the Russian-made film adaptation by director Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972, starring Donatas Banionis and Natalya Bondarchuk. Lem spent six months working with Tarkovsky in Moscow, but their collaboration ended in a bitter conflict over the changes and additions to the original story. After seeing edited parts of the 1972 film, Lem said of Tarkovsky: "Instead of focusing on deeper moral questions related to frontiers of human knowledge, he made a drama-type 'Crime and Punishment' in space, by making up unnecessary characters of parents and relatives, then adding a hut on an island." "Tarkovsky was a genius, but he was moving in the opposite direction from my book", also said Lem. Upon his doctor's advice Lem did not want to see the 2002 remake by director Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone.
"Solaris" (1961) is arguably the best known work of Lem's works. It deals with the problem of human existence in the world of the unknown. It also shows the inevitability of misunderstandings in human contacts with other worlds. Planet Solaris is inhabited by a single Plasma Ocean organism with the eerie ability to materialize human thoughts. When astronauts become more aggressive in forcing contact with Solaris, it confronts them with pushing the buttons of their most painful thoughts by recreating their dead wives and relatives, and virtually bringing the dead back to life in front of their eyes. Obsolete biological human impulses are shown in stark contrast with the magnitude of the ocean-size organism. At some point humans become an irrational liability to their machine partner, the spaceship. Lem's imagination and talent for creation of alternative reality challenges the limits of human knowledge.
"Past is more perfect than future, which makes me sad," said Lem. Although some of his predictions came true, he expressed his disappointment about the failure of many positive prognosis that were made during the 1960s and 1970s. He died on March 27, 2006, in Kraków, and was laid to rest in the Salwatorski cemetery in Kraków, Poland. His books sold over 27 million copies in 41 languages.1019 points - Writer
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Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born on 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany as son of a lawyer. After growing up in a privileged upper middle class family, he studied law in Leipzig from 1765 to 1768, although he was more interested in literature. As he was seriously ill, he had to interrupt his studies, but finally graduated in Strassburg with a degree in law. In the following years, his novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774) became one of the first bestsellers, making him a key author in the "Sturm und Drang" (Storm and Stress) movement. In 1775, he settled down in Weimar, being the Duke's adviser and writing popular dramas such as "Egmont" or "Torquato Tasso". One of his life's important milestones was the Italian Journey from 1786 and 1788, where he discovered his interest in Greek and Roman classicism. After his return to Germany, he began the "Weimar Classicism" movement with his good friend Friedrich Schiller, concentrating on poems and dramas such as his best known work "Faust", which he published in two parts (1808/1832). Beside his literary work, he contributed many interesting theories to sciences, making him Germany's leading polymath in that period. On 22 March 1832, he died in Weimar, the town he had lived for more than fifty years.976 points- Writer
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Edward Albee was born on 12 March 1928 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA. He was a writer, known for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), A Delicate Balance (1973) and Qui a peur de Virginia Woolf? d'Edward Albee (2011). He died on 16 September 2016 in Montauk, New York, USA.967 points- Franz Kafka was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Austrian Empire, in 1883. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a business owner and a domestic tyrant, frequently abusing his son. Kafka later admitted to his father, "My writing was all about you...". He believed that his father broke his will and caused insecurity and guilt, that affected his whole life. Their tensions come out in "The Trial" and in "The Castle" in form of a hopeless conflict with an overwhelming force. His mother, Julie Lowy, came from an intellectual, spiritual family of the Jewish merchant and brewer Jakob Lowy. Although her influence was diminished by his dominating father, she shared her son's delicate nature. Kafka had a few relationships with women and was engaged, but never made a family.
He finished the German National Gymnasium in 1901, and graduated from the German University in Prague as Doctor of Law in 1906. He worked for insurance companies for the rest of his life. His profession shaped the formal, cold language of his writings which avoided any sentimental interpretations, leaving it to the reader. In 1908 Kafka published eight short stories compiled under the title "Meditation". In 1911 he became interested in Yiddish theater, that absorbed him more than abstract Judaism. In 1912 he began writing "The Judgment", which was more than an autobiography, providing a therapeutical outlet for his wrecked soul. The same year he started "Metamorphosis" about a traveling salesman, who transformed into a giant bug. In 1914 he wrote "In the Penal Colony" and "The Trial", which is regarded to be his best work. His style remains unique, though literary connections may be traced to Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Nikolay Gogol, as well as to Chinese parables, to the Bible and Talmud.
As a Jew Kafka experienced social tensions and isolation from the German community, so very few of his writings could find readers during his life. His three sisters later died in the Nazi concentration camps. He suffered from clinical depression, social anxiety, insomnia, and tuberculosis, complicated by laryngitis, that caused him the loss of his voice before his death in 1924. He was comforted by his girlfriend Dora Diamant, who had broken away from her Hasidic shtetl in Poland. She was 19 when they met in 1923 and Kafka wrote to her parents, asking for their permission to marry her. Their answer was negative, because Kafka presented himself as a non-religious Jew. He asked Dora to destroy his manuscripts after his death, but she kept about 20 notebooks of his writings and 35 private letters, that were reportedly confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933 and are not yet recovered. His university friend Max Brod became his editor, biographer and literary agent, who preserved and published most of Kafka's works posthumously, including the unfinished novels "The Trial", "The Castle", and "America".955 points - Writer
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, the eldest of five children in a wealthy aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia. His grandfather was a Justice Minister to the Czar Alexander II. His father, named Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal political leader, the editor of a liberal newspaper, and was a friend of Sergei Diaghilev. His mother, named Elena Ivanovna (née Rukavishnikov), was the daughter of the wealthiest Russian goldmine owner.
Nabokov's family was trilingual. As a child he was already reading foreign writers Edgar Allan Poe, Gustave Flaubert, and the Russians Lev Tolstoy, Nikolay Gogol, and Anton Chekhov. He excelled in languages and literature, as well, as in soccer, tennis and chess. He was inspired by his father's studies in lepidoptery from the age of 7, and spent summers collecting butterflies in the family estate of Vyra, near St. Petersburg. He graduated from the most advanced and prestigious Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Nabokov's father was the Secretary of the Russian Provisional Government, when he was arrested during the Russian revolution of October, 1917, and the family estate was confiscated by the communists. The Nabokov family emigrated to London and then to Berlin. There Nabokov's father was murdered at a political meeting while shielding his opponent from assassins. The painful memory of his father's violent death would echo in many of Nabokov's writings. In 1923 Nabokov graduated with honors from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied zoology and literature. He worked as a translator and tutor in Europe for 18 years. In 1925 he married Vera Evseevna Slonim, from a Russian-Jewish family, and their son Dimitri was born in 1934.
Traumatized by the death of his father and the loss of his home country, Nabokov expressed himself in writing. His novel 'The Luzhin Defence' (1930) is alluding to his own story of emigration and the sense of loss. In 1937 his father's killer was released by Adolf Hitler, and Nabokov had to move to Paris. Three years later he fled from the advancing German Armies to the United States, with his wife and son. In 1940 he crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the Champlain, where he had a first class cabin, paid with the money from the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. In 1945 Nabokov became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught literature at Cornell University and worked as entomologist at Harvard University, becoming a distinguished lepidopterist.
He published short stories in the Atlantic and the New Yorker magazines in English, while still writing his memoirs in Russian, and agonizing to switch from Russian to English. It took him 6 years to complete "Lolita" (1955), a controversial story of a pedophile's desire for a 12-year-old girl, who reminds him of the little girl he loved as a boy. The novel was banned in America and the UK until 1958. He later wrote a screenplay for the film Lolita (1962), directed by Stanley Kubrick. Lolita and "Pale Fire" (1962) are his best known novels. In 1964 Nabokov published his four-volume translation of 'Eugene Onegin' by Alexander Pushkin, on which he worked for 10 years. He later made English translations of poems by Mikhail Lermontov and Fyodor Tyutchev. His own later works: the artfully constructed 'Ada' (1969), 'Transparent Things' (1972), and the autobiographic 'Look at the Harlequins' (1975), were translated into Russian by his son Dimitri. Nabokov also published scholarly works on Nikolay Gogol, James Joyce and Franz Kafka.
In 1960 Nabokov moved to Switzerland and made his home at the Montreux Palace Hotel. From there he frequently traveled to Milan, Italy, where his son Dimitri Nabokov was an opera singer at the La Scala. Nabokov's main hobby was his immense collection of rare butterflies which grew to a museum-quality with his many entomological expeditions. He never learned to drive a car, and he depended on his wife Vera to drive him around. Nabokov's individualism manifested in his ironic rejection of any mass-psychology, especially Marxism, Freudism, etc. He never used telephones, thus preventing any outside influence over his way of life. He had a rare gift of synaesthesia, cognate with that of composer Alexander Scriabin and artist Wassily Kandinsky. Nabokov also made his name in chess by composing chess problems.
Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, in Montreux Palace Hotel, and was laid to rest in the Clarens Cemetery, Montreux, Switzerland. His wife and muse, Vera Slonim, died in 1993, and was laid to rest with Nabokov. The family mansion of Nabokov's in St. Petersburg, Russia is now a Nabokov's Museum. His first collection of butterflies is now part of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. His last and most valuable butterfly collection was bequeathed to the Zoology Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.938 points- Writer
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The Oscar-winning screenwriter John Osborne, better known as one of the most important British playwrights of the 1950s generation that revolutionized English-speaking theater, was born on December 12, 1929 in London, England. His father, Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a native of Newport, Monmouthshire, was a copywriter, and his mother, Nellie, was a Cockney barmaid. John's father died in 1941 when he was 11 years old. The insurance settlement allowed him to go to Belmont College, Devon.
After completing school, Osborne did not go on to university but returned to London to live with his mother, where he tried to make it as a journalist. He was introduced to the theater through a job tutoring a touring company of junior actors. Smitten by the theater, he became a stage manager and actor, eventually becoming a member of Anthony Creighton's provincial touring company. Osborne wrote his second play, "Personal Enemy", in collaboration with Anthony Creighton (their "Epitaph for George Dillon" would be staged at the Royal Court in 1958, after Osborne had broken through as a solo artist with the watershed production of "Look Back in Anger", also at the Royal Court).
Look Back in Anger (1959), which opened on May 8, 1956 at the Royal Court, the 11th anniversary of V-E Day (the surrender of Germany and the cessation of hostilities in the European theater of World War II), was revolutionary, as it gave voice to the working class. A press agent came up with the phrase "Angry Young Man" that would stick to Osborne and his compatriots, who created a new type of theater rooted in Bertolt Brecht and class consciousness. Though it initially received mix reviews, the play was a smash in London,and it made the transfer to Broadway, where it ran for a year. "Look Back in Anger" was nominated for a 1958 Tony Award for Best Play (Osborne and producer David Merrick, Best Actress in a Play (Mary Ure, whom Osborne made his second wife), and Best Costume Design (The Motley). It eventually was made into a movie starring Richard Burton and directed by Tony Richardson.
Laurence Olivier had taken Arthur Miller and his wife Marilyn Monroe to see the play when Olivier was shooting The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) in London with MM. Olivier was abashed by the play, but Miller convinced him of its greatness as a theatrical work. Olivier, sensing a sea-change in culture that could make actors of his ilk obsolete, engaged Osborne to write a play for him, and the playwright followed up "Anger" with another brilliant work, The Entertainer (1960). Olivier reinvented himself as well as realigned himself with the new youth movement shaking the theater, giving a tour de force performance as Archie Rice, a down-at-the-heels, third-rate music hall entertainer facing emigration to Canada or oblivion. Osborne used the decline of the music hall, once the premier venue of British entertainment, as a metaphor for the post-war decline of the British Empire in light of the recent debacle in Suez, when the U.K., France and Israel were rebuffed by Egypt and the U.S. when the three countries invaded Egypt to seize the recently nationalized Suez Canal.
Osborne's career continued strong in the 1960s. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Tony Richarson's movie version of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1963), which won Richardson an Oscar as Best Director and was named Best Picture of 1963. He followed this success up with his last great play Luther (1974), in which the cinematic Tom Jones, Albert Finney, won raves playing Osborne's take on Martin Luther, the man who revolutionized Christianity 1,500 years after The Christ. Fitting, that the rebel, the protester Osborne would take on the father of Protestantism. The play, first performed in England in 1961 and transferred to Broadway in 1963, won Osborne a 1964 Tony Award for Best Play, as well as a Tony Award nomination for Albert Finney. (Laurence Olivier had received his sole Tony nomination for "The Entertainer" when he had brought his legendary performance to Broadway.)
Other important plays followed. "Inadmissible Evidence", first performed in 1964, made Nicol Williamson a star (both Osborne and Williamson were nominated for Tony Awards in 1966 after the show transferred to Broadway). His other major play, "A Patriot for Me" (London debut 1965), dealt with the blackmailing of the Austro-Hungarian officer Colonel Redl (also dramatized in István Szabó's Colonel Redl (1985)), who was a homosexual and possibly a Jew in a pre-World War One society that was virulently anti-gay and anti-semitic. The production of the play helped erode theatrical censorship in Britain. The Lord Chamberlain, the theatrical censor in Britian, was opposed to the play and denied it the exhibition license the theater needed to put on public shows due to its frank depiction of homosexuality.
In exchange for an exhibition license, The Lord Chamberlain demanded multiple cuts, which would have resulted in the excision of half the play, according to Alan Bates in a B.B.C. interview during a 1983 revival of the play. Osborne and The Royal Court refused, and -- denied a license -- the theater had to be turned into a private club in order to produce the play in London as to produce it legitimately would have been impossible as half the play would have been censored. "A Patriot for Me" won "The Evening Standard" Best Play of the Year award (as would one of his latter plays, "The Hotel in Amsterdam" in 1968), though it was a succes d'estime, the theater taking a heavy loss on the production.
The year 1968 was a watershed in Osborne's professional life. Not only is 1968 the year that the counterculture "won", sweeping away all before it (and whose effects, as well as detritus, has yet to be replaced by anything else), it was the year of his last successful play, "The Hotel in Amsterdam", and the year that Tony Richardson's masterful satire The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) -- based on a screenplay by Osborne -- was released. He would not enjoy the same success as he had in the 1950s and '60s in the latter part of his life. Starring Maximilian Schell, "A Patriot for Me" was not a success on Broadway, lasting but 49 performances in 1969, testifying to Osborne's decreasing commercial prowess in the theater, which once again was undergoing a revolution, but from the anarchist left with such productions as Tom O'Horgan's Hair (1979).
The five-times married Osborne died from complications of diabetes on December 24, 1994, two weeks after his 65th birthday. His last produced play was "Déjà Vu" (1991), a sequel to his first great success, "Look Back in Anger". His legacy was a transformed British theater, which had broken its links to the ossified D'Oly D'Carte of the former generation, in which the theater was more about elocution by actors playing toffs than it was about life as lived by most Britons. Osborne and the legions of playwrights he influenced made language important, as well as introduced an emotional intensity into the theater. Osborne and his brethren used the theater as a soapbox on which to attack class barriers (and a theater which reinforced those class distinctions).920 points- Writer
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A gifted poet, playwright and wit, Oscar Wilde was a phenomenon in 19th-century England. He was illustrious for preaching the importance of style in life and art, and of attacking Victorian narrow-mindedness.
Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin before leaving the country to study at Oxford University in England when he was in his early 20s. His prodigious literary talent was recognized when he received the Newdegate Prize for his outstanding poem "Ravenna". After leaving college his first volume of poetry, "Patience", was published in 1881, followed by a play, "The Duchess of Padua", two years later. It was around this time that Wilde sparked a sensation.
On his arrival to America he stirred the nation with his flamboyant personality: wearing long silk stockings--an unusual mode of dress--long, flowing hair that gave the impression to many of an effeminate and a general air of wittiness, sophistication and eccentricity. He was an instant celebrity, but his works did not find recognition until the publication of "The Happy Prince and Other Tales" in 1888. His other noted work was his only novel, was "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1890), which caused controversy as the book evidently attacked the hypocrisy of England. It was later used as incriminating evidence at Wilde's trial, on the basis of its obvious homosexual content.
Wilde was a married man with children, but his private life was as a homosexual. He had an affair with a young snobbish aristocrat named Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas' father, the Marquess of Queensberry, did not approve of his son's relationship with the distinguished writer, and when he accused Wilde of sodomy, Wilde sued the Marquess in court. However, his case was dismissed when his homosexuality--which at the time was outlawed in England--was exposed. He was sentenced to two years hard labor in prison. On his release he was a penniless, dejected man and soon died in Paris. He was 46.
Wilde is immortalized through his works, and the stories he wrote for children, such as "The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant", are still vibrant in the imagination of the public, especially "The Picture of Dorian Gray", the story of a young handsome man who sells his soul to a picture to have eternal youth and beauty, only to face the hideousness of his own portrait as it ages, which entails his evil nature and degradation. The book has been interpreted on stage, films and television.911 points- Writer
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Kesey burst into the literary scene with the "Cuckoo's Nest" in 1962 which he wrote from his experiences working at a veterans hospital. During this period, he volunteered for the testing on the drug LSD. After writing his second novel, "Sometimes A Great Notion," he bought an old school bus dubbed "Further." With Neal Cassidy at the wheel and pitchers of LSD-laced-Kool-Laid in the cooler, Kesey and a band of friends who called themselves The Merry Pranksters took a trip across America to New York's World Fair. It would be 28 years until Kesey published his third major novel, "Sailor Song," in 1992, and he later said he lost interest in the novel as an art form after he discovered the magic of the bus. The bus ride was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 account, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." The movie version of the "Cuckoo's Nest" swept the 1974 Academy Awards for best actor, best actress, best director, and best picture. But Kesey, who has never seen the film, sued the producers because it took the viewpoint away from the character of the schizophrenic American Indian, Cheif Bromden. Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992 and set down root in Pleasant Hill, in the mid 1960s, after serving four months in jail for a marijuana bust in California. His rambling red barn-house has become a landmark of the psychedelic era, attracting visits from myriad strangers in tie-dyed clothing seeking enlightenment.902 points- E.M. Forster was born on 1 January 1879 in London, England, UK. He was a writer, known for Howards End (1992), A Room with a View (1985) and The Machine Stops (2009). He died on 7 June 1970 in Coventry, Warwickshire, England, UK.897 points
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Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20th in Stockmannsgerden in Skien. His mother was Marichen and his father was Knud, a merchant. On 1835 his father gave up his business and the family moved to Venstop, a farm in Gjerpen. In 1843 he confirmed in Gjerpen church and left home in order to apprentice to Jens Aarup Reinmann, chemist. Three years later his first son was born by Else Sophie Jesdatter. On 1849 he wrote Catiline which was published a year later. On September 26, 1850 the first Ibsen staging in history took place; the one-act The Burial Mound was performed at Cristiania Theater. Two years later he started directing productions at Det norske Theater in Bergen. From 1853 to 1877 he wrote the plays St. John's night, Lady Inger, The feast at Solhoug, Olaf Liliekrans, The Vikings at Helgeland, Love's comedy, The pretenders, Brand, Peer Gynt, The League of Youth, Emperor and Galilean and Pillars of Society and the poems Life on the Upland, Terje Vigen and Balloon letter to a Swedish lady. Meanwhile he married Suzannah Thoresen in 1858 and his second son Sigurg was born a year later. In 1878 he moved to Rome where he lived for seven years. There he started writing the circle of his 11 last plays that made him classic; A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the people (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), Little Ejolf (1894) John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and his last one When We Dead Awaken (1898). The same year large-scale celebrations took place in Christiania, Copenhagen and Stockholm for his 70th birthday. Two years later he had his first stroke. On May 23rd 1906 he died.896 points- Writer
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Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, Maharashtra, India, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, a museum director and author and illustrator. This was at the height of the "British Raj", so he was brought up by Indian nurses ("ayahs"), who taught him something of the beliefs and tongues of India. He was sent "home" to England at the age of six to live with a foster mother, who treated him very cruelly. He then spent five formative years at a minor public school, the United Services College at Westward Ho! which inspired "Stalky & Co.". He returned to India as a journalist in 1882. By 1890 he had published, in India, a major volume of verse, "Departmental Ditties", and over 70 Indian tales in English, including "Plain Tales from the Hills" and the six volumes of the "Indian Railway Library". When he arrived in London in October 1889, at the age of 23, he was already a literary celebrity. In 1892 he married Caroline Balestier, the daughter of an American lawyer, and set up house with her in Brattleboro, Vermont, where they lived for four years. While in Vermont he wrote the two "Jungle Books" and "Captains Courageous". In 1901 he wrote "Kim" and in 1902 "The Just So Stories" that explained things like "How the Camel Got Its Hump". From 1902 they made their home in Sussex, England. He subsequently published many collections of stories, including "A Diversity of Creatures", "Debits and Credits" (1926) and "Limits and Renewals" (1932). These are now thought by many to contain some of his finest writing, although his introspection may well have been influenced by the death of their only son in the First World War. Although vilified by some as "the poet of British imperialism" in the past, nowadays he may be regarded as a great story-teller with an extraordinary gift for writing of peoples of many cultures and classes and backgrounds from the inside.882 points- Writer
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Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz was born on 20 February 1894 in Kalnik, Podolia Governorate, Russian Empire [now Kalnik, Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine]. He was a writer and actor, known for Nad Niemnem (1939), Kochankowie z Marony (1966) and Kochankowie z Marony (2005). He was married to Anna Lilpop. He died on 2 March 1980 in Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland.882 points- Writer
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Nelle Harper Lee grew up in Monroeville, Alabama in the 1920s. It was a time of hostility between whites and blacks in the United States, especially in Alabama. Her father, a lawyer, also ran a local newspaper. Her mother suffered from mental illness and oftentimes stayed inside from others; she was thought to suffer from bipolar disorder. Harper was a young lady with an agile personality. She was tomboyish, and eventually befriended Truman Persons. Truman would also turn out to become a writer later on in life, as Truman Capote, and they would later on collaborate in a newspaper called The New Yorker. Harper would often serve as Truman's protector in elementary school, as she was a tougher girl who did not fear other boys. Lee developed a passion for literature in high school. After graduating in 1944, she went on to join Huntingdon College-an all-female academy located in Montgomery. Throughout her college years, she was distant from other students. Rather than working on her makeup and getting dates, she was focused on her studies, constantly reading and writing.
Lee moved to New York in the 1950s, took a job as an airline reservations clerk, and wrote her first novel during that time. "To Kill a Mockingbird," published in 1960, won a Pulitzer Prize, and is still admired, widely-taught, and beloved. The film version, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), received several Academy Awards. Lee insisted that the novel is a work of fiction, not autobiography. She protected her privacy, spoke through her literary agent, McIntosh and Otis, did not appear on television and did not give interviews. She lived in Monroeville, Alabama and New York. She died in Monroeville on February 19, 2016.882 points- Writer
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Margaret Mitchell was an American historical novelist and a journalist. She published only one completed novel in her lifetime, "Gone with the Wind" (1936), which covered a woman's struggle for survival through the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, and it was the top American fiction bestseller in 1936 and 1937. Mitchell had completed the romance novella "Lost Laysen" in her adolescence, but it was only published posthumously in 1996. A collection of Mitchell's newspaper articles was published under the title ""Margaret Mitchell: Reporter" (2000). Several of her writings from her early life have been published under the title "Before Scarlett: Girlhood Writings of Margaret Mitchell." (2000).
In 1900, Mitchell was born in Atlanta, Georgia. Her father was Eugene Mitchell (1866-1944), a prominent lawyer, politician, and historian. He served a term as the President of the Atlanta Board of Education (1911-1912), and co-founded the Atlanta Historical Society. Mitchell's mother was Maybelle Stephens Mitchell (1872-1919), a prominent suffragist leader, and a co-founder of both the League of Women Voters in Georgia and the Catholic Layman's Association of Georgia. Mitchell's paternal ancestors were Scottish-Americans, and her maternal ancestors were Irish-Americans.
During her early childhood, Mitchell lived with her family at a Jackson Street mansion, east of downtown Atlanta. The mansion was owned by Miitchell's maternal grandmother, Annie Stephens (d. 1934) , who lived with them. Stephens was reportedly a tyrant to her family, and had a somewhat adversarial relationship with her granddaughter. But Mitchell went on to interview her for "eye-witness information" about the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Atlanta. Stephen's memories were one of the primary sources for "Gone with the Wind" .
Mitchell's mother had the habit of dressing her daughter in boys' pants, because she thought that they were safer than dresses. Mitchell continued dressing as a boy until she was 14, and her family nicknamed her "Jimmy" (after the comic strip character "Little Jimmy"). Mitchell was a tomboy in her childhood, and her favorite pastime was to ride her Texas plains pony. Aging Confederate soldiers tried to entertain the young girl by narrating to her gritty details of specific battles from the Civil War.
In 1912, the Mitchell family moved to a new residence at the east side of Peachtree Street. The house was located at a short distance from the Chattahoochee River. The family reportedly had concerns about the safety of their Jackson Hill home, due to its proximity to areas affected by the Atlanta Race Riot (1906). The Jackson Hill home was eventually destroyed in the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917.
By the early 1910s , Mitchell was an avid reader. Among her favorite writers were Edith Nesbit and Thomas Dixon. Mitchell started writing fairy tales and adventure stories as a hobby. Among her early works was "The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden" (1913), about a mixed-race "Indian" who has to endure pain to win over his love interest. Mitchell's mother kept her daughter's stories in white enamel bread boxes.
In 1914, Mitchell started attending Atlanta's Washington Seminary, a then-fashionable private girls' school. The school had over 300 students. Mitchell joined the school's drama club. She was still a tomboy, and she habitually played the male characters in performances of William Shakespeare's plays. She also joined the school's literary club, and had her stories published in the school's yearbook. Among her first published stories was the revenge-themed "Little Sister", where a little girl shoots her sister's rapist.
In 1918, Mitchell graduated and started preparing for a college education, at the insistence of her mother. Her mother chose which school Mitchell would attend, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. At the time, it was reputedly "the best women's college in the United States". Before her college classes started, Mitchell was engaged to her first serious love interest, the army lieutenant Clifford West Henry. He was send to fight in France in July 1918, and was mortally wounded in October of the same year. Mitchell would continue mourning him for years.
In 1919, Mitchell' mother died from the flu. She was one of the many victims of a flu pandemic that had started in 1918. Mitchell arrived home from college, a day after her mother had died. She found that her mother left a short letter of advise for her, telling her to take care of herself before taking care of other causes.
Later in 1919, Mitchell dropped out of college. She did not excel in any area of academics, and her father expected her to take over the family's household. Mitchell had health problems of her own, and had an appendectomy in the autumn of 1919. Mitchell was feeling increasingly disappointed with her life's direction, as she wrote to a friend. In 1920, Mitchell made her Atlanta society debut. Shortly after, she started dressing as a flapper. In 1921, she shocked the Atlanta high society by performing an Apache dance in a charity ball, and kissing her male partner during the performance. She was consequently blacklisted from the Junior League.
In 1922, Mitchell started dating the bootlegger Berrien ("Red") Kinnard Upshaw (1901-1949). In September 1922. the couple were married against her family's wishes. They both moved in with Mitchell's father. Red was an alcoholic with a violent temper, and Mitchell suffered physical abuse at his hands. They agreed to a period of separation in December 1922, and their divorce was finalized in October 1924. In 1925, Mitchell married her second husband John Robert Marsh (1895-1952). He was Red's former roommate, and another love interest for Mitchell since 1922. Marsh had reportedly secured Mitchell's uncontested divorce, by giving Red a loan. Mitchell and her new husband set their residence at the Crescent Apartments in Atlanta, nicknaming their new home "The Dump". It would later become known as Margaret Mitchell House and Museum.
Between her two marriages, Mitchell had decided that she needed her own source of income. In 1922, she started working as a journalist for "The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine". Among her early successes was securing a 1923 interview with the then-popular actor Rudolph Valentino. She continued her journalistic career until May 1926. At the time of her resignation, Mitchell had suffered an ankle injury that would not heal properly. Her mobility problems prevented her from working on assignments.In her four years as a journalist, Mitchell wrote 129 feature articles, 85 news stories, and several book reviews.
Following her resignation from "The Atlanta Journal", Mitchell worked for a few months as a gossip columnist for the "Sunday Magazine". In 1926, Marsh asked his increasingly bored wife why she did not write a book of her own instead of reading thousands of them. By 1928, Mitchell started work on a historical novel of her own. In 1935, her novel was still unfinished. But the book editor Harold Latham of Macmillan read her manuscript and was convinced that it was a potential best-seller. Having secured a publisher, Mitchell spend 6 months in making revisions and checking the novel's historical references. "Gone with the Wind" was published in June 1936.
Her novel turned Mitchell into a literary celebrity, but she had no intention of writing further works. In September 1941, Mitchell christened the light cruiser USS Atlanta (CL-51). During World War II, Mitchell served as a volunteer for the American Red Cross. She raised money for the war effort by selling war bonds. In 1944, she christened the light cruiser USS Atlanta (CL-104).
On August 11, 1949, Mitchell crossed Peachtree Street with her husband. They were on their way to a movie theatre, when Mitchell was struck by a drunk driver. She was hospitalized at Grady Hospital. She died on August 16, without ever regaining consciousness. She was buried at Oakland Cemetery, Georgia. Her husband was buried by her side in 1952. Though Mitchell is long gone, her novel never went out of print. It remains popular into the 21st century. Mitchell was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2000.870 points- Writer
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James Ellroy was born on 4 March 1948 in Los Angeles, California, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for L.A. Confidential (1997), Street Kings (2008) and The Black Dahlia (2006).867 points- Writer
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Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City, one of three children born to Augusta (nee Barnett) and Isidore Miller. His family was of Austrian Jewish descent. His father manufactured women's coats, but his business was devastated by the Depression, seeding his son's disillusionment with the American Dream and those blue-sky-seeking Americans who pursued it with both eyes focused on the Grail of Materialism. Due to his father's strained financial circumstances, Miller had to work for tuition money to attend the University of Michigan, where he wrote his first plays. They were successful, earning him numerous student awards, including the Avery Hopwood Award in Drama for "No Villain" in 1937.
The award was named after one of the most successful playwrights of the 1920s, who simultaneously had five hits on Broadway, the Neil Simon of his day. Now almost forgotten except for his contribution to Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Hopwood achieved a material success that the older Miller could not match, but he failed to capture the immortality that would be Miller's. Hopwood's suicide, on the beach of the Cote d'Azur, reportedly inspired Norman Maine's march into the southern California surf in A Star Is Born (1937).
Like Fitzgerald, Miller tasted success at a tender age. In 1938, upon graduating from Michigan, he received a Theatre Guild National Award and returned to New York, joining the Federal Theatre Project. He married his college girlfriend, Mary Grace Slattery, in 1940; they would have two children, Joan and Robert. In 1944, he made his Broadway debut with "The Man Who Had All the Luck", a flop that lasted only four performances. He went on to publish two books, "Situation Normal" (1944) and "Focus" (1945), but it was in 1947 that his star became ascendant. His play "All My Sons", directed by Elia Kazan, became a hit on Broadway, running for 328 performances. Both Miller and Kazan received Tony Awards, and Miller won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It was a taste of what was to come.
Staged by Kazan, "Death of a Salesman" opened at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949, and closed 742 performances later on Nov 18, 1950. The play was the sensation of the season, winning six Tony Awards, including Best Play and Best Author for Miller. Miller also was awarded the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play made lead actor Lee J. Cobb, as Willy Loman, an icon of the stage comparable to the Hamlet of John Barrymore: a synthesis of actor and role that created a legend that survives through the bends of time. A contemporary classic was recognized, though some critics complained that the play wasn't truly a tragedy, as Willy Loman was such a pathetic soul. Given his status, Loman's fall could not qualify as tragedy, as there was so little height from which to fall. Miller, a dedicated progressive and a man of integrity, never accepted that criticism. As Willy's wife Linda said at his funeral, "Attention must be paid", even to the little people.
In 1983, Miller himself directed a staging of "Salesman" in Chinese at the Beijing People's Art Theatre. He said that while the Chinese, then largely ignorant of capitalism, might not have understood Loman's career choice, they did have empathy for his desire to drink from the Grail of the American Dream. They understood this dream, which Miller characterizes as the desire "to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count." It is this desire to sup at the table of the great American Capitalists, even if one is just scrounging for crumbs, in a country of which President Calvin Coolidge said, "The business of America is business," this desire to be recognized, to be somebody, that so moves "Salesman" audiences, whether in New York, London or Beijing.
Miller never again attained the critical heights nor smash Broadway success of "Salesman," though he continued to write fine plays that were appreciated by critics and audiences alike for another two decades. Disenchanted with Kazan over his friendly testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the two parted company when Kazan refused to direct "The Crucible", Miller's parable of the witch hunts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Defending her husband, Kazan's wife, Molly, told Miller that the play was disingenuous, as there were no real witches in Puritan Salem. It was a point Miller disagreed with, as it was a matter of perspective--the witches in Salem were real to those who believed in them. However, subsequent research has shown that the cursorily-researched (at best) play contains fictional motifs (regarding Goodman and Goodwife Putnam and their offspring), limited research, and carelessness in identifying (or not identifying, as with William Stoughton) the true authors of the witch trials. Directed by another Broadway legend, Jed Harris, the play ran for 197 performances and won Miller the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play. Miller had another success with "A View from the Bridge", a play about an incest-minded longshoreman written with overtones of classical Greek tragedy, which ran for 149 performances in the 1955-56 season.
It was in 1956 that Miller made his most fateful personal decision, when he divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery Miller, and married movie siren-cum-legend Marilyn Monroe. With this marriage Miller achieved a different type of fame, a pop culture status he abhorred. It was a marriage doomed to fail, as Monroe was, in Miller's words, "highly self-destructive". In his 1989 autobiography, "Timebends", Miller wrote that a marriage was a conspiracy to keep out the light. When one or more of the partners could no longer prevent the light from coming in and illuminating the other's faults, the marriage was doomed. In his own autobiography, "A Life", Kazan said that he could not understand the marriage. Monroe, who had slept with Kazan on a casual basis, as she did with many other Hollywood players, was the type of woman someone took as a mistress, not as a wife. Miller, however, was a man of principle. He was in love. "[A]ll my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems", Miller confessed to a French newspaper in 1992. "Unfortunately, I didn't have much success."
The conspiracy collapsed during the filming of The Misfits (1961) (1961), with John Huston shooting the original script Miller had written expressly for his wife. The genesis of the story had come to him while waiting out a divorce from his first wife Mary in Nevada. Monroe hated her character Roslyn, claiming Miller had made her out to be the dumb blond stereotype she so loathed and had been trying to escape. Withering in her criticism of Miller, and ultimately unfaithful to him, she and Miller separated. Norman Mailer, in his 1973 biography, "Marilyn", ridiculed Miller for not doing enough to help Monroe. Film critic Pauline Kael lambasted Mailer by imputing petty machismo and jealousy as the cause of his animus against Miller. Miller would later reunite with Kazan to launch the new Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, with the play "After the Fall", a fictionalization of his relationship with Monroe. "Fall" ran for 208 performances in repertory in 1964 and 1965 and won 1964 Tony Awards for Jason Robards and Kazan's future wife Barbara Loden, playing the Miller and Monroe stand-ins Quentin and Maggie. Miller's own "Incident at Vichy" played in repertory with "Fall" in the 1965 season, but lasted only 32 performances.
On June 1, 1957, Miller was found in contempt of Congress for refusing to name names of a literacy circle suspected of Communist Party affiliations. The State Department deprived him of his passport, and he became a left-wing cause célèbre. In 1967 Miller became President of P.E.N., an international literacy organization that campaigned for the rights of suppressed writers. He published a collection of short stories entitled "I Don't Need You Any More", that same year. Returning to the Morosco Theatre, the site of his greatest triumph, "The Price" was Miller's last unqualified hit in America, running for 429 performances between February 7, 1968 and February 15, 1969. Though Miller won a 1968 Tony Award for Best Play, the bulk of his success as an original playwright was over. The Price (1971) (a 1971 teleplay) was nominated for six Emmy awards, including Outstanding Single Program-Drama or Comedy, and won three, including Best Actor for George C. Scott, who would later win a 1976 Tony playing Willy Loman in a 1975 Broadway revival.
Miller never again achieved success on Broadway with an original play. In the 1980s, when he was hailed as the greatest living American playwright after the death of Tennessee Williams, he even had trouble getting full-scale revivals of his work staged. One of his more significant later works, "The American Clock", based on Studs Terkel's oral history of the Great Depression, "Hard Times", ran for only 11 previews and 12 performances in late 1980 at the Biltmore Theatre. Also in 1980, Miller courted controversy by backing the casting of the outspokenly anti-Zionist Vanessa Redgrave as a concentration-camp Jewess in his teleplay Playing for Time (1980), an adaptation of the memoir "The Musicians of Auschwitz". Despite the fallout in the United States for America's then-greatest living playwright, his works were popular in Great Britain, whose intellectual and theatrical communities treated him as a major figure in world literature. The universality of his work was highlighted with his own successful staging of "Death of a Salesman" in Beijing in 1983.
"Death of a Salesman" has become a standard warhorse, now revived each decade on Broadway, and internationally. In addition to George C. Scott and Lee J. Cobb (who received an Emmy nomination for the 1966 teleplay; Miller himself received a Special Citation from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the production), Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy have garnered kudos for playing Willie Loman. The 1984 Broadway revival of "Salesman" won a Tony for best Reproduction and helped revive Miller's domestic reputation, while Volker Schlöndorff's 1985 film (Death of a Salesman (1985)) of the production won 10 Emmy nominations, including one for Miller as executive producer of the Outstanding Drama/Comedy Special. Hoffman won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing Willy Loman. The 1999 revival won four Tonys, including Dennehy for Best Actor, and ran for 274 performances at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Arthur Miller died in Roxbury, Connecticut in 2005, aged 89. He had been suffering from cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition.
Miller based his works on American history, his own life, and his observations of the American scene. His stature is traditionally based on his perceived refusal to avoid moral and social issues in his writing. His willingness to fight for what he believed in his chosen art form made him a literary icon whose name will live on in world letters.866 points- Writer
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Anthony Shaffer was born on 15 May 1926 in Liverpool, England, UK. He was a writer, known for Sleuth (1972), Frenzy (1972) and The Wicker Man (1973). He was married to Diane Cilento and Carolyn Soley. He died on 6 November 2001 in London, England, UK.854 points- Writer
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Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. Although his reputation was not high at the time of his death, the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival, and Moby-Dick grew to be considered one of the great American novels.841 points- Writer
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L. Frank Baum became a success with his 1883 production of "The Maid of Arran" in 1882. He was a dreamer, had a printing press and an amateur newspaper, "The Rose Lawn Home Journal" and published a coin and stamp collecting guide. He failed at almost everything through poor business sense. He had been an actor, though only successfully in "The Maid of Arran," a newspaper editor ("The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer"), a store owner (Baum's Bazaar, from which he filed for bankruptcy on New Year's Day of 1899), and motion picture producer and director. He met everything with enthusiasm and talent, but things did not work just right and only became successful again as a writer. Diverse in audience and subject matter, he is best remembered for his fourteen Oz books and their subsidiary fantasies. He is said to have singlehandedly created the fantasy genre out of the Andersen-style literary fairy tale. He used a variety of pseudonyms for juvenile series made at the publishers request, the best known and most successful being as Edith Van Dyne, who was once played by an actress at a luncheon with another publisher who wanted to meet her. The name was later used by Emma Speed Sampson, who continued some of his series.
Baum was a kind and gentle family man, who never swore or told dirty jokes, nor was he able to punish his four sons, whom Maud had to handle for him. He was born with a bad heart and suffered several minor attacks, including one induced by The Peekskill Military Academy at age 14. He loved to make fun of the military after that incident, as one can see in his Oz books. He created and headed The Oz Film Manufacturing Company in 1914 and directed one film the year later, after which his son Frank Joslyn Baum took it over, changing the name to Dramatic Feature Films, after the Oz name had been cursed as box-office poison, despite excellent critical reception of J. Farrell MacDonald's The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914).
He continued writing, sitting up in bed long after his health had failed him, and his final Oz book was published posthumously in 1920. It was only his second attempt at science fiction. Baum's writing attracted legions of fans of all ages, both during and after his lifetime. His work has influenced such writers as Gore Vidal, Ray Bradbury, and Terry Brooks. The Oz series has been continued both officially and unofficially after his death. Frank Joslyn Baum sold the film rights of the first Oz book to MGM in 1934, and Walt Disney soon picked up the rest, unable to secure the original from them, for he, too, had desired to make a film version, as had been done before by Baum himself, Otis Turner, Ray C. Smallwood, Larry Semon, Ethel Meglin, Ted Eshbaugh, and many subsequent to 1939. Ironically, Baum moved to Hollywood at Ozcot to have a quiet place to write, which, of course, resulted in the OFMC. One other notable work by Baum is Tamawaca Folks, a spoof of his vacation town of Macatawa Michigan, taking the name of Michigan author John Esten Cooke and changing it to John Estes Cooke. Baum himself has a supporting role (under a different name) in the novel, which was based on all the vacationers. Baum's health problems limited his life to 63 years, but his literary output was remarkable, though mostly forgotten. An episode of the television series Death Valley Days (1952) features him and Maud as characters.839 points- Producer
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Dennis Lehane was born on 4 August 1965 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for The Drop (2014), Mystic River (2003) and Live by Night (2016). He was previously married to Dr. Angela Mililani (Lieb) Bernardo and Sheila Fort Lawn.839 points- Writer
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Nicholas Sparks was born on December 31, 1965 in Omaha, Nebraska. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1988 and is one of the more critically-acclaimed authors of the past 5 years. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, including "The Notebook" and "The Rescue". Eleven of his books, Message in a Bottle (1999), A Walk to Remember (2002), The Notebook (2004), Nights in Rodanthe (2008), The Last Song [2010] , Dear John [2010] , The Lucky One [2012], Safe Haven [2013] , The Best of Me [2014] , The Longest Ride (2015) and The Choice (2016)
have been adapted into blockbuster movies. Sparks lives in North Carolina with his wife, 3 sons, and twin daughters.837 points- Writer
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Jerzy Kosinski was born on 14 June 1933 in Lódz, Lódzkie, Poland. He was a writer and actor, known for Being There (1979), Reds (1981) and The Painted Bird (2019). He was married to Kiki von Fraunhofer-Kosinski and Mary Emma (Hayward) Weir. He died on 3 May 1991 in New York City, New York, USA.836 points- Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun was born to a poor family and sent to live with an uncle, a commercial fisherman. He grew up without any formal schooling. Hamsun left Norway for the U.S. twice: once in 1882, and again in 1886. Each time he stayed in the U.S. for two years, holding various jobs including farmhand and Chicago streetcar conductor. He was often poverty-stricken. His first novel "Hunger" is autobiographical and about poverty, alienation, and desperation, and, innovatively: consciousness and intense inner states. He returned to Norway and wrote several more novels, all well-received, original, and successful. He won the Nobel Prize in 1920 for "Growth of the Soil," but gradually became reclusive due to his need to write combined with and his cranky temperament. Norwegians were dismayed when in the 1930's he expressed his support for Hitler. Although he claimed his sentiments were more anti-British than pro-German, he spoke in favor of National Socialism and was vilified in Norway. His rocky relations with his children and second wife are the subject of Hamsun (1996). In 1948, he was briefly imprisoned, and his assets were seized by the state. He died penniless in 1952. Hamsun was rehabilitated posthumously, and is again considered one of the great modern Scandinavian novelists.833 points
- Schulz is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable writers in Polish literature of the first half of the 20h Century. He was born in Drohobycz, a small village near Lvov, where he would live until he was shot by the Nazis on the street on November 19th, 1942. By then, Schulz had published two books. They were collections of stories and prose texts of extremely original style and contents. The first collection was published as The Cinnamon Shops in 1933; the second, published as Sanatorium Pod Klepsydra, was published in 1937. Schulz's work has often been compared to Franz Kafka's.819 points
- B. Traven was born on 23 February 1882 in Schwiebus, Prussia, Germany [now Swiebodzin, Lubuskie, Poland]. He was a writer and actor, known for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Macario and The White Rose. He was married to Rosa Elena Lujan. He died on 27 March 1969 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico.818 points
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Christopher Isherwood was born on 26 August 1904 in Cheshire, England, UK. He was a writer and actor, known for Cabaret (1972), A Single Man (2009) and Frankenstein: The True Story (1973). He died on 4 January 1986 in Santa Monica, California, USA.813 points- Writer
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Anthony Burgess was born on 25 February 1917 in Manchester, England, UK. He was a writer, known for A Clockwork Orange (1971), Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and Vinyl (1965). He was married to Liana Burgess and Llewela Isherwood Jones. He died on 22 November 1993 in London, England, UK.813 points- Writer
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Peter Ulrich Weiss was born in Berlin in 1916. His family was prosperous, educated, and middle-class; his father had been in the military, and his mother had given up her acting career in order to marry Peter's father and raise a family. Weiss describes, with Kafkaesqe photographic recall, his childhood in the one-paragraph autobiographical "Leavetaking", published in Germany in 1961. As a young student he was passionately, sometimes torturously, involved with people and things, and interested in art and literature, and by his twenties was writing novels and painting. The rise of Nazism forced Weiss to flee Germany and settle in Sweden in 1940, where he remained until the war's end. He wrote prolifically and politically and lived in Paris and London, while continuing to travel widely. His second autobiographical work, "Vanishing Point", (1962) describes his emotional and intellectual struggles, his intense inner states, relationships with friends and lovers, and creative life -- up to one evening in Paris in the spring of 1947, when he had a sort of revelation. Weiss remained true to his humanistic, liberal, left-wing political values throughout his life, and expressed them in his widely-admired plays and novels, which were translated into many languages. He died in 1982.812 points- Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont was born on 7 May 1867 in Kobiele Wielkie, Poland, Russian Empire [now Kobiele Wielkie, Lódzkie, Poland]. He was a writer, known for Chlopi (1922), Ziemia obiecana (1927) and Komediantka (1987). He was married to Aurelia Szablowska. He died on 5 December 1925 in Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland.808 points
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Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, England, UK. He is a writer and producer, known for Atonement (2007), The Good Son (1993) and Enduring Love (2004). He has been married to Annalena McAfee since 1997. He was previously married to Penny Allen.805 points- Writer
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John le Carré was born in Poole, Dorset in England on 19 October, 1931. He went to Sherborne School and, later, studied German literature for one year at University of Bern. Later, he went to Lincoln College, Oxford and graduated in Modern Languages. From 1956 to 1958, he taught at Eton and from 1959 to 1964, he was a member of the British Foreign Service as second secretary at British Embassy in Bonn, and then, as Politician Consul in Hamburg. His first novel was written in 1961 and, by the time of his death in December 2020, he had published nearly 30. His books took many prizes, and inspired numerous films.789 points- Theodore Dreiser was one of the great American writers, and a transitional figure between Victorian America and the "modern" age that was inaugurated after the cessation of hostilities after WWI and the publication of Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street" in 1920. A naturalist with a committed social conscience (Dreiser was a socialist in a time when socialists were an established third party and had many mayoral posts and seats in state legislatures before the post-WWI "Red Scare" wiped out socialism in the U.S.), Theodore Dreiser is a seminal figure in the evolution of American letters to a more mature literature.
Born on August 27, 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana, he was the twelfth of thirteen children Born to John Paul & Sarah Dreiser, ten of whom survived infancy. Theordore's Dreiser's father, John, was a German immigrant and a strict Baptist. His mother Sarah came from a Mennonite community who later converted to Roman Catholicism. His older brother Paul Dresser became a famous songwriter.
Theodore Dreiser attended Indiana University from 1889 to 1890, but flunked out and became a journalist in Chicago and St. Louis. He married the former Sara White in 1898, but the marriage failed and they separated in 1909. Dreiser never divorced his wife.
His first novel "Sister Carrie" was published in 1900. It is considered a classic and a seminal piece of American literature. The publisher did not promote the novel, likely due to its controversial subject matter (adultery, extramarital sex), and the book sold poorly. He did not score a best-seller for a quarter-of-century, until "An American Tragedy" in 1925. (The novel was made into George Stevens 1951 masterpiece A Place in the Sun (1951).
Theodore Dreiser died on December 28, 1945, not long after he had joined the Communist Party, a move that Ernest Hemingway said was that of an old man trying to save his soul.762 points - Nikolai (Mykola) Gogol was a Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist of Ukrainian origin. His ancestors were bearing the name of Gogol-Janovsky and claimed belonging to the upper class Polish Szlachta. Gogol's father, a Ukrainian writer living on his old family estate, had five other children. He died when the Gogol was 15. Young Gogol was fond of the drama class at his high school in Nezhin, Ukraine. He was strongly influenced by his religious mother, as well as by the enchanting beauty of the Ukrainian folklore. He also called himself a "free Cossac".
At age 18 Gogol moved to St. Petersburg, became a student, and later a professor of history at the St. Petersburg University. His short stories, set in St. Petersburg, became a success. His play "Revizor" (1836, The Inspector General) had its premiere in St. Petersburg attended by the Tzar Nickolai I. But it also made him many powerful enemies who hated his satire on the corrupt Russian society. It was his friend Alexander Pushkin who suggested to him the subject for "Revizor". Pushkin also suggested the main idea of "The Dead Souls" (1842), a bitter satirical story of a crook, who was buying the names of dead surfs from various greedy landlords, for a tax-evasion scheme. In his other famous story "Shinel" (1842, The Overcoat) a poor clerk is intimidated both by thieves and by the government. Gogol's discontent against the slavery and social injustices in Russia caused him trouble. He escaped to Europe for 12 years, returning to Russia briefly to publish the 1st part of "The Dead Souls".
His religious beliefs were used by the State-controlled Orthodox Church to place guilt on him and to cause interruption of his literary work. In 1848 he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After his return to Russia, he settled in Moscow, where he fell under the control of the fanatical Orthodox priest, Konstantinovskii, who demanded that Gogol quit writing and destroy the manuscript of the 2nd part of "The Dead Souls". Torn by his inner conflict with guilt and being under the pressure from the fanatical priest, Gogol burned his manuscript. He died nine days later in pain without having any food during his last days. In the 1931 excavation of his tomb, his body was found lying face down, which caused suspicion that Gogol was buried alive.
His style involves the elements of the fantastic and grotesque, with the taste for the macabre and absurd, following the tradition of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Fyodor Dostoevsky proclaimed, "We all came out from under his Overcoat", referring to Gogol's influence on Russian writers. Sometimes compared with Franz Kafka, Gogol had such followers, as Yevgeni Zamyatin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Mikhail A. Bulgakov.756 points - Charlotte was born 1816, the third of the six children of Patrick Brontë, an Anglican clergyman, and his wife Maria Branwell Brontë. After their mother's death in 1821, Charlotte and her sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, were sent to Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters' School, which Charlotte would later immortalize as the brutal Lowood school in "Jane Eyre". Conditions at the school were so bad that both Maria and Elizabeth became ill with consumption (tuberculosis) which killed them in 1825. Charlotte was very close to her surviving siblings, Anne Brontë, Branwell, and Emily Brontë. The children invented the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal, and spent much of their childhood writing poetry and stories about their make-believe realms. In 1846 the three sisters published a collected work of their poetry called, appropriately enough, "Poems", and in 1847 Charlotte published her most famous book, "Jane Eyre", under a male pseudonym, Currer Bell. Charlotte lost her remaining siblings within a brief time -- Branwell from alcoholism and Emily from consumption, both in 1848; Anne also from consumption in 1849. Charlotte was devastated, and became a lifelong hypochondriac. She resided in London, where she made the acquaintance and admiration of William Makepeace Thackeray. In 1854, she married Reverend A. B. Nicholls, curate of Haworth, against her father's wishes. Charlotte found she was pregnant not long after her marriage, and it was felt she would have a difficult pregnancy due to previous ill-health. She died on 31 March 1855.729 points
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William (Motter) Inge brought small-town life in the American Midwest to Broadway with four successive dramatic triumphs: "Come Back Little Sheba" (1950), "Picnic" (1953; Pulitzer Prize), "Bus Stop" (1955) and "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" (1957). With the exception of his Academy Award-winning screenplay for Splendor in the Grass (1961), his later plays and prose never achieved the success of his early work. Convinced he could no longer write, Inge fell into a paralyzing depression, which resulted in his suicide.702 points- Writer
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Neil Simon was born on 4 July 1927 in The Bronx, New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Odd Couple (1968), Murder by Death (1976) and The Goodbye Girl (1977). He was married to Elaine Joyce, Diane Lander, Marsha Mason and Joan Baim. He died on 26 August 2018 in New York City, New York, USA.695 points- Writer
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Dahl was born in Wales in 1916. He served as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force during World War II. He made a forced landing in the Libyan Desert and was severely injured. As a result, he spent five months in a Royal Navy hospital in Alexandria. Dahl is noted for how he relates suspenseful and sometimes horrific events in a simple tone.689 points- Writer
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Mikhail Sholokhov was a Russian writer who received a Nobel prize for his epic novel 'Tikhiy Don'.
He was born in 1905 into a Cossack family of farmers in Kruzhilin, Veshenskaya, Rostov province in Southern Russia. His high school studies were interrupted by the Russian revolution and the Civil War, in which he fought on the side of the revolutionaries and joined the Red Army. From 1922-24 he lived in Moscow, where he attended "writers seminars" and published his early works: "A Test" and "The Birthmark". In 1924 he married Maria Gromoslavskaya in his native town, and the couple had four children.
His first book, "Donskie Rasskazy" (1925), exposed the bitter divide among the Russian people during and after the Civil War. His epic novel "And Quiet Flows the Don", published in parts during 1928-40, shows the turbulent life of Cossacks during the dramatic events of the Russian revolution and Civil War. The main character, Grigori Melekhov, was based on a historical prototype, 'Kharlampi Ermakov', a Cossack who opposed the Communists and was imprisoned and executed in 1929. Sholokhov's account of the conflict between Cossacks and Communists caused a suspension of publication in 1929, but he managed to get permission from Joseph Stalin to continue the publication. The novel had over 100 million copies in print, translated in 90+ languages worldwide.
Sholokhov was only 22 in 1928, when he delivered the massive manuscript of "Quiet Flows the Don" (book 1) to a Soviet publisher. It took him almost 14 years to complete the novel of four books in 1940. This led to a suggestion by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that Sholokhov used the work of another Cossack writer, Fyodor Kryukov (who died in 1920), for some parts of this epic work.
Sholokhov had a lifelong political career. He was a co-chairman of the Soviet Writers Union from the 1930s to his death in 1984. He traveled in western Europe on several occasions, and also accompanied Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to the US in 1959. He was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature for his novels and stories about the Cossacks in Russia, becoming the first and only officially sanctioned Soviet writer to win the honor.
Sholokhov took a hardline position against dissident writers, such as Boris Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky and Daniel. In 1965 he joined the side of Leonid Brezhnev in the restoration of the political image of Joseph Stalin. Such restoration was opposed by such figures as Andrei Sakharov, Valentin Kataev, Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy, Oleg Efremov, and Maya Plisetskaya. Sholokhov remained a hard-liner during the 60s and 70s. In late 70s he suffered from diabetes and had a stroke, and later developed a throat cancer. He was in denial of his medical condition. Shortly before his death he rejected the doctor's advise and interrupted his treatment at the Kremlin Hospital. Instead, he returned to his native village and died there on February 21, 1984.654 points- Henry James was born 15 April 1843, to a wealthy family. He was born in New York, New York USA. His parents were Henry James Sr. and Mary Robertson Walsh; He had one brother William James (January 11 1842-August 26 1910) and one sister Alice James. When Henry James was a young boy he would enjoy reading the classics of English, American, German, French, and Russian literature. Also when he was a kid he and his family would travel back and forth to England and the United States of America. Henry James educated in New York City, London, Paris and Geneva.
He tried to strive for a higher education then he decided it was not for him and writing was his calling in life. (When Henry James was at the age of 19 he briefly attended Harvard Law School, but preferred reading literature to studying law). When Henry James hit the age of 21 he decided to write his first novel, A Tragedy of error. From that point on he started to write. He went on to write 23 more novels in his lifetime (this is a short list of the book's he wrote the Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Portrait of a Lady, The American, Washington Square, The Bostonians, and The Wings of the Dove). Henry James also was an extraordinarily productive on top of all of his novels he wrote he published articles an, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays (one of them being Guy Domville), some of which were performed during his lifetime with moderate success. Henry James also wrote a whole lot of short stories for either the local news or just for fun. He often wrote for the New York tribune. Henry James was a key stone writer of his time (He was one of the foremost literary figures of his time, leaving us an enormous body of novels, 'tales' (short stories), literary and art criticism, autobiography and travel writing). Throughout his life he was in love with his cousin, Mary Temple, but later in life while he was in London he became homosexual, the young man he started to wright was at the age of 27 and Henry James was at the age of 56. He also wrote another guy named, Howard Sturgis. They started to write back and forth and they started to have more emotion in the letters. He also started to write a woman named Lucy Clifford; But Henry James never got married in his lifetime. Henry James brother William James died when Henry James was at the age of 67; Henry James had a stroke on Dec 2nd of 1915. His health started to decline from then. He died in London in Feb. 28th of 1916. When he died he was not only a citizen for the United States of America but also a British subject. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes are interred at Cambridge, Massachusetts.632 points - Writer
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Born to noble parents (his father Sergei was a retired major, and his mother, Nadezhda, was the granddaughter of an ennobled Ethiopian general) on the 26th of May, 1799 in Moscow, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin became involved with a liberal underground revolutionary group that saw him exiled to the Caucasus.
He spent most of his time there writing poetry and novels. In 1826 Pushkin was pardoned by the Tsar and allowed to return home after six years of exile. He married Natalia Goncharova, whose coquettish behavior led to her husband challenging an admirer of hers to a duel in January 1837. Though both were wounded, only Pushkin died two days later from his injuries.629 points- Chingiz Aitmatov was a Russian-Kyrgyz writer and statesman known for such films as The First Teacher (1965), Selvi Boylum Al Yazmalim (1977) and Jamila (1995).
He was born Chingiz Torekulovich Aitmatov on December 12, 1928, in Kirgizia, Soviet Union. His family was bilingual, Russian-Kyrgyz. His father, Torekul Aitmatov, was one of the first Kyrgyz communists and a regional party secretary. In 1937, while attending the Institute for Red Professorship in Moscow, Torekul was arrested and executed on charges of anti-Soviet bourgeois nationalism. Young Aitmatov was brought up by a single mother. He attended the Russian school, then Kyrgyz Agricultural Institute in Frunze, but changed from the study of livestock to the study of literature at the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.
He made his literary debut in Russia, in 1952, with publication of his stories in Russian. From 1958 to 1966 he was roving correspondent for the leading Soviet Newspaper Pravda. In 1967 he became a member of the Executive Board of the Soviet Writers Union, and in 1968 he won the Soviet State Prize for literature for his novel Farewell, Gulsary!, a tale of an old man reminiscing about the parallel lives of himself and his old horse, which is dying. Aitmatov won two more State Prizes in 1977 and 1983, and was named a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1978.
From 1964 to 1985 he was Chairman of the Cinema Union of Kyrgyzian SSR, and in 1985 he was named Chairman of the Kyrgyz Writers Union. In 1990-1991 he served as an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and in 1990 was appointed Soviet Ambassabor to Luxemburg. He served as the Soviet and then Russian ambassador to Belgium from 1990 to 1993. In 1995, he became Kyrgyzstan's ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and also represented his home country in the European Union, NATO and UNESCO. During the 1990s, Chingiz Aitmatov was member of the Kyrgyzstan's parliament.
His representative works : 'Jamila' (1958), 'The First Teacher' (1967), 'Farewell, Gyulsary!' (1967), 'The White Ship' (1972), and 'The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years' (1988) were translated in more than 20 languages across the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Aitmatov's novels found a new audience in the West and gained popularity in Germany. He died of pneumonia and kidney failure on June 10, 2008, in Nuremberg, Germany, and was laid to rest in Kyrgyzstan.628 points - William Faulkner, one of the 20th century's most gifted novelists, wrote for the movies in part because he could not make enough money from his novels and short stories to support his growing number of dependants. The author of such acclaimed novels as "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom!", Faulkner received official screen credits for just six theatrical releases, five of which were with director Howard Hawks. Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1949 and he received two Pulitzer Prizes, for "A Fable" in '1955 and "The Reivers", which was published shortly before he died in 1962.622 points
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Ferber initially studied acting. She then worked as a reporter in Milwaukee and Chicago. Travels through America and Europe followed. Ferber became the author of interesting novels with a cultural-historical background. She often designed the plot in such a way that a female figure was in the foreground. In her works she depicts changing environments and American life in a realistic style. Her books often reveal a socially critical attitude. She expanded her narrative approach to create broad family and homeland novels that she linked to the history of the USA or the respective regions. It features the lower Mississippi region in the early 19th century, the time of the fur trade in Seattle, the run on oil in Oklahoma and the settlement of Texas.
She also wrote social comedies as stage plays, which were successful, as well as short stories, dramas and her autobiography. Some of her novels have been made into films. The most famous example is probably "Giant", the film of the same name, in German: "Giganten". It was made into a film in 1956 by director George Stevens with stars such as James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Dennis Hopper and Rock Hudson. The film became a box office hit worldwide. Edna Ferber also provided the book for the musical "Show Boat" (premiered in 1927). It is about a critical attitude towards segregation and prejudices against blacks. This adaptation brought this socially critical, previously taboo topic to the musical stage for the first time. "Cimarron", a film title from 1960, is also based on the book title of the same name by Edna Ferber.
Her works include "Dawn O'Hara" (1911, German 1916), "Buttered Side Down" (1912), "Fanny Herself" (1917, German 1930: "This is Fanny"), "Half Portions " (1920), "The Girls" (1921, German 1928), "So Big" (1924, German 1927, "A Woman Alone" from 1962), "Show Boat" (1926, German 1929: "That Comedian Ship"), "Mother Knows Best" (1927), "The Royal Family" (1928, German 1931). This was followed by "American Beauty" (1931, German 1957: "The House of the Fathers"), "Dinner at Eight" (1932), "They Brought Their Women" (1933), "Come and Get it" (1935), "Stage Door" (1936), "A Peculiar Treasure" (191939), "Saratoga Drunk" (1941, German 1947), "The Land is Bright" (1941), "Great Son" (1945, German 1950) , "Bravo" (1948), "Ice Palace" (1958) and "Kind of Magic" (1963).616 points- Writer
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Friedrich Dürrenmatt was born on 5 January 1921 in Konolfingen, Switzerland. He was a writer and director, known for The Pledge (2001), It Happened in Broad Daylight (1958) and Suspicion (1957). He was married to Charlotte Kerr and Lotti Geißler. He died on 14 December 1990 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.585 points- David Herbert Lawrence was born in Nottinghamshire, England, 11 September 1885. His father was a coal miner, his mother a genteel woman who sought education and refinement for her son. Lawrence earned a university degree and taught school for a short time. While still a student he began to publish his poems and short stories. He fell in love with the wife of a professor, Frieda von Richthofen Weekley. She eloped with Lawrence, abandoning her husband and three small children. Lawrence's pet themes of myth, freedom, redemption, the difficulty and necessity of emotional, erotic expression and the inevitable torments of family relationships occupied him throughout his life. Eventually, there would be accusations of obscenity, his novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover" being the most prominent example.582 points
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Robert Ludlum was born on 25 May 1927 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Bourne Identity (2002) and The Bourne Legacy (2012). He was married to Karen Dunn and Mary Patricia Ryducha. He died on 12 March 2001 in Naples, Florida, USA.581 points- Writer
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Robert Harris is a former television news reporter, journalist and columnist who wrote his first suspense novel "Fatherland" in 1992. He has followed up that novel with several others, among them "Enigma" (1995) and "Archangel" (1998). Harris is a graduate of Cambridge University and lives in Berkshire with his wife and four children.580 points- Writer
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Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer from Edinburgh. His most popular works include the pirate-themed adventure novel "Treasure Island" (1883), the poetry collection "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885), the Gothic horror novella "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" (1886) which depicted a man with two distinct personalities, and the historical novels "Kidnapped" (1886) and "The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses" (1888). Stevenson spend the last years of his life in Samoa, where he tried to act as an advocate for the political rights of Polynesians.
In 1850, Stevenson was born in Edinburgh. His father was Thomas Stevenson (1818-1887), a civil engineer, lighthouse designer, and meteorologist. Thomas was a co-founder of the Scottish Meteorological Society, and one of the sons of the famed engineer Robert Stevenson (1772-1850). Thomas' brothers were the engineers David Stevenson and Alan Stevenson. Stevenson's mother (and Thomas' wife) was Margaret Isabella Balfour, a member of a centuries-old gentry family. Stevenson's maternal grandfather was Lewis Balfour (1777-1860), a minister of the Church of Scotland. Lewis was himself a grandson of the philosopher James Balfour (1705-1795).
Both Stevenson's mother and his maternal grandfather had chronic problems with coughs and fevers. Stevenson demonstrated the same problems throughout his childhood. His contemporaries suspected that he was suffering from tuberculosis. Modern biographers have suggested that he was instead suffering from bronchiectasis (a congenital disorder of the respiratory system) or sarcoidosis (an autoimmune disease which affects the lungs).
Stevenson's parents were Presbyterians, but they were not particularly interested in indoctrinating their son. Stevenson's nurse was Alison "Cummy" Cunningham, a fervently religious woman. While tending to Stevenson during his recurring illnesses, she read to him passages from the Bible and from the works of the Puritan preacher John Bunyan (1628-1688). She also narrated to him tales of the Covenanters, a 17th-century religious movement.
Stevenson's poor health as a child kept him away from school for extended periods. His parents had to hire private tutors for him. He did not learn to read until he was 7 or 8-years-old. However, he developed an interest in narrating stories in early childhood. When he learned to write, he started writing tales as a hobby. His father Thomas was happy about this hobby, as he was also an amateur writer in his early life. In 1866, Stevenson completed his first book. It was "The Pentland Rising: A Page of History, 1666", a historical narrative of a Covenanter revolt. It was published at his father's expense.
In November 1867, Stevenson entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering. He showed little interest in the subject matter. He joined both the debating club Speculative Society, and an amateur drama group organized by professor Fleeming Jenkin (1833-1885). During the annual holidays, Stevenson repeatedly joined his father in travels to inspect the family's engineering works. He displayed little interest in engineering, but the travels turned his interests towards travel writing.
In April 1871, Stevenson announced to his father that he wanted to become a professional writer. His father agreed, on the condition that Stevenson should also study to gain a law degree. In the early 1870s, Stevenson started dressing in a Bohemian manner, wore his hair long, and joined an atheist club. In January 1873, Stevenson explained to his father that he no longer believed in God, and that he had grown tired of pretending to be pious. He would eventually rejoin Christianity, but remained hostile to organized religion until his death.
In late 1873, Stevenson visited London. He had an essay published in the local art magazine "The Portfolio" (1870-1893), and started socializing with the city's professional writers. Among his new friends was the poet William Ernest Henley (1849-1903). Henley had a wooden leg, due to a childhood illness which led to amputation. Stevenson later used Henley as his inspiration for the one-legged pirate Long John Silver.
Stevenson qualified for the Scottish bar in July 1875, at the age of 24. He never practiced law, though his legal studies inspired aspect of his works. In September 1876, Stevenson was introduced to the American short-story writer Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne (1840-1914). She had separated from her unfaithful husband, and lived with her daughter in France. Fanny remained in his thoughts for months, and they became lovers in 1877. They parted ways in August 1878, when she decided to move back to San Francisco.
In August 1879, Stevenson decided to travel to the United States in search of Fanny. He arrived to New York City with little incident. The journey from New York City to California negatively affected his health, and he was near death by the time he arrived in Monterey, California. He and Fanny reunited in December 1879, but she had to nurse him to recovery. His father cabled him money to help in his recovery.
Stevenson and Fanny married in May 1880. Th groom was 29-years-old, and the bride was 40-years-old. They spend their honeymoon at an abandoned mining camp on Mount Saint Helena. The couple sailed back to the United Kingdom in August 1880. Fanny helped Stevenson to reconcile with his father.
Stevenson and his wife moved frequently from place to place in the early 1880s. In 1884, they settled in their own home in the seaside town of Bournemouth, Dorset. Stevenson named their new residence "Skerryvore". He used the name of a lighthouse which his uncle Alan had constructed. In 1885, Stevenson reacquainted himself to his old friend, the novelist Henry James (1843-1916). James had moved to Bournemouth to care for his invalid sister. Stevenson and James started having daily meetings to converse over various topics. Stevenson wrote several of his popular works while living in Bournemouth, though he was frequently bedridden.
In 1887, Thomas Stevenson died. Stevenson felt that nothing tied him to the United Kingdom, and his physician had advised him that a complete change of climate might improve his health. Stevenson and much of his surviving family (including his widowed mother) traveled to the state of New York. They spend the winter at a cottage in the Adirondacks, with Stevenson starting to work on the adventure novel "The Master of Ballantrae" (1889).
In June 1888, Stevenson chartered the yacht "Casco" to transport him and his family to San Francisco. The sea air helped restore his health for a while. Stevenson decided to spend the next few years wandering in the Pacific islands. He visited the Hawaiian Islands, and befriended the local monarch Kalakaua (1836-1891, reigned 1874-1891) and his niece Ka'iulani (1875-1899). Stevenson's other voyages took him to the Gilbert Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and the Samoan Islands.
In December 1889, Stevenson and his family at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands. He decided to settle in Samoa. In January 1890, he purchased an estate on the island. He started building Samoa's two-story house, and also started collecting local folktales. He completed an English translation of the moral fable "The Bottle Imp".\
Stevenson grew concerned with the ongoing rivalry between Britain, Germany and the United States over their influence in Samoa. He feared that the indigenous clan society would be displaced by foreigners. He published various texts in defense of the Polynesians and their culture. He also worked on "A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa" (1892), a detailed chronicle of the Samoan Civil War (1886-1894) and the international events leading up to it.
Stevenson's last fiction writings indicated his growing interest in the realist movement, and his disdain for colonialism. In December 1894, Stevenson suffered a stroke while conversing with his wife. He died hours later, at the age of 44. The local Samoans provided a watch-guard to protect his body until a tomb could be prepared for it. Stevenson was buried at Mount Vaea, on a spot overlooking the sea. A requiem composed by Stevenson himself was inscribed on the tomb.
Stevenson was seen as an influential writer of children's literature and horror fiction for much of the 20th century, but literary critics and historians had little interest in his works. He was re-evaluated in the late 20th century "as an artist of great range and insight", with scholarly studies devoted entirely to him. The Index Translationum, UNESCO's database of book translations, has ranked him as the 26th most translated writer on a global level. Stevenson ranked below Charles Dickens (25th) in the index, and ahead of Oscar Wilde (28th). His works have received a large number of film adaptations.577 points- Writer
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Heinrich Mann, German novelist and the elder brother of Nobel-Prize winner Thomas Mann, is most famous in the English-speaking world for his novel "Professor Unrat" that was turned into the successful 1930 movie "Der Blaue Engel" ("The Blue Angel"). Mann once enjoyed a considerable reputation in German literary circles, but many of his novels and practically all of his essays are unknown to most anglophones as they remain untranslated. He remains of interest as his work details a people enculturated under an authoritarian regime in their struggle to achieve and sustain democracy.
Mann was born in Lübeck on March 27, 1871, the first child of Senator Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann and his wife Julia da Silva-Bruhns. Descended from grain merchants and born into the patrician class, Mann started his writing career as an essayist with a determinedly conservative point of view. Eventually, he evolved into a well-known proponent of democracy and socialism.
Mann's education consisted of attendance at a private preparatory school until 1889. Leaving school, he went to work as an apprentice for a Dresden bookseller, but failed at the job. He moved to Berlin in 1891, where he became a published writer. In 1892, he contracted tuberculosis and was cared for in a Swiss sanatorium. Mann, who published his first novel in 1893, became financially independent upon the death of his father.
The next year, Mann moved from Berlin to Munich along with his mother and the rest of the family, and took the post of editor of "Das zwanzigste Jahrhundert." Mann preferred living in France and Italy to Germany, and he spent most of his time in those two countries until the outbreak of World War I.
His early novels were social satires of the German bourgeoisie that showed the society's resistance to democratic ideals. In 1904, he published the novel he is most famous for, "Professor Unrat" ("Professor Garbage"), which details the moral, social and physical decay of a pompous prep school teacher romantically obsessed with a nightclub singer. Josef von Sternberg's 1930 German- and English-language movies based on the novel, "Der Blaue Engel" and "The Blue Angel," made a star out of Marlene Dietrich, who played the bewitching chanteuse Lola Lola.
Mann's 1912 novel "Der Untertan" ("The Patrioteer") features an amoral, manipulative and opportunistic businessman, Diederich Hessling, who uses patriotism to get ahead and winds up as a simulacrum of the Kaiser. An indictment of the militarism and nationalism of prewar Prussia, it was banned by the German government during World War I. Mann used a gallery of grotesques to elucidate the moral weakness and the lack of personal responsibility of the bourgeoisie under the German Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II. As a youth who bullies the sole Jew in his school, Hessling believed "[h]e was acting on behalf of the whole Christian community of Netzig. How splendid it was to share responsibility, and to be a part of a collective consciousness."
Mann's essay on the great French naturalist novelist "Zola" (1915), satirized Germany and Prussian militarism and blamed World War I on capitalist exploitation and the plutocracy. "Zola" disrupted Mann's relationship with his brother Thomas, who at that time was more conservative than Heinrich. Thomas Mann supported Germany's participation in World War I, and he wrote his own essay in 1918 that directly attacked Heinrich. Thomas Mann's contemporaneous credo was that an artist should be independent and not dabble in politics. The estrangement between the brothers proved only temporary, and eventually, the four years-younger Thomas came to support many of Heinrich's opinions.
As he progressed as a novelist, Mann became firmly committed to the idea of the didactic power of art. He dedicated himself during and after the post war revolutionary period of 1918-19 to teaching Germany about democratic values through his writing. He became popular during the Weimar Republic when the ban on "Der Untertan" was lifted in 1918, and it was republished to great acclaim. The novel, plus "Die Armen" ("The Poor") in 1917, and "Der Kopf" ("The Chief") in 1925, make up Mann's "Das Kaiserreich" ("The Empire") trilogy.
The Prussian Government appointed Mann to the Academy of Arts in Berlin, and in 1931, he was elected the Poetry Section president. In 1933, Mann published "Der Hass" ("Hate"), a novel with the premise that the hate perpetrated by fascism would trigger the Gotterdammerung of civilization. After the Nazis solidified power, he was removed from his post and declared persona non grata due to his novels criticizing German authoritarianism, militarism, and nationalism.
Mann went into exile, first in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and then in Nice, France. While living on the Côte d'Azur, Mann wrote a novel based on French King Henry IV, a promoter of tolerance. It was this king, known as "Henry the Good," who ended the religious civil war racking 16th century France by issuing the Edict of Nantes, which allowed Protestants to openly practice their religion.
After the Nazi conquest of France, Mann fled to Spain, crossing the Pyrenees Mountains on foot at the age of 69. From Spain, he immigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Santa Monica, California with his second wife, Nelly Kroeger. His friends had arranged a one-year contract for him at Warner Bros., but he was hobbled by a poor command of English. After the contract expired, Mann had financial difficulties for the rest of his life. He had lost his German and French audiences and the royalties his book sales in Europe had generated, and he became financially dependent on friends and family, including Brother Thomas.
In California, Mann hobnobbed with other German exiles, including Bertolt Brecht. He was virtually unknown in America, his reputation eclipsed by that of his brother. Compounding his difficulties in America, his second wife, who was afflicted with mental illness, committed suicide in 1944.
Mann published his autobiography in 1945, and shortly before he died, had accepted an offer from East Germany to become head of their newly reconstituted Academy of Arts in East Berlin. Mann was not able to actually take over the post, as he died in Santa Monica on March 12, 1950. He was cremated and his ashes interred at the Academy in East Berlin.576 points- Eugene O'Neill, the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, is widely considered the greatest American playwright. No one, not Maxwell Anderson, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, nor Edward Albee, approaches O'Neill in terms of his artistic achievement or his impact on the American theater.
James O'Neill, one of the most popular actors of the late 19th century, was his father, so one could say that Eugene O'Neill was born to a life in the theater. His father, who had been born into poverty in Ireland before emigrating to the United States, developed his craft and became a star in the theaters of the Midwest. He married Mary Ellen "Ella" Quinlan, the Irish-American daughter of a wealthy Cleveland businessman, whose death when she was a teenager had hurt her emotionally. She remained emotionally fragile throughout her life, a condition exacerbated by a further tragedy, the loss of a child. A further strain was placed on her when it was discovered that James had lived in "concubinage" with a common-law wife who later sued him for child support and alimony, claiming he had fathered her child. Both were pious and believing Catholics.
They had three sons, including James Jr. (born 1878) and Edmund (1883), who died at the age of two from measles, leaving Ella distraught. Their last son, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (his middle name a salute to the British prime minister who was in favor of home rule for Ireland), was born at the Barrett Hotel (home of many theatrical artistes) in New York City, on October 16, 1888. Supposedly, it was a difficult delivery, and in the spirit of the times, Ella was given morphine for her pain. She became an addict.
James O'Neill made a fortune playing The Count of Monte Cristo, both on Broadway in multiple productions and as a touring show. However, he suffered an artistic death as a performing artiste through the sheer repetition of the Monte Cristo role, which he turned to repeatedly as it always proved a success. He reportedly played the role at least 4,000 times, perhaps nearly twice that number. He would provide the prototype for the character of James Tyrone, the pater familias in his son's "Long Day's Journey Into Night". James O'Neill Sr. knew that he had suffered artistically from his commercial instincts, and Eugene never forgot that. His son remained steadfast in his own fidelity to his principles of artistic integrity.
The father also was a notorious skinflint, terrified that some unforeseen calamity would throw him back into the hellish poverty of his childhood in Ireland. Both young Gene and his older brother Jamie tried their hands at acting, and though Jamie was more successful than Gene, he never developed a significant, independent career as a professional thespian due to instability caused by his alcoholism. Jamie relied on his father for work, which further fueled his drinking.
Jamie was a full-blown alcoholic, just like his younger brother, Gene, and he drank himself to death at a relatively young age, a fate Gene managed to avoid, but not from lack of trying. The characters of Jamie in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and James Tyrone Jr. in "A Moon for the Misbegotten" were based on him.
As a young man, Eugene suffered from tuberculosis, which likely exacerbated his propensity for pessimism (the stuff of his life became the guts of his last masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey Into Night"). His pessimistic, tragic outlook on life likely was hereditary: O'Neill's two sons, Eugene O'Neill Jr. and Shane O'Neill, became substance abusers as adults: Eugene Jr. was an alcoholic and Shane was a heroin addict. Both committed suicide. He disowned his daughter Oona Chaplin, for marrying Charles Chaplin, who was just six months younger than O'Neill himself. He had never had much to do with her anyway, nor any of his children. His life was devoted to writing.
After recovering from tuberculosis, O'Neill attended Princeton for the 1907-08 term, but was kicked out after his freshman year, allegedly for being drunk and disorderly at a reception held by the university president, future President of the United States Woodrow Wilson. For the next eight years he led a freebooting existence, fortune-hunting for gold in South America and plying the seas as an able-bodied seaman, while trying to drink himself to death (he even made an attempt at suicide). Eventually he returned to New York City and tried his hand at playwriting, and with the financial help of his father, studied playwriting at Harvard in 1915. His father was unimpressed by the results, and died the same year his son made his big breakthrough on Broadway (he did live to see the production of Eugene's first full-length play, "Beyond the Horizon", which opened on February 2, 1920 and ran for a then-impressive 111 performances, and its honoring with the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama that May. James O'Neill Sr. died on August 10, 1920. His namesake, James O'Neill Jr., died three years later, at the age of 45.)
Where Eugene truly learned his craft was in the writing of one-act melodramas that dealt with the lives of sailors, that were performed by the Provincetown Players, which had theaters in Provincetown on Cape Cod and off of Washington Square in New York City (John Ford made a 1940 movie out of four of his sea plays, collected in The Long Voyage Home (1940)). The theater he created was a reaction against the theater of his father, the old hoary melodramas that packed them in for a night of crowd-pleasing entertainment.
Eugene started out as a dramatist at a time when there was an average of 70 plays being performed on Broadway each week. The Great White Way resembled a modern movie multiplex in that potential theatergoers would peruse the various marquees in and around Times Square seeking an entertainment for the night. At the time O'Neill began to establish himself, in pre- and post-World War I era, entertainment was first and foremost in most people's minds.
The movies and O'Neill would change that. The competition of the more sophisticated movies of the late silent era, and then the talkies, usurped the position of Broadway and the theater as the premier venue for American entertainment. The light plays that were the equivalent of television fare became extinct. Musicals continued to thrive, as did comedies, but drama became more serious and developed a psychological depth. O'Neill was the midwife of the phenomenon.
Eugene O'Neill helped foster the maturation of American drama, as he incorporated the techniques of both European expressionism and realism in his work. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, brought to the American stage a tragic vision that influenced scores of American playwrights that followed.
Eugene O'Neill died in the Shelton Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1953. Allegedly, his last words were, "Born in a hotel room, and goddammit! Died in one!" His health had been hurt by his alcoholism and he suffered from Parkinson's disease-like tremors of his hands that had made it difficult, if not impossible, to write since the early 1940s. It is believed that he suffered cerebellar cortical abiotrophy, a neurological disease in which certain neurons in the cerebellum of the brain die off, adversely affecting the balance and coordination of the sufferer. As a dramatist, he had flourished on Broadway from 1920, when his first full-length work, "Beyond the Horizon", debuted, winning him his first Pulitzer, until 1934, when his first and only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (debut October 1933) came to an end that June and his play, "Days Without End," was staged in repertory between January and November). After 1934, he entered a cocoon, staying away from Broadway until after World War II, when the 1946 production of "The Iceman Cometh" debuted. The first production of "Iceman" failed, and O'Neill's reputation suffered, but the 1956 production of "Iceman" starring Jason Robards and directed by José Quintero was a great success, as was the posthumous production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night", which brought O'Neill his fourth Pulitzer. The two plays solidified his legend.576 points - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin; 30 August 1797 - 1 February 1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel "Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus" (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
After Wollstonecraft's death less than a month after her daughter Mary was born, Mary was raised by Godwin, who was able to provide his daughter with a rich, if informal, education, encouraging her to adhere to his own liberal political theories. When Mary was four, her father married a neighbor, with whom, as her stepmother, Mary came to have a troubled relationship.
In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, the then married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Together with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, Mary and Shelley left for France and traveled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.
In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel "Frankenstein". The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, probably caused by the brain tumor that was to kill her at the age of 53.
Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel "Frankenstein", which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Mary Shelley's achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels "Valperga" (1823) and "Perkin Warbeck" (1830), the apocalyptic novel "The Last Man" (1826), and her final two novels, "Lodore" (1835) and "Falkner" (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book "Rambles in Germany and Italy" (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia" (1829-46), support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin543 points