Well-Known Works of William Faulkner William Faulkner is considered one of the greatest writers in the history of American literature. His works are known for their complex and layered narratives, richly developed characters, and deep exploration of themes such as race, class, and the human condition. Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi in 1897…
Thomas Hardy’s Literary Life Author Biography: Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in the Southwestern English village of Upper Bockhampton. His father was a stone worker who also played the violin. His mother loved reading and telling stories about the region’s folk songs and folklore. Hardy inherited all of the passions that would…
Sir Sidney Philip (1554-1586) Sir Philip Sidney was born on November 30, 1554, in Penshurst, Kent, England, to Lady Mary and Sir Henry Sidney, a lord deputy of Ireland and lord president of the Marches of Wales. Sir Henry Sidney’s royal assignment in Wales required him to spend the most of his youth away from…
Francis Bacon and His Works Francis Bacon was born in London on January 22, 1561. He was an English Renaissance statesman and philosopher. Sir Nicholas Bacon, his father, was Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Lady Anne Cooke Bacon was his father’s second wife and the daughter of humanist Sir Antony Cooke. His…
Jonathan Swift – Literary Life & Works Jonathan Swift is the greatest genius and most tragic figure of Anne’s generation. Everyone recalls being enthralled as a child by the sturdy figure of Gulliver helpless among the Lilliputians and living in constant fear of the enormous Brobdingnagians’ stupid clumsiness. Swift, whether he realised it or not,…
Author Feature: John Keats If the aristocratic families of Byron and Shelley seemed unlikely to produce a great poet, the origin of John Keats seems just as unaccountable. His father, foreman in a London livery-stable, married the owner’s daughter, and became proprietor. Yet Keats’s parents were not ordinary people. The father, but for an untimely…
Author Feature: Alfred, Lord Tennyson Great ages are fortunate which find the one voice that can turn to music their otherwise mute beliefs and endeavors, their joy and pain. Such was Chaucer for his time; such were Shakespeare and Spenser for theirs, Pope for his, and preeminently Alfred, Lord Tennyson, for the time of Victoria….
The age of young Milton was a period described by Green as when “England became the people of the book, and that book was the bible.” It was not an overnight occurrence but one that had been festering for fifty years with intellectual and spiritual development traveling on separate tracks but headed to an unavoidable collision. Demands for not only civil but religious freedom were spreading throughout the country.
John Dryden 1631-1700 “A prose writer with kind of Aeolian attachment” “I confess,” says Dryden, “that my chief endeavors are to delight the age in which I live. If the humor of this be for low comedy, small accidents, and railery, I will force my genius to obey it.” His maxim was “He who lives…
Essay on Flood Floods occur in rivers. Floods occur when a river becomes so full of water that it overflows its banks. During a flood, the normally dry area of the ground is submerged in water. Simply put, a flood is too much water in the “wrong” place. A flood is a dreadful natural calamity…
Emily Dickinson 1830-1886 An American poetess born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father was a prominent lawyer, treasurer of Amherst College and a two term United States Congressman. Well-educated, Emily attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and Amherst College. Apart from a few trips to Boston for medical treatment she never travelled outside the Amherst community. Only…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) “Of all the poets who helped to usher in the Romantic movement, none was more original and brilliant than Coleridge” so wrote Charles Gayley. He was born at Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devon, on October 21, 1772. His father died when he was nine years old leaving the…
