Literature in English

Roddy Doyle was born in 1958 in Dublin, Ireland. He attended St. Fintan’s Christian Brothers School in Sutton and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and continued his education at University College, Dublin. He worked for fourteen years as an English and Geography teacher at Greendale Community School, in Kilbarrack, North Dublin. Since 1993 he has been dedicated to writing full-time. He is married to Belinda and has two sons, Rory and Jack.

“Roddy Doyle achieved widespread recognition when his novel The Commitments (1987) was made into a motion picture in 1991. Doyle’s novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary award in 1993. This novel established Doyle as a leading comic writer, earning comparisons to Irish humorists such as Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan” (Encarta). Roddy Doyle is intensely private. Those who know him describe the man as modest and unassuming. He goes to great lengths to protect his privacy and has stated a preference for the quiet family life. He hopes that his celebrity will not alienate him from his relationship with the North Dublin suburbs that have provided the inspiration for his body of work.

He is a modest writer and always has time to help out his writer friends whenever he can–whether with advice or publications. He has been a book lover from a very young age and still holds a strong passion for books and reading. His outlook on writing is, “If writers want to write, they want to write, and they should be left alone, I am no mentor and I don’t think I’d be doing anyone any favours if I said,–come on, lets do it this way–we’ll leave the cloning to the sheep” (Cullen).

Roddy Doyle writes rowdy novels, rooted in working-class experience. “Doyle’s early novels rely very heavily on pure scene, in which dialogue rather than inner thoughts dominates” (Keen). His first three novels, known as the Barrytown trilogy, focused on the Rabbittes, a family of eight whose lives are a mixture of “high comedy, depressing poverty and domestic chaos” (Turbide). As Keen notes, “The Booker Prize-winning novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha explores with remarkable subtlety the development of a small boy’s interiority and empathy, as he simultaneously masters language and discovers a new understanding of pain.” The novel is the most commercially successful Booker winner to date and is now available in nineteen languages. Any translator would have a daunting job with Doyle’s work, though. Written almost entirely in dialogue, his books are full of “hilarious slang, colloquialisms, vulgarisms and cursing that is so vibrant and charged that it is almost musical” (Turbide). In the past, Doyle’s raw portrayal of working-class Ireland has received as much censure as praise in his native country. “I’ve been criticized for the bad language in my books–that I’ve given a bad image of the country,” said Doyle. “There’s always a subtle pressure to present a good image, and it’s always somebody else’s definition of what is good” (Turbide). The author’s own view is that his job is simply to describe things and people as they really are. In Doyle’s world, the lives are tough, and the language is rough, but beauty and tenderness survive amid the bleakness.

(1931-1989), was an author of short fiction and novels, born on April 7, 1931, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He attended parochial schools and was raised as a Catholic. While in school he served as editor of a variety of school newspapers. He entered the University of Houston in 1949 and worked on a journalism degree sporadically through 1957. There he edited the college paper, the Cougar; worked for a news service, edited the faculty newspaper, Acta Diurna, and founded Forum, a university literary magazine. He was drafted into the army in 1953 and served in Fort Polk, Louisiana, Japan, and Korea. In 1955-56 he worked for the Houston Postqv as an entertainment editor and critic.

He served as the director of the Contemporary Arts Museumqv in Houston in 1961-62. In 1963 he moved to Manhattan, New York, where he began his writing career as managing editor of Location. He published his first story in 1961 in the New Yorker and his first novel, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, in 1964. In 1966 he received a Guggenheim fellowship and continued to receive honors throughout his years in New York. By the time he returned to Houston in the early 1980s he had published more books, including Snow White (1967), City Life (1970), The Dead Father (1975), Amateurs (1976), and several other short story collections.

He began teaching creative writing at the University of Houston in the early 1980s and was an important influence on his students. At his death, on July 23, 1989, in Houston he had written fifteen books; The King was published posthumously in 1990. In addition Barthelme had contributed many stories to the New Yorker. He won a National Book Award in 1972 for a children’s book, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine (1971), and a PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982 for Sixty Stories (1981). He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Authors League of America, and PEN.

Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is reported to had been a reclusive, self-destructive woman; nevertheless, she is also well-known as the most important writer from Dominica, one of the islands that made the so-called West Indies. 

Jean Rhys was, in fact, the pen name of Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, born in Roseau, Dominica, from a Welsh doctor and one of the daughters of the Lockhart family, longstanding Dominican Creoles. She was educated at the Convent School in her hometown and left for England when she was sixteen years old. She went into the theatre for a short time but began writing in 1922, publishing her first book in 1927. By then she had married a Dutch poet, the first of her three husbands, and lived a rootless wandering life in Europe mainly in London, Paris and Vienna. Her early novels and short stories reflect this lifestyle. She only returned to Dominica once, in 1936.

Her literary triumph was the novel “Wide Sargasso Sea” published in 1966, after a long period of reclusion by the author. It won several literary awards, and which, like parts of her other books, drew on her memories of Dominica. “Wide Sargasso Sea” is a brilliant novel inspired by Charlotte Brönte’s “Jane Eyre”, through the eyes of  Bertha Mason, one of Brönte’s characters - but now set in the West Indies. She died in Devon, England, on May 14, 1979.

“I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them” (from Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975)

Prominent Igbo (Ibo) writer, well-known for his novels describing the effects of Western customs and values on traditional African society, Chinua Achebe is one of the most famous Nigerian writers.  His texts, marked by satire and his keen ear for spoken language, have made him one of the most highly esteemed African writers in English.

Chinua Achebe was born in Ogidi, Nigeria, the son of a teacher in a missionary school. His parents, though they installed in him many of the values of their traditional Igbo culture, were devout evangelical Protestants and christened him Albert after Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria. In 1944 Achebe attended Government College in Umuahia. Like other major Nigerian writers, he was also educated at the University College of Ibadan, where he studied English, History and Theology. At the university, Achebe rejected his British name and took his indigenous name Chinua. In 1953 he graduated with a BA. Before joining the Nigerian Broadcasting Company in Lagos in 1954 he travelled in Africa and America, and worked for a short time as a teacher. In the 1960s he was the director of External Services in charge of the Voice of Nigeria.

During the Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) Achebe was in the Biafran government service, and then taught at US and Nigerian universities. Achebe’s writings from this period reflect his deep personal disappointment with what Nigeria became since independence.

In 1967 Achebe cofounded a publishing company at Enugu with the poet Christopher Okigbo. Later he was appointed research fellow at the University of Nigeria, After serving as professor of English, he retired in 1981. Since 1985, Achebe has been a professor emeritus. From 1971 he has edited Okike, the leading journal of Nigerian new writing. He has also held the post of Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There he met James Baldwin, the famous African-American writer, also a faculty member, who was Professor of African studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. In the1990s Acgebe was a faculty member at Bard College, a liberal arts school, where he has taught literature to undergraduates. An automobile accident on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway in 1990 left Achebe confined to a wheelchair, permanently.

Achebe’s first novel, THINGS FALL APART, appeared in 1958. The story of a traditional village “big man” Okonkwo, and his downfall has been translated into some 50 languages. It was followed two year later by NO LONGER AT EASE, and ARROW OF GOD (1964), which concerned traditional Igbo life as it clashed with colonial powers in the form of missionaries and colonial government. Among Achebe’s later works is ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH (1987), a polyvocal story with multiple narrators. Set in an imaginary West African state, its central character is Sam, a Sandhurst-trained military officer, who has become President. Chris Oriko and Ikem Osodi, his friends, die when resisting brutal abuse of power. A military coup eliminates Sam. Beatrice Okah - Chris’s London-educated girl friend - is entrusted with her community of women to return the political sanity.

Achebe has also written collections of short stories, poetry, and several books for juvenile readers. His essays include BEWARE, SOUL BROTHER (1971), about his experiences during the Civil War. He has received a Margaret Wrong Prize, the New Statesman Jock Campbell Prize, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and the 2007 Man Booker International award. In 1983, upon the death of Mallan Aminu Kano, Achebe was elected deputy national president of the People’s Redemption Party. As the director of Heineman Educational Books in Nigeria, he has encouraged and published the work of dozens of African writers. He founded in 1984 the bilingual magazine Uwa ndi Igbo, a valuable source for Igbo studies.

Achebe’s own literary language is standard English blended with pidgin, Igbo vocabulary, proverbs, images and speech patterns. He has defended the use of the English language in the production of African fiction, insisting that the African novelist has an obligation to educate, and has attacked European critics who have failed to understand African literature on its own terms. Achebe has defined himself as a cultural nationalist with a revolutionary mission “to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement.” But Achebe has not stopped criticizing postcolonial African leaders who have pillaged economies. During the military dictatorship of Gen. Sani Abacha he left Nigeria several times. When the 70th birthday of the patriarch of the modern African novel was celebrated at Bard College, on November 2000, Wole Soyinka said: “Achebe never hesitates to lay blame for the woes of the African continent squarely where it belongs.”

American writer, economist, and lecturer, an early theorist of the feminist movement, who wrote over two hundred short stories and about ten novels, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was also famous for her positions as a feminist - although she refused to call herself so.  She used to say that the domestic environment had become an institution which oppressed women.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860.  Her father, a librarian and writer, abandoned her mother, Mary Westcott Perkins, after their infant died in 1866 - Mary Perkins lived with her children on poverty and was often forced to move from relative to relative.

Gilman was a voracious reader and largely self-educated. She studied two years at Rhode Island School of Design (1878-80) and then earned her living designing greetings cards. In 1884 she married Charles Walter Stetson, an aspiring artist. From her early adulthood, she had suffered from periodic bouts of melancloly, and after the birth of their daughter Katharine, she was beset by depression. Gilman began treatment with a famous doctor at their time, who recommender her to ”live as domestic a life as possible” and “never touch a pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”. Gilman later satirized this in her autobiography, and used the discussions in her most renowned short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Loosely based on Gilman’s own experiendes it tells of a young mother suffering from a temporary nervous depression. John, her husband, is a physician, who doesn’t believe in supernatural things. He has ordered her to “rest” in the bedroom of their rented house. There narrator records her psychological torment in a secret diary. The patterns of the room’s hideous yellow wallpaper start to haunt her. She sees a woman creeping around it, as if she wanted to get out. Finally she locks her inside the room to creep around as she pleases:

 “Personally, I disagree with their ideas.
Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.
But what to do?
I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal - having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.
I sometime fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus - but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.” (from ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’)

After divorcing her first husband in 1894, Gilman moved to California and married her cousin George Houghton Gilman, a New York lawyer. She worked as an editor as well as a lecturer and writer, and had her own feminist newspaper, , The Forerunner, in which most of her fiction appeared. The magazine had nearly 1,500 subscribers.  She also wrote non-fiction books such as economic analysis of the U.S. and sociological discussions on labor and women’s conditions. 

In 1932 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After her husband died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1934, she returned to California to live near her daughter. Gilman died on August 17, 1935, in Pasadena, California - an advocate of euthanasia, she ended her own life by taking an overdose of chloroform.  Gilman and her work were mostly forgotten for two decades until the feminist movement of the 1960s revived the interest in her work.

“Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?”

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a British author who made an original contribution to the form of the novel - also distinguished feminist essayist, critic in The Times Literary Supplement, and a central figure of Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf’s books were published by Hogart Press, which she founded with her husband, the critic and writer Leonard Woolf. Originally their printing machine was small enough to fit on a kitchen table, but their publications later included T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922), fiction by Maxim Gorky, E.M. Forster, and Katherine Mansfield, and the complete twenty-four-volume translation of the works of Sigmund Freud.

She was born in London, the daughter of a member of the Duckworth publishing family and a famous literary critic.  In her home, she kept in contact with her father’s friends - a group of famous writers that included Henry James, Alfred Tennyson and George Eliot.

Woolf, who was educated at home by her father, had a youth shadowed by a series of emotional shocks: Gerald Duckworth, her half-brother, sexually abused her; her father suffered a slow death from cancer; when her beloved brother Thoby died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown.

Following the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved with her sister Vanessa and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury. Vanessa, a painter, agreed to marry the critic of art and literature Clive Bell. Their house become central to activities of the Bloomsbury group, formed by artists and writers - including E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, her brother-in-law Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, and her husband Leonard Woolf.  In 1905, Woolf began to write for the Times Literary Supplement, and in 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard (Sidney) Woolf, who had returned from serving as an administrator in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and was also a writer himself.

With TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927) and THE WAVES (1931), Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of modernism. On the publication of To the Lighthouse, Lytton Strachey wrote: “It is really most unfortunate that she rules out copulation - not the ghost of it visible - so that her presentation of things becomes little more… than an arabesque - an exquisite arabesque, of course.” The Waves is perhaps Woolf’s most difficult novel. It follows in soliloquies the lives of six persons from childhood to old age. Louis Kronenberger noted in The New York Times that Woolf was not really concerned with people, but “the poetic symbols, of life–the changing seasons, day and night, bread and wine, fire and cold, time and space, birth and death and change.” To the Lighthouse had a tripartite structure: part 1 presented the Victorian family life, the second part covers a ten-year period, and the third part is a long account of a morning and reconciliation. The central figure, Mrs. Ramsay, was based on Woolf’s mother. Also other characters in the book were drawn from Woolf’s family memories.

MRS. DALLOWAY (1925) formed a web of thoughts of several groups of people during the course of a single day. There is little action, but much movement in time from present to past and back again. The central figure, Clarissa Dalloway, married to Richard Dalloway, is a wealthy London hostess. She spends her day in London preparing for her evening party. She recalls her life before World War I, her friendship with the unconventional Sally Seton, and her relationship with Peter Walsh. At her party she never meets the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, one of the first Englishmen to enlist in the war. Sally returns as Lady Rossetter, Peter Walsh is still enamored with Mrs. Dalloway, the prime minister arrives, and Smith commits suicide. Most critics consider that Woolf’s masterpiece is ORLANDO (1928), a fantasy novel, in which Woolf traced the career of the androgynous protagonist, Orlando, from a masculine identity within the Elisabethan court to a feminine identity in 1928.

In these works Woolf developed innovative literary techniques in order to reveal women’s experience and find an alternative to the male-dominated views of reality. In her essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ Woolf argued that John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and other realistic English novelist dealt in surfaces but to get underneath these surfaces one must use less restricted presentation of life, and such devices as stream of consciousness and interior monologue and abandon linear narrative.

In the event of a Nazi invastion, Woolf and Leonard had made provisions to kill themselves. After the final attack of mental illness, Woolf loaded her pockets full of stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her Sussex home on March 28, 1941. On her note to her husband she wrote: “I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness to you but cannot go on and spoil your life.” Woolf’s suicide has much colored the interpretation of both of their work.