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.

Katherine Mansfield revolutionised the 20th Century English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong. And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness—its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire.

Virginia Woolf once said that Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) had produced ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ After Mansfield died, Virginia Woolf often dreamed at night of her great rival. The dreams gave her a Mansfield who was vividly, shockingly alive, so that the ‘emotion’ of the dream encounter remained with Woolf for the next day. Hermione Lee, Woolf’s biographer, writes that ‘Katherine haunted her as we are haunted by people we have loved, but with whom we have not completed our conversation, with whom we have unfinished business.’ It is a formulation that captures wonderfully the current position of Mansfield. She is a key figure in the development of the short story and yet she remains somehow on the margins of literary history. She is also the great ghost of New Zealand cultural life.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield left for London in 1908 aged 20, never to return to New Zealand.  In the context of a long and arduous sea journey – six or seven weeks—this might not appear significant.  Later in her life, she was frequently incapacitated by illness and never able to return to her hometown. Howeverm her biographers also consider that it is obvious that she saw no point in a return voyage to her birthplace—and that has had an effect on how New Zealanders see her. Though D.H. Lawrence believed the most important fact about her was that she was a colonial, Mansfield can seem to her own people, at first glance, ‘too English’.  And yet her masterpieces—the long stories ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’—are lovingly detailed recreations of a New Zealand childhood, reports from the ’edge of the world’ as she felt it to be. Of course these luminous re-imaginings are lit with the affection and nostalgia of the expatriate. They would not exist without their author’s estrangement from the scenes and places and people she describes. They are set in a New Zealand of the mind, composed at the edge of Mansfield’s memory.

Mansfield’s relationship with her country of birth was, like most of her relationships, marked by extremes. In the beginning, as a precocious, literary schoolgirl, she despaired of her uncouth colonial home where ‘people don’t even know their alphabet’. As a mature writer she found in that ‘hopeless’ material a way of pushing the boundaries of the form—in the words of her biographer, Antony Alpers, a means of ‘revolutionising the English short story’.

Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including “Miss Brill”, “Prelude”, “The Garden Party”, “The Doll’s House”, are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian writer Anton Chekhov and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing. The fact that Mansfield died relatively young - thirty-four years old, by Tuberculosis - only added to her legacy.

Source: http://www.nzedge.com/heroes/mansfield.html and Wikipedia

Jack London [John Griffith London] (1876-1916) was born in San Francisco of an unmarried mother of wealthy background, Flora Wellman. His father may have been William Chaney, a journalist, lawyer, and major figure in the development of American astrology. Because Flora was ill, Jack was raised by an ex-slave, Virginia Prentiss, who would remain a major maternal figure while the boy grew up. Late in 1876, Flora married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran. 

As an adolescent, the boy adopted the name of Jack. He worked at various hard labor jobs, pirated for oysters on San Francisco Bay, served on a fish patrol to capture poachers, sailed the Pacific on a sealing ship, joined Kelly’s Army of unemployed working men, hoboed around the country, and returned to attend high school at age 19. In the process, he became acquainted with socialism and was known as the Boy Socialist of Oakland for his street corner oratory.  He would run unsuccessfully several times on the socialist ticket as mayor. Always a prolific reader, he consciously chose to become a writer to escape from the horrific prospects of  life as a factory worker. He studied other writers and began to submit stories, jokes, and poems to various publications, mostly without success.

Spending the winter of 1897 in the Yukon provided the metaphorical gold for his first stories, which he began publishing in the Overland Monthly in 1899. From that point he was a highly disciplined writer, who would produce over fifty volumes of stories, novels, and political essays. Although The Call of the Wild (1903) brought him lasting fame, many of his short stories deserve to be called classics, as does his critique of capitalism and poverty in The People of the Abyss (1903), and his stark discussion of alcoholism in John Barleycorn (1913). London’s long voyage (1907-09) across the Pacific in a small boat provided material for books and stories about Polynesian and Melanesian cultures. He was instrumental in breaking the taboo over leprosy and popularizing Hawaii as a tourist spot.

London was among the most publicized figures of his day, and he used his fame to endorse his support of socialism and the women’s suffrage cause. He was among the first writers to work with the movie industry, and saw a number of his novels made into films. His novel The Sea-Wolf became the basis for the first full-length American movie.  He was also one of the first celebrities to use his endorsement for commercial products in advertising, including dress suits and grape juice.

Because he was an autodidact, London’s ideas lacked consistency and precision. For example, he clearly accepted the Social Darwinism and scientific racism prevalent during his time, yet he seem troubled that the “inevitable white man,” as he called him, would destroy the rich cultures of various native groups he had encountered over the years. Although he supported women’s suffrage and created some of the most independent and strong female characters in American fiction, he was patriarchal toward his two wives and two daughters. His socialism was fervent, but countered by his strong drive toward individualism and capitalist success. These contradictory themes in his life and writing make him a difficult figure to reduce to simple terms.

Often troubled by physical ailments, during his thirties London developed kidney disease of unknown origin. He died of renal failure on November 22, 1916. Because his writings were translated in several languages, he remains more widely read in some countries outside of the United States than in his home country. Following London’s death, for a number of reasons a biographical myth developed in which he has been portrayed as an alcoholic womanizer who committed suicide. Recent scholarship based upon firsthand documents challenges this caricature. But its persistence has resulted in neglect of his full literary ouevre and his significance as a seminal figure in turn-of-the-century social history.

One of the most famous Irish writers ever, James Joyce was born in 1882, the eldest of ten surviving children. He was educated in the finest schools in Dublin before going on to University College.

After he graduated from university, where he studied modern languages, Joyce went to Paris to study medicine, but was recalled to Dublin in April 1903 because of the illness and subsequent death of his mother. He stayed in Ireland until 1904, and in June that year he met Nora Barncale, who was to become his partner and later his wife.

In August 1904 the first of Joyce’s short stories was published in the Irish Homestead magazine, followed by two others, but in October that year Joyce and Nora left Ireland going first to Pola (now Pula, Croatia) where Joyce got a job teaching English at a Berlitz school. After he left Ireland in 1904, Joyce only made four return visits, the last of those in 1912, after which he never returned to Ireland.

Six months after their arrival in Pola, they went to Trieste where they spent most of the next ten years. Joyce and Nora learned the local Triestino dialect of Italian, and Italian remained the family’s home language for many years. Joyce wrote and published articles in Italian in the Piccolo della Sera newspaper and even gave lectures on English literature. 

1914 proved a crucial year for Joyce. With Ezra Pound’s assistance, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s first novel, began to appear in serial form in Harriet Weaver’s Egoist magazine in London. His collection of short stories, Dubliners - which includes the short story CLAY as well as he most famous novella THE DEAD -, a book on which he had been working since 1904, was finally published, and he also wrote his only play, Exiles. In that same year, he started working on the novel he had been thinking about since 1907: Ulysses.

With the start of World War One, Joyce and his family were forced to leave Trieste and arrived in Zurich where they lived for the duration of the war. The family had little money, relying on subventions from friends and family. After the War, the poet Ezra Pound persuaded him to come to Paris for a while, and Joyce stayed for the next twenty years. The publication of Ulysses in serial form in the American journal The Little Review was suspended in 1921 when a court banned it as obscene. For a while it looked as though Ulysses would never be published, but, in July 1920, Joyce had met Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate living in Paris who owned and ran the bookshop Shakespeare & Co - and she offered to publish the novel.  On 2nd February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday, the first edition of Ulysses was published.

Joyce’s last and perhaps most challenging work, Finnegans Wake, was published on May 4th 1939. It was immediately listed as “the book of the week” in the UK and the USA.

Joyce died at the age of fifty-nine, on  January 13th 1941, in Zurich, where he and his family had been given asylum during the Second World War.

“I have never met a boy who so persistently writes the exact opposite of what he means,” a teacher once wrote in the young Roald Dahl’s report card. “He seems incapable of marshaling his thoughts on paper.” From such inauspicious beginnings emerged an immensely successful author whom The Evening Standard would one day dub “one of the greatest children’s writers of all time.”

Dahl may have been an unenthusiastic student, but he loved adventure stories, and when he finished school he went out into the world to have some adventures of his own. He went abroad as a representative of the Shell corporation in Dar-es-Salaam, and then served in World War II as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. After the war, Dahl began his writing career in earnest, publishing two well-received collections of short stories for adults, along with one flop of a novel.

The short stories, full of tension and subtle psychological horror, didn’t seem to presage a children’s author. Malcolm Bradbury wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “[Dahl's] characters are usually ignoble: he knows the dog beneath the skin, or works hard to find it.” Yet this talent for finding, and exposing, the nastier sides of grown-up behavior served him well in writing for children. As Dahl put it, “Writing is all propaganda, in a sense. You can get at greediness and selfishness by making them look ridiculous. The greatest attribute of a human being is kindness, and all the other qualities like bravery and perseverance are secondary to that.”

 In 1953, Dahl married the actress Patricia Neal; two of his early children’s books, James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) grew out of the bedtime stories he made up for their children. Elaine Moss, writing in the Times, called the latter “the funniest children’s book I have read in years; not just funny but shot through with a zany pathos which touches the young heart.” Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a colossal hit. A film version starring Gene Wilder was released in 1971 (as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), while in 2005, Johnny Depp played Willie Wonka in a new version of the famous book. James and the Giant Peach was made into a movie in 1996.

Dahl followed his initial successes with a string of bestsellers, including Danny, the Champion of the World, The Twits, The BFG, The Witches and Matilda. Some adults objected to the books’ violence — unpleasant characters (like James’s Aunts Sponge and Spiker) tend to get bumped off in grotesque and inventive ways — but Dahl defended his stories as part of a tradition of gruesome fairy tales in which mean people get what they deserve. “These tales are pretty rough, but the violence is confined to a magical time and place,” he said, adding that children like violent stories as long as they’re “tied to fantasy and humor.” By the time of his death in 1990, Dahl’s mischievous wit had captivated so many readers that The Times called him “one of the most widely read and influential writers of our generation.”