William Somerset Maugham  (1874 – 1965) William Somerset Maugham was an English author noted as an expert storyteller and a master of fiction technique. He was born in Paris as the sixth and youngest son of the solicitor to the British embassy. He learned French as his native tongue. An introvert child afflicted with a stammer, Maugham was orphaned at 10 and went to live with his uncle, a vicar. Although...

William Makepeace Thackeray  ( 1811 – 1863) Thackeray was an English journalist, novelist, famous for his novel Vanity Fair (1847-48), a tale of two middle-class London families. Most of Thackeray’s major novels were published as monthly serials. Thackeray studied in a satirical and moralistic upper-middle-class English life – he was at one time considered the equal of his contemporary Dickens, or even as his superior. William Makepeace Thackeray was born in...

William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878 ) William Cullen Bryant was born at Cummington, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, November’ 3, 1794. In 1810, at the age of sixteen, he entered Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he studied for two years. In 1812 he withdrew from college and entered upon the study of law. After three years of preparation he was admitted to the bar in 1815. He practiced first at Plainfield,...

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) W B. Yeats, Irish poet and playwright and one of the greatest lyric poet Ireland has produced and was one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, Yeats was the acknowledged leader of the Irish literary renaissance. Son of the painter John Butler Yeats, William studied painting in Dublin (1883-86). As a boy he attended school in London and spent vacations in County Sligo, Ireland,...

William Blake (1757 – 1827) William Blake was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake pro-claimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th- century. Misunderstanding shadowed his career as a writer and artist and it was left to later generations to recognise his importance. Blake was born in London, where he spent most of his life....

William Black William Black, novelist and journalist, was born in Glasgow, Scot-land, in November 1841. In early life, he was a close student, and was most attracted by the study of botany. Black was a close ob-server of nature, and used natural objects and phenomena to good ‘ advantage in his works. His literary career may be briefly stated as follows: His first essays in literature were some contributions to a...

Wallace Stevens  (1 879 – 1955) Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the son of Garrett Barcalow Stevens, a prosperous country lawyer. His mother’s family, the Zellers, was of Dutch origin; she taught at school. Stevens attended the Reading Boys’ High School, and en-rolled in 1893 at Harvard College. During this period Stevens began to write for the Harvand Advocate, Trend, and Harriet Monroe’s magazine Poetry. In his writing aspirations...