Pelham Grenville Wodehouse   (1881 – 1975) English comic novelist, short story writer, lyricist and playwright, best known as the creator of Jeeves, the perfect ‘gentleman’s gentle-man,’ Berrie Wooster of the Drones Club, a young bachelor aristocrat, and the absentminded Lord Emsworth of the Blandings Castle. Pelham. Grenville Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey, as the son of Henry Ernest Wodehouse, a British judge in Hong Kong,- and Eleanor (Deane) Wodehouse....

Paul (Mark) Scott (1920 – 1978 ) Paul Scott was born in suburban North London. He was educated at Winchmore Hill Collegiate School, but was forced to abandon his studies at the age of 16 when the family’s money ran out. Scott started a career in accountancy and met an aesthetic estate agent called Gerald Armstrong, who became his lover. During these years he read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian...

Patrick (Victor Matindale) White (1912 – 1990) Patrick White was an Australian novelist, short story writer and playwright who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. In his work White combines myth, symbols and allegory. White’s international breakthrough novel was Voss, published in 1957. Riders In The Chariot, which contains a powerful indictment of Australian suburban life, established him as one of the most important modern writers. He was...

Oscar Wilde   (1854 -1900) Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet and dramatist whose reputation rests on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Among Wilde’s other best-known works are his only novel The Picture of Dorian. Gray (1891) and his fairy tales especially The Happy Prince. He was born on October 16, 1854 in Dublin to unconventional parents -his mother Lady Jane Francesca...

O. Henry (1862 – 1910) Henry, pseudonym of William Sydney Porter, prolific American short-story writer, a master of surprise endings, who wrote about the life of ordinary people in New York City. Typical for 0. Henry’s stories is a twist of plot, which turns on an ironic or coincidental circumstance. Although some critics were not so enthusiastic about his work, the public loved it. Porter was born in Greenboro, North Carolina....

Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol  (1809 — 1852) Gogol was a Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of the 19th-century Russian realist literature. Gogol was born on March 20, 1809, in Sorochintsy Mirgorod, Poltava Province, of cossack parents. In 1828 he went to Saint Petersburg, where he eventually secured employment in the civil service and became known in literary circles. Enthusiastic praise greeted his volume of...

Mildmay Fane (1600 — 1666) Mildmay Fane was born around 1600, probably in Kent, to Francis Fane, first Earl of Westmorland, and his wife Lady Mary Mildmay, daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s Treasurer. From around 1615 until 1617, Fane attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which had been founded by his grandfather, Sir Walter Mildmay. Fane served as MP for Peterborough (1620-21;1626-28) and for Kent (1625), and was created a Knight of the Bath...

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Taylor Clemens,) was an American writer, journalist and humorist, who won a worldwide audience for his stories of the youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Sensitive to the sound of language, Twain introduced colloquial speech into American fiction. Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, of a Virginian family. He was brought up in Hannibal, Missouri....