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...

Vikram Seth    Vikram Seth was born in Kolkata in 1952 to Prem Seth, a shoe company executive, and Laila Seth, a judge. Vikram Seth is the oldest of three children in the Seth family. He was sent to Doon school, a prestigious boarding school for boys, at the age of six. As a young student, Vikram was very shy, “Incapable of looking people in the eye,” he says. But what...

Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885) Victor Hugo, novelist, poet, and dramatist, is one of the most important of French Romantic writers. Among his best-known works are The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Miser-able (1862). Victor Hugo was born in Besancon as the son of a army general, who taught young Victor to admire Napoleon as a hero. He began in early adolescence to write verse tragedies and poetry; and...

Upton Sinclair (1878 – 1968)   Upton Sinclair was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, and short story writer, whose most famous book is The Jungle (1906). Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a liquor salesman whose alcoholism shadowed Sinclair’s childhood. When Sinclair was ten, the family moved to New York. He started to write dime novels at the age of 15 and produced ethnic...

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965) S. Eliot, American-British poet and critic, is one of the most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century. T. S. Eliot won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature. He studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford. In 1914, he established residence in Lon-don and in 1927 became a British subject. After working as a teacher and a bank clerk he began a publishing career; he...

Thomas Moore Thomas Moore was born in Dublin as the son of a grocer. His background was poor and he never varnished it. Moore studied at Trinity College, Dublin and London, and published his first book, The Poetical Works Of Thomas Little, in 1801. He became in 1803 a civil officer to Bermuda, where he stayed for a year, and then returned to England after travels in U.S. and Canada. Moore’s...