Robert Browning (1812 1889) Robert Browning was an English poet, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue. Browning was long unsuccessful as a poet, but finally became a great Victorian poet. Robert Browning was born in London as the son of Robert Browning, a wealthy clerk in the Bank of England, and Sarah Anna Wiedemann, of German-Scottish origin. He received scant formal education, but had access to his father’s large (6,000...

Richard (Nathaniel) Wright  (1908 – 1960) Wright was an American short story writer and novelist, whose best-known work, Native Son, was published in 1940. The book immediately established Wright as an important author and a spokesman on conditions facing African-Americans. It gained a large multiracial readership and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. He grew up in poverty His grandparents had been...

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) Ralph Waldo Emerson was the most original of American philosophers and essayists. He was .born in Boston, Massachusetts, May 25, 1803, His pen first attracted attention in 1837, through two orations entitled Nature and Man Thinking, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge. He was educated in Boston and Harvard, like his father, and graduated in 1821. In 1825 he began to study...

Rabinderanath Tagore   Tagore was a Bengali poet, novelist and educator who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and was considered the greatest writer in the modern Indian literature. He was born in Kolkata into a wealthy and prominent Brahman family. His father was Maharishi Debendranath Tagore, a religious reformer and scholar, his mother Sarada Devi. His grandfather had established a huge financial empire for himself, and financed public...

Philip Massinger Philip Massinger was born in 1583 to Anne and Arthur Massinger. He was baptized in the church of St. Thomas, Salisbury, on November 24, 1583. Arthur Massinger was a long-time trusted servant first to Sir Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, and then to his heir Sir William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, until Arthur’s death in 1603. On May 14, 1602, Philip Massinger entered as a commoner of...

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...