GREAT AUTHORS AND THEIR LIVES

The authors:
Charles Dickens

Dickens was an English writer of the Victorian period. During his lifetime Dickens' works enjoyed unprecedented popularity and fame, and they remain popular today.

His most famous novels: The Posthumous Papers

of the Pickwick Club, The Adventures of Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations are all full
of autobiographical elements.

Dickens was forced to leave school and work to help his family who was in prison because of financial reasons. Later he made two visits to America and was very well received in spite of his support for the abolition of slavery. He survived a railway crash and after only five years he died of a stroke. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.

Bronte Sisters:

The story of the Brontes, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, is one of the saddest in the annals of literature. They started by writing verses which they published under the title of "Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell Currer Bell being Charlotte; Ellis, Emily; and Acton, Anne. Then Charlotte wrote The Professor, which was refused by editors and it was not until Jane Eyre that Charlottes talent was recognized.

Encouraged by the success of their sister, Emily and Anne sent to the publishers their novels: Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, but the novels werent published and Emily decided never to write again, while Anne wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Their stories deal with suffering, endurance, or rebellion against fate; with violence, with crime and its punishment and all are inspired from their lives.

Oscar Wilde

Irish dramatist, poet, and author who wrote the darkly sardonic Faustian themed novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. He is also known for his poetry and dramaturgy plays.

He was part of the ever-growing movement of 'decadents' who advocated pacifism, social reform, and libertarianism.
When he was still in college he helped found the Aesthetic Movement, "art for art's sake".

Wilde excelled in his studies, winning many prizes and awards including Oxford's Newdigate Prize for his poem "Ravenna.

After school Wilde settled in London and continued to write poetry; his first collection simply titled Poems was published in 1881. In 1891 Wilde met English poet Lord Alfred Douglas and this was the beginning of a tumultuous relationship that would cause many problems for Oscar.
Adopting the name Sebastian Melmoth, Wilde went to Paris, penniless, and is said to have reunited with his friend and lover of many years, Canadian journalist Robert Baldwin.

Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humorist, best known for the humorous travelogue Three Men in a Boat. His family suffered poverty, and debt collectors often visited, an experience Jerome described vividly in his autobiography My Life and Times. He tried to become a journalist, writing essays, satires and short stories, but most of these were rejected. Over the next few years he was a school teacher, a packer, and a solicitor's clerk.

His success came with Three Men in a Boat which was inspired by his honeymoon which took place on the Thames "in a little boat. The book presents comic situations which are intertwined with the history of the Thames region. In 1898, a short stay in Germany inspired Three Men on the Bummel, the sequel to Three Men in a

Boat.

Salman Rushdie

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West. Rushdie's first career was as a copywriter, working for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather.

His novel, Midnight's Children, catapulted him to literary notability and won him the Booker Prize in 1981.

Midnight's Children follows the life of a child,

born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with special powers and a connection to other children born at the dawn of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian sub-continent and the birth of the modern nation of India.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was the centre of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death threats were made against him, including a fatw issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. He also wrote "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" in 1990.

Rushdie first began orally composing the stories that comprise Haroun and the Sea of Stories while writing his famous novel The Satanic Verses. During this time, Rushdie's nine-year-old son, Zafar, chastised his father for not writing books that children could read. Rushdie made a deal with his son that the next novel he wrote would be for children. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II dubbed him Knight Bachelor for his services to literature. In May 2008 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

John Fowles

Fowles spent four years at Oxford, where he discovered the writings of the French existentialists, in particular he admired Albert Camus and JeanPaul Sartre.

He worked as a teacher in France, Greece and London and details of these experiences are mirrored in his books.
The time spent in Greece was of great importance to Fowles. During his tenure on the island he began to write poetry. In late 1960 Fowles completed the first draft of The Collector and it appeared in the spring of 1963.

The Aristos, a collection of philosophical thoughts and musings on art, human nature and other subjects, appeared the following year. Then in 1965, The Magus which has perhaps generated the most enduring interest, becoming something of a cult novel, particularly in the U.S. With parallels to Shakespeare's The Tempest and Homer's The Odyssey, The Magus is a traditional quest story made complex by the incorporation of dilemmas involving freedom, hazard and a variety of existential uncertainties.

The most commercially successful of Fowles' novels, The French Lieutenant's Woman, resembles a Victorian novel in structure and detail, while pushing the traditional boundaries of narrative in a very modern manner.

Ian McEwan

Ian Russell McEwan is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. McEwan's first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976.

The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers

were his first two novels, and earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre".

His 1997 novel, Enduring Love, about the relationship between a science writer and a stalker, was popular with critics.

In 1998, he won the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam, a contemporary morality tale that is as profound as it is witty. His next novel, Atonement (2001), received considerable acclaim; Time magazine named it the best novel of 2002, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
In 2008, McEwan publicly spoke out against Islamism for its views on women and on homosexuality.

Q AND A SESSION