The Twentieth-

century Writers
Ted Hughes
(1930-1998)

lHe was born in West

Yorkshire.
lHe served in Royal
Air Force for two years
before he studied
archeology and
anthropology at
Cambridge.
lHe often used violent nature imagery
to symbolize the human condition.
lHe has been called "a 20th century
Aesop whose fable lack an explicit
moral".
lIn 1956, he married the brilliant
young American poet Sylvia Plath.
 lIn 1963, the
couple had been
separated for a
short time, Plath,
ill and depressed,
took her own life
in unheated flat.

lIn 1998, he published a collection of

poem called Birthday Letters.
The titles of Hughes's other books
of poetry reveal his recurring
subjects:
 The Hawk in the Rain (1957)
 Animal Poems (1967)
 A Few Crows (1970)
 Cave Birds (1975)
 Wolfwatching (1991)

lIn 1984, he was named poet

laureate of England.
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)

lHe was born in Dublin,

Ireland.
lHe was regarded as 20th
century's greatest poet
writing in English.
lHe came on to the literary
scene when the Pre-
Raphaelite movement was
reviving.
 The revival, called Art Nouveau
in the world of painting,
emphasized the mysterious and
unfathomable.
 It was being scrutinized by the
great pioneers in psychology,
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
 In his collection of early poems called The
Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems
(1889), he was a romantic dreamer,
evoking mythic and heroic past of Ireland.
 In 1914, he heed the advice of the
American poet Ezra Pound. The same
year, he published a volume aptly titled
Responsibilities.
 Maud Gonne, the beautiful Irish political
activist that Yeats idolized and yearned.
 In 1917, at age of 52, he married Georgie
Hyde-Lees, an Englishwoman.
 From 1922-1928, he served as a senator of the
newly formed Irish Free State.
 In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature.
 Lady Gregory established Dublin's Abbey
Theater as a monument to Irish culture and
high literary standards.

lHe often making adaptations of the

ceremonial choreography of the Japanese
Noh Theater.
David Herbert Lawrence
(1885-1930)

lHe was born in the

English Midlands.
lHe chose to become a
teacher, while he was
teaching he began
publishing poems and
stories in magazines. In
1912, he called on his
former professor, Ernest
Weekley, and became
enchanted with Weekley's
Germanborn wife, Frieda
 Laurence and Frieda fled to
Germany and for the next 2 years
they traveled to Austria and Italy.
 During this short time, he finished
his novel Sons and Lovers (1913)
and began work on two others, The
Rainbow (1915) and Women in
Love (1920).
 He embraced a belief in "blood
knowledge", inputting one's animal
self balance with one's intellect.
 Returning to England in 1914, he
announced that "the source of life
and knowledge is in man and
woman, and the source of all living
is in the interchange and the
meeting and mingling of these two".
 When Women in Love was
published in 1920, one London
critic judge it "a loathsome study of
sex depravity leading youth to
unspeakable disaster".
 Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy
American writer invited him to
come to Taos, New Mexico.
 He learned that he had incurable
tuberculosis, he left United States
and returned to Italy.
 He now wrote continually,
producing Lady Chartterley's
Lover (1928).
Elizabeth Bowen
(1899-1973)

lShe was born in Dublin,

Ireland
lHer father, a lawyer, was
confined to a mental hospital
and her mother contracted
fatal cancer.
lMuch of her writing is
concerned with the process
of growing up, of losing
innocence, of coming to
terms with reality.
 At seventeen, she moved to London to write
stories. There she attended readings at
Poetry Bookshop.
 Some of her literary friends were Rose
Macaulay, Edith Sitwell, Ezra Pound, and
Aldous Huxley.
 In 1923, Bowen published her first collection
of stories, Encounters.
 She married Alan Cameron, a teacher. The
couple lived in the town of Oxford.
 In 1927, her first novel published, The
Hotel.
 In 1935, the couple moved back to London,
when she won acclaim for her novel The
Death of the Heart (1938).
 In 1945, The Demon Lover was published, a
collection she called a "diary" of her own
reactions to the war.
 The Heat of the Day (1949), a classical love
story also set in wartime London.
 After the war, the couple returned to
Bowen's Court.
 She traveled to Europe, visited her
American publishers in New York and
lectured at Princeton , Vassar, Bryn Mawr
and the University of Wisconsin.
 In 1973, she died.
Dylan Thomas
(1914-1953)

lHe was born in

Swansea, Wales.
lHe was a prodigy.
lLargely self-
educated, he chose the
rough-and-tumble life
of a newspaper
reporter over the
comparative serenity
of a university
education.
lHis wife was Caitlin and they had
three children.
lThe temporary solace he found in
alcohol led to that "insult to brain"
that caused his early death, in St.
Vincent's Hospital in New York City.
lAt the time, he was making his fourth
visit to the United States and
preparing to collaborate on an opera
with the composer Igor Stravinsky.
 In 1950, he first came to America. He
was regarded as the most charismatic
British visitor since Oscar Wilde in
1885.
 His poems are mixture of intricate
complication and preachlike
eloquence, of sonorous solemnity
combined with a playful use of
language apparent even in his most
serious works.
 His two works that became familiar around
the world: Under Milk Wood (1954) "play for
voices" and his lyrical memoir A Child
Christmas in Wale (1955).
 Thomas died at the height of fame he could
neither accept not enjoy. "Once I was lost and
proud" he told a reporter of New York Times;
"now I'm found and humble. I prefer that
other".
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
(1932- )

lHe was born in

Caribbean Island of
Trinidad.
lHe was an outstanding
student. Scholastic honors
won him a place at
Trinidad's Queen's Royal
College.
lHe was granted a
scholarship to England's
prestigious Oxford
University.
 In 1954 he leave Oxford, with no desire to
return to Trinidad's narrow possibilities.
 He worked part time for the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
 His first short stories, which later became
Miguel Street, went begging until he was
able to publish his two earlier novels set in
Trinidad, The Mystic Masseur (1957) and
The Suffrage of Elvira (1958).
 A House for Mr. Biswas, his first
masterpiece, came along in 1961.
 He traveled to West Indies, Africa,
Middle East and India as he pursues
the meaning of his own heritage.
 These voyages and inquiries led him to
produce more the twenty books, both
fiction and nonfiction, including A
Bend in the River (1979), India: A
Million Mutinies Now (1991), and A
Way in the World (1994)
Katherine Mansfield
(1888-1923)

lShe was born Kathleen

Mansfield Beauchamp in
Wellington, New Zealand.
lWhen she was fifteen the
Beauchamp family sailed for
England to enroll their
daughters in Queen's College
in London.
lIn 1908, when she was
nineteen Mansfield's family
permitted her to return to
London alone
 In 1910, A. R. Orange, editor of the
progressive journal The New Age, accepted
several of her stories.
 These stories influenced the Russian writer
Anton Chekhov, were collected in a volume
called In a German Pension (1911).
 John Middleton Murry, an Oxford
undergraduate, accepted a story and some
of her poems for his new literary magazine,
Rhythm. Eventually they married and
became publishing partner.
 When her younger brother Leslie died in
World War I, she was overcome with grief.
 She at last emerged from this cloud and
vowed to write about New Zealand from then
on as "a sacred debt... because my brother
and I were born there."
 She called it "debt of love... I shall tell
everything, even of how the laundry basket
squeaked".
 In 1917, she learned that she had
tuberculosis.
 In the brief time left to her, she wrote some
of her finest stories, which are collected in
The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)
and The Dove's Nest and Other Stories
(1923).
 She went to an institute run by a healer
named George Gurdjieff in France.
 She died in January 1923.
Frank O'Connor
(1903-1966)

lHe was born Michael

Francis O'Donovan in Cork
City, Ireland.
 "I was improvising and education I could not
afford and the country was improvising a
revolution it could not afford" he said.
 Truce with England came in 1921. The treaty
was immediately followed by a civil war in
which O'Connor took the Republican side.
 In 1923, he was arrested and imprisoned.
 In 1935, he began writing stories, with his
friend W. B. Yeats, he became a director of
Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
 The theatre was the heart of Irish revival,
which also involved Lady Gregory, Sean
O'Casey, Sean O'Faolain and Liam
O'Flaherty.
 He was a regular contributor to such
American magazines as The New Yorker,
The Atlantic Monthly, and Esquire.
 In 1952, he came to United States. He taught
at Harvard, Northwestern, and Stanford.
Wystan Hugh Auden
(1907-1973)

lHe was born in York

lHe gave a name to his
times―"the Age of
Anxiety".
lHe waited to see that the
same era could have been
called "the Age of Auden"
 By the time he entered Oxford, he was as
much a teacher as he was a student.
 Auden as a poet was difficult to classify.
 In 1930, he established his preeminence
among the brilliant group of poets that
included Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice,
and Cecil Day-Lewis.
 In 1939, as Hitler's divisions were about to
march into Poland and initiate World War II,
he decided to make his home in United
States.
 From 1939-1942, he taught at the University
of Michigan and various other Universities.
 In 1946, he became a U.S. citizen.
Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941)

lShe was born in Victorian

London
lShe was a daughter of the
scholar and literary critic
Sir Leslie Stephen and his
artistic wife, Julia.
lIn 1904, Virginia, her
sister Vanessa, and their
two brothers move to the
area of London known as
Bloomsbury.
 Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual circle
whose other prominent members included
the writer E.M. Forster, the artist Duncan
Grant, and the economist John Maynard
Keynes.
 Leonard Woolf, one of the member of B.G., a
journalist and economist, whom Virginia
married in 1912.
 In 1915, her first novel, The Voyage Out was
published.
 The publication of Jacob's Room (1922) and
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) established her
position as one of the foremost writers of
her time.
 With these novels―and with subsequent
novels such as To the Lighthouse (1927) and
the Waves (1931)― she pursued an
experimental vision that emphasized
personal impressions over external events.
 Like James Joyce, she used the technique of
stream of consciousness.
 In 1917, she and her husband established the
Hogarth Press.
 In March 1941, she took her own life.
Princess Cynel P. Padre
BSE III-B