1.
Grand Duchy of Finland
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The Grand Duchy of Finland was the predecessor state of modern Finland. It existed between 1809 and 1917 as an part of the Russian Empire and was ruled by the Russian Emperor as Grand Duke. The new title Grand Duke of Finland did not result in any Finnish autonomy, during the next two centuries, the title was used by some of Johns successors on the throne, but not all. Usually it was just a title of the king, used only on very formal occasions. The title Grand Duke of Finland was added to the long list of titles of the Russian Tsar, after his return to Finland in 1812, the Finnish-born Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt became counsellor to the Russian emperor. The formation of the Grand Duchy stems from the Treaty of Tilsit between Czar Alexander I of Russia and Napoleon Bonaparte of France, the treaty mediated peace between Russia and France and allied the two countries against Napoleons remaining threats, Great Britain and Sweden. Russia invaded Finland in February of 1808, claimed as an effort to impose sanctions against Sweden, but not a war of conquest. The oath also dubbed anyone person who gave aid to the Swedish or Finnish armies a rebel, the Finns complied, bitter over Sweden abandoning the country for their war against Denmark and France, and begrudgingly embraced Russian conquest. The Diet of Finland was now to only meet whenever requested, further on, Alexander I requested a deputation of the four Finnish estates, as he expressed concern over continued Finnish resistance. The deputation refused to act without the Diet, to which Alexander agreed with, by 1809, all of Finland had been conquered and The Diet was summoned in March. Finland was then united through Russia via crown, and Finland was able to keep the majority of its own laws, the earlier years of the Grand Duchy can be seen as uneventful. In 1812, the area of Old Finland, known as the Viipuri Province was returned to Finland after being annexed by Russia in the Great Northern War, despite the outcry, the borders remained set until 1940. Moreover, Alexander moved the capital from Turku to Helsinki, a fortified town protected by Suomenlinna. Finlands main university also transferred to Helsinki after a fire out in Turku. Alexander went a step further to demand a Finnish House of Nobles, the house was designed to register all noble families in Finland, so that the highest Finnish estate would be representative of the next Finnish diet. As for Sweden, the majority did not think too much about Finlands conquest, as Sweden itself annexed Norway from Denmark in 1814, despite this, Alexander I ceased to give in to Finnish affairs and returned to governing Russia. In 1823, Arseny Zakrevsky was made general of Finland and quickly became unpopular by the Finns. Zakrevsky abolished the Committee for Finnish Affairs and managed to obtain the right to submit Finnish affairs to the Czar, bypassing the Finnish Secretary of State
2.
Helsinki
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Helsinki is the capital and largest city of Finland. It is in the region of Uusimaa, in southern Finland, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland. Helsinki has a population of 629,512, a population of 1,231,595. Helsinki is located some 80 kilometres north of Tallinn, Estonia,400 km east of Stockholm, Sweden, Helsinki has close historical connections with these three cities. The Helsinki metropolitan area includes the core of Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Kauniainen. It is the worlds northernmost metro area of one million people. The Helsinki metropolitan area is the fourth largest metropolitan area in the Nordic countries, Helsinki is Finlands major political, educational, financial, cultural, and research center as well as one of northern Europes major cities. Approximately 75% of foreign companies operating in Finland have settled in the Helsinki region, the nearby municipality of Vantaa is the location of Helsinki Airport, with frequent service to various destinations in Europe and Asia. In 2009, Helsinki was chosen to be the World Design Capital for 2012 by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, the city was the venue for the 1952 Summer Olympics and the 52nd Eurovision Song Contest 2007. In 2011, the Monocle magazine ranked Helsinki the most liveable city in the world in its Liveable Cities Index 2011, in the Economist Intelligence Units August 2015 Liveability survey, assessing the best and worst cities to live in globally, Helsinki placed among the worlds top ten cities. Helsinki is used to refer to the city in most languages, the Swedish name Helsingfors is the original official name of the city. The Finnish name probably comes from Helsinga and similar names used for the river that is known as the Vantaa River. Helsingfors comes from the name of the parish, Helsinge and the rapids, which flowed through the original village. As part of the Grand Duchy of Finland in the Russian Empire, one suggestion for the origin of the name Helsinge is that it originated with medieval Swedish settlers who came from Hälsingland in Sweden. Others have proposed that the name derives from the Swedish word helsing, other Scandinavian cities located at similar geographic locations were given similar names at the time, for example Helsingør and Helsingborg. The name Helsinki has been used in Finnish official documents and in Finnish language newspapers since 1819, the decrees issued in Helsinki were dated with Helsinki as the place of issue. This is how the form Helsinki came to be used in written Finnish, in Helsinki slang the city is called Stadi. Hesa, is not used by natives to the city, helsset is the Northern Sami name of Helsinki
3.
Nobel Prize for literature
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Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, here work refers to an authors work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize in any given year, the academy announces the name of the chosen laureate in early October. Although the Nobel Prize in Literature has become the worlds most prestigious literature prize, many authors who have won the prize have fallen into obscurity, while others rejected by the jury remain widely studied and read. The prize has become seen as a political one - a peace prize in literary disguise, whose judges are prejudiced against authors with different political tastes to them. Tim Parks has expressed skepticism that it is possible for Swedish professors, as of 2016,16 of the 113 recipients have been of Scandinavian origin. The Academy has often been alleged to be biased towards European, Nobels vague wording for the criteria for the prize has led to recurrent controversy. In the original Swedish, the word translates as either idealistic or ideal. The Nobel Committees interpretation has varied over the years, in recent years, this means a kind of idealism championing human rights on a broad scale. Though Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime, the last was written a little over a year before he died, Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets,31 million Swedish kronor, to establish and endow the five Nobel Prizes. Due to the level of surrounding the will, it was not until 26 April 1897 that the Storting approved it. The executors of his will were Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that were to award the Peace Prize were appointed shortly after the will was approved. The prize-awarding organisations followed, the Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, the Nobel Foundation then reached an agreement on guidelines for how the Nobel Prize should be awarded. In 1900, the Nobel Foundations newly created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II, according to Nobels will, the Royal Swedish Academy was to award the Prize in Literature. Each year, the Swedish Academy sends out requests for nominations of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature and it is not permitted to nominate oneself. Thousands of requests are sent out each year, and as of 2011 about 220 proposals are returned and these proposals must be received by the Academy by 1 February, after which they are examined by the Nobel Committee. By April, the Academy narrows the field to around twenty candidates, by May, a short list of five names is approved by the Committee. The subsequent four months are spent in reading and reviewing the works of the five candidates. In October, members of the Academy vote and the candidate who receives more than half of the votes is named the Nobel laureate in Literature
4.
Peasant
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A peasant is a member of a traditional class of farmers, either laborers or owners of small farms, especially in the Middle Ages under feudalism, or more generally, in any pre-industrial society. In Europe, peasants were divided into three classes according to their status, slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants either hold title to land in fee simple, or hold land by any of several forms of tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold. The implication of the term is that the peasant is uneducated, ignorant, the word peasant is also commonly used in a non-pejorative sense as a collective noun for the rural population in the poor and under-developed countries of the world. The word peasant is derived from the 15th century French word païsant, meaning one from the pays, or countryside, ultimately from the Latin pagus, Peasants typically made up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a pre-industrial society. The majority of the people in the Middle Ages were peasants, more generally, the word peasant is sometimes used to refer pejoratively to those considered to be lower class, perhaps defined by poorer education and/or a lower income. The open field system of agriculture dominated most of northern Europe during medieval times, under this system, peasants lived on a manor presided over by a lord or a bishop of the church. Peasants paid rent or labor services to the lord in exchange for their right to cultivate the land, fallowed land, pastures, forests, and wasteland were held in common. The open field system required cooperation among the peasants of the manor and it was gradually replaced by individual ownership and management of land. This process happened in a pronounced and truncated way in Eastern Europe. Lacking any catalysts for change in the 14th century, Eastern European peasants largely continued upon the original medieval path until the 18th and 19th centuries, even before emancipation in 1861, serfdom was on the wane in Russia. The proportion of serfs within the empire had decreased from 45-50 percent at the end of the eighteenth century. In Germany, peasants continued to center their lives in the well into the 19th century. They belonged to a body and helped to manage the community resources. In the East they had the status of serfs bound permanently to parcels of land, a peasant is called a Bauer in German and Bur in Low German. In most of Germany, farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents, Peasant leaders supervised the fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, and supported a village court which handled minor offenses. Inside the family the patriarch made all the decisions, and tried to arrange marriages for his children. Much of the communal life centered on church services and holy days
5.
Tampere
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Tampere is a city in Pirkanmaa, southern Finland. It is the most populous city in any of the Nordic countries. The city has a population of 223,292 growing to 313,058 people in the urban area, Tampere is the second-largest urban area and third most-populous individual municipality in the country, after Helsinki and Espoo municipalities. Its also the most populous Finnish city outside the Greater Helsinki area and inner Finlands major urban, economic, Tampere is between two lakes, Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi. Since the two differ in level by 18 metres, the rapids linking them, Tammerkoski, have been an important power source throughout history. Tampere is dubbed the Manchester of Finland for its industrial past as the center of Finnish industry. Helsinki is approximately 160 kilometres south of Tampere, and can be reached in 1.5 hours by train and 2 hours by car, the distance to Turku is roughly the same. Tampere–Pirkkala Airport is Finlands third-busiest airport, with over 400,000 passengers annually, there have been many debates on the origin of the name Tampere. One theory is that it comes from the Swedish word damber, other suggestions have been the Swedish tamper-dagar, fasting days, and also the Finnish word tammi. Although the name Tampere or its Swedish counterparts Tammer- part cannot be completely confirmed, Tampere was founded as a market place on the banks of the Tammerkoski channel in 1775 by Gustav III of Sweden and four years later,1 October 1779, Tampere was granted full city rights. At this time, it was a small town, consisting of only a few square kilometres of land around the Tammerkoski. Tampere grew as a market town and industrial centre in the 19th century. The towns industrial nature in the 19th and 20th centuries gave it the nickname Manchester of the North, Tampere was the centre of many important political events of Finland in the early 20th century. On 1 November 1905, during the strike, the famous Red Declaration was proclaimed on the Keskustori. In 1918, when Finland had recently gained independence, Tampere also played a major role, Tampere was a red stronghold during the war, with Hugo Salmela in command. White forces captured the town after the Battle of Tampere, seizing about 10,000 Red prisoners on 6 April 1918, prevalent in Tamperes post-World War II municipal politics was the Brothers-in-Arms Axis. From 2007 on, Tampere switched to a new model of having a mayor and four deputy mayors, timo P. Nieminen was elected by the city council as the first mayor of Tampere for the years 2007–09. He was re-elected in 2009 and was succeeded by Anna-Kaisa Ikonen in 2013, after World War II, Tampere was enlarged by joining some neighbouring areas
6.
Pekka Halonen
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Pekka Halonen was a painter of Finnish landscapes and people in the national romantic style. His favorite subjects were the Finnish landscape and its people which he depicted in his Realist style, Pekka Halonen was born on 23 September 1865 in Linnasalmi, Lapinlahti, Finland, the son of Olli Halonen, a farmer, and Wilhelmina Halonen. Halonens father was himself an amateur artist who not only ran the farm, Halonen often accompanied his father on these painting trips and was thus introduced into the craft of painting. He studied in Helsinki at the Art Societys Drawing School for four years and he graduated with good grades and won a scholarship to study abroad. He went in 1890 to Paris, where he first studied at the Academie Julian, in 1895 Pekka Halonen married a young music student, Maija Mäkinen. In the beginning of their marriage, the couple lived in places before settling down in a house with a studio on Lake Tuusula in Tuusula. Here the Halonen family lived in an imposing pinewood villa known as ‘Halosenniemi’, Halosenniemi was designed by Pekka Halonen himself and his brother Antti Halonen and was completed in 1902. The building is now a museum that includes original furnishings and Halonen’s own art, on the shores of the lake where he resided an artists’ community flourished, helping to develop a sense of Finnish national identity. Adjacent to the house Halonen built a sauna, which in typical Finnish tradition also served as a laundry, the landscape near Halosenniemi was an important source of inspiration for his art. In Tuusula Halonen had a circle of artist friends and relatives which provided him with a daily source of social and cultural stimulation. Hallonen and his wife had eight children, four sons and four daughters, Halonen died in Tuusula on 1 December 1933. Halonen chronicled the Finnish landscape and its people and he had an early interest in Symbolism, but Gauguin’s decorative Synthetism, as well as Japanese woodcuts, had a deeper impression on his work. Many of his paintings depict scenes from his everyday surroundings, such as Sauna in the Snow. When at the beginning of the 20th century Finland’s existence was threatened, Halonen stated that he never painted for anyone but himself. He felt that “Art should not jar the nerves like sandpaper – it should produce a feeling of peace. ”Pekka Halonen Media related to Pekka Halonen at Wikimedia Commons
7.
Jean Sibelius
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Jean Sibelius, born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius, was a Finnish composer and violinist of the late Romantic and early-modern periods. The core of his oeuvre is his set of seven symphonies which, like his major works, continue to be performed and recorded in his home country. His other best-known compositions are Finlandia, the Karelia Suite, Valse triste, the Violin Concerto, the choral symphony Kullervo, throughout his career, the composer found inspiration in nature and Nordic mythology, especially the heroic legends of the national epic, the Kalevala. Although he is reputed to have stopped composing, he attempted to continue writing, including abortive efforts on an eighth symphony, in later life, he wrote Masonic music and re-edited some earlier works while retaining an active but not always favourable interest in new developments in music. The Finnish 100 mark note featured his image until 2002, when the euro was adopted, since 2011, Finland has celebrated a Flag Day on 8 December, the composers birthday, also known as the Day of Finnish Music. In 2015, the 150th anniversary of the birth, a number of special concerts and events were held. Sibelius was born on 8 December 1865 in Hämeenlinna in the Grand Duchy of Finland and he was the son of the Swedish-speaking medical doctor Christian Gustaf Sibelius and Maria Charlotta Sibelius née Borg. The family name stems from the Sibbe estate in Eastern Uusimaa which was owned by his paternal great-grandfather, Sibeliuss father died of typhoid in July 1868, leaving substantial debts. As a result, his mother—who was again pregnant—had to sell their property and move the family into the home of Katarina Borg, her widowed mother, who also lived in Hämeenlinna. Sibelius was therefore brought up in a decidedly female environment, the only male influence coming from his uncle, Pehr Ferdinand Sibelius and it was he who gave the boy a violin when he was ten years old and later encouraged him to maintain his interest in composition. For Sibelius, Uncle Pehr not only took the place of a father, from an early age, Sibelius showed a strong interest in nature, frequently walking around the countryside when the family moved to Loviisa on the coast for the summer months. In his own words, For me, Loviisa represented sun, Hämeenlinna was where I went to school, Loviisa was freedom. It was in Hämeenlinna, when he was seven, that his aunt Julia was brought in to give him piano lessons on the familys upright instrument and he progressed by improvising on his own, but still learned to read music. He later turned to the violin, which he preferred and he participated in trios with his elder sister Linda on piano, and his younger brother Christian on the cello. Furthermore, Sibelius often played in quartets with neighboring families, adding to his experience in chamber music, fragments survive of his early compositions of the period, a trio, a piano quartet and a Suite in D Minor for violin and piano. Around 1881, he recorded on paper his short pizzicato piece Vattendroppar for violin, in 1881, he started to take violin lessons from the local bandmaster, Gustaf Levander, immediately developing a particularly strong interest in the instrument. Despite such success as an instrumentalist, he chose to become a composer. Although his mother tongue was Swedish, in 1874 Sibelius attended Lucina Hagmans Finnish-speaking preparatory school, despite having to repeat a year, he succeeded in passing the schools final examination in 1885 which allowed him to enter a university
8.
Juhani Aho
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Juhani Aho, originally Johannes Brofeldt, was a Finnish author and journalist. He was nominated for the Nobel prize in literature twelve times, Juhani Aho was born at Lapinlahti in 1861. His parents were Theodor and Emma Brofeldt, the Brofeldts were a priestly family, Theodor was a relatively well-known revivalist preacher whose sermons were published in 1917 as Rovasti H. G. Th. Brofeldtin saarnoja and his father had been a chaplain and his grandfather a vicar, Juhani had two younger brothers Kaarlo and Petter who, following Juhanis example, adopted the Finnish names Kalle and Pekka as well as the surname Aho. From 1872 to 1880 Juhani Aho attended the Kuopion Lyseo, one of the few secondary schools offering education in Finnish. During his time at the school he adopted the pen name Juhani Aho for many of his school works, in the 1880s he studied at the University of Helsinki and was associated with political radicals. His literary pursuits were aided by Elisabeth Järnefelt and her circle, the Järnefelt school, Ahos literary output is wide-ranging since he pursued different styles as time passed. He started as a realist and his first novel Rautatie, which is considered one of his works, is from this period. Later he moved towards neoromanticism with novels Panu and Kevät ja takatalvi as well as Juha. The last one is one of his most famous works and has twice as adapted an opera, by Aare Merikanto and by Leevi Madetoja. His novel Yksin, published in 1890, controversially bold by the standards of Finnish literature in that epoch, is a roman à clef. Its tale of unfulfilled love is the novel of Ahos passion for Aino Järnefelt who, at that time, was secretly engaged to Jean Sibelius. In addition to his novels Aho wrote a number of stories of distinct style. Their topics could vary from political allegories to depictions of everyday life, the first and most famous of the short stories is When Father Brought Home the Lamp, depicting the effect of the innovation on people living in the countryside. Nowadays the title is a Finnish saying used when something related to new technology is introduced, Aho was one of the founders of Päivälehti, the predecessor of the biggest newspaper in Finland today, Helsingin Sanomat. In 1906 he got to know Huopanankoski rapids in Viitasaari, after that he went there every spring and autumn for 14 years. Aho died in Helsinki in 1921, the photographer Claire Aho is his granddaughter
9.
Nobel Prize in Literature
–
Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, here work refers to an authors work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize in any given year, the academy announces the name of the chosen laureate in early October. Although the Nobel Prize in Literature has become the worlds most prestigious literature prize, many authors who have won the prize have fallen into obscurity, while others rejected by the jury remain widely studied and read. The prize has become seen as a political one - a peace prize in literary disguise, whose judges are prejudiced against authors with different political tastes to them. Tim Parks has expressed skepticism that it is possible for Swedish professors, as of 2016,16 of the 113 recipients have been of Scandinavian origin. The Academy has often been alleged to be biased towards European, Nobels vague wording for the criteria for the prize has led to recurrent controversy. In the original Swedish, the word translates as either idealistic or ideal. The Nobel Committees interpretation has varied over the years, in recent years, this means a kind of idealism championing human rights on a broad scale. Though Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime, the last was written a little over a year before he died, Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets,31 million Swedish kronor, to establish and endow the five Nobel Prizes. Due to the level of surrounding the will, it was not until 26 April 1897 that the Storting approved it. The executors of his will were Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that were to award the Peace Prize were appointed shortly after the will was approved. The prize-awarding organisations followed, the Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, the Nobel Foundation then reached an agreement on guidelines for how the Nobel Prize should be awarded. In 1900, the Nobel Foundations newly created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II, according to Nobels will, the Royal Swedish Academy was to award the Prize in Literature. Each year, the Swedish Academy sends out requests for nominations of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature and it is not permitted to nominate oneself. Thousands of requests are sent out each year, and as of 2011 about 220 proposals are returned and these proposals must be received by the Academy by 1 February, after which they are examined by the Nobel Committee. By April, the Academy narrows the field to around twenty candidates, by May, a short list of five names is approved by the Committee. The subsequent four months are spent in reading and reviewing the works of the five candidates. In October, members of the Academy vote and the candidate who receives more than half of the votes is named the Nobel laureate in Literature
10.
Asteroid
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Asteroids are minor planets, especially those of the inner Solar System. The larger ones have also been called planetoids and these terms have historically been applied to any astronomical object orbiting the Sun that did not show the disc of a planet and was not observed to have the characteristics of an active comet. As minor planets in the outer Solar System were discovered and found to have volatile-based surfaces that resemble those of comets, in this article, the term asteroid refers to the minor planets of the inner Solar System including those co-orbital with Jupiter. There are millions of asteroids, many thought to be the remnants of planetesimals. The large majority of known asteroids orbit in the belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, or are co-orbital with Jupiter. However, other orbital families exist with significant populations, including the near-Earth objects, individual asteroids are classified by their characteristic spectra, with the majority falling into three main groups, C-type, M-type, and S-type. These were named after and are identified with carbon-rich, metallic. The size of asteroids varies greatly, some reaching as much as 1000 km across, asteroids are differentiated from comets and meteoroids. In the case of comets, the difference is one of composition, while asteroids are composed of mineral and rock, comets are composed of dust. In addition, asteroids formed closer to the sun, preventing the development of the aforementioned cometary ice, the difference between asteroids and meteoroids is mainly one of size, meteoroids have a diameter of less than one meter, whereas asteroids have a diameter of greater than one meter. Finally, meteoroids can be composed of either cometary or asteroidal materials, only one asteroid,4 Vesta, which has a relatively reflective surface, is normally visible to the naked eye, and this only in very dark skies when it is favorably positioned. Rarely, small asteroids passing close to Earth may be visible to the eye for a short time. As of March 2016, the Minor Planet Center had data on more than 1.3 million objects in the inner and outer Solar System, the United Nations declared June 30 as International Asteroid Day to educate the public about asteroids. The date of International Asteroid Day commemorates the anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid impact over Siberia, the first asteroid to be discovered, Ceres, was found in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi, and was originally considered to be a new planet. In the early half of the nineteenth century, the terms asteroid. Asteroid discovery methods have improved over the past two centuries. This task required that hand-drawn sky charts be prepared for all stars in the band down to an agreed-upon limit of faintness. On subsequent nights, the sky would be charted again and any moving object would, hopefully, the expected motion of the missing planet was about 30 seconds of arc per hour, readily discernible by observers
11.
Svenska Dagbladet
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Svenska Dagbladet, abbreviated SvD, is a daily newspaper published in Stockholm, Sweden. The first issue of Svenska Dagbladet appeared on 18 December 1884, ivar Anderson is among its former editors-in-chief who assumed the post in 1940. The paper is published in Stockholm and provides coverage of national and international news as well as coverage of the Greater Stockholm region. Its subscribers are concentrated in the capital, but it is distributed in most of Sweden, during the beginning of the 1900s the paper was one of the right-wing publications in Stockholm. Svenska Dagbladet is owned by Schibsted which purchased it in the late 1990s, the stated position of the editorial page is independently moderate, which means it is independent but adheres to the liberal conservatism of the Moderate Party. On the other hand, the paper is regarded as conservative. In November 2000 Svenska Dagbladet changed its format from broadsheet to tabloid, in 2005 the paper started a Web portal for business news as a joint venture with Aftonbladet. Since 1925 Svenska Dagbladet has awarded an individual sportsperson or a team the Svenska Dagbladet Gold Medal at the end of each year, the circulation of Svenska Dagbladet was 185,000 copies in 2003. The paper had a circulation of 187,100 copies on weekdays in 2005, among Swedish morning newspapers Svenska Dagbladet had the third largest circulation with 195,200 copies in 2007 after Dagens Nyheter and Göteborgs-Posten. In 2008 Svenska Dagbladet had a circulation of 123,383 copies, the circulation of the paper was 185,600 copies in 2011. It was 159,600 copies in 2012 and 143,400 copies in 2013, gunilla Asker, in 2009 appointed CEO of Svenska Dagbladet. Cordelia Edvardson, Jerusalem correspondent for Svenska Dagbladet from 1977 to 2006, list of Swedish newspapers Svenska Utlandstidningen Merrill, John C. and Harold A. Fisher. The worlds great dailies, profiles of fifty newspapers pp 308–13 Official website of Svenska Dagbladet
12.
Helsingin Sanomat
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Helsingin Sanomat, abbreviated HS and colloquially known as Hesari, is the largest subscription newspaper in Finland and the Nordic countries, owned by Sanoma. Except after certain holidays, it is published daily and its name derives from that of the Finnish capital, Helsinki, where it is published. The paper was founded in 1889 as Päivälehti, when Finland was a Grand Duchy under the Tsar of Russia and its proprietors re-opened the paper under its current name in 1905. Founded as the organ of the Young Finnish Party, the paper has been politically independent, Helsingin Sanomat has a long history as a family business, owned by the Erkko family. It is currently owned by the Sanoma media group also owns Ilta Sanomat. The relationship between the owners of Helsingin Sanomat and Finlands government have sometimes been close, for instance, during the run-up to the Winter War, Eljas Erkko was at the same time the papers publisher and Finlands foreign minister. Mikael Pentikäinen was the editor-in-chief until May 2013 when he was fired from the post, riikka Venäläinen replaced him temporarily in the post. Helsingin Sanomat is published daily in Finnish in tabloid format with the exception of the days after public holidays when the paper does not appear, the only exception to this is the day after Finnish independence day when the revenue from Christmas advertising ensures an edition after that public holiday. Subscriptions make up 97% of the circulation and the lack of a need to attract casual readers on newsstands had led to the front page usually being totally devoted to advertisements. The newspaper was published in broadsheet format until 6 January 2013, the paper also has a monthly supplement named Kuukausiliite, and a weekly TV guide and entertainment-oriented supplement named Nyt. Between 1999 and 2012 there were also both Finnish and English-language online newspaper editions, Helsingin Sanomat is published daily for the iPad. iPad version of Helsingin Sanomat resembles the newspapers traditional version but is optimized for the tablet device. Content of Helsingin Sanomat can be accessed through mobile devices as well. The circulation of Helsingin Sanomat was 476,163 copies in 1993, in the period of 1995–96 the paper had a circulation of 470,600 copies. Its circulation was 446,380 copies in 2001, making it the largest paper in the country, in 2008 its daily circulation was 412,421 on weekdays and 468,505 on Sundays. In 2011 the daily had a circulation of 365,994 copies, the same year it was also the largest paper in terms of readership. The paper has a penetration of approximately 75% of the households of the Greater Helsinki region and its total daily circulation is well over 400,000, or about 8% of Finlands total population, making it the biggest daily subscription newspaper in the Nordic countries. The paper is a significant factor in Finnish society and in public opinion, pertti Klemola, a Finnish journalist and scholar, once called it a state authority, an institution with its own independent social and political will. Helsingin Sanomat strongly advocated Finland joining the European Union in the run-up to the decision to do so in 1994 and it has also openly expressed support for Finlands membership of NATO
13.
Open Library
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Open Library is an online project intended to create one web page for every book ever published. It provides access to public domain and out-of-print books, which can be read online. Its book information is collected from the Library of Congress, other libraries, if books are available in digital form, a button labelled Read appears next to its catalog listing. Links to where books can be purchased or borrowed are also provided, tens of thousands of modern books were made available from four and then 150 libraries and publishers for ebook digital lending. Open Library began in 2006 with Aaron Swartz as the engineer and leader of Open Librarys technical team. The project was led by George Oates from April 2009 to December 2011, Oates was responsible for a complete site redesign during her tenure. In 2015, the project was continued by Giovanni Damiola and then Brenton Cheng, the site was redesigned and relaunched in May 2010. The site uses Infobase, its own database framework based on PostgreSQL, the source code to the site is published under the GNU Affero General Public License. The website was relaunched adding ADA compliance and offering over 1 million modern, under certain provisions of United States copyright law, libraries are sometimes able to reproduce copyrighted works in formats accessible to users with disabilities
14.
List of Nobel laureates in Literature
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The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually by the Swedish Academy to authors for outstanding contributions in the field of literature. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, which are awarded for outstanding contributions in chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine. As dictated by Nobels will, the award is administered by the Nobel Foundation, the first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in 1901 to Sully Prudhomme of France. Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma and a monetary prize that has varied throughout the years. In 1901, Prudhomme received 150,782 SEK, which is equivalent to 7,731,004 SEK in December 2007, the award is presented in Stockholm at an annual ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Nobels death. As of 2016, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to 113 individuals, when he received the award in 1958, Russian-born Boris Pasternak was forced to publicly reject the award under pressure from the government of the Soviet Union. In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre made known that he did not wish to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, however the Nobel committee does not acknowledge refusals, and includes Pasternak and Sartre in its list of Nobel laureates. Fourteen women have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, more than any other Nobel Prize with the exception of the Nobel Peace Prize. Among all the years the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded, there have been seven years in which the Nobel Prize in Literature was not awarded. The country with the most recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature is France, with 16, followed by the United States with 11, the 113 Nobel laureates in literature from 1901 to 2016 have come from the following countries, One Nobel laureate is classified as stateless. These three Nobel laureates have been sorted under Bengali, French and Russian, respectively, the 113 Nobel laureates in literature from 1901 to 2016 were from the following genders, General Specific Notes
15.
Sully Prudhomme
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René François Armand Prudhomme was a French poet and essayist. He was the first ever winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, born in Paris, Prudhomme originally studied to be an engineer, but turned to philosophy and later to poetry, he declared it as his intention to create scientific poetry for modern times. In character sincere and melancholic, he was linked to the Parnassus school, although, at the same time, Prudhomme was born to a French shopkeeper. Prudhomme attended the Lycée Bonaparte, but eye trouble interrupted his studies and he worked for a while in the Creusot region for the Schneider steel foundry, and then began studying law in a notarys office. The favourable reception of his poems by the Conférence La Bruyère encouraged him to begin a literary career. His first collection, Stances et Poèmes, was praised by Sainte-Beuve and it included his most famous poem, Le vase brisé. He published more poetry before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War and this war, which he discussed in Impressions de la guerre and La France, permanently damaged his health. The inspiration was clearly Lucretiuss De rerum natura, for the first book of which he made a verse translation and his philosophy was expressed in La Justice and Le Bonheur. The extreme economy of means employed in these poems has, however and he was elected to the Académie française in 1881. Another distinction, Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, was to follow in 1895, after, Le Bonheur, Prudhomme turned from poetry to write essays on aesthetics and philosophy. The first writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, he devoted the bulk of the money he received to the creation of a prize awarded by the Société des gens de lettres. He also founded, in 1902, the Société des poètes français with Jose-Maria de Heredia, at the end of his life, his poor health forced him to live almost as a recluse at Châtenay-Malabry, suffering attacks of paralysis while continuing to work on essays. He died suddenly on 6 September 1907, and was buried at Père-Lachaise in Paris,1901, Testament poétique 1905, La vraie religion selon Pascal 1922, Journal intime, lettres-pensée Gale Contemporary Authors Online, from the Gale Biography Resource Center database Petri Liukkonen. Archived from the original on 4 July 2013
16.
Theodor Mommsen
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His work regarding Roman history is still of fundamental importance for contemporary research. He was also a prominent German politician, as a member of the Prussian and German parliaments and his works on Roman law and on the law of obligations had a significant impact on the German civil code. Mommsen was born to German parents in Garding in the Duchy of Schleswig in 1817, then ruled by the king of Denmark, and grew up in Bad Oldesloe in Holstein and he studied mostly at home, though he attended the gymnasium Christianeum in Altona for four years. He studied Greek and Latin and received his diploma in 1837, as he could not afford to study at Göttingen, he enrolled at the University of Kiel. Mommsen studied jurisprudence at Kiel from 1838 to 1843, finishing his studies with the degree of Doctor of Roman Law, during this time he was the roommate of Theodor Storm, who was later to become a renowned poet. Together with Mommsens brother Tycho, the three friends even published a collection of poems, thanks to a royal Danish grant, Mommsen was able to visit France and Italy to study preserved classical Roman inscriptions. During the revolution of 1848 he worked as a war correspondent in then-Danish Rendsburg, supporting the German annexation of Schleswig-Holstein, having been forced to leave the country by the Danes, he became a professor of law in the same year at the University of Leipzig. When Mommsen protested against the new constitution of Saxony in 1851, however, the next year he obtained a professorship in Roman law at the University of Zurich and then spent a couple of years in exile. In 1854 he became a professor of law at the University of Breslau where he met Jakob Bernays, Mommsen became a research professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1857. He later helped to create and manage the German Archaeological Institute in Rome. In 1858 Mommsen was appointed a member of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and he became professor of Roman History at the University of Berlin in 1861. At 2 a. m. on 7 July 1880 a fire occurred in the upper floor workroom-library of Mommsens house at Marchstraße 6 in Berlin, after being burned while attempting to remove valuable papers, he was restrained from returning to the blazing house. Several old manuscripts were burnt to ashes, including Manuscript 0.4.36, there is information that the important Manuscript of Jordanes from Heidelberg University library was burnt. Two other important manuscripts, from Brussels and Halle, were also destroyed, Mommsen was an indefatigable worker who rose at five to do research in his library. People often saw him reading whilst walking in the streets, Mommsen had sixteen children with his wife Marie. Their oldest daughter Maria married Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the great Classics scholar and their grandson Theodor Ernst Mommsen became a professor of medieval history in the United States. Two of the great-grandsons, Hans Mommsen and Wolfgang Mommsen, were prominent German historians, Mommsen published over 1,500 works, and effectively established a new framework for the systematic study of Roman history. He pioneered epigraphy, the study of inscriptions in material artifacts
17.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
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Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz was a Polish journalist, novelist and the Nobel Prize laureate. He is best remembered for his novels, especially for his internationally known best-seller Quo Vadis. Born into an impoverished Polish noble family in Russian-ruled Congress Poland, in the late 1860s he began publishing journalistic, in the late 1870s he traveled to the United States, sending back travel essays that won him popularity with Polish readers. In the 1880s he began serializing novels that further increased his popularity, many of his novels remain in print. The Trilogy and Quo Vadis have been filmed, the several times. Sienkiewicz was born on 5 May 1846 in Wola Okrzejska, now a village in the part of eastern Polish region of Lubelskie. His family were impoverished Polish nobles, on his fathers side deriving from Tatars who had settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and his parents were Józef Sienkiewicz and Stefania, née Cieciszowska. He had five siblings, a brother, Kazimierz, and four sisters, Aniela, Helena. His family were entitled to use the Polish Oszyk coat of arms, Wola Okrzejska belonged to the writers maternal grandmother, Felicjana Cieciszowska. His family moved several times, and young Henryk spent his childhood on family estates in Grabowce Górne, Wężyczyn, in September 1858 he began his education in Warsaw, where the family would finally settle in 1861, having bought a tenement house in eastern Warsaws Praga district. He received relatively poor school grades except in the humanities, notably Polish language, due to the hard times, 19-year-old Sienkiewicz took a job as tutor to the Weyher family in Płońsk. It was probably in this period that he wrote his first novel, Ofiara and he also worked on his first novel to be published, Na marne. He completed extramural secondary-school classes, and in 1866 he received his secondary-school diploma, Little is known about this period of his life, other than that he moved out of his parents home, tutored part-time, and lived in poverty. His situation improved somewhat in 1868 when he became tutor to the princely Woroniecki family, in 1867 he wrote a rhymed piece, Sielanka Młodości, which was rejected by Tygodnik Ilustrowany. He completed his university studies in 1871, though he failed to receive a diploma because he did not pass the examination in Greek language, Sienkiewicz also wrote for Gazeta Polska and Niwa, under the pen name Litwos. In 1873 he began writing a column, Bez tytułu, in The Polish Gazette, in 1874 a column, Sprawy bieżące for Niwa and he also collaborated on a Polish translation, published in 1874, of Victor Hugos last novel, Ninety-Three. In June that year, he became co-owner of Niwa, meanwhile, in 1872, he had debuted as a fiction writer with his short novel Na marne, published in the magazine Wieniec. This was followed by Humoreski z teki Woroszyłły, Stary Sługa, Hania, the last three are known as the Little Trilogy
18.
Rudyard Kipling
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Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Kiplings works of fiction include The Jungle Book, Kim, and many short stories and his poems include Mandalay, Gunga Din, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, The White Mans Burden, and If—. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, Henry James said, Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known. In 1907, at the age of 42, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize and its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on occasions for a knighthood. Kiplings subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age, George Orwell called him a prophet of British imperialism. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote, is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary, but as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and a recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts. Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865, in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, to Alice Kipling, Alice was a vivacious woman about whom Lord Dufferin would say, Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room. Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal, John Lockwood and Alice had met in 1863 and courted at Rudyard Lake in Rudyard, Staffordshire, England. They married and moved to India in 1865 and they had been so moved by the beauty of the Rudyard Lake area that when their first child was born they referenced it when naming him. Alices sister Georgiana was married to painter Edward Burne-Jones, and her sister Agnes was married to painter Edward Poynter, Kiplings most famous relative was his first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times in the 1920s and 1930s. Kiplings birth home on the campus of the J J School of Art in Bombay for many years was used as the Deans residence. Although the cottage bears a plaque stating that this is the site where Kipling was born, the original cottage may have torn down decades ago. Some historians and conservationists are also of the view that the bungalow merely marks a site close to the home of his birth, as the bungalow was built in 1882, Kipling seems to have also said so to the dean when he visited J J School in the 1930s. Kipling was to write of Bombay, According to Bernice M. Murphy, Kipling’s parents considered themselves Anglo-Indians and so too would their son, complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent features in his fiction. So one spoke English, haltingly translated out of the idiom that one thought. Kiplings days of light and darkness in Bombay ended when he was five years old
19.
Rudolf Christoph Eucken
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Rudolf Christoph Eucken was a German philosopher. Eucken was born on 5 January 1846 in Aurich, then in the Kingdom of Hanover and his father, Ammo Becker Eucken died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his mother, Ida Maria. He was educated at Aurich, where one of his teachers was the classical philologist and he studied at Göttingen University, where Hermann Lotze was one of his teachers, and Berlin University. In the latter place, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was a professor whose ethical tendencies, Eucken received his Ph. D. in classical philology and ancient history at Göttingen University in 1866 with a dissertation under the title De Aristotelis dicendi ratione. However, the bent of his mind was definitely towards the side of theology. He stayed there until 1874 when he took up a position at the University of Jena. He stayed there until he retired in 1920, from 1913–1914 he served as guest lecturer at New York University. During World War I, Eucken, like many of his academic colleagues, Euckens philosophical work is partly historical and partly constructive, the former side being predominant in his earlier, the latter in his later works. Their most striking feature is the organic relationship between the two parts. The aim of the works is to show the necessary connexion between philosophical concepts and the age to which they belong, the same idea is at the root of his constructive speculation. All philosophy is philosophy of life, the development of a new culture, not mere intellectualism and this practical idealism Eucken described by the term ethical activism. In accordance with this principle, Eucken gave considerable attention to social and educational problems and he maintained that humans have souls, and that they are therefore at the junction between nature and spirit. He believed that people should overcome their non-spiritual nature by continuous efforts to achieve a life, another aspect of his ethical activism. He married Irene Passow in 1882 and had a daughter and two sons and his son Walter Eucken became a famous founder of ordoliberal thought in economics. His son Arnold Eucken was a chemist/physicist, Rudolf Eucken died on 15 September 1926 in Jena at the age of 80. Main Currents of Modern Thought, A Study of the Spiritual and Intellectual Movements of the Present Day, the Meaning and Value of Life, A. and C. Collected Essays, T. Fisher Unwin,1914 and he delivered lectures in England in 1911 and spent six months lecturing at Harvard University and elsewhere in the United States in 1912–1913. Rudolf Eucken, His Philosophy and Influence, Charles Scribners Sons,1913, Rudolf Euckens Philosophy, The Dublin Review, Vol. CLV, July/October,1914
20.
Paul Heyse
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Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse was a distinguished German writer and translator. A member of two important literary societies, the Tunnel über der Spree in Berlin and Die Krokodile in Munich, he wrote novels, poetry,177 short stories, the sum of Heyses many and varied productions made him a dominant figure among German men of letters. Wirsen, one of the Nobel judges, said that Germany has not had a literary genius since Goethe. Heyse is the fifth oldest laureate in literature, after Doris Lessing, Theodor Mommsen, Alice Munro, paul Heyse was born on 15 March 1830 in Heiliggeiststraße, Berlin. His paternal grandfather Johann Christian August Heyse, was a famous German grammarian, Heyse attended the renamed Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium until 1847. He was later remembered as a model student, after leaving school Heyse began studying classical philology. He met Jacob Burckhardt, Adolph Menzel, Theodor Fontane and Theodor Storm, frühlingsanfang 1848, the first of Heyses poems to see print, expressed his enthusiasm for the recent Revolution. After a brief excursion to see the student militias he returned home without joining them, apparently out of consideration for the concerns of his parents and friends. Having studied for two years at the University of Berlin he left for Bonn in April 1849 in order to art history. Heyses first book, Der Jungbrunnen was published anonymously by his father that year as was his tragedy Francesca von Rimini. About the same time, Heyse received from the publisher Alexander Duncker a manuscript by the then-unknown Theodor Storm, Heyses enthusiastic critique of Sommergeschichten und Lieder laid the foundations of their future friendship. In 1851 Heyse won a contest held by the members of the Tunnel for the ballad Das Tal von Espigno, wolf also set poems from Heyses collection Italienisches Liederbuch of 1860. Throughout his career Heyse worked as a translator, above all of Italian literature, in May 1852 Heyse was awarded a doctorate for his work on the troubadours, and a Prussian scholarship allowed him to depart for Italy to look for old Provençal manuscripts. He made friends with Arnold Böcklin and Joseph Victor von Scheffel but was banned from the Vatican library after being discovered copying passages from unpublished manuscripts, much of his new writing appeared in the Argo, the yearbook of the Rütli writers. Emanuel Geibel persuaded the King of Bavaria, Maximilian II, to grant Heyse a titular professorship in Munich, Heyse was thus appointed professor of Romance philology, although he never taught at that citys university. After his marriage on 15 May to Margarete Kugler he arrived in Munich on 25 May 1854, in December Heyse began a long correspondence with Eduard Mörike. On 22 August 1855 Heyses first son, Franz, was born, Heyse would have four children by his first marriage, Franz, Julie or Lulu, Ernst and Clara. On 30 September 1862, his wife Margarete died in Meran of a lung illness and he completed the historical drama, Ludwig der Bayer – a Bavarian period piece which Maximilian II had long been eager to see – but its theatrical production was a failure
21.
Maurice Maeterlinck
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Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was Flemish but wrote in French. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life and his plays form an important part of the Symbolist movement. In later life, Maeterlinck committed plagiarism, Maeterlinck was born in Ghent, Belgium, to a wealthy, French-speaking family. His mother, Mathilde Colette Françoise, came from a wealthy family and his father, Polydore, was a notary who enjoyed tending the greenhouses on their property. In September 1874 he was sent to the Jesuit College of Sainte-Barbe and his experiences at this school influenced his distaste for the Catholic Church and organized religion. He had written poems and short novels during his studies, after finishing his law studies at the University of Ghent in 1885, he spent a few months in Paris, France. He met some members of the new Symbolism movement, Villiers de lIsle Adam in particular, Maeterlinck instantly became a public figure when his first play, Princess Maleine, received enthusiastic praise from Octave Mirbeau, the literary critic of Le Figaro in August 1890. In the following years, he wrote a series of symbolist plays characterized by fatalism and mysticism, most importantly Intruder, The Blind and Pelléas and he had a relationship with the singer and actress Georgette Leblanc from 1895 until 1918. Leblanc influenced his work for the two decades. With the play Aglavaine and Sélysette Maeterlinck began to create characters, especially female characters, Leblanc performed these female characters on stage. Even though mysticism and metaphysics influenced his work throughout his career, in 1895, with his parents frowning upon his open relationship with an actress, Maeterlinck and Leblanc moved to the district of Passy in Paris. The Catholic Church was unwilling to grant her a divorce from her Spanish husband and they frequently entertained guests, including Mirbeau, Jean Lorrain, and Paul Fort. They spent their summers in Normandy, during this period, Maeterlinck published his Twelve Songs, The Treasure of the Humble, The Life of the Bee, and Ariadne and Bluebeard. In 1903, Maeterlinck received the Triennial Prize for Dramatic Literature from the Belgian government. During this period, and down to the Great War, he was looked up to, throughout Europe, as a great sage. In 1906, Maeterlinck and Leblanc moved to a villa in Grasse and he spent his hours meditating and walking. As he emotionally pulled away from Leblanc, he entered a state of depression, diagnosed with neurasthenia, he rented the Benedictine Abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy to help him relax. By renting the abbey he rescued it from the desecration of being sold and used as a chemical factory, Leblanc would often walk around in the garb of an abbess, he would wear roller skates as he moved about the house
22.
Gerhart Hauptmann
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Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann was a German dramatist and novelist. He is counted among the most important promoters of literary naturalism and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912. Gerhart Hauptmann was born in 1862 in Obersalzbrunn, now known as Szczawno-Zdrój and his parents were the Robert and Marie Hauptmann, who ran a hotel in the area. As a youth, Hauptmann had a reputation of being loose with the truth, beginning in 1868, he attended the village school and then, in 1874, the Realschule in Breslau for which he had only barely passed the qualifying exam. Hauptmann had difficulties adjusting himself to his new surroundings in the city and he lived, along with his brother Carl, in a somewhat run-down student boarding house before finding lodging with a pastor. He also ran into problems with the Prussian-influenced school, above all the strictness of the teachers and the better treatment of his noble classmates. His dislike and numerous illness which kept him from attending class, over time, he came to appreciate Breslau because of the opportunity to visit the theater. In the spring of 1878, Hauptmann left the Realschule to learn agriculture on his uncles farm in Lohnig, after a year and a half, however, he had to break off his training. He was not physically prepared for the work and he had a contracted a lung ailment that troubled him for the next twenty months. After he failed to pass an entry exam for the Prussian Army, Hauptmann entered the sculpture school at the Royal Art. There he met Josef Block who became a lifelong friend, for his brothers wedding, he wrote a short play, Liebesfrühling, that was performed on the night before the wedding. Also at the wedding, he met the sister, Marie Thienemann. After he left Jena, Marie financed a Mediterranean trip, which he undertook with his brother Carl, on the trip, he decided to settle in Rome as a sculptor, however he had little success. His attempt to himself as part of Romes German expatriate community also failed. Hauptmann returned to Germany, disappointed and began a stint at the Royal Academy in Dresden before beginning to study history at Humboldt University of Berlin. While there, he devoted his interests to the rather than to his studies. In 1891 he moved to Schreiberhau in Silesia and it was followed by The Reconciliation, Lonely People and The Weavers, a powerful drama depicting the uprising of the Silesian weavers in 1844 for which he is best known outside of Germany. Hauptmann married Marie Theienemann in Radebeul on May 5,1885, in July, they took their honeymoon to Rügen along with Carl and his wife, Maries sister, Martha
23.
Rabindranath Tagore
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Author of Gitanjali and its profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Sometimes referred to as the Bard of Bengal, Tagores poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial, however, his elegant prose, a Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta with ancestral gentry roots in Jessore, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At the age of sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha, by 1877 he graduated to his first short stories and dramas, published under his real name. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and ardent anti-nationalist, he denounced the British Raj, Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal, Gitanjali, Gora and Ghare-Baire are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems, Indias Jana Gana Mana and Bangladeshs Amar Shonar Bangla, the Sri Lankan national anthem was inspired by his work. The youngest of thirteen surviving children, Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in the Jorasanko mansion in Calcutta to Debendranath Tagore, Tagore was raised mostly by servants, his mother had died in his early childhood and his father travelled widely. The Tagore family was at the forefront of the Bengal renaissance and they hosted the publication of literary magazines, theatre and recitals of Bengali and Western classical music featured there regularly. Tagores father invited several professional Dhrupad musicians to stay in the house, Tagores oldest brother Dwijendranath was a philosopher and poet. Another brother, Satyendranath, was the first Indian appointed to the elite, yet another brother, Jyotirindranath, was a musician, composer, and playwright. His sister Swarnakumari became a novelist, jyotirindranaths wife Kadambari Devi, slightly older than Tagore, was a dear friend and powerful influence. Her abrupt suicide in 1884, soon after he married, left him for years profoundly distraught, Tagore largely avoided classroom schooling and preferred to roam the manor or nearby Bolpur and Panihati, idylls which the family visited. His brother Hemendranath tutored and physically conditioned him—by having him swim the Ganges or trek through hills, by gymnastics and he learned drawing, anatomy, geography and history, literature, mathematics, Sanskrit, and English—his least favourite subject. Tagore loathed formal education—his scholarly travails at the local Presidency College spanned a single day, there Tagore read biographies, studied history, astronomy, modern science, and Sanskrit, and examined the classical poetry of Kālidāsa. Tagore returned to Jorosanko and completed a set of works by 1877. As a joke, he claimed that these were the lost works of a newly discovered 17th-century Vaiṣṇava poet Bhānusiṃha, regional experts accepted them as the lost works of Bhānusiṃha. He debuted in the genre in Bengali with Bhikharini. Published in the year, Sandhya Sangit includes the poem Nirjharer Swapnabhanga
24.
Romain Rolland
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Rolland was born in Clamecy, Nièvre into a family that had both wealthy townspeople and farmers in its lineage. Writing introspectively in his Voyage intérieur, he himself as a representative of an antique species. He would cast these ancestors in Colas Breugnon, accepted to the École normale supérieure in 1886, he first studied philosophy, but his independence of spirit led him to abandon that so as not to submit to the dominant ideology. When he returned to France in 1895, he received his degree with his thesis Les origines du théâtre lyrique moderne. Histoire de l’opéra en Europe avant Lulli et Scarlatti, for the next two decades, he taught at various lycées in Paris before directing the newly established music school École des Hautes Études Sociales from 1902–11. In 1903 he was appointed to the first chair of history at the Sorbonne. His first book was published in 1902, when he was 36 years old, through his advocacy for a peoples theatre, he made a significant contribution towards the democratization of the theatre. As a humanist, he embraced the work of the philosophers of India, Rolland was strongly influenced by the Vedanta philosophy of India, primarily through the works of Swami Vivekananda. A demanding, yet timid, young man, he did not like teaching and he was not indifferent to youth, Jean-Christophe, Olivier and their friends, the heroes of his novels, are young people. But with real-life persons, youths as well as adults, Rolland maintained only a distant relationship and he was first and foremost a writer. Assured that literature would provide him with a modest income, he resigned from the university in 1912, Romain Rolland was a lifelong pacifist. He was one of the few major French writers to retain his pacifist internationalist values and he protested against the first World War in Au-dessus de la mêlée, Above the Battle. In 1924, his book on Gandhi contributed to the Indian nonviolent leaders reputation, in 1932 Rolland was among the first members of the World Committee Against War and Fascism, organized by Willi Münzenberg. Rolland criticized the control Münzenberg assumed over the committee and was against it being based in Berlin, Rolland moved to Villeneuve, on the shores of Lac Léman to devote himself to writing. His life was interrupted by health problems, and by travels to art exhibitions and his voyage to Moscow, on the invitation of Maxim Gorky, was an opportunity to meet Joseph Stalin, whom he considered the greatest man of his time. Rolland served unofficially as ambassador of French artists to the Soviet Union, however, as a pacifist, he was uncomfortable with Stalins brutal repression of the opposition. During Serges imprisonment, Rolland had agreed to handle the publications of Serges writings in France, in 1937, he came back to live in Vézelay, which, in 1940, was occupied by the Germans. During the occupation, he isolated himself in complete solitude, never stopping his work, in 1940, he finished his memoirs
25.
Verner von Heidenstam
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Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam was a Swedish poet, novelist and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1916. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1912 and his poems and prose work are filled with a great joy of life, sometimes imbued with a love of Swedish history and scenery, particularly its physical aspects. He was born in Olshammar, Örebro County on 6 July 1859 to a noble family and he studied paintings in the Academy of Stockholm, but soon left because of ill health. He then traveled extensively in Europe, Africa and the orient and he was at once greeted as a poet of promise on the publication of his first collection of poems, Vallfart och vandringsår. It is a collection of inspired by his experiences in the orient. His love for beauty is also by the long narrative poem Hans Alienus. Dikter and Karolinerna, a series of portraits of King Charles XII of Sweden and his cavaliers. English translations of stories from Karolinerna can be found in the American-Scandinavian Review, May 1914, November 1915. The two volumes of Folkunga Trädet are the inspired, epic story of a clan of Swede chieftains in the Middle Ages, professors Lidforss and Böök also took part. Heidenstams chief contribution was the pamphlet, directed chiefly against Strindberg, heidenstams poetical collection Nya Dikter, published in 1915, deals with philosophical themes, mainly concerning the elevation of man to a better humanity from solitude. He died at his home Övralid on 20 May 1940, works in English translation A King and his Campaigners The Soothsayer Swedens Laureate. Sweden and Visions of Norway, Politics and Culture, 1814-1905, Swedish Literature, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 8, pp. 313–329
26.
Karl Adolph Gjellerup
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Karl Adolph Gjellerup was a Danish poet and novelist who together with his compatriot Henrik Pontoppidan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1917. He belonged to the Modern Break-Through and he occasionally used the pseudonym Epigonos. Gjellerup was the son of a vicar in Zealand who died when his son was three years, Karl Gjellerup was raised then by the uncle of Johannes Fibiger, he grew up in a national and romantic idealistic atmosphere. In the 1870s he broke with his background and at first he became a supporter of the naturalist movement and Georg Brandes, writing audacious novels about free love. Strongly influenced by his origin he left the Brandes line and 1885 he broke totally with the naturalists. As years passed he totally identified with the German Empire, including its war aims 1914-18, some Wagnerian dramas show his growing romanticist interests. An important work is the novel Møllen, a melodrama of love. In his last years he was influenced by Buddhism and Oriental culture. His critically acclaimed work Der Pilger Kamanita/Pilgrimen Kamanita has been called one of the oddest novels written in Danish, in Thailand, which is a Buddhist country, the Thai translation of The Pilgrim Kamanita co-translated by Phraya Anuman Rajadhon was formerly used as part of the school textbooks. Den fuldendtes hustru is a drama, inspired by Dantes Divine Comedy, about Buddhas earthly life as Siddharta, being inhibited in his spiritual efforts by his wife. Rudolph Stens Landpraksis is set in the rural Zealand of Gjellerups youth, das heiligste Tier was Gjellerups last work. Having elements of self-parody, it is regarded as his attempt at humour. It is a peculiar mythological satire in which animals arrive at their own Elysium after death and these include the snake that killed Cleopatra, Odysseus dog Argos, Wisvamitra, the donkey of Jesus and the horses of various historical commanders in field. The assembly select, after discussion, Buddhas horse Kantaka as the holiest of animals, in Denmark, Gjellerups Nobel award was received with little enthusiasm. He had long regarded as a German writer. During various stages of his career, he had made himself unpopular with both the naturalist left surrounding Georg Brandes and the conservative right and his nomination for the Nobel award was, however, supported from Danish side for several times. Because Sweden was neutral during World War I, the prize did not arouse political speculations about partial decision. Today Gjellerup is almost forgotten in Denmark, in spite of this, however, literary historians normally regard him as an honest seeker after truth
27.
Henrik Pontoppidan
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Henrik Pontoppidan was a Danish realist writer who shared with Karl Gjellerup the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917 for his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark. As a writer he was a figure, distancing himself both from the conservative environment in which he was brought up and from his socialist contemporaries. He was the youngest and in ways the most original and influential member of the Modern Break-Through. The first phase of his work constitutes rebellious social criticism, and he was perhaps the first Danish progressive writer to break with an idealised portrayal of farmers. The tales from this era are collected in Landsbybilleder and Fra Hytterne, after this period he increasingly concentrated on psychological and naturalist problems without giving up his social engagement. Pontoppidans 1889 review Messias and 1890 piece Den gamle Adam were anonymously published and triggered a controversy after being denounced as blasphemous, the editor, Ernst Brandes, was fined 300 kroner for Messias in December 1891 and committed suicide in 1892. The three novels which are considered to be Pontoppidan’s main works were written from about 1890 to 1920. In these works he established on his own terms a Danish version of the description of society novel in the tradition of Balzac. Det forjættede Land, describes a fantasist and his dream of being a preacher in the country leads to self-deception. However, at the height of his success, they at last catch up with him, pontoppidans last large novel Mands Himmerig is an almost desperate description of the crisis of a Danish intellectual at the time of the outbreak of World War I. Pontoppidan also wrote short novels and long tales in which he discussed political, psychological and sexual themes. Isbjørnen describes the confrontation between an outspoken vicar from Greenland and his narrow-minded Danish provincial clergymen, mimoser is an ironic-tragic tale about the exaggerated intolerance of unfaithfulness. Nattevagt deals with a courageous and revolutionary artist who is nevertheless a frustrated failure as a husband, Pontoppidan drew on the life of his friend the painter L. A. Ring for the portrait of the artist Thorkild Drehling, Ring considered it a betrayal of trust, Den gamle Adam deals with both men’s fear of women and of sexuality as a whole. Ørneflugt is a commentary on Hans Christian Andersens The Ugly Duckling with the opposite morale. Borgmester Hoeck og Hustru portrays a tragic marriage dominated by the husbands jealousy, a central theme in most of these tales is the difficulties of handling the new tolerance, open-mindedness and democratisation which are introduced by both the transition of society and by literature. Another theme is the conflict between the introverted and closed male nature and the vitality of the woman, behind all this lies the classic naturalist theme of heritage and milieu against which man has to rebel without quite denying their existence. In his later works he sometimes seems to become a mixture of a castigator of society, between 1933 and 1943 Pontoppidan wrote two different versions of his Memoirs, in which he tried to define his own view of his personal development
28.
Carl Spitteler
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Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler was a Swiss poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919 in special appreciation of his epic, Olympian Spring. His work includes both pessimistic and heroic poems and his father was an official of the government, being Federal Secretary of the Treasury from 1849–56. Young Spitteler attended the gymnasium at Basel, having among his teachers philologist Wilhelm Wackernagel, from 1863 he studied law at the University of Zurich. In 1865–1870 he studied theology in the institution, at Heidelberg and Basel, though when a position as pastor was offered him. He had begun to realize his mission as an epic poet, later he worked in Russia as tutor, starting from August 1871, remaining there until 1879. Later he was teacher in Bern and La Neuveville, as well as journalist for the Der Kunstwart. In 1883 Spitteler married Marie op der Hoff, previously his pupil in Neuveville and this 1881 edition was given an extended psychological exegesis by Carl Gustav Jung in his book Psychological Types. Late in life, Spitteler reworked Prometheus and Epimetheus and published it under his true name, in 1882 he published his Extramundana, a collection of poems. He gave up teaching in 1885 and devoted himself to a career in Basel. Now his works began to come in rapid succession, in 1891 there appeared Friedli, der Kalderi, a collection of short stories, in which Spitteler, as he himself says, depicted Russian realism. Literarische Gleichnisse appeared in 1892, and Balladen in 1896, in 1900–1905 Spitteler wrote the powerful allegoric-epic poem, in iambic hexameters, Olympischer Frühling. This work, mixing fantastic, naturalistic, religions and mythological themes, during World War I he opposed the pro-German attitude of the Swiss German-speaking majority, a position put forward in the essay Unser Schweizer Standpunkt. In 1919 he won the Nobel Prize, Spitteler died at Lucerne in 1924. Carl Spittelers estate is archived in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern, in the Zürich Central Library, Carl Jung claimed his idea of the archetype of the Anima was based upon what Spitteler described as My Lady Soul. Musician David Bowie, who described himself as Jungian wrote a song in 1973 entitled Lady Grinning Soul. dichtermuseum. ch/willkommen
29.
Knut Hamsun
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Knut Hamsun was a major Norwegian writer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsuns work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to the subject, perspective and he published more than 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, and some essays. The young Hamsun objected to realism and naturalism and he argued that the main object of modernist literature should be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should describe the whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow. Hamsun is considered the leader of the Neo-Romantic revolt at the turn of the 20th century, with such as Hunger, Mysteries, Pan. His later works—in particular his Nordland novels—were influenced by the Norwegian new realism, portraying life in rural Norway and often employing local dialect, irony. Hamsun is considered to be one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years, isaac Bashevis Singer called Hamsun the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, on August 4,2009, the Knut Hamsun Centre was opened in Hamarøy. Since 1916, several of Hamsuns works have been adapted into motion pictures, Knut Hamsun was born as Knud Pedersen in Lom in the Gudbrandsdal valley of Norway. He was the son of Tora Olsdatter and Peder Pedersen. When he was three, the moved to Hamsund, Hamarøy in Nordland. They were poor and an uncle had invited them to farm his land for him, at nine Knut was separated from his family and lived with his uncle Hans Olsen, who needed help with the post office he ran. Olsen used to beat and starve his nephew, and Hamsun later stated that his chronic nervous difficulties were due to the way his uncle treated him. In 1874 he finally escaped back to Lom, for the five years he did any job for money, he was a store clerk, peddler, shoemakers apprentice, sheriffs assistant. At 17 he became an apprentice, at about the same time he started to write. He asked businessman Erasmus Zahl to give him significant monetary support, Hamsun later used Zahl as a model for the character Mack appearing in his novels Pan, Dreamers, and Benoni and Rosa. He spent several years in America, traveling and working at various jobs, working all those odd jobs paid off, and he published his first book about it, Den Gaadefulde, En Kjærlighedshistorie fra Nordland. In his second novel Bjørger, he attempted to imitate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsons writing style of the Icelandic saga narrative, the melodramatic story follows a poet Bjørger and his love for Laura. This book was published under the pseudonym Knud Pedersen Hamsund and this book later served as the basis for Victoria, En Kærligheds Historie
30.
Anatole France
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Anatole France was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers, ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. Anatole France was also documented to have a brain size just three-quarters the normal weight, France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcels literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Prousts In Search of Lost Time. The son of a bookseller, France spent most of his life around books and was a bibliophile and his fathers bookstore, called the Librairie France, specialized in books and papers on the French Revolution and was frequented by many notable writers and scholars of the day. France studied at the Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school, after several years he secured the position of cataloguer at Bacheline-Deflorenne and at Lemerre. In 1876 he was appointed librarian for the French Senate, Anatole France began his literary career as a poet and a journalist. In 1869, Le Parnasse Contemporain published one of his poems, in 1875, he sat on the committee which was in charge of the third Parnasse Contemporain compilation. As a journalist, from 1867, he wrote articles and notices. He became famous with the novel Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard and its protagonist, skeptical old scholar Sylvester Bonnard, embodied Frances own personality. The novel was praised for its elegant prose and won him a prize from the Académie française, in La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque Anatole France ridiculed belief in the occult, and in Les Opinions de Jérôme Coignard, France captured the atmosphere of the fin de siècle. France was elected to the Académie française in 1896, France took an important part in the Dreyfus affair. He signed Émile Zolas manifesto supporting Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer who had been convicted of espionage. France wrote about the affair in his 1901 novel Monsieur Bergeret and it is a satirical history of France, starting in Medieval times, going on to the writers own time with special attention to the Dreyfus Affair and concluding with a dystopian future. Les dieux ont soif is a novel, set in Paris during the French Revolution, about a true-believing follower of Robespierre and it is a wake-up call against political and ideological fanaticism and explores various other philosophical approaches to the events of the time. La Revolte des Anges is often considered Frances most profound novel, loosley based on the Christian myth of the War in Heaven, it tells the story of Arcade, the guardian angel of Maurice dEsparvieu. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 and he died in 1924 and is buried in the Neuilly-sur-Seine community cemetery near Paris. On 31 May 1922, Frances entire works were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Roman Catholic Church and he regarded this as a distinction. This Index was abolished in 1966, in 1877, Anatole France married Valérie Guérin de Sauville, a granddaughter of Jean-Urbain Guérin a miniaturist who painted Louis XVI, with whom he had a daughter, Suzanne, in 1881
31.
Jacinto Benavente
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Jacinto Benavente y Martínez was one of the foremost Spanish dramatists of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922 for the manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama. Benavente showed a preoccupation with aesthetics and later with ethics, in 1936 Benaventes name became associated with the assassination of the Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca. This happened when the Nationalist newspapers Estampa, El Correo de Andalucia, Benavente died in Aldeaencabo de Escalona at the age of 87. According to many sources, he was homosexual, among his most important works are, El nido ajeno, comedy, three acts. Gente conocida, satirical scenes of life, four acts. La noche del sábado, stage romance, five divisions, Imperia is a ballerina and later prostitute who falls in love with Prince Miguel, rosas de otoño, sentimental comedy, three acts. Los intereses creados, comedy of masks based on the Italian commedia dellarte, Benaventes most famous, señora ama, rural drama, a penetrating psychological study of a woman jealous of her husband. The Unloved Woman, 1913), rural drama, three acts, the basis for the 1921 film The Passion Flower, starring Norma Talmadge. La ciudad alegre y confiada, continuation from Los intereses creados, archived from the original on 4 July 2013
32.
W. B. Yeats
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William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. He was born in Sandymount, Ireland and educated there and in London and he spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeatss debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, from 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, in 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Of Anglo-Irish descent, William Butler Yeats was born at Sandymount in County Dublin and his father, John Butler Yeats, was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier, linen merchant, and well-known painter who died in 1712. Benjamin Yeats, Jerviss grandson and Williams great-great-grandfather, had in 1773 married Mary Butler of a family in County Kildare. Following their marriage, they kept the name Butler in the family name, Mary was a descendant of the Butler of Ormond family from the Neigham Gowran branch of the family. They were descendants of the first Earls of Ormond, by his marriage, Williams father John Yeats was studying law but abandoned his studies to study art at Heatherleys Art School in London. His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from a merchant family in Sligo. Yeats was raised a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, which was at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleons dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty is manifestly true of W. B. Y. Yeatss childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the power-shift away from the minority Protestant Ascendancy, the 1880s saw the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement, the 1890s saw the momentum of nationalism, while the Catholics became prominent around the turn of the century. These developments had an effect on his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his countrys biography. In 1867, the moved to England to aid their father, John. At first the Yeats children were educated at home and their mother entertained them with stories and Irish folktales. John provided an education in geography and chemistry, and took William on natural history explorations of the nearby Slough countryside
33.
George Bernard Shaw
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He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman, Pygmalion and Saint Joan. With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1873, where he established himself as a writer and novelist. By the mid-1880s he was a theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society, Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, 1894s Arms and the Man. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctors Dilemma and Caesar, Shaws expressed views were often contentious, he promoted eugenics and alphabet reform while opposing vaccination and organised religion. He courted unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the First World War as equally culpable and he castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period, and became a citizen of the Irish Free State in 1934, maintaining dual citizenship. He was prolific, finishing during the years a series of often ambitious plays which achieved varying degrees of popular success. Since Shaws death, opinion has varied about his works and he has at times been rated as second only to William Shakespeare among English-language dramatists, analysts recognise his extensive influence on generations of playwrights. The word Shavian has entered the language as encapsulating Shaws ideas, Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, a lower-middle-class part of Dublin. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw and his elder siblings were Lucinda Frances and Elinor Agnes. The Shaw family was of English descent and belonged to the dominant Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, George Carr Shaw and his relatives secured him a sinecure in the civil service, from which he was pensioned off in the early 1850s, thereafter he worked irregularly as a corn merchant. In 1852 he married Bessie Gurly, in the view of Shaws biographer Michael Holroyd she married to escape a tyrannical great-aunt, if, as Holroyd and others surmise, Georges motives were mercenary, then he was disappointed, as Bessie brought him little of her familys money. She came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later described as a life of shabby-genteel poverty. By the time of Shaws birth, his mother had become close to George John Lee, Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father, there is no consensus among Shavian scholars on the likelihood of this. The young Shaw suffered no harshness from his mother, but he recalled that her indifference. He found solace in the music that abounded in the house, Lee was a conductor and teacher of singing, Bessie had a fine mezzo-soprano voice and was much influenced by Lees unorthodox method of vocal production. The Shaws house was filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players
34.
Grazia Deledda
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She was the first Italian woman to receive this honor. Born in Nuoro, Sardinia, into a family, she attended elementary school and then was educated by a private tutor. She started writing at a young age, inspired by the Sardinian peasants. The first novel she wrote and published was Fiori di Sardegna and this novel was published in 1892. She first published pieces in the fashion magazine Lultima moda when it still published works in prose. Nellazzurro, published by Trevisani in 1890, might be considered her first work and her family was not supportive of her desire to write. Her works seemed to focus on portraying harsh realities and difficult lifestyles, combining imaginary and her novels tend to criticize social values and moral norms rather than the people who are victims of such circumstances. Still between prose and poetry are, among the first works, Paesaggi sardi, published by Speirani in 1896 and she had two sons and lived a quiet life occupied by her writing. She was a prolific writer publishing, on average, a novel a year. Cenere was the inspiration for a silent movie with the famous Italian actress Eleonora Duse and it was the only time Duse appeared in film. Deledda received the Nobel Prize in 1926 in Literature after she had been nominated by Henrik Schück and her response in winning the prize was Già. Deledda was very protective of her daily writing routine and her schedule was exactly the same seven days a week, a late breakfast, a few hours of reading, lunch followed by a nap and then, clearly, ending the day with a few hours of writing. Deledda happened to receive the Nobel Prize almost exactly a year after Benito Mussolini dropped the charade of constitutional rule of the favor of Fascism. Mussolini himself wished to give Grazia a portrait of himself, and he signed it with “profound admiration. ”With this string of fame, came a slew of journalists and her beloved pet crow, Checcha was irritated by all the commotion with people coming in and out. “If Checcha has had enough, so have I, ” Deledda was quoted as saying, Deledda continued to write even as she grew older and weaker. La Casa del Poeta and Sole dEstate are two of the collections of stories she wrote during this time. She showcased her optimistic view of even as she suffered from painful illnesses. She believed that life was beautiful and serene, unaltered by personal suffering, man and her later works show how mankind and faith in God are beautiful things
35.
Henri Bergson
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Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century and after WWII in continental philosophy. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism. He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas, in 1930 France awarded him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Legion dhonneur. Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier in 1859 and his father, the pianist Michał Bergson, was of a Polish Jewish background. His great-grandmother, Temerl Bergson, was a well-known patroness and benefactor of Polish Jewry and his mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous Jewish entrepreneurial family of Polish descent, Henri Bergsons great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski, King of Poland from 1764 to 1795. Henri Bergsons family lived in London for a few years after his birth, before he was nine, his parents settled in France, Henri becoming a naturalized French citizen. Henri Bergson married Louise Neuberger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, Henri and Louise Bergson had a daughter, Jeanne, born deaf in 1896. Bergsons sister, Mina Bergson, married the English occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and he then replaced Gabriel Tarde in the Chair of Modern Philosophy, which he held until 1920. The public attended his open courses in large numbers, Bergson attended the Lycée Fontanes in Paris from 1868 to 1878. He had previously received a Jewish religious education, between 14 and 16, however, he lost his faith. While at the lycée Bergson won a prize for his work and another, in 1877 when he was eighteen. His solution was published the year in Annales de Mathématiques. It was his first published work, after some hesitation as to whether his career should lie in the sphere of the sciences or that of the humanities, he decided in favour of the latter, to the dismay of his teachers. When he was nineteen, he entered the École Normale Supérieure, during this period, he read Herbert Spencer. He obtained there the degree of licence ès lettres, and this was followed by that of agrégation de philosophie in 1881 from the University of Paris, the same year he received a teaching appointment at the lycée in Angers, the ancient capital of Anjou. Two years later he settled at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, while teaching and lecturing in this part of his country, Bergson found time for private study and original work. He crafted his dissertation Time and Free Will, which was submitted, along with a short Latin thesis on Aristotle, the work was published in the same year by Félix Alcan
36.
Sigrid Undset
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Sigrid Undset was a Norwegian novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. Undset was born in Kalundborg, Denmark, but her family moved to Norway when she was two years old, in 1924, she converted to Catholicism. She fled Norway for the United States in 1940 because of her opposition to Nazi Germany and the German invasion and occupation of Norway, but returned after World War II ended in 1945. Her best-known work is Kristin Lavransdatter, a trilogy about life in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages and its three volumes were published between 1920 and 1922. Sigrid Undset was born on 20 May 1882 in the town of Kalundborg, Denmark, at the childhood home of her mother. Undset was the eldest of three daughters and she and her family moved to Norway when she was two. She grew up in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, when she was only 11 years old, her father, the Norwegian archaeologist Ingvald Martin Undset, died at the age of 40 after a long illness. She joined the Norwegian Authors Union in 1907 and from 1933 through 1935 headed its Literary Council, while employed at office work, Undset wrote and studied. She was 16 years old when she made her first attempt at writing a set in the Nordic Middle Ages. The manuscript, a novel set in medieval Denmark, was ready by the time she was 22. It was turned down by the publishing house, nonetheless, two years later, she completed another manuscript, much less voluminous than the first at only 80 pages. She had put aside the Middle Ages and had produced a realistic description of a woman with a middle-class background in contemporary Kristiania. This book was refused by the publishers at first but it was subsequently accepted. The title was Fru Marta Oulie, and the opening sentence scandalised readers, thus, at the age of 25, Undset made her literary debut with a short realistic novel on adultery, set against a contemporary background. It created a stir, and she found herself ranked as a young author in Norway. During the years up to 1919, Undset published a number of set in contemporary Kristiania. Her contemporary novels of the period 1907–1918 are about the city and they are stories of working people, of trivial family destinies, of the relationship between parents and children. Her main subjects are women and their love, or, as she herself put it—in her typically curt and ironic manner—the immoral kind
37.
Thomas Mann
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Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and his analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in his first novel and his older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland, when World War II broke out in 1939, he moved to the United States, returning to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur. Manns work influenced many authors, including Heinrich Böll, Joseph Heller, Yukio Mishima. Paul Thomas Mann was born to a family in Lübeck. His mother was Roman Catholic but Mann was baptised into his fathers Lutheran religion, Manns father died in 1891 and his trading firm was liquidated. The family subsequently moved to Munich, Mann lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933, with the exception of a year in Palestrina, Italy, with his novelist elder brother Heinrich. Thomas worked with the South German Fire Insurance Company in 1894-95 and his career as a writer began when he wrote for Simplicissimus. Manns first short story, Little Mr Friedemann, was published in 1898, in 1905, Mann married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a wealthy, secular Jewish industrialist family. She later joined the Lutheran church, today the cottage is a cultural center dedicated to him, with a small memorial exhibition. In 1933, while traveling in the South of France, Mann heard from Klaus and Erika in Munich, the family emigrated to Küsnacht, near Zurich, Switzerland but received Czechoslovak citizenship and a passport in 1936. After Nazi Germany took over Czechoslovakia, he emigrated to the United States in 1939. In 1942, the Mann family moved to 1550 San Remo Drive in the Pacific Palisades suburb of Los Angeles, on 23 June 1944 Thomas Mann was naturalized as a citizen of the United States. The Manns lived in Los Angeles until 1952, the outbreak of World War II on 1 September 1939, prompted Mann to offer anti-Nazi speeches to the German people via the BBC. In October 1940 he began monthly broadcasts, recorded in the U. S. and flown to London, in these eight-minute addresses, Mann condemned Hitler and his paladins as crude philistines completely out of touch with European culture. In one noted speech he said, The war is horrible, Mann was one of the few publicly active opponents of Nazism among German expatriates in the U. S
38.
Sinclair Lewis
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Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars and he is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H. L. Mencken wrote of him, there was ever a novelist among us with a call to the trade. It is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds and he has been honored by the U. S. Postal Service with a postage stamp in the Great Americans series. Born February 7,1885, in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Sinclair Lewis began reading books at a young age and he had two siblings, Fred and Claude. His father, Edwin J. Lewis, was a physician, Lewiss mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891. The following year, Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis apparently enjoyed, throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewis—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat pop-eyed—had trouble gaining friends and pined after various local girls. At the age of 13 he unsuccessfully ran away from home, Lewis was also nonreligious and an atheist. In late 1902 Lewis left home for a year at Oberlin Academy to qualify for acceptance by Yale University, while at Oberlin, he developed a religious enthusiasm that waxed and waned for much of his remaining teenage years. Lewiss unprepossessing looks, fresh country manners and seemingly self-important loquacity made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and he did initiate a few relatively long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer. Lewiss earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale Courant, after graduation Lewis moved from job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, write fiction for publication and to chase away boredom. While working for newspapers and publishing houses, he developed a facility for turning out shallow and he also earned money by selling plots to Jack London, including one for the latters unfinished novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. Lewiss first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham. Sinclair Lewiss first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn, The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk, A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life and The Job. That same year saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents, A Story for Lovers. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919, in 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger, an editor at Vogue magazine. They had one son, Wells Lewis, named after British author H. G. Wells, Wells Lewis was killed in action while serving in the U. S. Army in World War II during the rescue of the Lost Battalion in the Forêt de Champ in France. On May 14,1928, he married Dorothy Thompson, a newspaper columnist
39.
Erik Axel Karlfeldt
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It has been rumored that he had been offered, but declined, the award already in 1919. Karlfeldt was born into a family in Karlbo, in the province of Dalarna. Initially, his name was Erik Axel Eriksson, but he assumed his new name in 1889, wanting to distance himself from his father, after completing his studies, he held a position at the Royal Library of Sweden, in Stockholm, for five years. In 1904 Karlfeldt was elected a member of the Swedish Academy, in 1905 he was elected a member of the Nobel Institute of the Academy, and, in 1907, of the Nobel Committee. In 1912 he was elected permanent secretary of the Academy, a position he held until his death, uppsala University, Karlfeldts alma mater, awarded him the title of Doctor honoris causae in 1917. Modern Swedish Poetry Part 1 – Arcadia Borealis – The North, – Biography at the Nobel e-Museum Short biography at nobel-winners. com Karlfeldts collected works and a facsimile of a 1956 edition, both at Project Runeberg Petri Liukkonen. Archived from the original on 4 July 2013
40.
John Galsworthy
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John Galsworthy OM was an English novelist and playwright. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. Galsworthy was born at what is now known as Galsworthy House on Kingston Hill in Surrey, England and he attended Harrow and New College, Oxford, after which he trained as a barrister and was called to the bar in 1890. However, he was not keen to begin practising law and instead travelled abroad to look after the shipping business. During these travels he met Joseph Conrad, then the first mate of a sailing-ship moored in the harbour of Adelaide, Australia, in 1895 Galsworthy began an affair with Ada Nemesis Pearson Cooper, the wife of his cousin Major Arthur Galsworthy. After her divorce ten years later, they were married on 23 September 1905, before their marriage, they often stayed clandestinely in a farmhouse called Wingstone in the village of Manaton on Dartmoor, Devon. In 1908 Galsworthy took a lease on part of the building. From the Four Winds, a collection of stories, was Galsworthys first published work in 1897. His first full-length novel, Jocelyn, was published in an edition of 750 under the name of John Sinjohn – he later refused to have it republished, although he continued writing both plays and novels, it was as a playwright that he was mainly appreciated at the time. Along with those of writers of the period, such as George Bernard Shaw, his plays addressed the class system and other social issues. He is now far better known for his novels, particularly The Forsyte Saga, his trilogy about the eponymous family and these books, as with many of his other works, deal with social class, and upper-middle class lives in particular. Although sympathetic to his characters, he highlights their insular, snobbish and he is viewed as one of the first writers of the Edwardian era who challenged some of the ideals of society depicted in the preceding literature of Victorian England. The depiction of a woman in an unhappy marriage furnishes another recurring theme in his work, the character of Irene in The Forsyte Saga is drawn from Ada Pearson, though her previous marriage was not as miserable as that of the character. Through his writings Galsworthy campaigned for a variety of causes, including prison reform, womens rights, and animal welfare and he was too ill to attend the Nobel awards ceremony and died six weeks later. Galsworthy lived for the seven years of his life at Bury in West Sussex. He died from a brain tumour at his London home, Grove Lodge, the popularity of his fiction waned quickly after his death but the hugely successful television adaptation of The Forsyte Saga in 1967 renewed interest in his work. A number of John Galsworthys letters and papers are held at the University of Birmingham Special Collections, in 2007, Kingston University opened a new building named in recognition of his local birth. Galsworthy Road in Kingston, the location of Kingston Hospital, is named for him
41.
Ivan Bunin
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Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was noted for the artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose. The texture of his poems and stories, sometimes referred to as Bunin brocade, is considered to be one of the richest in the language. Ivan Bunin was born on his estate in Voronezh province in Central Russia. He had two sisters, Masha and Nadya and two elder brothers, Yuly and Yevgeny. Having come from a line of rural gentry with a distinguished ancestry including Polish roots, Bunin was especially proud that poets Anna Bunina. The Bunins are direct ancestors of Simeon Bunkovsky, a nobleman who came from Poland to the court of the Great Prince Vasily Vasilyevich, he wrote in 1915, quoting the Russian gentrys Armorial Book. Chubarovs, according to Bunin, knew little about themselves except that their ancestors were landowners in Kostromskaya, Moskovskaya, Orlovskya and Tambovskaya Guberniyas. As for me, from early childhood I was such a libertine as to be totally indifferent both to my own blood and to the loss of whatever might have been connected to it. Ivan Bunins early childhood, spent in Butyrky Khutor and later in Ozerky, was a happy one, before the Crimean War hed never even known the taste of wine, on return he became a heavy drinker, although never a typical alcoholic, he wrote. It was Lyudmila Alexandrovna who introduced her son to the world of Russian folklore, elder brothers Yuly and Yevgeny showed great interest in mathematics and painting respectively, his mother said later, yet, in their mothers words, Vanya has been different from the moment of birth. None of the others had a soul like his, young Bunins susceptibility and keenness to the nuances of nature were extraordinary. Bunins experiences of life had a profound impact on his writing. Later it was university-educated Yuly Bunin who taught his younger brother psychology, philosophy and it was Yuly who encouraged Ivan to read the Russian classics and to write himself. Until 1920 Yuly was the latters closest friend and mentor, I had a passion for painting, which, I think, shows in my writings. I wrote both poetry and prose fairly early and my works were published from an early date, wrote Bunin in his short autobiography. By the end of the 1870s, the Bunins, plagued by the habits of the head of the family, had lost most of their wealth. In May 1887 Bunin published his first poem Village Paupers in the Saint Petersburg literary magazine Rodina, in 1891 his first short story Country Sketch appeared in Nikolay Mikhaylovsky-edited journal Russkoye Bogatstvo
42.
Luigi Pirandello
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Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre, Pirandellos works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandellos tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd, Pirandello was born into an upper-class family in a village with the curious name of u Càvusu, a poor suburb of Girgenti. Both families, the Pirandellos and the Ricci Gramittos, were ferociously anti-Bourbon and actively participated in the struggle for unification, Pirandello would eventually assimilate this sense of betrayal and resentment and express it in several of his poems and in his novel The Old and the Young. It is also probable that this climate of disillusion inculcated in the young Luigi the sense of disproportion between ideals and reality which is recognizable in his essay on humorism, by the age of twelve he had already written his first tragedy. At the insistence of his father, he was registered at a school but eventually switched to the study of the humanities at the ginnasio. In 1880, the Pirandello family moved to Palermo and it was here, in the capital of Sicily, that Luigi completed his high school education. He also began reading omnivorously, focusing, above all, on 19th-century Italian poets such as Giosuè Carducci and he then started writing his first poems and fell in love with his cousin Lina. During this period the first signs of serious contrast between Luigi and his father began to develop, Luigi had discovered some notes revealing the existence of Stefanos extramarital relations. This later expressed itself, after her death, in the pages of the novella Colloqui con i personaggi in 1915. His romantic feelings for his cousin, initially looked upon with disfavour, were taken very seriously by Linas family. They demanded that Luigi abandon his studies and dedicate himself to the business so that he could immediately marry her. In 1886, during a vacation from school, Luigi went to visit the mines of Porto Empedocle. The marriage, which seemed imminent, was postponed, Pirandello then registered at the University of Palermo in the departments of Law and of Letters. The campus at Palermo, and above all the Department of Law, was the centre in those years of the vast movement which would evolve into the Fasci Siciliani. In 1887, having chosen the Department of Letters, he moved to Rome in order to continue his studies. When I arrived in Rome it was raining hard, it was time and I felt like my heart was being crushed. The desperate laugh, the manifestation of revenge for the disappointment undergone, inspired the bitter verses of his first collection of poems
43.
Eugene O'Neill
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Eugene Gladstone ONeill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. ONeills plays were among the first to include speeches in American vernacular and they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. Of his very few comedies, only one is well-known, nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism. ONeill was born in a hotel, the Barrett House, at Broadway and 43rd Street, a commemorative plaque was first dedicated there in 1957. The site is now occupied by 1500 Broadway, which offices, retail. He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James ONeill and Mary Ellen Quinlan and his father suffered from alcoholism, his mother from an addiction to morphine, prescribed to relieve the pains of the difficult birth of her third son, Eugene. ONeill spent his summers at the Monte Cristo Cottage in New London and he attended Princeton University for one year. Accounts vary as to why he left, ONeill spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from depression and alcoholism. Despite this, he had a love for the sea and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays. ONeill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World, ONeills parents and elder brother Jamie died within three years of one another, not long after he had begun to make his mark in the theater. After his experience in 1912–13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis, ONeill had previously been employed by the New London Telegraph, writing poetry as well as reporting. In the fall of 1914, he entered Harvard University to attend a course in dramatic technique given by Professor George Baker and he left after one year and did not complete the course. During the 1910s ONeill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, ONeill also had a brief romantic relationship with Reeds wife, writer Louise Bryant. ONeill was portrayed by Jack Nicholson in the 1981 film Reds and his involvement with the Provincetown Players began in mid-1916. ONeill is said to have arrived for the summer in Provincetown with a full of plays. He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished, the Provincetown Players performed many of ONeills early works in their theaters both in Provincetown and on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Some of these early plays began downtown and then moved to Broadway, ONeills first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920 and his best-known plays include Anna Christie, Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, and his only well-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness
44.
Roger Martin du Gard
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Roger Martin du Gard was a French novelist, winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature. Six parts of the novel were published between 1922 and 1929, after abandoning a seventh volume in manuscript, he published two more volumes in 1936 and 1940. Martin du Gard wrote several novels, including Jean Barois. During World War II, he resided in Nice, where he prepared a novel which remained unfinished at his death and it was posthumously published in 1983. His other works include plays and a memoir of André Gide, Roger Martin du Gard died in 1958 and was buried in the Cimiez Monastery Cemetery in Cimiez, a suburb of the city of Nice, France. Jean Barois Les Thibault Vieille France Notes sur André Gide Souvenirs du lieutenant-colonel de Maumort Claude Sicard, Les années dapprentissage littéraire, Champion,1976. Archived from the original on 4 July 2013
45.
Pearl S. Buck
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Pearl Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang and her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and she was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Originally named Comfort by her parents, Pearl Sydenstricker was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, to Caroline Stulting and her parents, Southern Presbyterian missionaries, traveled to China soon after their marriage on July 8,1880, but returned to the United States for Pearls birth. When Pearl was five months old, the arrived in China, first in Huaian and then in 1896 moved to Zhenjiang. The Boxer Uprising greatly affected the family, their Chinese friends deserted them and her father, convinced that no Chinese could wish him harm, stayed behind as the rest of the family went to Shanghai for safety. A few years later, Pearl was enrolled in Miss Jewells School there and she also read voraciously, especially, in spite of her fathers disapproval, the novels of Charles Dickens, which she later said she read through once a year for the rest of her life. In 1911, Pearl left China to attend Randolph-Macon Womans College in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the United States, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1914 and a member of Kappa Delta Sorority. Although she had not intended to return to China, much less become a missionary, from 1914 to 1932, she served as a Presbyterian missionary, but her views later became highly controversial during the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy, leading to her resignation. In 1914, Pearl returned to China and she married an agricultural economist missionary, John Lossing Buck, on May 13,1917, and they moved to Suzhou, Anhui Province, a small town on the Huai River. This region she describes in her books The Good Earth and Sons, from 1920 to 1933, the Bucks made their home in Nanjing, on the campus of the University of Nanking, where they both had teaching positions. She taught English literature at the private, church-run University of Nanking, Ginling College, in 1920, the Bucks had a daughter, Carol, afflicted with phenylketonuria. In 1921, Bucks mother died of a disease, sprue. In 1924, they left China for John Bucks year of sabbatical and returned to the United States for a short time, in 1925, the Bucks adopted Janice. That autumn, they returned to China, the tragedies and dislocations that Buck suffered in the 1920s reached a climax in March 1927, during the Nanking Incident. In a confused battle involving elements of Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalist troops, Communist forces, since her father Absalom insisted, as he had in 1900 in the face of the Boxers, the family decided to stay in Nanjing until the battle reached the city. When violence broke out, a poor Chinese family invited them to hide in their hut while the house was looted. The family spent a day terrified and in hiding, after which they were rescued by American gunboats and they traveled to Shanghai and then sailed to Japan, where they stayed for a year, after which they moved back to Nanjing
46.
Johannes V. Jensen
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Johannes Vilhelm Jensen was a Danish author, often considered the first great Danish writer of the 20th century. One of his sisters, Thit Jensen, was also a writer and a very vocal. He was born in Farsø, a village in North Jutland, Denmark, as the son of a veterinary surgeon, while studying medicine at the University of Copenhagen he worked as a writer to fund his studies. After three years of studying he chose to change careers and devote himself fully to literature, the first phase of his work as an author was influenced by fin-de-siècle pessimism. His career began with the publication of Himmerland Stories, comprising a series of set in the part of Denmark where he was born. During 1900 and 1901 he wrote his first masterpiece, Kongens Fald, literary critic Martin Seymour-Smith said it is an indictment of Danish indecision and lack of vitality, which Jensen saw as a national disease. Apart from this aspect of it, it is a study of sixteenth-century people. In 1906 Jensen created his greatest literary achievement, the collection of verses Digte 1906 and he also wrote poetry, a few plays, and many essays, chiefly on anthropology and the philosophy of evolution. He developed his theories of evolution in a cycle of six novels, Den lange rejse, translated into English as The Long Journey and this is often considered his main work in prose, a daring and often impressive attempt to create a Darwinian alternative to the Biblical Genesis myth. In this work we see the development of mankind from the Ice Age to the times of Columbus, focusing on pioneering individuals. Like his compatriot Hans Christian Andersen, he travelled extensively, a trip to the United States inspired a poem of his, Paa Memphis Station, walt Whitman was among the writers who influenced Jensen. Jensens most popular works were all completed before 1920, a year which also marks his initiation of the Museumcentre Aars in the town of Aars in Himmerland. After this he concentrated on ambitious biological and zoological studies in an effort to create an ethical system based upon Darwinian ideas. He also hoped to renew classical poetry, for many years he worked in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper. Jensen was a figure in Danish cultural life. He was a reckless polemicist and his often dubious racial theories have damaged his reputation, however, he never showed any Fascist leanings. His direct influence was felt as late as the 1960s, without being a Danish answer to Kipling, Hamsun or Sandburg, he bears comparison to all three authors. He combines the outlook of the writer with the view of the modern academic and scientific observer
47.
Gabriela Mistral
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Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and humanist. Her portrait also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note, Mistral was born in Vicuña, Chile, but was raised in the small Andean village of Montegrande, where she attended a primary school taught by her older sister, Emelina Molina. She respected her sister greatly, despite the financial problems that Emelina brought her in later years. Her father, Juan Gerónimo Godoy Villanueva, was also a schoolteacher and he abandoned the family before she was three years old, and died, long since estranged from the family, in 1911. Throughout her early years she was never far from poverty, by age fifteen, she was supporting herself and her mother, Petronila Alcayaga, a seamstress, by working as a teachers aide in the seaside town of Compañia Baja, near La Serena, Chile. Probably in about 1906, while working as a teacher, Mistral met Romelio Ureta, a railway worker, who killed himself in 1909. The profound effects of death were already in the work, writing about his suicide led the poet to consider death. While Mistral had passionate friendships with men and women. She had been using the pen name Gabriela Mistral since June 1908 for much of her writing, after winning the Juegos Florales she infrequently used her given name of Lucila Godoy for her publications. Mistrals meteoric rise in Chiles national school system plays out against the politics of Chile in the first two decades of the 20th century. In her adolescence, the need for teachers was so great, and the number of trained teachers was so small, especially in the rural areas, the poet was able to rise from one post to another because of her publications in local and national newspapers and magazines. Her willingness to move was also a factor, between the years 1906 and 1912 she had taught, successively, in three schools near La Serena, then in Barrancas, then Traiguén in 1910, and in Antofagasta in the desert north, in 1911. By 1912 she had moved to work in a liceo, or high school, in Los Andes, in 1918 Pedro Aguirre Cerda, then Minister of Education, and a future president of Chile, promoted her appointment to direct a liceo in Punta Arenas. He had her join in the plan to reform libraries and schools. That year she published Desolación in New York, which promoted the international acclaim she had already been receiving thanks to her journalism. A year later she published Lecturas para Mujeres, a text in prose and verse that celebrates Latin America from the broad, following almost two years in Mexico she traveled from Laredo, Texas to Washington D. C. In early 1925 she returned to Chile, where she retired from the nations education system. The University of Chile had granted her the title of Spanish Professor in 1923
48.
Hermann Hesse
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Hermann Karl Hesse was a German-born Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individuals search for authenticity, self-knowledge, in 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hermann Karl Hesse was born on 2 July 1877 in the Black Forest town of Calw in Württemberg and his grandparents served in India at a mission under the auspices of the Basel Mission, a Protestant Christian missionary society. Hesses mother, Marie Gundert, was born at such a mission in India in 1842, in describing her own childhood, she said, A happy child I was not. As was usual among missionaries at the time, she was left behind in Europe at the age of four when her parents returned to India, Hesses father, Johannes Hesse, the son of a doctor, was born in 1847 in the Estonian town of Paide. Johannes Hesse belonged to the German minority in the Russian-ruled Baltic region, Hermann had five siblings, but two of them died in infancy. In 1873, the Hesse family moved to Calw, where Johannes worked for the Calwer Verlagsverein, maries father, Hermann Gundert, managed the publishing house at the time, and Johannes Hesse succeeded him in 1893. Hesse grew up in a Swabian Pietist household, with the Pietist tendency to insulate believers into small, furthermore, Hesse described his fathers Baltic German heritage as an important and potent fact of his developing identity. His father, Hesse stated, always seemed like a polite, very foreign, lonely. His fathers tales from Estonia instilled a sense of religion in young Hermann. An exceedingly cheerful, and, for all its Christianity, a merry world and we wished for nothing so longingly as to be allowed to see this Estonia. Where life was so paradisiacal, so colorful and happy, from childhood, Hesse appeared headstrong and hard for his family to handle. In a letter to her husband, Hermanns mother Marie wrote, The little fellow has a life in him, a strength, a powerful will, and, for his four years of age. How can he express all that, Hesse showed signs of serious depression as early as his first year at school. The fictional town of Gerbersau is pseudonymous for Calw, imitating the real name of the town of Hirsau. It is derived from the German words gerber, meaning tanner, Calw had a centuries-old leather-working industry, and during Hesses childhood the tanneries influence on the town was still very much in evidence. Hesses favorite place in Calw was the St. Nicholas-Bridge, which is why the Hesse monument was built there in 2002, all this instilled a sense in Hermann Hesse that he was a citizen of the world. His family background became, he noted, the basis of an isolation, young Hesse shared a love of music with his mother
49.
T. S. Eliot
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Thomas Stearns Eliot OM was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and one of the twentieth centurys major poets. He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working and he eventually became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, renouncing his American citizenship. Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and it was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets. He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry. The Eliots were a Boston family with roots in Old and New England, Thomas Eliots paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. Eliot was the last of six surviving children, his parents were both 44 years old when he was born, Eliot was born at 2635 Locust St. property owned by his grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot. His four sisters were between 11 and 19 years older, his brother was eight years older, known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns. Eliots childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors, firstly, he had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in physical activities. As he was isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the boy immediately became obsessed with books and was absorbed in tales depicting savages. In his memoir of Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living. Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision, I feel that there is something in having passed ones childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been here, rather than in Boston, or New York. From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French and he began to write poetry when he was fourteen under the influence of Edward Fitzgeralds Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them and his first published poem, A Fable For Feasters, was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905. Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript and he also published three short stories in 1905, Birds of Prey, A Tale of a Whale and The Man Who Was King. The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration of Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 Worlds Fair of St. Louis, such a link with primitive people importantly antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard
50.
William Faulkner
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William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and he is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally, two of his works, A Fable and his last novel The Reivers, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Absalom, Absalom. is often included on similar lists, Faulkner was born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler. He had three brothers, Murry Charles Jack Falkner, author John Faulkner, and Dean Swift Falkner. Soon after his first birthday, his family moved to Ripley, Mississippi, Murry hoped to inherit the railroad from his father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner, but John had little confidence in Murrys ability to run a business and sold it for $75,000. Following the sale of the business, Murry became disappointed and planned a new start for his family by moving to Texas. Maud, however, disagreed with this proposition, and it was decided that they would move to Oxford, Mississippi, where Murrys father owned several businesses, making it easy for Murry to find work. Thus, four days prior to Williams fifth birthday on September 21,1902, the Falkner family settled in Oxford and his family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia Butler, and Caroline Callie Barr crucially influenced the development of Faulkners artistic imagination. Both his mother and grandmother were avid readers and also painters and photographers, while Murry enjoyed the outdoors and encouraged his sons to hunt, track, and fish, Maud valued education and took pleasure in reading and going to church. She taught her sons to read before sending them to school and exposed them to classics such as Charles Dickens. Faulkners lifelong education by Callie Barr is central to his novels preoccupations with the politics of sexuality, as a schoolchild, Faulkner had much success early on. He excelled in the first grade, skipped the second, and continued doing well through the third, however, beginning somewhere in the fourth and fifth grades of his schooling, Faulkner became a much more quiet and withdrawn child. He began to play hooky occasionally and became indifferent to his schoolwork. The decline of his performance in school continued, and Faulkner wound up repeating the eleventh, and then final grade, Faulkner also spent much of his boyhood listening to stories told to him by his elders. These included war stories shared by the old men of Oxford and stories told by Barr of the Civil War, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Falkner family. Faulkners grandfather would tell him of the exploits of Williams great-grandfather, after whom he was named, William Clark Falkner, who was a successful businessman, writer. Telling stories about William Clark Falkner, whom the family called Old Colonel, had become something of a family pastime when Faulkner was a boy
pronunciation (help·info)) (16 September 1888 – 3 June 1964) was one of the most famous Finnish writers and in 1939 became the first Finnish writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature "for his deep understanding of his country's peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature".[1]
