Cecil Day-Lewis
Cecil Day-Lewis writing as C. Day-Lewis, was an Anglo-Irish poet and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death in 1972, he wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake. During World War II, Day-Lewis worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information for the UK government, served in the Musbury branch of the British Home Guard, he is the father of Sir Daniel Day-Lewis, a noted actor, Tamasin Day-Lewis, a documentary filmmaker and television chef. Day-Lewis was born in 1904 in Athy/Stradbally border, Queen's County, Ireland, he was the son of Frank Day-Lewis, Church of Ireland Rector of that parish, Kathleen Blake. Some of his family were from England, his father took the surname "Day-Lewis" as a combination of his own birth father's and adoptive father's surnames. In his autobiography The Buried Day, Day-Lewis wrote, "As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname – a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results". After the death of his mother in 1906, when he was two years old, Cecil was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in County Wexford.
He was educated at Wadham College, Oxford. In Oxford, Day-Lewis became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927, his first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil, appeared in 1925. In 1928 Day-Lewis married Constance Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne master. Day-Lewis worked as a schoolmaster in three schools, including Larchfield School, Scotland. During the 1940s he had a troubled love affair with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, his first marriage was dissolved in 1951, he married actress Jill Balcon, daughter of Michael Balcon. During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, an institution satirised by George Orwell in his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, but based on Orwell's experience of the BBC. During the Second World War his work was now no longer so influenced by Auden and he was developing a more traditional style of lyricism; some critics believe that he reached his full stature as a poet in Word Over All, when he distanced himself from Auden.
After the war he joined the publisher Windus as a director and senior editor. In 1946, Day-Lewis was a lecturer at Cambridge University, publishing his lectures in The Poetic Image. Day-Lewis was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by George VI in his 1950 Birthday Honours, he taught poetry at Oxford, where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951 to 1956. During 1962–1963, he was the Norton Professor at Harvard University. Day-Lewis was appointed Poet Laureate in succession to John Masefield. Day-Lewis was chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London. Cecil Day-Lewis died from pancreatic cancer on 22 May 1972, aged 68, at Lemmons, the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, where he and his family were staying; as a great admirer of Thomas Hardy, he arranged to be buried near the author's grave at St Michael's Church in Stinsford, Dorset.
Day-Lewis's epitaph, taken from his poem "Is it Far to Go?", reads: Day-Lewis fathered four children. His first two children, with Constance Mary King, were Sean Day-Lewis, a TV critic and writer, Nicholas Day-Lewis, who became an engineer, his children with Balcon were Tamasin Day-Lewis, a television chef and food critic, Daniel Day-Lewis, who became an award-winning actor. Sean Day-Lewis published a biography of his father, C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life. Daniel Day-Lewis donated his father’s archive to the Bodleian library. In 1935, Day-Lewis decided to increase his income from poetry by writing a detective novel, A Question of Proof under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, he created Nigel Strangeways, an amateur investigator and gentleman detective who, as the nephew of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, has the same access to, good relations with, official crime investigation bodies as those enjoyed by other fictional sleuths such as Ellery Queen, Philo Vance and Lord Peter Wimsey.
He published nineteen more crime novels. From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing. Four of the Blake novels – A Tangled Web, Penknife in My Heart, The Deadly Joker, The Private Wound – do not feature Strangeways. Minute for Murder is set against the background of Day-Lewis's Second World War experiences in the Ministry of Information. Head of a Traveller features as a principal character a well-known poet and suffering writer's block, whose best poetic days are long behind him. Readers and critics have speculated whether the author is describing himself, one of his colleagues, or has invented the character. In his youth and during the disruption and suffering of the Great Depression, Day-Lewis adopted communist views, becoming a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1935 to 1938, his early poetry was marked by a preoccupation with social themes. In 1937 he edited The Mind in Chains: the Cultural Revolution. In the introduction, he sup
The Mint (book)
The Mint is a book written by T. E. Lawrence and published posthumously, it describes his time in the Royal Air Force, despite having held senior rank in the army, as an ordinary aircraftman, under an assumed name, 352087 Ross. The book is notable, despite flaws noted by critics, for its sharp observation, for the insight it gives into Lawrence himself, for the censorship issues around its publication; the novelist E. M. Forster corresponded with Lawrence, in 1929 writing two detailed letters to him criticising The Mint, which he liked, advising on how it might be improved; the Mint concerns the period following the First World War when Lawrence decided to disappear from public view. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force under an assumed name; the book is a observed autobiographical account of his experiences in the RAF. The book covers his initial training at RAF Uxbridge in 1922 and a part of his service at RAF Cranwell, 1925–26; the book is divided into three parts: Part I:'The Raw Material', with 29 chapters.
The book's title likens the RAF training to a coin factory, with the men as'The Raw Material' and life in the training camp as being'In the Mill' that stamps the coins out of the blank metal. Lawrence appears to have wanted to have his past life and fame obliterated, when he wrote to Edward Garnett: "The Air Force is not a man-crushing humiliating slavery, all its days. There is sun & decent treatment, a real measure of happiness, to those who do not look forward or back." Lawrence stated. Lawrence's brother took the further precaution of substituting "new names" in the expurgated edition for characters in A/c Ross's squad "in all passages which might have caused embarrassment or distress". However, A. W. Lawrence notes that his brother had "intended, in fact, to print a limited edition himself on a hand-press, had obtained enough copies for its frontispiece of a reproduction.. of a portrait drawing by Augustus John, now in the Ashmolean Museum."Lawrence himself wrote "I shall bequeath you my notes on life in the recruits camp of the R.
A. F, they will disappoint you."In fact a limited edition of no more than 50 copies was published to protect United States copyright in 1936 by Doubleday and Company in Garden City, New York around November, under Lawrence's pseudonym. Only 10 of these were for general sale and priced at a prohibitive US$500,000 each; when The Mint achieved general publication in 1955 there were two editions, the expurgated edition and a limited edition containing the full uncensored text. The delay in publication and sensitivity surrounding the full text concerned its barrack-room language and frank references to bodily functions, which some people might still find offensive. However, social mores have changed since the 1950s with the result that the original text is now available. For example, Chapter 19:'SHIT-CART' was published under the clipped and obscure title' -CART'; however any doubt as to the missing word is soon resolved as the chapter begins: "At eight in the morning four of us stood about the Transport Yard feeling out of sorts with life.
Just our luck to have clicked'-cart on a Monday, the double-load day."A few lines later,'352087 A/c Ross' treats his readers to an rougher word in common RAF usage: "Hillingdon House looked forlorn, because of its black windows, behind whose wideness the clerks lounged with their first cups of tea.'Jammy,' sneered Sailor enviously." The novelist E. M. Forster corresponded with Lawrence, in 1929 Forster wrote two detailed letters, as a literary friend, criticising The Mint. There were many features that Forster liked, including the word picture of the drill sergeant "Stiffy" and the energy and style of parts I and II. Forster was not happy with the conclusion to the book which he felt to be insipid and trying too hard to be fair, but he much liked chapters 9 and 10 of part III, on the day of Queen Alexandra's funeral, "Dance Night", when a soldier has his first sexual encounter. Reviewing Forster's letters, Jeffrey Meyers writes that "Forster rightly judged The Mint unequal to Seven Pillars".
The critic Irving Howe described Lawrence's The Mint in The Hudson Review as a "severely chiselled picture of barrack life: Joycean in style, sometimes brilliant in evocation, structured as a series of set-pieces, showing a decided advance in control over The Seven Pillars of Wisdom but too markedly an exercise, a self-conscious effort to write."Jeremy Wilson writes that "The Mint, written in a different style to Seven Pillars, is, like Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a work of observation written by a intelligent man who found himself imprisoned. Lawrence distilled its spare descriptions from events that he had witnessed over again. Both Seven Pillars and The Mint were for many years ranked among Penguin's Modern Classics."Thomas J. O'Donnell studies and compares The Mint and Seven Pillars for clues to Lawrence's personality, writing that "in The Mint Lawrence in fact does assert his will to mastery, asserts himself against authority, leads from the ranks", using his writing to "keep him known, em
Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars. He is respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H. L. Mencken wrote of him, " there was a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade... it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds." 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, Sinclair Lewis began reading books at a young age and kept a diary, he had two siblings and Claude. His father, Edwin J. Lewis, was a physician and a stern disciplinarian who had difficulty relating to his sensitive, unathletic third son.
Lewis's mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891. The following year, Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis enjoyed. Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewis—tall 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, wanting to become a drummer boy in the Spanish–American War. 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, he entered Yale in 1903 but did not receive his bachelor's degree until 1908, having taken time off to work at Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair's cooperative-living colony in Englewood, New Jersey, to travel to Panama. Lewis's unprepossessing looks, "fresh" country manners and self-important loquacity made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and Yale.
He did initiate a few long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer. Lewis became an atheist. Lewis's earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine, of which he became an editor. 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, popular stories that were purchased by a variety of magazines, he earned money by selling plots to Jack London, including one for the latter's unfinished novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. Lewis's first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham. Sinclair Lewis's 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, an expanded version of a serial story that had appeared in Woman's Home Companion. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919. In 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger, an editor at Vogue magazine, they had Wells Lewis, named after British author H. G. Wells. Serving as a U. S. Army lieutenant during World War II, Wells Lewis was killed in action on October 29 amid Allied efforts to rescue the "Lost Battalion" in France. Dean Acheson, the future Secretary of State, was a neighbor and family friend in Washington, observed that Sinclair's literary "success was not good for that marriage, or for either of the parties to it, or for Lewis's work" and the family moved out of town. Lewis divorced Grace in 1925. On May 14, 1928, he married a political newspaper columnist. In 1928, he and Dorothy purchased a second home in rural Vermont, they had a son, Michael Lewis, in 1930. Their marriage had ended by 1937, they divorced in 1942.
Michael Lewis became an actor, who suffered with alcoholism, died in 1975 of Hodgkin's lymphoma. Michael had two sons, John Paul and Gregory Claude, with wife Bernadette Nanse, a daughter, with wife Valerie Cardew. Upon moving to Washington, D. C. Lewis devoted himself to writing; as early as 1916, he began taking notes for a realistic novel about small-town life. Work on that novel continued through mid-1920, when he completed Main Street, published on October 23, 1920, his biographer Mark Schorer wrote that the phenomenal success of Main Street "was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history". Lewis's agent had the most optimistic projection of sales at 25,000 copies. In its first six months, Main Street sold 180,000 copies, within a few years, sales were estimated at two million. According to biographer Richard Lingeman, "Main Street made rich—earning him three million current dollars". Lewis followed up this first great success with Babbitt, a novel that satirized the American commercial culture and boosterism.
The story was set in the fictional Midwestern town of Zenith, Winnemac, a setting to which Lewis returned in future novels, including Gideon Planish and Dodsworth. Lewis continued his success in the 1920s with Arrowsmith, a novel about the chall
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into U. S. drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The drama Long Day's Journey into Night is numbered on the short list of the finest U. S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. O'Neill's plays were among the first to include speeches in American English vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society, they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but slide into disillusionment and despair. Of his few comedies, only one is well-known. Nearly all of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism. O'Neill was born in a hotel, the Barrett House, at Broadway and 43rd Street, on what was Longacre Square. A commemorative plaque was first dedicated there in 1957.
The site is now occupied by 1500 Broadway, which houses offices and the ABC Studios. He was the son of Irish immigrant actor James O'Neill and Mary Ellen Quinlan, of Irish descent; because his father was on tour with a theatrical company, accompanied by Eugene's mother, O'Neill was sent to St. Aloysius Academy for Boys, a Catholic boarding school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he found his only solace in books, his father suffered from alcoholism. The O'Neill family reunited for summers at the Monte Cristo Cottage in Connecticut, he briefly attended Betts Academy in Stamford. He attended Princeton University for one year. Accounts vary as to, he may have been dropped for attending too few classes, been suspended for "conduct code violations," or "for breaking a window", or according to a more concrete but apocryphal account, because he threw "a beer bottle into the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson", the future president of the United States. O'Neill spent several years at sea, during which he suffered from alcoholism.
Despite this, he had a deep love for the sea and it became a prominent theme in many of his plays, several of which are set on board ships like those on which he worked. O'Neill joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World, fighting for improved living conditions for the working class using quick'on the job' direct action. O'Neill's 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, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays. O'Neill had 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, he did not complete the course. During the 1910s O'Neill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, where he befriended many radicals, most notably Communist Labor Party of America founder John Reed.
O'Neill had a brief romantic relationship with Reed's wife, writer Louise Bryant. O'Neill was portrayed about the life of John Reed, his involvement with the Provincetown Players began in mid-1916. O'Neill is said to have arrived for the summer in Provincetown with "a trunk full of plays." Susan Glaspell describes a reading of Bound East for Cardiff that took place in the living room of Glaspell and her husband George Cram Cook's home on Commercial Street, adjacent to the wharf, used by the Players for their theater: "So Gene took Bound East for Cardiff out of his trunk, Freddie Burt read it to us, Gene staying out in the dining-room while reading went on. He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished." The Provincetown Players performed many of O'Neill's early works in their theaters both in Provincetown and on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Some of these early plays began downtown and moved to Broadway. One of these early one acts written by O'Neill was The Web.
Written in 1913, this is the first time O'Neill explores the famous themes he thrives in in his career. The Web was one of O'Neill's first dramas; this one act began his interesting inclusion of the brothel world. This can be showcased. We see O'Neill explore memorable avenues within this play such a including a baby, born out of prostitution; this was a huge stepping stone as O'Neill is exploring fields in which have never before been explored with such success. O'Neill's first published play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway in 1920 to great acclaim, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, his first major hit was The Emperor Jones, which ran on Broadway in 1920 and obliquely commented on the U. S. occupation of Haiti, a topic of debate in that year's presidential election. His best-known plays include Anna Christie, Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude, Mourning Becomes Electra, his only well-known comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, a wistful re-imagining of his youth as he wished it had been.
In 1936 he received the
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses, a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners, the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake, his other writings include three books of poetry, a play, his published letters and occasional journalism. Joyce was born in Dublin into a middle-class family. A brilliant student, he attended the Christian Brothers-run O'Connell School before excelling at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's alcoholism and unpredictable finances, he went on to attend University College Dublin. In 1904, in his early twenties, Joyce emigrated to continental Europe with his partner Nora Barnacle.
They lived in Trieste and Zurich. Although most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe centres on Dublin and is populated by characters who resemble family members and friends from his time there. Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses, he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal." On 2 February 1882, Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square, Dublin, Ireland. Joyce's father was John Stanislaus Joyce and his mother was Mary Jane "May" Murray, he was the eldest of ten surviving siblings. James was baptised according to the Rites of the Catholic Church in the nearby St Joseph's Church in Terenure on 5 February 1882 by Rev. John O'Mulloy. Joyce's godparents were Ellen McCann. John Stanislaus Joyce's family came from Fermoy in County Cork, had owned a small salt and lime works.
Joyce's paternal grandfather, James Augustine Joyce, married Ellen O'Connell, daughter of John O'Connell, a Cork Alderman who owned a drapery business and other properties in Cork City. Ellen's family claimed kinship with Daniel O'Connell, "The Liberator"; the Joyce family's purported ancestor, Seán Mór Seoighe was a stonemason from Connemara. In 1887, his father was appointed rate collector by Dublin Corporation. Around this time Joyce was attacked by leading to his lifelong cynophobia, he suffered from astraphobia. In 1891 Joyce wrote a poem on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, his father was angry at the treatment of Parnell by the Catholic Church, the Irish Home Rule Party and the British Liberal Party and the resulting collaborative failure to secure Home Rule for Ireland. The Irish Party had dropped Parnell from leadership, but the Vatican's role in allying with the British Conservative Party to prevent Home Rule left a lasting impression on the young Joyce. The elder Joyce had the poem printed and sent a part to the Vatican Library.
In November, John Joyce was suspended from work. In 1893, John Joyce was dismissed with a pension, beginning the family's slide into poverty caused by his drinking and financial mismanagement. Joyce had begun his education at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare, in 1888 but had to leave in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the fees. Joyce studied at home and at the Christian Brothers O'Connell School on North Richmond Street, before he was offered a place in the Jesuits' Dublin school, Belvedere College, in 1893; this came about because of a chance meeting his father had with a Jesuit priest called John Conmee who knew the family and Joyce was given a reduction in fees to attend Belvedere. In 1895, now aged 13, was elected to join the Sodality of Our Lady by his peers at Belvedere; the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas continued to have a strong influence on him for most of his life. Joyce enrolled at the established University College Dublin in 1898, studying English and Italian.
He became active in literary circles in the city. In 1900 his laudatory review of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken was published in The Fortnightly Review. Joyce wrote a number of at least two plays during this period. Many of the friends he made at University College Dublin appeared as characters in Joyce's works, his closest colleagues included leading figures of the generation, most notably, Tom Kettle, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington and Oliver St. John Gogarty. Joyce was first introduced to the Irish public by Arthur Griffith in his newspaper, United Irishman, in November 1901. Joyce had written an article on the Irish Literary Theatre and his college magazine refused to print it. Joyce had it distributed locally. Griffith himself wrote a piece decrying the censorship of the student James Joyce. In 1901, the National Census of Ireland lists James Joyce as an English- and Irish-speaking scholar living with his mother and father, six sisters and three brothers at Royal Terrace (now Inverness Ro
