Poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright, Tess Gallagher was born on July 21, 1943 in Port Angeles, Washington. She received a BA and MA from the University of Washington, where she studied creative writing with Theodore Roethke, and a MFA from the University of Iowa. Her first collection of poems, Instructions to the Double, won the 1976 Elliston Book Award for "best book of poetry published by a small press". In 1984, she published the collection Willingly, which consists of poems written to and about her third husband, author Raymond Carver, who died in 1988. Other collections include Dear Ghosts (Graywolf Press, 2006); My Black Horse: New and Selected Poems (1995); Owl-Spirit Dwelling (1994) and Moon Crossing Bridge (1992).

Her honors include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, two National Endowment of the Arts Awards, and the Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award.She has taught at St. Lawrence University, Kirkland College, the University of Montana in Missoula, the University of Arizona in Tucson, Syracuse University, and Willamette University, Bucknell University, and Whitman College.

From https://poets.org/poet/tess-gallagher.

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first short stories appeared in Esquire during Gordon Lish's tenure as fiction editor in the 1970s. Carver's work began to reach a wider audience with the 1976 publication of Will You Please be Quiet, Please, but it was not until the 1981 publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under Gordon Lish, then at Knopf, that he began to achieve real literary fame. This collection was edited by more than 40 per cent before publication, and Carver dedicated it to his fellow writer and future wife, Tess Gallagher, with the promise that he would one day republish his stories at full length. He went on to write two more collections of stories, Cathedral and Elephant, which moved away from the earlier minimalist style into a new expansiveness, as well as several collections of poetry. He died in 1988, aged fifty.

From https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/183905/raymond-carver?tab=penguin-biography.

For more information about Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver:

A New Path to the Waterfall: https://groveatlantic.com/book/a-new-path-to-the-waterfall/

“Tess Gallagher”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/tess-gallagher

“Raymond Carver”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/raymond-carver

“Regarding Tess”: https://www.seattlemet.com/arts-and-culture/2009/01/0508-regardingtess

“Raymond Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76”: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3059/the-art-of-fiction-no-76-raymond-carver

“Raymond Carver: the kindest cut”: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/27/raymond-carver-editor-influence

Naomi Shihab Nye is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has appeared widely. She edited the ALA Notable international poetry collection, This Same Sky, and The Tree Is Older Than You Are: Poems and Paintings from Mexico, as well as The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East. Her books of poems include Fuel, Red Suitcase, and Words Under the Words. A Guggenheim fellow, she is also the author of the young adult novel Habibi, which was named an ALA Notable Book, a Best Book for Young Adults, and winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award as well as the Book Publishers of Texas award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Naomi lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Michael, and their son, Madison.

From https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Naomi-Shihab-Nye/1339809.

For more information about Naomi Shihab Nye:

Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:

Naomi Shihab Nye on The Quarantine Tapes: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-073-naomi-shihab-nye

Edward Hirsch about Nye, at 18:00: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-173-edward-hirsch

Words Under the Words: https://www.amazon.com/Words-Under-Selected-Poems-Corner/dp/0933377290

“Adios”: https://wordsfortheyear.com/2018/02/07/adios-by-naomi-shihab-nye/

“Naomi Shihab Nye”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/naomi-shihab-nye

“Naomi Shihab Nye, On Being”: ​​https://onbeing.org/programs/naomi-shihab-nye-before-you-know-kindness-as-the-deepest-thing-inside/

“Naomi Shihab Nye Believes in the Found Poem”: https://miscellanynews.org/2020/10/21/arts/naomi-shihab-nye-believes-in-the-found-poem/

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871 in the Paris suburb of Auteuil. His father, Dr. Adrien Proust, was one of France's most distinguished scientists. His mother, Jeanne Weil, was a well-educated woman who loved the great classic writers of the 17th century, especially Molière and Racine. Marcel's only sibling, Robert, was born in 1873. The hypersensitive Marcel suffered all his life from a number of ailments, especially asthma. Although he earned university degrees in philosophy and law, he always knew that he wanted to be a writer.

In 1910, he had his bedroom lined with cork to block out the deafening noise of daytime Paris because he slept during the day and wrote through the night, after returning home from some of Paris's most exclusive salons. He was known as the city's most famous recluse, he even called himself an owl because he wrote while listening to his “nocturnal Muse.” Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, was published in November 1913 and was headed for a fourth printing when World War I broke out.

Proust continued to write, incorporating the unprecedented conflict into his story of contemporary French society. In 1919, Within a Budding Grove was published and won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. The final three years of his life saw the publication of The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah. The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained were published posthumously. The novel's main themes are time and memory and the power of art to withstand the destructive forces of time.

From https://www.proust-ink.com/biography.

For more information about Marcel Proust:

Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:

Sven Birkerts about Proust, at 18:00: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-181-sven-bikerts

Merve Emre about Proust, at 16:46: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-170-merve-emre

The Hare with Amber Eyes: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250811271/theharewithambereyes

In Search of Lost Time: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/SLT/in-search-of-lost-time

“Reading Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ During a Pandemic”: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/11/reading-proust-in-search-of-lost-time-during-pandemic/616850/

“What We Find When We Get Lost in Proust”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/what-we-find-when-we-get-lost-in-proust

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) was born on June 10, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland. A largely self-taught artist, Sendak illustrated over one hundred-fifty books during his sixty-year career.

The books he wrote as well as illustrated include Kenny’s Window, Very Far Away, The Sign on Rosie’s Door, Nutshell Library (consisting of Chicken Soup with Rice, Alligators All Around, One Was Johnny, and Pierre), Higglety Pigglety Pop!, Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, Bumble-Ardy, My Brother’s Book, and Presto and Zesto in Limboland (co-authored by Arthur Yorinks). He has collaborated with such celebrated authors as Meindert DeJong, Tony Kushner, Randall Jarrell, Ruth Krauss, Else Holmelund Minarik, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. And he has illustrated classics by Mother Goose, the Brothers Grimm, Herman Melville, and Leo Tolstoy.

Sendak began a second career as a costume and stage designer in the late 1970s, designing operas that included Krása’s Brundibar, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges, and Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, as well as Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker. He also designed the sets and costumes, as well as wrote the book and lyrics for the musical production of Really Rosie.

Maurice Sendak remains the most honored children’s book artist in history. He was the recipient of the 1964 Caldecott Medal, the 1970 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 1983 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, and the 2003 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. In 1996 President Bill Clinton presented him with the National Medal of Arts in recognition of his contribution to the arts in America. In 1972 Sendak moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut with his partner of fifty years, the psychiatrist Dr. Eugene Glynn (1926-2007).

From https://www.sendakfoundation.org/biography.

For more information about Maurice Sendak:

“He saw it, he loved it, he ate it”: https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/he-saw-it-he-loved-it-he-ate-it

“‘Fresh Air’ Remembers Author Maurice Sendak”: https://www.npr.org/2012/05/08/152248901/fresh-air-remembers-author-maurice-sendak

“Transcript: ‘Fresh Air’ Remembers Author Maurice Sendak”: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/152248901

“Sendak’s Fantastic Imagination”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1966/01/22/among-the-wild-things

“Maurice Sendak: ‘I refuse to lie to children’”: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/02/maurice-sendak-interview

“An Illustrated Talk With Maurice Sendak”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH2OaaktJrw

“The Wildest Rumpus: Maurice Sendak and the Art of Death”: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/maurice-sendak-art-of-death/472350/

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. He was born on April 29, 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s, and died on the same day in 1933. During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet, living in relative seclusion and publishing little of his work. A short collection of his poetry was privately printed in the early 1900s and reprinted with new verse a few years later, but that was the extent of his published poetry. Instead, Cavafy chose to circulate his verse among friends.

Cavafy is the leading poet of the periphery, writing in Greek far from Greek lands. The body of his poetry includes the 154 poems of the “canon”; 37 “repudiated poems,” most of which are juvenilia written in romantic katharevousa; 75 “hidden” poems that were found finished in his papers; and 30 “unfinished” poems. His poems often feature historical figures or creations of the poet’s imagination, with frequent references to elements of Homeric, Hellenistic, and Byzantine years. Today, his poetry occupies a prominent place in both Greek and world literature.

You may read the complete C. P. Cavafy bio here https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/and discover the digital collection of the Cavafy Archive here https://cavafy.onassis.org/.

For more information about C. P. Cavafy:

Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:

Daniel Mendelsohn about Cavafy, at 11:50: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-096-daniel-mendelsohn

C. P. Cavafy: Complete Poems: https://www.danielmendelsohn.com/book/c-p-cavafy-complete-poems

“Cavafy Archive”: https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/cavafy-archive/

“Man With a Past: Cavafy Revisited”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/23/man-with-a-past

“The City”: https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/cavafy-archive/the-canon/the-city

“Handwritten notes on ‘The City’”: https://cavafy.onassis.org/object/ad3m-a5bh-hs47/

On December 4, 1875, Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague. His parents placed him in military school with the desire that he become an officer—a position Rilke was not inclined to hold. With the help of his uncle, who realized that Rilke was a highly gifted child, Rilke left the military academy and entered a German preparatory school. By the time he enrolled in Charles University in Prague in 1895, he knew that he would pursue a literary career: he had already published his first volume of poetry, Leben und Lieder, the previous year. At the turn of 1895-1896, Rilke published his second collection, Larenopfer (Sacrifice to the Lares). A third collection, Traumgekrönt (Dream-Crowned) followed in 1896. That same year, Rilke decided to leave the university for Munich, Germany, and later made his first trip to Italy.

In 1897, Rilke went to Russia, a trip that would prove to be a milestone in Rilke's life, and which marked the true beginning of his early serious works. While there the young poet met Tolstoy, whose influence is seen in Das Buch vom lieben Gott und anderes (Stories of God), and Leonid Pasternak, the nine-year-old Boris's father. At Worpswede, where Rilke lived for a time, he met and married Clara Westhoff, who had been a pupil of Rodin. In 1902 he became the friend, and for a time the secretary, of Rodin, and it was during his twelve-year Paris residence that Rilke enjoyed his greatest poetic activity. His first great work, Das Stunden Buch (The Book of Hours), appeared in 1905, followed in 1907 by Neue Gedichte (New Poems) and Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). Rilke would continue to travel throughout his lifetime; to Italy, Spain and Egypt among many other places, but Paris would serve as the geographic center of his life, where he first began to develop a new style of lyrical poetry, influenced by the visual arts.

When World War I broke out, Rilke was obliged to leave France and during the war he lived in Munich. In 1919, he went to Switzerland where he spent the last years of his life. It was here that he wrote his last two works, the Duino Elegies (1923) and the Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). He died of leukemia on December 29, 1926. At the time of his death his work was intensely admired by many leading European artists, but was almost unknown to the general reading public. His reputation has grown steadily since his death, and he has come to be universally regarded as a master of verse.

From https://poets.org/poet/rainer-maria-rilke.

James Baldwin — the grandson of a slave — was born in Harlem in 1924. The oldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty, developing a troubled relationship with his strict, religious stepfather. In 1948, at age 24, Baldwin left for Paris, where he hoped to find enough distance from the American society he grew up in to write about it.

Over the next ten years, Baldwin moved from Paris to New York to Istanbul, writing two books of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), as well as two novels, Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962). In the early 1960s, overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility to the times, Baldwin returned to take part in the civil rights movement. Traveling throughout the South, he began work on an explosive work about black identity and the state of racial struggle, The Fire Next Time (1963). This, too, was a bestseller: so incendiary that it put Baldwin on the cover of TIME Magazine. For many, Baldwin’s clarion call for human equality – in the essays of Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time – became an early and essential voice in the civil rights movement.

By 1987, when he died of stomach cancer at age 63, James Baldwin had become one of the most important and vocal advocates for equality. From Go Tell It on the Mountain to The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), James Baldwin created works of literary beauty and depth that will remain essential parts of the American canon.

From https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/james-baldwin-about-the-author/59/.

Born in New York in 1923, Richard Avedon dropped out of high school and joined the Merchant Marine’s photographic section. Upon his return in 1944, he found a job as a photographer in a department store. Within two years he had been “found” by an art director at Harper’s Bazaar and was producing work for them as well as Vogue, Look, and a number of other magazines. During the early years, Avedon made his living primarily through work in advertising. His real passion, however, was the portrait and its ability to express the essence of its subject.

As Avedon’s notoriety grew, so did the opportunities to meet and photograph celebrities from a broad range of disciplines. Avedon’s ability to present personal views of public figures, who were otherwise distant and inaccessible, was immediately recognized by the public and the celebrities themselves. Many sought out Avedon for their most public images. His artistic style brought a sense of sophistication and authority to the portraits. More than anything, it is Avedon’s ability to set his subjects at ease that helps him create true, intimate, and lasting photographs.

Beyond his work in the magazine industry, Avedon has collaborated on a number of books of portraits. In 1959 he worked with Truman Capote on a book that documented some of the most famous and important people of the century. Observations included images of Buster Keaton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Pablo Picasso, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mae West. Around this same time he began a series of images of patients in mental hospitals. Replacing the controlled environment of the studio with that of the hospital he was able to recreate the genius of his other portraits with non-celebrities. The brutal reality of the lives of the insane was a bold contrast to his other work. Years later he would again drift from his celebrity portraits with a series of studio images of drifters, carnival workers, and working class Americans.

Throughout the 1960s Avedon continued to work for Harper’s Bazaar and in 1974 he collaborated with James Baldwin on the book Nothing Personal. Having met in New York in 1943, Baldwin and Avedon were friends and collaborators for more than thirty years. For

Appointed United States Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress in 2010, William Stanley Merwin had a career that spanned seven decades. A poet, translator, gardener and environmental activist, Merwin has become one of the most widely read and honored poets in America. He died at home at the age of 91, in the house he built, among the thousands of palms he planted, on Friday, March 15, 2019.

Born September 30, 1927, in New York City, William Stanley Merwin was the son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five. He was raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and attended Princeton University on a scholarship. As a young man, Merwin went to Europe and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. Over the years, his poetic voice moved from the more formal to a more distinctly American voice. As the Atlantic Monthly said, “The intentions of Merwin’s poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and the underground.”

He has lived in Majorca, London, France, Mexico and several places in the United States, as well as Boston and New York. In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with Robert Aitken, a Zen Buddhist teacher. He married Paula Dunaway, in 1983, and settled on Maui. For over 40 years, they lived in a home that William designed and helped build, surrounded by acres of land once devastated and depleted from years of erosion, logging and toxic agricultural practices. Together, the Merwins painstakingly restored the land into one of the most comprehensive palm gardens in the world. He continued to live, write and garden in Hawaii until he died at home on Friday, March 15th, 2019.

From https://merwinconservancy.org/about-w-s-merwin/.

Henry James, (born April 15, 1843, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Feb. 28, 1916, London, Eng.), was a U.S.-British novelist. Born to a distinguished family, the brother of William James, he was privately educated. He traveled frequently to Europe from childhood on; after 1876 he lived primarily in England. His fundamental theme was to be the innocence and exuberance of the New World in conflict with the corruption and wisdom of the Old. Daisy Miller (1879) won him international renown; it was followed by The Europeans (1879), Washington Square(1880), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1886), his subjects were social reformers and revolutionaries. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897), What Maisie Knew(1897), and The Turn of the Screw (1898), he made use of complex moral and psychological ambiguity. The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904) were his great final novels. His intense concern with the novel as an art form is reflected in the essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884), his prefaces to the volumes of his collected works, and his many literary essays. Perhaps his chief technical innovation was his strong focus on the individual consciousness of his central characters, which reflected his sense of the decline of public and collective values in his time.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Henry-James-American-writer.

For more information about Henry James:

The Aspern Papers: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-aspern-papers-henry-james/1116755591

“A Discussion of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/entitled-opinions/another-look-dci-event-discussion-henry-james-aspern-papers/

“Henry James”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/henry-james

“Henry James and the American Idea”: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/julyaugust/feature/henry-james-and-the-american-idea

Born in California on September 21, 1945, Kay Ryan grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor's and master's degree from UCLA. Ryan has published several collections of poetry, including The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 2010), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2011; The Niagara River (2005); Say Uncle(2000); Elephant Rocks (1996); Flamingo Watching (1994), which was a finalist for both the Lamont Poetry Selection and the Lenore Marshall Prize; Strangely Marked Metal (1985); and Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends(1983).

Ryan's awards include a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Union League Poetry Prize, the Maurice English Poetry Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and was included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997.

Ryan's poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, Parnassus, among other journals and anthologies. She was named to the “It List” by Entertainment Weekly and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. In 2008, Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County in California.

From https://poets.org/poet/kay-ryan.

For more information about Kay Ryan:

Erratic Facts: https://groveatlantic.com/book/erratic-facts/

“New Rooms”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55648/new-rooms

“Kay Ryan”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/kay-ryan

“Kay Ryan at 75: Surprised by Joy”: https://www.wsj.com/articles/kay-ryan-at-75-surprised-by-joy-11600466756

“Kay Ryan, The Art of Poetry No. 94”: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5889/the-art-of-poetry-no-94-kay-ryan

“Kay Ryan Reads From Her New Book, Erratic Facts”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMYWy9WKD_k

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate from 1897 to 1900. He planned to travel to Paris and work as a writer, but, after working briefly as a reporter for the New York Herald Times, he decided to study law. Stevens graduated with a degree from New York Law School in 1903 and was admitted to the bar the following year. He practiced law in New York City until 1916.

Though Stevens was focused on his legal career, he was also part of New York’s literary community. He had several friends among the writers and painters in Greenwich Village, including William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings. In 1914, under the pseudonym “Peter Parasol,” he sent a group of poems under the title “Phases” to Harriet Monroe as entries for a war poem competition hosted by Poetry magazine. Stevens did not win the prize, but Monroe published his work in November of that year.

Stevens moved to Connecticut in 1916, having found employment at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., where he became vice president in 1934. He had also begun to establish an identity for himself outside the worlds of law and business. His first book of poems, Harmonium (Alfred A. Knopf), published in 1923, exhibited the influences of both the English Romantics and the French Symbolists, and demonstrated a wholly original style and sensibility: exotic, whimsical, and infused with the light and color of an Impressionist painting.

For the next several years, Stevens focused on his business career. He began to publish new poems in 1930, however. In the following year, Knopf released a second edition of Harmonium, which included fourteen new poems, but excluded three of the decidedly weaker ones. More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the transformative power of the imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens spent his days behind a desk at his office, and led a quiet, relatively uneventful life.

Though now considered one of the major American poets of the twentieth century, Stevens did not receive widespread recognition until the publication of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Knopf, 1954), just a year before his death. His other major works include The Necessary Angel (Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), a collection of essays on poetry; Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (The Cummington Press, 1942); The Man With the Blue Guitar (Alfred A. Knopf, 1937); and Ideas of Order (The Alcestis Press, 1935). Stevens died in Hartford, Connecticut on August 2, 1955.

Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990), born in Monemvasia, lost his mother and an older brother to tuberculosis at an early age, then contracted the disease himself and spent years in and out of sanatoriums. His first poems, published in the 1930s, were hailed with enthusiasm by Kostis Palamas. He fought in the Greek Resistance during the Axis occupation of Greece, sided with the Communists in the Greek Civil War, and subsequently spent years in prison and in detention camps. He was imprisoned again during the dictatorship of 1967-1974. One of the most prolific Greek poets, Ritsos wrote over a hundred volumes of poetry, was broadly translated, and was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1976 and the Order of the October Revolution in 1977.

From The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present.

For more information about Yannis Ritsos:

The Greek Poets: https://www.amazon.com/Greek-Poets-Homer-Present/dp/0393060837

Yannis Ritsos: Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691019086/yannis-ritsos

“Yannis Ritsos”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/yannis-ritsos

“Yannis Ritsos, a Greek Poet, 81; Wrote Verse Inspired by Politics”: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/14/obituaries/yannis-ritsos-a-greek-poet-81-wrote-verse-inspired-by-politics.html

“Interview with Edmund Keeley”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkW9OuyjarI

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes's birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry. After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University in New York City. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, launderer, and busboy. He also travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten. Criticism of the book from the time varied, with some praising the arrival of a significant new voice in poetry, while others dismissed Hughes's debut collection. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter(Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

Hughes, who claimed Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language itself alongside their suffering.

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1950); Simple Stakes a Claim (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1953); and Simple's Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965). He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940), and cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”

From https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes.

Joan Fuster (1922-1992) was a highly influential poet, critic and thinker who wrote in both Catalan and Spanish. Born in Sueca, a village near Valencia, he grew up in a middle-class Catholic family and graduated with a law degree from the Universitat de Valencia in 1947. Renowned for his irony, and his concise, incisive style of writing, Fuster is best known as an essayist and left-wing thinker who championed Catalan language and culture in Francoist Spain. Among his most celebrated books are Nosaltres, els valencians (1962), Diccionari per a ociosos (1964), and Final Judgements (1960).

From https://www.umasspress.com/9781913744359/final-judgements/.

For more information about Joan Fuster:

Final Judgements: https://www.umasspress.com/9781913744359/final-judgements/

“Final Judgements by Joan Fuster”: https://www.lunate.co.uk/reviews/final-judgments-by-joan-fuster

“A short biography - Joan Fuster”: https://espaijoanfuster.org/a-short-biography/?lang=en

“Joan Fuster Museum”: https://museujoanfuster.org/en/

“The Catalan Paradox, Part II: Conversation with Translator Mary Ann Newman”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-catalan-paradox-part-ii-conversation-with-translator-mary-ann-newman/

William Kentridge uses drawings to create films. In his works, unlike in traditional animation that employs multiple drawings to denote change and movement, Kentridge erases and alters a single, stable drawing while recording the changes with stop-motion camera work. He modifies the drawing slightly, goes to the camera, and begins what he calls “the rather dumb physical activity of stalking the drawing, or walking backwards and forwards between the camera and drawing; raising, shifting, adapting the image.” The result is a hybrid of drawing and film that has been highly praised for both its innovative manipulation of media and its ability to look at troubling social issues in a way that is neither sentimental nor aggrandized.

South Africa, where Kentridge was born and continues to work, is the focal point of his studio practice. Kentridge addresses apartheid and other social wounds without tackling the issues head-on, making them susceptible either to redemption that comes too easily or to a rendering of their history that is too spectacular. He enters into historical discussions through the lives of three fictional characters: Soho Eckstein, Mrs. Eckstein, and Felix Teitelbaum. Their individual lives are set against the wide, political landscape of South Africa as well as the deeper forces of life like renewal and destruction. The various vectors of thoughts, feelings, and inner turmoil of the characters, represented sometimes by animals or lines or other markings, spill across Kentridge’s images and frames. The personal and public become critically mixed, neither free of guilt nor completely capable of redemption.

In Stereoscope, 1999 Soho Eckstein is portrayed as interconnected with both images of the social injustices and upheaval of South Africa and his own sort of primal, fractured existence. The stereoscope, a device used to unite split images into the illusion of a coherent visual field, represents exactly what Kentridge does not allow in the film. He instead uses his method of erasure to move between disparate images and situations, not a presentation of a unified field but a shifting scene of energetic connections and splits. The result is a work that can face the humanity of the individual without expunging guilt and address larger issues in society without trite, easy solutions.

From https://www.thebroad.org/art/william-kentridge

On March 24, 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York. After spending his early childhood in France, he received his BA from the University of North Carolina, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the Sorbonne. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions, 2007); Americus, Book I (New Directions, 2004); A Far Rockaway of the Heart (New Directions, 1997); and A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958). He has translated the works of a number of poets, including Nicanor Parra, Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In addition to poetry, he is also the author of more than eight plays and three novels, including Little Boy: A Novel (Doubleday, 2019), Love in the Days of Rage (Overlook, 1988), and Her (New Directions, 1966).

In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin opened the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, California, helping to support their magazine, City Lights. Two years later, they launched City Lights Publishers, a book-publishing venture, which helped start the careers of many alternative local and international poets. In 1956, Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s book Howl and Other Poems, which resulted in his being arrested by the San Francisco Police for publishing “obscene work” and a subsequent trial that gained international attention. At the end, the judge concluded that “Howl” had “some redeeming social importance” and “was not obscene”; Ferlinghetti prevailed. City Lights became known as the heart of the Beat movement, which also included the writers Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac.

In 1994, San Francisco renamed a street in Ferlinghetti’s honor, and in 1998, he was named the first poet laureate of San Francisco. He is the recipient of many international awards and honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, and the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award, presented for “outstanding service to the American literary community,” among others. In 2003, he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007, he was named Commandeur of the French Order of Arts and Letters. He died on February 22, 2021, in San Francisco, California.

From https://poets.org/poet/lawrence-ferlinghetti.

Thomas Bernhard, (born Feb. 9/10, 1931, Cloister Heerland, Neth.—died Feb. 12, 1989, Gmunden, Austria), was an Austrian writer who explored death, social injustice, and human misery in controversial literature that was deeply pessimistic about modern civilization in general and Austrian culture in particular. Bernhard was born in a Holland convent; his mother, unwed at the time, had fled there from Austria to give birth. After a year, she returned to her parents in Vienna, where her father, writer Johannes Freumbichler (1881–1949), became the major influence on Bernhard. After surviving a life-threatening coma and repeated hospitalizations (1948–51) in tuberculosis sanatoriums, he studied music and drama in Salzburg and Vienna.

Bernhard achieved little success with several collections of poetry in the late 1950s, but in 1963 he gained notoriety with his first novel, Frost (Eng. trans. Frost). In such novels as Verstörung (1967; “Derangement,” Eng. trans. Gargoyles), Das Kalkwerk (1970; The Lime Works), and Korrektur (1975; Corrections), he combined complex narrative structure with an increasingly misanthropic philosophy. In 1973 Bernhard withdrew his drama Die Berühmten (“The Famous”) from the prestigious Salzburg Festival because of a controversy over staging. After its publication in 1984 his novel Holzfällen(Woodcutters, or Cutting Timber: An Irritation) was seized by police for allegedly criticizing a public figure. Even before its premiere in November 1988, Bernhard’s last play, Heldenplatz(“Heroes’ Square”), a bleak indictment of anti-Semitism in contemporary Austria, provoked violent protests. His other plays include Ein Fest für Boris (1968; A Party for Boris), Die Jagdgesellschaft (1974; The Hunting Party), Die Macht der Gewohnheit (1974; The Force of Habit), and Der Schein trügt(1983; Appearances Are Deceiving). Bernhard’s memoirs were translated in Gathering Evidence(1985), a compilation of five German works published between 1975 and 1982.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Bernhard.

For more information about Thomas Bernhard:

Concrete: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/12747/concrete-by-thomas-bernhard/

“The Art of Extinction: The bleak laughter of Thomas Bernhard”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/12/25/the-art-of-extinction

“Between the Rare Oases of Thought: On Thomas Bernhard and the Mind”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/rare-oases-thought-thomas-bernhard-mind/

“Thomas Bernhard is Dead at 58”: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/17/obituaries/thomas-bernhard-is-dead-at-58-his-last-play-enraged-austrians.html

Bessie Smith (ca. 1895–1937) was a blues and jazz singer from the Harlem Renaissance who is remembered as the Empress of the Blues. Elizabeth “Bessie” Smith was the youngest child of seven, born to Laura and William Smith in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her father was a Baptist minister and day laborer and her mother a laundress. In 1900, William Smith died in a work accident and his wife and son Bud passed away in 1906. The six remaining Smith children, including Bessie, were orphaned and left to be raised by an aunt. Living in poverty, Smith began singing as a street performer on Ninth Street, Chattanooga’s center of music and dance, with her guitar-playing brother Andrew. The first published reference of a performance by Smith—when she was only 14 years old—was in the May 8, 1909, issue of the Indianapolis newspaper The Freedman. According to the review of her performance at Atlanta's 81 Theater, Smith captivated her audience through her contralto voice.

Smith refined her vocal style on the Black vaudeville stage. Her brother Clarence was a comedian and dancer in the Moses Stokes Traveling Show. Bessie was hired onto the circuit but shortly after left to join the Mother of the Blues, Ma Rainey, and the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. Smith became a mentee of Ma Rainey, learning how to command an audience and navigate the music business. By the time she was 24 years old, Smith had her own solo acts and was performing throughout the South and East Coast. In 1923, Smith signed with Columbia Records. Her first recording was “Down-hearted Blues,” written by blues singer Alberta Hunter and pianist Lovie Austin. The 1923 song was a major hit and it launched Smith into the national spotlight. Beyond blues, Smith played and recorded with jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. Her incredible talent led her to become the highest paid Black entertainer of her time.

The Great Depression cut Smith’s recording career short, and her last recording was in 1933. Still, Smith performed across the country. In 1937, enroute to Chattanooga, Smith suffered fatal injuries in a car accident in Mississippi. Smith’s funeral was held in Philadelphia, where she had been living since 1923, and was attended by more than 5,000 people.

Throughout her career, Smith was unapologetically herself. She drank and was open about her romantic relationships with both men and women. Smith was married to Jack Gee from 1923 to 1929. Gee was unable to adjust to the show business life nor Smith’s bisexuality. Their marriage ended in 1929 when Smith learned about an affair between Gee and singer Gertrude Saunders. Smith incorporated the hardships of being Black working class in her lyrics by singing about poverty, racism, and sexism on top of singing about love and female sexuality. While some, such as the Black Swan Records, labeled her as “rough,” Smith’s ability to channel her personality and life experience into her voice is what made her stand out.

A note from the translator of this week’s Quotomania, James Romm:

This quote gives a good sense of why Seneca is so enjoyable to read in Latin or translate. His short clauses fairly crackle with energy; metaphors pop in and out elusively as though playing hide and seek. At times the language is so seductive that one hardly cares what's being said, though the message is usually, as here, a powerful and soul-searching one.

Seneca lived in the Rome of the first century AD and served under emperor Nero as a kind of chief minister, even while composing works of Stoic philosophy. The riddle of a committed moralist who abetted an immoral regime has fascinated readers for centuries, and ultimately cannot be solved except with reference to the paradoxes and contradictions of of human nature. In the work from which this quote comes, "On the Shortness of Life," Seneca inveighs against those who waste their time on business and legal dealings, yet he certainly gave much of his own time to such occupations during his political career. Many have accused him of hypocrisy, but when he writes as passionately as he does here, with the intensity of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, one wants to believe he's sincere.

Death was a constant preoccupation for Seneca, as seen in this quote. "We are dying every day," he said at two different points in his surviving writings (of which there are a vast number). That is, our life is a journey toward death, from the moment we're born. If we truly understood that, we wouldn't waste precious hours on meaningless things -- in modern terms, scrolling through social media or channel surfing. "Life's too short" is an expression we use but we don't really grasp the problem it represents. Life's not short in itself, writes Seneca in "On the Shortness of Life," but we make it so by the way that we live. If we lived to the fullest at all times, we would lengthen our lives and even enjoy a kind of immortality. His essay, retitled in my translation as "How to Have a Life," teaches us how to achieve this.

Seneca addressed his essay to his father-in-law, Pompeius Paulinus, who was serving Rome as praefectus annonae, the official in charge of managing Rome's grain supply. Though the essay is meant to reach a wide readership, he deals at one point with Paulinus's circumstances in very specific terms. How can you think about whether mice are getting into the silos, he asks, when you could be contemplating the motions of stars, the origins of the cosmos, the fate of the soul after death? It's a wonderful passage that reminds us how we're surrounded by dross if we don't lift our minds toward the heavens. Unfortunately Seneca never deals with the problem that mice may very well destroy the grain supply if everyone has their eyes on the Milky Way.

I've translated four small volumes of selections from Seneca and have one more in the works. In spending time with his essays I feel I'm following his most urgent advice in "On the Shortness of Life:" "Those who make time for wisdom are the only ones truly alive," he writes there; "they not only attend to their own lifespan but add every age to their own." That's a powerful incentive to read more Seneca.

Sir Peter Brook, (born March 21, 1925, London, Eng.—died July 2, 2022, Paris, France), British director and producer. After directing plays in Stratford-upon-Avon, he became director of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden (1947–50). He later directed several innovative Shakespearean productions that aroused controversy, including his 1962 staging of King Lear at the Royal Shakespeare Co. During his long association with that company, he directed such other critically acclaimed productions as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970). Brook won international fame with his avant-garde direction of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade (1964). His films include Lord of the Flies (1963), King Lear (1970), and the six-hour Mahabharata(1989). In 1970 he moved to Paris, where he cofounded the International Centre for Theatre Research. Brook continued to work into the early 21st century.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Peter-Brook.

For more information about Peter Brook:

The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-quality-of-mercy-peter-brook/1114335100

“Peter Brook, Celebrated Stage Director of Scale and Humanity, Dies at 97”: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/obituaries/peter-brook-dead.html

“For Peter Brook, the Experimental Showman, ‘Nothing Is Ever Finished’”: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/theater/peter-brook-interview.html

“Peter Brook: ‘To give way to despair is the ultimate cop-out’”: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/theater/peter-brook-interview.html

Milan Kundera is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

From https://www.harpercollins.com/blogs/authors/milan-kundera-20154134342990.

For more information about Milan Kundera:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-unbearable-lightness-of-being-milan-kundera?variant=32131838115874

“Milan Kundera, The Art of Fiction No. 81”: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2977/the-art-of-fiction-no-81-milan-kundera

“A Talk With Milan Kundera”: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/19/magazine/a-talk-with-milan-kundera.html

“Why Read Milan Kundera?”: ​​https://www.nypl.org/blog/2021/04/16/milan-kundera

Albert Camus, (born Nov. 7, 1913, Mondovi, Alg.—died Jan. 4, 1960, near Sens, France), was an Algerian-French novelist, essayist, and playwright. Born into a working-class family, Camus graduated from the university in Algiers and then worked with a theatrical company, becoming associated with leftist causes. He spent the war years in Paris, and the French Resistance brought him into the circle of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism. He became a leading literary figure with his enigmatic first novel, The Stranger (1942), a study of 20th-century alienation, and the philosophical essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), an analysis of contemporary nihilism and the concept of the absurd. The Plague (1947), his allegorical second novel, and “The Rebel” (1951), another long essay, developed related issues. Other major works include the short-story collection Exile and the Kingdom (1957) and the posthumous autobiographical novel The First Man (1994). His plays include Le Malentendu (1944) and Caligula(1944). Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He died in a car accident.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Albert-Camus.

Elizabeth Alexander is a prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author, renowned poet, educator, scholar, and cultural advocate. She is also president of the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder in the arts, culture, and humanities.

Dr. Alexander’s most recent book, The Trayvon Generation (2022), is a galvanizing meditation on the power of art and culture to illuminate America’s unresolved problem with race and the challenges facing young Black America. Among the fifteen books she has authored or co-authored, her poetry collection American Sublime was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2006, and her memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2015. Other works include Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (2010), Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews, Interviews (2007), The Black Interior: Essays (2004), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), Body of Life (1996), and The Venus Hottentot (1990).

Over the course of an esteemed career in education, Dr. Alexander has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Columbia University, and Yale University, where she taught for fifteen years and chaired the African American Studies Department. She has been awarded the Jackson Poetry Prize, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the George Kent Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes for Poetry. Notably, Dr. Alexander composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama.

Dr. Alexander is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board, and co-designed the Art for Justice Fund.

From http://www.elizabethalexander.net/about.

Anne Carson was born in Toronto, Ontario on June 21, 1950. With the help of a high school Latin instructor, she learned ancient Greek, which contributed to her continuing interest in classical and Hellenic literature. She attended St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto and, despite leaving twice, received her BA in 1974, her MA in 1975 and her PhD in 1981. She also studied Greek metrics for a year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Since bursting onto the international poetry scene in 1987 with her long poem “Kinds of Water," Carson has published numerous books of poetry, including Float (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016); Red Doc> (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013); The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry;Autobiography of Red (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); and Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992). Also a Classics scholar, Carson is the translator ofElectra (Oxford University Press, 2001), If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Knopf, 2002), and An Oresteia (Faber and Faber, 2009), among others. She is also the author of Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton University Press, 1986).

Her awards and honors include the Lannan Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur Fellowship. She was also the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany. Carson was the Director of Graduate Studies in Classics at McGill University and taught at Princeton University from 1980-1987. She has also taught classical languages and literature at Emory University, California College of the Arts, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. She currently teaches in New York University’s creative writing program.

From https://poets.org/poet/anne-carson.

Harold Pinter, (born Oct. 10, 1930, London, Eng.—died Dec. 24, 2008, London), British playwright. Born into a working-class family, he acted with touring companies until 1959. His early one-act plays were followed by the full-length The Birthday Party (1958). His next major plays, The Caretaker (1960) and The Homecoming (1965), established his reputation as an innovative and complex dramatist, sometimes considered as belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd. He often used disjointed small talk and lengthy pauses in dialogue to convey a character’s thought, which often contradicts his speech. Pinter’s later plays include Old Times (1971), No Man’s Land (1975), Betrayal (1978; film, 1983), Mountain Language (1988), Moonlight(1993), and Celebration (2000). He also wrote radio and television plays, as well as screenplays for The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant’s Woman(1981), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), and Sleuth(2007). In 2005 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Harold-Pinter.

For more information about Harold Pinter:

“Harold Pinter: Nobel Lecture”: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/lecture/

“Harold Pinter, Playwright of the Pause, Dies at 78”: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/theater/26pinter.html

“Harold Pinter, The Art of Theater No. 3”: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4351/the-art-of-theater-no-3-harold-pinter

“Front Row, Harold Pinter”: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00gy71c

Marcus Aurelius , in full Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustusorig. Marcus Annius Verus, (born April 26, AD 121, Rome—died March 17, 180, Vindobona [Vienna] or Sirmium, Pannonia), was a Roman emperor (161–180). He was born into a wealthy and prominent family. Hadrian arranged that Marcus and Lucius Verus be adopted by the designated future emperor Antoninus Pius, who dutifully groomed Marcus as his heir. On his accession, Marcus nevertheless shared power with his adoptive brother as coemperor, though he himself remained the more dominant. His reign was marked by numerous military crises, all the major frontiers being threatened by invasion. Struggles against the Parthians (162–166) were successful, but returning troops brought a devastating plague to Rome. With a concurrent German invasion, Roman morale declined; the Germans were repulsed, but Verus died during the campaign (169). Marcus made his son Commodus coemperor in 177. Though a man of gentle character and wide learning, Marcus opposed Christianity and supported persecution of its adherents. His Meditations on Stoicism, considered one of the great books of all times, gives a full picture of his religious and moral values. His reign is often thought to mark the Golden Age of Rome.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Marcus-Aurelius-Roman-emperor.

For more information about Marcus Aurelius:

Meditations: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/6367/meditations-by-marcus-aurelius/

“Marcus Aurelius”: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcus-aurelius/

A Companion to Marcus Aurelius: https://www.wiley.com/en-ie/A+Companion+to+Marcus+Aurelius-p-9781405192859

Edgar Kunz is the author of the poetry collections Tap Out (Mariner, 2019), a NYT New & Noteworthy pick, and Fixer, forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins in August 2023.

His writing has been supported by fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Vanderbilt University, where he earned his MFA, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow.

His poems appear widely, including in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.

From https://www.edgarkunz.com.

For more information about Edgar Kunz:

“Piano”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/07/piano

Tap Out: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781328518125

“Conversations with Contributors: Edgar Kunz”: https://theadroitjournal.org/2020/04/20/conversations-with-contributors-edgar-kunz/

J. A. Baker was a native of Essex, England. He wrote The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer. J. A. Baker was born on August 6, 1926, and died on December 26, 1987.

From https://www.nyrb.com/collections/j-a-baker.

For more information about J. A. Baker:

The Peregrine: https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-peregrine?variant=1094932429

“Werner Herzog on the Books Every Filmmaker Should Read”: https://lithub.com/werner-herzog-on-the-books-every-filmmaker-should-read/

“Robert Macfarlane: ‘I Wanted the Reader to Undertake a Descent into the Darkness.’”: https://lithub.com/robert-macfarlane-i-wanted-the-reader-to-undertake-a-descent-into-the-darkness/

“Legendary Werner Herzog talks books with author Robert Pogue Harrison”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MncnB-kofRo

“The secret life behind the writer of England’s greatest cult book”: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-secret-life-behind-the-writer-of-england-s-greatest-cult-book-1.3333957

Born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in the town of Parral in southern Chile on July 12, 1904, Pablo Neruda led a life charged with poetic and political activity. In 1923, he sold all of his possessions to finance the publication of his first book, Crepusculario (“Twilight”). He published the volume under the pseudonym “Pablo Neruda” to avoid conflict with his family, who disapproved of his occupation. The following year, he found a publisher for Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (“Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”). The book made a celebrity of Neruda, who gave up his studies at the age of twenty to devote himself to his craft.

In 1927, Neruda began his long career as a diplomat in the Latin American tradition of honoring poets with diplomatic assignments. After serving as honorary consul in Burma, Neruda was named Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1933. While there, he began a friendship with the visiting Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. After transferring to Madrid later that year, Neruda also met Spanish writer Manuel Altolaguirre. Together, the two men founded a literary review called Caballo verde para la poesîa in 1935. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 interrupted Neruda’s poetic and political development. He chronicled the horrendous years which included the execution of García Lorca in Espana en el corazon (1937), published from the war front. Neruda’s outspoken sympathy for the loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War led to his recall from Madrid in 1937. He then moved to Paris and helped settle Spanish republican refugees in Chile.

Neruda returned to Chile in 1938 where he renewed his political activity and wrote prolifically. Named Chilean Consul to Mexico in 1939, Neruda left Chile again for four years. Upon returning to Chile in 1943, he was elected to the Senate and joined the Communist Party. When the Chilean government moved to the right, they declared communism illegal and expelled Neruda from the Senate. He went into hiding. During those years he wrote and published Canto general (1950).

In 1952 the government withdrew the order to arrest leftist writers and political figures, and Neruda returned to Chile and married Matilde Urrutia, his third wife (his first two marriages, to Maria Antonieta Haagenar Vogelzang and Delia del Carril, both ended in divorce). For the next twenty-one years, he continued a career that integrated private and public concerns and became known as the people’s poet. During this time, Neruda received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Diagnosed with cancer while serving a two-year term as ambassador to France, Neruda resigned his position, ending his diplomatic career. On September 23, 1973, just twelve days after the defeat of Chile’s democratic regime, the man widely regarded as the greatest Latin American poet since Darío died in Santiago, Chile.

From https://poets.org/poet/pablo-neruda.

Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989) is one of the best-loved authors of popular fiction of her generation. Her novels established her as a master storyteller, but she also wrote plays, short stories and biographies. Haunting and atmospheric, her work occupies a unique place in 20th century literature, appealing to a broad audience yet worthy of literary merit.

Daphne du Maurier’s first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931 to critical acclaim. She married Major Frederick Arthur Montague ('Boy') Browning in 1932 and had her first daughter, Tessa, in 1933. Her frank biography of her father, Gerald: A Portrait (1934) shocked some of her father’s admirers but also gained her recognition as a talented writer. In 1936, publication of Jamaica Inn propelled her to the top of the best-seller lists.

An unhappy period in Egypt as an army wife gave rise to Daphne du Maurier’s best-known novel, Rebecca (1938). An intense study of female jealousy, Rebecca was made into a successful film in 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Frenchman’s Creek (1941) and Hungry Hill (1943) followed, both of which were also made into successful films. She had another daughter, Flavia, in 1937, and a son, Christian, in 1940, and while her husband was away at war, she moved back to Cornwall with the children to live in 'Menabilly', a house which she had loved since her early 20s.

During and after the war, the du Mauriers’ marriage became strained. This prompted her to write a play, The Years Between (performed in 1944), which explored the effects of war on marriage. My Cousin Rachel (1951) was followed by two collections of short stories, The Apple Tree (1952) and The Breaking Point(1959); the latter was also influenced by her psychological stress. The Scapegoat (1957), a novel exploring themes of stolen identity and the self, is appreciated by critics as a more serious work, though at the time it was pigeonholed as another of her romantic thrillers. In 1963, Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of her short story The Birds, was released and became a cult classic. The death of her husband, in 1965, affected Daphne du Maurier profoundly and her unease was compounded by a growing sense that her imaginative talent was waning. Unable to renew the lease on her treasured home, Menabilly, she moved to Kilmarth, in Par, where she wrote the well-received The House on the Strand in 1969, the same year that she was made a DBE. She subsequently entered into a period of creative and personal decline, culminating with a nervous breakdown in 1981. She died at home in Cornwall in 1989 at the age of 81.

From https://www.bl.uk/people/daphne-du-maurier.

Quentin Tarantino, in full Quentin Jerome Tarantino, (born March 27, 1963, Knoxville, Tennessee, U.S.), is an American director and screenwriter whose films are noted for their stylized violence, razor-sharp dialogue, and fascination with film and pop culture.

Tarantino worked in a video store in California before selling two screenplays that became True Romance (1993) and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994). In 1992 he made his directing debut with Reservoir Dogs, a violent film about a failed jewelry store robbery. Two years later he established himself as a leading director with Pulp Fiction. The provocative film, which featured intersecting crime stories, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, and Tarantino later received (with Roger Avary) an Academy Award for best original screenplay. For Jackie Brown (1997), he adapted an Elmore Leonard novel about a flight attendant entangled in criminal activities.

Tarantino worked in a video store in California before selling two screenplays that became True Romance (1993) and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994). In 1992 he made his directing debut with Reservoir Dogs, a violent film about a failed jewelry store robbery. Two years later he established himself as a leading director with Pulp Fiction. The provocative film, which featured intersecting crime stories, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, and Tarantino later received (with Roger Avary) an Academy Award for best original screenplay. For Jackie Brown (1997), he adapted an Elmore Leonard novel about a flight attendant entangled in criminal activities. In addition to writing and directing, Tarantino also worked as an actor and producer.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Quentin-Tarantino.

Alfred Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, England on August 13, 1899. He was the youngest of three children born to William and Emma Jane Hitchcock. After attending a technical school at 15, Hitchcock spent the first years of his career as a draftsman, advertising designer, and writer. An interest in photography led to him working in London's film industry, first as a title card designer for silent movies and, just five years later, as a director.

In 1926, Hitchcock married his assistant director, Alma Reville, and in 1928 they had a daughter, Patricia. Hitchcock quickly gained notoriety as a director who delivered suspense, twist endings, and dark subject matter. His own personality and gallows humor were embedded in popular culture through interviews, film trailers, and cameo appearances in his own films. He was popular with audiences at home and abroad, and in 1939 the Hitchcock family moved to Hollywood. In the three decades that followed he would cement his legacy by directing and producing his most successful and enduring works. His television anthology, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, ran from 1955 to 1965 and made him a household name.

During his career, he created over fifty feature films in a career that saw not only the development of Hitchcock's own distinctive directorial style, but also landmark innovations in cinema. In 1929, Blackmail was his first feature film with sound and in 1948, his first colour film was Rope. Hitchcock himself has been credited with pioneering many camera and editing techniques for peers and aspiring directors to emulate.

Hitchcock collected many professional accolades including two Golden Globes, eight Laurel Awards, and five lifetime achievement awards. He was a five-time Academy Award nominee for Best Director and in 1940, his film Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture. In 1980, he received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. A husband, father, director, and the Master of Suspense, Sir Alfred Hitchcock passed away on April 29, 1980.

From http://www.alfredhitchcock.com/life-and-legacy/biography/.

Only a handful of details are known about the life of Sappho. She was born around 615 B.C. to an aristocratic family on the Greek island of Lesbos. Evidence suggests that she had several brothers, married a wealthy man named Cercylas, and had a daughter named Cleis. She spent most of her adult life in the city of Mytilene on Lesbos where she ran an academy for unmarried young women. Sappho's school devoted itself to the cult of Aphrodite and Eros, and Sappho earned great prominence as a dedicated teacher and poet. A legend from Ovid suggests that she threw herself from a cliff when her heart was broken by Phaon, a young sailor, and died at an early age. Other historians posit that she died of old age around 550 B.C.

The history of her poems is as speculative as that of her biography. She was known in antiquity as a great poet: Plato called her "the tenth Muse" and her likeness appeared on coins. It is unclear whether she invented or simply refined the meter of her day, but today it is known as "Sapphic" meter. Her poems were first collected into nine volumes around the third century B.C., but her work was lost almost entirely for many years. Merely one twenty-eight-line poem of hers has survived intact, and she was known principally through quotations found in the works of other authors until the nineteenth century. In 1898 scholars unearthed papyri that contained fragments of her poems. In 1914 in Egypt, archeologists discovered papier-mâché coffins made from scraps of paper that contained more verse fragments attributed to Sappho.

Three centuries after her death the writers of the New Comedy parodied Sappho as both overly promiscuous and lesbian. This characterization held fast, so much so that the very term "lesbian" is derived from the name of her home island. Her reputation for licentiousness would cause Pope Gregory to burn her work in 1073. Because social norms in ancient Greece differed from those of today and because so little is actually known of her life, it is difficult to unequivocally answer such claims. Her poems about Eros, however, speak with equal force to men as well as to women.

Sappho is not only one of the few women poets we know of from antiquity, but also is one of the greatest lyric poets from any age. Most of her poems were meant to be sung by one person to the accompaniment of the lyre (hence the name, "lyric" poetry). Rather than addressing the gods or recounting epic narratives such as those of Homer, Sappho's verses speak from one individual to another. They speak simply and directly to the "bittersweet" difficulties of love. Many critics and readers alike have responded to the personal tone and urgency of her verses, and an abundance of translations of her fragments are available today.

From https://poets.org/poet/sappho.

Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007) was the Newbery Medal-winning author of more than 60 books, including the much-loved A Wrinkle in Time. Born in 1918, L'Engle grew up in New York City, Switzerland, South Carolina and Massachusetts. Her father was a reporter and her mother had studied to be a pianist, and their house was always full of musicians and theater people. L'Engle graduated cum laude from Smith College, then returned to New York to work in the theater. While touring with a play, she wrote her first book, The Small Rain, originally published in 1945. She met her future husband, Hugh Franklin, when they both appeared in The Cherry Orchard. Upon becoming Mrs. Franklin, L'Engle gave up the stage in favor of the typewriter. In the years her three children were growing up, she wrote four more novels. Hugh Franklin temporarily retired from the theater, and the family moved to western Connecticut and for ten years ran a general store. Her book Meet the Austins, an American Library Association Notable Children's Book of 1960, was based on this experience. Her science fantasy classic A Wrinkle in Time was awarded the 1963 Newbery Medal. Two companion novels, A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (a Newbery Honor book), complete what has come to be known as The Time Trilogy, a series that continues to grow in popularity with a new generation of readers. Her 1980 book A Ring of Endless Light won the Newbery Honor. L'Engle passed away in 2007 in Litchfield, Connecticut.

From https://us.macmillan.com/author/madeleinelengle.

Born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1942, Schjeldahl was a college dropout who fell into journalism with a job at the Jersey Journal in Jersey City at the age of 20. He spent a year in New York, befriending the poet Frank O’Hara, who was part of the New York School of experimental painters and writers.

Schjeldahl once planned a biography of O’Hara, who died young in a dune buggy accident in 1966, but never completed it. The surviving interview tapes became the basis for the book Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, a 2022 memoir by Schjeldahl and Alderson’s daughter, Ada Calhoun, exploring her complex relationship with her father. After a year in Paris, Schjeldahl returned to New York, in 1965, “an ambitious poet, a jobber in journalism, and a tyro art nut,” as he put it earlier this year. Though he had no background in criticism, Thomas B. Hess hired Schjeldahl to write reviews for ARTnews, kickstarting one of the field’s most storied careers.

“I thought it was normal for poets to write art criticism. So I started doing that, and people liked what I did,” he told Interview magazine in 2014. Over the course of his nearly 60 years in the business, Schjeldahl won numerous accolades for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, and the Howard Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009, the New York Review of Books called him “our best—our most perspicacious and wittiest—art critic.”

From https://news.artnet.com/art-world/peter-schjeldahl-has-died-80-2197014.

For more information about Peter Schjeldahl:

“The New Life”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=31358

“The Art of Dying”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/23/the-art-of-dying

“Remembering Peter Schjeldahl”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/postscript/10/31/remembering-peter-schjeldahl-a-consummate-critic

“Peter Schjeldahl, New York Art Critic With a Poet’s Voice, Dies at 80”: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/nyregion/peter-schjeldahl-dead.html

“The Thrilling Mind of Wallace Stevens”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-thrilling-mind-of-wallace-stevens

Walter Pater, in full Walter Horatio Pater, (born August 4, 1839, Shadwell, London, England—died July 30, 1894, Oxford, Oxfordshire), was an English critic, essayist, and humanist whose advocacy of “art for art’s sake” became a cardinal doctrine of the movement known as Aestheticism. Pater was educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he studied Greek philosophy under Benjamin Jowett. He then settled in Oxford and read with private pupils. In 1864 he was elected to a fellowship at Brasenose College. Pater’s early intention to enter the church gave way at this time to a consuming interest in classical studies. Pater then began to write for the reviews, and his essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Pico della Mirandola, Michelangelo, and others were collected in 1873 as Studies in the History of the Renaissance (later called simply The Renaissance). His delicate, fastidious style and sensitive appreciation of Renaissance art in these essays made his reputation as a scholar and an aesthete, and he became the centre of a small group of admirers in Oxford. In the concluding essay in The Renaissance, Pater asserted that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it acknowledges neither moral standards nor utilitarian functions in its reason for being. These views brought Pater into an association with Algernon Charles Swinburne and with the Pre-Raphaelites.

Marius the Epicurean (1885) is his most substantial work. It is a philosophical romance in which Pater’s ideal of an aesthetic and religious life is scrupulously and elaborately set forth. The setting is Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius; but this is a thin disguise for the characteristically late-19th-century spiritual development of its main character. Imaginary Portraits (1887) are shorter pieces of philosophical fiction in the same mode. Appreciations (1889) is a return to the critical essay, this time largely on English subjects. In 1893 came Plato and Platonism, giving an extremely literary view of Plato and neglecting the logical and dialectical side of his philosophy. Pater’s Greek Studies (1895), Miscellaneous Studies (1895), and Essays from The Guardian (privately printed, 1896; 1901) were published posthumously. Also published posthumously was his unfinished romance, Gaston de Latour (1896).

The primary influence on Pater’s mind was his classical studies, coloured by a highly individual view of Christian devotion and pursued largely as a source of extremely refined artistic sensations. In his later critical writings Pater continued to focus on the innate qualities of works of art, in contrast to the prevailing tendency to evaluate them on the basis of their moral and educational value. Pater’s early influence was confined to a small circle in Oxford, but he came to have a widespread effect on the next literary generation. Oscar Wilde, George Moore, and the aesthetes of the 1890s were among his followers and show obvious and continual traces both of his style and of his ideas.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Walter-Pater.

American poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. After studying at Harvard and teaching for a brief time, Emerson entered the ministry. He was appointed to the Old Second Church in his native city, but soon became an unwilling preacher. Unable in conscience to administer the sacrament of the Lord's Supper after the death of his nineteen-year-old wife of tuberculosis, Emerson resigned his pastorate in 1831.

The following year, he sailed for Europe, visiting Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Carlyle, the Scottish-born English writer, was famous for his explosive attacks on hypocrisy and materialism, his distrust of democracy, and his highly romantic belief in the power of the individual. Emerson's friendship with Carlyle was both lasting and significant; the insights of the British thinker helped Emerson formulate his own philosophy. On his return to New England, Emerson became known for challenging traditional thought. In 1835, he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson, and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. Known in the local literary circle as "The Sage of Concord," Emerson became the chief spokesman for Transcendentalism, the American philosophic and literary movement. Centered in New England during the 19th century, Transcendentalism was a reaction against scientific rationalism.

Emerson's first book, Nature (1836), is perhaps the best expression of his Transcendentalism, the belief that everything in our world—even a drop of dew—is a microcosm of the universe. His concept of the Over-Soul—a Supreme Mind that every man and woman share—allowed Transcendentalists to disregard external authority and to rely instead on direct experience. "Trust thyself," Emerson's motto, became the code of Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and W. E. Channing. From 1842 to 1844, Emerson edited the Transcendentalist journal, The Dial. Emerson wrote a poetic prose, ordering his essays by recurring themes and images. His poetry, on the other hand, is often called harsh and didactic. Among Emerson's most well known works are Essays, First and Second Series (1841, 1844). The First Series includes Emerson's famous essay, "Self-Reliance," in which the writer instructs his listener to examine his relationship with Nature and God, and to trust his own judgment above all others.

Emerson's other volumes include Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life (1860), and English Traits (1865). His best-known addresses are The American Scholar (1837) and The Divinity School Address, which he delivered before the graduates of the Harvard Divinity School, shocking Boston's conservative clergymen with his descriptions of the divinity of man and the humanity of Jesus. Emerson's philosophy is characterized by its reliance on intuition as the only way to comprehend reality, and his concepts owe much to the works of Plotinus, Swedenborg, and Böhme. A believer in the "divine sufficiency of the individual," Emerson was a steady optimist. His refusal to grant the existence of evil caused Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James, Sr., among others, to doubt his judgment. In spite of their skepticism, Emerson's beliefs are of central importance in the history of American culture. Ralph Waldo Emerson died of pneumonia on April 27, 1882.

From https://poets.org/poet/ralph-waldo-emerson.

Though poet and essayist Mary Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh, she spent her youth moving around the United States and Europe with her military family. She has published over a dozen books of poetry, including Dunce (2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, My Private Property (2016), Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (2007), and The Adamant (1989), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) and the work of fiction The Most of It (2008). A Little White Shadow (2006), her book of erasures—found texts in which all but a few words have been erased from the page—reveals what Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called “haiku-like minifables, sideways aphorisms, and hauntingly perplexing koans.” Ruefle's erasures are available to view on her website; a full-color facsimile of her erasure Incarnation of Now was published in a limited edition by See Double Press.

Ruefle’s free-verse poetry is at once funny and dark, domestic and wild. Reviewing Post Meridian (2000), critic Lisa Beskin of the Boston Review observed, “Like John Ashbery and James Tate, Mary Ruefle investigates the multiplicities and frailties of being with an associative inventiveness and a lightness of touch; the purposefulness of her enquiry never eclipses the remarkable beauty of her work.”

Ruefle earned a BA from Bennington College. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Whiting Writers’ Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems (2003), American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006), and The Next American Essay (2002). Ruefle has taught at Vermont College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Vermont.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-ruefle.

Clarice Lispector, (born December 10, 1920, Chechelnyk, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died December 9, 1977, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) was a novelist and short-story writer, and one of Brazil’s most important literary figures, who is considered to be among the greatest women writers of the 20th century.

Escaping the Jewish pogroms that were part of life in Ukraine and other parts of the Russian Empire in the late 19th–early 20th century, Lispector at age five immigrated with her parents and two older sisters to Brazil. There her mother died some four years later of syphilis, contracted from a group of Russian soldiers who had raped her. Lispector studied law for a time and then took up journalism.

Her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem(1944; Near to the Wild Heart), published when she was 24 years old, won critical acclaim for its sensitive interpretation of adolescence. In her later works, such as A maçã no escuro (1961; The Apple in the Dark), A paixão segundo G.H. (1964; The Passion According to G.H.), Água viva (1973; The Stream of Life ), A hora da estrela (1977; The Hour of the Star), and Um sopro de vida: pulsações (1978; A Breath of Life), her characters, alienated and searching for meaning in life, gradually gain a sense of awareness of themselves and accept their place in an arbitrary, yet eternal, universe. In 2011 the publishing company New Directions issued a new translation of A hora da estrelaand in 2012 issued new translations of Perto do coração selvagem, Água viva, and A paixão segundo G.H.

Lispector’s finest prose is found in her short stories. Collections such as Laços de família(1960; Family Ties) and A legião estrangeira(1964; The Foreign Legion) focus on personal moments of revelation in the everyday lives of the protagonists and the lack of meaningful communication among individuals in a contemporary urban setting. English translations of her stories were collected as The Complete Stories (2015).

Lispector achieved international fame with works that depict a highly personal, almost existentialist view of the human dilemma and are written in a prose style characterized by a simple vocabulary and elliptical sentence structure. She is notoriously difficult to translate. In contrast to the regional or national social concerns expressed by many of her Brazilian contemporaries, her artistic vision transcends time and place; her characters, in elemental situations of crisis, are frequently female and only incidentally modern or Brazilian.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Clarice-Lispector.

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. He was born on April 29, 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s, and died on the same day in 1933. During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet, living in relative seclusion and publishing little of his work. A short collection of his poetry was privately printed in the early 1900s and reprinted with new verse a few years later, but that was the extent of his published poetry. Instead, Cavafy chose to circulate his verse among friends.

Cavafy is the leading poet of the periphery, writing in Greek far from Greek lands. The body of his poetry includes the 154 poems of the “canon”; 37 “repudiated poems,” most of which are juvenilia written in romantic katharevousa; 75 “hidden” poems that were found finished in his papers; and 30 “unfinished” poems. His poems often feature historical figures or creations of the poet’s imagination, with frequent references to elements of Homeric, Hellenistic, and Byzantine years. Today, his poetry occupies a prominent place in both Greek and world literature.

You may read the complete C. P. Cavafy bio here https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/and discover the digital collection of the Cavafy Archive here https://cavafy.onassis.org/.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/c-p-cavafy and https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/.

For more information about C. P. Cavafy:

Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:

The Collected Poems: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-collected-poems-9780199555956?cc=ca&lang=en&

“Cavafy Archive”: https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/cavafy-archive/

“Body, Remember…”: https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/cavafy-archive/the-canon/remember-body

Benjamin Constant, in full Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, (born Oct. 25, 1767, Lausanne, Switz.—died Dec. 8, 1830, Paris), Franco-Swiss novelist and political writer, the author of Adolphe, a forerunner of the modern psychological novel. The son of a Swiss officer in the Dutch service, whose family was of French origin, he studied at Erlangen, Ger., briefly at the University of Oxford, and at Edinburgh. In 1787 he formed, in Paris, his first liaison, with Madame de Charrière, 27 years his senior. His republican opinions in no way suited him to the office of chamberlain to the duke of Brunswick, which he held for several years. In 1794 he chose the side of the French Revolution, abandoning his office and divorcing his wife, a lady of the court. Madame de Staël had much to do with his decision. Their tumultuous and passionate relationship lasted until 1806.

After the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (1799), Constant was nominated to the tribunate, but he quickly became, like Madame de Staël, an opponent of the Bonapartist regime. Expelled from the tribunate in 1802, he followed her into exile the year after. Thereafter he spent his time either at Madame de Staël’s salon at Coppet, near Geneva, or in Germany, chiefly at Weimar, where he met Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. Constant was the associate of the brothers Friedrich and August von Schlegel, the pioneers of the Romantic idea, and with them he inspired Madame de Staël’s book De l’Allemagne (“On Germany”).

In 1808 Constant secretly married Charlotte von Hardenberg. But his intellectual relationship with Madame de Staël and the group at Coppet remained unbroken. As a liberal he was disappointed by the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814, and he reconciled himself with the Napoleonic empire of the Hundred Days under the influence of Madame Récamier, the other great love of his life. On his return to Paris, Constant became one of the leaders of liberal journalism. He was elected a deputy in 1819. After the revolution of July 1830, he was appointed president of the council of state but died the same year.

During his exile, Constant began work on De la religion considérée dans sa source, ses formes, et ses développements, 5 vol. (1824–31; “On Religion Considered in Its Source, Its Forms, and Its Developments”), a historical analysis of religious feeling. He is better known, however, for his novels. Published in 1816 and written in a lucid and classical style, the autobiographical Adolphe (Eng. trans. Adolphe) describes in minute analytical detail a young man’s passion for a woman older than himself. Nearly 150 years after the publication of Adolphe, another of Constant’s autobiographical novels, Cécile, dealing with events between 1793 and 1808, was discovered and first published. Constant is also known for his Journaux intimes(“Intimate Journals”), first published in their entirety in 1952. They add to the autobiographical picture of Constant provided by his Le Cahier rouge (1907; The Red Notebook).

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benjamin-Constant.

Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish was born in al-Birwa in Galilee, a village that was occupied and later razed by the Israeli army. Because they had missed the official Israeli census, Darwish and his family were considered “internal refugees” or “present-absent aliens.” Darwish lived for many years in exile in Beirut and Paris. He is the author of over 30 books of poetry and eight books of prose, and earned the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, the Lenin Peace Prize, and the Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres Medal from France.

In the 1960s Darwish was imprisoned for reciting poetry and traveling between villages without a permit. Considered a “resistance poet,” he was placed under house arrest when his poem “Identity Card” was turned into a protest song. After spending a year at a university of Moscow in 1970, Darwish worked at the newspaper Al-Ahram in Cairo. He subsequently lived in Beirut, where he edited the journal Palestinian Affairs from 1973 to 1982. In 1981 he founded and edited the journal Al-Karmel. Darwish served from 1987 to 1993 on the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In 1996 he was permitted to return from exile to visit friends and family in Israel and Palestine.

Mahmoud Darwish’s early work of the 1960s and 1970s reflects his unhappiness with the occupation of his native land. Carolyn Forché and Runir Akash noted in their introduction to Unfortunately It Was Paradise (2003) that “as much as [Darwish] is the voice of the Palestinian Diaspora, he is the voice of the fragmented soul.” Forché and Akash commented also on his 20th volume, Mural: “Assimilating centuries of Arabic poetic forms and applying the chisel of modern sensibility to the richly veined ore of its literary past, Darwish subjected his art to the impress of exile and to his own demand that the work remain true to itself, independent of its critical or public reception.” Mahmoud Darwish died in 2008 in Houston, Texas.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mahmoud-darwish.

Lydia Davis is the author of Essays One, a collection of essays on writing, reading, art, memory, and the Bible. She is also the author of The End of the Story: A Novel and many story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction; Can’t and Won’t (2014); and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, described by James Wood in The New Yorker as “a grand cumulative achievement.” Davis is also the acclaimed translator of Swann’s Way and Madame Bovary, both awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and of many other works of literature. She has been named both a Chevalier and an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and in 2020 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

From https://us.macmillan.com/author/lydiadavis.

For more information about Lydia Davis:

The Cows: https://www.sarabandebooks.org/all-titles/the-cows-lydia-davis

“Lydia Davis, The Art of Fiction No. 227”: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6366/art-of-fiction-no-227-lydia-davis

“Interview with Lydia Davis”: https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-lydia-davis/

Randall Jarrell was born on May 6, 1914 in Nashville. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University. From 1937 to 1939 he taught at Kenyon College, where he met John Crowe Ransom and Robert Lowell, and then at the University of Texas.

Jarrell’s first book of poems, Blood for a Stranger (Harcourt, 1942), was published in 1942, the same year he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He soon left the Air Corps for the U.S. Army and worked as a control tower operator, an experience which provided much material for his poetry.

Jarrell’s reputation as a poet was established in 1945, while he was still serving in the army, with the publication of his second book, Little Friend, Little Friend (Dial Press, 1945), which bitterly and dramatically documents the intense fears and moral struggles of young soldiers. Other volumes followed, all characterized by great technical skill, empathy with the lives of others, and an almost painful sensitivity.

Following the war, Jarrell accepted a teaching position at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and remained there, except for occasional absences to teach elsewhere, until his death. Jarrell is highly regarded not only as a poet, but also as a peerless literary essayist, and was considered the most astute (and most feared) poetry critic of his generation. Robert Lowell, in an essay published after Jarrell’s death, wrote, “What Jarrell’s inner life was in all its wonder, variety, and subtlety is best told in his poetry [...] His gifts, both by nature and by a lifetime of hard dedication and growth, were wit, pathos, and brilliance of intelligence. These qualities, dazzling in themselves, were often so well employed that he became, I think, the most heartbreaking English poet of his generation...Always behind the sharpened edge of his lines, there is the merciful vision, his vision, partial like all others, but an illumination of life, too sad and radiant for us to stay with long—or forget.”

Randall Jarrell was struck by a car and killed at the age of fifty-one on October 14, 1965.

From https://poets.org/poet/randall-jarrell.

Patti Smith (American, b.1946) is a singer-songwriter, poet, and visual artist, known for her role in the punk rock movement of the 1970s. Born in Chicago, and raised in South Jersey, she studied at Glassboro State Teachers College, before moving to New York City in 1967. There, she met and befriended Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom she maintained a close friendship and artistic partnership until his death.

Throughout the 1970s, Smith developed a reputation as a poet and performance artist. In 1975, she released her debut album, Horses, which would go on to become one of the most influential and critically successful albums of all time.

In 1979, and continuing into the 1980s, Smith largely disappeared from the public scene, moving to Detroit with her husband, MC5 guitarist, Fred “Sonic” Smith, and devoting herself to domestic life. Following her husband’s death in 1994, Smith returned to the music and art scene, beginning with her successful comeback album, Gone Again.

She has also been featured in a number of art exhibitions, including Strange Messenger at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2002, and Rockaway!, hosted by MoMA PS1 in 2014. In addition, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2005, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

From http://www.artnet.com/artists/patti-smith/biography.

Alexander, Freiherr von Humboldt, (born Sept. 14, 1769, Berlin, Prussia—died May 6, 1859, Berlin), was a German naturalist and explorer. In 1792 he joined the mining department of the Prussian government, where he invented a safety lamp and established a technical school for miners. From 1799 he explored Central and South America, traveling in the Amazon jungles and the Andean highlands. During these journeys he discovered the connection between the Amazon and Orinoco river systems and surmised that altitude sickness was caused by lack of oxygen. He studied the oceanic current off the western coast of South America; it became known as the Humboldt Current (now the Peru Current). He returned to Europe in 1804. His research helped lay the foundation for comparative climatology, drew a connection between a region’s geography and its flora and fauna, and added to an understanding of the development of the Earth’s crust. In Paris he used his financial resources to help Louis Agassiz and others launch careers. In 1829 he traveled to Russia and Siberia and made geographic, geologic, and meteorologic observations of Central Asia. During the 1830s he investigated magnetic storms. The last 25 years of his life were spent writing Kosmos, an account of the structure of the universe as then known.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Alexander-von-Humboldt.

For more information about Alexander von Humboldt:

“Who Was Alexander von Humboldt?”: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/who-was-alexander-von-humboldt-180974473/

“Humboldt in the New World”: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/novemberdecember/feature/humboldt-in-the-new-world

“The Very Great Alexander von Humboldt”: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/22/very-great-alexander-von-humboldt/

Heraclitus, also spelled Heracleitus or Herakleitos, (born c.540 BCE, Ephesus, Anatolia [now Selçuk, Turkey]—died c. 480) was a Greek philosopher remembered for his cosmology, in which fire forms the basic material principle of an orderly universe. Little is known about his life, and the one book he apparently wrote is lost. His views survive in the short fragments quoted and attributed to him by later authors.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Heraclitus.

For more information about Herakleitos:

“Heraclitus”: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/

7 Greeks: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/7-greeks/

“Davenport’s pleiad”: https://newcriterion.com/issues/1995/11/davenports-pleiad

Gilles Deleuze, (born January 18, 1925, Paris, France—died November 4, 1995, Paris), was a French writer and antirationalist philosopher. Deleuze began his study of philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1944. Appointed to the faculty there in 1957, he later taught at the University of Lyons and the University of Paris VIII, where he was a popular lecturer. He retired from teaching in 1987.

Two of Deleuze’s early publications, David Hume (1952; with Andre Cresson) and Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), were historical studies of thinkers who, though in different ways, emphasized the limited powers of human reason and mocked the pretensions of traditional philosophy to discern the ultimate nature of reality. In the 1960s Deleuze began to philosophize in a more original vein, producing two major works, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969). In the former he argued against the devaluation of “difference” in Western metaphysics and tried to show that difference inheres in repetition itself.

A central theme of Deleuze’s work during this period was what he called the “Eleatic-Platonic bias” of Western metaphysics—i.e., the preference, which originated with the pre-Socratic school of Eleaticism and the subsequent philosophy of Plato, for unity over multiplicity (“the one” over “the many”) and for sameness over difference. According to Deleuze, this bias, which manifests itself in the characteristic philosophical search for the abstract “essences” of things, falsifies the nature of experience, which consists of multiplicities rather than unities. In order to do justice to reality as multiplicity, therefore, a completely new set of philosophical concepts is required. Deleuze also criticized traditional metaphysics for its “arboreal” or “treelike” character—i.e., its conception of reality in terms of hierarchy, order, and linearity—and compared his own thought, by contrast, to the structure of a rhizome, an underground plant stem whose growth is aimless and disordered.

Following the student uprising in Paris in May 1968, Deleuze’s thought became more politically engaged. Anti-Oedipus (1972), the first volume of a two-volume work (Capitalism and Schizophrenia) written with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (1930–92), is an extended attack on traditional psychoanalysis and the concept of the Oedipus complex, which the authors contend has been used to suppress human desire in the service of normalization and control. The book concludes with a rather naive celebration of schizophrenia as a heroic expression of social nonconformity. In the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), which they present as a study in “nomadology” and “deterritorialization” (the former term suggesting the nomadic lifestyle of Bedouin tribes, the latter a general state of flux and mobility), Deleuze and Guattari condemn all species of rationalist metaphysics as “state philosophy.” In 1995, depressed by chronic illness and his generally deteriorating health, Deleuze committed suicide.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gilles-Deleuze.

Poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. In 1912, Millay entered her poem "Renascence" to The Lyric Year's poetry contest, where she won fourth place and publication in the anthology. This brought her immediate acclaim and a scholarship to Vassar College, where she continued to write poetry and became involved in the theater. In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems (Harper, 1917). At the request of Vassar's drama department, she also wrote her first verse play, The Lamp and the Bell (1921), a work about love between women.

After graduating from Vassar, Millay moved to New York City's Greenwich Village, where she lived with her sister Norma in a nine-foot-wide attic. Millay published poems in Vanity Fair, the Forum, and others while writing short stories and satire under the pen name Nancy Boyd. She and Norma acted with the Provincetown Players in the group's early days, befriending writers such as poet Witter Bynner, critic Edmund Wilson, playwright and actress Susan Glaspell, and journalist Floyd Dell. Millay publishedA Few Figs from Thistles (Harper & Brothers, 1920), a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In 1923, Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (Flying Cloud Press, 1922). In addition to publishing three plays in verse, Millay also wrote the libretto of one of the few American grand operas, The King's Henchman (Harper & Brothers, 1927).

Millay married Eugen Boissevain in 1923, and the two were together for twenty-six years. Boissevain gave up his own pursuits to manage Millay's literary career, setting up the readings and public appearances for which Millay grew famous. Edna St. Vincent Millay died at the age of fifty-eight on October 18, 1950, in Austerlitz, New York.

From https://poets.org/poet/edna-st-vincent-millay.

Annie Ernaux, née Duchesne, was born in 1940 in Lillebonne Normandy. A few years later her parents moved to Yvetot, where they kept a café and grocery shop in a working-class district of the town. She studied at a private Catholic secondary school in Yvetot, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time. In 1958, at eighteen, she left home for the summer to look after children in a summer camp (colonie de vacances).

During that summer, living for the first time with a group of people of her own age, she had her first sexual experiences, recounted in her recent work Mémoire de fille (A Girl’s Story). In this same book, she also writes about her stay in London as an au pair in 1960, and her first attempt at Higher Education which took the form of primary teacher training in Rouen. At the end of the book we see Annie returning to Rouen from London to take a degree in literature, having abandoned her primary school teacher training course. She had also already written the first pages of her first, unpublished novel in London.

The years that followed saw her married with two sons, qualifying as a secondary school teacher in two competitive examinations, the Capès and the still more prestigious agrégation, and teaching French in a secondary school in Annecy, Haute Savoie. One of her rare returns to Normandy coincided with her father’s final illness and death in 1967. In 1974 Annie Ernaux published her first book, Cleaned Out, a fictionalized account of the illegal abortion she underwent in 1964, and her move from working-class to middle-class culture through education. In 1977 the family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town in the Paris region. Ernaux eventually left secondary school teaching and took up a post at the Cned, Centre for Distance Education. She won both literary acclaim in the form of the Prix Renaudot, and a large readership with the publication of her account of her father’s life, A Man’s Place in 1983. After her divorce in the early 1980s, Ernaux remained in her house in Cergy, where she lives to this day. In 2000 she retired from her teaching post, and devoted herself to writing, and in 2008 published The Years, considered by many to be her crowning achievement in terms both of its content and innovative form, intertwining personal and collective history over six decades. The success of this work was recognized by the award of the Marguerite Duras and the François Mauriac prizes, and the English translation shortlisted for the Man Booker prize International.

Her works overall have received the French language prize and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize, as well as publication of her almost complete works to date in the Quarto edition by Gallimard in 2011 (Ernaux is the first woman writer to be published in this series in her lifetime). In 2014 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cergy-Pontoise. In October 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

From https://www.annie-ernaux.org/biography/.

Annie Ernaux, née Duchesne, was born in 1940 in Lillebonne Normandy. A few years later her parents moved to Yvetot, where they kept a café and grocery shop in a working-class district of the town. She studied at a private Catholic secondary school in Yvetot, encountering girls from more middle-class backgrounds, and experiencing shame of her working-class parents and milieu for the first time. In 1958, at eighteen, she left home for the summer to look after children in a summer camp (colonie de vacances).

During that summer, living for the first time with a group of people of her own age, she had her first sexual experiences, recounted in her recent work Mémoire de fille (A Girl’s Story). In this same book, she also writes about her stay in London as an au pair in 1960, and her first attempt at Higher Education which took the form of primary teacher training in Rouen. At the end of the book we see Annie returning to Rouen from London to take a degree in literature, having abandoned her primary school teacher training course. She had also already written the first pages of her first, unpublished novel in London.

The years that followed saw her married with two sons, qualifying as a secondary school teacher in two competitive examinations, the Capès and the still more prestigious agrégation, and teaching French in a secondary school in Annecy, Haute Savoie. One of her rare returns to Normandy coincided with her father’s final illness and death in 1967. In 1974 Annie Ernaux published her first book, Cleaned Out, a fictionalized account of the illegal abortion she underwent in 1964, and her move from working-class to middle-class culture through education. In 1977 the family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town in the Paris region. Ernaux eventually left secondary school teaching and took up a post at the Cned, Centre for Distance Education. She won both literary acclaim in the form of the Prix Renaudot, and a large readership with the publication of her account of her father’s life, A Man’s Place in 1983. After her divorce in the early 1980s, Ernaux remained in her house in Cergy, where she lives to this day. In 2000 she retired from her teaching post, and devoted herself to writing, and in 2008 published The Years, considered by many to be her crowning achievement in terms both of its content and innovative form, intertwining personal and collective history over six decades. The success of this work was recognized by the award of the Marguerite Duras and the François Mauriac prizes, and the English translation shortlisted for the Man Booker prize International.

Her works overall have received the French language prize and the Marguerite Yourcenar prize, as well as publication of her almost complete works to date in the Quarto edition by Gallimard in 2011 (Ernaux is the first woman writer to be published in this series in her lifetime). In 2014 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cergy-Pontoise. In October 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.

From https://www.annie-ernaux.org/biography/.

Groucho was born Julius Henry Marx on Oct 2 1890 in New York. He was the third of the five surviving sons of Sam and Minnie Marx. He was the first of the brothers to start a stage career aged 15 in an act called The Leroy Trio. Other acts followed, but none of them was a great success. Twice the other members of the act disappeared overnight and left him penniless in places far away from home.

When his Brothers came on stage they finally had success with the musical comedy called I'll Say She Is. It was at one of the performances of this show that Groucho got his painted moustache. He arrived late at the theater and used greasepaint to create a moustache. He found this so much easier than a glued-on moustache that he insisted on using this technique from then on. I'll Say She Is is was followed by two more Broadway hits - The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers. The latter of which has the character of Captain Spaulding which remained (with the song Hooray for Captain Spaulding) a trademark for Groucho for the rest of his life.

The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers were also the first movies (except for one unreleased) made by the Brothers and were filmed in New York. The remaining movies were made in Hollywood. In the later years of the Brothers movie career Groucho started working on radio. He hosted several programmes and was a guest on many shows. His biggest success was the comedy quiz show You Bet Your Life which started in 1947. The show later moved to television and was on the air until 1961.

Groucho also appeared in a few movies without his brothers. Always being a liberal, Groucho sometimes made critical remarks about politics and had friends who were regarded as communist by the US of the 1950s. This led to Groucho being investigated by the FBI.

When Marx Brothers became popular again in the late sixties/early seventies Groucho made a comeback with a show in Carnegie Hall in 1972. At the film festival in Cannes in 1972 he was made Commandeur des Arts et Lettres and in 1974 he received a special Academy Award for the achievements of the Marx Brothers. Groucho died on August 19th 1977 at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. His ashes are at Eden Memorial Park, San Fernando, California.

From https://www.marx-brothers.org/biography/groucho.htm.

Bob Dylan was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. He grew up in the city of Hibbing. As a teenager, he played in various bands and with time his interest in music deepened, with a particular passion for American folk music and blues. One of his idols was the folk singer Woody Guthrie. He was also influenced by the early authors of the Beat Generation, as well as by modernist poets. Dylan moved to New York City in 1961 and began to perform in clubs and cafés in Greenwich Village. He met the record producer John Hammond, with whom he signed a contract for his debut album, Bob Dylan (1962). In the following years, he recorded a number of albums which have had a tremendous impact on popular music: Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, Blonde On Blonde in 1966 and Blood On The Tracks in 1975. His productivity continued in the following decades, resulting in masterpieces like Oh Mercy (1989), Time Out of Mind (1997) and Modern Times (2006).

Dylan’s tours in 1965 and 1966 attracted a lot of attention. For a period, he was accompanied by film maker D. A. Pennebaker, who documented life around the stage in what would come to be the movie Dont Look Back (1967). Dylan has recorded a large number of albums revolving around topics such as: the social conditions of man, religion, politics and love. The lyrics have continuously been published in new editions starting in 1973, under the title WritingsandDrawings, subsequently changed to Lyrics. As an artist, he is strikingly versatile; he has been active as a painter, actor and scriptwriter. Besides his large production of albums, Dylan has published experimental work like the prose poetry collection Tarantula (1971). He has written an autobiography, Chronicles (2004), which depicts memories from the early years in New York and which provides glimpses of his life at the center of popular culture. Since the late 1980s, Bob Dylan has toured consistently, playing over 3000 concerts during the last 20 years. Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on contemporary culture is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of literary and musical analysis.

From https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/biographical/.

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. He was born on April 29, 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s, and died on the same day in 1933. During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet, living in relative seclusion and publishing little of his work. A short collection of his poetry was privately printed in the early 1900s and reprinted with new verse a few years later, but that was the extent of his published poetry. Instead, Cavafy chose to circulate his verse among friends.

Cavafy is the leading poet of the periphery, writing in Greek far from Greek lands. The body of his poetry includes the 154 poems of the “canon”; 37 “repudiated poems,” most of which are juvenilia written in romantic katharevousa; 75 “hidden” poems that were found finished in his papers; and 30 “unfinished” poems. His poems often feature historical figures or creations of the poet’s imagination, with frequent references to elements of Homeric, Hellenistic, and Byzantine years. Today, his poetry occupies a prominent place in both Greek and world literature.

You may read the complete C. P. Cavafy bio here https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/and discover the digital collection of the Cavafy Archive here https://cavafy.onassis.org/.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/c-p-cavafy and https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/.

The son of Joseph-Francois Baudelaire and Caroline Archimbaut Dufays, Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris on April 9, 1821. Baudelaire’s father, who was thirty years older than his mother, died when the poet was six. Baudelaire was very close with his mother (much of what is known about his later life comes from the letters he wrote her), but was deeply distressed when she married Major Jacques Aupick. In 1833, the family moved to Lyon, where Baudelaire attended a military boarding school. Shortly before graduation, he was kicked out for refusing to give up a note passed to him by a classmate. Baudelaire spent the next two years in Paris’s Latin Quarter, pursuing a career as a writer and accumulating debt. It is also believed that he contracted syphilis around this time.

In 1841, Baudelaire’s parents sent him to India, hoping the experience would help reform his bohemian urges. He left the ship, however, and returned to Paris in 1842. Upon his return, he received a large inheritance, which allowed him to live the life of a Parisian dandy. He developed a love for clothing and spent his days in art galleries and cafés. He also experimented with hashish and opium. Baudelaire also fell in love with Jeanne Duval, who inspired the “Black Venus” section of Les Fleurs du mal. By 1844, he had spent nearly half of his inheritance. His family won a court order that appointed a lawyer to manage Baudelaire’s fortune and to pay him a small “allowance” for the rest of his life.

In 1857, Auguste Poulet-Malassis published the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal. Baudelaire was so concerned with the quality of the printing that he took a room near the press to help supervise the book’s production. Six of the poems, which described lesbian love and vampires, were condemned as obscene by the public safety section of the Ministry of the Interior. The ban on these poems was not lifted in France until 1949. In 1861, Baudelaire added thirty-five new poems to the collection. Les Fleurs du mal afforded Baudelaire a degree of notoriety; other writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo, publicly praised the poems. Flaubert wrote to Baudelaire, extolling his artistry: “You have found a way to inject new life into Romanticism. You are unlike anyone else [which is the most important quality].” Unlike earlier Romantics, Baudelaire looked to the urban life of Paris for inspiration. He argued that art must create beauty from even the most depraved or “non-poetic” situations.

Les Fleurs du mal, with its explicit sexual content and juxtapositions of urban beauty and decay, only added to Baudelaire’s reputation as a poète maudit (cursed poet). Baudelaire enhanced this reputation by flaunting his eccentricities; for instance, he once asked a friend in the middle of a conversation “Wouldn't it be agreeable to take a bath with me?” Due to the abundance of stories about the poet, it is difficult to sort fact from fiction.

In 1862, Baudelaire began to suffer nightmares and increasingly bad health. He left Paris for Brussels in 1863 to give a series of lectures, but had several strokes that resulted in partial paralysis. On August 31, 1867, at the age of forty-six, Charles Baudelaire died in Paris. Although doctors at the time didn’t mention it, it is likely that syphilis led to terminal illness. His reputation as poet was secure: the Symbolists who led the next major movement in French poetry— Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud—claimed him as a predecessor. In the twentieth century, thinkers and artists as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Robert Lowell, and Seamus Heaney, have celebrated his work.

From https://poets.org/poet/charles-baudelaire.

Anaïs Nin (born February 21, 1903, Neuilly, France—died January 14, 1977, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) was a French-born author of novels and short stories whose literary reputation rests on the eight published volumes of her personal diaries. Her writing shows the influence of the Surrealist movement and her study of psychoanalysis under Otto Rank. Brought to New York City by her mother in 1914, Nin was educated there but later returned to Europe. She launched her literary career with the publication of D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932); the book led to a lifelong friendship with the American author Henry Miller.

At the beginning of World War II Nin returned to New York City. There she continued—at her own expense—to print and publish her novels and short stories, and, although no critical acclaim was forthcoming, her works were admired by many leading literary figures of the time. Not until 1966, with the appearance of the first volume of her diaries, did she win recognition as a writer of significance. The success of the diary provoked interest in her earlier work Cities of the Interior (1959), a five-volume roman-fleuve, or continuous novel, which consists of Ladders to Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954), and Solar Barque (1958).

Nin’s literary contribution was a subject of controversy in her lifetime and remained so after her death. Many critics admired her unique expression of femininity, her lyrical style, and her psychological insight. Some dismissed her concern with her own fulfillment as self-indulgent and narcissistic. Opinion was further divided by the posthumous Delta of Venus: Erotica (1977) and later collections of previously unpublished erotic stories written on commission during the financially lean years of the early 1940s. Her other works of fiction included a collection of short stories, Under a Glass Bell (1944); the novels House of Incest (1936), Seduction of the Minotaur(1961), and Collages (1964); and three novelettes collected in Winter of Artifice (1939).

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anais-Nin.

Appointed United States Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress in 2010, William Stanley Merwin had a career that spanned seven decades. A poet, translator, gardener and environmental activist, Merwin has become one of the most widely read and honored poets in America. He died at home at the age of 91, in the house he built, among the thousands of palms he planted, on Friday, March 15, 2019.

Born September 30, 1927, in New York City, William Stanley Merwin was the son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five. He was raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and attended Princeton University on a scholarship. As a young man, Merwin went to Europe and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator. Over the years, his poetic voice moved from the more formal to a more distinctly American voice. As the Atlantic Monthly said, “The intentions of Merwin’s poetry are as broad as the biosphere yet as intimate as a whisper. He conveys in the sweet simplicity of grounded language a sense of the self where it belongs, floating between heaven, earth, and the underground.”

He has lived in Majorca, London, France, Mexico and several places in the United States, as well as Boston and New York. In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with Robert Aitken, a Zen Buddhist teacher. He married Paula Dunaway, in 1983, and settled on Maui. For over 40 years, they lived in a home that William designed and helped build, surrounded by acres of land once devastated and depleted from years of erosion, logging and toxic agricultural practices. Together, the Merwins painstakingly restored the land into one of the most comprehensive palm gardens in the world. He continued to live, write and garden in Hawaii until he died at home on Friday, March 15th, 2019.

From https://merwinconservancy.org/about-w-s-merwin/.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman's, a literary annual of new writing, and executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing, as well as Tales of Two Americas, an anthology about income inequality in America, and Tales of Two Planets, an anthology of new writing about inequality and the climate crisis globally. He is also the author of two poetry collections, Maps and The Park. His work is translated into more than twenty languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. The former editor of Granta, he teaches writing at New York University.

From https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/96608/john-freeman/.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology, with a focus on apiology, the study of bees. In 1940, when Plath was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined Plath's relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegiac and infamous poem "Daddy."

Plath kept a journal from the age of eleven and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school. In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1955. After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.

Plath returned to Massachusetts in 1957 and began studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. She returned to England, where she gave birth to her children Frieda and Nicholas, in 1960 and 1962, respectively. In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. That winter, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel. In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She died on February 11 of that year.

Plath’s poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, and compared to the work of poets such as Lowell and fellow student Anne Sexton. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.

Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize.

From https://poets.org/poet/sylvia-plath.

Sophocles (born c. 496, Colonus, near Athens—died 406 BC, Athens) was a Greek playwright. With Aeschylus and Euripides, he was one of the three great tragic playwrights of Classical Athens. A distinguished public figure in Athens, he served successively in important posts as a treasurer, commander, and adviser. He competed in dramatic festivals, where he defeated Aeschylus to win his first victory in 468 BC. He went on to achieve unparalleled success, writing 123 dramas for dramatic competitions and achieving more than 20 victories. Only seven tragedies survive in their entirety: Antigone, Ajax, Electra, The Trachinian Women, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, and Oedipus the King, his best-known work. He increased the size of the chorus and was the first to introduce a third actor onstage. For their supple language, vivid characterization, and formal perfection, his works are regarded as the epitome of Greek drama.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Sophocles.

Carlo Ginzburg (1939) has taught at the University of Bologna, at UCLA, at the Scuola Normale of Pisa. His books, translated into more than twenty languages, include The Night Battles; The Cheese and the Worms; Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method; The Enigma of Piero della Francesca; History, Rhetoric, and Proof; The Judge and the Historian; Wooden Eyes; No Island is an Island; Threads and Traces; Fear Reverence Terror: Five Essays in Political Iconography. He received the Aby Warburg Prize (1992), the Humboldt-Forschungs Prize (2007), the Balzan Prize for the History of Europe, 1400-1700 (2010) and sixteen honorary degrees from different universities.

From https://history.ceu.edu/people/carlo-ginzburg.

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. He was born on April 29, 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s, and died on the same day in 1933. During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet, living in relative seclusion and publishing little of his work. A short collection of his poetry was privately printed in the early 1900s and reprinted with new verse a few years later, but that was the extent of his published poetry. Instead, Cavafy chose to circulate his verse among friends.

Cavafy is the leading poet of the periphery, writing in Greek far from Greek lands. The body of his poetry includes the 154 poems of the “canon”; 37 “repudiated poems,” most of which are juvenilia written in romantic katharevousa; 75 “hidden” poems that were found finished in his papers; and 30 “unfinished” poems. His poems often feature historical figures or creations of the poet’s imagination, with frequent references to elements of Homeric, Hellenistic, and Byzantine years. Today, his poetry occupies a prominent place in both Greek and world literature.

You may read the complete C. P. Cavafy bio here https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/and discover the digital collection of the Cavafy Archive here https://cavafy.onassis.org/.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/c-p-cavafy and https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/.

Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) was an American poet known for her work focusing on the African American experience and family life. Winner of the National Book Award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Clifton is the only author to have two books of poetry nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in the same year. She is best known for her collections Two-Headed Woman, Next, Good Woman, and Quilting. In addition to her several poetry collections, Clifton also wrote numerous books for children, including her Everett Anderson series.

From https://www.nyrb.com/collections/lucille-clifton.

Primo Levi, (born July 31, 1919, Turin, Italy—died April 11, 1987, Turin), was an Italian-Jewish writer and chemist, noted for his restrained and moving autobiographical account of and reflections on survival in the Nazi concentration camps.

Levi was brought up in the small Jewish community in Turin, studied at the University of Turin, and graduated summa cum laude in chemistry in 1941. Two years later he joined friends in northern Italy in an attempt to connect with a resistance movement, but he was captured and sent to Auschwitz. While there, Levi worked as a slave labourer for an I.G. Farbenindustrie synthetic-rubber factory. Upon the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviets in 1945, Levi returned to Turin, where in 1961 he became the general manager of a factory producing paints, enamels, and synthetic resins; the association was to last some 30 years.

Levi’s first book, Se questo è un uomo (1947; If This Is a Man, or Survival in Auschwitz), demonstrated extraordinary qualities of humanity and detachment in its analysis of the atrocities he had witnessed. His later autobiographical works, La tregua (1963; The Truce, or The Reawakening) and I sommersi e i salvati (1986; TheDrowned and the Saved), are further reflections on his wartime experiences. Il sistema periodico (1975; The Periodic Table) is a collection of 21 meditations, each named for a chemical element, on the analogies between the physical, chemical, and moral spheres; of all of Levi’s works, it is probably his greatest critical and popular success. He also wrote poetry, novels, and short stories. A court in Turin ruled his death in 1987 a suicide, a verdict broadly accepted but debated by some. The Complete Works of Primo Levi (2015) contains English translations of his entire oeuvre, including pieces never previously available to Anglophone readers.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Primo-Levi.

Janet Malcolm (1934–2021) was the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives; The Journalist and the Murderer; Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; and Forty-One False Starts, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In 2017, Malcolm received the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

From https://us.macmillan.com/author/janetmalcolm.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, (born Sept. 24, 1896, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.—died Dec. 21, 1940, Hollywood, Calif.) was a U.S. novelist and short-story writer. Fitzgerald attended Princeton University but dropped out with bad grades. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre (1900–48), daughter of a respected Alabama judge. His works, including the early novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and the story collections Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) and All the Sad Young Men (1926), capture the Jazz Age’s vulgarity and dazzling promise. His brilliant The Great Gatsby (1925; film, 1926, 1949, 1974; TV movie 2001), a story of American wealth and corruption, was eventually acclaimed one of the century’s greatest novels. In 1924 Scott and Zelda became part of the expatriate community on the French Riviera, the setting of Tender Is the Night (1934; film, 1962). His fame and prosperity proved disorienting to them both, and he became seriously alcoholic. Zelda never fully recovered from a mental breakdown in 1932 and spent most of her remaining years in a sanitarium. In 1937 Scott moved to Hollywood to write film scripts; the experience inspired the unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941; film, 1976). He died of a heart attack at age 44.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/F-Scott-Fitzgerald.

Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio and began writing verse in his early teenage years. Though he never attended college, Crane read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and the nineteenth-century French poets Charles Vildrac, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write.

Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, the novelist and short story writer Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman. His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature.

Hart Crane died by suicide on April 27, 1932, at the age of thirty-two, while sailing back to New York from Mexico.

From https://poets.org/poet/hart-crane.

Bruno Schulz was born 12.07.1892 in Drohobych (present Ukraine) and died there 19.11.1942 in tragic circumstances. He spent nearly his entire life there and was generally unwilling to travel. His voyages outside of his native city were sporadic and brief. He viewed Drohobych to be the center of the world and was a acute observer of life there, proving himself an excellent "chronicler." His writings and his art are both saturated with the realities of Drohobych. His stories are replete with descriptions of the town's main streets and landmarks, as well as with portraits of its inhabitants.

Schulz's output as a writer was relatively modest in terms of quantity, but exceptionally rich in quality and subject matter. It consists of two volumes of short stories - The Street of Crocodiles and The Hourglass Sanatorium - and a handful of texts the writer did not include in the first editions of these two collections. Apart from the stories, there is an unusually interesting set of letters, published in the so-called Księga listów / Book of Letters, as well as "critical essays" (primarily press reviews of literary works) that were only recently collected and published in a separate volume.

From https://culture.pl/en/artist/bruno-schulz.

Simone Weil, (born February 3, 1909, Paris, France—died August 24, 1943, Ashford, Kent, England), was a French mystic, social philosopher, and activist in the French Resistance during World War II, whose posthumously published works had particular influence on French and English social thought.

To learn the psychological effects of heavy industrial labour, she took a job in 1934–35 in an auto factory, where she observed the spiritually deadening effect of machines on her fellow workers. In 1936 she joined an anarchist unit near Zaragoza, Spain, training for action in the Spanish Civil War, but after an accident in which she was badly scalded by boiling oil, she went to Portugal to recuperate. Soon thereafter Weil had the first of several mystical experiences, and she subsequently came to view her social concerns as “ersatz Divinity.” After the German occupation of Paris during World War II, Weil moved to the south of France, where she worked as a farm servant. She escaped with her parents to the United States in 1942 but then went to London to work with the French Resistance. To identify herself with her French compatriots under German occupation, Weil refused to eat more than the official ration in occupied France. Malnutrition and overwork led to a physical collapse, and during her hospitalization she was found to have tuberculosis. She died after a few months spent in a sanatorium.

Weil’s writings, which were collected and published after her death, fill about 20 volumes. Her most important works are La Pesanteur et la grâce (1947; Gravity and Grace), a collection of religious essays and aphorisms; L’Enracinement (1949; The Need for Roots), an essay upon the obligations of the individual and the state; Attente de Dieu (1950; Waiting for God), a spiritual autobiography; Oppression et Liberté (1955; Oppression and Liberty), a collection of political and philosophical essays on war, factory work, language, and other topics; and three volumes of Cahiers (1951–56; Notebooks). Though born of Jewish parents, Weil eventually adopted a mystical theology that came very close to Roman Catholicism. A moral idealist committed to a vision of social justice, Weil in her writings explored her own religious life while also analyzing the individual’s relation with the state and God, the spiritual shortcomings of modern industrial society, and the horrors of totalitarianism.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Simone-Weil.

Lou Reed, byname of Lewis Allan Reed, (born March 2, 1942, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died October 27, 2013, Southampton, New York), was a singer-songwriter whose place in the rock pantheon rests primarily on his role in guiding the Velvet Underground, a New York City-based quartet that produced four poor-selling but enormously influential studio albums under Reed’s direction from 1965 to 1970.

After quitting the Velvets, he reemerged as a solo performer in England, where he was adopted by admirers such as glam rock pioneer David Bowie, who produced and performed on Reed’s breakthrough hit, “Walk on the Wild Side” (1973), and Mott the Hoople, who covered Reed’s Velvets classic “Sweet Jane.” His albums embraced everything from rote pop to heavy metal and included an orchestrated song cycle about a sadomasochistic love affair, Berlin (1973), and a double album of guitar drones, Metal Machine Music (1975), that are among his most notorious works. At the onset of the 1980s, Reed recruited his finest post-Velvets band, including guitarist Robert Quine and bassist Fernando Saunders, and reimmersed himself in raw guitar rock on The Blue Mask (1982), addressing his fears, ghosts, and joys with riveting frankness. No longer bedeviled by his addictions, Reed adopted a more-serious if less-daring tone on his recordings, peaking with three releases that were less concept albums than song cycles: New York (1989), about the spiritual death of his hometown; Songs for Drella (1990), an elegy for his 1960s mentor, Pop art conceptualist Andy Warhol, done in collaboration with former Velvets bandmate John Cale; and Magic and Loss (1991), inspired by the deaths of two friends. A romantic relationship with American performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson rejuvenated him again in the mid-1990s, resulting in the playful Set the Twilight Reeling (1997) and the harder-hitting Ecstasy (2000).

In 2000–01 Reed collaborated with director Robert Wilson to bring to the stage POEtry, which was based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The songs from the show were also packaged, with spoken-word interludes, on The Raven (2003)—an ambitious if critically panned experiment. It was followed by Animal Serenade(2004), an excellent live recording that echoed Reed’s landmark 1974 concert album Rock ’n’ Roll Animal. In 2006 Reed celebrated New York City in a book, Lou Reed’s New York, which collected his photography. Reed was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Velvet Underground in 1996 and as a solo performer in 2015.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lou-Reed.

Ingeborg Bachmann, (born June 25, 1926, Klagenfurt, Austria—died Oct. 17, 1973, Rome, Italy), was an Austrian author whose somber, surreal writings often deal with women in failed love relationships, the nature of art and humanity, and the inadequacy of language. Bachmann grew up in Kärnten during World War II and was educated at the Universities of Graz, Innsbruck, and Vienna. She received a doctoral degree in philosophy from Vienna in 1950. Bachmann’s literary career began in earnest in 1952, when she read her poetry to members of the avant-garde Gruppe 47. She produced two volumes of verse, Die gestundete Zeit (1953; “Borrowed Time”), about the sense of urgency produced by the passage of time, and Anrufung des grossen Bären (1956; “Invocation of the Great Bear”), featuring poems of fantasy and mythology. Of her several radio plays, the best known is Der gute Gott von Manhattan (1958; “The Good God of Manhattan” in Three Radio Plays). First broadcast on May 29, 1958, it is about a couple attacked by a covert group that seeks to destroy all traces of love.

Following Bachmann’s five landmark lectures on literature at the University of Frankfurt in 1959–60, she shifted her focus from poetry to fiction. During this period she also wrote the libretti for Hans Werner Henze’s operas Der Prinz von Homberg (1960; from a play by Heinrich von Kleist) and Der junge Lord(1965; from a fable by Wilhelm Hauff). Among her prose writings are Das dreissigtse Jahr(1961; The Thirtieth Year) and the lyrical novel Malina (1971; Eng. trans. Malina). She also published essays, stories, and more radio plays. Her death by fire may have been a suicide.

Much attention was given to Bachmann’s work both in her lifetime and after her death, and several of her writings were translated into English. A volume of selected poems, In the Storm of Roses, was published in 1986; it was the inspiration for Elizabeth Vercoe’s composition In the Storm: Four Songs on Texts by Ingeborg Bachmann for medium voice, clarinet, and piano. Some of Bachmann’s stories were translated in Three Paths to the Lake (1989), and a bilingual edition of her collected poems, translated and introduced by Peter Filkins, was published as Songs in Flight(1995). Fragments of two novels intended to complete the trilogy begun with Malina were translated and published together in a single volume entitled The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann (1999).

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ingeborg-Bachmann.

Persian lyric poet Hafez, or Hafiz, (born Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī) grew up in Shiraz. Very little is known about his life, but it is thought that he may have memorized the Qur’an after hearing his father recite passages. When his father died, he left school to work at a bakery and as a copyist. Hafiz became a poet at the court of Abu Ishak and also taught at a religious college. He is one of the most celebrated of the Persian poets, and his influence can be felt to this day. As the author of numerous ghazals expressing love, spirituality, and protest, he and his work continue to be important to Iranians, and many of his poems are used as proverbs or sayings.

Hafiz’s tomb is in Musalla Gardens in Shiraz.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hafez.

Eugenio Montale was born into a family of businessmen in Genoa, Italy, on October 12, 1896. During World War I, he served as an infantry officer on the Austrian front. Orginially Montale had trained to be an opera singer, but when his voice teacher died in 1923, he gave up singing and concentrated his efforts on writing.

After his first book, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), appeared in 1925, Montale was received by critics as a profoundly original and experimental poet. His style mixed archaic words with scientific terms and idioms from the vernacular. He was dismissed from his directorship of the Gabinetto Vieusseux research library in 1938 for refusing to join the Fascist party. He withdrew from public life and began translating English writers such as Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Herman Melville, and Eugene O'Neill. In 1939, Le occasioni (The Occasions) appeared, his most innovative book, followed by La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things, 1956). It was this trio of books established him as a founder of the hermetic school of Italian poetry.

In 1948 he moved from Florence to Milan, where he became chief literary critic for Italy's primary newspaper, Corriere della Sera. In addition to writing poems, Montale was also a prolific essayist, writer of stories and travel sketches, distinguished music critic, translator, and amateur painter. He corresponded with Ezra Pound (despite Pound's Fascist sympathies), Italo Svevo, and Salvatore Quasimodo. In 1961, Montale was awarded an honorary degree at the University of Rome and shortly afterwards, at the universities of Milan, Cambridge, and Basel. In recognition of his work, as well as his courageous opposition to fascism, he was made a lifetime member of the Italian Senate in 1967.

After a long break from writing poetry, Montale published four collections during the last ten years of his life: Satura (Miscellany, 1971), Diario del '71 e del '72 (Diary of 1971 and 1972, 1973), Quaderno di quattro anni (Notebook of Four Years, 1977), and Altri versi e poesi disperse (Other and Uncollected Poems, 1981). In 1975 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions." Montale died in Milan in 1981 at the age of 85.

From https://poets.org/poet/eugenio-montale.

Kenneth Koch was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 27, 1925. He studied at Harvard University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree, and attended Columbia University for his PhD. As a young poet, Koch was known for his association with the New York School of poetry. Originating at Harvard, where Koch met fellow students Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, the New York School derived much of its inspiration from the works of action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Larry Rivers, whom the poets met in the 1950s after settling in New York City. The poetry of the New York School represented a shift away from the Confessional poets, a popular form of soul-baring poetry that the New York School found distasteful. Instead, their poems were cosmopolitan in spirit and displayed not only the influence of action painting, but of French Surrealism and European avant-gardism in general. In 1970 Ron Padgett and David Shapiro edited and published the first major collection of New York School poetry, An Anthology of New York Poets, which included seven poems by Koch.

Koch's association with the New York School worked, in effect, as an apprenticeship. Many critics found Koch's early work obscure, such as Poems (1953), and the epic Ko, or A Season on Earth (1959), yet remarked upon his subsequent writing for its clarity, lyricism, and humor, such as in The Art of Love (1975), which was praised as a graceful, humorous book. His other collections of poetry include New Addresses (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Book Award; Straits (1998); One Train and On the Great Atlantic Rainway, Selected Poems 1950-1988 (both published in 1994), which together earned him the Bollingen Prize in 1995; Seasons of the Earth (1987); On the Edge (1986); Days and Nights (1982); The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979); The Duplications (1977); The Pleasures of Peace(1969); When the Sun Tries to Go On (1969); Thank You (1962); and Seasons on Earth(1960).

Koch's short plays, many of them produced off- and off-off-Broadway, are collected in The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays. He has also published Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (Scribners, 1998); The Red Robins (1975), a novel; Hotel Lambosa and Other Stories (1993); and several books on teaching children to write poetry, including Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Koch wrote the libretto for composer Marcello Panni's The Banquet, which premiered in Bremen in June 1998, and his collaborations with painters have been the subject of exhibitions at the Ipswich Museum in England and the De Nagy Gallery in New York. His numerous honors include the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress in 1996, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Ingram-Merrill foundations. In 1996 he was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kenneth Koch lived in New York City, where he was professor of English at Columbia University. Koch died on July 6, 2002, from leukemia.

From https://poets.org/poet/kenneth-koch.

Journalist, historian, and travel writer, Jan Morris was the renowned author of more than forty books. Her work ranges from such classics as Pax Britannica, The World of Venice, Hong Kong, and The Matter of Wales to the masterly essays published in Journeys, Destinations, and Among the Cities. She has also written a novel, Last Letters from Hav. An Honorary Litt.D. of the University of Wales and Glamorgan, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), she lived in Wales. Jan Morris died in 2020.

From https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Jan-Morris/1287676.

Virgil, or Vergil orig. Publius Vergilius Maro, (born Oct. 15, 70 BCE, Andes, near Mantua—died Sept. 21, 19 BCE, Brundisium), was the Greatest of Roman poets. The well-educated son of a prosperous provincial farmer, Virgil led a quiet life, though he eventually became a member of the circle around Octavian (later Caesar Augustus) and was patronized by Maecenas. His first major work, the 10 pastoral Eclogues (42–37), may be read as a prophecy of tranquility, and one has even been read as a prophecy of Christianity. The Georgics (37–30) point toward a Golden Age in the form of practical goals: the repopulation of rural lands and the rehabilitation of agriculture. His great epic, the Aeneid (begun c. 29, but unfinished at his death), is one of the masterpieces of world literature. A celebration of the founding of Rome by the legendary Aeneas at the request of Augustus, whose consolidation of power in 31–30 unified the Roman world, it also explores the themes of war and the pathos of unrequited love. In later centuries his works were regarded in the Roman Empire as virtually sacred. He was taken up reverently by Christians as well, including Dante, who, in his poem The Divine Comedy, made Virgil his guide through hell and purgatory.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Virgil.

Baltasar Gracián, in full Baltasar Gracián y Morales, (born January 8, 1601, Belmonte de Calatayud, Spain—died December 6, 1658, Tarazona), was a philosopher and writer known as the leading Spanish exponent of conceptism (conceptismo), a style of dealing with ideas that involves the use of terse and subtle displays of exaggerated wit.

After studying at Calatayud and Zaragoza, Gracián entered the Jesuit order at the age of 18 and later became rector of the Jesuit college at Tarragona. His early works—El héroe (1637; The Hero), El discreto (1646; The Compleat Gentleman), and El oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (1647; The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle)—were largely efforts to educate people in the ethics of worldly life. His literary ideas on conceptism and the art of conceited writing (writing that continually shocks the reader by the use of startling metaphor) were clearly set forth in Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1642, 2nd ed. 1648; “Subtlety and the Art of Genius”). In defiance of his superiors, he published pseudonymously El criticón (1651, 1653, 1657; The Critick), a three-part philosophical novel considered by the 19th-century German pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer one of the most important books ever written. In it he examined society from the standpoint of a savage and gave the clearest statement of his pessimistic philosophy with its emphasis on willpower and struggle.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Baltasar-Gracian.

William James, philosopher and psychologist, was instrumental in establishing Harvard's psychology department, which at its inception was tied to the department of philosophy. James himself remained unconvinced that psychology was in fact a distinct discipline, writing in his 1892 survey of the field, Psychology: Briefer Course, "This is no science; it is only the hope of a science" (p. 335). Despite James’s skepticism, in the ensuing century this hope was fully realized in the department he helped to found.

Initially trained in painting, James abandoned the arts and enrolled in Harvard in 1861 to study chemistry and anatomy. During an extended stay in Germany after graduating, James developed an interest in studying the mind, as well as the body. In 1872 James was recruited by Harvard’s new, reformer president, Charles Eliot, to teach vertebrate physiology. In 1875 James taught one of the university’s first courses in psychology, “The Relations between Physiology and Psychology,” for which he established the first experimental psychology demonstration laboratory. James oversaw Harvard’s first doctorate in psychology, earned by G. Stanley Hall in 1878. Hall noted that James’s course was, “up to the present time the only course in the country where students can be made familiar with the methods and results of recent German researches in physiological psychology” (Hall, 1879).

James’s laboratory research on sensation and perception was conducted in the first half of his career. His belief in the connection between mind and body led him to develop what has become known as the James-Lange Theory of emotion, which posits that human experience of emotion arises from physiological changes in response to external events. Inspired by evolutionary theory, James’s theoretical perspective on psychology came to be known as functionalism, which sought causal relationships between internal states and external behaviors.

In 1890 James published a highly influential, two-volume synthesis and summary of psychology, Principles of Psychology. The books were widely read in North America and Europe, gaining attention and praise from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in Vienna. James then moved away from experimental psychology to produce more philosophical works (he is credited as one of the founders of the school of American Pragmatism), although he continued to teach psychology until he retired from Harvard in 1907.

From https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/william-james.

Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (also Marina Cvetaeva and Marina Tsvetayeva) was born in Moscow. During her lifetime she wrote poems, verse plays, and prose pieces; she is considered one of the most renowned poets of 20th-century Russia. Tsvetaeva’s life coincided with turbulent years in Russian history. She married Sergei Efron in 1912; they had two daughters and later one son. Efron joined the White Army, and Tsvetaeva was separated from him during the Civil War. She had a brief love affair with Osip Mandelstam, and a longer relationship with Sofia Parnok. During the Moscow famine, Tsvetaeva was forced to place her daughters in a state orphanage, where the younger, Irina, died of hunger in 1919. In 1922 she emigrated with her family to Berlin, then to Prague, settling in Paris in 1925. In Paris, the family lived in poverty. Sergei Efron worked for the Soviet secret police, and Tsvetaeva was shunned by the Russian expatriate community of Paris. Through the years of privation and exile, poetry and contact with poets sustained Tsvetaeva. She corresponded with Rainer Maria Rilke and Boris Pasternak, and she dedicated work to Anna Akhmatova.

In 1939 Tsvetaeva returned to the Soviet Union. Efron was executed, and her surviving daughter was sent to a labor camp. When the German army invaded the USSR, Tsvetaeva was evacuated to Yelabuga with her son. She hanged herself on August 31, 1941.

Critics and translators of Tsvetaeva’s work often comment on the passion in her poems, their swift shifts and unusual syntax, and the influence of folk songs. She is also known for her portrayal of a woman’s experiences during the “terrible years” (as the period in Russian history was described by Aleksandr Blok). Collections of Tsvetaeva’s poetry translated into English include Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Elaine Feinstein (1971, 1994). She is the subject of several biographies as well as the collected memoirs No Love Without Poetry (2009), by her daughter Ariadna Efron (1912–1975).

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marina-tsvetaeva.

Franz Kafka, (born July 3, 1883, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary—died June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria), was a Czech writer who wrote in German. Born into a middle-class Jewish family, he earned a doctorate and then worked successfully but unhappily at a government insurance office from 1907 until he was forced by a case of tuberculosis to retire in 1922. The disease caused his death two years later. Hypersensitive and neurotic, he reluctantly published only a few works in his lifetime, including the symbolic story The Metamorphosis (1915), the allegorical fantasy In the Penal Colony (1919), and the story collection A Country Doctor (1919). His unfinished novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927), published posthumously against Kafka’s wishes, express the anxieties and alienation of 20th-century humanity. His visionary tales, with their inscrutable mixture of the normal and the fantastic, have provoked a wealth of interpretations. Kafka’s posthumous reputation and influence have been enormous, and he is regarded as one of the great European writers of the 20th century.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Franz-Kafka.

Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish was born in al-Birwa in Galilee, a village that was occupied and later razed by the Israeli army. Because they had missed the official Israeli census, Darwish and his family were considered “internal refugees” or “present-absent aliens.” Darwish lived for many years in exile in Beirut and Paris. He is the author of over 30 books of poetry and eight books of prose, and earned the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, the Lenin Peace Prize, and the Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres Medal from France.

In the 1960s Darwish was imprisoned for reciting poetry and traveling between villages without a permit. Considered a “resistance poet,” he was placed under house arrest when his poem “Identity Card” was turned into a protest song. After spending a year at a university of Moscow in 1970, Darwish worked at the newspaper Al-Ahram in Cairo. He subsequently lived in Beirut, where he edited the journal Palestinian Affairs from 1973 to 1982. In 1981 he founded and edited the journal Al-Karmel. Darwish served from 1987 to 1993 on the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In 1996 he was permitted to return from exile to visit friends and family in Israel and Palestine.

Mahmoud Darwish’s early work of the 1960s and 1970s reflects his unhappiness with the occupation of his native land. Carolyn Forché and Runir Akash noted in their introduction to Unfortunately It Was Paradise (2003) that “as much as [Darwish] is the voice of the Palestinian Diaspora, he is the voice of the fragmented soul.” Forché and Akash commented also on his 20th volume, Mural: “Assimilating centuries of Arabic poetic forms and applying the chisel of modern sensibility to the richly veined ore of its literary past, Darwish subjected his art to the impress of exile and to his own demand that the work remain true to itself, independent of its critical or public reception.” Mahmoud Darwish died in 2008 in Houston, Texas.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mahmoud-darwish.

G.K. Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, and theologian who lived and wrote at the turn of the 20th century. He was a prolific writer, producing fiction and nonfiction along with essays, poetry, and plays. Chesterton is best known for his creation of the priest-detective character Father Brown and for his book Orthodoxywhich has become a classic of Christian apologetics.

From https://us.macmillan.com/author/gkchesterton.

Flavius Philostratus, (born AD 170—died c.245) was a Greek writer of Roman imperial times who studied at Athens and some time after AD 202 entered the circle of the philosophical Syrian empress of Rome, Julia Domna. On her death he settled in Tyre.

Philostratus’s works include Gymnastikos, a treatise dealing with athletic training; Ērōïkos(“Hero”), a dialogue on the significance of various heroes of the Trojan War; Epistolai erōtikai(“Erotic Epistles”), one of which was the inspiration for the English poet Ben Jonson’s To Celia(“Drink to me only with thine eyes”); and two sets of descriptions (ekphraseis) of paintings of mythological scenes, attributed to two men named Philostratus, possibly the well-known figure and his grandson. Flavius Philostratus’s Bioi sophistōn (Lives of the Sophists) treats both the Sophists of the 5th century BC and the later philosophers and rhetoricians of the Second Sophistic, a name coined by Philostratus to describe the art of declamation in Greek as practiced in the Roman Empire from the time of Nero (AD 54–68) to Philostratus’s own day.

Philostratus’s work on the life of the Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana (1st century AD), which was commissioned by Julia Domna, is revealing of religious attitudes in a transitional period. His idealized portrait of Apollonius as an ascetic miracle worker was taken up with enthusiasm by the pagan elites of the next centuries—when Christianity had become of political significance—as a counter figure to the Christian Jesus. In Philostratus’s moderately Atticizing prose (i.e., aspiring to the Classical style of 5th-century-BC Athens and opposed to the florid and bombastic style of Greek associated especially with Asia Minor), formal elegance was a way to give new significance and validity to the traditional cultural heritage of the pagan Greek world.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Flavius-Philostratus.

Fran Lebowitz is a writer and social commentator. Her essays and interviews offer her acerbic views on current events and the media – as well as pet peeves including tourists, baggage-claim areas, after-shave lotion, adults who roller skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan. The New York Times Book Review calls Lebowitz an "important humorist in the classic tradition."

Her first book, a collection of essays titled Metropolitan Life, was a bestseller, as was a second collection, Social Studies. By turns ironic, facetious, deadpan, sarcastic, wry, wisecracking, and waggish, Lebowitz’s prose is wickedly entertaining. Her two books are collected in The Fran Lebowitz Reader, with a new preface by the author. The Fran Lebowitz Reader has been published in nine languages including French, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Lebowitz is also the author of the children’s book, Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas.

Between 2001 to 2007, Lebowitz had a recurring role as Judge Janice Goldberg on the television drama Law & Order. She also had a part in the Martin Scorsese-directed film, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). She can also be seen in various documentary films including the American Experienceseries on New York City, as well as Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016), Regarding Susan Sontag (2014), and Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol(1990), among others. In 2010 Martin Scorsese directed a documentary about Lebowitz for HBO titled Public Speaking. A limited documentary series, Pretend It's a City, also directed by Martin Scorsese, premiered on Netflix in 2021, and was nominated for the 2021 Emmys in the Outstanding Documentary Or Nonfiction Series category.

Lebowitz was named to Vanity Fair’s International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 2008. She remains a style icon. Lebowitz lives in New York City, as she does not believe that she would be allowed to live anywhere else.

From https://franlebowitz.com/bio.

Graham Greene, (born Oct. 2, 1904, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, Eng.—died April 3, 1991, Vevey, Switz.), British author. After studying at the University of Oxford, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926. Beginning c. 1930 he worked principally as a freelance journalist for several decades, during which he traveled widely. Stamboul Train (1932; also titled Orient Express; film, 1934) was the first of his “entertainments,” thrillers with considerable moral complexity and depth; others included A Gun for Sale (1936; also titled This Gun for Hire; film, 1942), The Confidential Agent (1939; film, 1945), and The Third Man (1949; film, 1949). His finest novels—Brighton Rock (1938; film, 1948), The Power and the Glory (1940; film, 1962), The Heart of the Matter(1948; film, 1954), and The End of the Affair (1951; film, 1999)—all have distinctly religious themes. Several of his novels set in “third-world” nations on the brink of political upheaval were also adapted as films.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Graham-Greene.

Mae West, original name Mary Jane West, (born August 17, 1893, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died November 22, 1980, Los Angeles, California), was an American stage and film actress, a sex symbol whose frank sensuality, languid postures, and blasé wisecracking became her trademarks. She usually portrayed women who accepted their lives of dubious virtue with flippant good humor.

West made her debut with a Brooklyn stock company about 1901, and by 1907 she had become a performer on the national vaudeville circuit in partnership with Frank Wallace. She made her Broadway debut as a singer and acrobatic dancer in the revue A la Broadway in 1911. For the next 15 years she alternated between vaudeville and Broadway shows, and she did an occasional nightclub act.

In 1926 West began to write, produce, and star in her own plays on Broadway. In the first of these, Sex (1926), her performance as a prostitute created a sensation but also earned her an eight-day jail sentence for “corrupting the morals of youth,” from which she emerged a national figure. Her plays Diamond Lil (1928) and The Constant Sinner (1931) were also successful. For all the variety of the scripts she wrote, the constant factor was West’s own ironic, languorous personality and her ability to ridicule social attitudes, especially toward sex.

In 1932 West moved to Hollywood. Her first film there, Night After Night (1932), showed the lighthearted approach that was characteristic of her subsequent pictures. She Done Him Wrong (1933), a screen adaptation of Diamond Lil, is memorable for her amusing ability to charge such lines as “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” with suggestive implications. West then wrote and costarred in I’m No Angel (1933), Belle of the Nineties (1934), and Klondike Annie (1936), which brought her popularity to its height. In the 1940s and ’50s she sometimes appeared onstage surrounded by young musclemen, including on Broadway in Catherine Was Great(1944). Her films were revived in the 1960s, and she appeared in Myra Breckinridge(1970), an adaptation of a novel by Gore Vidal, and Sextette (1978), based on a play that she wrote.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mae-West.

Author, playwright and poet Oscar Wilde was a popular literary figure in late Victorian England. After graduating from Oxford University, he lectured as a poet, art critic and a leading proponent of the principles of aestheticism. In 1891, he published The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel which was panned as immoral by Victorian critics, but is now considered one of his most notable works. As a dramatist, many of Wilde’s plays were well received including his satirical comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play. Unconventional in his writing and life, Wilde’s affair with a young man led to his arrest on charges of "gross indecency" in 1895. He was imprisoned for two years and died in poverty three years after his release at the age of 46.

From https://www.biography.com/writer/oscar-wilde

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (born June 28, 1712, Geneva, Switz.—died July 2, 1778, Ermenonville, France), was a Swiss-French philosopher. At age 16 he fled Geneva to Savoy, where he became the steward and later the lover of the baronne de Warens. At age 30, having furthered his education and social position under her influence, he moved to Paris, where he joined Denis Diderot at the center of the philosophes; he wrote on music and economics for Diderot’s Encyclopédie. His first major work, the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), argued that man is good by nature but has been corrupted by society and civilization; Rousseau’s belief in the natural goodness of man set him apart from Roman Catholic writers who, like him, were hostile to the idea of progress. He also wrote music; his light opera The Cunning-Man (1752) was widely admired. In 1752 he became involved in an influential dispute with Jean-Philippe Rameau over the relative merits of French and Italian music; Rousseau championed the latter. In the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1754), he argued against Thomas Hobbes that human life before the formation of societies was healthy, happy, and free and that vice arose as the result of social organization and especially the introduction of private property. Civil society, he held, comes into being only to ensure peace and to protect property, which not everyone has; it thus represents a fraudulent social contract that reinforces inequality. In the Social Contract (1762), which begins with the memorable line, “Man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” Rousseau argues that a civil society based on a genuine social contract rather than a fraudulent one would provide people with a better kind of freedom in exchange for their natural independence, namely, political liberty, which he understands as obedience to a self-imposed law created by the “general will.” In 1762 the publication of Émile, a treatise on education, produced outrage, and Rousseau was forced to flee to Switzerland. He began showing signs of mental instability c. 1767, and he died insane. His Confessions (1781–88), which he modeled on the work of the same title by St. Augustine, is among the most famous autobiographies.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Jean-Jacques-Rousseau.

Naomi Shihab Nye is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has appeared widely. She edited the ALA Notable international poetry collection, This Same Sky, and The Tree Is Older Than You Are: Poems and Paintings from Mexico, as well as The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East. Her books of poems include Fuel, Red Suitcase, and Words Under the Words. A Guggenheim fellow, she is also the author of the young adult novel Habibi, which was named an ALA Notable Book, a Best Book for Young Adults, and winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award as well as the Book Publishers of Texas award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Naomi lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Michael, and their son, Madison.

From https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Naomi-Shihab-Nye/1339809.

Homer, (flourished 9th or 8th century BCE, Ionia?), was an ancient Greek poet and presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Though almost nothing is known of his life, tradition holds that Homer was blind. The ancient Greeks attributed to him the great epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Modern scholars generally agree that he composed (but was not the original creator of) the Iliad, most likely relying on oral traditions, and at least inspired the composition of the Odyssey.

The Iliad, set during the Trojan War, tells the story of the wrath of Achilles. The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus as he travels home from the war. The two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture in the Classical age, and they have remained among the most significant poems of the European tradition. The method of their composition has been long debated.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Homer-Greek-poet.

Ralph Harper (1916–1996) was an adjunct professor of humanities at the Johns Hopkins University and a rector of St. James Church in Monkton, Maryland. He is the author of twelve books, including The Seventh Solitude, Human Love, The World of the Thriller, The Existential Experience, and Journey from Paradise, which were published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

From https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/9239/presence.

Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón was a Spanish poet awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. His many works include La soledad sonora (Revista de Archivos, 1911), Platero y yo (Ediciones de la Lectura, 1914), Diario de un poeta recién casado (Casa Editorial Calleja, 1917), Canción (Editorial Signo, 1935), and Animal de fondo(Editorial Pleamar, 1949). He died on May 29, 1958.

From https://poets.org/poet/juan-ramon-jimenez.

Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling poetry collection, Time is a Mother (Penguin Press 2022), and The New York Timesbestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press 2019), which has been translated into 36 languages. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.

Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out of Business school and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.

He currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts where he serves as an Associate Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst.

From https://www.oceanvuong.com/about.

Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (also Marina Cvetaeva and Marina Tsvetayeva) was born in Moscow. During her lifetime she wrote poems, verse plays, and prose pieces; she is considered one of the most renowned poets of 20th-century Russia. Tsvetaeva’s life coincided with turbulent years in Russian history. She married Sergei Efron in 1912; they had two daughters and later one son. Efron joined the White Army, and Tsvetaeva was separated from him during the Civil War. She had a brief love affair with Osip Mandelstam, and a longer relationship with Sofia Parnok. During the Moscow famine, Tsvetaeva was forced to place her daughters in a state orphanage, where the younger, Irina, died of hunger in 1919. In 1922 she emigrated with her family to Berlin, then to Prague, settling in Paris in 1925. In Paris, the family lived in poverty. Sergei Efron worked for the Soviet secret police, and Tsvetaeva was shunned by the Russian expatriate community of Paris. Through the years of privation and exile, poetry and contact with poets sustained Tsvetaeva. She corresponded with Rainer Maria Rilke and Boris Pasternak, and she dedicated work to Anna Akhmatova.

In 1939 Tsvetaeva returned to the Soviet Union. Efron was executed, and her surviving daughter was sent to a labor camp. When the German army invaded the USSR, Tsvetaeva was evacuated to Yelabuga with her son. She hanged herself on August 31, 1941.

Critics and translators of Tsvetaeva’s work often comment on the passion in her poems, their swift shifts and unusual syntax, and the influence of folk songs. She is also known for her portrayal of a woman’s experiences during the “terrible years” (as the period in Russian history was described by Aleksandr Blok). Collections of Tsvetaeva’s poetry translated into English include Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Elaine Feinstein (1971, 1994). She is the subject of several biographies as well as the collected memoirs No Love Without Poetry (2009), by her daughter Ariadna Efron (1912–1975).

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marina-tsvetaeva.

Groucho was born Julius Henry Marx on Oct 2 1890 in New York. He was the third of the five surviving sons of Sam and Minnie Marx. He was the first of the brothers to start a stage career aged 15 in an act called The Leroy Trio. Other acts followed, but none of them was a great success. Twice the other members of the act disappeared overnight and left him penniless in places far away from home.

When his Brothers came on stage they finally had success with the musical comedy called I'll Say She Is. It was at one of the performances of this show that Groucho got his painted moustache. He arrived late at the theater and used greasepaint to create a moustache. He found this so much easier than a glued-on moustache that he insisted on using this technique from then on. I'll Say She Is is was followed by two more Broadway hits - The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers. The latter of which has the character of Captain Spaulding which remained (with the song Hooray for Captain Spaulding) a trademark for Groucho for the rest of his life.

The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers were also the first movies (except for one unreleased) made by the Brothers and were filmed in New York. The remaining movies were made in Hollywood. In the later years of the Brothers movie career Groucho started working on radio. He hosted several programmes and was a guest on many shows. His biggest success was the comedy quiz show You Bet Your Life which started in 1947. The show later moved to television and was on the air until 1961.

Groucho also appeared in a few movies without his brothers. Always being a liberal, Groucho sometimes made critical remarks about politics and had friends who were regarded as communist by the US of the 1950s. This led to Groucho being investigated by the FBI.

When Marx Brothers became popular again in the late sixties/early seventies Groucho made a comeback with a show in Carnegie Hall in 1972. At the film festival in Cannes in 1972 he was made Commandeur des Arts et Lettres and in 1974 he received a special Academy Award for the achievements of the Marx Brothers. Groucho died on August 19th 1977 at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. His ashes are at Eden Memorial Park, San Fernando, California.

From https://www.marx-brothers.org/biography/groucho.htm.

Sir Isaac Newton, (born Jan. 4, 1643, Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, Eng.—died March 31, 1727, London), was an English physicist and mathematician. The son of a yeoman, he was raised by his grandmother. He was educated at Cambridge University (1661–65), where he discovered the work of René Descartes. His experiments passing sunlight through a prism led to the discovery of the heterogeneous, corpuscular nature of white light and laid the foundation of physical optics. He built the first reflecting telescope in 1668 and became a professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1669. He worked out the fundamentals of calculus, though this work went unpublished for more than 30 years. His most famous publication, Principia Mathematica (1687), grew out of correspondence with Edmond Halley. Describing his works on the laws of motion (see Newton’s laws of motion), orbital dynamics, tidal theory, and the theory of universal gravitation, it is regarded as the seminal work of modern science. He was elected president of the Royal Society of London in 1703 and became the first scientist ever to be knighted in 1705. During his career he engaged in heated arguments with several of his colleagues, including Robert Hooke (over authorship of the inverse square relation of gravitation) and G.W. Leibniz (over the authorship of calculus). The battle with Leibniz dominated the last 25 years of his life; it is now well established that Newton developed calculus first, but that Leibniz was the first to publish on the subject. Newton is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Isaac-Newton.

Homer, (flourished 9th or 8th century BCE, Ionia?), was an ancient Greek poet and presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Though almost nothing is known of his life, tradition holds that Homer was blind. The ancient Greeks attributed to him the great epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Modern scholars generally agree that he composed (but was not the original creator of) the Iliad, most likely relying on oral traditions, and at least inspired the composition of the Odyssey.

The Iliad, set during the Trojan War, tells the story of the wrath of Achilles. The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus as he travels home from the war. The two epics provided the basis of Greek education and culture in the Classical age, and they have remained among the most significant poems of the European tradition. The method of their composition has been long debated.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Homer-Greek-poet.

Poet, novelist, essayist Adam Zagajewski was born in Lwów on June 21, 1945. He spent his childhood in Silesia and then in Cracow, where he graduated from Jagiellonian University.

Zagajewski first became well known as one of the leading poets of the Generation of '68' or the Polish New Wave (Nowa fala) and is one of Poland's most famous contemporary poets. His books of poetry in English include Asymmetry: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), Eternal Enemies: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), and Mysticism for Beginners (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), all translated by Clare Cavanagh.

He is also the author of a memoir, Another Beauty (2000, translated by Clare Cavanagh) and the prose collections, Two Cities(1995, translated by Lillian Vallee) and Solitude and Solidarity (1990, translated by Lillian Vallee). His poems and essays have been translated into many languages. Among his honors and awards are a fellowship from the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, a Prix de la Liberté, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Since 1988, he has served as Visiting Associate Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. In 2010, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He served as co-editor of Zeszyty literackie (Literary Review), which is published in Paris. Zagajewski lived in Paris and Houston, Texas until his death on March 21, 2021.

From https://poets.org/poet/adam-zagajewski.

Salman Rushdie is the author of fourteen novels—including Luka and the Fire of Life; Grimus; Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker); Shame; The Satanic Verses; Haroun and the Sea of Stories; The Moor’s Last Sigh; The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Fury; Shalimar the Clown; The Enchantress of Florence; Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights; The Golden House; and Quichotte—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published four works of non-fiction—Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and coedited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

From https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/26491/salman-rushdie.

Ingmar Bergman, (born July 14, 1918, Uppsala, Swed.—died July 30, 2007, Fårö, Swed.), was a Swedish film writer-director. The rebellious son of a Lutheran pastor, he worked in the theatre before directing his first film, Crisis (1945). He won international acclaim for his films The Seventh Seal (1957) and Wild Strawberries (1957). He assembled a group of actors, including Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, and a cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, with whom he made powerful films often marked by bleak depictions of human loneliness, including Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978), and Fanny and Alexander (1982). Bergman later wrote screenplays for The Best Intentions (1992) and Private Confessions (1996). He directed a number of television movies, most notably Saraband (2003), which received a theatrical release. Throughout his career Bergman continued to direct stage productions, usually at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Ingmar-Bergman.

Cecília Meireles, (born November 7, 1901, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—died November 9, 1964, Rio de Janeiro), poet, teacher, and journalist, whose lyrical and highly personal poetry, often simple in form yet containing complex symbolism and imagery, earned her an important position in 20th-century Brazilian literature. Orphaned at an early age and brought up by her grandmother, Meireles began to write poetry at the age of nine. She became a public school teacher at 16 and two years later established her literary reputation with the publication of Espectros (1919; “Ghosts”), a collection of sonnets in the Symbolist tradition.

The 1920s were a time of revolution in Brazilian literature, but Meireles’s work of the period showed little affinity with the prevailing nationalistic tendencies or the radical technical innovations in free verse and colloquial language. Her poetry is considered by most critics to have found its best expression in such traditional forms as the sonnet. Between 1925 and 1939 Meireles concentrated on her career as a teacher, writing several books for children and in 1934 founding the Biblioteca Infantil in Rio de Janeiro, the first children’s library in Brazil. That year she lectured on Brazilian literature in Portugal at the universities of Lisbon and Coimbra; in 1936 she was appointed lecturer at the new Federal University in Rio de Janeiro.

Meireles reestablished her reputation as a poet after 14 years of silence with Viagem(1939; “Journey”), considered by many critics to mark her attainment of poetic maturity and individuality. From that time she devoted herself to her literary career, continuing to publish collections of poetry regularly until her death. Much of her work is collected in Obra poética (1958; “Poetic Work”), and several of her poems have been translated into English for anthologies.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cecilia-Meireles.

Arthur Schopenhauer, (born Feb. 22, 1788, Danzig, Prussia—died Sept. 21, 1860, Frankfurt am Main), German philosopher. His father was a banker and his mother a novelist. He studied in several fields before earning his doctorate in philosophy. He regarded the Upanishads, together with the works of Plato and Immanuel Kant, as the foundation of his philosophical system, a metaphysical doctrine of the will developed in reaction to the idealism of G.W.F. Hegel. His magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (1819), consists of two comprehensive series of reflections on the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of nature, aesthetics, and ethics. By turning away from spirit and reason to the powers of intuition, creativity, and the irrational, he influenced (partly via Friedrich Nietzsche) the ideas and methods of vitalism, life philosophy, existentialism, and anthropology. His other works include On the Will in Nature (1836), The Two Main Problems of Ethics(1841), and Parerga and Paralipomena (1851). An unhappy and solitary man, his works earned him the sobriquet “the philosopher of pessimism.”

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Arthur-Schopenhauer.

Harrison was also the author of over thirty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including seven volumes of novellas, Legends of the Fall (1979), The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990), Julip (1994), The Beast God Forgot to Invent (2000), The Summer He Didn’t Die (2005), The Farmer’s Daughter (2010), and The River Swimmer (2013); eleven novels, Wolf (1971), A Good Day to Die (1973), Farmer (1976), Warlock(1981), Sundog (1984), Dalva (1988), The Road Home (1998), True North (2004), Returning to Earth (2007), The English Major (2008), and The Great Leader (2011); thirteen collections of poetry, including most recently Songs of Unreason (2011), In Search of Small Gods(2009), and Saving Daylight (2006); and three works of nonfiction, the memoir Off to the Side (2001) and the collections Just Before Dark(1991) and The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand (2001).

The winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters (2007) and was named Officier des Arts et Lettres (2012) by the French Ministry of Culture for his “significant contribution to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance.” He has had his work published in twenty-seven languages.

Harrison lived in Montana and Arizona before his death in 2016 at the age of seventy-eight.

From https://groveatlantic.com/author/jim-harrison/.

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. He was born on April 29, 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s, and died on the same day in 1933. During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet, living in relative seclusion and publishing little of his work. A short collection of his poetry was privately printed in the early 1900s and reprinted with new verse a few years later, but that was the extent of his published poetry. Instead, Cavafy chose to circulate his verse among friends.

Cavafy is the leading poet of the periphery, writing in Greek far from Greek lands. The body of his poetry includes the 154 poems of the “canon”; 37 “repudiated poems,” most of which are juvenilia written in romantic katharevousa; 75 “hidden” poems that were found finished in his papers; and 30 “unfinished” poems. His poems often feature historical figures or creations of the poet’s imagination, with frequent references to elements of Homeric, Hellenistic, and Byzantine years. Today, his poetry occupies a prominent place in both Greek and world literature.

You may read the complete C. P. Cavafy bio here https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/and discover the digital collection of the Cavafy Archive here https://cavafy.onassis.org/.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/c-p-cavafy and https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/.

On June 13, 1888, Fernando António Nogueira Pessôa was born in Lisbon, Portugal. When he was scarcely five years old, his father died. His mother remarried a year and a half later to the Portuguese consul in Durban, South Africa. Pessoa attended an English school in Durban, where he lived with his family until the age of seventeen. When he was thirteen he made a year-long visit to Portugal, returning there for good in 1905. He began studying at the University of Lisbon in 1906 but dropped out after only eight months. During the following years he stayed with relatives or in rented rooms, making his living by translating, writing in avant-garde reviews, and drafting business letters in English and French. He began publishing criticism in 1912, creative prose in 1913, and poetry in 1914. This was also the year when the alter egos he called heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos came into existence. In 1915 he dropped the circumflex from his surname.

The majority of Pessoa's poems, heteronymic or otherwise, appeared in literary journals and magazines. He published his first book of English poems, Antinous in 1918, followed by Sonnets(1918) and English Poems (1921), but released only a single book of Portuguese poems, Mensagem, in 1933. He died November 30, 1935, in Lisbon from cirrhosis of the liver. Pessoa avoided the literary world and most social contact; it wasn't until years after his death that his work garnered a wide readership.

Literary alter egos were popular among early twentieth-century writers: Pound had Mauberley, Rilke had Malte Laurids Brigge, and Valéry had Monsieur Teste. But no one took their alter ego as far as Pessoa, who gave up his own life to confer quasi-real substance on the poets he designated at heteronyms, giving each a personal biography, psychology, politics, aesthetics, religion, and physique. Alberto Caeiro was an ingenuous, unlettered, unemployed man of the country. Ricardo Reis was a doctor and classicist who wrote Horace-like odes. Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer, was a bisexual dandy who studied in Glasgow, traveled to the Orient, and lived outrageously in London. In an English text, Pessoa wrote, "Caeiro has one discipline: things must be felt as they are. Ricardo Reis has another kind of discipline: things must be felt, not only as they are, but also so as to fall in with a certain ideal of classic measure and rule. In Álvaro de Campos things must simply be felt." In later years, Pessoa also gave birth to Bernardo Soares, a "semiheteronym" who authored the sprawling fictional diary known as The Book of Disquietude; António Mora, a prolific philosopher and sociologist; the Baron of Teive, an essayist; Thomas Crosse, whose critical writings in English promoted Portuguese literature in general and Alberto Caeiro's work in particular; I. I. Crosse, Thomas's brother and collaborator; Coelho Pacheco, poet; Raphael Baldaya, astrologer; Maria José, a nineteen-year-old hunchback consumptive who wrote a desperate, unmailed love letter to a handsome metalworker who passed under her window on his way to work each day; and so on.

At least seventy-two names besides Fernando Pessoa were "responsible" for the thousands of texts that were actually written and the many more that he only planned. Although Pessoa also published some works pseudonymically, he distinguished this from the "heteronymic" project: "A pseudonymic work is, except for the name with which it is signed, the work of an author writing as himself; a heteronymic work is by an author writing outside his own personality: it is the work of a complete individuality made up by him, just as the utterances of some character in a drama would be."

George Lamming, in full George William Lamming, (born June 8, 1927, Carrington Village, near Bridgetown, Barbados), was a West Indian novelist and essayist who wrote about decolonization and reconstruction in Caribbean nations.

At Combermere High School, Lamming studied under Frank Collymore, editor of the Caribbean literary journal Bim, which published some of Lamming’s early work. Lamming left Barbados and worked as a teacher in Trinidad from 1946 to 1950 before settling in England. His highly acclaimed first novel, In the Castle of My Skin(1953), is an autobiographical bildungsroman set against the backdrop of burgeoning nationalism in the British colonies of the Caribbean in the 1930s and ’40s.

Lamming continued to study decolonization in his succeeding three novels: The Emigrants (1954), a despairing, fragmentary work about Caribbean immigrants in post-World War II England; Of Age and Innocence (1958), a microcosmic look at the problems of political independence; and Season of Adventure (1960), in which a West Indian woman discovers her African heritage. The Pleasures of Exile (1960) is a collection of essays that examines Caribbean politics, race, and culture in an international context. Lamming’s later novels included Water with Berries (1971), a political allegory based on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Natives of My Person (1971), about 16th-century explorers in the West Indies. His poetry and short stories were published in various anthologies, and Conversations, a volume of essays and interviews, was published in 1992.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Lamming.

Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, on November 9, 1928. She attended boarding school at Rogers Hall Lowell, Massachusetts, where she first started writing poetry. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen. Sexton and her husband spent time in San Francisco before moving back to Massachusetts for the birth of their first daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, in 1953.

After her second daughter was born in 1955, Sexton was encouraged by her doctor to pursue an interest in poetry that she had developed in high school. In the fall of 1957, she joined writing groups in Boston that introduced her to many writers such as Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath. She published her first two books, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962), with Houghton Mifflin.

In 1965, Sexton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. She then went on to win the 1967 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third collection, Live or Die(Houghton Mifflin, 1966). In total, Sexton published nine volumes of poetry during her lifetime, including Love Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), The Book of Folly (Houghton Mifflin, 1973) and The Awful Rowing Toward God (Houghton Mifflin, 9175). She also authored several children's books with Maxine Kumin.

Sexton received several major literary prizes including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1967 Shelley Memorial Prize, the 1962 Levinson Prize, and the Frost Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She taught at Boston University and Colgate University, and died on October 4, 1974, in Weston, Massachusetts. Her papers are collected and housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

From https://poets.org/poet/anne-sexton.

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes's birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry. After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University in New York City. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, launderer, and busboy. He also travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten. Criticism of the book from the time varied, with some praising the arrival of a significant new voice in poetry, while others dismissed Hughes's debut collection. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter(Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

Hughes, who claimed Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language itself alongside their suffering.

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1950); Simple Stakes a Claim (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1953); and Simple's Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965). He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940), and cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”

From https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes.

Fannie Lou Hamer, née Townsend, (born October 6, 1917, Ruleville, Mississippi, U.S.—died March 14, 1977, Mound Bayou, Mississippi), African American civil rights activist who worked to desegregate the Mississippi Democratic Party.

The youngest of 20 children, Fannie Lou was working the fields with her sharecropper parents at the age of six. Amid poverty and racial exploitation, she received only a sixth-grade education. In 1942 she married Perry (“Pap”) Hamer. Her civil rights activism began in August 1962, when she answered a call by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for volunteers to challenge voter registration procedures that excluded African Americans. Fired for her attempt to register to vote (she failed a literacy test), she became a field secretary for the SNCC; she finally became a registered voter in 1963.

In 1964 Hamer cofounded and became vice-chairperson of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), established after unsuccessful attempts by African Americansto work with the all-white and pro-segregation Mississippi Democratic Party. That year she testified before the credentials committee of the Democratic National Convention, demanding that the delegation of the Mississippi Democratic Party be replaced by that of the MFDP. After U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson attempted to block the television broadcast of her testimony by scheduling a news conference for the same time, forcing television networks to cut away from their live coverage of the convention, her speech was carried on many evening news programs, where it was exposed to a much larger audience than it would have received had it been broadcast at its original time. In her testimony she movingly described incidents of violence and injustice suffered by civil rights activists, including her own experience of a jailhouse beating that left her crippled. At the insistence of President Johnson, however, the committee refused to seat the MFDP delegation, offering only two at-large seats, provided that neither went to Hamer. She and the MFDP refused.

In 1967 Hamer published To Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography. As a member of the Democratic National Committee for Mississippi (1968–71) and the Policy Council of the National Women’s Political Caucus (1971–77), she actively opposed the Vietnam War and worked to improve economic conditions in Mississippi.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fannie-Lou-Hamer-American-civil-rights-activist.

Praxilla was a Greek lyric poet who originated from the city of Sicyon in the fifth century B.C.E.

There is no direct evidence from Praxilla herself, and what survives are reiterated poems by other people.

Not much is known about Praxilla’s life other than she was a composer.

Some assumptions suggests that she may have been a prostitute but because there is no official story of her life these interpretations are inconclusive.

She was famous for the composition of scolia, short poems with erotic overtones, featuring gods, goddesses, and mythological heroes, that were typically sung after the evening meal.

Much of her work survives today through extant fragments quoted by writers such as Zenobius or Hephaestion, in their own works, or mentioned in annotations left by ancient writers on other works. Only 8 fragments of hers survive. Many of these are hymns and dithyrambs.

One fragment includes the Hymn to Adonis which itself is fragmented. This hymn tells of Adonis being asked by the inhabitants of Hades to name the most beautiful things he left behind in the world of the living. These survive today only because Zenobius quoted them.

For more information about Praxilla:

Selected fragments of Praxilla

Carl Jung, in full Carl Gustav Jung, (born July 26, 1875, Kesswil, Switzerland—died June 6, 1961, Küsnacht), was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytic psychology, in some aspects a response to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Jung proposed and developed the concepts of the extraverted and the introverted personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. His work has been influential in psychiatry and in the study of religion, literature, and related fields.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carl-Jung.

Thomas Mann, (born June 6, 1875, Lübeck, Ger.—died Aug. 12, 1955, near Zürich, Switz.), German novelist and essayist, considered the greatest German novelist of the 20th century. After a brief period of office work, Mann devoted himself to writing, as had his elder brother Heinrich (1871–1950). Buddenbrooks (1901), his first novel, was an elegy for old bourgeois virtues. In the novella Death in Venice (1912), a somber masterpiece, he took up the tragic dilemma of the artist in a collapsing society. Though ardently patriotic at the start of World War I, after 1919 he slowly revised his views of the authoritarian German state. His great novel The Magic Mountain (1924) clarified his growing espousal of Enlightenment principles as one strand of a complex and multifaceted whole. An outspoken opponent of Nazism, he fled to Switzerland on Adolf Hitler’s accession; he settled in the U.S. in 1938 but returned to Switzerland in 1952. His tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933–43) concerns the biblical Joseph. Doctor Faustus (1947), his most directly political novel, analyzes the darker aspects of the German soul. The often hilarious Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954) remained unfinished. He is noted for his finely wrought style enriched by humor, irony, and parody and for his subtle, many-layered narratives of vast intellectual scope. His essays examined such figures as Leo Tolstoy, Sigmund Freud, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Anton Chekhov, and Friedrich Schiller. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Thomas-Mann.

Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. When she was less than a year old, her father died, and shortly thereafter, her mother was committed to an asylum. Bishop was first sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia and later lived with paternal relatives in Worcester and South Boston. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1934.

Bishop was independently wealthy, and from 1935 to 1937 she spent time traveling to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy and then settled in Key West, Florida, for four years. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her travels and the scenery that surrounded her, as with the Florida poems in her first book of verse, North & South (Houghton Mifflin), published in 1946.

She was influenced by the poet Marianne Moore, who was a close friend, mentor, and stabilizing force in her life. Unlike her contemporary and good friend Robert Lowell, who wrote in the Confessional style, Bishop’s poetry avoids explicit accounts of her personal life and focuses instead with great subtlety on her impressions of the physical world.

Her images are precise and true to life, and they reflect her own sharp wit and moral sense. She lived for many years in Brazil, communicating with friends and colleagues in America only by letter. She published sparingly, and her work is often praised for its technical brilliance and formal variety. She received the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for her collection Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955). Her Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), won the National Book Award in 1970. That same year, Bishop began teaching at Harvard University, where she worked for seven years. For years she was considered a “poet’s poet,” but with the 1977 publication of her last book, Geography III (Chatto and Windus), Bishop was finally established as a major force in contemporary literature. Elizabeth Bishop was awarded an Academy Fellowship in 1964 for distinguished poetic achievement, and served as a Chancellor from 1966 to 1979. She died in her apartment at Lewis Wharf in Boston on October 6, 1979.

From https://poets.org/poet/elizabeth-bishop.

Hugh of Saint-Victor, also called Hugo of Saint-Victor, (born 1096—died Feb. 11, 1141, Paris, France), was an eminent scholastic theologian who began the tradition of mysticism that made the school of Saint-Victor, Paris, famous throughout the 12th century.

Of noble birth, Hugh joined the Augustinian canons at the monastery of Hamersleben, near Halberstadt (now in Germany). He went to Paris (c. 1115) with his uncle, Archdeacon Reinhard of Halberstadt, and settled at Saint-Victor Abbey. From 1133 until his death, the school of Saint-Victor flourished under Hugh’s guidance.

His mystical treatises were strongly influenced by Bishop St. Augustine of Hippo, whose practical teachings on contemplative life Hugh blended with the theoretical writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Hugh’s somewhat innovative style of exegesis made an important contribution to the development of natural theology: he based his arguments for God’s existence on external and internal experience and added a teleological proof originating from the facts of experience. His chief work on dogmatic theology was De sacramentis Christianae fidei (“The Sacraments of the Christian Faith”), which anticipated some of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Hugh upheld secular learning by promoting knowledge as an introduction to contemplative life: “Learn everything,” he said, “and you will see afterward that nothing is useless.” A prolific writer, Hugh wrote the Didascalicon, a remarkably comprehensive early encyclopedia, as well as commentaries on the Scriptures and on the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius. The edition of Hugh’s work by the canons of Saint-Victor (1648) was reprinted in J.-P. Migne’s Patrologiae Cursus Completus (Series Latina), 1844–64.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hugh-of-Saint-Victor.

Jenny Holzer was born in 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio. She received a BFA in printmaking and painting from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, in 1972, and an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1977. Holzer then moved to New York and enrolled in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. That same year, she created her first text-based works, initiating an ongoing artistic investigation of language in which she presents both original and appropriated texts to deconstruct how personal and political meaning are created in Western culture’s patriarchal, consumer-oriented society.

For Truisms, her series comprising terse one-liners written between 1977 and ’79, and Inflammatory Essays, which were composed between 1979 and ’82, Holzer anonymously pasted posters of unswerving, declarative statements around New York City. Since then her text-based work has evolved in numerous mediums. In the 1980s Holzer used electronic signs to present her work in such prominent public spaces as Times Square in New York and Piccadilly Circus in London, as well as in sport stadiums. She began producing engraved marble and granite benches, initially bearing text from Under the Rock (1986), and stone sarcophagi inscribed with Laments (1988–89), a moving reflection on the devastating repercussions of the AIDS crisis. For her 1989–90 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Holzer created a site-specific LED sign that wound its way around the parapet of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda, displaying aphorisms and declarations from all of her work to date. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and was awarded the Golden Lion for her Venice Installation, where she presented a series of her writings—including Mother and Child (1990), an account of motherhood—incised on a marble floor and emanating from LED signs.

Holzer has had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel (1984); Brooklyn Museum, New York (1988); Dia Art Foundation, New York, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (both 1989–90); Haus der Kunst, Munich (1993); Art Tower Mito, Japan (1994); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (1997); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2001, 2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2004); MAK, Vienna (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2008–09; travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art [2009], and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland [2009–10]); Tate Modern, London (2018–19); and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2019), among other institutions. Select group exhibitions include Eating Friends, Artists Space, New York (1981); Around 1984: A Look at Art in the Eighties, MoMA PS1 (2000); and Surprise, Surprise, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2006). Her works have appeared in Documenta (1982, 1987); Whitney Biennial (1983, 1985); Carnegie International (1985); Sculpture Project, Münster (1987); Venice Biennale (1990, 2005, 2007, 2015); Florence Biennial (1996); Singapore Biennial (2006); and Gwangju Biennial (2012). She has been the recipient of several important awards, and in 2016 she was made an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. Holzer is one of the six artist-curators who made selections for Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2019–20). She lives and works in New York.

From https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/jenny-holzer.

Samuel Beckett, (born April 13?, 1906, Foxrock, Co. Dublin, Ire.—died Dec. 22, 1989, Paris, France), was an Irish playwright. After studying in Ireland and traveling, he settled in Paris in 1937. During World War II he supported himself as a farmworker and joined the underground resistance. In the postwar years he wrote, in French, the narrative trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953). His play Waiting for Godot (1952) was an immediate success in Paris and gained worldwide acclaim when he translated it into English. Marked by minimal plot and action, existentialist ideas, and humor, it typifies the Theatre of the Absurd. His later plays, also sparsely staged, abstract works that deal with the mystery and despair of human existence, include Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1961). In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Samuel-Beckett.

Marcus Aurelius , in full Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustusorig. Marcus Annius Verus, (born April 26, AD 121, Rome—died March 17, 180, Vindobona [Vienna] or Sirmium, Pannonia), was a Roman emperor (161–180). He was born into a wealthy and prominent family. Hadrian arranged that Marcus and Lucius Verus be adopted by the designated future emperor Antoninus Pius, who dutifully groomed Marcus as his heir. On his accession, Marcus nevertheless shared power with his adoptive brother as coemperor, though he himself remained the more dominant. His reign was marked by numerous military crises, all the major frontiers being threatened by invasion. Struggles against the Parthians (162–166) were successful, but returning troops brought a devastating plague to Rome. With a concurrent German invasion, Roman morale declined; the Germans were repulsed, but Verus died during the campaign (169). Marcus made his son Commodus coemperor in 177. Though a man of gentle character and wide learning, Marcus opposed Christianity and supported persecution of its adherents. His Meditations on Stoicism, considered one of the great books of all times, gives a full picture of his religious and moral values. His reign is often thought to mark the Golden Age of Rome.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Marcus-Aurelius-Roman-emperor.

John Milton, (born Dec. 9, 1608, London, Eng.—died Nov. 8?, 1674, London?), was an English poet and pamphleteer. Milton attended the University of Cambridge (1625–32), where he wrote poems in Latin, Italian, and English; these include the companion poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” both written c. 1631. In 1632–39 he engaged in private study—writing the masque Comus (first performed 1634) and the elegy “Lycidas” (1638)—and toured Europe, spending most of his time in Italy. Concerned with the republican cause in England, he spent much of 1641–60 pamphleteering for civil and religious liberty and serving in Oliver Cromwell’s government. His best-known prose is in the pamphlets Areopagitica, on freedom of the press, and Of Education (both 1644). He also wrote tracts on divorce and against the monarchy and the Church of England. He lost his sight c. 1651 and thereafter dictated his works. After the Restoration he was arrested as a prominent defender of the Commonwealth but was soon released. Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), considered the greatest epic poem in English, uses blank verse and reworks Classical epic conventions to recount the Fall of Man; Milton’s characterization of Satan has been widely admired. Paradise Regained (1671) is a shorter epic in which Christ overcomes Satan the tempter, and Samson Agonistes (1671) is a dramatic poem in which the Old Testament figure conquers self-pity and despair to become God’s champion. History of Britain was incomplete when published in 1670, and an unfinished work on theology was discovered in 1823. Milton is generally considered the greatest English poet after William Shakespeare.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/John-Milton.

On March 27, 1926, Frank (Francis Russell) O’Hara was born in Maryland. He grew up in Massachusetts, and later studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. O’Hara then served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.

Following the war, O’Hara studied at Harvard College, where he majored in music and worked on compositions and was deeply influenced by contemporary music, his first love, as well as visual art. He also wrote poetry at that time and read the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. While at Harvard, O’Hara met John Ashbery and soon began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O’Hara changed his major and left Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English. He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received his MA in 1951. That autumn, O’Hara moved into an apartment in New York. He was soon employed at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and continued to write seriously.

O’Hara’s early work was considered both provocative and provoking. In 1952, his first volume of poetry, A City Winter, and Other Poems, attracted favorable attention; his essays on painting and sculpture and his reviews for ArtNews were considered brilliant. O’Hara became one of the most distinguished members of the New York School of poets, which also included Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. O’Hara’s association with painters Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns, also leaders of the New York School, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry. He attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas. In certain instances, he collaborated with the painters to make “poem-paintings,” paintings with word texts.

O’Hara’s most original volumes of verse, Meditations in an Emergency (1956) and Lunch Poems (1964), are impromptu lyrics, a jumble of witty talk, journalistic parodies, and surrealist imagery. O’Hara continued working at the Museum of Modern Art throughout his life, curating exhibitions and writing introductions and catalogs for exhibits and tours. On July 25, 1966, while vacationing on Fire Island, Frank O’Hara was killed in a sand buggy accident. He was forty years old.

From https://poets.org/poet/frank-ohara.

Alejandra Pizarnik was born in Buenos Aires to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. She studied philosophy and literature at the University of Buenos Aires before dropping out to pursue painting and her own poetry. In 1960, she moved to Paris, where she befriended writers such as Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, and Silvina Ocampo. Considered one of mid-century Argentina’s most powerful and intense lyric poets, Pizarnik counted among her influences Hölderlin and, as she wrote in “The Incarnate Word,” an essay from 1965, “the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” and the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.” Pizarnik’s themes were cruelty, childhood, estrangement, and death. According to Emily Cooke, Pizarnik “was perennially mistrustful of her medium, seeming sometimes more interested in silence than in language, and the poetic style she cultivated was terse and intentionally unbeautiful.” Her work has continually attracted new readers since her suicide at age 36.

Pizarnik published several books of poetry during her lifetime, including: La tierra más ajena (1955), La última inocencia (1956), Las aventuras perdidas(1958), Árbol de Diana (1960), Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968), and El infierno musical (1971). She also published the prose essay “La condesa sangrienta” (1971), a meditation on a 16th-century Hungarian countess allegedly responsible for the torture and murder of more than 600 girls. Pizarnik’s work has been translated into English in the collections Alejandra Pizarnik: Selected Poems (translated by Cecilia Rossi, 2010) and Extracting the Stone of Madness (translated by Yvette Siegert, 2016).

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alejandra-pizarnik.

Gabriel García Márquez, (born March 6, 1927, Aracataca, Colom.—died April 17, 2014, Mexico City, Mex.), Latin American writer. He worked many years as a journalist in Latin American and European cities and later also as a screenwriter and publicist, before settling in Mexico. His best-known work, the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), recounts the history of the fictional village of Macondo, the setting of much of his work; enormously admired and influential, it became the principal vehicle for the style known as magic realism. Later novels include The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004). His collections of short stories and novellas include No One Writes to the Colonel (1968) and Leaf Storm (1955). In 2002 he published Living to Tell the Tale, an autobiographical account of his early years. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez.

Daniel Dumile, best known by his stage name MF Doom, was a British-American rapper and record producer. Noted for his intricate wordplay, signature metal mask, and "supervillain" stage persona, Dumile became a major figure of underground hip hop and alternative hip hop in the 2000s.

Dumile created the MF Doom character as an alter ego with a backstory he could reference in his music. The character combines elements from the Marvel Comics supervillain Doctor Doom, Destro, and the Phantom of the Opera.

Dumile, described as among the "most celebrated" musicians in hip hop, exerted a strong influence over his artistic peers, and public life.

American president-elect Joe Biden included the instrumental to Dumile's popular 2004 song "Rapp Snitch Knishes" in his inauguration playlist; the decision was criticized by some, as Biden was part of the Obama administration which barred Dumile from returning to the United States.

For more information about MF DOOM:

https://gasdrawls.com

Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her work is described as Southern Gothic, and reflects McCullers Southern roots and her birthplace of Columbus, Georgia. Critics describe her characters as eccentric, but with universal scope. McCullers’ first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town in the Southern United States.

Her stories have been adapted to stage and film and a stage adaptation of her novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), made a successful Broadway run in 1950–51. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was adapted to film in 1968.

For more information about Carson McCullers follow these links:

http://www.mccullerscenter.org

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/carson-mccullers-1917-1967/

Isocrates was an ancient Greek rhetorician, one of the 10 Attic orators, and a teacher whose writings are an important historical source on the intellectual and political life of the Athens of his day. The school he founded, the first academy of rhetoric, was very different from the intellectual and philosophical Academy of Plato. Isocrates was contemptuous of the Platonic circles, and is considered focused on polished expression, rather than the higher intellectual pursuits. Isocrates training was almost entirely given over to rhetoric, the art of persuasion.

Of his hundred pupils the most notable were Timotheus, the Athenian general, prominent in Athens’s history between 378 and 355; Nicocles, the ruler of Salamis in Cyprus; and the two greatest Greek historians of the 4th century—Ephorus, who wrote a universal history, and Theopompus, who wrote the history of Philip II of Macedon. In this way his influence permeated both politics and literature.

The letter to Demonicus was written approximately 374-372 BCE.

Its authenticity is disputed by some, as it was believed that the verbal form and style were not consistent with the style and views of Isocrates. However, the work’s influence is evident in other oratory speeches, advice to rulers, pedagogical works and essays that have borrowed its elements. The Letter to Demonicus has been used as an example and reference for many late Roman and Byzantine scholars and extracts of it have been found in seven papyri.
 This letter is offered as a gift to Demonicus. Isocrates explains that friendship, benevolence, modesty in the way of life, and does not fail to mention the difficult task of fulfilling the duties related to public functions. Isocrates points out that proper behavior not only leads to virtue, which is the highest “commodity”, and adds that virtue is also a pleasure of higher order.

To listen to the Letter to Demonicus in Greek, follow this link:

https://youtu.be/NuKjxVjnzN4

Read more information about rhetoric here:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/rhetoric

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871 in the Paris suburb of Auteuil. His father, Dr. Adrien Proust, was one of France's most distinguished scientists. His mother, Jeanne Weil, was a well-educated woman who loved the great classic writers of the 17th century, especially Molière and Racine. Marcel's only sibling, Robert, was born in 1873. The hypersensitive Marcel suffered all his life from a number of ailments, especially asthma. Although he earned university degrees in philosophy and law, he always knew that he wanted to be a writer.

In 1910, he had his bedroom lined with cork to block out the deafening noise of daytime Paris because he slept during the day and wrote through the night, after returning home from some of Paris's most exclusive salons. He was known as the city's most famous recluse, he even called himself an owl because he wrote while listening to his “nocturnal Muse.” Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, was published in November 1913 and was headed for a fourth printing when World War I broke out.

Proust continued to write, incorporating the unprecedented conflict into his story of contemporary French society. In 1919, Within a Budding Grove was published and won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. The final three years of his life saw the publication of The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah. The Captive, The Fugitive, and Time Regained were published posthumously. The novel's main themes are time and memory and the power of art to withstand the destructive forces of time.

From https://www.proust-ink.com/biography.

Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, (born Jan. 22, 1561, London, Eng.—died April 9, 1626, London) was a British statesman and philosopher, father of modern scientific method. He studied at Cambridge and at Gray’s Inn. A supporter of the Earl of Essex, Bacon turned against him when Essex was tried for treason. Under James I he rose steadily, becoming successively solicitor general (1607), attorney general (1613), and lord chancellor (1618). Convicted of accepting bribes from those being tried in his court, he was briefly imprisoned and permanently lost his public offices; he died deeply in debt. He attempted to put natural science on a firm empirical foundation in the Novum Organum (1620), which sets forth his scientific method. His elaborate classification of the sciences inspired the 18th-century French Encyclopedists, and his empiricism inspired 19th-century British philosophers of science. His other works include The Advancement of Learning (1605), History of Henry VII (1622), and several important legal and constitutional works.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Francis-Bacon-Viscount-Saint-Alban.

Anna Akhmatova, orig. Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, (born June 23, 1889, Bolshoy Fontan, near Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died March 5, 1966, Domodedovo, near Moscow) was a Russian poet. She won fame with her first poetry collections (1912, 1914). Soon after the Revolution of 1917, Soviet authorities condemned her work for what they perceived as its narrow preoccupation with love and God, and in 1923, after the execution of her former husband on conspiracy charges, she entered a long period of literary silence. After World War II she was again denounced and expelled from the Writers Union. Following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, she was slowly rehabilitated. In her later years she became the influential center of a circle of younger Russian poets. Her longest work, Poem Without a Hero, is regarded as one of the great poems of the 20th century. Regarded today as one of the greatest of all Russian poets, she is also admired for her translations of other poets’ works and for her memoirs.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Anna-Akhmatova.

Bob Dylan was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. He grew up in the city of Hibbing. As a teenager, he played in various bands and with time his interest in music deepened, with a particular passion for American folk music and blues. One of his idols was the folk singer Woody Guthrie. He was also influenced by the early authors of the Beat Generation, as well as by modernist poets. Dylan moved to New York City in 1961 and began to perform in clubs and cafés in Greenwich Village. He met the record producer John Hammond, with whom he signed a contract for his debut album, Bob Dylan (1962). In the following years, he recorded a number of albums which have had a tremendous impact on popular music: Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, Blonde On Blonde in 1966 and Blood On The Tracks in 1975. His productivity continued in the following decades, resulting in masterpieces like Oh Mercy (1989), Time Out of Mind (1997) and Modern Times (2006).

Dylan’s tours in 1965 and 1966 attracted a lot of attention. For a period, he was accompanied by film maker D. A. Pennebaker, who documented life around the stage in what would come to be the movie Dont Look Back (1967). Dylan has recorded a large number of albums revolving around topics such as: the social conditions of man, religion, politics and love. The lyrics have continuously been published in new editions starting in 1973, under the title WritingsandDrawings, subsequently changed to Lyrics. As an artist, he is strikingly versatile; he has been active as a painter, actor and scriptwriter. Besides his large production of albums, Dylan has published experimental work like the prose poetry collection Tarantula (1971). He has written an autobiography, Chronicles (2004), which depicts memories from the early years in New York and which provides glimpses of his life at the center of popular culture. Since the late 1980s, Bob Dylan has toured consistently, playing over 3000 concerts during the last 20 years. Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on contemporary culture is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of literary and musical analysis.

From https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/biographical/.

Bob Dylan was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. He grew up in the city of Hibbing. As a teenager, he played in various bands and with time his interest in music deepened, with a particular passion for American folk music and blues. One of his idols was the folk singer Woody Guthrie. He was also influenced by the early authors of the Beat Generation, as well as by modernist poets. Dylan moved to New York City in 1961 and began to perform in clubs and cafés in Greenwich Village. He met the record producer John Hammond, with whom he signed a contract for his debut album, Bob Dylan (1962). In the following years, he recorded a number of albums which have had a tremendous impact on popular music: Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, Blonde On Blonde in 1966 and Blood On The Tracks in 1975. His productivity continued in the following decades, resulting in masterpieces like Oh Mercy (1989), Time Out of Mind (1997) and Modern Times (2006).

Dylan’s tours in 1965 and 1966 attracted a lot of attention. For a period, he was accompanied by film maker D. A. Pennebaker, who documented life around the stage in what would come to be the movie Dont Look Back (1967). Dylan has recorded a large number of albums revolving around topics such as: the social conditions of man, religion, politics and love. The lyrics have continuously been published in new editions starting in 1973, under the title WritingsandDrawings, subsequently changed to Lyrics. As an artist, he is strikingly versatile; he has been active as a painter, actor and scriptwriter. Besides his large production of albums, Dylan has published experimental work like the prose poetry collection Tarantula (1971). He has written an autobiography, Chronicles (2004), which depicts memories from the early years in New York and which provides glimpses of his life at the center of popular culture. Since the late 1980s, Bob Dylan has toured consistently, playing over 3000 concerts during the last 20 years. Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on contemporary culture is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of literary and musical analysis.

From https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/biographical/.

On August 9, 1922, Philip Larkin was born in Coventry, England. He attended St. John's College, Oxford. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945 and, though not particularly strong on its own, is notable insofar as certain passages foreshadow the unique sensibility and maturity that characterizes his later work.

In 1946, Larkin discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy and became a great admirer of his poetry, learning from Hardy how to make the commonplace and often dreary details of his life the basis for extremely tough, unsparing, and memorable poems. With his second volume of poetry, The Less Deceived (1955), Larkin became the preeminent poet of his generation, and a leading voice of what came to be called "The Movement," a group of young English writers who rejected the prevailing fashion for neo-Romantic writing in the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Like Hardy, Larkin focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity.

In 1964, he confirmed his reputation as a major poet with the publication of The Whitsun Weddings, and again in 1974 with High Windows: collections whose searing, often mocking, wit does not conceal the poet's dark vision and underlying obsession with universal themes of mortality, love, and human solitude. Deeply anti-social and a great lover and published critic of American jazz, Larkin never married and worked as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull, where he died on December 2, 1985.

From https://poets.org/poet/philip-larkin.

Archilochus, (flourished c. 650 BCE, Paros [Cyclades, Greece]), was a poet and soldier, the earliest Greek writer of iambic, elegiac, and personal lyric poetry whose works have survived to any considerable extent. The surviving fragments of his work show him to have been a metrical innovator of the highest ability.

Archilochus’s father was Telesicles, a wealthy Parian who founded a colony on the island of Thasos. Archilochus lived on both Paros and Thasos. Fragments of his poetry mention the solar eclipse of April 6, 648 BCE, and the wealth of the Lydian king Gyges (c. 680–645 BCE). The details of Archilochus’s life, in the ancient biographical tradition, are derived for the most part from his poems—an unreliable source because the events he described may have been fictitious or may have involved imaginary personae or ritual situations.

Modern discoveries, however, have supported the picture given in the poetry. Two inscriptions dedicated to Archilochus were discovered in a sacred area on Paros; they are named, after the men who dedicated them, the Mnesiepes inscription (3rd century BCE) and the Sosthenes inscription (1st century BCE). Archilochus’s self-presentation was taken seriously as early as the late 5th century BCE by the Athenian politician and intellectual Critias, who denounced him for presenting himself as the impoverished, quarrelsome, foul-mouthed, lascivious son of a slave woman. Some scholars feel that the Archilochus portrayed in his poems is too scurrilous to be real.

Archilochus probably served as a soldier. According to ancient tradition, he fought against Thracians on the mainland near Thasos and died when the Thasians were fighting against soldiers from the island of Naxos. In one famous poem, Archilochus tells, without embarrassment or regret, of throwing his shield away in battle. (“I saved my life. What do I care about my shield? The hell with it! I’ll buy another just as good.”) The motif of the abandoned shield appears again in the lyric poems of Alcaeus and Anacreon, in a parody by Aristophanes (Peace), and in a learned variation by the Latin poet Horace (Carmina).

Although the truth is difficult to discern with certainty from the poems and other evidence, Archilochus may have been disreputable. He was particularly famous in antiquity for his sharp satire and ferocious invective. It was said that a man named Lycambes betrothed his daughter Neobule to the poet and then later withdrew the plan. In a papyrus fragment published in 1974 (the “Cologne Epode”)—the longest surviving piece of Archilochus’s poetry—a man, who is apparently the poet himself, tells in alternately explicit and hinting language how he seduced the sister of Neobule after having crudely rejected Neobule herself. According to the ancient accounts, Lycambes and his daughters committed suicide, shamed by the poet’s fierce mocking.

Archilochus was the first known Greek poet to employ the elegiac couplet and various iambic and trochaic metres, ranging from dimeter to tetrameter, as well as epodes, lyric metres, and asinarteta (a mixture of different metres). He was a master of the Greek language, moving from Homeric formulas to the language of daily life in a few lines. He was the first European author to make personal experiences and feelings the main subject of his poems: the controlled use of the personal voice in his verse marks a distinct departure from other surviving Greek verse, which is typically more formulaic and heroic. For his technical accomplishments Archilochus was much admired by later poets, such as Horace, but there was also severe criticism, especially of a moralistic character, by writers such as the poet Pindar (5th century BCE).

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 7, 1917, and raised in Chicago. She was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Children Coming Home (The David Co., 1991); Blacks (The David Co., 1987); To Disembark (Third World Press, 1981); The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (The David Co., 1986); Riot (Broadside Press, 1969); In the Mecca (Harper & Row, 1968); The Bean Eaters (Harper, 1960); Annie Allen (Harper, 1949), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize; and A Street in Bronzeville (Harper & Brothers, 1945).

She also wrote numerous other books including a novel, Maud Martha (Harper, 1953), and Report from Part One: An Autobiography (Broadside Press, 1972), and edited Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (Broadside Press, 1971).

In 1968 she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois. In 1985, she was the first black woman appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a post now known as Poet Laureate. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.

From: https://poets.org/poet/gwendolyn-brooks

On June 13, 1888, Fernando António Nogueira Pessôa was born in Lisbon, Portugal. When he was scarcely five years old, his father died. His mother remarried a year and a half later to the Portuguese consul in Durban, South Africa. Pessoa attended an English school in Durban, where he lived with his family until the age of seventeen. When he was thirteen he made a year-long visit to Portugal, returning there for good in 1905. He began studying at the University of Lisbon in 1906 but dropped out after only eight months. During the following years he stayed with relatives or in rented rooms, making his living by translating, writing in avant-garde reviews, and drafting business letters in English and French. He began publishing criticism in 1912, creative prose in 1913, and poetry in 1914. This was also the year when the alter egos he called heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos—came into existence. In 1915 he dropped the circumflex from his surname.

The majority of Pessoa's poems, heteronymic or otherwise, appeared in literary journals and magazines. He published his first book of English poems, Antinous in 1918, followed by Sonnets (1918) and English Poems (1921), but released only a single book of Portuguese poems, Mensagem, in 1933. He died November 30, 1935, in Lisbon from cirrhosis of the liver. Pessoa avoided the literary world and most social contact; it wasn't until years after his death that his work garnered a wide readership.

Literary alter egos were popular among early twentieth-century writers: Pound had Mauberley, Rilke had Malte Laurids Brigge, and Valéry had Monsieur Teste. But no one took their alter ego as far as Pessoa, who gave up his own life to confer quasi-real substance on the poets he designated at heteronyms, giving each a personal biography, psychology, politics, aesthetics, religion, and physique. Alberto Caeiro was an ingenuous, unlettered, unemployed man of the country. Ricardo Reis was a doctor and classicist who wrote Horace-like odes. Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer, was a bisexual dandy who studied in Glasgow, traveled to the Orient, and lived outrageously in London. In an English text, Pessoa wrote, "Caeiro has one discipline: things must be felt as they are. Ricardo Reis has another kind of discipline: things must be felt, not only as they are, but also so as to fall in with a certain ideal of classic measure and rule. In Álvaro de Campos things must simply be felt." In later years, Pessoa also gave birth to Bernardo Soares, a "semiheteronym" who authored the sprawling fictional diary known as The Book of Disquietude; António Mora, a prolific philosopher and sociologist; the Baron of Teive, an essayist; Thomas Crosse, whose critical writings in English promoted Portuguese literature in general and Alberto Caeiro's work in particular; I. I. Crosse, Thomas's brother and collaborator; Coelho Pacheco, poet; Raphael Baldaya, astrologer; Maria José, a nineteen-year-old hunchback consumptive who wrote a desperate, unmailed love letter to a handsome metalworker who passed under her window on his way to work each day; and so on.

At least seventy-two names besides Fernando Pessoa were "responsible" for the thousands of texts that were actually written and the many more that he only planned. Although Pessoa also published some works pseudonymically, he distinguished this from the "heteronymic" project: "A pseudonymic work is, except for the name with which it is signed, the work of an author writing as himself; a heteronymic work is by an author writing outside his own personality: it is the work of a complete individuality made up by him, just as the utterances of some character in a drama would be."

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, on February 21, 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. In 1928, his collection Poems was privately printed, but it wasn't until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.

Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.

He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic. W. H. Auden served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna on September 29, 1973.

From https://poets.org/poet/w-h-auden.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, (born July 1, 1742, Ober-Ramstadt, near Darmstadt, Hesse [Germany]—died Feb. 24, 1799, Göttingen, Hanover), was a German physicist, satirist, and writer of aphorisms, best known for his ridicule of metaphysical and romantic excesses. Lichtenberg was the 17th child of a Protestant pastor, who taught him mathematics and natural sciences. In 1763 he entered Göttingen University, where in 1770 he became assistant professor of physics and in 1775 professor. This post he held until his death. Lichtenberg did research in a wide variety of fields—including geophysics, volcanology, meteorology, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics—but most important were his investigations into physics. Notably, he constructed a huge electrophorus and, in the course of experimentations, discovered in 1777 the basic principle of modern xerographic copying; the images that he reproduced are still called “Lichtenberg figures.”

As a satirist and humorist Lichtenberg takes high rank among the German writers of the 18th century. His biting wit involved him in many controversies with well-known contemporaries, such as Johann Kaspar Lavater, whose science of physiognomy he ridiculed, and Johann Heinrich Voss, whose views on Greek pronunciation called forth a powerful satire, Über die Pronunciation der Schöpse des alten Griechenlandes(1782; “On the Pronunciation of the Muttonheads of Old Greece”). In 1769 and again in 1774 he resided for some time in England, and his Briefe aus England (1776–78; “Letters from England”) are the most attractive of his writings. He contributed to the Göttinger Taschenkalender (“Göttingen Pocket Almanac”) from 1778 onward and to the Göttingisches Magazin der Literatur und Wissenschaft (“Göttingen Magazine of Literature and Science”), which he edited for three years (1780–82) with J.G.A. Forster. He also published in 1794–99 an Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthschen Kupferstiche (“Full Explanation of Hogarthian Copper Engravings”).

From 1765 until the end of his life, Lichtenberg kept notebooks he referred to as Sudelbücher, or “waste books,” where he recorded quotations, sketched, and made brief observations on a wide range of subjects from science to philosophy. First published posthumously in 1800–06, they became his best-known work and gave him his reputation as an aphorist. Selections from the Sudelbücher were published in English as The Waste Books (2000).

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georg-Christoph-Lichtenberg.

Bertolt Brecht, orig. Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, (born Feb. 10, 1898, Augsburg, Ger.—died Aug. 14, 1956, East Berlin, E.Ger.), was a German playwright and poet. He studied medicine at Munich (1917–21) before writing his first plays, including Baal (1922). Other plays followed, including A Man’s a Man (1926), as well as a considerable body of poetry. With the composer Kurt Weill he wrote the satirical musicals The Threepenny Opera (1928; film, 1931), which gained him a wide audience, and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930). In these years he became a Marxist and developed his theory of epic theatre. With the rise of the Nazis he went into exile, first in Scandinavia (1933–41), then in the U.S., where he wrote his major essays and the plays Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The Life of Galileo (1943), The Good Woman of Sichuan (1943), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948). Harassed for his politics, in 1949 he returned to East Germany, where he established the Berliner Ensemble theatre troupe and staged his own plays, including The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1957). He outlined his theory of drama in A Little Organum for the Theatre (1949).

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Bertolt-Brecht.

Antiphanes, (born c. 408–404 BC, Chios [Greek island near modern Turkey] or Rhodes [Greece] or Smyrna [now İzmir, Tur.]—died c. 334–330 BC, Chios), was a prolific and influential Greek writer of Middle Comedy, which succeeded Old Comedy (known from the 5th-century plays of Aristophanes).

Antiphanes, son of Demophanes (or of Stephanus), began producing comedies at Athens in the second half of the 380s BC. In the festival contests Antiphanes won 13 victories, of which 8 were awarded at the small Lenaea festival held in January and 5 at the more impressive Great Dionysia, held in late March. Although he died in Chios, he was buried in Athens, the site of his literary triumphs.

Ancient sources attribute to him variously 260 to 365 plays, none of which has survived. He was often quoted by later writers, who preserve more than 330 fragments from plays with 134 titles. An analysis of the fragments and titles shows that the themes of his plays included mythological farce (e.g., Minos and Cyclops), stories about hetairai, highly cultivated courtesans (e.g., Malthace and Melitta), everyday occupations (e.g., Kithara-Player and Doctor), family affairs (e.g., Sisters and Ancestors), and social relations (e.g., Resident Alien and Lover of Thebes). A long fragment of the comedy Poiesis is important for its exposition of the differences between comedy and tragedy. According to this passage, writers of comedy have the more difficult task, since they must invent names and plots for each play, while the tragic poet writes about well-known myths.

The Athenian scholar and politician Demetrius of Phaleron composed About Antiphanes, and Dorotheus of Ascalon, a grammarian of the early Roman Empire (1st century AD), also wrote about him. Athenaeus (late 2nd century AD), whose work is the source for many fragments of Antiphanes, praised him for his graceful style.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Antiphanes.

On February 18, 1925, Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was educated in Pittsburgh and San Francisco, where he later participated in Jack Spicer's famous "Poetry as Magic" Workshop at San Francisco State College in 1957.

His first book, Views of Jeopardy (Yale University Press, 1962) won the Yale Younger Poets Series and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Soon after publishing his first book, Gilbert received a Guggenheim Fellowship and subsequently moved abroad, living in England, Denmark, and Greece. During that time, he also toured fifteen countries as a lecturer on American Literature for the U.S. State Department. Nearly twenty years after completing Views of Jeopardy, he published his second book, Monolithos, which won the Stanley Kunitz Prize and the American Poetry Review Prize. The collection takes its title from Greek, meaning "single stone," and refers to the landscape where he lived on the island of Santorini.

Gilbert is also the author of Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012); The Dance Most of All(2009); Transgressions: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books 2006); Refusing Heaven(2005); winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (1996).

His other awards and honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Gilbert was the 1999-2000 Grace Hazard Conkling writer-in-residence at Smith College and a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Tennessee in 2004. Gilbert died on November 13, 2012 in Berkeley, California after a long battle with Alzheimer's. He was 87.

From https://poets.org/poet/jack-gilbert.

Vita Sackville-West, an English poet, novelist, journalist, diarist, member of the Bloomsbury Group, and muse of Virginia Woolf, was born Victoria Mary Sackville-West in Knole, Kent, England on March 9, 1892.

West was the author of seventeen novels and nine works of nonfiction, particularly books about gardening. By the time she was eighteen, she had written eight novels and five plays. She published her first poetry collection, Poems of West and East (John Lane Company), a volume of twenty-one poems, in October 1917. Her other works of poetry include her Collected Poems (Hogarth Press, 1933) and the pastoral epic The Land (William Heinemann Ltd., 1926), both of which separately won the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature. She also translated a volume of Rainer Maria Rilke’s elegies into English.

In the 1940s, West was named Companion of Honor for her contributions to literature. West died at home at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, England on June 2, 1962.

From https://poets.org/poet/vita-sackville-west.

Corita Kent (1918–1986) was an artist, educator, and advocate for social justice. At age 18 she entered the religious order Immaculate Heart of Mary, eventually teaching in and then heading up the art department at Immaculate Heart College. Her work evolved from figurative and religious to incorporating advertising images and slogans, popular song lyrics, biblical verses, and literature. Throughout the ‘60s, her work became increasingly political, urging viewers to consider poverty, racism, and injustice. In 1968 she left the order and moved to Boston. After 1970, her work evolved into a sparser, introspective style, influenced by living in a new environment, a secular life, and her battles with cancer. She remained active in social causes until her death in 1986. At the time of her death, she had created almost 800 serigraph editions, thousands of watercolors, and innumerable public and private commissions.

From https://www.corita.org/about/corita.

Graham Greene, (born Oct. 2, 1904, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, Eng.—died April 3, 1991, Vevey, Switz.), British author. After studying at the University of Oxford, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926. Beginning c. 1930 he worked principally as a freelance journalist for several decades, during which he traveled widely. Stamboul Train (1932; also titled Orient Express; film, 1934) was the first of his “entertainments,” thrillers with considerable moral complexity and depth; others included A Gun for Sale (1936; also titled This Gun for Hire; film, 1942), The Confidential Agent (1939; film, 1945), and The Third Man (1949; film, 1949). His finest novels—Brighton Rock (1938; film, 1948), The Power and the Glory (1940; film, 1962), The Heart of the Matter(1948; film, 1954), and The End of the Affair (1951; film, 1999)—all have distinctly religious themes. Several of his novels set in “third-world” nations on the brink of political upheaval were also adapted as films.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Graham-Greene.

Mark Twain, orig. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (born Nov. 30, 1835, Florida, Mo., U.S.—died April 21, 1910, Redding, Conn.), was a U.S. humorist, writer, and lecturer. He grew up in Hannibal, Mo., on the Mississippi River and was apprenticed in 1848 to a local printer. He received a riverboat pilot’s license in 1859 and later moved on to Nevada and California. In 1863 he took his pseudonym, the riverman’s term for water 2 fathoms (12 ft [3.7 m]) deep. In a California mining camp he heard the story that he first published in 1865 and made famous as the title story of his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867). He traveled widely, using his travels as subject matter for lectures and books, from the humorous narratives The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872) to Life on the Mississippi (1883), his reflections on being a riverboat captain. He won a worldwide audience for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially Tom Sawyer(1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1885), one of the masterpieces of American fiction. The satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and increasingly grim works including Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899) followed. In the 1890s financial speculations bankrupted him. His eldest daughter died in 1896, his wife in 1904, and another daughter in 1909. He expressed his pessimism about human character in such late works as the posthumously published Letters from the Earth (1962).

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Mark-Twain.

Friedrich Hölderlin, (born March 20, 1770, Lauffen am Neckar, Württemberg—died June 7, 1843, Tübingen), was a German poet. He qualified for ordination but found himself more drawn to Greek mythology than to Christian dogma. In 1793 he was befriended by Friedrich Schiller, who helped him publish his early poetry. He produced works of passionate, expressive intensity, including his only novel, Hyperion (1797–99), the unfinished tragedy The Death of Empedocles, and a number of odes, elegies, and verse translations. In these works he naturalized the forms of Classical Greek verse in German and lamented the loss of an idealized Classical Greek world. His behavior became erratic, and in 1805 he succumbed irretrievably to schizophrenia; he spent his last 36 years in a carpenter’s house under the shadow of insanity. Little recognized in his lifetime, he was forgotten until the 20th century, when he came to be ranked among the finest of German lyric poets.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Friedrich-Holderlin.

Marcus Aurelius , in full Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustusorig. Marcus Annius Verus, (born April 26, AD 121, Rome—died March 17, 180, Vindobona [Vienna] or Sirmium, Pannonia), was a Roman emperor (161–180). He was born into a wealthy and prominent family. Hadrian arranged that Marcus and Lucius Verus be adopted by the designated future emperor Antoninus Pius, who dutifully groomed Marcus as his heir. On his accession, Marcus nevertheless shared power with his adoptive brother as coemperor, though he himself remained the more dominant. His reign was marked by numerous military crises, all the major frontiers being threatened by invasion. Struggles against the Parthians (162–166) were successful, but returning troops brought a devastating plague to Rome. With a concurrent German invasion, Roman morale declined; the Germans were repulsed, but Verus died during the campaign (169). Marcus made his son Commodus coemperor in 177. Though a man of gentle character and wide learning, Marcus opposed Christianity and supported persecution of its adherents. His Meditations on Stoicism, considered one of the great books of all times, gives a full picture of his religious and moral values. His reign is often thought to mark the Golden Age of Rome.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Marcus-Aurelius-Roman-emperor.

Thomas McGuane, in full Thomas Francis McGuane III, (born December 11, 1939, Wyandotte, Michigan, U.S.), is an American author noted for his picaresque novels of violent action set amid rural landscapes.

McGuane attended the University of Michigan, Olivet (Michigan) College, Michigan State University (B.A., 1962), Yale University (M.F.A., 1965), and Stanford University. McGuane’s first three novels—The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), and Ninety-two in the Shade (1973)—present the central plot and theme of his early fiction: a man, usually from a secure family, exiles himself from American society (which he despises for its materialism and triviality), removes himself to an isolated locale, and then finds a reason—alienation, attraction to a woman, rights to territory—to oppose another man in a succession of acts of escalating violence and revenge.

The locales of his novels—Key West, Florida; northern Michigan; Montana—and his scenes of fishing and personal combat suggest the influence of Ernest Hemingway. Whereas McGuane’s early novels are noted for their stylistic extravagance, a growing plainness of style developed in his later novels. They include Panama (1978), Nobody’s Angel (1981), Something to Be Desired(1984), Keep the Change (1989), and Nothing but Blue Skies (1992). After a hiatus from writing novels, McGuane returned with The Cadence of Grass(2002), which depicts a Montana clan’s colorfully tangled lives. It was followed by Driving on the Rim (2010), a freewheeling tale of a small-town doctor.

McGuane also wrote short stories, collected in To Skin a Cat (1986), Gallatin Canyon (2006), Crow Fair (2015), and Cloudbursts (2018). In addition, he penned screenplays, several of which were adaptations of his novels. His essay collections—An Outside Chance (1980; rev. ed., 1990), Some Horses (1999), and The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing (1999)—reflect mostly on leisure and the outdoors, especially his passion for fly-fishing and horseback riding. McGuane was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-McGuane.

Florence Margaret "Stevie" Smith was born on September 20, 1902 in Yorkshire, England. Her father left the family to join the North Sea Patrol when she was very young. At age three she moved with her sister and mother to the northern London suburb Palmers Green. This was her home until her death in 1971. Her mother died when she was a teenager and she and her sister lived with their spinster aunt, an important figure throughout her life, known as "The Lion." After high school she attended North London Collegiate School for Girls. She began as a secretary with the magazine publisher George Newnes and went on to be the private secretary to Sir Nevill Pearson and Sir Frank Newnes. She began writing poetry in her twenties while working at George Newnes. Her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, was published in 1936 and drew heavily on her own life experience, examining the unrest in England during World War I. Her first collection of verse, A Good Time Was Had By All (1937), also contained rough sketches or doodles, which became characteristic of her work. These drawings have both a feeling of caprice and doom, and the poetry in the collection is stylistically typical of Smith as it conveys serious themes in a nursery rhyme structure.

While Smith's volatile attachment to the Church of England is evident in her poetry, death, her "gentle friend," is perhaps her most popular subject. Much of her inspiration came from theology and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. She enjoyed reading Tennyson and Browning and read few contemporary poets in an attempt to keep her voice original and pure. Her style is unique in its combination of seemingly prosaic statements, variety of voices, playful meter, and deep sense of irony. Smith was officially recognized with the Chomondeley Award for Poetry in 1966 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1969. Smith died of a brain tumor on March 7, 1971.

From https://poets.org/poet/stevie-smith.

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which gathers a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include War’s Unwomanly Face (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

From https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/339/svetlana-alexievich.

Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America’s most renowned photographers. She has received numerous awards, including NEA, NEH, and Guggenheim Foundation grants, and her work is held by major institutions internationally. Her many books include At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), Proud Flesh (2009), The Flesh and the Spirit (2010), Remembered Light (2016) and Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings (2018). In 2001 Mann was named “America’s Best Photographer” by Time magazine. A 1994 documentary about her work, Blood Ties, was nominated for an Academy Award and the feature film, What Remains, was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008. Her bestselling memoir, Hold Still (Little, Brown, 2015), received universal critical acclaim, and was named a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2016 Hold Still won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. The National Gallery of Art presented a critically lauded show, Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings, in 2018. Comprised of 109 prints and several videos, A Thousand Crossings addresses complex issues relating to the American South and will travel internationally until the beginning of 2020. Mann is represented by Gagosian Gallery, New York. She lives in Virginia.

From https://www.sallymann.com/new-page.

Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford.

Her books, all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and nine works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Where the Stress Falls, Regarding the Pain of Others, and At the Same Time. In 1982, FSG published A Susan Sontag Reader.

Her stories and essays appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary publications all over the world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Art in America, Antaeus, Parnassus, The Threepenny Review, The Nation, and Granta. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages.

Among Ms. Sontag's many honors are the 2003 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the 2003 Prince of Asturias Prize, the 2001 Jerusalem Prize, the National Book Award for In America (2000), and the National Book Critics Circle Award forOn Photography (1978). In 1992 she received the Malaparte Prize in Italy, and in 1999 she was named a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government (she had been named an Officier in the same order in 1984). Between 1990 and 1995 she was a MacArthur Fellow.

Ms. Sontag died in New York City on December 28, 2004.

From http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/index.shtml

Oliver Cromwell, (born April 25, 1599, Huntingdon, Huntingdonshire, Eng.—died Sept. 3, 1658, London), was an English soldier and statesman, lord protector of the republican Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1653–58). He was elected to Parliament in 1628, but Charles I dissolved that Parliament in 1629 and did not call another for 11 years. In 1640 Cromwell was elected to the Short and the Long Parliament. When differences between Charles and Parliament erupted into the English Civil Wars, Cromwell became one of the leading generals on the Parliamentary side, winning many notable victories, including the Battles of Marston Moor and Naseby. He was among those who brought the king to trial and signed his death warrant. After the British Isles were named the Commonwealth, he served as the first chairman of the Council of State. In the next few years he fought against the Royalists in Ireland and Scotland and suppressed a mutiny inspired by the Levelers. When Charles II advanced into England, Cromwell destroyed his army at Worcester (1651), the battle that ended the civil wars. As lord protector, Cromwell raised his country’s status once more to that of a leading European power and concluded the Anglo-Dutch War. Though a devout Calvinist, he pursued policies of religious toleration. He refused the title of king offered to him by Parliament in 1657. After his death he was succeeded by his son Richard Cromwell.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Oliver-Cromwell.

Pindar, (born 518/522, Cynoscephalae—died c. 438 BC, Argos), was a Greek poet. A Boeotian of aristocratic birth, Pindar was educated in neighboring Athens and lived much of his life in Thebes. Almost all his early poems have been lost, but his reputation was probably established by his later hymns in honor of the gods. He developed into the greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece, respected throughout the Greek world. Of his 17 volumes, comprising almost every genre of choral lyric, only four have survived complete, and those lack his musical settings. The extant poems, probably representing his masterpieces, are odes (see Pindaric ode) commissioned to celebrate triumphs in various Hellenic athletic games. Lofty and religious in tone, they are noted for their complexity, rich metaphors, and intensely emotive language.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Pindar.

Ingrid Bergman, (born Aug. 29, 1915, Stockholm, Swed.—died Aug. 29, 1982, London, Eng.), Swedish film and stage actress. After appearing in Intermezzo in Sweden, she went to the U.S. to act in the English-language version (1939). Her radiance and unaffected charm made her a star in films such as Casablanca (1942), Gaslight (1944, Academy Award), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946). The scandal caused by her love affair with Roberto Rossellini (1949) kept her off the U.S. screen for seven years, and she made films in Europe before being welcomed back to Hollywood in Anastasia (1956, Academy Award). Her later films include Indiscreet (1958) and Murder on the Orient Express (1974, Academy Award).

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Ingrid-Bergman.

Michel Foucault, (born Oct. 15, 1926, Poitiers, France—died June 25, 1984, Paris), French structuralist philosopher and historian. A professor at the Collège de France from 1970, he examined the codes and concepts by which societies operate, especially the “principles of exclusion” (such as the distinctions between the sane and the insane) by which a society defines itself. He theorized that, by surveying social attitudes in relation to institutions such as asylums, hospitals, and prisons, one can examine the development and omnipresence of power. His books—including Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order of Things (1966), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish (1975), and History of Sexuality, 3 vol. (1976–84)—made him one of the most influential intellectuals of his time.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-Foucault.

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Cohen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.

The operas – “Einstein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha,” “Akhnaten,” and “The Voyage,” among many others – play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award-winning motion pictures such as “The Hours” and Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun,” while “Koyaanisqatsi,” his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since “Fantasia.” His associations, personal and professional, with leading rock, pop and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music – simultaneously.

He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland , Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble – seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than twenty five operas, large and small; twelve symphonies, thirteen concertos; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; nine string quartets; a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble.

From https://philipglass.com/biography/.

Georgia O’Keeffe, (born Nov. 15, 1887, near Sun Prairie, Wis., U.S.—died March 6, 1986, Santa Fe, N.M.) was a U.S. painter. She studied art in Chicago and New York City, where she met and married the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. By the early 1920s, her highly individualistic painting style had emerged, as typified by such works as Black Iris (1926). Her subjects were often enlarged views of the skulls and other bones of animals, flowers and plant organs, shells, rocks, mountains, and other natural forms. Her mysteriously suggestive images of bones and flowers set against a perspectiveless space have inspired a variety of erotic, psychological, and symbolic interpretations. Her later works celebrate the clear skies and desert landscapes of New Mexico, where she moved after her husband’s death in 1946. She is regarded by critics as one of the most original and important American artists, and her works are highly popular among the general public.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Georgia-OKeeffe.

Born Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh, poet and writer Annie Dillard earned a BA and an MA at Hollins College. Influenced by Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, Dillard writes compressed, lyric poetry and prose that engages the balance of daily life within the frame of literature and ideas. In a 2007 review of The Maytrees for the Washington Post, Marilynne Robinson observes, “Annie Dillard's books are like comets, like celestial events that remind us that the reality we inhabit is itself a celestial event, the business of eons and galaxies, however persistently we mistake its local manifestations for mere dust, mere sea, mere self, mere thought. The beauty and obsession of her work are always the integration of being, at the grandest scales of our knowledge of it, with the intimate and momentary sense of life lived.”

Dillard’s numerous books include the poetry collections Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974) and Mornings Like This: Found Poems (1995); the nonfiction books Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), winner of a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist An American Childhood (1987), For the Time Being (1999), and The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New (2016); and the novels The Living (1992) and The Maytrees (2007). She edited the anthologies Best American Essays 1988 and Modern American Memoirs (1996, coedited with Cort Conley).

A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Dillard also holds honorary doctorates at Boston College, the University of Hartford, and Connecticut College. Additional honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, a New York Press Club Award for Excellence, an Appalachian Gold Medallion, a Campion Award, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal in 2014.

Professor emeritus at Wesleyan University, she lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and Wythe County, Virginia. A selection of her papers is archived at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/annie-dillard.

Louise Labé, original name Louise Charly, byname La Belle Cordière (French: “The Beautiful Rope Maker”), (born c. 1524, Lyon, France—died 1566, Parcieux-en-Dombes), was a French poet, the daughter of a rope maker (cordier).

Labé was a member of the 16th-century Lyon school of humanist poets dominated by Maurice Scève. Her wit, charm, accomplishments, and the freedom she enjoyed provoked unverifiable legends, such as those claiming she rode to war, was taken to dressing like a man, and was a cultured courtesan. In 1555 she published a book of love sonnets, which are remarkable for their emotional intensity and their stylistic simplicity and which probably relate to her passion for the poet Olivier de Magny. The same volume also contained a prose dialogue, Débat de Folie et d’Amour (“Debate of Love and Folly”).

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louise-Labe.

Theognis, (flourished 6th century BC, Megara[Greece]), was an ancient Greek elegiac poet whose work preserved a glimpse into Greek society in a time of turmoil. More than half of all surviving elegiac poetry in ancient Greek was transmitted under his name, preserved in a collection of elegiac couplets in two books, or papyrus rolls, consisting of 1,389 verses, some of which are variants of each other. The collection includes poems by other authors, such as Tyrtaeus, Mimnermus (both 7th century BC), and Solon (early 6th century BC). One elegy mentions the “war with the Medes,” which could refer either to the conquest of Ionia by Cyrus the Great (547 or 546 BC) or, more likely, to one of the Persian invasions of Greece (490 or 480/479 BC).

The elegiacs of the Theognidean collection are independent both stylistically and thematically. The collection is an anthology, originally intended for use at symposia, or dinner parties, and characterized by a moralizing and educational attitude. The nucleus of the anthology is authentic poems by Theognis, but it is not possible to distinguish with certainty the genuine poetry of Theognis from later additions. Evidence suggests that the first 254 verses of the first book are his, judging from the quality, tone, and subjects of the poetry. Several of the elegies are addressed to Cyrnus, a boy who was said to be loved by Theognis and to whom some of the poet’s works were dedicated. The second book, consisting of 159 verses, was preserved in a single medieval manuscript. It is believed that the Byzantine compilers selected the verses from a larger corpus of pederastic poems.

Most ancient sources consider Theognis a native of Megara Nisaea, in Greece, and date his maturity to the middle of the 6th century BC. Plato (4th century BC) thought he came from Megara Hyblaea, a Sicilian colony of Greek Megara. Some tried to reconcile the two accounts by speculating that Theognis went to Sicily after being exiled from Megara. From a literary perspective the Theognidean corpus, although a composite, expresses a unified worldview, pessimistic and deeply rooted in an aristocratic milieu that was in crisis in the 6th century BC. (The pederastic poems have the same moral tone and worldview as the others.) As depicted in the works, society is divided into noble and base according to ethical, social, and political principles. The newly rich are described as vulgar, faithless, and arrogant. Virtue is innate and inherited, and the highest values are loyalty to friends and enmity to enemies.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theognis.app!

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.

It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.

As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century (most notably John Donne) and the nineteenth century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post–World War I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major later poetry collections include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.

He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He died in London on January 4, 1965.

From https://poets.org/poet/t-s-eliot

W.G. Sebald, in full Winfried Georg Sebald, (born May 18, 1944, Wertach, Allgäu, Germany—died December 14, 2001, Norwich, England), was a German-English novelist and scholar who was known for his haunting, nonchronologically constructed stories.

Sebald’s work imaginatively explored themes of memory as they related to the Holocaust. His novels include Schwindel, Gefühle (1990; Vertigo), Die Ausgewanderten (1992; The Emigrants), Die Ringe des Saturn (1995; The Rings of Saturn), Logis in einem Landhaus: über Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser und andere(1998; A Place in the Country: On Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser, and Others), and Austerlitz (2001).

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-G-Sebald.

Frida Kahlo, (born July 6, 1907, Coyoacán, Mex.—died July 13, 1954, Coyoacán), was a Mexican painter. The daughter of a German Jewish photographer, she had polio as a child and at 18 suffered a serious bus accident. She subsequently underwent some 35 operations; during her recovery, she taught herself to paint. She is noted for her intense self-portraits, many reflecting her physical ordeal. Like many artists working in post-revolutionary Mexico, Kahlo was influenced by Mexican folk art; this is apparent in her use of fantastical elements and bold use of colour, and in her depictions of herself wearing traditional Mexican, rather than European-style, dress. Her marriage to painter Diego Rivera (from 1929) was tumultuous but artistically rewarding. The Surrealists André Breton and Marcel Duchamp helped arrange exhibits of her work in the U.S. and Europe, and though she denied the connection, the dreamlike quality of her work has often led historians to identify her as a Surrealist. She died at 47. Her house in Coyoacán is now the Frida Kahlo Museum.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Frida-Kahlo.

Zinn grew up in Brooklyn in a working-class, immigrant household. At 18 he became a shipyard worker and then joined the Air Force and flew bombing missions during World War II. These experiences helped shape his opposition to war and his strong belief in the importance of knowing history.

After attending college under the G.I. Bill, he worked as a warehouse loader while earning a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. From 1956 to 1963, he taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, where he became active in the Civil Rights Movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support for student protesters, Zinn became a professor of political science at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988.

Zinn was the author of dozens of books, including A People’s History of the United States, the play Marx in Soho, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, and SNCC: The New Abolitionists. He received many awards including the Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Nonfiction, the Eugene V. Debs award for his writing and political activism, and the Ridenhour Courage Prize.

From https://www.howardzinn.org/about/biography/.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, (born 1907, Warsaw, Pol., Russian Empire [now in Poland]—died Dec. 23, 1972, New York, N.Y., U.S.), was a Jewish theologian and philosopher, noted for his presentation of the prophetic and mystical aspects of Judaism and for his attempt to construct a modern philosophy of religion on the basis of the ancient and medieval Jewish tradition.

After a traditional Jewish education, Heschel went on to higher studies at the University of Berlin and the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. He taught at the latter school, at the noted Jüdisches Lehrhaus at Frankfurt am Main, at the Institute of Jewish Studies in Warsaw after being deported from Nazi Germany (1938), at the Institute for Jewish Learning in London, and at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, before taking the chair of professor of Jewish ethics and mysticism at Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City (1945), a post he held until his death.

Heschel sought to evoke in 20th-century man the inner depth of devotion and spontaneous response that he discerned in traditional Jewish piety. He also emphasized social action as an expression of the ethical concern of the pious man and was at the forefront of protests and demonstrations in the 1960s and ’70s. Although he came to the English-speaking world relatively late in life, he soon achieved a vivid and moving English prose style. Among his best-known works are The Earth Is the Lord’s (1950); Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (1951); The Sabbath: Its Meaning to Modern Man (1951); Man’s Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (1954); God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism(1956); and The Prophets (1962; originally published in German in 1936).

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abraham-Joshua-Heschel.

For more information about Abraham Joshua Heschel:

“Abraham Joshua Heschel”: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/heschel-abraham-joshua

God in Search of Man: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374513313/godinsearchofman

“The Radical Heschel”: https://jewishcurrents.org/the-radical-heschel

Max Frisch, in full Max Rudolf Frisch, (born May 15, 1911, Zürich, Switzerland—died April 4, 1991, Zürich), was a Swiss dramatist and novelist, noted for his depictions of the moral dilemmas of 20th-century life. In 1933 Frisch withdrew from the University of Zürich, where he had studied German literature, and became a newspaper correspondent. After touring southern and eastern Europe from 1934 to 1936, he returned to Zürich, where he studied architecture. Frisch worked as an architect after service in the Swiss army during World War II. He abandoned architecture in 1955 to devote himself full-time to writing.

Frisch’s play Santa Cruz (1947) established the central theme found throughout his subsequent works: the predicament of the complicated, skeptical individual in modern society. One of Frisch’s earliest dramas was the morality play Nun singen sie wieder (1946; Now They Sing Again), in which Surrealistic tableaux reveal the effects caused by hostages being assassinated by German Nazis. His other historical melodramas included Die chinesische Mauer (1947; The Chinese Wall) and the bleak Als der Krieg zu Ende war (1949; When the War Was Over). Reality and dream are used to depict the terrorist fantasies of a responsible government prosecutor in Graf Öderland (1951; Count Oederland), while Don Juan oder die Liebe zur Geometrie(1953; Don Juan, or The Love of Geometry) is a reinterpretation of the legend of the famous lover of that name. In his powerful parable play Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1958; The Firebugs, also published as The Fire Raisers), arsonists insinuate themselves into the house of the weak-willed, complacent Biedermann, who allows them to destroy his home and his world rather than confront them. Frisch’s later plays included Andorra (1961), with its theme of collective guilt, and Biografie(published 1967; Biography), which deals with social relationships and their limitations.

Frisch’s early novels Stiller (1954; I’m Not Stiller), Homo Faber (1957), and Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964; A Wilderness of Mirrors) portray aspects of modern intellectual life and examine the theme of identity. His autobiographical works included two noteworthy diaries, Tagebuch 1946–1949 (1950; Sketchbook 1946–1949) and Tagebuch 1966–1971 (1972; Sketchbook 1966–1971). His later novels included Montauk: Eine Erzählung (1975), Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979; Man in the Holocene), and Blaubart (1982; Bluebeard).

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Max-Frisch.

Philippus was a Greek writer of epigrams, who lived in the middle of the first century A.D. He produced a compilation of his own epigrams and epigrams by various other poets of the preceding 150 years, which was called the "Garland of Philip"; much of this compilation has been preserved, because it was incorporated into the Greek Anthology.

From http://www.attalus.org/poetry/philippus.html.

For more information about Philip of Thessalonika:

“Greek Anthology, Volume 3”: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Anth.+Gr.+9.575&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0474

A Dictionary of Classical Greek Quotations: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/dictionary-of-classical-greek-quotations-9781784534929/

Billy Collins is the author of twelve collections of poetry including The Rain in Portugal, Aimless Love, Horoscopes for the Dead, Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, and Picnic, Lightning. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. A former Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Collins served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and as New York State Poet from 2004 to 2006. In 2016 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Florida with his wife Suzannah.

From https://billycollinspoetry.com/bios/billy-collins.

For more information about Billy Collins:

The Rain in Portugal: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/213127/the-rain-in-portugal-by-billy-collins/

“Billy Collins”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/billy-collins

“Billy Collins, The Art of Poetry No. 83”: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/482/the-art-of-poetry-no-83-billy-collins

Marie Howe is the author of four volumes of poetry: Magdalene: Poems (W.W. Norton, 2017); The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton, 2009); What the Living Do (1997); and The Good Thief (1988). She is also the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others.

From http://www.mariehowe.com/home.

For more information about Marie Howe:

“What the Living Do”: https://wwnorton.com/books/What-the-Living-Do/

“Marie Howe”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marie-howe

“Poet Marie Howe on ‘What the Living Do’ After Loss”: https://www.npr.org/2014/04/25/306528499/poet-marie-howe-on-what-the-living-do-after-loss