Novels of Saul Bellow, Canadian-American writer, include Dangling Man in 1944 and Humboldt's Gift in 1975 and often concern an alienated individual within an indifferent society; he won the No…
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosop…
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spe…
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the …
V. S. Naipaul was a British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent known for his sharp, often controversial explorations of postcolonial societies, identity, and displacement. His works, which include bot…
John Dos Passos was a prominent American novelist, artist, and political thinker best known for his U.S.A. trilogy—The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money—a groundbreaking work of modernist fiction…
John Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit a…
John Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs" or "the Ovid of Ossining." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, th…
William Styron (1925–2006), born in Newport News, Virginia, was one of the greatest American writers of his generation. Styron published his first book, Lie Down in Darkness, at age twenty-six and wen…
Richard Ford, born February 16, 1944 in Jackson, Mississippi, is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day, The…
John Richard Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer, earliest practiced the "new journalism," which fuses storytelling devices of the novel with nonfiction reportage. A 36-member panel under…
Malcolm Lowry was a British novelist and poet whose masterpiece Under the Volcano is widely hailed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Born near Liverpool, England, Lowry grew up i…
American writer John Henry O'Hara contributed short stories to the New Yorker and wrote novels, such as BUtterfield 8 (1935) and Ten North Frederick (1955).
Noted American writer and critic James Rufus Agee collaborated with photographer Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a bleak depiction of rural poverty and posthumously published …
Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction…
Born Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein to prosperous Jewish parents, from the first West set about creating his own legend, and anglicising his name was part of that process. At Brown University in …
In late 1943, Allen Stuart Drury, a 25-year old Army veteran, sought work. A position as the Senate correspondent for United Press International provided him with employment and insider knowledge of t…
James Alan McPherson was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American short story writer and essayist. He spent his early career writing short stories and essays, almost without exception, for The Atlantic. At t…
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970.