Nobel Prize for Literature
The award was not awarded in 1914; 1918; 1935; 1940; 1941; 1942; 1943;
The following recipients below are not found here on this site:
Sully Prudhomme 1901
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen 1902
Rudolf Christoph Eucken 1908
Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler 1911
The following recipients below are not found here on this site:
Sully Prudhomme 1901
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen 1902
Rudolf Christoph Eucken 1908
Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler 1911
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Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson was born on 8 December 1832 in Kvikne, Norway. He was a writer, known for Fairy of Solbakken (1919), En glad gutt (1932) and Synnöve Solbakken (1934). He was married to Karoline Reimers. He died on 26 April 1910 in Paris, France.1903- José Echegaray y Eizaguirre was born on 19 April 1832 in Madrid, Spain. José was a writer, known for Lovers? (1927), The Celebrated Scandal (1915) and The World and His Wife (1920). José died on 14 September 1916 in Madrid, Spain.1904
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Frédéric Mistral was born on 8 September 1830 in Maillane, Provence, France. He was a writer and actor, known for Mireille (1934), Mireille's Sincere Love (1909) and Mireille (1922). He was married to Marie Louise Aimée Rivière. He died on 25 March 1914 in Maillane, Provence, France.1904- Henryk Sienkiewicz was born on 5 May 1846 in Wola Okrzejska, Poland, Russian Empire [now Wola Okrzejska, Lubelskie, Poland]. He was a writer, known for Quo Vadis (1951), Na jasnym brzegu (1921) and Invasion 1700 (1962). He was married to Maria Babska, Maria Romanowska and Maria Emilia Kazimiera Szetkiewicz. He died on 15 November 1916 in Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland.1905
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Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, Maharashtra, India, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, a museum director and author and illustrator. This was at the height of the "British Raj", so he was brought up by Indian nurses ("ayahs"), who taught him something of the beliefs and tongues of India. He was sent "home" to England at the age of six to live with a foster mother, who treated him very cruelly. He then spent five formative years at a minor public school, the United Services College at Westward Ho! which inspired "Stalky & Co.". He returned to India as a journalist in 1882. By 1890 he had published, in India, a major volume of verse, "Departmental Ditties", and over 70 Indian tales in English, including "Plain Tales from the Hills" and the six volumes of the "Indian Railway Library". When he arrived in London in October 1889, at the age of 23, he was already a literary celebrity. In 1892 he married Caroline Balestier, the daughter of an American lawyer, and set up house with her in Brattleboro, Vermont, where they lived for four years. While in Vermont he wrote the two "Jungle Books" and "Captains Courageous". In 1901 he wrote "Kim" and in 1902 "The Just So Stories" that explained things like "How the Camel Got Its Hump". From 1902 they made their home in Sussex, England. He subsequently published many collections of stories, including "A Diversity of Creatures", "Debits and Credits" (1926) and "Limits and Renewals" (1932). These are now thought by many to contain some of his finest writing, although his introspection may well have been influenced by the death of their only son in the First World War. Although vilified by some as "the poet of British imperialism" in the past, nowadays he may be regarded as a great story-teller with an extraordinary gift for writing of peoples of many cultures and classes and backgrounds from the inside.1907- Writer
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Lagerlöf made her debut in 1891 with The Gösta Berling saga, a story about her own region, Värmland and her home, the country manor Mårbacka. With her novel she starts the wave of romantic nationalist literature in Sweden of the 1890s. Her novel Jerusalem (1901-02) is about religious emigrants from Sweden to Palestine. She is the author of Sweden's most read novel, The Adventures of Nils Holgerssons (1906), a story about a boy traveling across Sweden on the back of a goose. Her stories often evolve around folklore and supernatural events. One of the peaks in her career was her novel The Emperor of Portugal (1914). In 1907 she got a honorary degree at the University of Uppsala, in 1909 she got the Nobel Prize and 1914 she became a member of the Swedish Academy. Her home Mårbacka is now a museum visited by thousands of tourists every year.1909- Paul Heyse was born on 13 March 1830 in Berlin, Germany. He was a writer, known for Your Favorite Story (1953) and Zwei Liebesgeschichten (1980). He was married to Anna Schubart and Margaret Kugler. He died on 2 April 1914 in Munich, Germany.1910
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Maeterlinck was a revolutionary symbolist playwright from Belgium. His influence on modern drama is vast and he was one of the best known figures in Europe in the early twentieth century, both for his plays and his philosophical writings. Best known today for his fantasy play "The Blue Bird", which has been adapted into a number of films, but most of his work was darker and even horrifying. Death was a frequent character in his plays, and his use of rythmic repepetive dialogue gave his plays a mesmeric quality. His best plays are probably "The Sightless" and "Pelleas and Melisande".1911- Writer
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Gerhart Hauptmann was born on 15 November 1862 in Obersalzbrunn, Lower Silesia, Germany [now Szczawno-Zdrój, Dolnoslaskie, Poland]. He was a writer and actor, known for Faust (1926), Rose Bernd (1919) and Die Weber (1927). He was married to Margarete Marschalk and Marie Thienemann. He died on 6 June 1946 in Jagniatków, Jelenia Góra, Dolnoslaskie, Poland.1912- Writer
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Rabindranath Tagore was born on 6 May 1861 in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India [now India]. He was a writer and composer, known for Song of the Body, Streer Patra (1972) and Natir Puja (1932). He was married to Mrinalini Devi. He died on 7 August 1941 in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India [now India].1913- Romain Rolland was born on 29 January 1866 in Clamecy, Nièvre, France. He was a writer, known for Xiang gui chun qing (1960), Miseraretaru tamasii (1953) and La novela mensual (1972). He was married to Maria Pavlovna Kudachova, Marie Mikhaïlova Cuvillier Koudachev and Clotilde Bréal. He died on 30 December 1944 in Vézelay, Yonne, France.1915
- Swedish poet and novelist Verner von Heidenstam was born in Orebro, Sweden, in 1859. His family came from a long line of Swedish nobility, and had a tradition of service in the country's diplomatic corps and military. As a child he was rather sickly and in poor health, and spent much time reading, his favorite subjects being poetry and epic, heroic tales. He began his higher education in Stockholm, but his ongoing health problems forced him to leave school in 1876, and he left Sweden for warmer climes to recuperate. He stayed away for eight yeas, traveling to France, Italy, Germany and Asia. In 1881 he traveled to Paris, France, and studied art at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts. He had married a Swiss girl, much to the disapproval of his family, in 1880 and he and his family were estranged for the next seven years, until they reunited at his father's deathbed in 1887.
He published his first collection of poems, "Pilgrimage: The WanderYears", in 1888. It included some works about his travels in the Orient--a subject which was to infuse a lot of his work--and in 1889 he turned out a novel, "Endymion", which also recounted his experiences traveling in Asia. In 1893 his wife died, and in 1896 he remarried again, but the marriage didn't last long and ended in divorce. In 1899 he was elected to the distinguished Gotenburg Academy of Sciences and Letters, and in that same year he married for the third time, to a woman almost 20 years younger than he. He bought an estate in the Swedish countryside, and not long afterward began publishing a string of novels about his favorite childhood subject, epic tales of heroism and bravery, this time based on ancient Swedish and Scandinavian history. In 1915 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel "Nya Dikter".
He died in Stockholm, Sweden, aged 80, on May 20, 1940.1916 - Karl Gjellerup was born on 2 June 1857 in Roholte, Denmark. He was a writer, known for Kvarnen (1921) and Møllen (1943). He was married to Eugenia Bendix. He died on 11 October 1919 in Dresden, Germany.1917
- Henrik Pontoppidan was born on 24 July 1857 in Fredericia, Denmark. He was a writer, known for Thora van Deken (1920), A Fortunate Man (2018) and A Fortunate Man (2018). He was married to Antoinette Kofoed and Mette Marie Hansen. He died on 21 August 1943 in Copenhagen, Denmark.1917
- Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun was born to a poor family and sent to live with an uncle, a commercial fisherman. He grew up without any formal schooling. Hamsun left Norway for the U.S. twice: once in 1882, and again in 1886. Each time he stayed in the U.S. for two years, holding various jobs including farmhand and Chicago streetcar conductor. He was often poverty-stricken. His first novel "Hunger" is autobiographical and about poverty, alienation, and desperation, and, innovatively: consciousness and intense inner states. He returned to Norway and wrote several more novels, all well-received, original, and successful. He won the Nobel Prize in 1920 for "Growth of the Soil," but gradually became reclusive due to his need to write combined with and his cranky temperament. Norwegians were dismayed when in the 1930's he expressed his support for Hitler. Although he claimed his sentiments were more anti-British than pro-German, he spoke in favor of National Socialism and was vilified in Norway. His rocky relations with his children and second wife are the subject of Hamsun (1996). In 1948, he was briefly imprisoned, and his assets were seized by the state. He died penniless in 1952. Hamsun was rehabilitated posthumously, and is again considered one of the great modern Scandinavian novelists.1920
- Anatole France, the 1921 Nobel laureate for literature, was born Jacques Anatole Thibault in Paris on April 16, 1844, the son of a Paris book dealer. He attended the Parisian boys' school Collège Stanislas, where he received a classical education, and later matriculated at the École des Chartes. For 20 years after finishing his education, he worked at various positions, including the post of assistant librarian of the French Senate from 1876 to 1890, before devoting himself full-time to writing. He was able to write even when he worked, and in his life-time in which he became the premier French man of letters, he produced a vast output of novels, as well as works in every genre. A story-teller in the French classical style, his literary precursors were Voltaire and Fénélon. His urbane skepticism and enlightened hedonism were in the spirit and tradition of the French enlightenment of the 18th century. His epicurean philosophy was limned in his 1895 book of aphorisms, "The Garden of Epicurus."
France's first great success was the novel "Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), which was honored by the Académie Française. France later became a member of the Académie in 1896. He published an autobiographical novel in 1885, "Le Livre de mon ami" ["My Friend's Book"], which he followed up with "Pierre Nozière" (1899), "Le Petit Pierre" (1918), and "La Vie au fleur" (1922) ["The Bloom of Life"].
France was the literary critic on the "Le Temps" newspaper, and his reviews were published in a four-volume collection entitled "La Vie littéraire" [On Life and Letters] between 1888 and 1892. It was in this period that France wrote historical fiction about past civilizations, focusing particularly on the transition from paganism to Christianity. He published "Balthazar" (1889), a story of the conversion of one of the Magi, and "Thaïs" (1890), about the conversion of an Alexandrian courtesan. In 1891, he published "L'Étui de nacre" ["Mother of Pearl"], the story of a hermit and a faun. It was during this period that the classicist France reacted strongly against Emile Zola's naturalism.
Approximately half of France's output appeared in periodicals and newspapers. The style of his novels was rooted in elegance and a subtle irony. "La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque" ["At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque], a historical novel about life in 18th century France, was published in 1893. It proved to be the most celebrated of France's novels; that same year, he used the central character of the novel, the Abbé Coignard, in "Les Opinions de Jérôme Coignard." The Abbé again appeared in "Le Puits de Sainte Claire" ["The Well of Saint Claire"], a collection of stories published in 1895.
With "Le Lys rouge" ["The Red Lily"], a tragic love story published in 1894, France returned to contemporary fiction. In 1896, he began a cycle of prose works focused on the character of Professor Bergeret, one of his most famous literary creations, in the "Histoire contemporaine," published between 1896 and 1901.
He protested the unjust conviction of Captain Alfed Dreyfuss for treason and the anti-semitism of the French establishment that permitted his persecution, and developed an empathy for socialism. After the Dreyfus Affair, in which he came out in support of Zola, Dreyfus' great champion, France's work became more engaged socially and slanted increasingly towards political satire. In 1908, he published a satire about the Dreyfus Affair, "L'Île des pingouins" ["Penguin Island"]. Also that year, his biography of Joan of Arc was published. His other major works of his later period include "Les Dieux ont soif (1912) ["The Gods are Athirst"], a novel about the French Revolution, and "La Révolte des anges" (1914) ["The Revolt of the Angels].
Anatole France was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921, "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament." In the presentation Speech by E.A. Karlfeldt, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, the author of historical novels about the transition from paganism to Christianity was praised for limning "a faith purified by healthy doubts, by the spirit of clarity, a new humanism, a new Renaissance, a new Reformation."
Karlfeldt would go on to praise rance as "the faithful servant of truth and beauty, the heir of humanism, of the lineage of Rabelais, Montaigne, Voltaire, [and ]Renan," but first, he would honor him as embodying the best of French civilization and letters:
"Sweden cannot forget the debt which, like the rest of the civilized world, she owes to French civilization," Karlfeldt said. "Formerly we received in abundance the gifts of French Classicism like the ripe and delicate fruits of antiquity. Without them, where would we be? This is what we must ask ourselves today. In our time Anatole France has been the most authoritative representative of that civilization; he is the last of the great classicists. He has even been called the last European. And indeed, in an era in which chauvinism, the most criminal and stupid of ideologies, wants to use the ruins of the great destruction for the building of new walls to prevent free intellectual exchange between peoples, his clear and beautiful voice is raised higher than that of others, exhorting people to understand that they need one another. Witty, brilliant, generous, this knight without fear is the best champion in the sublime and incessant war which civilization has declared against barbarism. He is a marshal of the France of the glorious era in which Corneille and Racine created their heroes.
France used the occasion to himself honor the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, the Swedish Prime Minister Karl Hjalmar Branting, a diplomat who worked for disarmament and helped draft the Geneva Protocol, a proposed international security system mandating arbitration between belligerent nations. France also denounced the Versailles Treaty as being unjust and a continuation of the Great War and called for the instillation of common sense among diplomats lest Europe meet its doom. After France received his Prize from the King of Sweden, after all the laureates had again ascended the rostrum, France turned to Professor Walther Nernst, the German Nobel laureate for chemistry, and shook his hand cordially for an extended time. The gesture profoundly moved the crowd as the symbolism of the meeting of the heart (literature) and the head (science) and of two nations so recently engaged in waging a ruinous war against each other was not missed. The audience applauded the gesture as a symbol of reconciliation between France, the nation, and Germany.
Anatole France's writings were put on the Index of Forbidden Books of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1920s. Between 1925 and 1935, France's collected works were published in 25 volumes.
Anatole France died on October 12, 1924 in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France and was buried in the Ancient Cemetery of Neuilly, Hauts-de-Seine.1921 - Writer
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Jacinto Benavente was born on 12 August 1866 in Madrid, Spain. He was a writer and director, known for La madona de las rosas (1919), Los intereses creados (1919) and Para toda la vida (1923). He died on 14 July 1954 in Madrid, Spain.1922- Writer
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William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 in Sandymount, County Dublin, Ireland, UK [now Republic of Ireland]. He was a writer, known for Valentines. A Bouquet of Letters and Poetry of Lovers (1994), Dancing at Lughnasa (1998) and Echoes. He was married to Georgiana Hyde-Lees. He died on 28 January 1939 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France.1923- Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont was born on 7 May 1867 in Kobiele Wielkie, Poland, Russian Empire [now Kobiele Wielkie, Lódzkie, Poland]. He was a writer, known for Chlopi (1922), Ziemia obiecana (1927) and Komediantka (1987). He was married to Aurelia Szablowska. He died on 5 December 1925 in Warsaw, Mazowieckie, Poland.1924
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The Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, acquired a reputation as the greatest dramatist in the English language during the first half of the 20th Century for the plays he had written at the height of his creativity from "Mrs. Warren's Profession" in 1893 to "The Apple Cart" in 1929. His works have been revived on Broadway from 1894 to 2010. His most famous work in the 21st Century is My Fair Lady (1964), the musical adaptation of Pygmalion (1938).
A Shavian drama (his reputation was so great, he had his own adjective ascribed to his works) had a biting social critique leavened by humor. According to his Nobel Prize citation, "His ideas were those of a somewhat abstract logical radicalism; hence they were far from new, but they received from him a new definiteness and brilliance. In him these ideas combined with a ready wit, a complete absence of respect for any kind of convention, and the merriest humor - all gathered together in an extravagance which has scarcely ever before appeared in literature."
He was a major international celebrity and a force in British politics, being a charter member of the Fabian Society. The Fabians were committed to democratic socialism, that is, using parliamentary mechanisms to encourage a gradual adoption of socialist policies through political reform rather than revolution.1925- Grazia Deledda was born on 27 September 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia, Italy. She was a writer, known for La grazia (1929), Devotion (1950) and Amore rosso (Marianna Sirca) (1952). She was married to Palmiro Madesani. She died on 15 August 1936 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.1926
- Henri Bergson was born on 18 October 1859 in Paris, France. He was a writer, known for Film socialisme (2010), Snow (2020) and Origins of the 21st Century (2000). He was married to Louise Neuburger. He died on 3 January 1941 in Paris, France.1927
- Sigrid Undset was born on 20 May 1882 in Kalundborg, Denmark. She was a writer, known for Camera Three (1955), Kristin Lavransdatter (1995) and Jenny (1983). She was married to Anders Svarstad and Anders Castus Svarstad. She died on 10 June 1949 in Lillehammer, Norway.1928
- Thomas Mann was probably Germany's most influential author of the 20th century, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Born on 6 June 1875 in Lübeck, his family moved to Munich in 1893, where he lived until 1933 and wrote some of his most successful novels like "Buddenbrocks" (1901), "Death in Venice" (1912) or "The Magic Mountain" (1924). After the Nazi takeover, the humanist and anti-fascist, married to Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a secular Jewish family, emigrated to Switzerland, then to Princeton and Pacific Palisades in the United States, where he finished his great tetra-logy "Joseph and His Brothers" in 1942. Two years later, he became a naturalized US citizen, but finally returned to Europe in 1952. The famous analyst and critique of the German and European soul died on 12 August 1955 in Kilberg near Zurich.1929
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Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was a colossus of American letters in the first half of the last century. Arguably, he is the first major "modern" writer of the 20th century, as there is American literature before "Main Street" (1920) and after that seminal novel, which revolutionized writing in the US. His eminence as a great American writer was eclipsed by Ernest Hemingway, who although more influenced by Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein, owes a debt to Lewis, as do most realists in 20th-century American letters.1930- Writer
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John Galsworthy was born on 14 August 1867 in Kingston Hill, Surrey, England, UK. He was a writer and actor, known for That Forsyte Woman (1949), 21 Days Together (1940) and The Stranger (1924). He was married to Ada Nemesis Pearson Cooper. He died on 31 January 1933 in Grove Lodge, Hampshire, England, UK.1932- Ivan Bunin was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933).
He was born Ivan Alekseevich Bunin on October 22, 1870 on his ancestral estate near Voronezh, Russia. His father, Aleksei Bunin, and his mother, were descendants of several lines of old nobility that included Russian landed gentry and Luthuanian knights. The Bunins were landlords and serf-owners; but Bunin's father lost his estate in a unfortunate card-game spree, leaving his family in a financial ruin. Young Ivan Bunin spent his childhood around the peasant surfs on his estate. He went to a grammar school in the town of Yelets, but after only five years of school he had to return back home. Bunin continued homeschooling under the tutelage of his elder brother, who was a university student. Brother encouraged Bunin to write and read Russian classics such as Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Lev Tolstoy, and others.
Bunin published his first poem at the age of 17, in a literary magazine in St. Petersburg. His first short story 'Derevenski eskiz' (aka.. Country Sketch) was published in 1891, it was soon followed by publications of more poems and short stories. At that time he had a job as an assistant editor of a local newspaper in the city of Orel, Russia. His stories were published in several newspapers and magazines across Russia. At that time Bunin started a correspondence with Anton Chekhov, and with a passage of time the two writers became close friends. In 1894 Bunin met Lev Tolstoy. He admired the works of Tolstoy, but their social and moral views were quite different. Bunin's communication with Maxim Gorky led to their meeting in 1899 and both writers developed good friendship. During the 1900s Bunin and Gorky spent several winters together on the isle of Capri. At that time Bunin had several publications through the "Znanie" (Knowledge) group, which was founded and managed by Maxim Gorky.
By 1900 Ivan Bunin had published over 100 poems. His 1899 translation of 'The Song of Hiawatha' by Longfellow was awarded the Pushkin Prize and Gold Medal from the Russian Academy of Science. His other translations included Lord Byron's 'Manfred', Tennyson's 'Lady Godiva', and poems by Alfred de Musset. In 1909 Bunin was elected one of the 12 full members of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1910 he published his first full-scale novel 'Derevnya' (The Village), and in 1912, 'Sukhodol' (Dry Valley), a nostalgic portrayal of decaying Russian nobility based on the true story of his own family. Bunin traveled extensively in Russia and abroad, in Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, all-over Europe and Asia. His first marriage to the daughter of a Greek revolutionary ended in divorce. His second marriage in 1907 lasted his all life.
Bunin witnessed the terror and destruction caused by communists during the Russian Revolution of 1917. He fled from the Bolshevok communists by moving from Moscow to Odessa. There Bunin lived for 2 years hoping that the White Russians might restore order and beat the communist revolutionaries, but soon revolutionary chaos spread all over Russia. In February 1920 Bunin had to leave all his property behind under the threat of approaching communist armies. He swiftly emigrated aboard the last French ship leaving Odessa with other anti-communist Russians, and eventually settled in Grasse, near Cannes, in the south of France. There he published his eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution in the form of a diary entitled 'Okayannye dni' (The Accursed Days 1925-26). In it Bunin described the Soviet government by writing of them: "What a disgusting gallery of convicts!"
He was the eldest of Russian émigré writes, and was regarded by all intellectual émigrés as the last one writing in the high tradition of Lev Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. Bunin was the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933. At that time Bunin received congratulations from intellectuals from all-over the world, but not a word from the Soviet Russia, where his name and his books were banned. On his way to accept the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, Sweden, Bunin had to pass through Germany. There he was arrested by the Nazis on a false accusations of smuggling jewels, and was forced to drink a bottle of Castor oil. Bunin had a staunch anti-Nazi position, he was known for sheltering a Jew in his home during the Nazi occupation of France.
Bunin's best known books 'Solnechny Udar' (A Sunstroke 1927), 'Zhizn Arsenyeva' (The Life of Arsenyev 1933), 'Lika' (1939), and 'Tyomnye Allei' (Dark Alleys, or in some translations, Shadowed Paths, 1943) are among the highest achievements in Russian literature of the 20th century. Bunin's poetry was highly regarded by Vladimir Nabokov. However, most of Bunin's books were banned in Russia under the Soviet censorship, because of his truthful and frightening description of chaos and destruction caused by the communists after the Russian revolution of 1917. Later, every year in the morning of the 8th of November, Bunin suffered from painful traumatic memories about the collapse of Russia caused by the communist takeover that happened on that date in 1917. He died of a heart attack in the morning of November 8, 1953, in his apartment in Paris, and was laid to rest in the Russian Cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois in Paris.
Selected works by Bunin were published posthumously in Russia, in 1956- 1961, during the "Thaw" that was initiated by Nikita Khrushchev. However,
1933 - Luigi Pirandello was born on 28 June 1867 in Girgenti, Sicily, Italy [now Agrigento, Sicily, Italy]. He was a writer, known for The Late Mathias Pascal (1925), Ma non è una cosa seria (1936) and Der Mann, der nicht nein sagen kann (1938). He was married to Antonietta Portulano. He died on 10 December 1936 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.1934
- Eugene O'Neill, the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, is widely considered the greatest American playwright. No one, not Maxwell Anderson, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, nor Edward Albee, approaches O'Neill in terms of his artistic achievement or his impact on the American theater.
James O'Neill, one of the most popular actors of the late 19th century, was his father, so one could say that Eugene O'Neill was born to a life in the theater. His father, who had been born into poverty in Ireland before emigrating to the United States, developed his craft and became a star in the theaters of the Midwest. He married Mary Ellen "Ella" Quinlan, the Irish-American daughter of a wealthy Cleveland businessman, whose death when she was a teenager had hurt her emotionally. She remained emotionally fragile throughout her life, a condition exacerbated by a further tragedy, the loss of a child. A further strain was placed on her when it was discovered that James had lived in "concubinage" with a common-law wife who later sued him for child support and alimony, claiming he had fathered her child. Both were pious and believing Catholics.
They had three sons, including James Jr. (born 1878) and Edmund (1883), who died at the age of two from measles, leaving Ella distraught. Their last son, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (his middle name a salute to the British prime minister who was in favor of home rule for Ireland), was born at the Barrett Hotel (home of many theatrical artistes) in New York City, on October 16, 1888. Supposedly, it was a difficult delivery, and in the spirit of the times, Ella was given morphine for her pain. She became an addict.
James O'Neill made a fortune playing The Count of Monte Cristo, both on Broadway in multiple productions and as a touring show. However, he suffered an artistic death as a performing artiste through the sheer repetition of the Monte Cristo role, which he turned to repeatedly as it always proved a success. He reportedly played the role at least 4,000 times, perhaps nearly twice that number. He would provide the prototype for the character of James Tyrone, the pater familias in his son's "Long Day's Journey Into Night". James O'Neill Sr. knew that he had suffered artistically from his commercial instincts, and Eugene never forgot that. His son remained steadfast in his own fidelity to his principles of artistic integrity.
The father also was a notorious skinflint, terrified that some unforeseen calamity would throw him back into the hellish poverty of his childhood in Ireland. Both young Gene and his older brother Jamie tried their hands at acting, and though Jamie was more successful than Gene, he never developed a significant, independent career as a professional thespian due to instability caused by his alcoholism. Jamie relied on his father for work, which further fueled his drinking.
Jamie was a full-blown alcoholic, just like his younger brother, Gene, and he drank himself to death at a relatively young age, a fate Gene managed to avoid, but not from lack of trying. The characters of Jamie in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and James Tyrone Jr. in "A Moon for the Misbegotten" were based on him.
As a young man, Eugene suffered from tuberculosis, which likely exacerbated his propensity for pessimism (the stuff of his life became the guts of his last masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey Into Night"). His pessimistic, tragic outlook on life likely was hereditary: O'Neill's two sons, Eugene O'Neill Jr. and Shane O'Neill, became substance abusers as adults: Eugene Jr. was an alcoholic and Shane was a heroin addict. Both committed suicide. He disowned his daughter Oona Chaplin, for marrying Charles Chaplin, who was just six months younger than O'Neill himself. He had never had much to do with her anyway, nor any of his children. His life was devoted to writing.
After recovering from tuberculosis, O'Neill attended Princeton for the 1907-08 term, but was kicked out after his freshman year, allegedly for being drunk and disorderly at a reception held by the university president, future President of the United States Woodrow Wilson. For the next eight years he led a freebooting existence, fortune-hunting for gold in South America and plying the seas as an able-bodied seaman, while trying to drink himself to death (he even made an attempt at suicide). Eventually he returned to New York City and tried his hand at playwriting, and with the financial help of his father, studied playwriting at Harvard in 1915. His father was unimpressed by the results, and died the same year his son made his big breakthrough on Broadway (he did live to see the production of Eugene's first full-length play, "Beyond the Horizon", which opened on February 2, 1920 and ran for a then-impressive 111 performances, and its honoring with the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama that May. James O'Neill Sr. died on August 10, 1920. His namesake, James O'Neill Jr., died three years later, at the age of 45.)
Where Eugene truly learned his craft was in the writing of one-act melodramas that dealt with the lives of sailors, that were performed by the Provincetown Players, which had theaters in Provincetown on Cape Cod and off of Washington Square in New York City (John Ford made a 1940 movie out of four of his sea plays, collected in The Long Voyage Home (1940)). The theater he created was a reaction against the theater of his father, the old hoary melodramas that packed them in for a night of crowd-pleasing entertainment.
Eugene started out as a dramatist at a time when there was an average of 70 plays being performed on Broadway each week. The Great White Way resembled a modern movie multiplex in that potential theatergoers would peruse the various marquees in and around Times Square seeking an entertainment for the night. At the time O'Neill began to establish himself, in pre- and post-World War I era, entertainment was first and foremost in most people's minds.
The movies and O'Neill would change that. The competition of the more sophisticated movies of the late silent era, and then the talkies, usurped the position of Broadway and the theater as the premier venue for American entertainment. The light plays that were the equivalent of television fare became extinct. Musicals continued to thrive, as did comedies, but drama became more serious and developed a psychological depth. O'Neill was the midwife of the phenomenon.
Eugene O'Neill helped foster the maturation of American drama, as he incorporated the techniques of both European expressionism and realism in his work. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, brought to the American stage a tragic vision that influenced scores of American playwrights that followed.
Eugene O'Neill died in the Shelton Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1953. Allegedly, his last words were, "Born in a hotel room, and goddammit! Died in one!" His health had been hurt by his alcoholism and he suffered from Parkinson's disease-like tremors of his hands that had made it difficult, if not impossible, to write since the early 1940s. It is believed that he suffered cerebellar cortical abiotrophy, a neurological disease in which certain neurons in the cerebellum of the brain die off, adversely affecting the balance and coordination of the sufferer. As a dramatist, he had flourished on Broadway from 1920, when his first full-length work, "Beyond the Horizon", debuted, winning him his first Pulitzer, until 1934, when his first and only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (debut October 1933) came to an end that June and his play, "Days Without End," was staged in repertory between January and November). After 1934, he entered a cocoon, staying away from Broadway until after World War II, when the 1946 production of "The Iceman Cometh" debuted. The first production of "Iceman" failed, and O'Neill's reputation suffered, but the 1956 production of "Iceman" starring Jason Robards and directed by José Quintero was a great success, as was the posthumous production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night", which brought O'Neill his fourth Pulitzer. The two plays solidified his legend.1936 - Roger Martin du Gard was born on 23 March 1881 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. He was a writer, known for Les Thibault (1972), Les Thibault (2003) and Jean Barois (1963). He was married to Helene Foucault. He died on 23 August 1958 in Bellême, Orne, France.1937
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Daughter of Christian missionaries, Pearl Buck was reared and educated in China. She received her university education in America but returned to China in the mid-1910s. She became a university instructor and writer, eventually authoring novels about China, some of which were turned into Hollywood films, including The Good Earth (1937) and Dragon Seed (1944). She also wrote novels using the pen-name 'John Sedges', and she won the 'Nobel Prize' for Literature in 1938.1938- Writer
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F.E. Sillanpää was born on 16 September 1888 in Hämeenkyrö, Finland. He was a writer and actor, known for One Man's Fate (1940), Silja - nuorena nukkunut (1956) and Nuorena nukkunut (1937). He died on 3 June 1964 in Helsinki, Finland.1939- Writer
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Danish novelist Johannes Vilhelm Jensen was born in Faroe, Denmark, in 1873, the son of a veterinarian. He went to school in Viborg, then studied medicine at the University of Copenhagen, but did not finish his studies; he dropped out to travel the world and write. In 1897 he made his first trip to the US, and returned several times (in fact, two of his early novels were set in Chicago). His 1898 novel "Hummerland Stories"--based on his memories of growing up in Jutland--garnered him wide attention in Scandinavia. However, in 1908 he began publishing what became a six-volume history of the Cimbrians, a Teutonic tribe that originated in the Jutland area of Denmark in the Ice Age and gradually overran much of Europe, fading out by the time of Christopher Columbus (who Jensen claimed was actually a Cimbrian). It was known in England as "The Long Journey" and got Jensen noticed in the rest of Europe, not just Scandinavia.
Jensen was not just a novelist and historian but also a poet and playwright--he translated William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" into Danish--and helped to introduce the writings of such American authors as Ernest Hemingway and Walt Whitman to Denmark. He died in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1950.1944- Gabriela Mistral was born on 7 April 1889 in Vicuña, Chile. She was an actress and writer, known for Sebastián y su amigo el artista (1971) and Time of the Angels (1987). She died on 10 January 1957 in Hempstead, New York, USA.1945
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Herman Hesse is known for Land Without Shadows (2010).1946- Writer
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Andre Paul Guillaume Gide was born on November 22, 1869, in Paris, France. His father, named Paul Gide, was a professor of law at the University of Paris, he was a descendant from Cevennes Huhuenots. His mother, named Juliette Rondeaux, was a devoted Calvinist. He received an excellent private education at home, then at the Ecole Alsacienne.
At the age of 18 Gide started writing. His first book 'Les Cahiers d'Andre Walter' (The Notebooks of Andre Walter, 1891) was well received by his friend Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1893 and 1894 Gide made voyages to North Africa, where he learned different moral and sexual conventions. In Algiers he met Oscar Wilde and the two became close friends. Gide's early collection of prose and poetry 'Les nourritues terrestres' (Fruits of the Earth, 1897), gained popularity, influencing Guillaume Apollinaire, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as a generation of young writers. His serious illness and a near-death experience there, gave him material for his "twin" psychological novels 'l'immoraliste' (The Immoralist, 1902) and 'La porte etroite' (Strait is the Gate, 1909). In dialogues between the inner narrator and the outer narrator Gide tackled the Shakesperian question, reformulated as "to be free" vs "to get freedom."
In his 'La symphonie pastorale' (The Pastoral Symphony, 1919) Gide revealed the hypocrisy behind the mask of a pastor, who adopted a blind orphan girl. Pastor seduces the girl on the eve of her eye surgery; she opens her eyes only to see the ugly truth about people, then commits suicide. In 'Les faux-monnayeurs' and 'Le journal des feux-monnayeurs' (The Couterfreiters, 1926) he exposed the self-deception and counterfeit personality of the protagonist, Edouard, who falls in love with his nephew. Gide was alluding to his own relationship with his adopted son Marc Allegret, with whom he eloped to London in 1916. In 1923 Gide conceived a daughter named Catherine with his girlfriend Elisabeth van Rysselberghe. Gide's wife Madeleine died in 1938 after an unconsummated marriage.
Andre Gide was an admirer of Fyodor Dostoevsky from his youth. In 1923 he published a collection of his lectures on Dostoyevsky, in which he reconstitutes the writer's personality through the traits of the characters of his books. At that time Gide prepared the first public release of his 'Corydon', which was initially published privately in 1911. It received widespread condemnation, but was considered by Gide his most important work. He was praised by his friends, such as Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, Paul Valéry and others; their correspondence was published in 1948. Gide collaborated with Sergei Diaghilev on a ballet production for the "Seasons Russes" in Paris. He was a regular member of 'literary Fridays' and developed a good friendship with Gertrude Stein.
Gide briefly associated with French communists, but he repudiated the Soviet communism after his 1936 voyage to the Soviet Union. His disillusionment with the communist doctrine was expressed in his contribution to 'The God That Failed' (1949). During the Second World War he lived in Tunis. Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1947). He died on February 19, 1951. A fine literary biography of Andre Gide was written by André Maurois.1947- Writer
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T.S. Eliot ranks with William Butler Yeats as the greatest English language poet of the 20th Century and was certainly the most influential. He was born Thomas Stearns Eliot into the bosom of a respectable middle class family on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. The family had roots in New England, and Eliot spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts. There was little doubt that he would matriculate at Harvard -- his cousin, Charles William Eliot was the 24th president of Harvard and turned it into a great research university during his 40-year-tenure -- and after graduating from the Milton Academy in 1906, it was off to Cambridge (on the left sight of The Pond) he went. (His cousin Charles spent his last three years as president during Thomas' first three years at the venerable institution.)
Though deeply committed to literature, Eliot studied philosophy with George Santayana, William James, and Bertrand Russell (who was a visiting professor) at Harvard. Eliot completed his undergraduate degree in three instead of the usual four years and stayed on at Harvard as a teaching assistant for another year. He then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris for a year before returning to Harvard in 1911 to get his PhD.
He decided to spend 1914-15 at the University of Marburg in Germany, but his plans were dashed by the declaration of the First World War. He won a scholarship to attend Merton College at Oxford and that changed his life as it put him in the vicinity of London. In London, he met Ezra Pound, Il miglior fabbro (Italian for "the better craftsman," the dedication Eliot gave Pound on the title page of "The Waste Land", which Pound edited), who championed him and provided him with vital contacts. Though Eliot completed his doctoral dissertation, he never returned to Harvard to defend it, so was never awarded his PhD.
Eliot had come to loathe academia and supported himself by working in a bank as he forged his literary reputation. (Later, he became an editor at the London publisher Faber and Faber.) Enamored of England, he spent the rest of his life there, becoming a British subject in 1927. Deeply conservative, the rigid class hierarchies of England appealed to him. He eschewed the Unitarianism of his family and became an ardent Anglo-Catholic within the bosom of the Church of England. Time Magazine titled its review of his "Collected Poems" in 1936 "Royalist, Classicist, Anglo-Catholic".
Eliot's first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom he wed in 1915 (partly to gain residency in England), was a disaster. Vivienne's biographer, Carole Seymour-Jones, attributed the strain in the marriage partly to what she contends was Eliot's closet homosexuality, though Vivienne's mental instability and poor health were major factors in the deterioration of their relationship. Eliot eventually had to institutionalize her. Eliot also suffered from mental problems and suffered a breakdown in 1921 and was treated at a sanitarium in Switzerland.
The brilliant though emotionally troubled artist, whom the New York Times in its obituary called "the poet of gray melancholy,", created some of the greatest masterpieces of English literature, beginning with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (written in America and published in 1915) and including "Gerontion "(1920), "The Waste Land" (1922) and "The Hollow Men" (1925). The "Waste Land" was a watershed of literary modernism and revolutionized Anglo-American letters.
In addition to his great poetry, Eliot was an accomplished playwright, best known for "Murder in the Cathedral (1951)" (1935), "The Family Reunion" (1935), and "The Cocktail Party" (1949). He won a Tony Award for Best Play when "The Cocktail Party" was produced on Broadway in 1950. Thirty-three years later, Eliot won two more Tony Awards, posthumously, for "Cats", cited for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score as the lyricist. Based on his book of whimsical poems, "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats", the musical "Cats" was the longest-running show in Broadway history, racking up 7,485 performances when it closed its 18-year-run in the year 2000. (Its record eventually was overtaken by Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of The Phantom of the Opera (1925).)
Eliot also busied himself as belletrist and essayist. While his belles lettres on literary topics are valuable, his essays on the human condition are less so due to his illiberal point of view. Fittingly, upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, the Swedish Academy lauded Eliot "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".
Viv died in 1947. Ten years later, the 68 year-old Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 36 years his junior. Esmé had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since 1949 and would be his widow when he died on January 4, 1965 at the age of 76.1948- William Faulkner, one of the 20th century's most gifted novelists, wrote for the movies in part because he could not make enough money from his novels and short stories to support his growing number of dependants. The author of such acclaimed novels as "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom!", Faulkner received official screen credits for just six theatrical releases, five of which were with director Howard Hawks. Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1949 and he received two Pulitzer Prizes, for "A Fable" in '1955 and "The Reivers", which was published shortly before he died in 1962.1949
- Bertrand Russell was born on 18 May 1872 in Ravenscroft, Trelleck, Monmouthshire, Wales, UK. He was a writer, known for Reductio: Adventures in Ideas (2019), Filosofix (2018) and Aman (1967). He was married to Edith Finch, Patricia Spence, Dora Russell and Alys Pearsall. He died on 2 February 1970 in Penrhyndeudraeth, Merioneth, Wales, UK.1950
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Pär Lagerkvist was born on 23 May 1891 in Vaxjö, Sweden. He was a writer, known for The Dwarf, Barabbas (1961) and Ombyte av tåg: En allvarlig komedi (1943). He was married to Elaine Luella Hallberg and Karen Sorensen. He died on 11 July 1974 in Stockholm, Sweden.1951- Writer
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François Mauriac was born on 11 October 1885 in Bordeaux, France. He was a writer, known for Therese (1962), Le pain vivant (1955) and Serpant's Skin (1963). He was married to Jeanne Lafon. He died on 1 September 1970 in Paris, France.1952- Writer
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Born in Blenheim Palace, the residence of his grandfather, the 7th Duke of Marlborough. His father was the Duke's third son, Lord Randolph Churchill. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was the daughter of an American financier.
After passing through famous English public schools such as Harrow, he went on to fulfill his ambition for a life in the army. He fought in various parts of the British Empire until in 1900 when he won the Conservative seat in Oldham in the general election. From here until 1929 he held various offices in British Parliament.
The 1930s saw fascism grow in strength throughout Europe with dictators such as Italy's Benito Mussolini, Germany's Adolf Hitler and Spain's Francisco Franco. When the UK and France declared war on Germany in 1939, Neville Chamberlain was British Prime Minister. On May 10, 1940 Hitler's forces invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg in order to invade France. Chamberlain was widely blamed for the failed British invasion of Norway, although realistically Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty was largely to blame for the failure of the Norwegian Campaign. Chamberlain recommended the King should ask Churchill to succeed him as Prime Minister. He made a speech on 13 May: "You ask: 'What is our policy?' I will say: 'It is to wage war by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalog of human crime.' That is our policy. You ask: 'What is our aim?' I can answer in one word: 'Victory! Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.'"
The United States officially entered the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The US's participation was excellent news to Churchill and after success on D-Day and as the Nazi forces were gradually forced back, the war in Europe gradually drew to a close. He lost the 1945 General Election by a landslide, lost again in 1950, but was re-elected as Prime Minister in 1951 despite receiving fewer votes than Labour. Due to deteriorating health he retired in 1955. He died at Hyde Park Gate, London, on January 24, 1965 at the age of 90. He had succeeded in the uniting of thought and deed. He had succeeded in uniting everyone in the common purpose, inspiring them with fortitude and strength to face whatever hardships that would have to be incurred in the process of first surviving and ultimately winning the war. His daughter Mary wrote to him on his death bed: "I owe you what every Englishman, woman, and child owes you - liberty itself."
As one of the most significant British politicians of the 20th century, Churchill remains one of the country's most widely recognized figures. He has been played by an almost incalculable number of actors on screen, but three of the most notable and acclaimed screen portrayals were by Robert Hardy in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (1981) (which covers Churchill's life from 1929 to 1939), Albert Finney in The Gathering Storm (2002) (also set in the 1930s before he became Prime Minister) and Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour (2017) (set in May 1940).
As well as a politician, Churchill was also an author and a prolific artist, who painted over 500 canvases, exhibited at the Royal Academy and at Paris, and sold paintings.1953- Ernest Hemingway was an American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954) for his novel The Old Man and the Sea, which was made into a 1958 film The Old Man and the Sea (1958).
He was born into the hands of his physician father. He was the second of six children of Dr. Clarence Hemingway and Grace Hemingway (the daughter of English immigrants). His father's interests in history and literature, as well as his outdoorsy hobbies (fishing and hunting), became a lifestyle for Ernest. His mother was a domineering type who wanted a daughter, not a son, and dressed Ernest as a girl and called him Ernestine. She also had a habit of abusing his quiet father, who suffered from diabetes, and Dr. Hemingway eventually committed suicide. Ernest later described the community in his hometown as one having "wide lawns and narrow minds".
In 1916 Hemingway graduated from high school and began his writing career as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. There he adopted his minimalist style by following the Star's style guide: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." Six months later he joined the Ambulance Corps in WWI and worked as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, picking up human remains. In July 1918 he was seriously wounded by a mortar shell, which left shrapnel in both of his legs causing him much pain and requiring several surgeries. He was awarded the Silver Medal. Back in America, he continued his writing career working for Toronto Star . At that time he met Hadley Richardson and the two married in 1921.
In 1921, he became a Toronto Star reporter in Paris. There he published his first books, called "Three Stories and Ten Poems" (1923), and "In Our Time" (1924). In Paris he met Gertrude Stein, who introduced him to the circle that she called the "Lost Generation". F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson and Ezra Pound were stimulating Hemingway's talent. At that time he wrote "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), "A Farewell to Arms" (1929), and a dazzling collection of Forty-Nine stories. Hemingway also regarded the Russian writers Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov as important influences, and met Pablo Picasso and other artists through Gertrude Stein. "A Moveable Feast" (1964) is his classic memoir of Paris after WWI.
Hemingway participated in the Spanish Civil War and took part in the D-Day landings during the invasion of France during World War II, in which he not only reported the action but took part in it. In one instance he threw three hand grenades into a bunker, killing several SS officers. He was decorated with the Bronze Star for his action. His military experiences were emulated in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940) and in several other stories. He settled near Havana, Cuba, where he wrote his best known work, "The Old Man and the Sea" (1953), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature. This was adapted as the film The Old Man and the Sea (1958), for which Spencer Tracy was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor, and Dimitri Tiomkin received an Oscar for Best Musical Score.
War wounds, two plane crashes, four marriages and several affairs took their toll on Hemingway's hereditary predispositions and contributed to his declining health. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and insomnia in his later years. His mental condition was exacerbated by chronic alcoholism, diabetes and liver failure. After an unsuccessful treatment with electro-convulsive therapy, he suffered severe amnesia and his physical condition worsened. The memory loss obstructed his writing and everyday life. He committed suicide in 1961. Posthumous publications revealed a considerable body of his hidden writings, that was edited by his fourth wife, Mary, and also by his son Patrick Hemingway.1954 - Writer
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Halldór Laxness was born on 23 April 1902 in Reykjavik, Iceland. He was a writer and actor, known for Salka Valka (1954), Atomic Station (1984) and Under the Glacier (1989). He was married to Auður Sveinsdóttir and Ingibjörg Einarsdóttir. He died on 8 February 1998 in Reykjavik, Iceland.1955- Writer
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Juan Ramón Jiménez was born on 24 December 1881 in Muguer, Huelva, Spain. He was a writer, known for Platero y yo (1966), Los libros (1974) and Imágenes y versos a la Navidad (1962). He was married to Zenobia Camprubí Aymar. He died on 29 May 1958 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.1956- Writer
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Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, Algeria. His parents were Spanish-French-Algerian (pied noir) colonists. His father, Lucien, died in the Battle of Marne (1914) during WWI. His mother, named Catherine Helene Sintes was of Spanish origin, she was a deaf mute due to a stroke, but she was able to read lips and worked as a cleaning lady, providing for her son, who loved her to tears.
Camus studied at Algiers Lycee from 1923-32, then at the University of Algiers, from where he graduated in 1936 with a degree in philosophy. While a student he joined the French Communist Party in 1934, but in 1936 he joined the 'Le Parti du Peuple Algerien' and was denounced by communists as 'Trotskyite'. He was seriously influenced by the writings of 'Andre Malraux', 'Andre Gide' and Plotinus' theory of the "One", which became Camus' graduation thesis (1936).
He was rejected from the French army because of tuberculosis, which he contracted in the 1930's. His first marriage to Simone Hie, a morphine addict, ended due to infidelity from both of them. In 1940 Camus married a pianist and mathematician Francine Faure, whom he loved and patiently tolerated her affair with the actress María Casares. Camus and Francine Faure had twins born in 1945.
During the Second World War Camus was a writer for 'Paris-Soir' magazine. He was in Paris during the Wermacht occupation, and witnessed the execution of the French communist and anti-fascist activist Gabriel Peri by firearm, which turned Camus' mind against Nazi Germany. He moved to Bordeaux, where he finished his early works, 'The Stranger' and 'The Myth of Sisyphus', which opens with his famous statement about the philosophical question of suicide, and deals with the absurdity of existence in the meaningless struggle.
Camus joined the French Resistance cell 'Combat' and edited the eponymous paper under the pseudonym 'Beauchard'. He reported on the fighting when Allies liberated Paris in 1944. Camus continued his work for 'Combat' until 1947, and through this work he became acquainted with Jean-Paul Sartre. For a couple of years Camus was a member of Sartre's circle at the Cafe de Flore on the Boulevard St. Germain, but Camus' criticism of communist doctrine soon alienated Sartre. He highly regarded Franz Kafka and William Faulkner, whose 'Requiem for a Nun' he adopted into a play.
Camus' lectures about French existentialism brought him on a 3-month tour of the United States and Canada in 1946, where he spoke at several universities. He lectured for 3 months in Brazil, Argentina and Chile in 1949, where he became sick and almost suicidal. The return of his tuberculosis forced Camus into seclusion from 1949-1951. It was during those 2 years that he crystallized his analysis of rebels and revolutions and published 'The Rebel'. The book clearly formulates his rejection of communism as well as any violent activity under various Utopian masks of 'social justice'.
Albert Camus' desire for clarity and meaning in the world that offers nothing, but chaos, resulted in his work on the idea of absurdism. It was incorporated in many of his works from 'The Myth of Sisyphus' (1942), 'The Plaque' (1947), 'The Rebel' (1951), and other works. Camus' ideas resulted from his philosophic analysis of the diverse list of sources from 'Epicurus' to Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and 'Andre Breton', as well as his own experiences in the war and his studies.
His greatest work 'The Fall' (1956) presents the monologues of a self-proclaimed 'judge penitent' Clamence, whose character alludes to Zarathustra from Friedrich Nietzsche and Grand Inquisitor from the 'Karamasov Brothers' of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Camus challenges the reader with the dilemma of accepting the absurdity of our existence and/or learning how to deal with it as well as with the unpredictable consequences from doing something about it.
Camus was the proponent of the idea of human rights. He resigned from UNESCO in 1952 in protest of the UN acceptance of Spain under 'Edgar Franco 'El General''. He protested against the Soviet crush upon the East Berlin workers in 1953, and against the Soviet repressions in Hungary in 1956. He was a steady supporter of pacifism and was in opposition to capital punishment. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He was killed in a car accident on January 4, 1960, in the small town of Villeblevin, France, in the car driven by his publisher and close friend Michel Gallimard, who also died in the accident.1957- Writer
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Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890 into an artistic family of Russian-Jewish heritage. His father was an acclaimed artist named Leonid Pasternak, who converted to Christianity, and his mother was a renown concert pianist named Rosa Kaufman. Their home was open to family friends such as composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and Aleksandr Skryabin as well as writers Rilke and Lev Tolstoy. Pasternak had a happy childhood, being brought up by prominent intellectuals in a cosmopolitan atmosphere. He studied music at the Moscow Conservatory and philosophy at the University of Marburg, Germany. In 1914 he returned to Moscow and published his first collection of poems. His work at a chemical factory in the Urals during WWI was later used as material for his novel "Doctor Zhivago".
In 1917 he fell in love with a Jewish girl and wrote "My Sister Life", a collection of passionate metaphoric poems that brought him international recognition and had an impact upon Russian Symbolist and Futurist poetry. Pasternak cautiously supported the Russian revolution, but was shocked with the brutality of communists. His parents and sisters emigrated to Europe in 1921. During the "Great Terror" of 1930s, Pasternak became disillusioned with the Soviet reality. He came under severe political attack and devoted himself to making translations of classic works: Shakespeare's "Hamlet", "Macbeth", "King Lear", Goethe's "Faust", as well as Paul Verlaine, Rainer Maria Rilke and other Western poets. His translations of Georgian poets favored by Joseph Stalin probably saved his life. Stalin spoke with Pasternak in 1934 over the phone, and questioned his association with poet Osip Mandelstam, who was executed upon Stalin's order. Later Stalin crossed Pasternak's name off the arrest list, quoted as saying "Don't touch this cloud dweller", alluding to his book "The Twin in the Clouds".
During 1940s-50s Pasternak wrote his autobiographic novel "Doctor Zhivago". A model for Lara in the novel was the poet's muse, beautiful and kind Olga Iwinskaja, an editor at "Novy Mir" magazine. In 1949, when she was pregnant by Pasternak, she was arrested by KGB on false accusations of "spying" and spent 4 years in prison-camp. Their unborn baby was lost, and Pasternak suffered a heart attack. After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Olga Iwinskaja was released and reunited with Pasternak, who completed "Doctor Zhivago". He tried to publish it in the Soviet magazine "Novy Mir", but was rejected. The manuscript of "Doctor Zhivago" was secretly smuggled out of the Soviet Union and was first published in Italy in 1957.
Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. But Soviet authorities declared him a "traitor" and attacked him with a campaign of persecution, terrorizing Pasternak up until his death in 1960. He was so abused by the Soviet authorities, that he became unable to go to accept the Nobel Prize and was forced to decline the honor. He lived the life of fear and insecurity that was imposed upon him and millions of others under the Soviet totalitarian system. He ended his life in poverty and a virtual exile in an artist's community of Peredelkino near Moscow. His last poems are devoted to love, to freedom, and to reconciliation with God. Pasternak was rehabilitated posthumously in 1987. In 1988, after being banned in the Soviet Union for three decades, "Doctor Zhivago" was published in the same "Novy Mir" magazine as a sign of changing times. In 1989 Pasternak's son accepted his father's Nobel Prize medal in Stockholm.1958- Writer
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Salvatore Quasimodo was born on 20 August 1901 in Modica, Syracuse, Italy. He was a writer, known for Megi (1989), Ecuba (2004) and Washington Square (1997). He was married to Maria Cumani Quasimodo and Bice Donetti. He died on 14 June 1968 in Naples, Italy.- Ivo Andric was born on 9 October 1892 in Dolac near Travnik, Austria-Hungary [now Bosnia and Herzegovina]. He was a writer, known for The Bridge on the Drina, Legends of Anika (1954) and The Woman from Sarajevo (1980). He was married to Milica Babic-Andric. He died on 13 March 1975 in Belgrade, Serbia, Yugoslavia.1961
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John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 without a degree. He was variously employed as a sales clerk, farm laborer, ranch hand and factory worker. In 1925, he traveled by freight from Los Angeles to New York, where he was a construction worker. From 1926-1928, he was a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, CA. His first novel, "Cup of Gold," was published in 1929. During the 1930s, he produced most of his famous novels ("To a God Unknown," "Tortilla Flat," "In Dubious Battle," "Of Mice and Men," and his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Grapes of Wrath"). In 1941, he moved with the singer who would become his second wife to New York City. They had two sons, Thom (b. 1944) and John IV (b. 1946). In 1948, his close friend Ed Ricketts died, he went through a divorce, he took a a tour of Russia, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His wrote the screenplay for Viva Zapata! (1952), and 17 of his works have been made into movies. He received three Academy Award nominations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. US President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964, and he was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on what would have been his 75th birthday. His ashes lie in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.1962- Writer
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Giorgos Seferis was born on 13 March 1900 in Urla, Ottoman Empire. He was a writer, known for Capitali culturali d'Europa (1983), Sta perihora tis Keryneias (1972) and Epi aspalathon (1979). He was married to Maria Zannou. He died on 20 September 1971 in Athens, Greece.1963- Writer
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Jean-Paul Charles-Aymard Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, France. His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, was an officer in the French Navy. His mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, was the cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Sartre was one year old when his father died. He was raised in Meudon, at the home of his tough grandfather Charles Schweitzer, a high school professor. His early education included music, mathematic, and classical literature. He studied at the Lycee Montaigne and at Lycee Henri IV in Paris. In 1917 his mother married an engineer at the naval yards in La Rochelle. There young Sartre suffered under his controlling stepfather, whom he called an "intruder". Such experiences shaped his character to rebel against any restrictions and domination.
The happiest part of his childhood was when Sartre met Paul Nizan, who was his classmate at the Lycee Henri IV in Paris. They became constant companions and best friends. Sartre continued his studies in Paris at Lycee Louis-Le-Grand, then at Ecole Normale Superieure and Sorbonne. There Sartre advanced in his studies of philosophy, absorbing mainly from the "Gifford Lectures" by Henri Bergson and "The Principles of Psychology" by Harvard philosopher William James, as well as from Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger.
Sartre saw the artificiality of grown-ups in the bourgeois class as the outcome of their spiritually destructive conformity. His Sorbonne classmate and girlfriend Simone de Beauvoir was also an unrestricted thinker and later one of the founders of contemporary feminism. Both learned to hate the restrictions of upper-class life. Both favored an "authentic state of being". In 1932 Sartre proposed to Beauvoir, but she turned him down and went on teaching alone. In 1935 she introduced Sartre to her 18-year-old student Olga Kozakiewich and the three formed the "family". Sartre was used by Beauvoir, who merged both relationships into a trio, that led to an unexpected and overwhelming outcome. While they imagined the trio would illustrate the 'authenticity' of their relationships; in reality the inevitable competition from the younger and independent-minded Olga became a growing threat. Beauvoir saw Olga as an object, a mere cast member of the game. She also overestimated her own tolerance. Eventually the trio failed before the challenge to reciprocate in recognition of each one's "authentic" consciousness. Each member wrote a different account of the same events in their "family" life. In Sartre's trilogy "Les chemins de la liberte" (The Roads to Freedom 1945-1949) Olga is disguised as the character of Ivich.
Sartre and de Beauvoir continued experimenting with their "open family" by including several former students of both Beauvoir and Sartre, forming a unique social group with Olga Kazakiewich, Nathalie Sorokine and Jacques-Laurent Bost. The complex manner of relationships in the "family" was somewhat based on the intellectual connection between students and teachers, who also shared cooking and other domestic duties. Other family members' "authentic" consciousness added to social inventiveness and developed a sort of a survival group-therapy during the occupation of Paris in WWII. "Existence precedes transformation of consciousness" - commented Sartre.
In 1938 he wrote "La Nausee" (Nausea), which became the canonical work of existentialism. It was partially influenced by Franz Kafka and Edmund Husserl, reiterating the belief that human life has no purpose. The book is set in a French town where Antoine, a 30-year-old historian, is doing his research on an 18th-century politician. He is gradually overtaken by a sickness he calls nausea. This alters his senses, thoughts and emotional experiences of the past and present in an uncommon way. Antoine is anxiously searching for the lost meaning of things, people and events. The character of Antoine embodies Sartre's theories of existential angst, and his own search through the chaos of things and events; that are crowding the human life.
Sartre was initially torn between his pacifism and his anti-Nazi position. In 1939 he was drafted into the French army and assigned to the 70th Division in Nancy, then transferred to Morsbonn military camp. There he started writing his "L'etre et neant". He was captured by the Germans and imprisoned from 1940-1941. While in prison he reread Martin Heidegger and wrote the play "Bariona". In March of 1941 he escaped from the Nazi POW camp. He and Beauvoir traveled to the south of France where they wooed André Gide and André Malraux to their underground group, "Socialisme et Liberte". Their active resistance was soon tamed into mere writing for "Combat", published by Albert Camus. Sartre became a teacher in Lycee Condorcet from 1941-1944 and supported the "family" of five during the occupation of Paris. At that time his opus magnum "L'etre et neant" (Being and Nothingness, 1943) was completed and published. He also wrote a play, "No Exit", as an attempt "to repeat 'Being and Nothingness' in different words". It premiered in May of 1944. In 1945 Sartre with his intellectual friends co-founded "Les Tempes Modernes", a leftist journal named after Charles Chaplin's film Modern Times (1936). Sartre published Beauvoir's works first, giving her a steady platform and publicity. In 1945 he published "L'age de raison" (The Age of Reason), beginning the trilogy of "The Roads to Freedom".
His "Reflexions sur la question juive" (Reflections on the Jewish Question) was written after the liberation of Paris from the Nazi occupation in 1944. The first part (The Portrait of the Anti-Semite) was published in December of 1945 in Les Temps Modernes. Sartre deals with anti-Semitism and reaction to it on all levels. In 1962 Sartre adopted a Jewish musician, Arlette El Kaim, and later took his adopted daughter along on his visit to Israel, where he accepted an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University in 1976. Through his life Sartre expressed his interest in Messianic Judaism. A few months before his death he began a study of Jewish history. In his last interview with his friend and associate Benny Levy, Sartre said that "the messianic idea is the base of the revolutionary idea", but violent revolution is not the way.
In 1950 Sartre denounced Soviet labor camps, known as gulag prison camps. In 1955 he and Beauvoir went on official visits to the Soviet Union and to communist China. As left-leaning academics they accepted the official invitations from the communist governments. Sartre and Beauvoir met with Nikita Khrushchev. Beauvoir was commissioned by the Communist governments to write positively about communism and the 1917 revolution. Beauvoir took their money and published her shameful book, for which she and Sartre were ostracized in the West. In 1960 the two visited Cuba on the invitation of Fidel Castro. "Every man is a political animal," stated Sartre when he started as an editor of La Liberacion.
Sartre came to disaffection with the bourgeois lifestyle, as one of the perpetual ceremony that can strip people from their identity. For a similar reason he saw religion as a prison, although he was baptized Catholic. He lived a very modest life in a small apartment which he shared with Beauvoir on Rue Bonaparte in Montparnasse. There were attacks on his home in 1961, most likely by right-wing elements outraged by his position on Algerian independence (he was for it). Sartre spoke out on behalf of the Hungarians in 1956 and on behalf of the Czechs in 1968. He presided over the International War Crimes Tribunal set up by Bertrand Russell in 1967. He turned down prizes and took no money for any of his political positions; unlike his partner Beauvoir. Such independence made his voice more credible.
Jean-Paul Sartre quit writing literature after decades of success and misunderstanding. Ambiguity of his ideas and political evolution only reflected an effort to keep up with the rapidly changing times. His existentialism became a philosophy of the beatniks. His works were prohibited by the Catholic "index". "If God does not exist, everything is permitted", quoted Sartre from Fyodor Dostoevsky. He finally renounced literature as a "machine for producing words", and refused to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he was awarded in 1964. He exhausted himself during the work on "Critique de la raison dialectique" (Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1960), the work he wanted to be remembered for. He left the unfinished massive biography of Gustave Flaubert, and over 300 personal letters to Beauvoir, who published them all after his death.
Sartre underwent his transformation from being a disciple of Andre Gide to a complete break-away. In his many incarnations--the philosopher, novelist, playwright, journalist, song lyricist, magazine editor, political activist--Sartre moved ahead by breaking old rules. He even used hard psychotropic drugs to "break the bones in his head" and think big. Sartre's opposition to the rigid social organization and self-destructive nature of class society and inevitable fatality of the modern world was paralleled by that of Aldous Huxley.
Jean-Paul Sartre exhausted himself with overwork, stress, drugs and alcohol. He died of edema of the lungs on April 15, 1980. His funeral was attended by 50,000 people, when he was laid to rest in the Cimetiere du Montparnasse in Paris, France. Six years later Beauvoir, who refused his marriage proposal in their youth, joined him in his grave forever.1964- Writer
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Mikhail Sholokhov was a Russian writer who received a Nobel prize for his epic novel 'Tikhiy Don'.
He was born in 1905 into a Cossack family of farmers in Kruzhilin, Veshenskaya, Rostov province in Southern Russia. His high school studies were interrupted by the Russian revolution and the Civil War, in which he fought on the side of the revolutionaries and joined the Red Army. From 1922-24 he lived in Moscow, where he attended "writers seminars" and published his early works: "A Test" and "The Birthmark". In 1924 he married Maria Gromoslavskaya in his native town, and the couple had four children.
His first book, "Donskie Rasskazy" (1925), exposed the bitter divide among the Russian people during and after the Civil War. His epic novel "And Quiet Flows the Don", published in parts during 1928-40, shows the turbulent life of Cossacks during the dramatic events of the Russian revolution and Civil War. The main character, Grigori Melekhov, was based on a historical prototype, 'Kharlampi Ermakov', a Cossack who opposed the Communists and was imprisoned and executed in 1929. Sholokhov's account of the conflict between Cossacks and Communists caused a suspension of publication in 1929, but he managed to get permission from Joseph Stalin to continue the publication. The novel had over 100 million copies in print, translated in 90+ languages worldwide.
Sholokhov was only 22 in 1928, when he delivered the massive manuscript of "Quiet Flows the Don" (book 1) to a Soviet publisher. It took him almost 14 years to complete the novel of four books in 1940. This led to a suggestion by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that Sholokhov used the work of another Cossack writer, Fyodor Kryukov (who died in 1920), for some parts of this epic work.
Sholokhov had a lifelong political career. He was a co-chairman of the Soviet Writers Union from the 1930s to his death in 1984. He traveled in western Europe on several occasions, and also accompanied Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to the US in 1959. He was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature for his novels and stories about the Cossacks in Russia, becoming the first and only officially sanctioned Soviet writer to win the honor.
Sholokhov took a hardline position against dissident writers, such as Boris Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky and Daniel. In 1965 he joined the side of Leonid Brezhnev in the restoration of the political image of Joseph Stalin. Such restoration was opposed by such figures as Andrei Sakharov, Valentin Kataev, Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy, Oleg Efremov, and Maya Plisetskaya. Sholokhov remained a hard-liner during the 60s and 70s. In late 70s he suffered from diabetes and had a stroke, and later developed a throat cancer. He was in denial of his medical condition. Shortly before his death he rejected the doctor's advise and interrupted his treatment at the Kremlin Hospital. Instead, he returned to his native village and died there on February 21, 1984.1965- Shmuel Yosef Agnon was born on 17 July 1888 in Buczacz, Galicia, Austria-Hungary [now Buchach, Ukraine]. He was a writer, known for Shabbat Hamalka (1965) and In the Prime of Her Life (2010). He was married to Esther Marx. He died on 17 February 1970 in Tel Aviv, Israel.1966
- Sachs, whose real name was Leonie Sachs, grew up in a sheltered upper-middle-class family until the National Socialists came to power. She enjoyed largely private lessons. It was not until 1940 that she and her mother were able to escape from the National Socialists to Stockholm, Sweden. From 1933 onwards, Sachs became intensively interested in her Jewish ancestry. Her reading at the time also included the mystic Jakob Böhme. She later used the knowledge from this in her lyrical works. As early as the 1920s, Nelly Sachs published impressionistic poems and stories in a neo-romantic tone in various newspapers. In 1921 her title "Legends and Stories" was published.
In Stockholm she began translating 20th century Swedish poetry. She published the fruits of this work in the titles "Of Waves and Granite. Cross-section through Swedish poetry of the 20th century" in 1947 and "But the sun is also homeless. Swedish poetry of the present" in 1957. But her actual literary work begins with the pieces in which she deals with the persecution by the Nazi regime and her experiences from the Auschwitz concentration camp. The dirge "Your body in smoke through the air" was written in 1944 and 1945 and was then published in 1947. The work is dedicated to Nelly Sachs's fiancé, who died in the concentration camp. The volumes of poetry "In the Apartments of Death" (1947) and "Sterndarkenung" (1949) address suffering and death in the German extermination camp.
The two collections were published in East Berlin at the initiative of Johannes R. Becher. The topic extends into the history of the Jews and into the mystical and cosmic. For Nelly Sachs, the term "dust" plays a prominent role, which she associates with destruction on the one hand, and with mystical motivation as resurrection on the other. In many works the author deals with Jewish history and the fate of the Jews. Some texts appeared in the GDR literary magazine "Sinn und Form". In 1962 the collected scenic poems "Signs in the Sand" were created; among other things, the "Mystery Play of the Suffering of Israel" written in 1943 and entitled "Eli" was included. In this game with a lyrical character, different artistic forms such as dance, drama, music and text are combined to create a total work of art.
"And nobody knows what to do next" was written in 1957, followed two years later by the lyric title "Flucht und Verwandlung". In it, Nelly Sachs continues the resignation and depression in the language that she began in her poetic works from the 1940s. The models for this are the poetry of French surrealism. Language itself becomes an issue, which becomes concrete in the demand for linguistic autonomy. Nelly Sachs's literary role models also included Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin. From them she got inspiration for her mystification and peculiar metaphorical language, which she realized, for example, in the poetry collection "Late Poems" from 1965. During this time she was honored with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In 1966 she shared the Nobel Prize for Literature with the Israeli writer Samuel Josef Agnon.
The Nelly Sachs Prize of the same name, which is awarded every two years by the city of Dortmund, is named after her. It was only in the 1960s that demand for Nelly Sachs' works began to increase.
Nelly Sachs died on May 12, 1970 in Stockholm.1966 - Miguel Ángel Asturias was born on 19 October 1899 in Guatemala City, Guatemala. He was a writer, known for Tres historias fantásticas (1964), Soluna (1969) and El señor presidente (1970). He was married to Blanca Mora y Araujo and Clemencia Amado. He died on 9 June 1974 in Madrid, Spain.1967
- Yasunari Kawabata was born on 11 June 1899 in Osaka, Japan. He was a writer and actor, known for A Page of Madness (1926), Izu no odoriko (1967) and Izu no odoriko (1974). He was married to Hideko Keizo. He died on 16 April 1972 in Zushi, Kanagawa, Japan.1968
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Samuel Beckett is an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator.
A resident of Paris for most of his life, he wrote in both French and English.
Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragi-comic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humor, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd".
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature.1969- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer who was imprisoned for his criticism of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and later exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile.
He was born Aleksandr Isaakovich Solzhenitsyn on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Southern Russia. He was born six months after the tragic death of his father, who was an Army artillery officer. His mother spoke English and French, she encouraged Solzhenitsyn's interest in literature and science. Since 1937 he was writing chapters for his book about the First World War. In 1936-1941 he studied at the Rostov State University, graduating with degrees in mathematics and physics. In 1939- 1941 he also took correspondence courses in literature from the
During the Second World War Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery captain in the Red Army. He was involved in major battles at the front as a commander of an artillery unit, and was twice decorated for courage. In February of 1945 he was fighting against the Nazis on the territory of East Prussia. There he was arrested by the Soviet secret service, because they opened all his private letters and found one line critical of Joseph Stalin. Solzhenitsyn was tried in his absence by a three-man tribunal of the Soviet security police and was sentenced to 8 years of prison just for describing Joseph Stalin as a "man with mustache" in a private letter to a friend.
Solzhenitsyn spent 8 years in Soviet Gulag prison-camps. There he was diagnosed with cancer of the stomach. He was forced to work as a miner, a bricklayer, a foundry-man, and as a mathematician. His mathematical skills really saved his life, because he was released from prison-camp and was eventually used in the secret "sharashka" prison-camp for scientists. After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 he was sent to a Tashkent hospital for tumor removal and radiation therapy. He described his experience of the treatment and recovery from cancer in his novel 'Cancer Ward'. Solzhenitsyn was secretly writing a thorough account of his life in prison-camps. That became the content of his first official publication in 1962. He gave Aleksandr Tvardovsky his autobiographical story 'One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' which was allowed for publication after personal permission from Nikita Khrushchev. That one sensational publication gave Solzhenitsyn a brief chance to publish one more small work during the "Thaw" that was initiated by Nikita Khrushchev.
In 1964 Nikita Khrushchev was dismissed by Leonid Brezhnev and neo-Stalinist hard liners. Solzhenitsyn fell under suspicion and was in danger again. At that time he took a risk and arranged that his manuscripts of autobiographical books 'First Circle' and 'Cancer Ward' were secretly smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and published in the West. But at home, his writings were confiscated by the KGB in 1965 and banned. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but could not go outside of the Soviet Union, and could not receive the award until several years later. Meanwhile he was wanted by the KGB, because he was officially restricted from being in Moscow and was secretly living in the dacha of Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya.
Solzhenitsyn was one of the leading dissidents in the Soviet Union, and was active against the Soviet Communist regime. His main work 'Gulag Archipelago' (1973), being inspired by the academic work of Anton Chekhov titled 'Island of Sakhalin' (1895). After the publication of 'Gulag Archipelago' abroad in 1973, he was arrested again, and charged with "anti-Soviet" treason, then exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He lived mostly in Cavendish, Vermont, USA, until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then he was invited by the new Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his Russian citizenship was restored. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 and was granted a suburban house in Moscow. His wife and three sons remained American citizens.
Back in Moscow, Solzhenitsyn enjoyed full recognition and wide publication of all his works. He was an active and important figure in Russian society, because of his independent position and sharp criticism of the declining state of affairs in Russia. He refused to take award from the Russian president Boris Yeltsin. His weekly TV show was canceled. His provocative and controversial two-volume history of Russian-Jewish relations ignited debates, which included little praise, but substantial criticism from both sides. His autobiographical novel 'First Circle' was made into a TV-movie and shown on the Russian national TV in 2006.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at age 89, on August 3, 2008, at his home near Moscow. His death caused a considerable mourning in Russia, especially among the Russian conservatives and Orthodox Christians. Solzhenitsyn received a state funeral and was laid to rest in Donskoy Convent cemetery in Moscow, Russia.1970 - Writer
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Pablo Neruda was the pseudonym of Chilean poet Ricardo Neftali Reyes Basualto. He was born in Parral, a little town in central Chile, but his family moved to Temuco City when he was just a few months old. It was there he showed interest in poetry and made his early works, and where he picked "Pablo Neruda" as a pseudonym because his father did not approve of his writing.
Neruda He is considered one of the greatest Spanish-language poets of the 20th century. He is called "The Poet of Love" because his poetry is sensual and sometimes very erotic. He was the honorary Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona and Madrid. In 1943 he returned to Chile but left in 1949 because Chilean President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla was after him for political reasons. From 1949-52 he lived in exile in different European countries. He was also known as an outspoken Communist. he died in Santiago, Chile, a few days after the military coup in which his friend Salvador Allende, the first socialist to have been democratically elected in Latin America, was toppled and later murdered.1971- Writer
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A recurring theme in Heinrich Böll's novels is the German society during the decades following WWII. In his early novels, like 'Wo warst du Adam?' he writes about the meaningless of war, its sufferings and horrors. The moral decay of post-war Germany is the theme for the following novels, 'Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit' and 'Haus ohne Hüter'. In the 1960s he wrote the conspicious consumption of the blossoming German economy. In his 'Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum' he wrote about a German society who had to deal with terrorist attacks.1972- Writer
Patrick White was born on 28 May 1912 in Knightsbridge, London, England, UK. He was a writer, known for Voss, The Night, the Prowler (1978) and Australian Theatre Festival (1980). He died on 29 September 1990 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.1973- Writer
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Eyvind Johnson was born on 29 July 1900 in Svartbjörnsbyn, Boden, Norrbottens län, Sweden. He was a writer and director, known for Here Is Your Life (1966), 4 x 4 (1965) and Gamla Stan (1931). He was married to Cilla Frankenhäuser and Aase Christoffersen. He died on 25 August 1976 in Stockholm, Stockholms län, Sweden.1974- Writer
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Harry Martinson was born on 6 May 1904 in Nyteboda, Blekinge län, Sweden. He was a writer and actor, known for Vägen till Klockrike (1953), Aniara (2018) and Aniara (1986). He was married to Moa Martinson. He died on 11 February 1978 in Karolinska sjukhuset, Solna, Stockholms län, Sweden.1974- Eugenio Montale was born on 12 October 1896 in Genoa, Liguria, Italy. He was a writer, known for And You're So Special? (1990), In quanto a noi (2022) and Journal de voyage (1961). He was married to Drusilla Tanzi. He died on 12 September 1981 in Milan, Lombardy, Italy.1975
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Saul Bellow was born on 10 July 1915 in Lachine, Québec, Canada [now Lachine, Montréal, Québec, Canada]. He was a writer and actor, known for Zelig (1983), Henderson the Rain King and Thirty-Minute Theatre (1965). He was married to Janis Bellow, Alexandra Ionesco Tuleca, Susan Glassman, Alexandra Tschacbasov and Anita Goshkin. He died on 5 April 2005 in Brookline, Massachusetts, USA.1976- Vicente Aleixandre was born on 26 April 1898 in Seville, Spain. He was a writer, known for Vibraciones oscilatorias (1975), Sufrían por la luz (2006) and Mirar un cuadro (1982). He died on 14 December 1984 in Madrid, Spain.1977
- Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on 14 July 1904 in Leoncin, Poland, Russian Empire [now Leoncin, Mazowieckie, Poland]. He was a writer, known for Yentl (1983), American Playhouse (1980) and Enemies, A Love Story (1989). He was married to Alma Wassermann and Runia Pontsch. He died on 24 July 1991 in Surfside, Florida, USA.1978
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Odysseas Elytis was born on 2 November 1911 in Heraklion, Crete, Greece. He was a writer, known for Eternity and a Day (1998), O zografos Theofilos (1979) and Mousiki vradya (1976). He died on 18 March 1996.1979- Czeslaw Milosz was born on 30 June 1911 in Szetejnie, Kovno Governorate, Russian Empire [now Seteniai, Lithuania]. He was a writer, known for Robinson warszawski (1950), Teatr Polskiego Radia (2004) and Dolina Issy (1982). He was married to Carol Marie Thigpen and Janina Dluska. He died on 14 August 2004 in Kraków, Malopolskie, Poland.1980
- Elias Canetti was born on 24 July 1905 in Russe, Bulgaria. He was a writer, known for Komödie der Eitelkeit (1972), Hochzeit (1972) and Zur Nacht (1967). He was married to Hera Buschor and Venetiana Taubner-Calderon. He died on 11 August 1994 in Zürich, Switzerland.1981
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Major Latin-American author of novels and short stories, a central figure in the so-called magical realism movement in Latin American literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. Studied law and journalism in Bogotá and Cartagena. He began his career as a journalist in 1948, was a foreign correspondent in Europe during the late 1950s, Cuba and N.Y. early 1960s, and a screenwriter, journalist and publicist in Mexico City during the 1960s. During the 1980s he moved to Mexico when restrictions where imposed on his continued traveling due to his left-view political views.1982- William Golding was born on 19 September 1911 in St Columb Minor, Cornwall, England, UK. He was a writer, known for Lord of the Flies (1990), Lord of the Flies (1963) and Alkitrang dugo (1975). He was married to Ann Brookfield. He died on 19 June 1993 in Perranarworthal, Cornwall, England, UK.1983
- Claude Simon was born on 10 October 1913 in Antananarivo, Madagascar. He died on 6 July 2005 in Paris, France.1985
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Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 in Abeokuta, Nigeria. He is a writer and director, known for Governor's Plea (2024), Dark Moment and Kongi's Harvest (1970). He has been married to Folake Doherty since 1989. They have three children. He was previously married to Libranrian Oladie Idowu and Barbara Dixon.1986- Joseph Brodsky was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian-Jewish poet, writer, director and translator, who was arrested and prosecuted by the Soviet regime before his emigration.
He was born Joseph Aleksandrovich Brodsky on May 24, 1940 in Leningrad (St. Petersburg, Russia). He survived the Nazi siege of Leningrad during WWII. His father, Aleksandr Brodsky, was a professional photographer, who worked for newspapers and magazines. His mother, Maria Volpert, was a professional interpreter. Young Brodsky was brought up in a highly intellectual and stimulating atmosphere of his family. He studied languages for the purpose of reading the banned Western authors.
Joseph Brodsky was an unusual individual with his own independent views. He was destined to be at odds with the Soviet system due to his highly original thinking and his uncommon ways. He got tired of being abused by the Soviet propaganda and countless portraits of Lenin at his school. In an act of disobedience to the totalitarian system he dropped out of school at the age of 15. Then he tried many different jobs, including a sanitary job in the morgue at the "Kresty" prison, where he would be imprisoned a few years later. From the age of 16 he was writing his own poetry and produced literary translations. In 1961, Brodsky met the leading Russian woman poet Anna Akhmatova, at her dacha in Komarovo. That meeting was a pivoting point in his life as a poet and man. Anna Akhmatova and her circle was an unofficial incubator for talented youth. She praised Brodsky's poetry as "enchanting", and encouraged him to keep on writing. At that time Brodsky met his first love, the artist Marianna Basmanova, who inspired him on writing a collection of poetry, dedicated to "M. B." But his happiness was not on the agenda of the secret police.
The Soviet regime attacked Brodsky after he wrote a poem "Isaac and Avraam", based on the Old Testament and tried to publish it in 1963. He was arrested for an unofficial publication in an underground edition in 1963. Then he was charged with "social parasitism" in 1964. The trial of poet Brodsky was designed to intimidate other intellectuals during the return of censorship under the hard-line regime of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The Soviet judge announced that Brodsky was not an officially registered poet, and that his activity does not help the construction of Communism. He was sentenced to five years of hard labor. He was exiled to the remote Northern village of Norenskaya in Arkhangelsk region. There he was visited by several Russian intellectuals and cultural figures. Marianna Basmanova went along to live with Brodsky in his exile for several months, and in 1965 she became the mother of his son, Andrei. The civil union between Joseph Brodsky and Marina Basmanova could not be registered officially due to obstruction from the Soviet authorities. Brodsky and Marina agreed to have the baby registered on the mother's name for the safety of their child.
The unfair trial and exile of Joseph Brodsky caused political protests from such prominent figures as Korney Ivanovich Chukovskiy, Dmitri Shostakovich, Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak, Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. After their written protests, his sentence was commuted. In 1965, Brodsky returned to Leningrad (St. Petersburg), but his poetry was still under the Soviet censorship. That same year his first collection of poetry was published in USA. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union Brodsky was forcefully sent to a Soviet mental institution, where the treatment consisted of wrapping him in cold, wet sheets. On June 4, 1972, Brodsky became an involuntary exile from the Soviet Union. He made brief stops in Vienna and London, and then went to USA. There he worked as a visiting professor at several universities. In 1978 he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University. In 1979, Brodsky was indicted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1981, Brodsky received the "genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation.
While living in America, Brodsky tried to bring his father and mother to live with him. He sent many official requests and invitations, but all his requests were denied by the Soviet authorities, and his parents ended up dying in the Soviet Union without seeing Brodsky ever again. In the 80s he published a collection of love poems, dedicated to Marianna Basmanova, with several verses titled "M. B." He also wanted to reunite with her and their son, Andrei Basmanov, but neither Marianna Basmanova, nor their son, were able to leave the Soviet Union to join Brodsky in emigration. In 1990 he married his Sorbonne student, Maria Sozzani, who was of Russian-Italian heritage, and they had a daughter. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Brodsky succeeded in bringing his son, Andrei Basmanov, for a father-son reunion in New York, and they were together for several months. By that time, his son already had a wife and three children living in Russia.
Joseph Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1987), and was designated Poet Laureate of the United States (1991-1992). Outside of his writing profession, he founded a popular Russian restaurant in New York, and also made a documentary film about the city of Venice, which was his favorite place to visit. He died of a heart attack on January 28, 1996, and was laid to rest in the island of San Michele in Venice, near the tomb of Sergei Diaghilev.1987 - Naguib Mahfouz was born on 11 December 1911 in Cairo, Egypt. He was a writer, known for El Fetewa (1957), The Monster (1954) and Between Heaven and Earth (1959). He was married to Atiyyatallah Ibrahim. He died on 30 August 2006 in Cairo, Egypt.1988
- Spanish novelista of post-Civil War period who, with his first and most popular novel, 'La familia de Pascual Duarte' (1942) established the narrative style known as tremendismo, a tendency to emphasize violence and grotesque imagery. His literary production -primarily novels, short narratives, and travel diaries- is characterized more by sketches, details and verbal innovations than by plot or character development. Cela's acute powers of observation and skill in colourful description are apparent in his travel books, based upon walking trips through rural Spain and his visits to Latin-American countries. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1989 "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability".1989
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Octavio Paz was born on 31 March 1914 in Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico. He was a writer, known for The Rebel (1943), I, the Worst of All (1990) and Sor Juana Inez de la cruz (1988). He was married to Marie Jo Paz and Elena Garro. He died on 19 April 1998 in Mexico City, Mexico.1990- Writer
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Nadine Gordimer was born on 20 November 1923 in Springs, Transvaal, South Africa. She was a writer and director, known for City Lovers (1982), The Gordimer Stories (1982) and Allen Boesak: Choosing for Justice (1984). She was married to Reinhold Cassirer and Gerald Gavronsky. She died on 13 July 2014 in Johannesburg, South Africa.1991- Writer
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Derek Walcott was born on 23 January 1930 in Castries, Saint Lucia. He was a writer and director, known for Haytian Earth (1984), The English Programme (1976) and The Fist (2017). He was married to Norline Metivier, Margaret Ruth Maillard, Fay Moston and Sigrid Nama. He died on 17 March 2017 in Cap Estate, Gros-Islet, Saint Lucia.1992- Writer
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Toni Morrison was born on 18 February 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, USA. She was a writer and actress, known for Song of Solomon, Beloved (1998) and American Experience (1987). She was married to Harold Morrison. She died on 5 August 2019 in Bronx, New York City, New York, USA.1993- Writer
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Kenzaburô Ôe was born on 31 January 1935 in Oose, Japan. He was a writer, known for Upland, A False Student (1960) and Warera no jidai (1959). He was married to Yukari itami. He died on 3 March 2023 in Japan.1994- Writer
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Seamus Heaney was born on 13 April 1939 in Castledawson, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, UK. He was a writer and actor, known for Stay (2013), Bye-Child (2003) and Seanchaí (2006). He was married to Marie Devlin. He died on 30 August 2013 in Dublin, Ireland.1995- Wislawa Szymborska was born on 2 July 1923 in Prowent, Poznanskie [now part of Kórnik, Wielkopolskie], Poland. She was a writer, known for Teatr Polskiego Radia (2004), Tortures (2017) and Vietnam (2021). She was married to Adam Wlodek. She died on 1 February 2012 in Kraków, Malopolskie, Poland.1996
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Dario Fo was born on 24 March 1926 in Sangiano, Lombardy, Italy. He was a writer and actor, known for It Happened in Rome (1957), Lo svitato (1956) and The Betrothed (1989). He was married to Franca Rame. He died on 13 October 2016 in Milan, Italy.1997- Writer
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José Saramago was born on 16 November 1922 in Azinhaga, Golega, Portugal. He was a writer, known for Enemy (2013), Blindness (2008) and O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo. He was married to Pilar del Río and Ilda Reis. He died on 18 June 2010 in Lanzarote, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain.1998- He grew up as the son of a merchant family. At the age of 15 he reported for military service in the Second World War. In 1944 he became a member of the Waffen-SS and was stationed in the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg. After the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the Americans until 1946. Grass then began an apprenticeship as a stonemason. In 1948 he began studying graphics and sculpture at the art academy in Düsseldorf. After completing his studies, he became a visual arts student with the sculptor Karl Hartung in Berlin in 1953. The first exhibitions of his sculptures and graphics followed. In 1954 he married Anna Schwarz. Grass first became active as a writer in 1957. Now he mainly wrote short prose, poems and plays that were poetic and absurd in character. In 1958, Grass received the "Group 47" sponsorship award for his manuscript "The Tin Drum."
Further novels such as "Cat and Mouse" and "Dog Years" were published. His excessive and provocative expression was always evident here, which earned him the reputation of a political moralist. The book "Letters across the border" was published in 1968. Here Grass commented on the topic of the Prague Spring. Further works such as "The Plebeians rehearse the uprising", "Before" and "locally anesthetized" were created. In the course of the student movement, his participation in public protests against the emergency laws increased. In 1972 the story "From the Diary of a Snail" was published. In it, Grass described the 1969 federal election campaign. The epic novel "The Butt" was published in 1977. In 1978 he divorced his wife Anna. In 1979 he married Ute Grunert for the second time. The film adaptation of "The Tin Drum" was also released in 1979 and was directed by Volker Schlöndorff. Mario Adorf, Katharina Thalbach, Otto Sander and Charles Aznavour, among others, played in the film adaptation. In 1980, "The Tin Drum" was awarded an Oscar for "Best Foreign Language Film," making it the first German film to receive this award.
From 1982 to 1993 Grass was a member of the SPD. Through his political activities, his literary work became increasingly popular with the public. In 1983, Grass and other writers, artists and scientists signed the "Heilbronn Manifesto", which called for people to refuse military service because of the stationing of the Pershing-2 rockets. Three years later, in 1986, the book "Die Rattin" was published, which was also made into a film a few years later. In 1987, Grass re-entered political life and took part in the SPD campaign for the state elections in Schleswig-Holstein. The Academy of Arts refused to hold a solidarity event for Salman Rushdie in 1989. Grass resigned from the association for this reason. Grass took the time of German reunification as an opportunity to speak out against "sudden unity based on mere annex Article 23 of the Basic Law". Grass campaigned for a cultural nation growing together. His novel "Prophecies of Doom," published in 1992, also described reconciliation between East and West. A year later, Grass resigned from the SPD because of the change in asylum law supported by social democratic votes. In other novels, such as "A Wide Field" (1995), he repeatedly brought up the problem of German history between the building of the wall and reunification.
In 1997, Grass, together with the SPD, Alliance 90/GREENS and the PDS, called on Helmut Kohl's government to resign. This year, with Egon Bahr, he also founded the "Willy Brandt Circle" for people "who have retained their independence of thought" (quote from Bahr). When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Turk Yasar Kemal, Grass criticized Kurdish policy. He once again turned against the change in asylum law in the Federal Republic. In 1998, Grass began campaigning for the SPD in the new federal states. In the work "My Century", which he completed in 1999, Grass tells a separate story for each year of this century. On December 10, 1999, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his life's work. For his services to German-Polish understanding, Grass was awarded the "Gloria Artis" medal in September 2001.
Grass received the Danish Hans Christian Andersen Prize in April 2005. In the same month he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Berlin. In the run-up to the early federal elections in September 2005, Grass drew attention to himself through his public support of the SPD ruling party, for which he was also able to win over other fellow writers. In the same year, 2005, he founded the authors' circle "Lübeck Literaturtreffen". In 2006, Grass was awarded the "Brücke Prize". In August of the same year he vacated his membership for the first time ft in the Waffen-SS. In previous information he was an anti-aircraft assistant for the Wehrmacht between 1944 and 1945. Günther Grass' clarification was accompanied by great media interest. With the documentary "The Uncomfortable" snapshots of the controversial Nobel Prize winner were released in German cinemas in April 2007.
Günter Grass died on April 13, 2015 in Lübeck.1999 - V.S. Naipaul was born on 17 August 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad, Trinidad and Tobago. He was a writer, known for The Mystic Masseur (2001), The Levin Interviews (1980) and Review (1969). He was married to Nadira Khannum Alvi and Patricia Ann Hale. He died on 11 August 2018 in London, England, UK.2001
- Imre Kertész was born on 9 November 1929 in Budapest, Hungary. He was a writer, known for Fateless (2005), Emelet (2006) and Csacsifogat (1984). He was married to Magda Ambrus-Sass and Albina Vas. He died on 31 March 2016 in Budapest, Hungary.2002
- J.M. Coetzee was born on 9 February 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a writer, known for Waiting for the Barbarians (2019), Dust (1985) and Disgrace (2008).2003
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Her mother Olga, née Buchner, came from the Viennese upper middle class. Her father Friedrich Jelinek was a chemist and of Jewish-Czech descent. Jelinek spent her childhood and youth in Vienna. There she initially attended a monastery school. She then began studying theater studies and art history at the University of Vienna until she was forced to stop studying in 1967 due to anxiety and lived at home in complete isolation for a year. Meanwhile, she began her life as a professional writer. The first novel "bukolit" (1968) remained unpublished until 1979. In the 1960s, Jelinek experimented with texts, approaching the "Vienna Group" in her stylistic expression. In 1970 she wrote the first German-language pop novel with the title "we are decoys baby!", which she assembled from ordinary set pieces.
After that, her works, which included novels as well as radio plays and theater works, became more socially critical. She also completed organ and piano training at the conservatory, which she completed with the organist examination in 1971. In 1972 she married Gottfried Hüngsberg. Her literary breakthrough came in 1975 with the novel "The Lovers", the Marxist-feminist caricature of a local novel. Her main topics now included women in a male-dominated society and the sexual oppression of women. In presenting her themes, Jelinek uses a special language technique: she uses different types of text, such as from advertising or Schubert songs, or she uses stereotypical formulations in an ironic way to reveal their true meanings.
The novel "The Piano Player" was published in 1983. The biographical interpretation predominated in the reviews; the discussion of the text faded into the background. In general, the author uses language in the literal sense in many of her pieces in order to question social ways of thinking. This is represented by novel titles such as "The Lovers" (1975), "The Piano Player" (1983), "Lust" (1989) as well as the plays "What happened after Nora left her husband" (among others 1979), "Clara S. " (including 1982) or "Illness or Modern Women" (premiered in 1987).
Jelinek packaged the diversity of her literary themes in the major novel "The Children of the Dead" (1995), in which she addresses motifs such as home, mother-daughter relationships, life and death. The play "Sportstück", which premiered in 1998, is also about death. As a Marxist-oriented author, according to her critics, she tried, in the tradition of Berthold Brecht, to further develop the enlightenment function of art using modern literary means. Jelinek became an award-winning writer. Her prizes and awards include, among others, the Austrian State Scholarship for Literature (1972), the Script Prize of the Ministry of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany (1979), the Heinrich Böll Prize of the City of Cologne (1986), the Literature Prize of the State of Styria (1987) and Germany highest literary award: the Georg Büchner Prize (1998). The novel "Greed. An Entertainment Novel" was published in 2000.
In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek received the Nobel Prize in Literature for "the musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and dramas that, with unique linguistic passion, reveal the absurdity and compelling power of social clichés." On November 28, 2008, her play "Rechnitz" (The Strangling Angel) premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele under the direction of Jossi Wieler. In 2012, the premiere of the work "The Street. The City. The Übefall", directed by Johan Simons, followed at this location. In 2018, her play "Am Königsweg" was named "Play of the Year" by the magazine "Theater aktuell".
Elfriede Jelinek lives in Vienna, Munich and Paris.2004- Writer
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Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Laureate for Literature, was born October 10, 1930, in London's working-class Hackney district to Hyman and Frances Pinter, Eastern European Jews who had immigrated to the United Kingdom from Portugal. Hyman (known as "Jack") was a tailor specializing in women's clothing and Frances was a homemaker. The Pinters, whose families hailed from Odessa and Poland in the Russian Empire, were part of a wave of Jewish emigration to the UK at the turn of the last century. It was a community that revered learning and culture. The Pinter family was close, and young Harold was traumatized when, at the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated from London to Cornwall with other London children for a year to avoid becoming casualties of German aerial bombing.
Pinter has said that his encounter with anti-Semitism while growing up was the fuse that ignited the organic process leading him to becoming a playwright. As the Nobel Prize citation attests, Pinter developed into the greatest English dramatist of the post-World War II era. The young Pinter studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama. In 1950 he published several poems and began working as a professional actor. Under the stage name David Baron, he toured the Republic of Ireland with Anew McMaster's Shakespearean repertory company in 1951-52. Significantly for Pinter's future, 1951 not only marked the debut of his career as a professional actor but also marked the first performance of future Nobel Literature Laureate Samuel Beckett's absurdist masterpiece "Waiting for Godot." He next appeared with Sir Donald Wolfit's theatrical company at the King's Theatre, Hammersmith, for the 1953- 54 season before becoming a player with various provincial repertory companies, including the Birmingham Rep, until he gave himself over full-time to playwriting in 1959.
Two significant events that would change Great Britain forever occurred during his apprenticeship in provincial rep: (1) the Suez Crisis of 1955 that shattered the UK's pretensions to empire in a post-colonial world and doomed the imperial generations represented by Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his mentor Winston Churchill, and (2) the 1956 premiere of John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger." The shattering of the United Kingdom's complacency over imperialism meant that many successful people of Pinter's generation, who normally would have become Tories upon achieving some modicum of success, were disillusioned and drifted towards Labour and the left. No longer would a working- class person, if he so chose, have to be ashamed or stymied if \eschewing becoming middle-class or bourgeois. Osborne's play was the seminal work of the "kitchen-sink" school of drama that would dominate English theater for a decade, in which working-class life and struggles were dramatized. The hegemony of this school of theater was such that for the first time, a working-class or provincial accent became something treasured, something to be proud of, as the former world was set firmly upon its head. Even the great Laurence Olivier turned his back on the commercial theater to assay Osbourne's Archie Rice, a down-at-the-heels music hall performer, in "The Entertainer" (1957).
The kitchen-sink drama was a movement that Pinter would not be a part of, though it did open the doors for working-class writers who, unlike the working class-born Noël Coward, had no interest in becoming bourgeois. The other major element in the cultural milieu that forged Pinter was the Cold War, the absurdity of facing doomsday everyday under the threat of The Bomb (the USSR had acquired the means to produce a bomb through its atomic spy ring and exploded its first A-bomb in 1949, thus ending the US monopoly on nuclear weapons and making the Korean war, the suppression of an East Berlin uprising and the squashing of the Hungarian Revolution practical, if not possible). The Cold War gave legitimacy to the rise of the police state, not in totalitarian countries but in the use of police-state tactics in the western industrial democracies. To quote American poet' Charles Bukowski', this was an era marked by "War All The Time," not between two superpower behemoths but in everyday human relations, poisoned as they were by the Cold War climate of absurdity, paranoia and imminent holocaust.
In 1953 the accused "atomic spies" Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the United States when President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who had overseen the liberation of Europe as Supreme Allied Commander fighting the Nazi totalitarian menace, had refused clemency for even Ethel, the mother of two small boys. It was a domestic drama -- a woman's loyalty to her husband, her loss of not only her life but the Issac-like evocative sacrifice of any normal life for her two children when Eisenhower-Jehovah refused to stay the executioner's hand -- that had combined with the felicities of affairs of state and world power politics. The question of whether they were guilty or innocent--not proven beyond a doubt in 1951, when they had been convicted in a trial that was compared by many to the Stalinist show-trials that had occurred in the Soviet Union and still occurred in the satellite countries of the Warsaw Pact after World War II - gave rise to an overwhelming fundamental question: What is real? Reality, as Hannah Arendt had put it in "The Human Condition," is socially defined; that is a given. But how about when that reality no longer makes sense, when the individual cannot partake of the consensus demanded of him in the 1950s, whether conservative, middle-class, haute bourgeoisie or radical left as dictated by some flaming Red party boss - a person struggling with his own life? How does he answer the question: What is real? It is a question that Pinter took upon himself to answer, and answered by showing us there is no answer. In this quest, a genius arrived on the world stage in the form of a player who decided to craft his own words, for himself and his post-Holocaust, pre-Holocaust audience. When life stops making sense, as it did in the 1940s when the global war against fascism left 50 million dead and the modern industrial state was tasked with the exigencies of mass- murder, and as it did in the 1950s when, under the aegis of combating another totalitarian system a domestic fascism in kind if not degree arose in the Anglo-Saxon countries with their great gravital pull towards conformity within a shell of consumerism, it still behooves a human being to try to understand the human condition.
In 1957 Bristol University staged Pinter's first play "The Room." He had told a friend who worked in Bristol University's drama department an idea he had for a play. The friend was so enamored of the idea that he commissioned the work, with the proviso that a script be ready within a week. Though he didn't believe he could meet his friend's demands, Pinter wrote the one-act play in four days. "The Room" had all the hallmarks of what would become known as "Pinteresque," in that it had a mundane situation that gradually filled with menace and mystery through the author's deliberate omission of an explanation or motivation for the action on stage. It is ironic perhaps that an actor would rid his script of motivation as "motivation" is the Holy Grail of inwardly-directed actors such as those tutored in "The Method" in America, but it was emblematic of the times that stated motivations frequently masked other, starker, more id-like drives in people or in nation-states that were beyond human comprehension in terms of being rational. Modern society had become irrational, and motivations post-Freud could be understood as a manifestation of Thanatos, the Death Instinct. Imminent violence and power plays would become other leitmotifs of Pinter's oeuvre.
Pinter wrote a second one-act play in 1957, "The Dumb Waiter," an absurdist drama concerning two hit men employed by a secret organization to kill an unknown victim. It was with this play that Pinter added an element of black comedy, mostly through his brilliant use of dialog, which not only elucidated the killers' growing anxiety but underscored the very absurdity of their situation. The play would not be performed until 1960, after the staging of his first two full-length plays, one a flop, and one a hit. His first full-length play, "The Birthday Party," debuted at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge in 1958. In the play the apathetic Stanley, the denizen of a dilapidated boarding house, is visited by two men. The audience never learns their motivation, but knows that Stanley is terrified of them. They organize a birthday party for Stanley, who insists that it is not his birthday. Pinter is following in the footsteps of the great absurdist Samuel Beckett in that he steadfastly refuses to give clear motivations to his characters, or rational explanations for the sake of his audience (Pinter and Beckett became friends). The play, now considered a masterpiece, flopped on its initial London run after being savaged by critics. It was revived after Pinter's second full-length play, 1960's "The Caretaker," established him as a major force in the English-language theater.
His early plays were rooted in the absurdism that became the major theatrical paradigm on the European stage in the third quarter of the 20th century, after the horrors of the war and the Holocaust. The early plays that made his reputation such as "The Homecoming" (1964) and his middle-period work such as "No Man's Land" (1976) have been called "comedies of menace." Typically, they use what at first seems like an innocent situation and develop it into an absurd and threatening environment through actions that usually are inexplicable to the audience and sometimes even to the other characters in the play. A Pinter drama is dark and claustrophobic. His language is full of menacing pauses. The lives of Pinter's characters usually are revealed to be stunted by guilt and horror. The duality and absurdity of Pinter's theatrical world-view gave rise to the adjective "Pinteresque," which took its place next to "Kafkaesque," a product of the horrors of the first quarter of the century (Pinter would write the screenplay for an adaption of Franz Kafka's "The Trial".)
Beginning in the 1960s, Pinter further enhanced his reputation as a writer with his screenplays, particular his work with Joseph Losey in The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967) (Losey planned an adaptation of Marcel Proust's "Le Temps Retrouve" and commissioned Pinter to write the screenplay. The film was never made by Losey, but Pinter's screenplay was subsequently published to great acclaim). His later screenplays, including his last produced work with Losey, The Go-Between (1971), are, ironically, noted for their clarity. He was twice nominated for the Academy Award as a screenwriter, for his adaptation of John Fowles' labyrinthine novel into the film The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and for Betrayal (1983), his adaptation of his own play. Such was the respect that Pinter was held that Elia Kazan, one of the great film directors, complained in his autobiography "A Life" (1988) that The Last Tycoon (1976) producer Sam Spiegel had such reverence for Pinter that he would not let Kazan change his script.
After the great plays of his early and mid-period, Pinter became more overtly political. His later plays, which generally are shorter than the plays from the period in which he made his reputation, typically address political subjects and often are allegories on oppression. In the late 1970s Pinter became more outspoken on political issues and is decidedly of the left. He is passionately committed to human rights and is not shy about bringing examples of oppression from client states sponsored by the Anglo-Saxon democracies to the public's attention. In 2002 Pinter experienced what he described as a "personal nightmare" when he had to undergo chemotherapy to treat a case of cancer of the esophagus. The ordeal, which has been ongoing for three years, triggered a personal metamorphosis in the man. "I've been through the valley of the shadow of death," Pinter explained about his quickening. "While in many respects I have certain characteristics that I had, I'm also a very changed man."
In early 2005 Pinter declared in a radio interview that he was retiring as a dramatist in favor of writing poetry: "I think I've stopped writing plays now, but I haven't stopped writing poems. I've written 29 plays. Isn't that enough?" Pinter has become an outspoken critic of war. He was a bitter critic of the US-led intervention against Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia during President Bill Clinton's administration and an even harsher critic of the US-led war in Iraq. The fiercely anti- war Pinter has accused President George W. Bush of being a "mass-murderer" and has called British Prime Minister Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" for supporting US foreign policy. Pinter claimed immediately after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon that they were a requited revenge for the destruction wrought on Afghanistan and Iraq by US imperialism and its anti-Taliban policies and sanctions on Iraq. He has publicly denounced the retaliatory U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the unprovoked 2003 invasion of Iraq. Pinter likens the Bush administration and Bush's America to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, claiming the US is bent on world hegemony. Controversially, he has declared that the only difference between Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union is that the US is more hypocritical and has better public relations.
One cannot fault Pinter, in the political ring, for being inconsistent or for jumping on a bandwagon. The man, as well as the artist, is a person that sticks to his convictions. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Pinter just after he celebrated his 75th birthday was completely unexpected by pundits handicapping the award. Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk and Syrian poet Adonis were considered the front-runners, as European writers recently had dominated the award (Pinter's Nobel Prize makes it nine out of ten times in the past ten years that a European writer has won, and the second time in the past five years an English writer has banged the gong), and it was felt the Academy would recognize a writer from another continent, particularly one from Asia Minor. Thus, the award can be seen as a not-so-veiled criticism of the United States in general and President George W. Bush in particular by the Swedish Academy. Because of Pinter's renouncing of the form of which he was a master and his anointment of himself as a poet, in light of his volume of poetry, "War" (2003) that denounces the Iraq War frequently in vulgar, raw and unrythmic poetry that poses no threat to William Butler Yeats or W.H. Auden or Robert Frost or Stevens, one must consider that the Swedish Academy was giving the world's highest prize for literature at least in part to a poet whose latest work was fiercely anti-American and anti-imperialist.
Despite being highly controversial, Pinter -- who was appointed a Commander of the British Empire in 1966 (one step down from a knighthood, an honor he subsequently turned down) -- was named a Companion of Honour in 2002, an honor that does not carry a title. In addition to writing poetry, acting and directing in the theater, Pinter serves as the chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, an affiliate of he Club Cricket Conference. He also is active in the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organization that supports Fidel Castro, who remains the #1 bugaboo of the United States after Islamic terrorists, just slightly ahead of fellow hemispheric boogeyman Hugo Chávez, a recent arriviste on the world stage. He also is a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, an organization that appeals for the freedom of Slobodan Milosevic on the grounds that NATO's war against Milosevic's Yugoslavia was unjustified under international law.2005- Writer
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After school, Pamuk studied journalism and architecture at the Technical University of his hometown. After initially being interested in painting, he discovered his talent for writing in the mid-1970s. Pamuk soon presented his first novel, which won an award in 1979 and was published in 1982. Just a year later, his next novel was published under the title "Sessiz Ev" (1983), which received the "Prix de la découverte européenne" in its French translation in 1991. In 1985 Pamuk moved to New York to teach at Columbia University until 1988. In 1988 he returned to Istanbul. The novel "Beyaz Kale", published in Turkey in 1985, was awarded the "Independent Award for Foreign Fiction" in 1990. In the same year it was also published in German translation under the title "The White Fortress".
Pamuk celebrated his greatest success in Turkey in 1994 with the publication of the novel "Yeni Hayat", which was also published in German in 1998. For his next work, which was published in 1998 as a historical novel under the title "Benim Ad...", he was awarded the "IMPAC Dublin Award" in 2003. The liberal Turkish writer published his first political novel, "Kar", in 2002, whose German translation under the title "Schnee" received great attention in the German-speaking cultural circle in 2005. The work ironically addresses taboo topics in the recent history and present of Turkish society, especially the presence of Islamist tendencies and the murder of Armenians and Kurds. Through this openness, Pamuk provoked controversial reactions in Turkey, including demonstrations and death threats organized against him. Pamuk's work has already been translated into 34 languages and has a total circulation of more than one million copies.
In the Western world he is now considered the "Umberto Eco of Turkey". In 2005, Pamuk was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, which was presented to him in October 2005 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. At the same time, the writer was also honored with the Ricardo Huch Prize from the city of Darmstadt for his contribution to European international understanding. At the end of August 2005 it became known that the Turkish writer was threatened with a prison sentence of up to three years in his homeland for "publicly denigrating Turkishness": Pamuk had criticized the Turkish genocide against Armenians and Kurds in an interview with a Swiss newspaper, which is why he declared himself a prisoner He was due to stand trial in an Istanbul court at the end of 2005. The case against him was dropped in January 2006. In December 2006, the Turkish writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Orhan Pamuk is married and has a daughter.2006- Doris Lessing was born on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia [now Iran]. She was a writer, known for Adore (2013), Maupassant (1963) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1981). She was married to Gottfried Anton Nicolai Lessing and Frank Charles Wisdom. She died on 17 November 2013 in London, England, UK.2007
- Writer
- Actor
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was born on 13 April 1940 in Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France. He is a writer and actor, known for Yo (2015), Mondo (1995) and Moloch, les chairs vives (2005). He has been married to Jémia Jean since 10 December 1975. They have two children. He was previously married to Rosemarie Piquemal.2008- Herta Müller was born on 17 August 1953 in Nitzkydorf, Banat, Romania. She is a writer, known for Vulpe - vânator (1993), Traveling on One Leg (2016) and An den Rand geschrieben - Rumäniendeutsche Schriftsteller im Fadenkreuz der Securitate (2010). She is married to Harry Merkle. She was previously married to Richard Wagner.2009
- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Mario Vargas Llosa was born on 28 March 1936 in Arequipa, Peru. He is a writer and director, known for Pantaleon (1976), Captain Pantoja and the Special Services (1999) and Tune in Tomorrow... (1990). He has been married to Patricia Llosa since 1965. He was previously married to Julia Urquidi.2010- Mo Yan (a pseudonym for Guan Moye) was born in 1955 and grew up in Gaomi in Shandong province in north-eastern China. His parents were farmers. As a twelve-year-old during the Cultural Revolution he left school to work, first in agriculture, later in a factory. In 1976 he joined the People's Liberation Army and during this time began to study literature and write. His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981. His breakthrough came a few years later with the novella Touming de hong luobo (1986, published in French as Le radis de cristal 1993).
In his writing Mo Yan draws on his youthful experiences and on settings in the province of his birth. This is apparent in his novel Hong gaoliang jiazu (1987, in English Red Sorghum 1993). The book consists of five stories that unfold and interweave in Gaomi in several turbulent decades in the 20th century, with depictions of bandit culture, the Japanese occupation and the harsh conditions endured by poor farm workers. Red Sorghum was successfully filmed in 1987, directed by Zhang Yimou. The novel Tiantang suantai zhi ge (1988, in English The Garlic Ballads 1995) and his satirical Jiuguo (1992, in English The Republic of Wine 2000) have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.
Fengru feitun (1996, in English Big Breasts and Wide Hips 2004) is a broad historical fresco portraying 20th-century China through the microcosm of a single family. The novel Shengsi pilao (2006, in English Life and Death are Wearing Me Out 2008) uses black humour to describe everyday life and the violent transmogrifications in the young People's Republic, while Tanxiangxing (2004, to be published in English as Sandalwood Death 2013) is a story of human cruelty in the crumbling Empire. Mo Yan's latest novel Wa (2009, in French Grenouilles 2011) illuminates the consequences of China's imposition of a single-child policy.
Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition. In addition to his novels, Mo Yan has published many short stories and essays on various topics, and despite his social criticism is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors.
The 9th MAODUN Literature Prize in 2011
Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 as "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".2012