With biographical entries for over 1,000 novelists, short-story writers, poets, and playwrights from Britain and Ireland, the United States and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, India, Africa, and the Caribbean, this Companion is an essential and entertaining handbook of the century's English-language writers. Readers will find profiles of all the major literary figures of the period, including James Joyce, W.H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, and Samuel Beckett, as well as James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Frost, J.R.R. Tolkien, Kazuo Ishiguro, Derek Walcott, Gertrude Stein, and those who have been undeservedly neglected or have fallen out of fashion.

 

This is an invaluable and highly readable reference book, which celebrates the lives and works of the best writers of the age. It has been written by the same team of contributors, made up of biographers, critics, novelists, historians, academics, and literary journalists, that produced The Reader's Companion to the Twentieth-Century Novel. Together these two volumes form the liveliest, as well as the most comprehensive, encyclopedia of twentieth-century literary life currently available.

 

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Publishers:

UK Print – Oxford University Press, 1996 

US Print – Oxford University Press, 1996