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Ayn Rand, born in 1905 as Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, was a Russian-born American writer who emigrated to the U.S. in 1925. Upon gaining permanent residency in 1929, she became a famous novelist and philosopher. Her analysis of the human condition and the role of reason in human affairs made her books of lasting influence on…
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Born in Ireland in 1882, James Joyce is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. His novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness and his other well-known works include A…
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John le Carré, born in October of 1931 as David John Moore Cornwell, was a British intelligence officer and and novelist during the latter half of the 20th century. After serving in British intelligence during the 1950s and 60s, le Carré‘s fame as a novelist in post-war Britain was established with his third novel, The…
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In 1982, a novel called Memorial do Convento was published in Portugal. A love story set against 18th-century Inquisitorial Lisbon, the novel captured the imagination of many readers, garnering widespread acclaim. Its author, then sixty year old José Saramago, was not known for literature, but for journalism. With this novel, his fourth to be published,…
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Thursday, September 21st marked Stephen King‘s seventy-fifth birthday. Born in 1947 in Maine, King was raised by his mother who, with her two sons, moved several times before settling in Durham, Maine. King’s love for horror blossomed in his childhood, when he discovered a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories in an attic. As he entered…
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September 13th marks the birthday of Roald Dahl, one of the most popular authors of children’s literature of the 20th century. Born in Wales in 1916, Dahl was a first generation Englishman who spent most of his life in the United Kingdom. His famous stories, such as Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and…
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Born on July 10, 1871 in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, famed French novelist Marcel Proust was born into a France torn by internal conflict. Though Paris was gripped by political turmoil and France’s modernization put pressure on the class system, Proust and his educated aristocratic parents were largely unaffected. Marcel, however, was a…
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Nikos Kazantzakis, born in 1883 on the island of Crete, had a tremendous desire for truth, a sharp intellect to seek it out, and an adventurous disposition that brought him around the world. His fiction largely reflects his philosophical training and religious values, while his work as a translator reflects his concern for the education and…
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One of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Clive Staples Lewis, or C.S. Lewis, has become a household name. With such works as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity, his works remain highly influential among writers and creatives, since the publication of his earliest works in the 1930s. Lewis was inspired…
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One of the most enduring stories of the modern era, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit remains one of the most popular stories in the English language and its publication in 1937 sparked a creative explosion in the genre of speculative fiction, paving the way for its sequel The Lord of the Rings and numerous adaptations for…
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