Can any writer, in literature's past or present, be compared to William Shakespeare? While most scholars would refuse to make such a bold statement, Kwame Anthony Appiah took this daring plunge when he wrote of Chinua Achebe's first novel, "It would be impossible to say how Things Fall Apart influenced African writing. It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians."
Halloween is the time for ghouls, goblins, witches, and...ghosts. In the art world, ghosts aren't merely the phantoms, banshees, and spooks of horror stories; there are also ghosts of the pen. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would ghostwrite music for wealthy patrons, and plenty of famous authors have written works on behalf of others as well.
Today we celebrate the birth of a novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass. He was born on October 16, 1927, in the Free City of Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland. Grass used his “frolicsome black fables [to] portray the forgotten face of history,” as noted by the Swedish Academy when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 Dec 1865 - 18 Jan 1936) died in England at the age of 70, the most famous and highly paid writer of his time. Born to Victorian parents who named him after Staffordshire's Rudyard Lake, Kipling split his boyhood between the markets of Bombay India and an abusive English foster home. His life of travel and tragedy led to two near nervous breakdowns, but made his creative work accessible to both the aristocracy and the everyman.
The Nobel Prize in literature has had an interesting and often controversial history since first awarding the prize in 1901. The year 1964 is perhaps one of the more intriguing stories of the Swedish Academy’s tradition.
Excitement has been building about this year's Nobel Prize in Literature! The winner is traditionally announced the second week of October. The Nobel Prize is certainly the most prestigious award in literature, and it's been conferred on the world's best authors since 1901.
This week we celebrated the birthday of Henry Graham Greene. The playwright, explorer, poet, and spy was above all one of the most widely read novelists of the 20th century. He wrote 24 novels, nearly all of which were adapted to film. His works include The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory, Brighton Rock, and The End of the Affair. Despite several nominations, Greene never won the Nobel Prize.
On September 25, 1897, William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi. Despite lacking both college degree and high school diploma, Faulkner established himself as one of America's preeminent authors. The Nobel laureate's life holds a few surprises for most of his readers.
"I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing."
-Seamus Heaney (All Things Considered, 2008)
Naipaul has said that "half a writer's work is the discovery of his subject matter. And a problem for me was that my life had been varied, full of upheavals and moves." Yet Naipaul found his authorial voice relatively early; after two failed attempts at writing a novel, Naipaul found inspiration in his childhood neighbor from Port of Spain.
