A selection of British and American writers

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 1977)

WH Auden grew up in Birmingham, in the industrial Midlands. He was well educated in Oxford University. Around the time of 1930 a new generation of poets appeared and Auden was the one who set the tone. He was witty, talented and very productive. This group of poets was interested in political and social questions and advocated that poets should write about these subjects. When the 2nd world war started, Auden emigrated to the states and started to focus towards Christianity. His poems became more religious, introspective and not very political at all. The spiritual search was now Audens main theme. Funeral Blues

Jane Austen (1775 1817)

Jane Austen is the first important female novelist in English literature, even though she was scarcely known in her own time. Austens writing is very realistic and everydaylike and her stories are always about upper class people. Her novels are like a Cinderella-story, with an ending where the young girl finds a husband, but before that there are some hindrances concerning peoples attitudes and qualities. Neither are there passion or adventure nor heroes or heroines in Austens novels. The focus is on ordinary people and their behaviour. Austens characteristics, except from realism, are irony, subtle observations, clever plots, humour and natural dialogues. Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion

Robert Frost (1874 1963)

Robert Frost grew up in San Francisco but had his break through in England. He went to college for a short time and tried many different jobs, but most of all he wanted to write. Frost also liked farming, and that is one of the themes in his poems. He also wrote about nature in a very simple and colloquial way. His trivial subjects are treated with a humble wisdom, which makes quite an impression on the reader. The road not taken

Charlotte Bront (1816 1855)

Charlotte Bront (also known as Currer Bell) and her sisters Emily (Ellis Bell) and Anne (Acton Bell) were born in Haworth, a tiny village on the windy moorland of North Yorkshire. They all wrote poetry, but Charlotte was the one who found fame in her own lifetime with her novel Jane Eyre. The novel caused a sensation because of the strong undertones of sexuality in the portrayal of a young heroine. Bront was influenced by the Romantic poets as well as the gothic terror novels. Bronts writing consists of vivid descriptions, strong characterisations and she also manages to create an atmosphere full of mystery and horror, all through the novel. Jane Eyre

Kerstin Bergek Slottegymnasiet

A selection of British and American writers

Ernest Hemingway (1899 1961)
Ernest Hemingway was born in Illinois, Chicago. His family often took him fishing and hunting. Wildlife and qualities belonging to it such as courage and endurance are often reflected in his fiction about Nick Adams, Hemingways alter ego. Hemingway worked as a newspaper reporter after high school and later on he joined the war, which also became one of his topics. His style of writing is related to the Icelandic stories, with simple words forming short sentences. This reduced, objective and economic way of writing reveals a lot of emotion where dialogues and action describe the inwardly (the iceberg principle). In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Price in Literature. Hemingways writing diminished eventually, probably mainly due to his abuse of alcohol, and in 1961 he committed suicide, just like his father once had done. The old man and the sea, Hills like white elephants

Virginia Woolf (1882 1941)

Virginia Woolf was one of the experimental novelists of the early 20th century. Instead of writing in the traditional way (plot, narrative, descriptions) Woolf wanted to show the inner life of her characters, similar to James Joyces stream of consciousness. The main themes in her novels are human relations and the search for meaning in life. Time and Death are also recurring themes in her writing. She brought a unique style with deep psychological analysis to the novel. Woolf belonged to the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of intellectuals. She suffered from depression all through her life and drowned herself in 1941. To the lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando

William Shakespeare (1564 1616)

Most facts about Shakespeare are uncertain, even his date of birth. He was born in Stratford-on-Avon and married to a local girl, Anne Hathaway. Later he went to London where he worked as an actor and gradually started to write plays for a drama company, Lord Chamberlainss company, later on The Kings men. During two decades, from the early 1590s to 1612, he was the leading play writer with a huge production in many different genres. Maybe he saw himself as an actor in particular, and wrote plays with the intention to provide the theater with good plays, since he never published his works himself. There are many reasons why Shakespeare became so popular and still is. He has a great technical skill as a dramatist, he has a wide range of subjects and characters and deep insight into human experience and above all is he a master of English. He wrote about all sorts of people, from kings to peasants, good and evil and looked upon them with great objectivity. In other words, he wrote for everyone and consequently all kinds of people came to see his plays. Before his playwriting he wrote lovepoems, sonnets, addressed to a young man and a dark lady. Many famous quotes are taken from Shakespeares works. Sonnets 18, 116, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Tempest

Nadine Gordimer (1923 - )

Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Price in literature in 1991. She still lives in South Africa, where she was born to Jewish immigrant parents. She began writing early, with the racially divided society as her subject. A prominent feature of her writing is to present more than one different perspective on a situation. Many times the focus is on apartheids supporters in order to show the structure of a diseased politics. Gordimer herself emphasizes that her subject is much more than apartheid; it is the human being in history.

Kerstin Bergek Slottegymnasiet

A selection of British and American writers

The moment before the gun went off

JD Salinger (1919 2010)

Jerome David Salinger was something of a recluse, which gave him quite some attention and also surrounded him with great mystique. If this image was a way of increasing book sales or not is hard to know for sure. It has been said that he was a man of contradictions; for instance he admired Hemingway, though parodied him and spoke critically of him. Salingers debut novel, The Catcher in The Rye (1951), is a story about a young boys struggle to find out who he really is. The novel received great response among young intellectuals in America and made Salinger the mouthpiece for a whole generation. The Catcher in the Rye

JK Rowling (1965 - )
Joanne Kathleen Rowling was born July 31, just like her character Harry Potter. She grew up in the countryside, outside Bristol. Rowling is welleducated, but before her break-through with Harry Potter, she was both broke and depressed from a broken marriage. In 1995 she finished the first book in the series of seven, and the year after that Bloomsbury wise enough, took the novel on and decided to publish it. Before that, Rowling had been turned down by several big publishers, with the excuse that Harry Potter was too long, too slow or too literary The Harry Potter-series

Sources: Pictures from http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=121 http://www.kvinnofronten.nu/Formodrar/austen.htm http://www.ketzle.com/frost/ http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Bront%EB http://www.lostgeneration.com/hrc.htm http://www.jmk.su.se/jmk/stud/magen/l-hollot/woolfsv.html http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1991/ http://www.levity.com/corduroy/salinger.htm http://www.abcdata.se/harrypotter/jk_rowling.htm Facts from Algulin Ingemar, Olsson Bernt, Litteraturens historia i vrlden, Norstedts, Stockholm 1997 Curry, Dean, Highlights of American literature, Washington DC 1987

Kerstin Bergek Slottegymnasiet

A selection of British and American writers

Oxenden Clive, Lennart Peterson, A Cross Section of English Literature, Liber, Malm 1986

Kerstin Bergek Slottegymnasiet

A selection of British and American writers

and here are some more writers and examples of their works: American writers: Edgar Allan Poe Herman Melville Moby Dick, Bartleby the scrivener Mark Twain Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn F.Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby John Steinbeck Grapes of wrath, Of mice and men Emily Dickinson poems Stephen King Toni Morrison Beloved Alice Walker The color Purple Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Toms cabin Joyce Carol Oates Jack London Call of the wild British writers: DH Lawrence Lady Chatterleys lover Agatha Christie JRR Tolkien Lord of Rings William Golding Lord of Flies George Orwell Animal Farm, 1984, Down and out in Paris and London Jonathan Swift Gullivers Travels Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe William Blake Percy Byssey Shelley Mary Shelley Frankenstein Charles Dickens Oliver Twist Emily Bront Wuthering Heights Oscar Wilde Roald Dahl Mathilda, BFG, Witches Walter Scott Ivanhoe Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland CS Lewis Narnia Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day Irish writers: James Joyce Ulysses WB Yeats Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot Seamus Heaney

Kerstin Bergek Slottegymnasiet