G. A. Henty once described himself as "a fierce and truculent Briton, ready to defy the whole world." It was an exaggerated yet appropriate description, given Henty's character and appearance. He was a tall, powerfully built man, with a la...

Best known for his Father Brown detective stories, and most admired as a thinker for his fulllength books, of which he wrote almost fifty, G. K. Chesterton is numbered among the great essayists of the English language. His essays so far co...

The work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez owes much of its popularity to the seemingly easy access it offers to readers and to the way it departs from the highly intellectualized, self-reflective mode that characterizes other Latin-American ficti...

Gabriel Okara is the first significant English-language black African poet, the first African poet to write in a modern style, and the first Nigerian writer to publish in and join the editorial staff of the influential literary journal Bla...

In 1945 novelist Gabrielle Roy helped create a new direction for francophone literature in Canada with Bonheur d'occasion (translated as The Tin Flute, 1947), a frank and uncompromising examination of urban misery. Her subsequent works of ...

Gael Turnbull is a British poet of considerable and various achievement, a friend of poets and a small publisher. His poetry is experimental and adventurous in style, yet it speaks with a clear, consistently recognizable, and always poetic...

Madeleine Gagnon was born in 1938 to Jean-Baptiste and Jeanne Beaulieu Gagnon at Amqui, Quebec. One of ten children, she grew up in the countryside of the Gaspé region of Quebec. She received her B.A. in literature from the Universi...

Gerd Gaiser grew up in the upheaval surrounding World War I, came of age in the year of the stock market crash, and fought in World War II. His career--really only an avocation--as a writer flourished after the war, bringing a number of di...

In Ernesto Galarza there is a confluence of lyric poet, labor organizer, veteran educator, international economist, and renowned scholar. Although best known as "the loudest and, surely, most unusual of the voices that have been raised to ...

Galen (130-200), Greek physician, anatomist, physiologist, philosopher, and lexicographer, was probably the most influential physician of all time. Throughout his life Galen was a prolific writer, producing his first books, Three Commentar...

Louise von Gall was one of many authors in the nineteenth century who were judged by the critics to be producers of Trivialliteratur or Unterhaltungsromane (light novels). But some of these authors dealt with matters in need of urgent atte...

William Davis Gallagher was one of the most important promoters of literary culture in the trans-Appalachian West in the first half of the nineteenth century. Himself a poet and essayist of considerable repute, he edited and published a se...

Once undervalued among literary scholars, diaries have been recognized in the late twentieth century as an important aspect of literature created by women. Among the most interesting diaries written during the American Revolution are those...

Brendan Galvin was born in Everett, Massachusetts, the son of James Russell Galvin, a letter carrier for the U.S. Post Office, and Rose McLaughlin Galvin. Both his parents are first-generation Irish-Americans. His marriage to Ellen Baer to...

Reymundo Gamboa is an ascending writer whose ethnographic poetry and prose reflect an intense, experiential, inward journey. Gamboa has been lauded for his linguistic style of writing which also evokes the universality of his life within t...

Poet, prose-fiction writer, essayist, and playwright, Sergei Gandlevsky was one of the key figures of literary life in the Soviet Union and Russia during the 1980s and 1990s. His path as a poet is highly characteristic for this pivotal epo...

Amadís de Gaula was the first prose chivalric romance of the Spanish-speaking world. The work is thought to have been first published in 1508 as Los quatro libros del Virtuoso cauallero Amadís de Gaula (The Four Books of the ...

Cristina García is one of several late-twentieth-century Cuban American writers whose work represents the experiences and issues of a generation of Cuban-born children who immigrated with their families to the United States after th...

As a young poet Richard García was several years ahead of his time. His first book, Selected Poetry (1973), charted a new direction for Chicano poetry when hardly anyone was listening. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s Chica...

Jane Gardam's earliest stories are children's stories, but only in the way that some of Katherine Mansfield's are: they recreate directly the sensations and impressions of childhood. Her first three books appeared on Hamish Hamilton's chil...

Alexander Garden, an opponent of religious enthusiasm, is known for his arguments with the charismatic instigator of the Great Awakening, George Whitefield. In his office as commissary of the Church of England, Garden represented the eccle...

Poet, composer, singer, and playwright, Michel Garneau derives his originality from two features rarely found among the contemporary avant-garde: his thoroughly affirmative outlook on life and the highly poetic quality of his drama. Conven...

John Arthur Garraty has long been one of America's leading historians. His contributions have been particularly strong in economic history, biography, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive era. Combining an able prose style with balanced jud...

Actor, director, dramatist, and screenwriter, as well as author of several novels and memoirs, Garson Kanin is remembered today primarily for a single play, Born Yesterday (1946), the first and most successful of his works for the stage. B...

Garth Williams has worked for almost forty years as an illustrator of children's books; his bibliography includes some of the most distinguished titles published in this century, among them the already-classic Charlotte's Web (1952) and St...