Called "the screwball's Boswell" by Fred Allen, H. Allen Smith achieved overnight success as a humorist with the publication of Low Man on a Totem Pole in 1941. Turning out sequels at the rate of nearly one a year, he was rarely off the be...

Known by his friends as "da H. C." (pronounced "hah-tseh") or "da Artmann," H. C. Artmann enjoys great popularity and an ever-growing number of admirers. Unlike most of his colleagues, this self-made poet had little formal education. He ha...

Herman Cyril McNeile was born 28 September 1888 in Bodmin, Cornwall, England, the son of Malcolm McNeile and Christiana Mary Sloggett. His father was a captain in the Royal Navy and, later, governor of the Royal Naval Prison at Lewes. McNe...

H. G. Wells's earlier works of science fiction have retained their popularity for nearly a century. In recent years they have also won academic regard for integrating the fantastic with the realistic to produce challenging alien perspectiv...

During his lifetime H. L. Mencken was called the Great Iconoclast and the Sage of Baltimore, appellations he gained because of his journalistic writing in newspapers and magazines. However, his contributions to American letters were more e...

Best known for his creation of Ganesh Ghote (pronounced "Go-tay"), a Bombay policeman who is both an effective investigator and an appealing man, H. R. F. Keating has been instrumental in widening the boundaries of the mystery novel. In th...

Instantaneous identification of an author with a popular and well-known creation, in this case a curious monkey, is the hallmark of significant contribution. H. A. Rey and his collaborator wife, Margret, were so closely linked with Curious...

Few writers have appeared on the American literary scene to such sudden acclaim as the Chinese émigré Ha Jin. His first short-story collection about life in the Chinese People's Liberation Army, Ocean of Words (1996), won the...

Rachel Hadas, a poet, translator, essayist, critic, and professor of literature, grew up in an environment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan contiguous to Columbia University and connected with the generation of New York intellectuals th...

Rudolf Hagelstange was acclaimed as a lyric and narrative poet during the first years after World War II and has been widely read as a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist since the 1960s. His poetry is often idealistic, advocating p...

Alyson Hagy is a writer of lyrical and emotionally rugged fiction in which psychologically complex characters confront the realities of their lives, often within a rural and decidedly American landscape and culture. Born Alyson Carol Hagy ...

John Meade Haines was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of naval officer John Meade Haines and Helen M. Donaldson Haines. After serving in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946, he was educated in Washington, D.C., at St. Johns, at the National...

Hal Clement is the pen name of Harry Clement Stubbs, one of the most exactingly scientific of science-fiction writers. Most of his novels and stories work out in minute detail the physical conditions for life on other worlds, from the astr...

To some, Max Halbe ranks second to Gerhart Hauptmann among the dramatists of the German naturalist movement; to others, he is a minor figure whose significance lies in his evocation of the landscape and traditions of West Prussia. That dua...

Nancy Hale is most often recognized as a keen observer of people who is at her best when dealing with fundamental human qualities. Hale, who grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts, worked in New York City, and lived in Charlottesville, Virginia,...

Baseball fans who grew up in Minnesota in the 1960s knew Halsey Hall as the color analyst on radio and television broadcasts for the Minnesota Twins. Hall was a masterful raconteur who wove tales of baseball from an earlier era into his pa...

Rodney Hall is one of a group of writers, painters, and musicians who came to prominence in Brisbane in the 1960s. In a sense he began his career outside the literary mainstream, which was then located in Sydney and Melbourne. He is unusua...

Although Johann Christian Hallmann enjoyed a considerable reputation in the 1660s and 1670s, much of his life is shrouded in obscurity. He was the son of an official in the service of the House of Liegnitz-Brieg and was probably born somew...

In his introduction to Novelists in Their Youth (1990) John William Halperin defends the importance of biography in an age when critical appraisal often turns away from social, historical, and biographical evidence toward such approaches a...

One of the most respected and prolific contemporary authors of books for children and young adults, Virginia Hamilton was the first African American writer to win the prestigious John Newbery Medal, in recognition of M. C. Higgins, the Gre...

Janet Hamilton may have been the most widely read and appreciated working-class poet of Victorian Scotland. Her vigorous, satiric, and recollective poems in English and her native Doric (Lowland Scots) exemplified the values of a region an...

James Hamilton-Paterson is one of those writers who, like James Joyce, chose to forsake his native country for a life of self-imposed exile. Unlike Joyce, however, Hamilton-Paterson has not spent his artistic life writing about the country...

John Hammond attempted to describe Virginia and Maryland honestly at a time when honest descriptions were rare. In mid-seventeenth-century England, where both pamphlets and rumors proliferated, the New World was either extravagantly praise...

Baroness Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti would be a forgotten author of pious historical works had not her novel Jesse und Mari: Ein Roman aus dem Donaulandea (1906; translated as Jesse and Maria, 1931) become the focal point in the bitter figh...

Hanif Kureishi is not only a leading contemporary novelist but also a prominent playwright, essayist, and screenwriter. He has also directed his own screenplay for the movie London Kills Me (1991). His script for the director Stephen Frear...