Tutor and fellow of Harvard College, poet, astronomer, and for twenty-four years pastor of the church at Roxbury, Massachusetts, Samuel Danforth was born in Framlingham, Suffolk, England, the second son of Nicholas and Elizabeth Danforth. ...

Unlike some screenwriters who feel they do not receive adequate recognition for their work, I. A. L. Diamond prefers to remain in the shadow of his cowriter, director Billy Wilder. Diamond is a talented man who deserves recognition, having...

With more than forty volumes of poetry and prose to his name, in English and Gaelic, Iain Crichton Smith is increasingly acknowledged as the elder statesman of modern Scottish letters and Scotland's most distinguished living poet. In 1978 ...

Ian Hamilton defined his poems with clarity in the Bulletin of the Poetry Book Society (Summer 1974) when he characterized them as "dramatic lyrics .... the intense climatic moment of a drama," adding that the reader must supply "the prose...

Ian McEwan is very much a product of the new British universities, those popularly known as "plate-glass universities" to distinguish them from the older "red-brick universities" at which writers such as Kinglsey Amis or Philip Larkin have...

According to a reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, Ian Watson is "probably the best thinker" in British science fiction. "I'm attempting to alter the states of mind of my readers, to make them more conscious of the operating progr...

Nikolai Iazykov would most likely have perceived his role in the development of Russian Romantic literature quite differently than did either his contemporaries or the subsequent generations of critics. He would have placed a greater value...

The poetry of Sara de Ibáñez has been praised throughout the Hispanic world since its first appearance in 1940. Her poems appear in many anthologies, and she has been acclaimed by such giants of Hispanic letters as the Nobel ...

Born into the upper ranks of an aristocratic tradition that extended back for at least half a millennium, Ichij Kaneyoshi (or Kanera) lived his life with an overpowering awareness of his place in that ancient hierarchy. Ironically, his sto...

Ida Gräfin von Hahn-Hahn was one of the most prolific and widely read novelists of the nineteenth century. She is significant mainly for her early works, which present shockingly unconventional heroines. She rejected the female models...

In the first volume of his Promised Land trilogy John Iggulden concisely enunciates the basis of an uncompromising program for financial and literary endeavor: "You cannot manage anything effectively unless you first decide on, and define,...

The Italian novelist and essayist Ignazio Silone (1900-1978) was one of the founding members of the Italian Communist Party. He directed international attention to Italian political and social realities and at the same time presented an un...

The popularity of the poet Igor' Severianin--a pseudonym, at first indivisible and hyphenated (Igor'-Severianin), that gradually came to be perceived as a first and last name--was unusually intense but passed almost in an instant. In 1913-...

In his own time Ikkyu Sjun was more important as a Zen master than as a writer. Yet, the expression of who he was is concentrated so vividly in his writings, particularly in the retrospective verse collection Kyunshu (Crazy Cloud Anthology...

In the aftermath of Nazism, Ilse Aichinger produced works with a personal yet politically and socially sensitive vision of reality. Her prose and poetry offer conceptual alternatives that the Nazi use of language had all but erased through...

Arguably the most popular satirical writers of the Soviet era, Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov wrote Dvenadtsat' stul'ev(The Twelve Chairs, 1928; translated as Diamonds to Sit On: A Russian Comedy of Errors, 1930), a picaresque novel that wa...

Francis Imbuga is undisputably the leading figure in Kenyan theater. As a playwright, actor, and play competition adjudicator, he has been a pacesetter for creative artists, especially for rising playwrights. Imbuga's nine published plays ...

Imre Kertész, recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2002, is a strong, independent voice in contemporary Hungarian literature. He is also a witness to the Holocaust, having survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration...

Increase Mather (1639-1723), American colonial representative, president of Harvard College, and author, was the most prominent member of the second generation in Massachusetts colony. Born in Dorchester, Mass., where his father was first ...

Ingeborg Bachmann ranks with Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Peter Handke as one of the most distinguished Austrian prose writers of the twentieth century and is recognized, along with Günter Eich and Paul Celan, as the most prominen...

Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, educated in science and engineering at Yale and Columbia Universities, entered the work world in 1921 as a goldminer in California. A gifted writer, he shifted to journalism within three years and was actively e...

The d'Aulaires' career as collaborative author-illustrators of children's picture books spans over forty years, and for most of this time their critical reception and continuing sales have ensured them canonic stature, confirmed by the awa...

Although she spent much of her life in the shadow of her celebrated husband. Mary Quayle Innis was an intelligent and capable writer, editor, and academic administrator. She was born Mary Emma Quayle in St. Mary's, Ohio, to Frederick R. Qu...

Although not as well known as Saigy or Bash, the renga poet Sgi is often grouped with them by scholars as one of Japan's three great traveling poets. In addition, he deserves attention as a true master of the genre of linked verse and as p...

Ippolit Fedorovich Bogdanovich--poet, translator, playwright, and journalist during the reign of Catherine the Great--earned an enduring place in Russian literary history with his long verse tale Dushin'ka (1783; revised as Dushen'ka, 1794...