Born in the wool-merchandising city of Bradford, Yorkshire, John Boynton Priestley is the author of more than fourscore works. These include literary criticism, novels, plays, collected short stories, essays, illustrated accounts of social...

John Davys Beresford was a restless and passionate seeker of truth whose quest led him to explore a range of ideas from materialism and realism to psychic research, psychoanalysis, Eastern mysticism, and Christian Science. An underlying id...

A dedicated scholar and a gifted editor of Elizabethan literature, John Dover Wilson contributed to the disciplines of bibliography and textual criticism in England, earning a place among the ranks of the most prominent scholars of the twe...

J. G. Ballard is "perhaps the most important figure to emerge from the British New Wave of science-fiction writers, whose works brought a new degree of literary sophistication and critical respectability to the genre beginning in the late ...

When the poetry of Jeremy Prynne began to appear in England during the 1960s, it secured for itself a reputation and influence among independent and avant-garde poets that was not matched by its reception in the established centers of lite...

The name Michael Innes is synonymous with the witty, academic crime novel beloved in the British tradition of mystery fiction. His Inspector Appleby series, which was published over half a century, set a standard for decades and earned for...

The English philosopher John Langshaw Austin (1911-1960) taught a generation of Oxford students a rigorous style of philosophizing based on language analysis. John Langshaw Austin was born in Lancaster on March 26, 1911. In 1924 he entered...

Known today mainly as the author of a paradox designed to prove the unreality of time--which, even if it has not convinced many, nonetheless served as the starting point for the great majority of philosophical discussions about time in the...

John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), the most powerful American banker of his time, helped build a credit bridge between Europe and America and financially rescued the United States government twice. On April 17, 1837, J. P. Morgan was born i...

The driving passion of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's literary life was to make his "fairystories" so complete in description and detail, so varied in character and action, so expansive in philosophy and religion, as to be "real." He was in e...

Jack Clemo's poetry is more often seen as a triumph against affliction than a literary success. His handicaps--physical, educational, social--have served, in place of criticism, as the measure of his art. Clemo has vigorously opposed this ...

Jack Hodgins is one of the most important talents to emerge in English-Canadian fiction in the decade of the 1970s. Especially since his receiving a Governor General's Award for The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne in 1980, his work has been ...

Jack London has been recognized as one of the most dynamic figures in American literature. Sailor, hobo, Klondike argonaut, social crusader, war correspondent, scientific farmer, self-made millionaire, global traveler, and adventurer, Lond...

As baseball historian Lee Allen wrote in his The Cincinnati Reds: An Informal History (1948), "in the isolationist cocoon of the Midwest, breakfast wasn't ten minutes on a drugstore stool and a dash to punch the time clock. . . . Breakfast...

Jack Spicer was a San Francisco poet who rejected the traditional centers for poetry--academia and the established publishing houses, using the phrase "English Department" as a derogatory description for analytical approaches to poetry and...

Jack Williamson has written steadily since his first sale in 1928 and has had published more than three million words of magazine science fiction, thirty-one novels, and at least eight collections and scholarly books. His works have been m...

Lawrence Pearsall Jacks was already a professor at Manchester College in Oxford and editor for several years of the prestigious Hibbert Journal when he began, at nearly age fifty, his career as a writer. From that date he wrote more than t...

Angela Jackson is generally recognized as the most versatile and richly talented of the writers to emerge from Chicago's Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Writers Workshop during the 1970s. She is the author of three volumes of...

Jacob Bidermann is generally considered the best of the Jesuit dramatists not only in his native Germany but also throughout Europe. Each of his many literary works--which include lyric poems and prose stories, as well as plays--is written...

Jacob August Riis (1849-1914), Danish-born American journalist and slum reformer, created new standards in civic responsibility regarding the poor and homeless in his reporting of New York City slum conditions. Jacob Riis was born May 3, 1...

Joseph Jacobs is remarkable for his learning, especially in folklore, history, ethnology, and anthropology. Also impressive is his productiveness: he wrote, edited, and translated at least twenty-nine books and composed innumerable article...

Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen occupies a distinct place in Scandinavian literature. He is the only Faroese writer to achieve international best-seller status. This status derives from his sole novel, Barbara: Roman (1939; translated, 1948)...

Far from being the ivory-tower dweller that the titles "professor" and "poet" might evoke, Jacques Brault has never been a writer in isolation but part of a larger movement which changed the direction of Quebec literature. Known mainly for...

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida (born 1930), by developing a strategy of reading called "deconstruction," challenged assumptions about metaphysics and the character of language and written texts. Jacques Derrida was born in El Biar,...

Jacques Godbout, one of Quebec's best-known writers, has established a solid reputation for himself both inside and outside his own province. In addition to his long career as a filmmaker, Godbout has published several collections of poetr...