Among modern American critics, M. H. Abrams ranks as one of the foremost defenders of humanistic and historical literary study. His two major works, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) and Natural Supernaturalism (1971), base their historical a...

In 1935 Hermann Hesse called Joachim Maass one of the most talented among the younger generation of German novelists. Maass belongs to the generation of exile authors who left Germany in opposition to the Nazi regime. Unlike Thomas Mann an...

Well known as an Ottawa literary personality and the first woman president of the Canadian Authors' Association, Madge Hamilton Lyons Macbeth was born in Philadelphia, 6 November 1880, the elder daughter of Bessie Maffit and Hymen Hart Lyo...

Philip MacDonald, one of the leading British writers of formal or Golden Age detective stories, remained until his death on 10 December 1980 one of the most mysterious figures in the world of detective fiction. Born in London on Guy Fawkes...

The older brother of Antonio Machado, Manuel was the more famous poet during the early years of the twentieth century. After a stay in Paris he brought the full force of modernism home to Spain with his adaptations in Spanish verse of symb...

While little is known of the life of Roland MacIlmaine, he figures prominently in the development of English Ramism because his was the first translation of the Ramist dialectic into English. Just two years after the Huguenot reformer Petr...

Mack Gordon turned out musical hits for Hollywood with almost machine-like regularity. In the 1930s, with composer Harry Revel, and in the 1940s, with composers Harry Warren and Josef Myrow, he wrote lyrics to nearly 120 hit songs, more th...

Maynard Mack has accomplished what was thought by twentieth-century scholars to be Herculean task, a definitive biography of Alexander Pope. Alexander Pope: A Life (1985) has been unanimously praised for its remarkable breadth of informati...

Isabel Ecclestone MacKay is one of a group of Canadian literary women whose phenomenal output and active public lives are a testimony to the considerable energy that characterized the early twentieth-century female literary community. Alth...

Shena Mackay has created one of the most distinctive bodies of work in late-twentieth-century British fiction. Beginning at an early age, she specialized in writing about the raffish, the eccentric, and the abnormal, sometimes heightening ...

Kenneth Mackenzie is the least known but the first of the "precocious" literary talents to come out of Western Australia. Like Randolph Stow and Tim Winton, he wrote a major work at a remarkably young age: the first draft of his best-known...

Nathaniel Mackey's work displays a deep and idiosyncratic erudition that encompasses many cultures and traditions, but his poetry remains true to an ideal of spontaneous, joyous musicality ultimately derived from improvisational jazz. Mack...

MacKinlay Kantor, in a literary career that covered nearly half a century, produced over thirty novels, several volumes of short stories, and a number of works of nonfiction. Although he utilized various themes and settings for his novels,...

Andrew Macphail was a kind of Canadian Renaissance man whose principal role as a writer was complemented by his roles as soldier and professor. Even though in his professional versatility he demonstrated the negative as well as the positiv...

As a prolific editor, educator, translator, and biographer, Frank MacShane has dedicated his career to documenting the lives and accomplishments of those writers "with substantial followings and many enthusiastic champions," but who are no...

David Madden is a writer who seems unafraid to tackle any project or subject. He has worked in almost every genre--short story, novel, poetry, drama, criticism, film, autobiography--and, until recently, kept as many as four projects going ...

Ben Maddow has gained a reputation as an independent and outspoken artist despite the fact that much of his work as a screenwriter of documentaries and commercial films over the past fifty years has been done pseudonymously, or without cre...

Novelist, philosopher, moralist, and feminist, Madeleine de Scudéry was a figure of enormous influence in the development of French literature in the seventeenth century. Her writings immortalized the style of speech cultivated in t...

Madison Cawein must be included in any consideration of turn-of-the-century American poetry for the same reason which probably prevented his making a greater impact upon it: the sheer quantity of his output. He published more than thirty v...

Effusive critical acclaim can be as debilitating as it is gratifying for young writers. Madison Smartt Bell, named by critics very early in his career as one of the best writers of his generation, has been singularly unaffected by the enth...

Mae West (1893-1980) played the sultry, provocative woman in numerous popular films and plays. Her sexuality and off-color comments made her films and plays the frequent target of censors. West also wrote and produced several plays and rec...

The recent unearthing of Leonor Villegas de Magnón's autobiographies marks still another retrieval effort which allows us a glimpse at women's historical struggles in appropriating a discursive voice to document their own stories. O...

Jón Trausti was the pen name of Gudmundur Magnússon, one of a small host of Icelandic writers who were precursors to such authors as Halldór Laxness and Gunnar Gunnarsson. Jón Trausti's importance rests in his a...

Louise Maheux-Forcier is among the best-known writers of her generation in Quebec and has been at times among the most controversial. She was born in Montreal in 1929, the daughter of Louis-Alfred Maheux, a banker, and his wife Céci...

Vasilii Ivanovich Maikov was one of the most gifted poets of his age. He successfully tried his hand in several literary genres and made pioneering contributions to the mock epic, the fable, and the ode. Maikov's almost complete lack of kn...