When William Sydney Porter had his first book, Cabbages and Kings (1904), published he had only six more years to live. But, with his identity hidden beneath the legendary pen name O. Henry, the fame of his short stories was already firmly...

Postwar Japanese literature has been characterized by the emergence of a large number of woman writers as major figures in the literary establishment. Among these ba Minako occupies a prominent position. Since winning the 1967 Akutagawa Pr...

In Camps in the Caribbees: The Adventures of a Naturalist in the Lesser Antilles (1880), lamenting the disorder and lack of cleanliness of the culinary facilities in one of his rustic campsites on the island of Dominica, Frederick Albion O...

Charlotte Grace O'Brien was an energetic and strong-willed Irish political reformer and writer who recorded many of her experiences, both political and personal, in her poetry. O'Brien's poems span the middle ground between traditional, se...

Octave Crémazie (1827-1879) was a Canadian poet who was closely linked to the emergence of French-Canadian literature. Known as Octave, Claude-Joseph-Olivier Crémazie was born on Nov. 8, 1827, and educated in Quebec. He becam...

Best known for his controversial novels and plays, Octave Mirbeau remains to be rediscovered as a short-fiction writer and art critic. He championed the causes of unknown artists who were destined to become giants in their fields: first an...

The Mexican diplomat, playwright, and essayist, Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was internationally regarded as one of the principal poets of the twentieth century. His work was formally recognized in 1990 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in li...

During his short life, Oda Sakunosuke reinvented the comic novel of urban manners and customs in Japan and had a lasting influence on the development of post--World War II Japanese fiction, especially in its comic, absurdist, and satiric a...

Prince Aleksandr Ivanovich Odoevsky, a descendant of the ancient clan of the Rurikids, was born on 26 November 1802 in St. Petersburg. An illustrious ancestor, Prince Ivan Vasil'evich, had served as president of the Votchinaiia Kollegiia, ...

Julia O'Faolain, novelist and short story writer, is considered one of the most accomplished Irish writers of her generation and one of the few with a truly international background. While she is at her best in some darkly comic short stor...

Ogden Nash (1902-1971) was arguably one of the most commercially successful English-language poets of the twentieth century. Nash's verse skewered the pretensions of the modern middle class existence and gave voice to the inner seethings o...

Desmond O'Grady has enjoyed for more than twenty-five years a productive international career as a poet and educator. He has been one of a group of Irish poets who, after Denis Devlin and Patrick Kavanagh, have worked to bring Irish poetry...

Howard O'Hagan has been described as "The writer that CanLit forgot." His major novel, Tay John, was first published in London in 1939, where its effect was lost in the turmoil of war. It was republished in New York in 1960 but still attra...

John O'Keeffe began his career as a singer and actor in Ireland, appearing both in Dublin and in the provincial theaters. He soon began writing songs, comic sketches, and pantomimes; by the time he moved permanently to London in 1781 he wa...

Isidore Chukwudozi Oghenerhuele Okpewho is the best example in Africa of the writer who combines steadfast commitment to scholarship with a deep devotion to art, especially the art of fictional narrative, which he has taken up and made his...

The wide range of eighteenth and nineteenth-century slave narratives—Anglo-African, French, Caribbean, North and South American, and Cuban—maps a long, diverse journey from slavery to freedom. The tradition roots twentieth-cent...

It has been said of Fremont Older that he influenced more journalists during his lifetime than any other man. His efforts in social, governmental, and penal reform are as legendary as his editorial exploits. For forty years, second only to...

The Norwegian-American writer Ole Edvart Rölvaag (1876-1931) was a powerful, realistic chronicler of the lives of Norwegian immigrants on the farms of the midwestern United States. His work is grimly pessimistic. Ole Edvart Rölva...

Juan E. O'Leary was a dedicated educator, an essayist, a journalist, an historian, a politician, and a poet. He was one of the earliest twentieth-century Paraguayan poets, and he was also one of the founders of modern Paraguayan culture. C...

Olive Custance is best known for her association with some of the decadent era's most notable people: the publisher John Lane, the poet Richard Le Gallienne, the artist Aubrey Beardsley, and one of the most notorious men of the 1890s--her ...

Manuel Zapata Olivella occupies a position of importance because of his straightforward approach in the areas of protest and ethnicity within the Latin-American perspective. Although it is popular to speak of the magic of realism as a back...

The most influential Baptist minister of revolutionary South Carolina, Oliver Hart represents the union of evangelical religion and political rebellion. Born in Westminster Township, Bucks Country, Pennsylvania, to John and Eleanor Crispin...

Oliver Onions changed his name to George Oliver in 1918 but always signed his original surname to his popular short stories and novels. His wife was the popular romantic novelist Berta Ruck; she was born in India under the Raj in 1878 and ...

For nearly a quarter of a century, from the publication in 1858 of The Autocrat of the Breakfast- Table until his resignation from the Harvard Medical School in 1882, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes dominated the intellectual life of Boston and ...

With the publication in 1958 of his first novel, Claude Ollier was immediately associated with the group of writers who came to be known in the 1950s and 1960s as the New Novelists. Although these writers (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor...