R. Austin Freeman, the son of Richard Freeman and Ann Maria Dunn, was born in Soho on 11 April 1862. His father was a journeyman tailor. Freeman, the youngest of four sons, had been named for his father, but (apparently in his teens) he as...

Robert Cedric Sherriff, son of Herbert Hankin and Constance Winder Sherriff, was born at Kingston-on-Thames, near London, where his father was an employee of the Sun Insurance Company. At seventeen, having been graduated from the Kingston ...

The English historian and philosopher Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943) did important historical research on Roman Britain and made original contributions to esthetics, the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of mind. Born at Coni...

R. M. Hare was the leading British moral philosopher of the last half of the twentieth century. His overarching aim, which he relentlessly pursued, was to demonstrate how rational argumentation about morality is possible. He achieved this ...

When Rupert Hart-Davis agreed to publish Song at the Year's Turning (1955), R. S. Thomas's collection of all his previous poems that he wished to preserve, it was decided that a well-known poetic figure should be asked to draw attention to...

Magnentius Hrabanus Maurus (also known as Raban, Rabanus, and Rhabanus) acquired the final part of his name from his teacher, Alcuin, who gave it to him in honor of Saint Maur, the favorite pupil of Saint Benedict. He was of aristocratic b...

Rachel Louise Carson (1907-1964) was an American biologist and writer whose book Silent Spring aroused an apathetic public to the dangers of chemical pesticides. Rachel Carson was born May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pa. A solitary child, she...

Rachel Field, talented in poetry, drama, and graphic illustration, as well as in fiction, produced from one to four high quality books for children almost every year from 1926 to her death in 1942. One of these, Hitty, Her First Hundred Ye...

Rachilde had a major role in the first Symbolist theaters in Europe, where she was instrumental in getting Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi produced as well as serving as a voice of encouragement for directors, playwrights, and actors. She herself w...

Henri Raczymow, a major contemporary French novelist, is a member of the "second generation" of Holocaust writers--those born after the Holocaust to parents who were survivors and transmitted their experiences to their children. He acknowl...

Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) is best known as the author of the controversial lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Court cases led to the book being banned in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The American verdict was overturn...

The status of Radoy Ralin in Bulgarian literature and culture is enviably paradoxical: his admirers greatly outnumber his readers. Ralin's political satire, coupled with his histrionics, have made him extremely popular even among people wi...

A member of the group of Spanish poets known as the "Generation of 1927," Rafael Alberti (born 1902) was forced to leave his home at the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War. During his nearly 40 years in exile he established a reputation a...

Champion of individualism and humanism during the Romantic period in Germany, Rahel Varnhagen became famous for her literary salon in Berlin during the Napoleonic era. In her day she was considered the German Madame de Staël. She was ...

Stevan Raickovic is a leading representative of intimate, lyric poetry in postwar Serbian literature. A prolific poet, Raickovic emerged on the Yugoslav literary scene in the early 1950s with work that challenged the socialist realism dogm...

What makes Janis Rainis an especially illustrious figure in the history of Latvian literature is the quality and originality of his creative work as well as the key role he played in his country's cultural and political struggle for indepe...

The English philosopher and theologian Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688) was the most important of the Cambridge Platonists, a 17th-century circle which expounded rationalistic theology and ethics. Ralph Cudworth was born in Aller, Somerset, wher...

Early in his career Ralph Gustafson won international attention as an anthologist of Canadian literature. His short stories have appeared in Canadian and American periodicals and anthologies, and since 1960 he has enjoyed a national audien...

The American journalist Ralph Emerson McGill (1898-1969) was the 1959 Pulitzer prize winner for his editorials on race, desegregation, and Southern politics--views that made him and the Atlanta Constitution major symbols of Southern libera...

To Julian Ralph there was no question but that success as a newspaperman depended upon one's being born to it, upon one's having a natural gift or fitness for the work. Of his own calling he had no doubt, as he indicated in recounting an a...

The poetry of Bin Ramke might best be described as unsettling because of its disturbing themes. Ramke's poems offer a vision of a world characterized by empty relationships, doubt, and disillusionment, but the vision is put in perspective ...

The Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet Ramón Maria del Valle Inclán (ca. 1866-1936) was a member of the Generation of '98. Foreign literary trends deeply influenced his work, and he was especially indebted to the modernis...

The publication of his novel The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz (1993) launched Manuel Ramos's literary career as a major writer and contributor to the Chicano/Latino mystery genre. His mystery novels, beginning with The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz and inc...

As a scholar, literary critic, and practicing biographer, Arnold Rampersad explores black culture, artistry, and experience. Racial themes dominate his theoretical writings, and in the two volumes of his biography of Langston Hughes (1986 ...

One of the most respected living horror writers in the world, Ramsey Campbell is also one of the least known, with names like Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Stephen King, and Jonathon Carroll leading in international sales. Yet Campbell has m...