(The following essay discusses Marshall Field III with his son, Marshall Field IV and his grandson, Marshall Field V.) Marshall Field III, IV, and V, heirs to the fortune of the first Marshall Field, a retailing magnate, were important fig...

V. S. Pritchett (1900-1997) was an English short story writer, novelist, literary critic, journalist, travel writer, biographer, and autobiographer. Though not an innovator in terms of style, he was nevertheless an interesting and highly c...

Vachel Lindsay's considerable loss of reputation in American letters is a continuing theme in critical evaluations published during the 1970s and 1980s. Ironically, the theme is illustrated, in part, not only by the meager number of articl...

Ludvík Vaculík played a major role in the life of postwar Czechoslovakia as a journalist and a writer. Starting out as an idealistic communist, he helped to promote socialism in his country in the 1950s. As an energetic and a...

Judita Vaiciunaite emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century as one of Lithuania's most prominent women poets. Filled with vibrant personal reflections, her poetry expresses the complicated structure and evolution of human emotio...

Petr Vail' and Aleksandr Genis, who started out as journalists in their native Latvia, pioneered a brand of writing that came to be known as "essayism," a specific genre combining a lyrical style with methods used in cultural studies. The ...

Gina Valdés's prose and poetry, characterized by a tension between her social concerns and a strong metaphysical current, place her at an important crossroads within Chicano letters. She is fusing trends that have been central to Ch...

The form of Patrizia Valduga's poetry--its most striking component--attracts the attention of critics and readers. Her rich, ponderous, minutely examined language has been full of philological refinements and neologisms since the publicati...

Valentin Kataev, a highly prominent Soviet writer, wrote fiction, plays, autobiographical essays, and poetry. He was founding editor of the journal Iunost' (Youth) in 1955 and served as its editor in chief until 1962. Kataev enjoyed a succ...

Early-twentieth-century biographers of Diego de Valera such as Lucas de Torre y Franco-Romero and José Antonio de Balenchana tend to dismiss Valera as little more than a pedant and a brigand. This portrait has been extensively revis...

The Argonautica (The Argonauts, a.d. 92/93), Valerius Flaccus's only known poem, is one of the last important epics of imperial Rome. It is one of three large-scale epics to have survived from the Flavian era (the other two are Statius's T...

Paolo Valesio, professor of Italian at Yale University, is a widely known scholar in the fields of linguistics, literary criticism, critical theory, and rhetoric. He is also a novelist, poet, and short story writer. A good point of departu...

As is the case with the work of many women writers, Luz Valle's poetry has been mentioned in passing by most Guatemalan literary historians, but her texts remain little studied. Although she was not a prolific poet, the value of her contri...

From its first manifestations, Armando Vallejo's poetic voice has shown his love for life and political action. In spite of its technical or formal inexpertness, his early poetry was heard as an embodiment of an authentic new voice and not...

Long before Albert Camus's L'Homme révolté (1951; translated as The Rebel, 1953), Jules Vallès, through the example of his life and literature, articulated boldly and firmly a revolutionary "non." His "non! à un...

Aleksandr Vampilov wrote only a handful of plays, but they defined his era sufficiently that "Vampilovian theater" and "the Vampilov hero" became standard phrases. In his life and his writing he expressed the hopes and frustrations of a ge...

Nettie Palmer was the most important nonacademic critic in Australia from the mid 1920s through the 1930s. Essayist, biographer, diarist, linguist, and poet, she was one of the most humane and sensitively perceptive writers of her time. At...

The career of Robert L. Vann combined journalism, law, politics, and civil rights activism with varying degrees of success. Vann rose from rural Southern poverty to become a struggling black lawyer in Pittsburgh, and fell into journalism w...

Although Blanca Varela's publications have been relatively few, her verses have been recognized by critics as among the most poignant expressions of the human condition. In 2001 she was awarded the Premio Octavio Paz; she was the fourth pe...

Svetlana Vasilenko belongs to the generation of Russian writers who began their literary careers in the interregnum between the late Stagnation--the end of Leonid Il'ich Brezhnev's rule--and perestroika, when Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev w...

Vasilii Grossman was a novelist and short-story writer who in his own way chronicled the tragic and bitter history of Russia in the twentieth century. His works explore the complicated events of the Russian Civil War and especially the Naz...

A director of five award-winning movies, a popular and prizewinning actor in more than twenty motion pictures in just sixteen years, and a writer with more than 130 short stories, 12 works for stage and screen, and 3 full-length novels to ...

Aleksandr Pushkin, unquestionably Russia's greatest poet, wrote of Vasilii Zhukovsky: “I am not his successor, but rather his pupil. . . . Nobody has had or will have as powerful and varied a poetic voice as his.” Zhukovsky was i...

The writing of Richard Vásquez straddles the realms of journalism and fiction, Mexico and the United States, and fact and fantasy. His contributions as a writer must be considered in terms of the explosive development of the city of...

Vaclav Havel has played a major role in the cultural and political life of Czechoslovakia—and, after the breakup of that country in 1993, of the Czech Republic—throughout the second half of the twentieth century. During the Sta...