Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) was a distinguished Japanese novelist who won the Nobel Prize in literature for exemplifying in his writings the Japanese mind. Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka on June 11, 1899, into a cultured family, his...

As a cosmopolitan man of letters, Inoue Yasushi established a reputation as a poet, journalist, and fiction writer, although he is best known as a novelist. He was a major introducer and interpreter of the Silk Road phenomenon in Japan, an...

The fiction of Chinese American poet and art critic John Yau is best understood as the transformation of a personal dilemma into a formal imperative; that is, his experience of feeling outside both his own ancestry and the American culture...

Of all the plebeian female poets of the eighteenth century, Ann Yearsley, the "milkwoman of Bristol," most repays detailed historical study. Her sizable oeuvre, competence across genres, and varied contemporary critical reception give her ...

Writer, autobiographer, journalist, and public figure, Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova was one of the first women in Europe to hold governmental office. In 1783 she was appointed director of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences a...

Evgeniia Semenovna Ginzburg's memoirs of her eighteen years in the gulag gained international renown both as the first female eyewitness account of the camps and as a literary masterpiece. Ginzburg was born on 20 December 1904 into a famil...

"There were three overwhelming passions which governed the life of Bertrand Russell," said E. Y. "Yip" Harburg in 1970, in a talk in the "Lyrics and Lyricists" series at the 92nd Street Y in New York: The longing for love, the search for k...

Yordan Yovkov has the reputation, along with Elin Pelin, of being one of the two outstanding Bulgarian prose writers in the period between the world wars. Of the many attempts to characterize him, "visionary realist," "dreamer," and "bard ...

A. S. "Doc" Young, who never held a full-time job at a mainstream daily newspaper, established a legacy in sports journalism through his extensive contributions to black weekly newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines and his several bo...

For millions of sports fans--and for more than forty years--Dick Young was the premier sportswriter of the New York Daily News, the newspaper that traditionally has had the largest circulation in New York City. In the 1940s and 1950s the D...

As they neared Karachi, Pakistan, the nakhoda (captain) of the launch, Ghani Adam, turned to Gavin Young and asked, "Why do you travel with us on Al Raza when you can fly"" Young says that he could have answered by quoting Graham Greene ("...

Waldemar Young, one of the most colorful and successful scenarists of his day, was admired in Hollywood for his ability to embellish screenplays with lyrical moods and historical perspectives. Although primarily remembered for his sharp wi...

Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was a Japanese novelist and playwright. He wrote in a multitude of styles, from ornate to plain, and dealt with a variety of subjects drawn from both literary sources and contemporary life. Born and raised in Toky...

Iurii Olesha was a controversial writer whose most productive period was the late 1920s and early 1930s. He also enjoyed a period of posthumous fame in the 1960s with the publication in 1965 of his writer's diary, Ni dnia bez strochki. Iz ...

Yusef Komunyakaa began publishing his poetry during the turbulent 1960s, a period that included what has been called the Second New Negro Movement, suggesting the fervor that characterized the Harlem Renaissance. His early verse appeared i...

Poet, translator, and respected critic of both literature and art, Yves Bonnefoy is widely acknowledged as the most significant and influential figure in contemporary French poetry. He has held visiting professorships at Yale, Princeton, W...

When Yvor Winters's publisher and friend Alan Swallow hailed him in 1940 as the "sage of Palo Alto," he accurately touched on the paradox of Winters's career: the isolation in which he became admired as a poet, a teacher, and critic of poe...