One of the best-known writers of the 1820s and 1830s, Mikhail Nikolaevich Zagoskin started his literary career as a successful playwright and subsequently worked in several other prose genres, but he is remembered primarily as an historica...

Zakes Mda occupies a unique position in the annals of contemporary South African theater. The publication of two novels in 1995--She Plays with the Darkness (winner of the Sanlam Literary Award for 1995) and Ways of Dying (winner of the Ol...

Adela Zamudio is Bolivia's most widely acclaimed female intellectual and a founding figure of its feminist movement. She dedicated herself to writing and teaching and vigorously defended the causes of the Bolivian Liberal Party in public f...

Bernice Zamora's considerable reputation as a poet rests largely on one book, Restless Serpents (1976). Other poems, essays, reviews, and short stories by Zamora appeared in journals and anthologies during the formative years of the Chican...

Ask anyone to name a western writer and chances are the first name to come to mind will be Zane Grey (1872-1939). Considered to be the father of the modern American western novel, Grey was beloved by two generations of readers. His strengt...

Ulrich von Zatzikhoven occupies an uncertain place in medieval German literature of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Overshadowed by the works of such monumental figures as Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, a...

Kanze Zeami (1364-1444), also called Zeami Motokiyo, was a Japanese actor, playwright, and critic. His theoretical works on the art of the No are as justly celebrated as his dramas. It was the great esthete, statesman, and patron of the fi...

In the autobiographical notes accompanying Paul Zech's contributions to the famous verse anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (The Dawn and Dusk of Mankind, 1920), edited by Kurt Pinthus, the poet writes of the self-imposed challenge that c...

Zenna Henderson (nee Chlarson) was born in the foothills of the South Catalina Mountains near Tucson, Arizona. She grew up in a strongly religious atmosphere that has had a profound effect on her writing. Henderson received a B.A. from Ari...

Thomasîn von Zerclære's renown as a poet rests solely on his long didactic work Der welsche Gast (The Italian Guest, 1215-1216). Over the course of the more than fifteen thousand lines of his poem Thomasîn sets forth a co...

Although contemporary critics often praised her poetry for successfully communicating powerful, unaffected emotion and thought, Iuliia Zhadovskaia's prose frequently elicited indifference or even sharp criticism from reviewers. Her briefly...

The literary productions, journalistic writings, and political activism of Imants Ziedonis make him one of the most important personalities on the twentieth-century Latvian cultural scene. Central to his multifaceted creativity is the idea...

Paul Zimmer was born in Canton, Ohio. He attended Kent State University beginning in 1952, but his education was interrupted from 1954 to 1955 by service in the army. He was back at Kent State from 1956 until 1959, but he did not receive h...

Julius Wilhelm Zincgref was a patriot as well as a reformer. He believed that national identity finds its source and sustenance in a common language and in educational and linguistic reforms that guarantee national and religious freedoms. ...

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zinov'ev began his academic career as a philosopher, but political events of the 1960s in Russia led him instead to a different path: that of a belletrist. Forced to emigrate for his radical views and criticism of ...

Native American activist and writer of the Sioux tribe Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (1876-1938) was prominent in the Pan-Indian movement of the 1920s and 1930s. She devoted her life to lobbying for the rights of Native Americans. One of the mos...

Zoë Akins was born in Humansville, Missouri. Raised in a well-to-do and strongly political Republican family, she fell in love with the stage after seeing productions of touring companies at various St. Louis theaters. She wrote her f...

The writings of Zofia Nalkowska are an important contribution in twentieth-century Polish prose. Nalkowska introduced into Polish fiction the modern question of personality; she abandoned traditional realism in favor of the novel of analys...

Charlotte Shapiro Zolotow, born to Louis J. and Ella Bernstein Shapiro on 26 June 1915, in Norfolk, Virginia, studied literature at the University of Wisconsin from 1933 to 1936 before joining the children's book department of Harper and B...

From the 1930s through the 1960s, Zora Neale Hurston was the most prolific and accomplished black woman writer in America. During that thirtyyear period she published seven books, many short stories, magazine articles, and plays, and she g...

Ahmos Zu-Bolton II, one of the most dynamic poets and energetic literary organizers of the 1970s and 1980s, is an artist who applies much of his talent to the community while issuing his own compositions sparingly. His work as a literary p...

Oton Zupancic's origins on the periphery of the Slovene lands and his evolution into Slovenia's central literary figure after World War I parallel his country's road to statehood. The poet was not as politically active as his contemporary ...

Reinmar von Zweter was one of the most highly praised didactic poets in the period between Walther von der Vogelweide and Heinrich Frauenlob. The Meistersinger of the fourteenth century idealized him as one of the Twelve Old Masters (who a...

In 1970 Vogue profiled several notable Coloradans, including Ann Zwinger, an unknown nature writer who had just published her first book, Beyond the Aspen Grove (1970). In a black-and-white photograph, Zwinger smiles among Canadian reed gr...