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...

Richard Bedford Bennett (1870-1947) was a leader of the Conservative party of Canada and prime minister during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Richard Bedford Bennett was born at Hopewell, New Brunswick, on July 3, 1870, a descendant of...

Blackmore's one famous story gave a name to a brand of cookies, to several British pubs, and to hundreds of baby girls born throughout the English-speaking world near the turn of the century. Lorna Doone (1869) even caused a legendary plac...

Ralph Hale Mottram wrote more than sixty books: novels, short stories, poetry, biography, autobiography, history, tour guides, topography, a study of banking--even this list is not exhaustive. However, he is usually remembered for his firs...

R. K. Narayan (born 1906) is one of the best-known of the Indo-English writers. He created the imaginary town of Malgudi, where realistic characters in a typically Indian setting lived amid unpredictable events. Rasipuram Krishnaswami Nara...

The standard account of R. P. Blackmur's career that few readers have questioned has him beginning as a New Critic producing his best essays, including those on Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, and other poets, in the 1920s...

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his 1975 biography of Edith Wharton, R. W. B. Lewis established himself first in the field of literary criticism. In fact, his influence can be largely traced to a single seminal work. Since its original publ...

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...

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet, philosopher, social reformer, and dramatist who came into international prominence when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. Rabindranath Tagore or simply Rabindranath a...

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...

Rachel Speght, pamphleteer and poet, was an important voice in the gender polemics of the early seventeenth century. She was the first of many authors to respond in print to Joseph Swetnam's Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward and unconstan...

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...

In modern Lithuanian poetry Henrikas Radauskas stands alone. His significance cannot be measured by his contribution to, or leadership of, any school or movement; nor can it be assessed in terms of his relationship to some general scheme i...

In the preface to his autobiography In My Time (1976), Thomas Raddall clearly and honestly describes his own writing: "In my novels and short stories I never sought to teach or to preach. My aim was intelligent entertainment, and if the re...

After Antoine Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity in 1896, there was much speculation as to the nature of the phenomenon. For one thing, it was unclear whether this was an effect produced only by uranium (and, as later discovered by Pie...

Radovan Karadzic (born 1945), the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, pursued a course of "ethnic cleansing" as he struggled to gain independence from the Muslim-controlled Bosnian government in the former Yugoslavia. He has been indicted by the ...

Rae Carruth was born on January 20, 1974. After his mother and step-father divorced when Carruth was fourteen, Rae and his only sibling, sister Samel, were raised by their mother alone in the suburbs of Sacramento, California. Carruth part...

The Spanish literary critic, historian, and jurist Rafael Altamira y Crevea (1866-1951) was, in his generation, the foremost Spanish proponent of the scientific method in history. He devoted his life as a jurist to international peace. Raf...

Rafael Campo's poetry extends many traditions. It belongs to the large community of gay and lesbian poetry and the growing body of Latino literature written in America. A physician-poet, he is the heir of both William Carlos Williams and J...

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina (1891-1961) presided for 31 years over what was probably the most absolute and ruthless dictatorship in Latin America at that time. Coming to power in 1930, he controlled the government of the Dominican Repu...

Rafael Calderón Fournier (born 1949) was elected president of Costa Rica in 1990, succeeding the popular Oscar Arias Sánchez, who had spearheaded the Central American peace plan. Calderón, who served until 1994, was pr...

Ragnar Arthur Granit was born in Helsinki, Finland, on October 30, 1900, the eldest son of Arthur W. Granit, a government forester, and Albertina Helena Malmberg Granit. Since both his parents were of Swedish origin, Granit attended the Sw...

Semen Raich—poet, translator, and journalist—was a significant figure in the Russian literary scene of the 1820s and 1830s. His experiments in the transplantation of Italian poetry on Russian soil played a large role in the devel...