(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...

"Half the writer's work . . . is the discovery of his subject." With this statement V. S. Naipaul declares his purpose as a writer and the object of his craft—the imaginative shaping of experience into an affecting and intelligent na...

Aimé Pelletier, who has written all of his works under the pseudonym Bertrand Vac, is a Montreal surgeon. Vac's literary career, which has spanned several decades, is marked by his constant attempt at various writing styles and diff...

Ojars Vacietis is generally considered one of Latvia's most talented poets of the second half of the twentieth century. He almost single-handedly revived interest in poetry in Latvia following World War II and played a key role in maintain...

Ekman was a member of a consortium of Scandinavian scientists who transformed the study of oceanography and meteorology at the turn of the twentieth century. Ekman's father, Fredrik Laurentz Ekman, was an oceanographer, but Vagn Ekman's gr...

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 ...

Val Logsdon Fitch was born to Fred B. and Frances M. (Logsdon) Fitch on March 10, 1923, on a cattle ranch near Merriman, Nebraska, a short distance from the South Dakota border. After an injury to the elder Fitch on the ranch, the family m...

Valdemar Poulsen was a Danish engineer who invented the magnetic recorder in 1898. His ideas were the basis of magnetic recording and led to crucial developments in communications and computer technology. Born in Copenhagen on November 23,...

Luis Valdez (born 1940) was founder of the El Teatro Campesino in California and is thought to be the father of Mexican American theater. Playwright and director Luis Valdez is considered the father of Mexican American theater. In 1965 he ...

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...

Valentina Tereshkova (born 1937) was the first woman in space, orbiting the earth 48 times in Vostok VI in 1963. Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman in space. Tereshkova took off from the Tyuratam Space Station in the Vostok VI in 196...

Diego Valeri represents a twentieth-century continuation of the classical lyric tradition in its purest form. Peripheral to contemporary ideological crises, his voice is imbued with the music and Arcadian imagery of Anacreon, Petrarch, Ang...

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...

As a Catholic poet José María Valverde is broadly representative of the literary situation in post-civil-war Spain. His poetry of the 1940s and 1950s appeals, in conversational language, to the general reader's concern with d...

During his undergraduate years at Harvard, Van Wyck Brooks had ambitions of becoming a poet. His poetry appeared regularly in the Harvard Advocate, and in 1905, he and another aspiring writer, John Hall Wheelock, privately published a smal...

Sutton Vane is remembered for one notable dramatic work, Outward Bound, that received a great deal of critical attention and substantial runs in London and New York in 1923 and 1924. In 1938 the play was revived in New York for another lon...

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...

The Italian mining engineer and metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480-1539) is famous for his important book, De la pirotechnica. Vannoccio Biringuccio was born in Siena, where he became embroiled in politics because of his friendship f...

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...