Charles Kenneth Williams was born in Newark, New Jersey. He was educated at Bucknell University and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took the B.A. in 1959. Since 1972 he has been a contributing editor for American Poetry Review....

C. S. Forester is best known for his series of eleven historical novels about the early-nineteenth-century British naval officer Horatio Hornblower. A prolific writer, Forester had produced twenty-four books before he conceived the nautica...

When something is created it is a given that it will be picked apart, dismantled, will evolve into something even greater. It has become the norm in film-making to play by these rules of deformation. Movie makers have stretched the defini...

SOURCE: Goldberg, Leonard S. “‘This Gloom … Which Can Avail Thee Nothing’: Cain and Skepticism.” Criticism 41, no. 2 (winter 1999): 207-32. In the following essay, Goldberg argues that, for Byron, Cain's tragedy “can serve as a ...

SOURCE: “Post-Colonial Pox,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4870, August 2, 1996, p. 23. In the following review, Baker offers a positive assessment of The Calcutta Chromosome. The existence of “research luck” has been often rema...

Rapid influx of fortune seekers to the site of newly discovered gold deposits. In North America, the first major gold strike occurred in California in 1848, when John Marshall, a carpenter building a sawmill for John Sutter, found gold. Wi...

"Constant pleasure," said Voltaire, "is no pleasure." The geyser of gag lines in Neil Simon's latest spurt, California Suite, is virtually incessant…. Occasionally I heard a spot of dialogue which struck me as particularly bright but, whe...

Call It Sleep - Henry Roth - 1934 Introduction Henry Roth's 1934 novel Call It Sleep is based loosely on the author's own experiences growing up as a Jewish American in New York City during the early 1900s. In the novel, David...

SOURCE: Kritzman, Lawrence D. “The Discourse of Desire and the Question of Gender.” In Signs in Culture: Roland Barthes Today, edited by Steven Ungar and Betty McGraw, pp. 99-118. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. In the follow...

Shaw himself wrote that Candida `is a counterpoint to Ibsen's Doll's House, showing that in the real typical doll's house it is the man who is the doll'.Ibsen in A Doll's House(1879)had shown how men treated their wives as inferior creatu...

SOURCE: “Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation,” in Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall, 1987, pp. 193-201. In the following essay, West discusses some of the factors that have influenced the Afro-American li...

The second of the Canopus in Argos series of novels is finer-grained and stronger than Shikasta [the first]…. [The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five] may be read for the pure pleasure of reading it, a tale unencumbered by meta...

Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales is the first film to come my way in which the protagonist is the Fart. And even that has every aural sign of being dubbed in…. Chaucer was not above specific gags about breaking wind, bums, queynts and the ...

[A Canticle for Leibowitz, a] very good, partly humorous historical novel, is about the role of the Church as the preserver of wisdom and spiritual life in dark ages, but its era is in the future rather than the past. (p. 632) The telling o...

Rocky promontory, southwestern coast, Western Cape province, South Africa. It was sighted by the Portuguese navigator Bartolemeu Dias in 1488 on his return voyage to Portugal after finding the southern limits of the African continent. Know...

[Miłosz's] study of the relationship between the creative writer and the oppressive state, The Captive Mind, has become something of a classic and achieved a popularity in the West which his essays and poetry can hardly hope to attain. Yet...

SOURCE: “Translating Caradoc Evans's Welsh English,” in Style, Vol. 30, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 433–44. In the following essay, Hopkins provides a systematic analysis of Evans's use of language and translation, asserting that it profou...

SOURCE: "Making the World Safe for Conventional War," in New York Times Book Review. July 31, 1988, p. 6. In the following review, Lekachman offers praise for The Cardinal of the Kremlin, which he considers "by far the best of the Jack Ryan...

SOURCE: Morley, Sheridan. “Pinter Surprise.” Spectator 285, no. 8990 (25 November 2000): 69-70. In the following review, Morley applauds a production of Pinter's The Caretaker that emphasizes the comic elements of the play. Now here's a...

American historian Carl Lotus Becker (1873-1945) was a proponent of the doctrine of historical relativism. He is best known for his book "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers." Carl Becker was born on a farm near Waterl...

The American astronomer and popularizer of science Carl E. Sagan (1934-1996) studied the surfaces and atmospheres of the major planets, conducted experiments on the origins of life on earth, made important contributions to the debate over ...

Although the output of Danish film director Carl Dreyer (1889-1968) was slim by Hollywood standards, he was nonetheless a master of early cinema. His insistence on artistic independence and the personal, idiosyncratic style of his films ha...

SOURCE: "Puppet's Progress," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 225, No. 4, April, 1970, pp. 88-91. In the following essay, Bacon discusses the cultural and literary impact of Pinocchio. What manner of man—or woman—sits down and deliberately...

The Italian writer and painter Carlo Levi (1902-1975), noted as an anti-Fascist leader during Mussolini's dictatorship, scored a sensational international success with his book "Christ Stopped at Eboli" in 1945. Carlo Levi was born on Nov....

Little consensus has been reached about Carlos Castaneda, whose books detailing his apprenticeship to the Yaqui Indian shaman Don Juan Matus have sold over eight million copies in 17 languages and contributed to defining the psychedelic ...