DATE: 467, part of a Theban tetralogy: Laios, Oedipus, Seven, Sphinx [satyr-play] COMPETITION: won first prize CHARACTERS: Eteokles, Messenger, Antigone, Ismene, Herald CHORUS: women of Thebes SETTING: the palace at Thebes SUMMARY: The Argive army, led by Polyneikes, is at the gates of Thebes. Eteokles rallies the spirits of his terrified people and leads them…
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Aeschylus’ Persians: Summary & Analysis
DATE: 472 COMPETITION: Aeschylus won with Phineus, Persians, Glaukos of Potniai, and Prometheus FireLighter (satyr-play) CHARACTERS: Queen Mother of Persia, Messenger, ghost of Dareios, Xerxes CHORUS: Persian elders SETTING: the tomb of Dareios before the Persian royal palace at Susa SUMMARY: The chorus enter and describe the glory of the great army that the Persian…
Nicholson Baker: Biography & Books
BAKER, Nicholson (born 1957) US writer The minutiae of life, the tiny details that form the background to most fiction, are brought into the foreground in the early novels of Nicholson Baker. Little happens in a conventional narrative sense but the reader’s interest is held by Baker’s playfulness with language, his odd, oblique observations and…
Beryl Bainbridge: Biography & Books
BAINBRIDGE, Beryl (born 1934) British novelist In British music-hall and stand-up comedy, there is a tradition of using flat, unemotional words to recount the disasters that happen to perfectly ordinary people, whose boring lives conceal passions and aspirations the speaker can only hint at. Bainbridge’s short, dialogue-filled novels do the same thing in print. They…
15 Best Autobiography Books
AUTOBIOGRAPHY Writing an autobiography gives you the chance to relive your own life – and to edit it to suit yourself. Although we readers may think that an autobiography allows us inside the writer’s head, this is an illusion. We see only what we are allowed to see, and who is to tell how much…
Paul Auster: Biography & Books
AUSTER, Paul (born 1947) US writer Auster’s first book, Squeeze Play (1982), was a pastiche of a crime novel and his key work, The New York Trilogy (1987, although the individual books appeared separately in 1985 and 1986 as City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room), is also a sly deconstruction job on the…
Jane Austen: Biography & Books
AUSTEN, Jane (1775–1817) British novelist Austen loved the theatre, and the nearest equivalents to her novels, for pace and verve, are the social comedies of such writers as Sheridan or Goldsmith. The kind of novels popular at the time were epic panoramas (like those of Sir Walter Scott), showing the human race strutting and swaggering…
Margaret Atwood: Biography & Books
ATWOOD, Margaret (born 1939) Canadian writer of novels, short stories and poems Atwood is a poet as well as a novelist, and her gifts of precise observation and exact description illuminate all her work. She is fascinated by the balance of power between person and person, and by the way our apparently coherent actions and…
Isaac Asimov: Biography & Books
ASIMOV, Isaac (1920–92) US writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction Asimov published his first story at nineteen, and went on to write over 300 books, ranging from Bible guides and history textbooks to the science fiction novels and stories for which he is best known. Much of his most seminal science fiction work was…
Maya Angelou: Biography & Books
ANGELOU, Maya (born 1928) American autobiographer and poet As a young woman, Maya Angelou was a singer and actress, touring the world in Porgy and Bess and working in New York nightclubs. In the 1960s she became a civil rights activist and spent five years in Africa as a journalist and teacher. Today she is…