AMBLER, Eric (1909–98) British novelist and screenwriter Ambler worked in advertising, the film industry and the secret service before becoming a full-time novelist. The deadpan style of his thrillers lets him move easily from violence to farce, and he either sets his books in exotic places (the Levant, the Far East, tropical Africa), or makes…
Tag: Biography
Douglas Adams: Biography & Books
ADAMS, Douglas (1952–2001), British novelist Adams began his career as a radio joke-writer, and also worked for the TV science fiction series Doctor Who. He made his name with a series of genial science fiction spoofs, beginning with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979). In this, Earthman Arthur Dent, informed that his planet is…
Peter Ackroyd: Biography & Books
ACKROYD, Peter (born 1949), British writer Ackroyd is a biographer as well as a novelist – his Dickens is 1,200 pages long, sumptuously detailed, and acclaimed – and his fiction benefits from a researcher’s eye for extraordinary and revealing detail about the past. Often, he blends a modern story with a historical one, and characters…
Margery Allingham: Biography & Books
ALLINGHAM, Margery (1905–66), British novelist Allingham wrote ‘crime fiction’ only in the sense that each of her books contains the step-by-step solution of a crime, and that their hero, Albert Campion, is an amateur detective whose amiable manner conceals laser intelligence and ironclad moral integrity. But instead of confining Campion within the boundaries of the…
Isabel Allende: Biography & Books
ALLENDE, Isabel (born 1942), Peruvian-born Chilean novelist Allende’s first novel, The House of the Spirits (1985), was a glowing family tapestry in the magic-realist manner of >> Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, spanning five generations and thronged with larger-than-life characters and supernatural events. She followed this vein in Eva Luna, which is particularly evocative…
Charles Simic: A Brief Biography
Charles Simic has come to be regarded as one of America’s most important poets—a remarkable achievement given that English is not his native language. ‘‘Classic Ballroom Dances’’ is the title poem in Simic’s 1980 collection of poems, Classic Ballroom Dances. The collection won the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of America’s di…
Shakespeare’s Personal Life and the Writing of Hamlet
It is a well-established fact that an author’s material for fiction is largely derived from his/her own personal experiences. And the greatest of English literary artists in the form of William Shakespeare is not an exception to this rule. The underlying thematic current in the play is tragedy. And based on what scholars have documented…