Literature Study Set

Zeami

(1363-1443), also called Kanze Motokiyo: The second master of the Kanze theatrical school, which had been founded by his father, he is regarded as the greatest playwright of the No theater. He provided 30 to 40 of the approximately 230 plays in the modern repertoire. He revised the works of his father Kan'ami, such as Wind in the Pines, and wrote a number of his own dramas, including the samurai play Atsumori. Also a drama critic, he established the aesthetic standards by which plays have been judged ever since. His Fushi kaden (The Transmission of the Flower of Acting Style) is a manual for his pupils.

Matsuo Basho

(1644-1694), a pseudonym of Matsuo Munefusa: Generally acknowledged as the master of the haiku form, the most notable influences on his work were Zen Buddhism and his travels throughout Japan. He is noted for works like The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no hosomichi), which includes descriptions of local sights in both prose and haiku. He took his pseudonym from the name of the simple hut where he retired: Basho-an, which means "Cottage of the Plaintain Tree."

Chikamatsu Monzaemon

(1653-1725): He was one of Japan's first professional dramatists (as opposed to playwright-actors). Originally named Sugimori Nobumori, he wrote more than 150 plays for both the bunraku (puppet theater) and the kabuki (popular theater). His scripts fall into two categories: historical romances (jidaimono) and domestic tragedies (sewamono). One of his most popular plays was The Battles of Coxinga, an historical melodrama about an attempt to re-establish the Ming dynasty in China. He is also largely responsible for developing the sewamono (contemporary drama on contemporary themes) in the joruri, a style of chanted narration adapted to bunraku.

Phillis Wheatley

(1753-1784) was born in Africa and brought to the United States as a slave in 1761; (insert last name) was her slave name. She was freed in the 1770s shortly after the release of her collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Her poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America" says that "mercy" brought her from her "Pagan land" and taught her "benighted soul" about God and Christian redemption. She praised George Washington in her poem "To His Excellency General Washington."

Mary Shelley

(1797-1851, United Kingdom). As the daughter of the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women), and the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe (insert last name), she was a product of both the Enlightenment and Romantic eras. Her 1818 novel Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus helped to lay the groundwork for modern science fiction by contrasting Enlightenment ideas of progress with a Romantic conception of nature as an untameable force. The idea for Frankenstein came to her while she was taking part in a friendly writing competition at Lord Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. Inspired by Luigi Galvani's experiments in "animal electricity," she wrote about the Swiss scientist Victor Frankenstein, who reanimates dead tissue and creates a "monster." This attempt to control nature fails, as the monster murders Frankenstein's brother William, friend Henry Clerval, and wife Elizabeth before fleeing to the Arctic. Frankenstein pursues his creation, and tells his story to the explorer Robert Walton before dying. She presented an even bleaker scenario in her 1826 novel The Last Man, which describes Lionel Verney's efforts to survive a 21st-century plague that devastates human civilization.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

(1804-1864) An American author whose stories are often set in New England. In "The Minister's Black Veil," He wrote about Reverend Hopper, who stubbornly refuses to take off the title article of clothing. He also wrote "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," in which the title character shows off water from the Fountain of Youth. Both of those stories are included in his collection Twice-Told Tales. In "Rappaccini's Daughter," the title character is Beatrice, the child of a scientist who grows poisonous plants, who herself becomes poisonous. After Giovanni falls in love with Beatrice, he brings her an antidote so they can be together, but, instead of curing her, the antidote kills Beatrice. That story appears alongside "The Birth-Mark" and "Young Goodman Brown" in the collection Mosses from an Old Manse.

Edgar Allan Poe

(1809-1849) An American author known for his works in the detective fiction, science fiction, and horror genres. In "The Cask of Amontillado," the narrator, Montresor, lures Fortunato into catacombs with the promise of the title wine, but ends up chaining Fortunato to a wall and burying him alive due to unnamed "insults." He also wrote "The Tell-Tale Heart," in which an unnamed narrator murders an old man with a "vulture-eye" and buries him beneath his floorboards. However, while being questioned by police, the guilty narrator hears the constant beating of his victim's heart, and orders them to "tear up the planks" to reveal the body. Other short stories by him include "The Gold-Bug," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Fall of the House of Usher."

Jules Verne

(1828-1905, France). He offered a brighter vision of technological progress in his novels of adventure, many of which doubled as works of popular science. In his 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Lidenbrock explains contemporary theories of geology and paleontology as he leads an expedition that travels beneath the Earth's crust from Iceland to the Italian volcano Stromboli. He later wrote the 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, whose narrator Pierre Aronnax offers extensive commentary on marine biology while accompanying the mysterious Captain Nemo on a voyage in the submarine Nautilus. In a more realistic vein, he considered the possibilities presented by new forms of transportation in the 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days, which describes a trip taken by the Englishman Phileas Fogg and his French valet Jean Passepartout. During his travels, which are undertaken to win a bet with members of the Reform Club, Fogg falls in love with an Indian woman named Aouda, and is pursued by the Scotland Yard detective Fix, who mistakenly believes that Fogg is a bank robber. Fogg ultimately wins his bet to return to the Reform Club within 80 days of his departure, with the help of an extra day gained by traveling eastward.

Guy de Maupassant

(1850-1893) A French author who frequently used ironic endings in his stories, including "The Necklace." In that story, Mathilde Loisel borrows the expensive-looking title piece of jewelry from Madame Forestier, and loses it at a high-class party. In order to afford a 36,000 francs replacement, she and her husband sell everything they own. Ten years later, Madame Forestier recognizes Mathilde on the street and informs her that the necklace was a fake. In "Boule de Suif," translated into English as "Ball of Fat," the title character is a prostitute who is on a carriage leaving Prussian-occupied Rouen. The travelers are detained by the Prussians until Boule de Suif sleeps with an officer, for which she is judged for the remainder of the trip even though her fellow passengers pressured her to do so.

José Martí

(1853-1895, Cuba): Best known as a poet and a revolutionary, he fought tirelessly for Cuban independence. Imprisoned at age sixteen and exiled from the island several times, he settled in New York for the last fifteen years of his life, where he wrote essays on Walt Whitman, Jesse James, and the threat of Latin American economic dependence on the United States. His Ill-Omened Friendship (1885) is considered the first Spanish modernist novel, and his poetry collections include Our America and Simple Verses, which contains the poem "Guantanamera," the inspiration for several songs. He was killed in a skirmish at Dos Ríos while participating in an invasion with other Cuban exiles.

O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)

(1862-1910)An American short story author known for his twist endings. He included many of his stories in his collections Cabbages and Kings and The Four Million. In his story "The Gift of the Magi," the married couple Jim and Della exchange Christmas gifts. Della sells her hair to Madame Sofronie and buys a gold pocket-watch chain, while Jim sells his watch in order to buy a set of combs, rendering each other's gifts useless. He also wrote "The Ransom of Red Chief," in which Ebenezer Dorset's son, the title character, is kidnapped by Bill and Sam, who intend to hold him for ransom. However, "Red Chief" annoys his captors so much that they pay Mr. Dorset to give him his son back.

Herbert George Wells

(1866-1946, United Kingdom). He used speculative fiction to explore the social issues of his day from a left-wing perspective. In the 1895 novella The Time Machine, he wrote about a "Time Traveller" who visits the year AD 802,701, and learns that humanity has diverged into two different species—the surface-dwelling Eloi, who are gentle and beautiful but intellectually limited, and the subterranean Morlocks, who resemble apes but are strong and clever enough to use the Eloi as livestock. The Time Traveller speculates that the Eloi are descended from aristocrats who were once served by the ancestors of the Morlocks. After writing about time travel, he helped to establish another of science fiction's key themes by depicting an alien invasion in the 1897 novel The War of the Worlds. The anonymous narrator of The War of the Worlds observes a Martian spaceship that lands in Surrey, and flees the "Tripods" and "Black Smoke" that the Martians use as weapons in the conquest of Earth. The invaders easily overcome human resistance, but eventually perish from lack of immunity to Earth microbes. He also wrote several novels about researchers who use science to pursue unethical goals. In his 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, the shipwrecked Edward Prendick discovers that the title vivisectionist performs painful experiments to transform animals into human-like "Beast Folk." A year later he published The Invisible Man, which centers on a student of physics named Griffin who plans to use his invisibility to enact a "reign of terror." However, Griffin's invisibility makes it difficult for him to exist in society (he must cover himself with clothes and thick bandages if he wishes to be seen), and he is eventually killed by an angry crowd.

Gabriela Mistral

(1889-1957, Chile; Nobel 1945): The first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, she was actually named Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, but took her pen name from the Italian and French poets Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral respectively. At first a prominent educator, she wrote "Sonnets of Death" (1914) after the suicide of her fiancé. Those sonnets later appeared in her most famous collection, Desolation (1922). A native Chilean, she served as a diplomat both in the United States and Europe. Langston Hughes translated a portion of her poetry into English just after she died.

Zora Neale Hurston

(1891-1960) set many of her works in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is about Janie Crawford, whose sexual awakening is compared to the blossoming of a pear tree. Janie successively marries Logan Killicks, Jody Starks, and Tea Cake; when Tea Cake attacks her after being bitten by a rabid dog during a hurricane, she shoots him. She was also a prominent anthropologist, collecting African-American folklore in books like Mules and Men. Her work was relatively unknown until 1975, when Alice Walker published the article "In Search of (insert author name here)."

Akutagawa Ryunosuke

(1892-1927): His mother died insane while he was a child, and his father was a failure who gave him up to relatives. Despite this inauspicious childhood, his 1915 short story "Rashomon" brought him into the highest literary circles and started him writing the macabre stories for which he is known. In 1927 he committed suicide by overdosing on pills, and his suicide letter "A Note to a Certain Old Friend" became a published work. "Rashomon" also was key to his international fame, as in 1951 Kurosawa Akira made a film entitled Rashomon, though the film's plot is more based on his other short story "In a Grove." One of Japan's two most prestigious literary prizes is named for him; it is awarded for the best serious work of fiction by a new Japanese writer.

Aldous Huxley

(1894-1963, United Kingdom). He belonged to a prominent family of British intellectuals that included the Victorian evolutionist Thomas Henry (insert last name). Although he depicted his own social milieu in novels such as Crome Yellow and Point Counter Point, he is best known for writing about a dystopian "World State" in the 1932 novel Brave New World. Extrapolating from Henry Ford's model of industrial production and contemporary advances in biochemistry, he imagined a world in which the fictional "Bokanovsky's Process" is used to create human clones, which are then modified to posses different intellectual abilities, and sorted into social castes named after the Greek letters Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Inhabitants of the World State enjoy a prosperous existence, immersive entertainment known as Feelies, and the drug soma, but lack family connections and spiritual fulfillment. The shallow pleasures of the World State are contrasted with the ideals of John the Savage, a young man who grew up on a New Mexico reservation. John is initially delighted to meet the World State residents Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne, and excitedly quotes the "Brave New World" speech from Shakespeare's play The Tempest. However, John soon grows disgusted with "civilization." After the World Controller Mustapha Mond forbids John from living on an isolated island with the aspiring writer Helmholtz Watson, John unsuccessfully tries to retreat from society, and eventually hangs himself.

Ernest Hemingway

(1899-1961) An American author many of whose stories feature the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams. Adams appears in "Big Two-Hearted River," in which he goes on a fishing trip to the town of Seney, Michigan. In "Hills Like White Elephants," a woman named Jig talks with a man at a train station, considering an unnamed "procedure," which is implied to be an abortion. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" begins with the description of a frozen leopard carcass; its protagonist, Harry, is a writer who dies of gangrene while on an African safari with his wife Helen. He also apocryphally wrote a six-word story consisting of the words "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Kawabata Yasunari

(1899-1972): Recipient of the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, he was the first Japanese author to win the Nobel. His works combine classic Japanese values with modern trends, and often center on the role of sex in people's lives. Many of his short stories are only a few pages long, a form given the name "palm-of-the-hand." He is best known for three novels: Thousand Cranes, based on the tea ceremony and inspired by The Tale of Genji; The Sound of the Mountain, about the relationship of an old man and his daughter-in-law; and Snow Country, about an aging geisha. A friend of Mishima Yukio, he was also associated with right-wing causes and openly protested the Cultural Revolution in China. He committed suicide two years after Mishima.

Miguel Asturias

(1899-1974, Guatemala; Nobel 1967): He left his native Guatemala in 1923 to study in Paris. There he discovered Mayan mythology, and translated the Popol Vuh into Spanish; the theme would pervade his work, such as 1963's Mulata de tal. He most famous novel, El señor presidente (1946), was a satire against the oppressive Guatalemalan dictatorship. He also completed a trilogy that blasted exploitation by the American-led United Fruit Company, and the short-story collection Weekend in Guatemala (1956), based on the CIA-led overthrow of president Jacobo Arbenz's liberal government.

Vladimir Nabokov

(1899-1977) was a Russian-American author. His 1955 novel Lolita depicts Humbert Humbert's obsession with the adolescent Ramsdale resident Dolores Haze, whom Humbert nicknames "Lolita." Humbert becomes Lolita's stepfather by marrying her mother Charlotte, who soon dies. Lolita and Humbert travel the U.S. before Humbert enrolls Lolita at the Beardsley School for Girls. There, Lolita is cast in a play written by Clare Quilty, and devises a plan of escape. In his highly meta-fictional novel Pale Fire, a 999-line poem of the same name by John Shade is the subject of a lengthy commentary by the scholar Charles Kinbote. However, Kinbote's notes are more concerned with himself than with the poem, revealing that he thinks of himself as King Charles, the exiled monarch of the land of Zembla. His other books include the novels Ada, or Ardor, which recounts an incestuous relationship; Invitation to a Beheading, about the condemned prisoner Cincinnatus, and The Defense, a Russian-language novel about the chess player Aleksandr Luzhin. In his memoir Speak, Memory, he wrote about his wife Vera and his scientific interest in butterflies.

Jorge Luis Borges

(1899-1986, Argentina): One-quarter English, he learned that language before he learned Spanish. Educated in Europe during World War I, he met a circle of avant-garde poets in Spain, which inspired him to found the ultraismo movement and publish the collection Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923) when he returned to Argentina. While working in a library, he developed his greatest short stories, collected in A Universal History of Infamy (1935), Ficciones (1944), and The Aleph (1949). By his fifties, a disorder inherited from his father had taken his eyesight, but in 1962 he completed the influential story collection Labyrinths.

Langston Hughes

(1901-1967) was a leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance. His poems "I, Too" and "Let America Be America Again" address America's racist history and the feelings of exclusion it causes. His poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" invokes world rivers like the Euphrates and the Congo and repeats the line "My soul has grown deep like the rivers," while his poem "The Weary Blues" describes a blues performance on Lenox Avenue in Harlem. He also wrote the poem "Harlem," which asks "What happens to a dream deferred?" and which inspired the title of Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun.

George Orwell

(1903-1950, United Kingdom). He had the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, and he condemned the totalitarian government of Joseph Stalin in the fantasy Animal Farm and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. His speculative fiction was part of a wide-ranging body of work that also included attacks on British colonialism (the essay "Shooting an Elephant" and the novel Burmese Days), first-hand accounts of war (Homage to Catalonia) and poverty (Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier), and works of cultural criticism (the essay "Politics and the English Language"). After taking part in the Spanish Civil War and growing alarmed at the authoritarian nature of Russian communism, he wrote the 1945 novel Animal Farm as an allegory of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Animal Farm describes barnyard animals who revolt against their owner, and try to create a more equitable society under the leadership of the pig Snowball, who develops principles of "Animalism" such as "Four legs good, two legs bad." However, Snowball is soon ousted by his fellow pig Napoleon, who exploits the other animals, sends the horse Boxer to be slaughtered, and degrades the principles of Animalism to "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Four years later, he imagined a future Britain subsumed into Oceania, a superpower under the harsh rule of "Big Brother", in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston Smith and his lover Julia try to rebel against Big Brother, but are tortured into compliance in the Ministry of Love. Nineteen Eighty-Four also described the distortion of the English language for political purposes ("Newspeak"), and introduced many words and phrases that are still used with reference to oppressive governments (thoughtcrime, doublethink, memory hole, "we've always been at war with Eastasia," "war is peace," "Big Brother is watching you").

Pablo Neruda

(1904-1973, Chile; Nobel 1971): Born Neftali Reyes, he adopted the surname of the 19th-century Czech poet Jan (insert last name). Gabriela Mistral was the head of his school in the small city Temuco. In 1923 his best-known work, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was published, which led to diplomatic appointments. As a penniless consul in Burma in the 1930s, he wrote the surrealist collection Residence on Earth. He served in the Chilean senate in the 1940s, though government opponents forced him into exile over his Communist views. Crossing the Andes on horseback inspired his epic Canto general (1950). He died of cancer days after his friend Salvador Allende was deposed.

Richard Wright

(1908-1960) wrote the 1940 bestseller Native Son. The protagonist of that novel, Bigger Thomas, gets a job as a chauffeur for Mary Dalton, but he suffocates her with a pillow for fear of being discovered in bed with her. Bigger later rapes and murders his girlfriend Bessie, and is ultimately sentenced to death for the murders. His memoir Black Boy describes his youth in the Jim Crow South and his move to Chicago, where he joins and then becomes disillusioned with the Communist Party. He also wrote Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of novellas including "Big Boy Leaves Home" and "Fire and Cloud."

Octavio Paz

(1914-1998, Mexico; Nobel 1990): A prominent poet and essayist, he supported leftist causes in Mexico; he fought briefly for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. He published the poetry collection Luna silvestre at age 19, and his 584-line poem The Sun Stone deals with the planet Venus, an important symbol to the Aztecs. While studying in Los Angeles, he observed flamboyantly-dressed Mexican-American pachucos ("zoot-suiters"), who inspired him to write about Mexico and its Native American/mestizo heritage in his pivotal essay collection The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Another prose work, In the Light of India (1997), reflected his part-(East) Indian heritage.

Shirley Jackson

(1916-1965) An American short story author and novelist known for her works in the mystery and horror genres. Her most famous short story is "The Lottery," whose publication in The New Yorker was extremely controversial, garnering her hate mail. The story begins with village children gathering stones, foreshadowing the end result of the title event. Mr. Summers tells all of the village families to draw slips of paper from a black box, and Bill Hutchinson's has a black spot. The entire Hutchinson family then has to draw, and Tessie receives the black spot, meaning she has "won" the title event. The story ends with her yelling "It isn't fair" as the townspeople stone her to death.

Gwendolyn Brooks

(1917-2000) became the first African-American person to win a Pulitzer in 1950 for her poetry collection Annie Allen. Many of her works reflect her experiences in Bronzeville, a neighborhood on Chicago's South Side that became a center of African-American life during the Great Migration. Her best-known poem, "We Real Cool," is set at the Golden Shovel and consists of three-word sentences starting with "We," such as "We / Lurk late" and "We / Jazz June." Though primarily a poet, she also wrote the novel Maud Martha.

Ralph Ellison

(1919-1994) is best known for his novel Invisible Man, whose unnamed narrator earns a college scholarship by participating in a degrading Battle Royal; after being kicked out of college and working at the Liberty Paint company (known for its pure white paint), he joins a political group called the Brotherhood. At the climax of the novel, the narrator is nearly lynched by a Black nationalist named Ras the Destroyer during riots in Harlem. His unfinished second novel was published posthumously in a long version called Three Days Before the Shooting... and a short version called Juneteenth.

J.D. Salinger

(1919-2010) An American author best known for the novel The Catcher in the Rye. Many of his short stories featured the Glass family, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in which Seymour and Muriel Glass are on vacation at a Florida resort. Seymour meets a young girl named Sybil Carpenter and talks with her about the title creatures, before returning to his hotel room and shooting himself. In "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor," the narrator Sergeant X replies to a wedding invitation with two distinct memories; in the first, he meets Esmé, an English orphan, during a church choir practice, and in the second, set during his time as a soldier in Bavaria, he receives a letter containing a wristwatch from Esmé. Both of those stories are included in his collection Nine Stories.

Isaac Asimov

(1920-1992, United States). Along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was one of genre science fiction's "Big Three" writers. During the 1930s' and 1940s' "Golden Age" of science fiction pulp magazines, he worked closely with Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell Jr. to create stories such as "Nightfall," which describes a rare moment of darkness on a planet with multiple suns, and "Robbie," the first of his many works about robots with positronic brains. (The word "robot" was introduced by the Czech author Karel Čapek in the 1920 play R.U.R., which depicts the worldwide uprising of "Rossum's Universal Robots"). Before him, most stories about artificial life had followed the template established by Shelley's Frankenstein, in which a scientist who tries to usurp God's power to create life is ultimately destroyed by his own creation. He challenged this trope by creating the "Three Laws of Robotics," which robots in his stories are obligated to follow: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. By using these laws in dozens of stories (some of which were collected in the book I, Robot), he helped to promote a conception of robots as useful machines rather than inhuman monsters. He is also known for his Foundation series, which was inspired by Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The Foundation series begins when the "psychohistorian" Hari Seldon realizes that the Galactic Empire will soon fall, and creates the title organization to limit the length of the ensuing Dark Age. He eventually linked together his Robot and Foundation series into a far-reaching "history of the future," which also includes his novels The Caves of Steel, Pebble in the Sky, and The Stars, Like Dust.

Ray Bradbury

(1920-2012, United States). His science fiction and fantasy stories often contain nostalgic elements related to his Midwestern childhood. The Illinois community Green Town is the setting of his novels Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, both of which center on boys beginning to enter adulthood. Similarly, small towns on Earth and Mars are the setting of many stories in his 1950 collection The Martian Chronicles, which is made up of loosely connected works about the expeditions of human astronauts, the displacement of indigenous Martians as human settlers arrive, and a nuclear war that destroys most life on Earth. He also wrote about Mars in several stories that appear in his collection The Illustrated Man, whose title character has tattoos that foretell the future. Another theme that recurs in his works is censorship and the importance of literature. This theme is expressed most strongly in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, which depicts a dystopian future in which "firemen" burn books. The protagonist of Fahrenheit 451 is Guy Montag, a fireman whose wife Mildred is deeply depressed and addicted to television programs that she watches on large "parlor walls." Montag begins to question his profession after meeting the free-spirited Clarisse McClellan, and secretly preserves books to read, leading to a rebuke from Fire Captain Beatty. Montag is eventually pursued by a robotic attack dog called the "Mechanical Hound," but escapes to join a community of rebels who memorize classic works of literature.

Kurt Vonnegut

(1922-2007, United States). His fiction provides a darkly humorous response to the absurdities and violence of the twentieth century. During World War II, he was a prisoner of war in Germany, and lived through the Allied firebombing of Dresden. That experience was the basis for his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, in which the soldier Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time," and perceives his life in a non-linear fashion. Billy travels between the present, past, and future as he is captured by the German army, witnesses the destruction of Dresden, becomes a prosperous optometrist in the town of Ilium, is kidnapped by aliens and placed in a zoo along with the actress Montana Wildhack, and is eventually assassinated. Slaughterhouse-Five contains a number of elements that recur in his other novels, including the veteran Eliot Rosewater, aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, the unsuccessful science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, and members of the wealthy Rumfoord family. He also wrote the novel Cat's Cradle, which describes a substance called "ice-nine" that instantly turns liquid water into a solid. Ice-nine was created by the atomic scientist Felix Hoenikker, whose life is researched by the novel's narrator, John. Another thread in Cat's Cradle concerns the "bittersweet lies" of the prophet Bokonon, who lives on the Caribbean island San Lorenzo. Bokonon comments on human stupidity after an accident that occurs during the funeral of the San Lorenzan dictator Papa Monzano causes ice-nine to fall into the ocean, destroying almost all life on Earth.

Italo Calvino

(1923-1985) was an Italian author. In his 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler, the even-numbered sections are presented as the first chapters of a number of different books, each of which breaks off abruptly at a climactic moment. The odd-numbered sections are addressed in the second person to "You," the reader of "(insert author name) new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler." You and a fellow book-lover named Ludmilla investigate oddities in the novels you are reading, in the process encountering a best-selling author named Silas Flannery, the deceitful translator Ermes Marana, and a scholar of Cimmerian literature named Professor Uzzi-Tuzii. His novel Invisible Cities is framed as a conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, who describes 55 fictional cities to the Mongol ruler. He is also known for his fantastical short stories, some of which are collected in the volume Cosmicomics and narrated by an ancient being named Qfwfq.

Endo Shusaku

(1923-1996): He converted to Catholicism at the age of 11, and majored in French literature. His first works, White Man and Yellow Man, explored the differences between Japanese and Western values and national experiences. Silence tells of the martyrdom of the Catholic converts of Portuguese priests. The Samurai recounts the tale of a samurai sent to establish trade relations between his shogun and Mexico, Spain, and Rome. The latter two novels are generally considered to be his greatest achievements.

Joseph Heller

(1923-1999) was an American novelist. He satirized Army bureaucracy in his novel Catch-22, which was based on his experiences as a bombardier on the Italian front during World War II. The novel is set in Rome and on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa, where John Yossarian is stationed with the 256th Squadron. "Catch-22" is a rule stating that airmen do not have to fly missions if they are insane, but that applying to be excused from flying missions is proof of sanity; consequently, there is no way to avoid the dangerous missions. Characters in the novel include the arch-capitalist mess officer Milo Minderbinder, who sets up a syndicate called M&M Enterprises, and Major Major Major, who is accidentally promoted to the rank of major because of his unusual name. The novel's main antagonist is Colonel Cathcart, who continually raises the number of missions that airmen must fly before they are allowed to go home. In 1994 he wrote a sequel to Catch-22, titled Closing Time.

James Baldwin

(1924-1987) grew up in Harlem, which he portrayed in his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. That novel is about the teenage John Grimes and his fanatically religious stepfather Gabriel. In his novel Giovanni's Room, an American named David has an affair with the title Italian bartender. His novel If Beale Street Could Talk, about the love between Tish and a man named Fonny who has been falsely accused of rape, was made into a 2018 movie directed by Barry Jenkins. He also wrote several essays, including an examination of race and religion in The Fire Next Time. His essay collection Notes of a Native Son begins with "Everybody's Protest Novel," which is critical of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son.

Flannery O'Connor

(1925-1964) A Catholic American author who wrote in the "Southern Gothic" style. In her story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," Bailey takes his family on a vacation; when they stop at a diner, "the grandmother" talks with the owner Red Sammy about The Misfit, an escaped murderer. After the cat Patty Sing causes the family's car to crash into a ditch, a group of men led by the Misfit murder the family, including the grandmother, who claims The Misfit is one of her own children before he shoots her three times. In "Good Country People," Hulga has her prosthetic leg taken by Manley Pointer, a nihilistic atheist Bible salesman. She also wrote "Everything That Rises Must Converge," in which Julian rides on a newly-integrated bus with his mother.

Mishima Yukio

(1925-1970), a pseudonym of Hiraoka Kimitake: He was a novelist whose central theme was the disparity between traditional Japanese values and the spiritual emptiness of modern life. He failed to qualify for military service during World War II, so worked in an aircraft factory instead. His first novel, Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no kokuhaku), was successful enough to allow him to write full-time. His four-volume epic The Sea of Fertility (Hojo no umi, consisting of Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel), is about self-destructive personalities and the transformation of Japan into a modern, but sterile, society. He, who organized the Tate no kai — a right-wing society stressing physical fitness and the martial arts — committed ritual suicide after a public speech failed to galvanize the armed forces into overthrowing the government.

Carlos Fuentes

(1928-2012, Mexico): Though born into a well-to-do family, he often dealt with the betrayed ideals from the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the subject of both his first novel, Where the Air is Clear (1958), and his most successful book, The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962). Other notable novels include Terra nostra, set during the reign of King Philip II of Spain, and The Old Gringo, which portrays Ambrose Bierce's last days in Mexico. He also wrote absurdist plays and essay collections on Mexican and American art and literature.

Gabriel García Marquez

(1928-2014, Colombia; Nobel Prize for Literature 1982): The master of magic realism, his birthplace, Aracataca was the model for the fictional town Macondo. The town played a prominent role in many of his works, such as Leaf Storm and his seminal novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which details the decline of the Buendía family over seven generations. A newspaper journalist in the 1950s, he exposed a naval scandal (chronicled in The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor). Other prominent novels include In Evil Hour, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The General in His Labyrinth, a depiction of Simón Bolívar's final years.

Lorraine Hansberry

(1930-1965) is best known for her play A Raisin in the Sun. That play is about the Younger family, who debate how to use $10,000 in life insurance money. Walter wants to invest the money in a liquor store, while his mother Mama wants to buy a house in the white neighborhood Clybourne Park. Mama's daughter Beneatha wants to spend the money on medical school and, unlike the other members of the family, explores her African heritage. Her other works include the play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window and the autobiography To Be Young, Gifted and Black.

Toni Morrison

(1931-2019) was the first Black woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature and won a Pulitzer for her novel Beloved. Beloved is about Sethe, a slave who escaped from Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky to 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati. Sethe is haunted by the ghost of Beloved, a daughter she killed to prevent her from being returned to slavery. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, is about Pecola Breedlove, a Black foster child who considers herself ugly and wishes she had blue eyes. Her other acclaimed novels include Song of Solomon, about the life of Macon Dead III, who is nicknamed "Milkman" because he is breastfed by his mother for a long time.

Oe Kenzaburo

(1935-present): Novelist and recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature. His first work, Shiiku (The Catch), describes a friendship between a Japanese boy and a black American POW, and won him the Akutagawa award while he was still a student. His early works are filled with insanity, abuse, perverse sex, and violence, but his later works — including A Personal Matter (Kojinteki-na taiken) and The Silent Cry (Man'en gannen no futtoboru) — reflect the experience of being the father of a brain-damaged child. His fiction centers on the alienation following Japan's surrender, and his political writings focus on the search for cultural and ideological roots.

Mario Vargas Llosa

(1936-present, Peru): While attending military school in Lima, he wrote the play The Escape of the Inca (1952), but the harsh treatment he received there was the basis for his novel The Time of the Hero. Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) was his serious take on living under the dictatorship of Manuel Odría, while in 1977 he published the lighter, autobiographical Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, about soap operas. Other important works include The War of the End of the World and A Fish in the Water, which discusses his political career; he ran for president of Peru in 1990 but was defeated by Alberto Fujimori.

Margaret Atwood

(1939-present, Canada). One of Canada's most prominent authors of literary fiction, she has written multiple works that combine speculative elements with psychological realism. In 1985 she published The Handmaid's Tale, which portrays a dystopian near-future in which the United States has been replaced by the patriarchal Republic of Gilead. The Handmaid's Tale is narrated by Offred, whose role as a "handmaid" is to bear children for "the Commander" and his wife, Serena Joy. Offred flees her oppressive existence with the help of Nick, a chauffeur who claims to be a member of the underground Mayday resistance movement. In an epilogue set in the year 2195, the archivist Professor Pieixoto discusses Offred's unknown fate. She later wrote a trilogy set in a post-apocalyptic world where corporations have created bioengineered diseases and people (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam). In addition to her speculative works, she has also written historical fiction (Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin, the latter of which contains a character who is a science fiction author), novels about the relationships between female friends (Cat's Eye and The Robber Bride), and a retelling of Homer's Odyssey from a female point of view (The Penelopiad).

Isabel Allende

(1942-present, Chile): Actually born in Peru, at age three she moved to her mother's native Chile. A successful news reporter in her twenties, she and her family fled to Venezuela after General Augusto Pinochet deposed her uncle Salvador (insert last name), setting up a dictatorship. Her formal literary career began at age 40, when she published The House of the Spirits, a magical-realist work that chronicles several generations of the Trueba family. Other works of fiction include the short-story collection Eva Luna (1989) and Paula (1995), which detailed her care for her terminally ill daughter.

Alice Walker

(1944-) won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer for her novel The Color Purple, whose protagonist, Celie, is repeatedly raped by her father, producing the children Olivia and Adam, both of whom are immediately taken away by her father. Celie deals with her trauma by writing letters to God. Celie marries Mister, who also abuses her; she has an affair with Shug Avery, a blues singer who is also Mister's mistress. Her short story "Everyday Use" is about the cultural differences between Dee and Maggie, the two daughters of a Southern woman known as Mama.

Douglas Adams

(1952-2001, United Kingdom). He wrote comic science fiction and fantasy novels that poked fun at genre tropes and the quirks of British culture. After working on Monty Python's Flying Circus, he created the BBC radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which premiered in 1978. The radio series became the basis of a series of novels (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe, and Everything; So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish; Mostly Harmless; and the authorized sequel And Another Thing..., which was written by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer after he died). The Hitchhiker's series focuses on Arthur Dent, an ordinary Englishman who becomes one of the last humans in the universe after Earth is destroyed by the alien Vogons. Arthur and his friend Ford Prefect travel on a starship named the Heart of Gold, along with the "paranoid android" Marvin, the two-headed galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox, and the human scientist Trillian. Arthur eventually discovers that "answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything" is 42 (although the question itself remains unknown). Characters in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series sometimes consult the title reference work, which offers the advice "Don't Panic," encourages hitchhikers to carry towels at all times, and provides the recipe for a drink called the "Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster." Besides the Hitchhiker's series, he also co-authored two books offering comic definitions of British place names (The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff), and wrote a pair of novels about the supernatural adventures of the private investigator Dirk Gently (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul).

David Foster Wallace

(1962-2008) was an American author. His massive 1996 novel Infinite Jest depicts a future North America in which years are named after corporate products. The novel is set mainly at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House and the Enfield Tennis Academy (where Hal Incandenza is a student). Hal's father, James, directs "the Entertainment," a dangerously enthralling film sought by Quebeçois terrorists known as the Wheelchair Assassins. His other novels are The Broom of the System and The Pale King, the latter of which was left unfinished at his 2008 suicide. He is also known for his essay collections, including Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

Don DeLillo

(born 1936) is an American author. His 1985 breakout novel White Noise is narrated by Jack Gladney, a professor of "Hitler Studies" at a Midwestern college. After a chemical spill results in an "Airborne Toxic Event," Jack's wife Babette begins taking a mysterious drug called Dylar. Three years later he published Libra, a novel about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's participation in a fictional conspiracy against John F. Kennedy. He also wrote the 1997 novel Underworld, in which the waste management executive Nick Shay buys the baseball that was hit by New York Giants player Bobby Thomson in the 1951 "Shot Heard 'Round the World."

Thomas Pynchon

(born 1937) is a reclusive American novelist. His 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow follows Tyrone Slothrop, a lieutenant in World War II whose sexual encounters seem to predict the locations of future V-2 rocket strikes. A number of characters in the novel are trying to find the secret of a mysterious device called the Schwärzgerat, which is to be installed in a rocket with the serial number 00000. He also wrote The Crying of Lot 49, in which Oedipa Maas suspects that she has become entangled in an ancient conflict between the Thurn und Taxis and Trystero mail delivery services. His other novels include V., in which Herbert Stencil searches for the mysterious title entity, and Inherent Vice, about the Los Angeles private investigator Doc Sportello.

Salman Rushdie

(born 1947) is a novelist born in India, who holds British and American citizenship. His 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight's Children follows Saleem Sinai, a man with an enormous nose who is born at precisely the moment that India becomes independent, giving him telepathic powers. Other members of the novel's title group—the people born within an hour of independence—include Shiva, a child with enormous knees, and the magical Parvati-the-witch. His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses begins as the actors Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha are miraculously saved after their plane explodes over the English Channel. Upon being betrayed by Gibreel, Saladin seeks revenge by ruining Gibreel's relationship with the mountaineer Allie Cone. The Satanic Verses was condemned in a fatwa, or religious decree, issued by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini. The fatwa accused him of blasphemy, and ordered Muslims to kill him, his editors, and his publishers. In 1998, Iran agreed not to actively seek his death. He described his years of hiding in the memoir Joseph Anton; the title refers to the pseudonym that he adopted, which was inspired by the authors Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. His other novels include The Moor's Last Sigh, which is narrated by the swiftly aging Moraes Zogoiby; The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which was loosely inspired by the legend of Orpheus; and the young adult books Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life.

Zadie Smith

(born 1975) is a British novelist. Her 2000 debut novel White Teeth depicts the Bengali Muslim Samad Iqbal and his English friend Archie Jones, who both live in London. Samad's son Magid becomes an atheist scientist who joins Marcus Chalfen's project to develop a genetically modified "FutureMouse," while Magid's twin brother Millat joins a Muslim fundamentalist group called KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation). Both twins sleep with Archie's daughter, Irie. Her other novels include NW, which takes place in northwest London; Swing Time, which describes a troubled dancer named Tracey; and the academic novel On Beauty, which is loosely based on E. M. Forster's novel Howards End.

Sei Shonagon

(c. 966 - c. 1013): Like Lady Murasaki, she was a lady-in-waiting of the Empress. Since Lady Murasaki and her were contemporaries and known for their wit, they were often rivals*. Her only major work is the Pillow Book (Makura no soshi), which is considered the best source of information about life at the Japanese court during the Heian period (784-1185).

Lady Mirasaki Shikibu

(c. 978 -c. 1015): Novelist, diarist, and lady-in-waiting. She was the author of the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari), the first known novel; the diary (insert author name) nikki; and a collection of tanka poems. The daughter of the court official Fujiwara Tametoki, she sat in on the classical Chinese literature lessons that her brother received, in spite of the Heian traditions against higher education for women.