July 06, 2008

Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877 — August 9, 1962) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. He was born in the Black Forest town of Calw in Württemberg, Germany to a Christian missionary family. In 1899, Hesse released his first small volume of poetry, Romantic Songs and a collection of prose, entitled One Hour After Midnight. Both works were financial failures. Nevertheless, the Leipzig publisher Eugen Diederichs was convinced of the literary quality of the work and from the beginning regarded the publications more as encouragement of a young author than as profitable business.

In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize for literature. His best known works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) which explore an individual’s search for spirituality outside society.

 

Emily Bronte

Emily Brontë (1818 — 1848) was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, in the north of England. She wrote under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell. She published only one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a story of the doomed love and revenge.

Unlike Charlotte, Emily had no close friends. She wrote a few letters and was interested in mysticism. Her novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a story-within-a-story, did not gain immediate success as Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, but it has acclaimed later fame as one of the most intense novels written in the English language. Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis in the late 1848.

 

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883 — 1924) was a Czech-born German-speaking writer. His father was Hermann Kafka, an owner of a large dry goods establishment, and mother Julie (Löwy) Kafka, who belonged to one of the leading families in the German-speaking, German-cultured Jewish circles of Prague.

In 1914 Kafka began his second novel, Der Prozess (The Trial). Kafka’s nightmares of dehumanization, bureaucratic labyrinths, and totalitarian society have much in common with the works of George Orwell. Kafka’s ill health was also an important biographical factor behind the fear of physical and mental collapse dramatised in such short stories as ‘Ein Hungerkünstler’ (1924) and ‘Die Verwandlung’ (1915, The Metamorphosis). Kafka died of tuberculosis on June 3, 1924.

 

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (July 26, 1856 — November 2, 1950) was an Irish playwright. Born in Dublin, he moved to London at the age of 20. His first printed novel was Cashel Byron’s Profession in 1886.

He is the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). These were for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion, respectively. Shaw would have refused his Nobel Prize outright, because he had no desire for public honours, but accepted it at his wife’s behest: she considered it a tribute to Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used to finance translation of Swedish books into English.

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 — May 19, 1864) was born on in Salem, Massachusetts. He was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. In 1837, he published Twice-Told Tales. Much of Hawthorne’s writing centers around New England and many feature moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration.

Hawthorne is best known today for his many short stories and his four major romances written between 1850 and 1860: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun (1860).

 

Barbara Cartland

Barbara Cartland (July 9, 1901 — May 21, 2000) was a successful writer of romance novels, specialising in historical love themes. Cartland published her first novel, Jigsaw (1923), a slightly naughty society thriller that became a bestseller.

In the 1920s and ‘30s Cartland was one of the leading young hostesses in London society, noted for her beauty, energetic charm and daring parties.

By 1983 she rated the longest entry in the British Who’s Who and was named the top-selling author in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records.

In the mid-1990s, by which time she had sold over a billion books, Vogue magazine called her ‘the true Queen of Romance’. She was buried at her estate in Hatfield under a tree that had been planted by Queen Elizabeth I. —Compiled by Maryam Khan