The Italian writer Cesare Pavese lived a relatively short life spanning the first half of the 20th century. He was a poet and literary critic and was responsible for translating a great deal of English and American literature into Italian – many of these translations were seen in Italian for the first time. He was well regarded as one of the leading ...
Born in Vaucluse in 1907, René Char was a member of the French surrealist movement and was one the enduring poets of the 20th Century. The fourth born and youngest in a well to do family, his father was the mayor of the district and an influential business man. Most of Char’s early life was spent in the palatial grounds of ...
Charles Lamb was an English literary figure from the late 18th and early 19th century who was described by his biographer, E V Lucas, as “the most lovable figure in English literature”. He was a contemporary of famous English writers Samuel T Coleridge and William Wordsworth and Lamb collaborated with both at different times on the publication of his poems and ...
Allen Tate was a member of the so-called Southern Agrarians, a group of twelve American poets, social commentators and writers who shared a common belief in the promotion of southern attitudes in literature, politics and agrarianism. Throughout the depression years in the 1920s and 1930s they were responsible for reviving long lost southern literature and writing new chapters in the story. He ...
Born in Maryland in 1913, Karl Shapiro was one of the youngest recipients of the Pulitzer Prize and was famous for denigrating his university in Virginia as a place where both blacks and Jews were treated with disdain. Shapiro’s early work was stoutly traditionalist but he quickly fell out of love with it, believing that it eventually stifled the creativity of ...
