Sir Walter Raleigh, featured in the BBC’s poll of 100 Greatest Britons in 2002, was best known for introducing the potato and tobacco to Britain. This has not been proven, though he did do much to promote the popularity of pipe smoking at the court of Queen Elizabeth the First. Born around 1552 in Devon, England, the product of his father Walter’s third ...
Although William Ernest Henley was a poet he was, in truth, better known as an editor and critic. He was, in fact, unknown as a poet until his 36th year and confessed himself “unmarketable” as a poet prior to 1887. Whether his generally poor health from boyhood up to then had anything to do with it is uncertain, but there is no ...
Gabriela Mistral became a cultural icon amongst all Hispanic people in 1945 when she became the first Spanish American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Her writing was influenced greatly by her humble beginnings in Chile which saw her family living in poverty. She became well known as a poet who wrote with a great deal of love and respect for ...
Although Gertrude Stein is remembered as an innovative, somewhat outlandish American poet and writer of prose, she actually spent the last 43 years of her life as a leading light on the Paris art scene where she lived from 1903. She was an avid collector or fine art and her salon in central Paris was well known as a meeting place for ...
William Stafford was a much-published writer who grew up in America’s mid-West at the time of the Depression. He was a well-educated man who came relatively late to further education which was interrupted when the United States joined the Second World War. Stafford, though, was a dedicated pacifist and spent the war years working on special camps for conscientious objectors. Following this ...
