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  He is best known for several novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from a character's point of view allowed him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators brought a new depth to narrative fiction. In addition to his voluminous works of fiction he published articles and books of travel, biography, autobiography, and criticism, and wrote plays. James alternated between America and Europe for the first twenty years of his life; eventually he settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. James was famous for his dexterous, somewhat long-winded phrases, both in his writings and in ‘real life.’  A famous anecdote survives which describes how James goes about a

  Remembering John Steinbeck on his birthday John Steinbeck was an American novelist whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath, portrayed the plight of migrant workers during the Great Depression. DID YOU KNOW …..….. OR THAT …….In the 1980s, a rumor arose that Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath had been translated into Japanese as ‘The Angry Raisins’. This rumor was, however, false. It is a good example of how people love a good ‘lost in translation’ story. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT …… The author of 27 books, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, the multi-generation epic East of Eden, and the novellas Of Mice and Men and The Red Pony. John Steinbeck was born in the farming town of Salinas, California on 27 February 1902. His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, was not a terribly successful man; at one time or another he was the manager of a Sperry flour plant, the ow

  A leading figure of the Romantic Movement in France, he is considered one of the greatest and best-known French writers. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862, and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (French: Notre-Dame de Paris), 1831. AND DID YOU KNOW :…. OR THAT …..Hugo was a foot fetishist. And he wasn’t alone in the world of great writers in being fond of feet – Dostoevsky, Goethe, George du Maurier, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were also podophiles (we’ve had to be careful with the spelling there). HOW ABOUT…. AND THAT ….. In France, Hugo is known primarily for his poetry collections, such as Les AND THIS ….He produced more than 4,000 drawings and also campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment. A BIT OF A RADICAL …. “Building Your Great Collection One Fine Book at a Time” Check us out at BlindHorseBooks.com

  From relatively modest beginnings in Manchester, England he became one of the best-known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century. He wrote librettos and screenplays, including for the 1977 TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth. He worked as a literary critic, including for The Observer and The Guardian, and wrote studies of classic writers, notably James Joyce. A versatile linguist, Burgess lectured in phonetics, and translated Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and the opera Carmen, among others. Burgess also composed over 250 musical works; he sometimes claimed to consider himself as much a composer as an author, although he enjoyed considerably more success in writing. The epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone, reads "Abba Abba." The phrase has several connotations. It means "Father, father" in Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew and other Semitic languages. It is Burgess's initials forwards and backwards; part of the rhyme scheme for

  Wilhelm's character was a complete contrast to that of his brother. As a boy, growing up he suffered a long and severe illness which left him weak the rest of his life. He had a less comprehensive and energetic mind than his brother, and he had less of the spirit of investigation, preferring to confine himself to some limited and definitely constrained field of work. He utilized everything that bore directly on his own studies and ignored the rest. These studies were almost always of a literary nature. Wilhelm took great delight in music and he had a remarkable gift of story-telling. He is described as “an uncommonly animated, jovial fellow.” He was, accordingly, much sought in society, which he frequented much more than his brother. With the goal of researching scholarly treatises on folk tales, they established a methodology for collecting and recording folk stories that became the basis for folklore studies. The rise of Romanticism in 19th-century Europe revived interest in tr

  A leading African-American sociologist, writer and activist. Educated at Harvard University and other top schools, Du Bois studied with some of the most important social thinkers of his time. He earned fame for the publication of such works as Souls of Black Folk (1903), and was a founding officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and editor of its magazine. Du Bois became the first person in his extended family to attend high school, and did so at his mother’s insistence. In 1883, Du Bois began to write articles for papers like the New York Globe and the Freeman. Du Bois initially attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, a school for Black students. His tuition was paid by several churches in his home town, Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Dubois also taught at Wilberforce University and Atlanta University and chaired the Peace Information Center. Shortly before his death, Du Bois settled in Ghana to work on the Encyclopedia Africana.

  Throughout much of her career, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the most successful and respected poets in America.    Encouraged to read the classics at home, as she was too rebellious to make a success of formal education, resulted in her winning poetry prizes from an early age, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, and she went on to use verse as a medium for her feminist activism. Like her contemporary Robert Frost, Millay was one of the most skillful writers of sonnets in the twentieth century, and also like Frost, she was able to combine modernist attitudes with traditional forms creating a unique American poetry. From the age of eight Millay was reared by her strong, independent mother, who divorced the frivolous Henry Millay and became a practical nurse in order to support herself and her three daughters. Though the family was poor, Cora Millay strongly promoted the cultural development of her children through exposure to varied reading materials and m

  An English poet, who later became an American citizen. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content. Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Epitaph on a Tyrant Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets. Above is one of Auden’s short masterpieces. In just six lines, he manages to say so much about the nature of tyranny.  He lived in Berlin in the 1930’s and published the poem in 1939. The specific tyrant Auden had in min

  He is best known as the author of I Am Legend, a 1954 horror novel that has been adapted for the screen four times, as well as the movie Somewhere In Time for which Matheson wrote the screenplay, based on his novel Bid Time Return. Matheson also wrote 16 television episodes of The Twilight Zone for Rod Serling, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" and "Steel". He adapted his 1971 short story "Duel" as a screenplay directed by a young Steven Spielberg, for the television movie of the same name that year. Six more of his novels or short stories have been adapted as major motion pictures: The Shrinking Man, Hell House, What Dreams May Come, Bid Time Return (filmed as Somewhere in Time), A Stir of Echoes and Button, Button. Lesser movies based on his work include two from his early noir novels—Cold Sweat, based on his novel Riding the Nightmare, and Les seins de glace (Icy Breasts) based on his novel Someone is Bleeding. “Building Your Great Collection One F

  Carson McCullers, considered to be among the most significant American writers of the twentieth century writing in the American Southern gothic genre. She is best known for her novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Member of the Wedding, all published between 1940 and 1946. At least four of her works have been made into films. McCullers's work is often described as Southern Gothic and indicative of her Southern roots. Critics also describe her writing and eccentric characters as universal in scope. Assessing McCullers's stature in American arts and letters, biographer Virginia Spencer Carr wrote: "Critics continue to compare and contrast McCullers with Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter, whom they generally consider to be better stylists in the short form than McCullers. Yet they tend to rank McCullers above her female contemporaries as a novelist. Among her friends were W. H. Au