Blind Horse Books

  Fowles's fiction was never merely dry, intellectual sparring. He was a writer possessed of an expansive imagination, whose gifts as a storyteller meant that his dramas were played out beyond the conflicts of the inner self. His narrative genius led to three of his novels being filmed, two of them to critical acclaim. John Fowles, the British writer whose teasing, multilayered fiction explored the tensions between free will and the constraints of society, even as it played with traditional novelistic conventions and challenged readers to find their own interpretations of his work. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, appeared in 1969 and won several awards and was made into a well-received film (1981) starring Meryl Streep in the title role and was the most commercially successful. "Fowles's success in the marketplace derives from his great skill as a storyteller," wrote Ellen Pifer. For whatever reason - he always said it was because he was mistrusted by the British liter...

  She belonged to a deeply religious family, her mother expressed her religious faith most noticeably by authoring a series of evangelical children's books, which Anna helped to edit. When Anna was 14 an injury to her ankles caused her to become an invalid. Likely, because of mistreatment of her injury, Anna was unable to stand without a crutch or to walk for any length of time for the rest of her life. For greater mobility, she frequently used horse-drawn carriages, which contributed to her love of horses and concern for the humane treatment of animals. Sewell sold the novel to local publisher Jarrolds on 24 November 1877, when she was 57 years of age. Although it is now considered a children's classic, she originally wrote it for those who worked with horses. She said "a special aim [was] to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses". Although Sewell died five months after the book appeared (the cause of her death has been attributed variou...

  Maxim Gorky considered a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist. He was a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his success as an author, he travelled widely across the Russian Empire changing jobs frequently, experiences which would later influence his writing. Gorky's reputation grew as a unique literary voice from the bottom strata of society and as a fervent advocate of Russia's social, political, and cultural transformation. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union. In 1932, he returned to Russia on Joseph Stalin's personal invitation and died there in June 1936. By 1899, he was openly associated with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement, which helped make him a celebrity among both the intelligentsia and the growing numbers of "conscious" workers. Both his writings and his letters reveal a "restless man" (a frequent self-description...

  He was known for his 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, his 1947 novel The Harder They Fall, his 1954 Academy Award-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront, and his 1957 screenplay for A Face in the Crowd. It is a rags to riches story chronicling the rise and fall of Sammy Glick, a Jewish boy born in New York's Lower East Side who, very early in his life, makes up his mind to escape the ghetto and climb the ladder of success by deception and betrayal. It was later made into a long-running Broadway musical. After his name was given to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, Schulberg voluntarily told HUAC that he had been a member of the Communist Party and named other members. His experience with the party and his first novel informed his decision to testify. In 1965 Schulberg established the Watts Writers Workshop in the Watts district of Los Angeles after the riots there, and in 1971 he founded the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center in New York City. Schulberg...

  After college, he moved to New Orleans, a city that would inspire much of his writing. On March 31, 1945, his play, The Glass Menagerie, opened on Broadway and two years later A Streetcar Named Desire earned Williams his first Pulitzer Prize. Many of Williams' plays have been adapted to film starring screen greats like Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. Williams died in 1983. The city would inspire much of his writing. On March 31, 1945, his play, The Glass Menagerie, opened on Broadway and two years later A Streetcar Named Desire earned Williams his first Pulitzer Prize. Many of Williams' plays have been adapted to film starring screen greats like Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. A Few “Fun Facts” Despite his most famous works being rooted in realism and taking place in the United States, Williams’ first ever short story revolved around an ancient Egyptian queen named Nitocris. The story, titled The Vengeance of Nitocris, follows the queen going on a rampage to avenge he...

Louis Dearborn L'Amour was an American novelist and short story writer. His books consisted primarily of Western novels; however, he also wrote historical fiction, science fiction, non-fiction, as well as poetry and short-story collections. Many of his stories were made into films. His books consisted primarily of Western novels though he called his work 'frontier stories'; however, Louis loved to collect books.  With success he had both the space and the money build his collection. His private library grew from some 3,000 to nearly 10,000 books and half again as many journals and periodicals. True to his athletic past he would spend an hour or two every day lifting weights, skipping rope and punching a heavy bag, first in a paved area of his small back yard in Hollywood, later, in the garage that he had converted into a gymnasium. Since his death in June of 1988 Bantam Books has continued to release the work of Louis L'Amour. Smoke from this Altar, his 1939 book of poe...

  He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements. He is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare.  He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen was nominated for the...

  Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. This renewed a controversy over whether his satirical treatment of Jewish themes constituted anti- Semitism. That controversy reached a fever pitch with his novel Portnoy’s Complaint, which created a sensation in 1969 because of its explicit recounting of a young lawyer’s sexual autobiography, consisting largely of compulsive attempts to free himself from the strict confines of his Jewish upbringing.  Since then, Roth’s output has ranged from wild comedy and political satire to examinations of his role as a writer and son and metafictional explorations of the relationship between art and life, fiction and re...

Updike's most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner). He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans; its emphasis on...

  Aubrey Beardsley (1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings in black ink, influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. In 1892, Beardsley travelled to Paris, where he discovered the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and the Parisian fashion for Japanese prints, both of which would be major influences on his own style. Beardsley's first commission was Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory (1893), which he illustrated for the publishing house J. M. Dent and Company. Beardsley was a caricaturist and did some political cartoons, mirroring Wilde's irreverent wit in art. Beardsley's work reflected the decadence of his era and his influence was enormous, clearly visible in the work of the French Symbolists, the Poster art Movement of the 1890s and the work of many later-period Art Nouveau artists such as Pape and Clarke. Although Beardsley was associated with the homosexual clique th...

  Ketcham started in the business as an animator for Walter Lantz and eventually Walt Disney, where he worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and several Donald Duck shorts. After World War II, he settled in Carmel, California, and began work as a freelance cartoonist. In 1951, he started Dennis the Menace, based on his own four-year-old son Dennis. Ketcham was in his studio in October 1950, when his first wife, Alice, burst into the studio and complained that their four-year-old, Dennis, had wrecked his bedroom instead of napping. "Your son is a menace," she shouted. Building Great Collections, One Fine Book at a Time Visit us at BlindHorseBooks.com

  Having previously written shorter fiction and screenplays, García Márquez sequestered himself away in his Mexico City home for an extended period of time to complete his novel Cien años de soledad, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967. The author drew international acclaim for the work, which ultimately sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. García Márquez is credited with helping introduce an array of readers to magical realism, a genre that combines more conventional storytelling forms with vivid, layered fantasy. Whether in fiction or nonfiction, in the epic novel or the concentrated story, Márquez is now recognized in the words of Carlos Fuentes as "the most popular and perhaps the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes". He is one of those very rare artists who succeed in chronicling not only a nation's life, culture and history, but also those of an entire continent, and a master storyteller who, as The New York Review of Books once said, "...