Y BORN: 1850, Leukas, Greece DIED: 1904, Okubo, Japan NATIONALITY: American GENRE: Travel, criticism, fiction MAJOR WORKS: Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1903) Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation In a relatively short life of fifty-four years, Lafcadio Hearn managed to have several different literary lives. Today, it is Hearn’s work on Japan—where he was known as Koizumi Yakumo after becoming a citizen—that... 

From the beginning, critical as well as popular acclaim has greeted each volume of Seamus Heaney’s poetry. In 1966 his first full-length book appeared. Few would have predicted the impact such poetry would have. It is, after all, a poetry about rural subjects and traditional in struc-ture—a poetry that appears to be a deliberate step back into a premodernist world and that rejects most contemporary poetic fashions. Works in Biographical and Historical Context Childhood... 

Bessie Head explored the effects of racial and social oppression and used the theme of exile in her novels and short stories. She was of mixed race, and she experienced discrimination both in her birthplace of South Africa and in her adopted land of Botswana. Her novels, unlike many other works of protest literature, cast a distinctly female perspective on social injustice and the psychological costs of alienation. Head, however, refused to be called a feminist,... 

A world-renowned playwright and human rights activist, Va´clav Havel became the president of Czechoslovakia in December of 1989, the country’s first leader following the fall of the authoritarian regime he had helped to overcome. His literary brilliance, moral authority, and political victories served to make him one of the most respected figures of the late twentieth century and led to his country being one of the first Eastern European nations to... 

Fleeing the Pogroms Agnon was born Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes in 1888 in the shtetl (Jewish village) of Buc-zacz, in Galicia, now part of Ukraine but then belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, an ordained rabbi and a fur trader by profession, was a Hasidic Jew who encouraged his son to study the Bible, the Talmud, and rabbinic texts. From his mother, he acquired knowledge of German language and literature, which enabled him to read European writers... 

Aeschylus’s work earned him a number of awards, and after his Persians was performed, Hieron, dictator of Gela and leader of the Greeks in Sicily, invited Aeschylus to stage the play in Gela. He also later commissioned Aeschylus to write Aetnean Women to celebrate the refounding of the city of Etna. In other words, Aeschylus did not labor in obscurity but was honored by the critics of his time. His impact on theater is still felt today, and his Oresteia is... 

BORN: 524 BCE, Eleusis, Greece DIED: 456 BCE, Gela, Italy NATIONALITY: Greek GENRE: Drama MAJOR WORKS: Persians (472 BCE) Seven Against Thebes (467 BCE) Oresteia (458 BCE) Prometheus Bound (unknown) His tragedies, exemplified by such seminal works as Prometheus Bound and the Oresteia trilogy, are widely praised as thoughtful and profoundly moving translations of tremendous feelings into the sublime language of poetry. A Noble Family Aeschylus, the son of Euphorion,...