Patricia Grace is considered New Zealand’s foremost Maori woman writer. She writes short stories and novels that place the reader at the intersection between native and Western cultures in modern New Zealand, and her work explores the challenges her people have faced and continue to face as they seek to retain their traditions and their lands. Works in Biographical and Historical Context New Zealand and the Maori People New Zealand was annexed by Great Britain... 

Maxim Gorky (a pseudonym for Alexei Maximovich Peshkov) is recognized as one of the earliest and foremost exponents of socialist realism in literature. His brutal yet romantic portraits of Russian life and his sympathetic depictions of the working class had an inspirational effect on the oppressed people of his native land. From 1910 until his death, Gorky was considered Russia’s greatest living writer. Gorky the tramp, the rebel, is as much a legend as the... 

Privileged Beginnings Gombrowicz was born on August 4, 1904, to proprietor and industrialist Jan Onu-fry Gombrowicz and Antonina ne´e Kotkowski, in his parents’ country manor located in the village of Malos-zyce in what once was and would be again central Poland. (While Poland had existed as a country, it had been physically divided by the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian empires in 1795. Poles retained their cultural unity despite lack of a political... 

BORN: 1728, Ballymahon, Longford, Ireland DIED: 1774, London, England NATIONALITY: Irish GENRE: Poetry, drama MAJOR WORKS: The Citizen of the World (1762) The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) The Good-Natur’d Man (1768) The Deserted Village (1770) She Stoops to Conquer (1771) Oliver Goldsmith was one of the most important writers of the Augustan Age, otherwise known as the neoclassical age or the Age of Reason. The most striking feature of Goldsmith’s writing... 

William Golding was a British novelist, poet, and Nobel Prize laureate. With the appearance of Lord of the Flies (1954), Golding’s first published novel, the author began his career as both a campus cult favorite and one of the most distinctive and debated literary talents of his era. The author’s prolific output—five novels in ten years— and the high quality of his work established him as one of the late twentieth century’s most distinguished writers.... 

Nikolai Gogol was an initiator of the Russian naturalist movement, which focused on descriptions of the lives of the lower classes of society. Gogol himself explored contemporary social problems, often in a satirical fashion. His best-known works—the novel Dead Souls (1842), the short story ‘‘The Overcoat’’ (1842), and the drama The Inspector General (1836)—are widely praised as masterpieces of Russian naturalism. Gogol is also seen by many as a... 

Some scholars have even placed her among the ranks of those South American writers—Gabriel Garc´ıa Ma´rquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, among others—who rose to prominence during the 1960s surge of interest in Latin American literature. As Alexander Coleman has asserted, ‘‘Allende is the first woman to join what has heretofore been an exclusive male club of Latin American novelists. Not that she is the first contemporary female...