BORN: 1840, Dorset, England DIED: 1928, Dorset, England NATIONALITY: English GENRE: Fiction, poetry, drama MAJOR WORKS: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) Jude the Obscure (1896) The works of the English novelist, poet, and dramatist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) unite the Victorian and modern eras. His work revealed the strains that widespread industrialization and urbanization placed on traditional... 

BORN: 1902, Camaguey, Cuba DIED: 1989, Havana, Cuba NATIONALITY: Cuban GENRE: Poetry, nonfiction MAJOR WORKS: Motifs of Son (1930) Songoro Cosongo (1931) West Indies Ltd. (1934) The Dove of Popular Flight (1958) I Have (1964) Nicolas Guillen was a significant Latin American poet of the twentieth century. He was one of the first writers to affirm and celebrate the black Cuban (or Afro-Cuban) experience, beginning with his celebrated and controversial Motifs... 

Graham Greene’s life and literature were played out on a global stage; he traveled widely and wrote works set in locales as disparate as Hanoi and Havana, Liberia and Lithuania, Mexico and Malaysia. His works focused on the borders and conflicts between the European world and the ‘‘other’’ world abroad. During Greene’s lifetime— which spanned two world wars and the advent of the nuclear age—he documented the changes that affected both strong... 

Thomas Gray Gray, Thomas, photograph. The Library of Congress. Thomas Gray is generally regarded as a transitional figure in eighteenth-century poetry, providing a bridge between the poetic sensibility of his own generation and the Romantic revolution of the future. He combines in a unique way a classic perfection of form typical of the Augustan era with subject matter and attitudes that are clearly Romantic and that anticipate still later developments. Gray’s... 

Robert Graves is considered one of the most distinctive and lyrical voices in twentieth-century English poetry. Openly dismissive of contemporary poetic fashions and precepts, Graves developed his own poetic theory, principally inspired by ancient mythology and folklore. Although Graves regarded himself as a poet first, he was widely respected for his prose works. He is best known for his World War I autobiography Good-Bye to All That (1929) and for his novel... 

BORN: 1927, Free City of Danzig, Poland NATIONALITY: German GENRE: Poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction MAJOR WORKS: Gunter Grass AP Images The Tin Drum (1959) Dog Years (1963) Local Anesthetic (1969) Peeling the Onion (2006) Both inspirational and controversial, Nobel Prize– winning author Gu¨nter Grass has been called the conscience of postwar Germany. Internationally recognized for novels that grapple with issues of collective guilt and moral ambiguity,... 

British author Kenneth Grahame established an early reputation as a writer with his short stories about children and their imaginative worlds, but he is remembered by succeeding generations primarily for the novel The Wind in the Willows (1907). Critics have counted Grahame among a special group of writers who have successfully created ‘‘unreal worlds,’’ including J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, and Nikolai Gogol. Works in Biographical and Historical...