Walter Whitman (1819-1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War in addition to publishing his poetry. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). After working as clerk, teacher, journalist and laborer, Whitman wrote his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, pioneering free verse poetry in a humanistic celebration of humanity, in 1855. Emerson, whom Whitman revered, said of Leaves of Grass that it held "incomparable things incomparably said." During the Civil War, Whitman worked as an army nurse, later writing Drum Taps (1865) and Memoranda During the War (1867). His health compromised by the experience, he was given work at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. After a stroke in 1873, which left him partially paralyzed, Whitman lived his next 20 years with his brother, writing mainly prose, such as Democratic Vistas (1870). Leaves of Grass was published in nine editions, with Whitman elaborating on it in each successive edition. In 1881, the book had the compliment of being banned by the commonwealth of Massachusetts on charges of immorality. A good friend of Robert Ingersoll, Whitman was at most a Deist who scorned religion. D. 1892. More: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/ http://philosopedia.org/index.php/Wal... http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/126 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/w... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt\_Whi... http://www.poemhunter.com/walt-whitman/

Emily Jane Brontë was an English novelist and poet, now best remembered for her only novel Wuthering Heights, a classic of English literature. Emily was the second eldest of the three surviving Brontë sisters, being younger than Charlotte Brontë and older than Anne Brontë. She published under the masculine pen name Ellis Bell. Emily was born in Thornton, near Bradford in Yorkshire to Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell. She was the younger sister of Charlotte Brontë and the fifth of six children. In 1824, the family moved to Haworth, where Emily's father was perpetual curate, and it was in these surroundings that their literary oddities flourished. In childhood, after the death of their mother, the three sisters and their brother Patrick Branwell Brontë created imaginary lands (Angria, Gondal, Gaaldine, Oceania), which were featured in stories they wrote. Little of Emily's work from this period survived, except for poems spoken by characters (The Brontës' Web of Childhood, Fannie Ratchford, 1941). In 1842, Emily commenced work as a governess at Miss Patchett's Ladies Academy at Law Hill School, near Halifax, leaving after about six months due to homesickness. Later, with her sister Charlotte, she attended a private school in Brussels. They later tried to open up a school at their home, but had no pupils. It was the discovery of Emily's poetic talent by Charlotte that led her and her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, to publish a joint collection of their poetry in 1846, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. To evade contemporary prejudice against female writers, the Brontë sisters adopted androgynous first names. All three retained the first letter of their first names: Charlotte became Currer Bell, Anne became Acton Bell, and Emily became Ellis Bell. In 1847, she published her only novel, Wuthering Heights, as two volumes of a three volume set (the last volume being Agnes Grey by her sister Anne). Its innovative structure somewhat puzzled critics. Although it received mixed reviews when it first came out, the book subsequently became an English literary classic. In 1850, Charlotte edited and published Wuthering Heights as a stand-alone novel and under Emily's real name. Like her sisters, Emily's health had been weakened by the harsh local climate at home and at school. She caught a chill during the funeral of her brother in September, and, having refused all medical help, died on December 19, 1848 of tuberculosis, possibly caught from nursing her brother. She was interred in the Church of St. Michael and All Angels family capsule, Haworth, West Yorkshire, England.

Bruno Schulz was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher of Jewish descent. He was regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. At a very early age, Schulz developed an interest in the arts. He studied at a gymnasium in Drohobycz from 1902 to 1910, and proceeded to study architecture at Lwów University. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in Vienna. After World War I, the region of Galicia which included Drohobycz became a Polish territory. In the postwar period, Schulz came to teach drawing in a Polish gymnasium, from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a schoolteacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole means of income. The author nurtured his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities: a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, and immersed in Jewish culture though unfamiliar with the Yiddish language. Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He preferred not to leave his provincial hometown, which over the course of his life belonged to four countries. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit: uneventful and enclosed. Schulz seems to have become a writer by chance, as he was discouraged by influential colleagues from publishing his first short stories. His aspirations were refreshed, however, when several letters that he wrote to a friend, in which he gave highly original accounts of his solitary life and the details of the lives of his fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska. She encouraged Schulz to have them published as short fiction, and The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe) was published in 1934; in English-speaking countries, it is most often referred to as The Street of Crocodiles, a title derived from one of the chapters. This novel-memoir was followed three years later by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą). The original publications were fully illustrated by Schulz himself; in later editions of his works, however, these illustrations are often left out or are poorly reproduced. He also helped his fiancée translate Franz Kafka's The Trial into Polish, in 1936. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 caught Schulz living in Drohobycz, which was occupied by the Soviet Union. There are reports that he worked on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of this manuscript survived his death. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as a Jew he was forced to live in the ghetto of Drohobycz, but he was temporarily protected by Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobycz, in the style with which he is identified. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was bringing home a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by a German officer, Karl Günther, a rival of his protector (Landau had killed Günther's "personal Jew," a dentist). Over the years his mural was covered with paint and forgotten. Source: wikipedia.com

Josep Pla i Casadevall (known as José Pla in Spanish) (March 8, 1897, Palafrugell, Girona - April 23, 1981, Llofriu, Girona) was a Catalan journalist and a popular author. As a journalist he worked in France, Italy, England, Germany and Russia, from where he wrote political and cultural chronicles in Catalan. The most important characteristics of the “planian” style are simplicity, irony, and clarity. His works show a subjective and colloquial view, “anti-literary”, in which he stresses, nevertheless, an enormous stylistic effort by calling things by their names and “coming up with the precise adjective”, one of his most persistent literary obsessions. Pla lived completely dedicated to writing. The extent of his Obres Completes - Complete Works (46 volumes and nearly 40,000 pages), which is a collection of all his journals, reports, articles, essays, biographies and both long and short novels. His liberal-conservative thought, skeptic and uncompromising, filled with irony and common sense, keeps sounding contemporary, completely current, even though it seems to contradict the current cultural establishment same as it did with its completely opposed antecessor. His books remain in print and both Spanish and Catalan critics have unanimously recognized him as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (1858-1940) was a Swedish author. In 1909 she became the first woman to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, "in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings". She later also became the first female member of the Swedish Academy. Born in the forested countryside of Sweden she was told many of the classic Swedish fairytales, which she would later use as inspiration in her magic realist writings. Since she for some of her early years had problems with her legs (she was born with a faulty hip) she would also spend a lot of time reading books such as the Bible. As a young woman she was a teacher in the southern parts of Sweden for ten years before her first novel Gösta Berling's Saga was published. As her writer career progressed she would keep up a correspondance with some of her former female collegues for almost her entire life. Lagerlöf never married and was almost certainly a lesbian (she never officially stated that she was, but most later researchers believe this to be the case). For many years her constant companion was fellow writer Sophie Elkan, with whom she traveled to Italy and the Middle East. Her visit to Palestine and a colony of Christians there, would inspire her to write Jerusalem, her story of Swedish farmers converting into a evangelical Christian group and travelling to "The American Colony" in Jerusalem. Lagerlöf was involved in both women issues as well as politics. She would among other things help the Jewish writer Nelly Sachs to come to Sweden and donated her Nobel medal to the Finnish war effort against the Soviet union. Outside of Sweden she's perhaps most widely known for her children's book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils).

Ana María Matute Ausejo was born in Barcelona, Spain, the second of five children in a conservative middle class family. Her father, Facundo Matute, owned an umbrella factory and has been credited with inspiring his daughter's creativity. Matute spent a considerable amount of time in Madrid during her childhood as well, but few of her stories are set there. When she was four years old, she almost died of an illness, and was taken to live with her grandparents in San Mansilla de la Sierra, a small town in the mountains, for a period of convalescence. Matute says that she was profoundly influenced by the villagers whom she met during her time there. This influence can be seen in such works as those published in the 1961 anthology Historias de la Artamila ("Stories about the Artamila", all of which deal with the people that Matute met during her recovery). Settings reminiscent of that town are also often used as settings for her other work. She was almost ten years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and this conflict is said to have had the greatest impact on Matute's writing. She considered not only "the battles between the two factions, but also the internal aggression within each one" The war resulted in Francisco Franco's rise to power, starting in 1936 and escalating until 1939, when he took control of the entire country. Franco established a dictatorship which lasted thirty-six years, until his death in 1975. The violence brought on by the war continued through much of his reign. Since Matute matured as a writer in this posguerra period under Franco's oppressive regime, some of the most recurrent themes in her works are violence, alienation, misery, and especially the loss of innocence. She married Ramón Eugenio de Goicoechea, also a writer, on 17 November 1952, and the couple had a son, Juan Pablo, to whom Matute dedicated various children's stories. The couple divorced in 1965. Because of the laws of Spain, following her divorce she was not allowed to see her son, as the law gave full care over to her ex-husband. This caused Matute great emotional distress. However, she refused to use this as material for any of her stories. During her last years, before being very ill, Matute worked as university professor. She traveled in various countries, especially the United States, as a lecturer. She was outspoken about subjects such as the benefits of emotional suffering, the constant changing of a human being, and how innocence is never completely lost. She claimed that, although her body was old, she was young at heart. In the year 1998, she was elected as a member of the Real Academia Española, becoming the third woman that could take part in the spanish language academia. Her academic life also led her to be an honorific member in the Hispanic Society of America and, in the year 2013, to be a juror in the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the most important in spanish language.

Ben Brooks (born 1992 in Gloucestershire) is the author of the novels: Grow Up, Fences, An Island of Fifty, The Kasahara School of Nihilism, Upward Coast and Sadie, Lolito, Everyone Gets Eaten, and Hurra. Writing for children, he has published the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller Stories For Boys Who Dare to Be Different, Stories For Boys Who Dare to be Different 2, Stories For Kids Who Dare to be Different, The Impossible Boy, and The Greatest Inventor. His first non-fiction book for adults, Things They Don't Want You To Know, was published by Quercus in September 2020. He contributed the story Kimchi or a Partial List of Misappropriated Hood Ornaments to Frank Ocean's Boys Don't Cry, accompanying the release of 2016 album Blonde.

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil. She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977. She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser.

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Lydia Davis, acclaimed fiction writer and translator, is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. In fall 2003 she received one of 25 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards. In granting the award the MacArthur Foundation praised Davis’s work for showing “how language itself can entertain, how all that what one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader’s interest... Davis grants readers a glimpse of life’s previously invisible details, revealing new sources of philosophical insights and beauty.” In 2013 She was the winner of the Man Booker International prize. Davis’s recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review” and garnered a starred review from “Publishers Weekly.” Her “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” (2001) was praised by “Elle” magazine for its “Highly intelligent, wildly entertaining stories, bound by visionary, philosophical, comic prose—part Gertrude Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis.” Davis is also a celebrated translator of French literature into English. The French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her fiction and her distinguished translations of works by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, Michel Butor and others. Davis recently published a new translation (the first in more than 80 years) of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, “Swann’s Way” (2003), the first volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” A story of childhood and sexual jealousy set in fin de siecle France, “Swann’s Way” is widely regarded as one of the most important literary works of the 20th century. The “Sunday Telegraph” (London) called the new translation “A triumph [that] will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world.” Writing for the “Irish Times,” Frank Wynne said, “What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose… Davis’ translation is magnificent, precise.” Davis’s previous works include “Almost No Memory” (stories, 1997), “The End of the Story” (novel, 1995), “Break It Down” (stories, 1986), “Story and Other Stories” (1983), and “The Thirteenth Woman” (stories, 1976). Grace Paley wrote of “Almost No Memory” that Lydia Davis is the kind of writer who “makes you say, ‘Oh, at last!’—brains, language, energy, a playfulness with form, and what appears to be a generous nature.” The collection was chosen as one of the “25 Favorite Books of 1997” by the “Voice Literary Supplement” and one of the “100 Best Books of 1997” by the “Los Angeles Times.” Davis first received serious critical attention for her collection of stories, “Break It Down,” which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The book’s positive critical reception helped Davis win a prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award in 1988. She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son, Daniel Auster. Davis is currently married to painter Alan Cote, with whom she has a son, Theo Cote. She is a professor of creative writing at University at Albany, SUNY. Davis is considered hugely influential by a generation of writers including Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, who once wrote that she "blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction."

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. See also: Serbian: Tomas Man Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate in 1929, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur.

Harry Eugene Crews was born during the Great Depression to sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. His father died when he was an infant and his mother quickly remarried. His mother later moved her sons to Jacksonville, Florida. Crews is twice divorced and is the father of two sons. His eldest son drowned in 1964. Crews served in the Korean War and, following the war, enrolled at the University of Florida under the G.I. Bill. After two years of school, Crews set out on an extended road trip. He returned to the University of Florida in 1958. Later, after graduating from the master's program, Crews was denied entrance to the graduate program for Creative Writing. He moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where he taught English at Broward Community College. In 1968, Crews' first novel, The Gospel Singer, was published. Crews returned to the University of Florida as an English faculty member. In spring of 1997, Crews retired from UF to devote himself fully to writing. Crews published continuously since his first novel, on average of one novel per year. He died in 2012, at the age of 78.

Maeve Brennan (January 6, 1917-1993) was an Irish short story writer and journalist. She moved to the United States in 1934 when her father was appointed to the Irish Legation in Washington. She was an important figure in both Irish diaspora writing and in Irish writing itself. Collections of her articles, short stories, and a novella have been published. (from Wikipedia)

Hija de padre español y madre mexicana, Elena Garro Navarro nació en el estado de Puebla el 11 de diciembre de 1920, aunque esta fecha no es confiable. Pasó su infancia en la Ciudad de México. Durante la Guerra Cristera, su familia se trasladó a Iguala, en el estado de Guerrero. Siendo joven viajó a la Ciudad de México para estudiar literatura, coreografía y teatro en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Allí conoció a Octavio Paz, con quien se casó en 1937, y quien le impidió continuar sus estudios universitarios. Elena lo acompañó a España ese mismo año, regresando en 1938. Tuvieron una hija, Helena, y finalmente se divorciaron en 1959. A raíz de la masacre de Tlatelolco, en 1968, la prensa manipuló sus declaraciones en las que ella supuestamente declaraba contra varios intelectuales mexicanos a los que responsabilizó de instigar a los estudiantes, para luego abandonarlos a su suerte. Estas acusaciones le ocasionaron el rechazo de la comunidad intelectual mexicana, lo que le llevó al exilio primero en Estados Unidos y España, luego en Francia durante veinte años. Al regresar vivió en Cuernavaca con 37 gatos y su hija. El Conaculta cubrió todos los gastos de su tratamiento contra el cáncer de pulmón, provocado por fumar desde su juventud. Finalmente, el cáncer la venció y murió. Su obra toca temas tales como la marginación de la mujer, la libertad femenina, al libertad política en Felipe Ángeles. Su figura literaria ha llegado a ser un símbolo libertario.

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature". In 2010, Spark was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize of 1970 for The Driver's Seat. Spark received eight honorary doctorates in her lifetime. These included a Doctor of the University degree (Honoris causa) from her alma mater, Heriot-Watt University in 1995; a Doctor of Humane Letters (Honoris causa) from the American University of Paris in 2005; and Honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, London, Oxford, St Andrews and Strathclyde. Spark grew up in Edinburgh and worked as a department store secretary, writer for trade magazines, and literary editor before publishing her first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961, and considered her masterpiece, was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film.

Roberto Arlt was an Argentine writer born Roberto Godofredo Christophersen Arlt in Buenos Aires on April 2, 1900. His parents were both immigrants: his father Karl Arlt was a Prussian from Posen (now Poznan in present-day Poland) and his mother was Ekatherine Iobstraibitzer, a native of Trieste and Italian speaking. German was the language commonly used at their home. His relationship with his father was stressful, as Karl Arlt was a very severe and austere man, by Arlt's own account. The memory of his oppressive father would appear in several of his writings. For example, Remo Erdosain (a character at least partially based on Arlt's own life) often recalls his abusive father and how little if any support he would give him. After being expelled from school at the age of eight, Arlt became an autodidact and worked at all sorts of different odd jobs before landing a job on at a local newspaper: as clerk at a bookstore, apprentice to a tinsmith, painter, mechanic, welder, manager in a brick factory, and dock worker. His first novel, El juguete rabioso (1926) ("Mad Toy"), was the semi-autobiographical story of Silvio, a dropout who goes through a series of adventures trying to be "somebody." Narrated by Silvio's older self, the novel reflects the energy and chaos of the early 20th century in Buenos Aires. The narrator's literary and sometimes poetic language contrasts sharply with the street-level slang of Mad Toy's many colorful characters. Arlt's second novel, the popular Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen) was rough, brutal, colloquial and surreal, a complete break from the polite, middle-class literature more typical of Argentine literature (as exemplified, perhaps, by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, however innovative his work was in other respects). Los lanzallamas (The Flame-Throwers) was the sequel, and these two novels together are thought by many to be his greatest work. What followed were a series of short stories and plays in which Arlt pursued his vision of bizarre, half-mad, alienated characters pursuing insane quests in a landscape of urban chaos. During his lifetime, however, Arlt was best known for his "Aguafuertes" ("Etchings"), the result of his contributions as a columnist - between 1928 and 1942 - to the Buenos Aires daily "El Mundo". Arlt used these columns to comment, in his characteristically forthright and unpretentious style, on the peculiarities, hypocrisies, strangeness and beauty of everyday life in Argentina's capital. These articles included occasional exposés of public institutions, such as the juvenile justice system ("Escuela primaria de delincuencia", 26–29 September 1932) or the Public Health System. Some of the "Aguafuertes" were collected in two volumes under the titles Secretos femeninos. Aguafuertes inéditas and Tratado de delincuencia. Aguafuertes inéditas which were edited by Sergio Olguín and published by Ediciones 12 and Página/12 in 1996. Between March and May 1930, Arlt wrote a series of "Aguafuertes" as a correspondent to "El Mundo" in Rio de Janeiro. In 1935 he spent nearly a year writing as he traveled throughout Spain and North Africa, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. At the time of his death, Arlt was hoping to be sent to the United States as a correspondent. Worn out and exhausted after a lifetime of hardships, he died from a stroke on July 26, 1942. His coffin was lowered from his apartment by an operated crane, an ironic end, considering his bizarre stories. Arlt has been massively influential on Latin American literature, including the 1960s "Boom" generation of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. Analogues in English literature are those who avoid literary 'respectability' by writing about the poor, the criminal and the mad: writers like William Burroughs, Iceberg Slim, and Irvine Welsh. Arlt, however, predated all of them. He is widely considered to be one of the founders of the modern Argentine novel; among those contemporary writers who cla

Russell Edson (December 12, 1928 – April 29, 2014) was an American poet, novelist, writer, and illustrator. He was the son of the cartoonist-screenwriter Gus Edson. He studied art early in life and attended the Art Students League as a teenager. He began publishing poetry in the 1960s. His honors as a poet include a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Award, and several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Russell Edson was born in Connecticut in 1935 and lived there with his wife Frances. Edson, who jokingly has called himself "Little Mr. Prose Poem," is inarguably the foremost writer of prose poetry in America, having written exclusively in that form before it became fashionable. In a forthcoming study of the American prose poem, Michel Delville suggests that one of Edson's typical "recipes" for his prose poems involves a modern everyman who suddenly tumbles into an alternative reality in which he loses control over himself, sometimes to the point of being irremediably absorbed—both figuratively and literally—by his immediate and, most often, domestic everyday environment... Constantly fusing and confusing the banal and the bizarre, Edson delights in having a seemingly innocuous situation undergo the most unlikely and uncanny metamorphoses... Reclusive by nature, Edson has still managed to publish eleven books of prose poems and one novel, The Song of Percival Peacock (available from Coffee House Press).