Biographical Notes on the Authors

Katherine Mansfield (1888 – 1923), British author, born in New Zealand, regarded as one of the masters of the short story. Her original name was Kathleen Beauchamp. A talented cellist, she did not turn to literature until 1908. Her first volume of short stories, In a German Pension (1911), was not remarkable and achieved little notice, but the stories in Bliss (1920) and The Garden Party (1922) established her as a major writer. Later volumes of stories include The Dove's Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924; U.S. ed. The Little Girl, 1924). Her collected stories appeared in 1937. Novels and Novelists (1930) is a compilation of critical essays. After an unhappy first marriage, she married John Middleton Murry, an editor and critic, in 1918. During the last five years of her life she suffered from tuberculosis and succumbed to the disease at the age of 35. Mansfield’s stories, which reveal the influence of Chekhov, are simple in form, luminous and evocative in substance. With delicate plainness they present elusive moments of decision, defeat, and small triumph. After her death Murry culled a number of books from her notebooks, editing her poems (1923, new ed. 1930), her journals (1927), her letters (1928), and a collection of unfinished pieces from her notebooks (1939).

Katherine Mansfield revolutionised the 20th Century English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong. And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness – its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire.

John Cheever

John Cheever (May 27, 1912–June 18, 1982) was an American novelist and short story writer, sometimes called “the Chekhov of the suburbs.” His The Stories of John Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979.

Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts. His father owned a shoe factory and was relatively wealthy until he lost his business in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and deserted his family. The young Cheever was deeply upset by the breakdown of his parents' relationship. His formal education ended when he was seventeen and left home. Cheever studied at that time at Thayer Academy, but was expelled for smoking. The experience was the nucleus of his first published story, ‘Expelled’ (1930), which Malcolm Cowley bought for The New Republic. Cheever went to live with his brother in Boston. He wrote synopses for MGM and sold stories to various magazines. After a journey in Europe, Cheever returned to the US. He settled in New York and became friends with such writers as John Dos Passos, Edward Estlin Cummings, James Agee, and James Farrell. In 1933 he attended the Yaddo writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs.

Cheever died in 1982, at the age of 70, in Ossinning, New York. In 1987, his widow, Mary, signed a contract with a small publisher, Academy Chicago, for the right to publish Cheever’s uncollected short stories. The contract led to a long legal battle, and a book of 13 stories by the author, published in 1994. Two of Cheever’s children, Susan and Benjamin, become novelists. Cheever’s posthumously published letters and journals revealed his guilt-ridden bisexuality. Cheever claimed in his diaries to have been diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) by a marriage counselor that his wife forced him to see. He was also an alcoholic. Cheever’s real-life bisexuality was referenced in an episode of Seinfeld, “The Cheever Letters”, in which correspondence from Cheever is discovered, revealing Cheever had an affair with the fictional character of Susan Ross’ father.

His most significant works include the Wapshot books. The Wapshot Chronicle won the National Book Award in 1958) and the collection The Stories of John Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize. He was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and was considered one of the purest examples of “the New Yorker writer”. Cheever’s main theme was the spiritual and emotional emptiness of life. He especially described the manners and morals of middle-class, suburban America, with an ironic humour which softened his basically dark vision. A number of Cheever’s early works were published in The New Republic, Collier’s Weekly, and The Atlantic. In 1935 he began a lifelong association with The New Yorker. He married Mary Winternitz in 1941, and two years later, published his first book, The Way Some People Live. Its stories had originally appeared in magazines and depicted the life of Upper-Eastside and suburban residents or dealt with Cheever's own experiences as a recruit. He had served during World War II as an infantry gunner and member of the Signal Corps.

After the war he worked as a teacher and wrote scripts for television. In 1951 Cheever received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to become a full-time writer. His second collection, The Enormous Radio And Other Stories, was published in 1953. In the mid-1950s Cheever began writing novels. The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) was an autobiographical story based on his mother's and father's relationship, his family’s genteel decline, and own life. The book won the National Book Award in 1958. In the 1960s Cheever worked briefly as a Hollywood scripwriter on a film version of D.H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl, published in 1920. From 1956 to 1957 Cheever taught writing at Barnard College – a work he never liked much. However, he was teacher at the University of Iowa and at Sing Sing prison in the early 1970s, and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Boston University (1974-75). The Stories Of John Cheever (1978) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award.

W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965) was born in Paris as the sixth and youngest son of a solicitor to the British embassy. He learned French as his native language. At the age of 10, Maugham was orphaned and sent to England to live with his uncle, the vicar of Whitstable. Educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and Heidelberg University, Maugham then studied medicine in London for six years. He qualified in 1897 as doctor from St. Thomas' medical school but abandoned medicine after the success of his first novels and plays.

Maugham lived in Paris for ten years as a struggling young author. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth appeared in 1897, and drew on his experiences of attending women in childbirth. His first play, A Man of Honor, was produced in 1903. Four of his plays ran simultaneously in London in 1904. Maugham’s breakthrough novel was the semi-autobiographical Of Human Bondage (1915), which is usually considered his outstanding achievement.

Disguised as a reporter, Maugham worked for the British Intelligence in Russia during the Russian Revolution in 1917, but his stuttering and poor health hindered his career in this field. He then set off with a friend on a series of travels to eastern Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Mexico. His most famous story, which became the play Rain and was made into several movies, was inspired by a missionary and prostitute among his fellow passengers on a trip to Pago Pago. In the 1928 he settled in Cape Ferrat in France. His plays, among them The Circle (1921), a satire of social life, Our Betters (1923), about Americans in Europe, and The Constant Wife (1927), about a wife who takes revenge on her unfaithful husband, were performed in Europe and in the United States. Maugham's famous novel The Moon And The Sixpence (1919) was the story of Charles Strickland (or actually Paul Gauguin), an artist, whose rejection of Western civilization led to his departure for Tahiti. Trembling of a Leaf (1921) included the story Rain, made into a play by John Colton and Clemence Randolph in 1922. Razor’s Edge (1944), about a spiritual quest, was made into film two times.

After the 1930s Maugham's reputation abroad was greater than in England. Interest in him revived again in his 80th birthday, which he celebrated by the special republication of Cakes And Ale (1930), a novel satirizing London literary circles and Grand Old Men. Maugham collected his literary experiences in The Summing Up, which has been used as a guidebook for creative writing.

Famous quotations by W. Somerset Maugham:

· It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

· Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all.

· The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

· It’s no good trying to keep up old friendships. It’s painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.

· We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

· We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

· The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.

· An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

· Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Oscar Wilde

J. D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger (born January 1, 1919) is an American author best known for The Catcher in the Rye, a classic coming-of-age story that has enjoyed enduring popularity since its publication in 1951. A major theme in Salinger’s work is the agile but powerful mind of disturbed young men, and the redemptive capacity of children in the lives of such men.

Born in New York City, New York, Salinger began his writing career writing short stories for magazines in New York. Of his early work, several stories – most notably A Perfect Day for Bananafish stood out. He also published two episodes from what would become The Catcher in the Rye before he had to leave America to join the War: I'm Crazy and Slight Rebellion Off Madison. He attended Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, upon which Pencey Prep in The Catcher in the Rye is based.

His writing was interrupted for a few years by World War II, where he saw combat action in some of the fiercest fighting in the war. This scarred him emotionally, and he later drew upon his wartime experiences in several stories, most notably For Esmé - With Love and Squalor, which is narrated by a traumatized soldier.

The Catcher in the Rye, his first, and most famous novel, was published in 1951 and was originally unpopular with critics, but later gained approbation from critics and readers. The book, written in the first person, is narrated by the rebellious, immature but insightful teenager named Holden Caulfield. Although never confirmed by Salinger himself, a large amount of the events in the novel are considered to be autobiographical. The novel has a unique style and was initially banned in some countries because of the – for the time – bold and offensive use of language. The plot is quite simple and straightforward but the book became famous for Salinger’s extensive and exceptional eye for detail and description, and for the depressing and desperate atmosphere of New York City.

Salinger later published Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters and Seymour – An Introduction (the latter two appearing together in 1963) as well as other short stories (collected in the book Nine Stories).

After the notoriety of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger became a recluse. He moved from New York to Cornish, New Hampshire where he continued to write novels but did not publish them.

Salinger has tried to escape public exposure and attention as much as possible (“A writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him”, he wrote). But he constantly struggles with the unwanted attention he gets as a cult figure. On learning of British writer Ian Hamilton’s intention to publish J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life, a biography including letters Salinger had written to other authors and friends, Salinger sued to stop the book’s publication. The book was finally published with the letters’ contents paraphrased; the court ruled that though a person may own a letter physically, the language within it belongs to the author.

An unintended result of the lawsuit was that many details of Salinger’s private life, including that he had written two novels and many stories but left them unpublished, became public in the form of court transcripts.

He has been a life long student of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism. This has been described at length by Sam P. Ranchan in his book An Adventure in Vedanta: J.D. Salinger's the Glass Family (1990).

A year-long affair in 1972 with eighteen-year old aspiring writer Joyce Maynard also became the source of controversy when she put his letters to her up for auction.

In 2000, his daughter, Margaret Salinger, by his second wife Claire Douglas, published “Dream Catcher: A Memoir.” In her “tell-all” book, Ms. Salinger stated that her father spoke in tongues, kept her mother “a virtual prisoner” and refused to allow her to see friends or relatives.

In 2002, more than 80 letters from writers, critics and fans to Mr. Salinger were published in the book Letters to J. D. Salinger, edited by Chris Kubica.

Salinger is the father of actor Matt Salinger.

H.G. Wells

Herbert George Wells, (1866-1946), English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian, famous for his works of science fiction. Wells’s best-known books are The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War Of The Worlds (1898).

H.G. Wells was born on September 21, 1866 in Bromley, Kent. His father was a shopkeeper and a professional cricketer, and his mother served from time to time as a housekeeper at the nearby estate of Uppark. His father’s business failed and Wells was apprenticed like his brothers to a draper, spending the years between 1880 and 1883 in Windsor and Southsea. Later he recorded these years in Kipps (1905).

In 1883 Wells became a teacher-pupil at Midhurst Grammar School. He obtained a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London and studied biology under T.H. Huxley. However, his interest faltered and in 1887 he left without a degree. He taught in private schools for four years, not taking his B.S. degree until 1890. Next year he settled in London, married his cousin Isabel and continued his career as a teacher in a correspondence college. From 1893 Wells became a full-time writer. After some years Wells left Isabel for one of his brightest students, Amy Catherine, whom he married in 1895.

As a novelist Wells made his debut with The Time Machine(1895), a parody of English class division and a satirical warning that human progress is not inevitable. The work was followed by such science-fiction classics as The Island Of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). The First Men On The Moon (1901) was a prophetic description of the methodology of space flight and The War In The Air (1908) describes a catastrophic aerial war. Love And Mr. Lewisham appeared in 1900, Tono-Bungay and The History Of Mr. Polly in 1909. Wells also published critical pamphlets attacking the Victorian social order, among them Anticipations (1901), Mankind In The Making (1903) and A Modern Utopia (1905).

Passionate concern for society led Wells to join the socialist Fabian Society in London, but he soon quarreled with the society's leaders, among them George Bernard Shaw. This experience was basis for his novel The New Machiavelli (1911), where he drew portraits of the noted Fabians. After WW I Wells published several non-fiction works, among them The Outline Of History (1920), The Science Of Life (1929-39) and Experiment In Autobiography (1934). In 1917 Wells was a member of Research Committee for the League of Nations and published several books about the world organization. Between the years 1924 and 1933 Wells lived mainly in France. From 1934 to 1946 he was the International president of PEN.

In The Holy Terror (1939) Wells studied the psychological development of a modern dictator based on the careers of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler. Wells lived through World War II in his house on Regent's Park, refusing to let the blitz drive him out of London.

His last book, Mind At The End Of Its Tether (1945), expressed pessimism about mankind's future prospects. Wells died in London on August 13, 1946.

D.H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930), English novelist, storywriter, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in 20th-century English literature. “Snake” and “How Beastly the Bourgeoisie is” are probably his most anthologized poems.

David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, central England. He was the fourth child of a struggling coal miner who was a heavy drinker. His mother was a former schoolteacher, greatly superior in education to her husband. Lawrence's childhood was dominated by poverty and friction between his parents. He was educated at Nottingham High School, to which he had won a scholarship. He worked as a clerk in a surgical appliance factory and then for four years as a pupil-teacher. After studies at Nottingham University, Lawrence matriculated at 22 and briefly pursued a teaching career. Lawrence’s mother died in 1910; he helped her die by giving her an overdose of sleeping medicine.

In 1909, a number of Lawrence’s poems were published by Ford Max Ford in the English Review. The appearance of his first novel, The White Peacock (1911), launched Lawrence into a writing career. In 1912 he met Frieda von Richthofen, the professor Ernest Weekly's wife and fell in love with her. Frieda left her husband and three children, and they eloped to Bavaria. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers appeared in 1913 and was based on his childhood. In 1914 Lawrence married Frieda von Richthofen, and traveled with her in several countries. Lawrence's fourth novel, The Rainbow (1915), was about two sisters growing up in the north of England. Lawrence started to write The Lost Girl in Italy. He dropped the novel for some years and rewrote the story in an old Sicilian farmhouse near Taormina in 1920.

During the First World War Lawrence and his wife were unable to obtain passports and were targets of constant harassment from the authorities. They were accused of spying for the Germans and officially expelled from Cornwall in 1917. The Lawrences were not permitted to emigrate until 1919, when their years of wandering began.

Lawrence's best known work is Lady Chatterly's Lover, first published privately in Florence in 1928. It tells of the love affair between a wealthy, married woman, and a man who works on her husband's estate. The book was banned for a time in both UK and the US as pornographic. Lawrence's other novels from the 1920s include Women In Love (1920), a sequel to The Rainbow.

Aaron's Rod (1922) shows the influence of Nietzsche, and in Kangaroo (1923) Lawrence expressed his own idea of a 'superman'. The Plumed Serpent (1926) was a vivid evocation of Mexico and its ancient Aztec religion. The Man Who Died (1929), is a bold story of Christ's Resurrection. Lawrence's non-fiction works include Movements In European History(1921), Psychoanalysis And The Unconscious (1922) and Studies In Classic American Literature (1923).

D.H. Lawrence died in Vence, France on March 2, 1930. He also gained posthumous renown for his expressionistic paintings completed in the 1920s.

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Hardie Jackson (1919-1965) was born in San Francisco, California, her mother a housewife and her father an employee of a lithographing company. Most of her early life was spent in Burlingame, California, which she later used as the setting for her first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948). As a child she was interested in writing; she won a poetry prize at age twelve, and in high school she began keeping a diary to record her writing progress. After high school she briefly attended the University of Rochester but left because of an attack of the mental depression that was to recur periodically in her later years. She recovered her health by living quietly at home and writing, conscientiously turning out a thousand words of prose a day.

In 1937 she entered Syracuse University, where she published stories in the student literary magazine. There she met Stanley Edgar Human, who was to become a noted literary critic. They were married in 1940, the year she received her degree. They had four children while both continued active literary careers, settling to raise their family in a large Victorian house in Vermont, where Hyman taught literature at Bennington College.

Jackson’s first national publication was a humorous story written after a job at a department store during the Christmas rush: My Life with R. H. Macy appeared in The New Republic in 1941. Her first child was born the next year, but she wrote every day on a disciplined schedule, selling her stories to magazines and publishing three novels. Jackson's best-known work, The Lottery, is often dramatized, and televised. However, many people are now discovering her other works, which range from children's non-fiction to fiction rooted in the Gothic to feminist fiction.

Appendix 1

Glossary of terms

Action – The events that take place within a story.

Character – A person who appears in a work of fiction. More accurately, a character is the person or conscious entity we imagine to exist within the world of such a work. In addition to people, characters can be aliens, animals, gods or, occasionally, inanimate objects. Characters are almost always at the center of fictional texts, especially novels and plays.

Characterization – The means by which the author creates the characters. Characterization can involve developing a variety of aspects of a character, such as appearance, age, gender, educational level, vocation or occupation, financial status, marital status, social status, hobbies, religious beliefs, ambitions, motivations, etc. The psychological makeup of a fully developed character involves fears, emotions, backstory, issues, beliefs, practices, desires, and intentions. Often these can be shown through the actions and language of the character, rather than by telling the reader directly. Characterization can be presented either directly or indirectly. Direct characterization takes place when the author literally tells the audience what a character is like. In indirect characterization, the audience must deduce for themselves what the character is like through the character’s thoughts, actions, speech, looks and interaction with other characters.

Episode – A single incident, complete in itself, that forms part of the continuing action of the story.

First person narrative – In a first person narrative, the narrator is a character in the story. This character takes actions, makes judgements and has opinions and biases. It is an important task for the reader to determine as much as possible about the character of the narrator in order to decide what “really” happens. This type of narrator is usually noticeable for the use of the first-person pronoun.

Message (moral) – The lesson a story teaches about what is considered to be right or wrong.

Narrative – A prose account of a fictional event or a series of such events.

Narrator(story teller) – The person who tells the story to the reader. The narrator sees the story from the point it occupies within the fictional world.

Plot – The pattern of events in a narrative. The traditional plot of a short story has the following elements:

· Initial situation – the beginning. It is the first incident that makes the story move.

· Conflict or Problem – the goal which the main character of the story has to achieve.

· Complication – obstacles which the main character has to overcome.

· Climax – the highest point of interest of the story.

· Suspense – the point of tension. It arouses the interest of the readers.

· Denouement or Resolution – what happens to the character after overcoming all obstacles to achieve the desired result and reaching/not reaching his goal.

· Conclusion – the end of the story.

Setting – The time and place in which the action of a story takes place.

Theme – The central or controlling idea of a story.

Appendix 2

Additional Reading

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