Curated category
Modernist writers
- F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald sold fewer than 23,000 copies of The Great Gatsby in its first year, and the novel posted tepid sales for the rest of his life.
- George OrwellGeorge Orwell did not exist on any birth certificate. The man behind the name was Eric Arthur Blair, born on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal…
- Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway was born on the 21st of July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, into a family where his mother kept his hair long and dressed him in frilly…
- André BretonAndré Breton defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism" - a phrase that landed in print in 1924 and reoriented the entire direction of modern art.
- William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner spent most of his writing life within a few square miles of Lafayette County, Mississippi, yet the fictional world he built from that patch…
- James JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on the 2nd of February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, and died 58 years later in Zurich after surgery…
- Joseph ConradJoseph Conrad did not speak English fluently until his twenties, and even then he spoke it with a strong foreign accent for the rest of his life.
- Albert CamusAlbert Camus was born on the 7th of November 1913 in Mondovi, a working-class town in French Algeria, to a mother who was deaf and illiterate and a father he…
- Dylan ThomasDylan Thomas walked into his 39th birthday party in New York on the 27th of October 1953 and left after an hour, feeling too ill to stay.
- André GideAndré Paul Guillaume Gide was born in Paris on the 22nd of November 1869, and by the time he died on the 19th of February 1951, his New York Times obituary…
- Franz KafkaFranz Kafka asked a friend to burn everything he had ever written. The friend was Max Brod, his literary executor, and the instruction was explicit: every…
- Hermann HesseHermann Hesse died on the 9th of August 1962, aged 85, in Montagnola, Switzerland, and a memorial in The New York Times called his works largely inaccessible…
- Samuel BeckettSamuel Beckett once described his own method as "impoverishment" - as taking away rather than adding, subtracting rather than building.
- Karel ČapekKarel Čapek died on Christmas Day, 1938, of pneumonia, and the Gestapo did not even know he was gone. Months later, Nazi agents arrived at his Prague home to…
- Louis-Ferdinand CélineLouis-Ferdinand Céline completed the second draft of his final novel on the 30th of June 1961. He died at home the very next day, of a ruptured aneurysm.
- Andrei BelyAndrei Bely was born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev in Moscow, into a household where intellectual life was the air everyone breathed.
- Luigi PirandelloLuigi Pirandello arrived in Rome on a hard, rainy night and felt, by his own account, that his heart was being crushed. Then he laughed, like a man in the…
- Mikhail BulgakovMikhail Bulgakov typed the last pages of The Master and Margarita knowing they would likely never be read. In a letter to his wife on the 15th of June 1938…
- Leopoldo LugonesLeopoldo Lugones died the way he had lived: in the grip of extremes. On the 18th of February 1938, at the river resort of El Tigre in Buenos Aires, he mixed…
- Maxim GorkyMaxim Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod, and by the time he died in June 1936, his ashes were carried through Moscow by Joseph…
- Miguel de UnamunoMiguel de Unamuno died on the 31st of December 1936, the last day of the last year of his life, under house arrest in Salamanca.