AUTHORS and WRITERS 3rd WEEK

First Month
AUTHORS
1 William Shakespeare
2 Washington Irving
3 Ralph Waldo
4 Walt Whitman
5 Emily Dickinson
6 Kate Chopin
7 Frederick Douglass
8 Herman Melville
9 Mary Shelley
10 Ben Johnson
11 Oscar Wilde
12 Lewis Carroll
 9- Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (UK: /ˈwʊlstənkrɑːft/, US: /-kræft/; née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1
February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novelFrankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and
philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopherWilliam Godwin and her mother
was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Shelley's mother died less than a month after giving birth to her. She was raised by her father who was able
to provide her with a rich if informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political
theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbour with whom Shelley came to have a troubled
relationship.[2][3]

In 1814, Shelley began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who
was already married. Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and
travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Shelley was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the
next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt and the death of their prematurely born
daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.

In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont
near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left
Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Shelley gave birth to her last and
only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank
during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to
the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by
illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at age 53.

Until the 1970s, Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel
Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent
scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Shelley's achievements. Scholars have shown
increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels
Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826) and her final two
novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book
Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet
Cyclopaedia (1829–1846), support the growing view that Shelley remained a political radical throughout her
life. Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the
family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic
Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her
father, William Godwin.
Works
 History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817)
 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
 Mathilda (1819)
 Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823)
 Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824)
 The Last Man (1826)
 The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830)
 Lodore (1835)
 Falkner (1837)
 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839)
 Contributions to Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men (1835–39), part of Lardner'sCabinet
Cyclopaedia
 Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844)
 10- Ben Jonson

Benjamin Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637[2]) was an English playwright and poet, whose
artistry exerted a lasting impact upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of
humours. He is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour[3] (1598), Volpone, or The Fox
(c. 1606), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry.
"He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare,
during the reign of James I."[4]

Jonson was a classically educated, well-read and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite
for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual) whose cultural influence was of unparalleled
breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603–1625) and of the Caroline era (1625–
1642).

Drama

As G. E. Bentley notes in Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century
Compared, Jonson's reputation was in some respects equal to Shakespeare's in the 17th century. After the
English theatres were reopened on the Restoration of Charles II, Jonson's work, along with Shakespeare's
and Fletcher's, formed the initial core of the Restoration repertory. It was not until after 1710 that
Shakespeare's plays (ordinarily in heavily revised forms) were more frequently performed than those of his
Renaissance contemporaries. Many critics since the 18th century have ranked Jonson below only
Shakespeare among English Renaissance dramatists. Critical judgment has tended to emphasise the very
qualities that Jonson himself lauds in his prefaces, in Timber, and in his scattered prefaces and dedications:
the realism and propriety of his language, the bite of his satire, and the care with which he plotted his
comedies.

Jonson's works
Plays

 A Tale of a Tub, comedy (c. 1596 revised performed 1633; printed 1640)
 The Isle of Dogs, comedy (1597, with Thomas Nashe; lost)
 The Case is Altered, comedy (c. 1597–98; printed 1609), possibly with Henry Porter and Anthony
Munday
 Every Man in His Humour, comedy (performed 1598; printed 1601)
 Every Man out of His Humour, comedy ( performed 1599; printed 1600)
 Cynthia's Revels (performed 1600; printed 1601)
 The Poetaster, comedy (performed 1601; printed 1602)
 Sejanus His Fall, tragedy (performed 1603; printed 1605)
 Eastward Ho, comedy (performed and printed 1605), a collaboration with John Marston and George
Chapman
 Volpone, comedy (c. 1605–06; printed 1607)
 Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, comedy (performed 1609; printed 1616)
 The Alchemist, comedy (performed 1610; printed 1612)
 Catiline His Conspiracy, tragedy (performed and printed 1611)
 Bartholomew Fair, comedy (performed 31 October 1614; printed 1631)
 The Devil is an Ass, comedy (performed 1616; printed 1631)
 The Staple of News, comedy (performed Feb. 1626; printed 1631)
 The New Inn, or The Light Heart, comedy (licensed 19 January 1629; printed 1631)
 The Magnetic Lady, or Humors Reconciled, comedy (licensed 12 October 1632; printed 1641)
 The Sad Shepherd, pastoral (c. 1637, printed 1641), unfinished
 Mortimer His Fall, history (printed 1641), a fragment
 11- OSCAR WILDE

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and
playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s saw him become one of
the most popular playwrights in London. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The
Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for "gross indecency",
imprisonment, and early death at age 46.

Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and
German. At university, Wilde read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at
Trinity College Dublin, then at Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism,
led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into
fashionable cultural and social circles.

As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of
poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and interior
decoration, and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting
wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities
of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues
and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine
them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote Salome (1891) in French while in
Paris but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical
subjects on the English stage. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which
made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.

At the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) was still being
performed in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for criminal libel. The Marquess
was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to
drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men. After two more trials he
was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to
1897. During his last year in prison, he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in 1905), a long letter
which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy
of pleasure. On his release, he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he
wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of
prison life.
Selected works
 Ravenna (1878)
 Poems (1881)
 The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888, fairy stories)
 Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891, stories)
 A House of Pomegranates (1891, fairy stories)
 Intentions (1891, essays and dialogues on aesthetics)
 The Picture of Dorian Gray
 The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891, political essay)
 Lady Windermere's Fan (1892, play)
 A Woman of No Importance (1893, play)
 An Ideal Husband (performed 1895, published 1898; play)
 The Importance of Being Earnest (performed 1895, published 1898; play)
 De Profundis (written 1897, published variously 1905, 1908, 1949, 1962; epistle)
 The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898, poem)
 12- LEWIS CARROLL

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (/ˈlʌtwɪdʒˈdɒdʒsən/; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his
pen nameLewis Carroll, was an English writer of children's fiction, notably Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He was noted for his facility at word play, logic, and
fantasy. The poems Jabberwocky and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary
nonsense. He was also a mathematician, photographer, and Anglican deacon.

Carroll came from a family of high-churchAnglicans, and developed a long relationship with Christ Church,
Oxford, where he lived for most of his life as a scholar and teacher. Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of
Christ Church, Henry Liddell, is widely identified as the original for Alice in Wonderland, though Carroll
always denied this.

Born in All Saints' Vicarage, Daresbury, Cheshire, in 1832, Carroll is commemorated at All Saints' Church,
Daresbury, in its stained glass windows depicting characters from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In
1982, a memorial stone to Carroll was unveiled in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Literary works

 La Guida di Bragia, a Ballad Opera for the Marionette Theatre (around 1850)
 "Miss Jones", comic song (1862)[110]
 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
 Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (1869)
 Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (includes "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the
Carpenter") (1871)
 The Hunting of the Snark (1876)
 Rhyme? And Reason? (1883) – shares some contents with the 1869 collection, including the long poem
"Phantasmagoria"
 A Tangled Tale (1885)
 Sylvie and Bruno (1889)
 Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893)
 Pillow Problems (1893)
 What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (1895)
 Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)
 The Manlet (1903)