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About the Authors

Bradbury, Ray

Burrage, Alfred McLelland

Coppard, Alfred Edgar

Cronin, Archibald

Galleymore, Frances

Goldberg, Rube

Hare, Cyril

Huxley, Aldous Leonard

Jerome Klapka Jerome

Mansfield, Katherine

Maugham, William Somerset

Munro, Hector Hugh

O. Henry

Reade, Charles

Saroyan, William

Stucley, Elizabeth

Twain, Mark

Webster, Jean

Wilde, Oscar

Bradbury, Ray

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction author. Best known for his novel “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as “The Martian Chronicles” (1950) and “The Illustrated Man” (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. He wrote and consulted on many screenplays and television scripts, including “Moby Dick” and most notably, “It Came from Outer Space”, and many of his works have been adapted into comic books, television shows, and films.

Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois, to Esther Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant, and Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a power and telephone lineman of English descent. Ray Bradbury was surrounded by a loving extended family during his early childhood and formative years in Waukegan, Illinois. This period provided foundations for both the author and his stories. In Bradbury’s works of fiction, 1920s Waukegan becomes “Green Town”, Illinois. In his stories, Green Town is a symbol of safety and home, which is often juxtaposed as a contrasting backdrop to tales of fantasy or menace.

Between 1926 and 1933, the Bradbury family moved back and forth between Waukegan and Tucson, Arizona. In 1931, at the age of eleven, young Ray began writing his own stories. The country was going through the Great Depression, and sometimes Bradbury wrote on butcher paper. When the Bradbury family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1934, Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School and was active in the drama club. Bradbury often roller-skated through Hollywood in hopes of meeting celebrities.

Bradbury began submitting his short stories for publication. His first published story was “Hollerbochen’s Dilemma”, which appeared in the January 1938. Ray Bradbury was free to start a career in writing when, owing to his bad eyesight, he was rejected admission into the military during World War II.

Bradbury began to publish science fiction stories in fanzines in 1938. In 1939, Bradbury joined Laraine Day’s Wilshire Players Guild where for two years he wrote and acted in several plays. Bradbury sold his first story, “The Lake”, for $13.75 at the age of twenty-two. He became a full-time writer by the end of 1942.

Ray Bradbury was married to Marguerite McClure from 1947 until her death; they had four daughters: Susan, Ramona, Bettina and Alexandra. Though he lived in Los Angeles, Bradbury never obtained a driver's license but relied on public transportation or his bicycle. He lived at home until he was twenty-seven and married. His wife of fifty-six years, Maggie, as she was affectionately called, was the only woman Bradbury ever dated.

Bradbury suffered a stroke in 1999 that left him partially dependent on a wheelchair for mobility. Despite this he continued to write, and had even written an essay on his inspiration for writing for The New Yorker published only a week prior to his death. Bradbury made regular appearances at science fiction conventions until 2009, when he retired from the circuit.

Bradbury died in Los Angeles, California, on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91, after alengthy illness.

Burrage, Alfred McLelland

Alfred McLelland Burrage (1889 – 1956) was a British writer. He was noted in his time as an author of fiction for boys which he published under the pseudonym Frank Lelland, including a popular series called “Tufty”.

Alfred McLelland Burrage was born in Hillingdon, Middlesex on 1st July, 1889. His father was Alfred Sherrington Burrage, a writer, mainly of boys’ magazine fiction. His uncle was also a writer of boys’ fiction, and a more celebrated one. He was Edwin Harcourt Burrage, author of books like Handsome Harry of the Fighting Belvedere (1894), and editor of The Young Briton.

At the beginning of the century young Alfred was at St. Augustine’s School, Ramsgate, a Catholic foundation. It was in this year that the sixteen-year-old A.M. Burrage had his first story published, in Chums, one of the most prestigious of the boys’ papers. Long before he reached his majority Burrage was a busy professional writer earning excellent money, and by the age of twenty-five he was not only turning out stories and articles for Boys’ Friend Weekly, Boys’ Herald, Gem, Comic Life, Vanguard, Dreadnought, Triumph Library, Cheer Boys Cheer, but unlike his father and uncle, had branched out into the even more lucrative adult market.

The years from 1890 to 1914 were the golden age of magazine fiction. New techniques made printing cheap, and other media had not yet lured the mass audience away from the printed word. There was a huge market for writing that was lively and commercial.

He served in the First World War and published a memoir of his experiences, War Is War, as “Ex-Private X”. War is War became a bestseller. His humorous novel, Poor Dear Esme (1925), described by Jack Adrian as a “comic classic”, was often reprinted.

Burrage died at Edgware General Hospital on 18th December, 1956. The cause of death was a cardiac failure.

Burrage is now remembered mainly for his horror fiction, which was originally collected in the books Some Ghost Stories (1927) and Someone in the Room (1931, as by “Ex-Private X”) and has been reprinted by Ash-Tree Press.

Coppard, Alfred Edgar

Alfred Edgar Coppard (4 January 1878 – 13 January 1957) was an English writer, noted for his influence on the short story form, and poet.

Coppard was born in the family of a tailor and a housemaid in Folkestone, and had little formal education. Coppard grew up in difficult, poverty-stricken circumstances; he later described his childhood as “shockingly poor”.

After the family moved to Brighton, Coppard was educated at the Lewes Hill Boarding School until the age of nine. His father had died of tuberculosis the year before. Coppard later remembered him as a radical young man with a bushy beard who never owned nor could afford an overcoat. This fact was apparently significant, as Coppardhimself did not own an overcoat until he was thirty. After the father’s death, the family (Coppard, three sisters, and their mother) was sunk in destitution and was forced to apply for parish relief.

At nine, Coppard was taken out of school to become a wage earner. A year later, he was sent to Whitechapel in London, where he lived with an uncle and served as a shop boy to a trousers maker. From there, he was transferred to a pool of messenger boys at Reuter’s Telegraph Agency. The pay was usual for the period, but it was not enough to take care of the rest of his family.

Two years later, Coppard returned to Brighton and hired out as an office boy. From thirteen on, he worked at a number of jobs, meanwhile becoming an avid reader of poetry and continuing what had already become a program of self-education. He appears to have extraordinary energy; his enthusiasms were broad. He loved sports, hiking, music, painting, and amateur theatricals. By the time of his early teens, he had started to write poetry, inspired chiefly by John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” and John Milton’s “L’Allegro.”

In the early 1920s, and still unpublished, he was in Oxford and a leading light of a literary group, the New Elizabethans, who met in a pub to read Elizabethan drama. At this period he met Richard Hughes and Edgell Rickword, amongst others.

Coppard was a member of the Independent Labour Party for a period. Coppard’s fiction was influenced by Thomas Hardy and on its initial publication, favourably compared to that of H. E. Bates. Coppard’s short stories were praised by Ford Madox Ford and Frank O’Connor. Coppard’s work enjoyed popularity in the US after his Selected Tales was chosen as a selection by the Book of the Month Club.

In the profile in Twentieth Century Authors, Coppard lists Abraham Lincoln as the politician he most admired. Coppard also listed Sterne, Dickens, James, Hardy, Shaw, Chekhov and Joyce as authors he valued; he expressed a dislike for the works of D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling.

Some of Coppard’s collections, such as Adam and Eve and Pinch Me and Fearful Pleasures, contain stories with fantastic elements, either of supernatural horror or allegorical fantasy.

In Nancy Cunard’s 1937 book “Authors take Sides on the Spanish War”, Coppard took the side of the Republicans.

All through his life Coppard claimed the writers to unite in peace protection against war threat. Being very progressive he visited the Soviet Union in 1952 and after his coming back to England he did his best to develop and strengthen the relationship between the Soviet Union and Great Britain.

Cronin, Archibald

Archibald Joseph Cronin (19 July 1896 – 6 January 1981), a Scottish novelist and physician, was born at Rosebank Cottage in Cardross, Dunbartonshire, the only child of a Protestant mother, Jessie Cronin and a Catholic father, Patrick Cronin, and would later write of young men from similarly mixed backgrounds. After their marriage, Cronin’s parents moved to Helensburgh, where Archibald attended Grant Street School. When he was seven years old, his father, an insurance agent and commercial traveller, died from tuberculosis. He and his mother moved to her parents’ home in Dumbarton, and she soon became a public health inspector in Glasgow.

Cronin was not only an outstanding student at Dumbarton Academy who won many prizes and writing competitions, but also an excellent athlete and footballer. From an early age, he was an avid golfer, a sport he enjoyed throughout his life, and he loved salmon fishing as well. The family later moved to Yorkhill, Glasgow, where he attended St. Aloysius’ College in the Garnethill area of the city. He played football for the First XI there, an experience he included in one of his last novels, “The Minstrel Boy”.

A family decision that he should study for either the church or medicine was settled by Cronin himself, who chose “the lesser of two evils”. He won a Carnegie scholarship to study medicine at the University of Glasgow in 1914. He was absent during the 1916–1917 session for naval service. In 1919 he graduated with highest honours, with the degree of MB, ChB. Later that year he made a trip to India as ship’s surgeon on a liner. Cronin went on to earn additional degrees, including a Diploma in Public Health (1923). In 1925, he was awarded an M.D. from the University of Glasgow for his dissertation, entitled “The History of Aneurysm”.

During World War I, Cronin served as a Surgeon Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve before graduating from medical school. After the war, he trained at various hospitals including Bellahouston and Lightburn Hospitals in Glasgow and Rotunda Hospital in Dublin.

In 1930, after being diagnosed with a chronic ulcer, Cronin was told he must take six months’ complete rest in the country on a milk diet. At Dalchenna Farm by Loch Fyne, he was finally able to indulge his lifelong desire to write a novel. So his writing career started.

It was at university that Cronin met his future wife, Agnes Mary Gibson (May) (1898–1981), who was also a medical student. She was the daughter of Robert Gibson, a baker, and Agnes Thomson Gibson of Hamilton, Lanarkshire. The couple maried on 31 August 1921. As a physician, May worked with her husband briefly in the dispensary while he was employed by the Tredegar Medical Aid Society; she also assisted him with his practice in London. When he became an author, she would proofread his manuscripts. Their first son, Vincent, was born in Tredegar in 1924. Their second son, Patrick, was born in London in 1926. Andrew, their youngest son, was born in London in 1937.

With his stories being adapted to Hollywood films, Cronin and his family moved to the United States in 1939. They took up residence at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City and then in Deerfield, Massachusetts before settling in New Canaan, Connecticut in 1947.

Many of Cronin’s books were bestsellers which were translated into numerous languages. His strengths included his compelling narrative skill and his powers of acute observation and graphic description. Although noted for its deep social conscience, his work is filled with colourful characters and witty dialogue. Some of his stories draw on his medical career, dramatically mixing realism, romance, and social criticism.

Ultimately, Cronin returned to Europe, residing in Lucerne and Montreux, Switzerland for the last 25 years of his life and continuing to write into his eighties. He included among his friends Laurence Olivier, Charlie Chaplin and Audrey Hepburn, to whose first son he was godfather.

Cronin died on 6 January 1981 in Montreux. Many of Cronin’s writings, including published and unpublished literary manuscripts, drafts, letters, school exercise books and essays, laboratory books, and his M.D. thesis, are held at the National Library of Scotland and at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.

Galleymore, Frances

Frances Galleymore is a poet and an established author. Frances Galleymore’s recent writing unites the natural and human worlds with spiritual elements. Six widely praised novels have been published in the UK and in translation, also in audio and serialisation. As an award winning television screenwriter she has over thirty drama productions to her name, working with directors including Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). Frances’ short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio Four and published in The Mail On Sunday.

Her poetry is published in anthologies and magazines and has won competitions: Frances’ poem Recently in Somalia was commended by judges Neil Astley and Amy Wack in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2014, second prize for her poem Owl, Newark Open Poetry Competition 2012, the ten-page mini collection Mischievous Geography was runner-up for the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize 2012.

Frances won the Battered Moons Poetry Competition 2012 with her poem My Father Travelled. The competition, in association with Swindon Festival of Literature, was judged by Michael Symmons Roberts.

Goldberg, Rube

Reuben Garrett Lucius “Rube” Goldberg (July 4, 1883 – December 7, 1970) was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor. Reuben Lucius Goldberg was born July 4, 1883, in San Francisco, California, to Jewish parents Max and Hannah Goldberg. He was the third of seven children, three of whom died as children (older brother Garrett, younger brother Walter, and younger sister Lillian also survived).

Rube began tracing illustrations when he was four years old, and first took professional drawing lessons when he was eleven. Goldberg’s father was a San Francisco police and fire commissioner, who encouraged the young Reuben to pursue a career in engineering. But after six months as an engineer for the Water and Sewers Department of San Francisco he resigned his position with the city to join the San Francisco Chronicle where he became a sports cartoonist.

The following year, he took a job with the San Francisco Bulletin, where he remained until he moved to New York City in 1907. Goldberg drew cartoons for five newspapers, including the New York Journal American New York Evening Journal and the New York Evening Mail. His work entered syndication in 1915, beginning his nationwide popularity. He was syndicated by the McNaught Syndicate from 1922 until 1934. But he didn’t give up his engineering occupation, and in 1931 the Merriam-Webster dictionary adopted the word “Goldberg” as an adjective defined as accomplishing something simple through complicated means, which his favourite hobby.

He is best known for a series of popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets that perform simple tasks. Goldberg received many honors in his lifetime, including a Pulitzer Prize for his political cartooning in 1948 and the Banshees’ Silver Lady Award 1959.

Goldberg was a founding member and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society, and he is the namesake of the Reuben Award, which the organization awards to the Cartoonist of the Year. He is the inspiration for various international competitions, known as Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, which challenge participants to make a complicated machine to perform a simple task.

Rube Goldberg wrote a feature film featuring his machines and sculptures called “Soup to Nuts”, which was released in 1930 and starred Ted Healy and The Three Stooges.

In the 1962 John Wayne movie “Hatari”, an invention to catch monkeys by character Pockets, played by Red Buttons, is described as a “Rube Goldberg”. In the late 1960s and early 70s, educational shows like Sesame Street, Vision On and The Electric Company routinely showed bits that involved Rube Goldberg devices, including the Rube Goldberg Alphabet Contraption, and the What Happens Next Machine.

Rube married Irma Seeman on October 17, 1916. They lived at 98 Central Park West in New York City and had two sons named Thomas and George. Goldberg died in 1970 at the age of 87, while his widow, Irma, died on April 26, 1990 at the age of 95.

Hare, Cyril

Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark (4 September 1900 – 25 August 1958) was an English judge and crime writer under the pseudonym “Cyril Hare”.

The socialist politician Susan Lawrence was his aunt. He was educated at St. Aubyn’s, Rottingdean and Rugby. He studied law.

Gordon Clark’s pseudonym was a mixture of Hare Court, where he worked in the chambers of Roland Oliver, and Cyril Mansions, Battersea, where he lived after marrying Mary Barbara Lawrence in 1933. They had one son, Charles Philip Gordon Clark (a clergyman), and two daughters, Alexandra Mary Gordon Clark (who became an architectural historian) and Cecilia Mary Gordon Clark (later a musician).

As a young man and during the early days of the Second World War, Gordon Clark toured as a judge’s marshal, an experience he used in Tragedy at Law. Between 1942 and 1945 he worked at the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. At the beginning of the war he served a short time at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the wartime civil. In 1950 he was appointed county court judge in Surrey. His best-known novel is Tragedy at Law, in which he drew on his legal expertise and in which he introduced Francis Pettigrew, a not very successful barrister who in this and four other novels just happens to elucidate aspects of the crime. His professional detective (they appeared together in three novels, and only one has neither of them present) was a large and realistic police officer, Inspector Mallett, with a vast appetite.

Of his other full length novels, “Suicide Excepted” shows a man committing an almost perfect murder, only to find that a quirk of the insurance laws deprives him of the reward.

Among the more outstanding of “Hare’s” literary contributions are his short stories, mostly written for the London Evening Standard. “The Story of Hermione” has been called one of the most chilling short stories ever written; “Sister Bessie” describes vividly the agonies of a blackmail victim and the desperate crimes he commits in the hope of freeing himself.

Having suffered from tuberculosis shortly after the Second World War Gordon Clark was never again in full health and died at his home near Box Hill, Surrey at the age of only 57.

Huxley, Aldous Leonard

Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer, philosopher and a prominent member of the Huxley family. Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. Huxley later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, in particular, Universalism. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time.

Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England, in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. Huxley began his learning in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, then went to Hillside School, Malvern. His teacher was his mother, who supervised him for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908 when he was 14. In 1911, he suffered an illness which “left him practically blind for two to three years”; he was half-blind in one eye. Once his eyesight recovered sufficiently, he was able to study English literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

In 1916 he edited Oxford Poetry and later graduated (B.A.) with first class honours. Huxley had to earn a living. He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later to become George Orwell) and Steven Runciman were among his pupils, but was remembered as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn't keep discipline.

Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early 20s. His first published novels were social satires, beginning with “Crome Yellow” (1921). During World War I, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor near Oxford, working as a farm labourer. Works of this period included important novels on the dehumanising aspects of scientific progress, most famously “Brave New World”, and on pacifist themes (for example, “Eyeless in Gaza”). Starting from this period, Huxley began to write and edit non-fiction works on pacifist issues, including “Ends and Means”, “An Encyclopedia of Pacifism”, and “Pacifism and Philosophy” and was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union.

Huxley married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955), a Belgian he met at Garsington, in 1919. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 – 10 February 2005), who had a career as an author, anthropologist, and prominent epidemiologist. In 1956, Huxley married Laura Archera (1911–2007), also an author. She wrote “This Timeless Moment”, a biography of Huxley. In 1960, Huxley was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer and, in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel “Island”, and gave lectures on “Human Potentialities” at the Esalen Institute, which were fundamental to the forming of the Human Potential Movement.

Huxley died aged 69 of advanced laryngeal cancer on 22 November 1963.

Jerome Klapka Jerome

Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humourist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889).

Jerome was born in Caldmore, Walsall, England. He was the fourth child of Marguerite Jones and Jerome Clapp (who later renamed himself Jerome Clapp Jerome), an ironmonger and lay preacher. He had two sisters, Paulina and Blandina, and one brother, Milton, who died at an early age. Jerome was registered, like his father, as Jerome Clapp Jerome, and the Klapka appears to be a later variation. Owing to bad investments in the local mining industry, the family fell into poverty and debt collectors visited often, an experience Jerome described vividly in his autobiography My Life and Times (1926).

The young Jerome attended St Marylebone Grammar School. He wished to go into politics or be a man of letters, but the death of his father when the younger Jerome was age 13 and of his mother when he was age 15 forced him to quit his studies and find work to support himself. He was employed at the London and North Western Railway, initially collecting coal that fell along the railway, and remained there for four years.

In 1877, inspired by his older sister Blandina’s love for the theatre, Jerome decided to try his hand at acting, under the stage name Harold Crichton. He joined a repertory troupe that produced plays on a shoestring budget, often drawing on the actors’ own meagre resources – Jerome was penniless at the time – to purchase costumes and props. After three years on the road with no evident success, the 21-year-old Jerome decided he had had enough of stage life and sought other occupations. He tried to become a journalist, writing essays, satires and short stories, but most of these were rejected. Over the next few years he was a school teacher, a packer, and a solicitor’s clerk. Finally, in 1885, he had some success with On the Stage — and Off (1885), a comic memoir of his experiences with the acting troupe, followed by Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), a collection of humorous essays which had previously appeared in the newly founded magazine, Home Chimes, the same magazine that would later serialise Three Men in a Boat.

On 21 June 1888, Jerome married Georgina Elizabeth Henrietta Stanley Marris, nine days after she divorced her first husband. She had a daughter from her previous, five-year marriage nicknamed Elsie (her actual name was also Georgina). The honeymoon took place on the Thames “in a little boat”, a fact that was to have a significant influence on his next, and most important work, “Three Men in a Boat”.

Jerome sat down to write “Three Men in a Boat” as soon as the couple returned from their honeymoon. In the novel, his wife was replaced by his longtime friends George Wingrave (George) and Carl Hentschel (Harris). This allowed him to create comic (and non-sentimental) situations. The book, published in 1889, became an instant success and is still in print. Its popularity was such that the number of registered Thames boats went up fifty percent in the year following its publication, and it contributed significantly to the Thames becoming a tourist attraction.

In its first twenty years alone, the book sold over a million copies worldwide. It has been adapted to films, TV and radio shows, stage plays, and even a musical. Its writing style influenced many humorists and satirists in England and elsewhere.

Jerome volunteered to serve his country at the outbreak of the war, but, being 56 years old, was rejected by the British Army. Eager to serve in some capacity, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French Army.

In June 1927, on a motoring tour from Devon to London via Cheltenham and Northampton, Jerome suffered a paralytic stroke and a cerebral haemorrhage. He lay in Northampton General Hospital for two weeks before dying on 14 June. He was cremated at Golders Green and his ashes buried at St. Mary’s Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire. His wife, daughter and his sister Blandina are buried beside him. A small museum dedicated to his life and works was opened in 1984.

Mansfield, Katherine

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923), a prominent modernist writer of short fiction, was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.

Her father was a banker. She had two older sisters, a younger sister and a younger brother, born in 1894.

Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls’ High School magazine in 1898 and 1899. Mansfield wrote in her journals of feeling alienated in New Zealand, and of how she had become disillusioned because of the repression of the Māori people. Māori characters are often portrayed in a sympathetic or positive light in her later stories, such as “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped”.

In 1903 she began to attend Queen’s CollegeinLondon, where shecontributed to the college newspaper and eventually became its editor. She was particularly interested in the works of the French Symbolists and Oscar Wilde.

After finishing her schooling in England, she returned to New Zealand in 1906, and only then began to write short stories. She had several works published in the Native Companion (Australia), her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her heart set on becoming a professional writer. It was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym “K. Mansfield”. She rapidly wearied of the provincial New Zealand lifestyle and of her family, and two years later headed again for London.

Back in London in 1908, Mansfield quickly fell into a bohemian way of life. She published only one story and one poem during her first 15 months there. In 1909 her mother sent her daughter to the spa town of Bad Wörishofen in Bavaria, Germany. Mansfield’s time in Bavaria had a significant effect on her literary outlook. In particular, she was introduced to the works of Anton Chekhov. She returned to London in January 1910. She then published more than a dozen articles in a socialist magazine The New Age.

Mansfield’s life and work were changed by the death in 1915 of her beloved younger brother, Leslie Heron “Chummie” Beauchamp, as a New Zealand soldier in France. She began to take refuge in nostalgic reminiscences of their childhood in New Zealand.

At the beginning of 1917 Mansfield entered into her most prolific period of writing, which began with several stories, including “Mr.Reginald Peacock’s Day” and “A Dill Pickle”, being published in The New Age.

In December 1917 Mansfield was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Mansfield spent her last years seeking increasingly cures for her tuberculosis. In October 1922 Mansfield moved to France, where she was put under the care. In January 1923 Mansfield suffered a fatal pulmonary haemorrhage and died on January, 9. She was buried in a cemetery in Avon.

Maugham, William Somerset

William Somerset Maugham (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s.

Maugham was the fourth child in the family. His father was a lawyer who handled the legal affairs of the British embassy in Paris. Maugham’s mother died of tuberculosis at the age of 41. Two years later Maugham’s father died in France of cancer. After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was sent to the UK to be cared for by his uncle, the Vicar of Whitstablein Kent, who was a cold and emotionally cruel man. The boy attended The King’s School in Canterbury which herefused to continue at the age of sixteen. His uncle allowed him to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University.

After returning from Germany, Maugham decided to be a medical doctor (physician) not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family. Some critics think that the years Maugham spent studying medicine were a creative dead end, but Maugham felt otherwise. He was living in the great city of London, meeting people of a “low” sort whom he would never have met otherwise.

His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), was sold out so quickly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time.By 1914, Maugham was famous, with 10 plays produced and 10 novels published.

During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he travelled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.In May 1917 Maugham married SyrieWellcome. They had a daughter called Liza. The marriage was unhappy, and Syrie divorced him in 1929.

In 1947 Maugham instituted the Somerset Maugham Award, awarded to the best British writer or writers under the age of thirty-five for a work of fiction published in the past year. On his death, Maugham donated his royalties to the Royal Literary Fund.

Maugham spent most of the Second World War in the United States, first in Hollywood (he worked on many scripts, and was one of the first authors to make significant money from film adaptations) and later in the South. In 1944, Maugham moved back to England. In 1946 he returned to his villa in France, where he lived, interrupted by frequent and long travels, until his death. William Somerset Maugham died in Nice, France on 16 December 1965.

Munro, Hector Hugh

Hector Hugh Munro (18 December 1870 – 14 November 1916), better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker.

Born in Akyab, Burma, when it was still part of the British Empire, Hector Hugh Munro was the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police, and his wife Mary Frances (1843–1872).

In 1872, on a home visit to England, Mary was charged by a cow and the shock caused her to miscarry. She never recovered and soon died. Charles Munro sent his children, including two-year-old Hector, to England, where they were brought up by their grandmother and aunts in a strict puritanical household.

Hector was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth, Devon and at Bedford School. On a few occasions after he retired from Burma Charles travelled with Hector and his sister to fashionable European spas and tourist resorts. In 1893 Hector followed his father into the Indian Imperial Police and was posted to Burma. Two years later, having contracted malaria, he resigned and returned to England.

Munro started his writing career as a journalist for newspapers such as the Westminster Gazette, the Daily Express, the Morning Post, and magazines such as the Bystander and Outlook. His first book “The Rise of the Russian Empire”, a historical study modelled upon Edward Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, appeared in 1900, under his real name.

From 1902 to 1908 Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post in the Balkans, Warsaw, Russia (where he witnessed Bloody Sunday), and Paris. He then gave up foreign reporting and settled in London. Many of his stories from this period feature Reginald and Clovis, young men-about-town who take mischievous delight in the discomfort or downfall of their conventional, pretentious elders.

Shortly before the First World War, when “invasion literature” was selling well, Munro published a “what-if” novel, When William Came, subtitled “A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns”, imagining the eponymous German emperor conquering and occupying Britain.

At the start of the First World War Munro was 43 and officially over age, but he refused a commission and joined the 2nd King Edward’s Horse as an ordinary trooper. He later transferred to the 22nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, in which he rose to the rank of lance sergeant. More than once he returned to the battlefield when officially still too sick or injured. In November 1916 he was sheltering in a shell crater near Beaumont-Hamel, France, during the Battle of the Ancre, when he was killed by a German sniper.

Munro has no known grave. He is commemorated on Pier and Face 8C 9A and 16A of the Thiepval Memorial.

In 2003 English Heritage marked Munro’s flat at 97 Mortimer Street, in Fitzrovia with a blue plaque.

After his death his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers and wrote her own account of their childhood.

O. Henry

William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910), known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American writer. O. Henry’s short stories are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization, and clever twist endings.

William Sidney Porter was born on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina. He changed the spelling of his middle name to Sydney in 1898. When William was three, his mother died of tuberculosis, and he and his father moved into the home of his paternal grandmother. As a child, Porter was always reading, everything from classics to dime novels; his favorite works were Lane’s translation of “One Thousand and One Nights”, and Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy”.

Porter graduated from his aunt Evelina Maria Porter’s elementary school in 1876. He then enrolled at the Lindsey Street High School. His aunt continued to tutor him until he was fifteen. In 1879 he started working in his uncle’s drugstore and in 1881, at the age of nineteen, he was licensed as a pharmacist. At the drugstore, he also showed off his natural artistic talents by sketching the townsfolk.

Over the next several years Porter took a number of different jobs, first as pharmacist then as a draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began writing as a sideline.

Porter led an active social life in Austin, including membership in singing and drama groups. He was a good singer and musician. He played both the guitar and mandolin. He became a member of the “Hill City Quartet”, a group of young men who sang at gatherings and serenaded young women of the town. Porter met and began courting Athol Estes, then seventeen years old and from a wealthy family. Her mother objected to the match and Porter eloped with Athol to the home of Reverend R. K. Smoot, where they were married. The couple continued to participate in musical and theater groups, and Athol encouraged her husband to pursue his writing. Athol gave birth to a son in 1888, who died hours after birth, and then a daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, in September 1889.

Porter’s friend Richard Hall became Texas Land Commissioner and offered Porter a job of a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office (GLO) in 1887. In the GLO building, he began developing characters and plots for such stories as “Georgia’s Ruling” (1900), and “Buried Treasure” (1908). The castle-like building he worked in was even woven into some of his tales such as “Scrip No. 2692” (1894).

Porter and his family moved to Houston in 1895, where he started writing for the Post. His salary was only $25 a month, but it rose steadily as his popularity increased. Porter gathered ideas for his column by sitting in hotel lobbies and observing and talking to people there. This was a technique he used throughout his writing career.

Porter’s most prolific writing period started in 1902, when he moved to New York City to be near his publishers. While there, he wrote 381 short stories. He wrote a story a week for over a year for the New York World Sunday Magazine. His wit, characterization, and plot twists were adored by his readers, but often panned by critics.

Porter was a heavy drinker, and his health became worse markedly in 1908, which affected his writing. He died on June 5, 1910, of cirrhosis of the liver, complications of diabetes, and an enlarged heart.

Reade, Charles

Charles Reade (8 June 1814 – 11 April 1884) was an English novelist and dramatist.

Charles Reade was born at Ipsden House, Oxfordshire, England, on 8 June, 1814, one of eleven children of John Reade, an Oxfordshire squire, and Anna Maria Scott-Waring, a devout evangelical. One of his brothers, William Barrington Reade, would become a seaman. Reade was privately educated and then, in spite of his mother’s expectations that he would later enter the church, he enrolled at Magdalen College, Oxford University. He would later become a Dean of Arts and Vice President.

Reade’s hearts’ desire was to become a dramatist, so he started writing plays and enjoying the theatre life of London. As a talented violinist, he was also partner with a Soho violin making company for a while.

Reade began his literary career as a dramatist, though many of his plays are criticized by melodrama and under-developed characters. As an author, he always had an eye to stage effect in scene and situation as well as in dialogue. His first comedy, The Ladies’ Battle, appeared at the Olympic Theatre in May 1851. It was followed by Angela (1851), A Village Tale (1852), The Lost Husband (1852), and Gold (1853).

But Reade’s reputation was made by the two-act comedy, Masks and Faces. It was produced in November 1852, and later was expanded into three acts. At that time Reade met actress Laura Seymour (1820-1879), who would become one of his greatest supporters and friends. By the advice of the actress he turned the play into a prose story which appeared in 1853 as Peg Woffington. The same year he wrote Christie Johnstone, a close study of Scottish fisher folk. In 1854 he produced Two Loves and a Life, and The King’s Rival.

He made his name as a novelist in 1856, when he published It Is Never Too Late to Mend, a novel written to reform abuses in prison discipline and the treatment of criminals. Five more novels followed in quick succession: The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth (1857), White Lies (1857), Jack of all Trades (1858), The Autobiography of a Thief (1858), and Love Me Little, Love Me Long (1859).

Though Reade he never married officially, he had a son, Charles Liston Reade, whose mother had died while giving birth to him. Through all his life Reade had a connection with Laura Seymour; she had been Reade’s most constant companion and also his housekeeper. Ever-charitable, she was kind and generous to all who knew her and an animal lover too. He and Laura had an adopted daughter. He ended relations with her after she escaped at age of sixteen with an actor. After her husband abandoned her, she worked as an actress for a number of years. She performed 2000 times in a production of Reade’s “It Is Never Too Late to Mend”. She ended her life in a workhouse in Kent.

In 1879, Laura Seymour died. Reade’s grief was great. Broken-hearted, he tried his hand at a few more novels and plays though he would never recover his old self. He could not live in their home at Albert Gate for more than a few hours at a time, so, took up residence in the Shepherd’s Bush district of London. The novel A Perilous Secret (1884) was Reade’s last effort.

Charles Reade died at home on 11 April 1884 and lies buried beside Laura Seymour at St. Mary’s church, in Willesden, London, England.

Saroyan, William

William Saroyan (August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an American dramatist and author. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film adaptation of his novel “The Human Comedy”.

William Saroyan was born on August 31, 1908 in Fresno, California, to Armenak and Takoohi Saroyan, Armenian immigrants from Bitlis, Ottoman Empire. His father came to New York in 1905 and started preaching in Armenian Apostolic churches. At the age of three, after his father’s death, Saroyan, along with his brother and sister, was placed in an orphanage in Oakland, California. He later went on to describe his experience in the orphanage in his writings.

Saroyan decided to become a writer after his mother showed him some of his father’s writings. A few of his early short articles were published in Overland Monthly. His first stories appeared in the 1930s. Among these was “The Broken Wheel”, written under the name SirakGoryan and published in the Armenian journal Hairenik in 1933.

An Armenian American, Saroyan wrote extensively about the Armenian immigrant life in California. Many of his stories and plays are set in his native Fresno and are based on his childhood experiences among the Armenian-American fruit growers of the San Joaquin Valley or dealt with the rootlessness of the immigrant. The short story collection “My Name is Aram” (1940), an international bestseller, was about a young boy and the colorful characters of his immigrant family. It has been translated into many languages. His best-known works are also “The Time of Your Life” and “My Heart’s in the Highlands”. He is recognized as “one of the most prominent literary figures of the mid-20th century.”

As a writer, Saroyan made his breakthrough in Story magazine with “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” (1934), the title taken from the nineteenth century song of the same title. The protagonist is a young, starving writer who tries to survive in a Depression-ridden society.

Saroyan served in the US Army during World War II. He was stationed in Astoria, Queens, spending much of his time at the Lombardy Hotel in Manhattan, far from Army personnel. In 1942, he was posted to London as part of a film unit. He narrowly avoided a court martial when his novel, “The Adventures of Wesley Jackson”, was seen as advocating pacifism.

In 1943, Saroyan married actress Carol Marcus (1924–2003; also known as Carol Grace), with whom he had two children, Aram, who became an author and published a book about his father, and Lucy, who became an actress. By the late 1940s, Saroyan’s drinking and gambling took a toll on his marriage, and in 1949, upon returning from an extended European trip, he filed for divorce. They were remarried briefly in 1951 and divorced again in 1952. Actually Saroyan’s divorce from Carol Marcus was due to Saroyan’s extreme anti-Semitism, and Carol’s confiding to him that she was “half-Jewish”, after ten years of marriage. Saroyan generally concealed his raging anti-Semitism very well.

Saroyan died in Fresno, of prostate cancer at age 72. Half of his ashes were buried in California and the remainder in Armenia at the Komitas Pantheon near fellow artists such as composer Aram Khachaturian, painter Martiros Sarian, and film director Sergei Parajanov.

Stucley, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Florence Stucley (1906-1974), a British author, was born in 1906 in London, but grew up in Devon and was indeed descended from good West Country stock, being related to Sir Richard Greville, one of the heroes of the Armada. As well as writing she also worked as a teacher, a driver in France during the Second World War and as a children’s occupational therapist. She moved around and travelled a lot, visiting America and the Hebrides and living in Devon, London and Bath.

She also seemed to enjoy the company of children, her home in Clapham being a mecca for local children who formed a club there, and it is perhaps this affinity for children which made her books realistic and popular. Her most well-known book was “Magnolia Buildings” which is in fact based on the Clapham kids and their gang and was written for them.

Just one of her stories is pony themed and it is in many ways not the traditional sort of pony story at all, being perhaps more of a psychological study of grief and repression and its impact on people. Unfortunately it is now fairly rare and hard to get hold of.

Twain, Mark

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called “the Great American Novel”.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in the city of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He was the son of Jane, a native of Kentucky, and John Marshall Clemens, a Virginian by birth. His parents met when his father moved to Missouri and were married several years later, in 1823. He was the sixth of seven children, but only three the children survived childhood.

When he was four, Twain’s family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Missouri was a slave state and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he would later explore in his writing.

In 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia. The next year, he became a printer’s apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia. He joined the newly formed International Typographical Union, the printers union, and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider information than at a conventional school.

At the start of the Civil War, Twain enlisted briefly in a Confederate local unit. He then left for Nevada to work for his brother, Orion Clemens, who was Secretary of the Nevada Territory, which Twain describes in his book, Roughing It.

In 1868 Twain fell in love with Olivia Langdon. Though she rejected his first marriage proposal, two months later, they were engaged. In February 1870, Twain and Langdon were married in Elmira, New York, where he courted her and managed to overcome her father’s initial coldness. The couple lived in Buffalo, New York, from 1869 to 1871. Twain owned a stake in the Buffalo Express newspaper and worked as an editor and writer. While they were living in Buffalo, their son Langdon died of diphtheria at age 19 months. They had three daughters: Susy (1872–1896), Clara (1874–1962)[31] and Jean (1880–1909). The couple’s marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivia’s death in 1904. All of the Clemens family are buried in Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery.

Twain passed through a period of deep depression that began in 1896 when his daughter, Susy, died of meningitis. Olivia’s death in 1904 and Jean’s on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom. On May 20, 1909, his close friend Henry Rogers died suddenly. In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the North American Review. Oxford University awarded Twain an honorary doctorate in letters (D.Litt.) in 1907.

In 1909, Twain said: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet”.

His prediction was accurate—Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet’s closest approach to Earth.

Webster, Jean

Jean Webster (pseudonym for Alice Jane Chandler Webster, July 24, 1876 – June 11, 1916) was an American writer and author of many books including “Daddy-Long-Legs” and “Dear Enemy”. Her best-known books feature lively and likeable young female protagonists who come of age intellectually, morally, and socially, but with enough humor, snappy dialogue, and gently biting social commentary to make her books enjoyable to contemporary readers.

Alice Jane Chandler Webster was born in Fredonia, New York. She was the eldest child of Annie Moffet Webster and Charles Luther Webster. She lived her early childhood in a strongly matriarchal and activist setting, with her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother all living under the same roof. Her great-grandmother worked on temperance issues and her grandmother on racial equality.

Alice’s mother was niece to Mark Twain, and her father was Twain’s business manager and publisher of many of his books by Charles L. Webster & Co., founded in 1884. At first the business was successful, and when Alice was five the family moved to a large brownstone in New York, with a summer house in Long Island. However, the publishing company ran into difficulties, and the relationship with Mark Twain came to an end.

Alice attended the Fredonia Normal School and graduated in 1894 in china painting. From 1894 to 1896, she attended the Lady Jane Grey School, in Binghamton. During her time there, the school taught academics, music, art, letter-writing, diction and manners to about 20 girls. The Lady Jane Grey School inspired many of the details of the school in Webster’s novel “Just Patty”, including the names of rooms (Sky Parlour, Paradise Alley), uniforms, and the girls’ daily schedule and teachers. It was at the school that Alice became known as Jean. Since her roommate was also called Alice, the school asked if she could use another name. She chose “Jean”, a variation on her middle name. Jean graduated from the school in June 1896 and returned to the Fredonia Normal School for a year in the college division.

In 1897, Webster entered Vassar College as a member of the class of 1901. Majoring in English and economics, she took a course in welfare and penal reform and became interested in social issues. As part of her course she visited institutions for “delinquent and destitute children”. That interest she would maintain throughout her life. Her experiences at Vassar provided material for her books “When Patty Went to College” and “Daddy-Long-Legs”.

Webster spent a semester in her junior year in Europe, visiting France and the United Kingdom, but with Italy as her main destination, including visits to Rome, Naples, Venice and Florence. She wrote columns about her travels for the Poughkeepsie Sunday Courier, and gathered material for a short story, “Villa Gianini”, which was published in the Vassar Miscellany in 1901.

Back in Fredonia, Webster began writing “When Patty Went to College”, in which she described contemporary women’s college life. After some struggles finding a publisher, it was issued in March 1903 to good reviews. The following years brought a further trip to Italy and an eight month world tour to Egypt, India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Hong Kong, China and Japan.

In June 1915, Webster was married to Glenn Ford McKinney in Washington, Connecticut. They honeymooned at McKinney’s camp near Quebec City, Canada, and were visited by former president Theodore Roosevelt, who invited himself, saying “I’ve always wanted to meet Jean Webster”. In November 1915, “Dear Enemy”, a sequel to “Daddy-Long-Legs”, was published, and it too proved to be a bestseller.

Webster became pregnant and according to family tradition, was warned that her pregnancy might be dangerous. Jean Webster entered the Sloan Hospital for Women, New York on the afternoon of June 10, 1916. Webster gave birth at 10:30 p.m. to a daughter. All was well initially, but Jean Webster became ill and died of childbirth fever at 7:30 a.m. on June 11, 1916. Her daughter was named Jean (Little Jean) in her honor.

Wilde, Oscar

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900), an Irish writer and poet, is remembered for his epigrams, his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death.

Oscar Wilde was born at 21 Westland Row, Dublin (now home of the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College), the second of three children born to Sir William Wilde and Jane Wilde. Wilde's mother, under the pseudonym “Speranza” (the Italian word for ‘Hope’), wrote poetry for the revolutionary Young Irelanders in 1848 and was a lifelong Irish nationalist. She read the Young Irelanders’ poetry to Oscar, inculcating a love of these poets in her son.

In 1855, the family moved to No. 1 Merrion Square, where Wilde’s sister, Isola, was born in 1857. The Wildes’ new home was larger and, with both his parents’ sociality and success, it soon became a “unique medical and cultural centre”.

Until he was nine, Oscar Wilde was educated at home, where a French and a German governesses taught him their languages. He then attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. Until his early twenties, Wilde summered at the villa, Moytura House, his father built in Cong, County Mayo. Isola died aged nine of meningitis. Wilde’s poem “Requiescat” is dedicated to her memory.

Wilde left Portora with a royal scholarship to read classics at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1871 to 1874, sharing rooms with his older brother Willie Wilde.The University Philosophical Society also provided an education, discussing intellectual and artistic subjects. After graduation from Oxford, Wilde returned to Dublin.

He had been publishing lyrics and poems in magazines, especially in Kottabos and the Dublin University Magazine.In London, he had been introduced in 1881 to Constance Lloyd, daughter of Horace Lloyd, a wealthy Queen’s Counsel. She happened to be visiting Dublin in 1884, when Wilde was lecturing at the Gaiety Theatre. He proposed to her, and they married on 29 May 1884 at the Anglican St. James Church in Paddington in London. The couple had two sons, Cyril (1885) and Vyvyan (1886).

The first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published as the lead story in the July 1890 edition of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, along with five others. Reviewers immediately criticized the novel's decadence and homosexual allusions; The Daily Chronicle for example, called it “unclean”, “poisonous”.

On accusation of homosexual relationship Wilde was imprisoned first in Pentonville Prison and then Wandsworth Prison in London. His health declined sharply, and in November he collapsed from illness and hunger. His right ear drum was ruptured in the fall, an injury that later contributed to his death. Wilde was released on 19 May 1897, and though his health had suffered greatly, he had a feeling of spiritual renewal. But next three years were full of sorrow, poverty and loneliness.

By 25 November Wilde had developed cerebral meningitis. Wilde died on 30 November 1900. Wilde was initially buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris; in 1909 his remains were transferred to Père Lachaise Cemetery, inside the city. In 2011, the tomb was cleaned of the many lipstick marks left there by admirers, and a glass barrier was installed to prevent further marks or damage.