John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
Snow Crash is a science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 1992. Like many of Stephenson's novels, its themes include history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy.
WatTyler was a leader of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England. He led a group of rebels from Canterbury to London to oppose the institution of a poll tax and to demand economic and social reforms. While the brief rebellion enjoyed early success, Tyler was killed by officers loyal to King Richard II during negotiations at Smithfield, London.
Jack Frost is a personification of frost, ice, snow, sleet, winter, and freezing cold. He is a variant of Old Man Winter who is held responsible for frosty weather, nipping the fingers and toes in such weather, coloring the foliage in autumn, and leaving fern-like patterns on cold windows in winter.
The Iron Heel is a political novel in the form of science fiction by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908.
A libertine is a person devoid of most moral principles, a sense of responsibility, or sexual restraints, which they see as unnecessary or undesirable, and is especially someone who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and forms of behaviour observed by the larger society. Libertinism is described as an extreme form of hedonism. Libertines put value on physical pleasures, meaning those experienced through the senses. As a philosophy, libertinism gained new-found adherents in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, particularly in France and Great Britain. Notable among these were John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, and the Marquis de Sade.
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge was a British novelist and poet who also wrote essays and reviews. She wrote poetry under the pseudonym Anodos. Other influences on her were Richard Watson Dixon and Christina Rossetti. Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, described her poems as 'wonderously beautiful… but mystical rather and enigmatic'.
Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton was an American author. Many of her novels are set in her home state of California. Her bestseller Black Oxen (1923) was made into a silent movie of the same name. In addition to novels, she wrote short stories, essays, and articles for magazines and newspapers on such issues as feminism, politics, and war.
Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow, was an English novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic.
William Hale White, known by his pseudonym Mark Rutherford, was a British writer and civil servant. His obituary in The Times stated that the "employment of a pseudonym, and sometimes of two, was sufficient to prove a retiring disposition, and Mr. Hale White was little before the world in person."
Joan London was an American writer and the older of two daughters born to Jack London and his first wife, Elizabeth "Bess" Maddern London.
Sarah Dunant is a British novelist, journalist, broadcaster, and critic. She is married with two daughters, and lives in London and Florence.
Peter Brown is a major character in the Oz novels of Ruth Plumly Thompson, who continued the series of Oz books after the death of their creator, L. Frank Baum. Thompson used Peter as the protagonist in three of her books: The Gnome King of Oz (1927), Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz (1929), and Pirates in Oz (1931).
The Virginians: A Tale of the Last Century (1857–59) is a historical novel by William Makepeace Thackeray which forms a sequel to his Henry Esmond and is also loosely linked to Pendennis.
The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) was the first of Charlotte M. Yonge's bestselling romantic novels. Its religious tone is derived from the High Church background of her family and from her friendship with a leading figure in the Oxford Movement, John Keble, who closely supervised the writing of the book. The germ of its plot was suggested by her friend Marianne Dyson. According to J. B. Priestley The Heir of Redclyffe was "the most popular novel of the whole age…Its popularity left Dickens and Thackeray far behind."
Tancred; or, The New Crusade (1847) is a novel by Benjamin Disraeli, first published by Henry Colburn in three volumes. Together with Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845) it forms a sequence sometimes called the Young England trilogy. It shares a number of characters with the earlier novels, but unlike them is concerned less with the political and social condition of England than with a religious and even mystical theme: the question of how Judaism and Christianity are to be reconciled, and the Church reborn as a progressive force.
Annie Shepherd Swan, CBE was a Scottish journalist and fiction writer. She wrote mainly in her maiden name, but also as David Lyall and later Mrs Burnett Smith. A writer of romantic fiction for women, she had over 200 novels, serials, stories and other fiction published between 1878 and her death. She has been called "one of the most commercially successful popular novelists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries". Swan was politically active in the First World War, and as a suffragist, a Liberal activist and founder-member and vice-president of the Scottish National Party.
The Shooting Party is an 1884 novel by Anton Chekhov. It is his longest narrative work, and only full-length novel. Framed as a manuscript given to a publisher, it tells the story of an estate forester's daughter in a provincial Russian village, who is stabbed to death in the woods during a hunting party, and the efforts to uncover her killer.
Alice Abigail Corkran was an Irish author of children's fiction and an editor of children's magazines. Born in France to Irish parents, she grew up in the stimulating environment of her mother's literary salon. She was a playmate of Robert Browning's ageing father, and still had his workbooks in her possession when she died. As well as writing a number of well received novels, she edited first the Bairn's Annual and then The Girl's Realm, being the founder of that magazine's Guild of Service and Good Fellowship, which maintained a cot at the Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, among other charitable works.
