The Dictionary of Literary Biography is a specialist biographical dictionary dedicated to literature. Published by Gale, the 375-volume set [1] covers a wide variety of literary topics, periods, and genres, with a focus on American and British literature. [2]
The series editors write that "Our purpose is to make literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and the reading public, while satisfying the needs of teachers and researchers." [3] They define literature as "the intellectual commerce of a nation; not merely belles lettres but as that ample and complex process by which ideas are generated, shaped, and transmitted." (emphasis in original) The series thus includes biographies of historians, journalists, publishers, book collectors, and screenwriters. [4] Each volume is overseen by an expert in the field, [5] and each volume contains approximately 30 entries around 4,000 to 6,000 words long. The biographies contain basic information, such as birth and death dates, a bibliography of the author's works, and a "further reading" list of sources on the author and his or her works. [1] Each volume is illustrated by relevant drawings, paintings, or photographs of the authors as well as title pages of their works. [4]
As of 2006, the series had 375 volumes, which included 23 yearbooks and 45 documentary volumes. Altogether, the series included 13,500 author biographies. [1] The DLB exists in both print and electronic versions. [1] As of 2006, approximately 85 percent of the series was online. [6]
The project was proposed by Frederick G. Ruffner, president of Gale, to the company Bruccoli Clark, in November 1975. After a few sample entries were written, an advisory board was appointed to design the format of the entire series. The first volume was published in 1978. [3] DLB Yearbooks were published between 1981 and 2002 to keep the series up-to-date. [3] These have now been discontinued. [1] The series is currently published and distributed by Thomson Gale, but produced in Columbia, South Carolina by Bruccoli Clark Layman, a company composed of the well-known scholars Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman and the now deceased businessman, C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr. [1]
Michael Rogers wrote that "it is hands-down the best overall literary reference work ever published" but that many reference librarians had probably never heard of it. [1] Choice has named the DLB an Outstanding Academic Book four times and American Library Association's Reference and User Services Association has twice named it as an Outstanding Reference Source. [1] The American Library Association Guide to Reference called it "An indispensable reference tool for literary research in far-reaching genres and crossing political borders, the articles in this series are often the first critical and biographical treatment of a literary figure". [7]
Edward Moxon was a British poet and publisher, significant in Victorian literature.
Matthew Joseph Bruccoli was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was the preeminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote about other writers, notably Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
Henry George Bohn was a British publisher. He is principally remembered for the Bohn's Libraries which he inaugurated. These were begun in 1846, targeted the mass market, and comprised editions of standard works and translations, dealing with history, science, classics, theology and archaeology.
Anzia Yezierska was a Jewish-American novelist born in Mały Płock, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. She emigrated as a child with her parents to the United States and lived in the immigrant neighborhood of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Walter Van Tilburg Clark was an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and educator. He ranks as one of Nevada's most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century, and was the first inductee into the 'Nevada Writers Hall of Fame' in 1988, together with Robert Laxalt, Clark's mentee and Nevada's other heralded twentieth century author. Two of Clark's novels, The Ox-Bow Incident and The Track of the Cat, were made into films. As a writer, Clark taught himself to use the familiar materials of the western saga to explore the human psyche and to raise deep philosophical issues.
Fernando de Herrera (~1534–1597), called "El Divino", was a 16th-century Spanish poet and man of letters. He was born in Seville. Much of what is known about him comes from Libro de descripción de verdaderos retratos de illustres y memorables varones (1599) by Francisco Pacheco.
Maureen Patricia Duffy is an English poet, playwright, novelist and non-fiction author. Long an activist covering such issues as gay rights and animal rights, she campaigns especially on behalf of authors. She has received the Benson Medal for her lifelong writings.
Current Biography is an American monthly magazine published by the H. W. Wilson Company of New York City, a publisher of reference books, that appears every month except December. Current Biography contains profiles of people in the news and includes politicians, athletes, businessmen, and entertainers. Published since 1940, the articles are annually collected into bound volumes called Current Biography Yearbook. A December issue of the magazine is not published because the staff works on the final cumulative volume for the year. Articles in the bound volumes correct any mistakes that may have appeared in the magazine and may include additional relevant information about the subject that became available since publication of the original article. The work is a standard reference source in American libraries, and the publisher keeps in print the older volumes. Wilson also issues cumulative indexes to the set, and an online version is available as a subscription database.
T. Fisher Unwin was the London publishing house founded by Thomas Fisher Unwin, husband of British Liberal politician Jane Cobden in 1882.
Richard James Bleiler is an American bibliographer of science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, and adventure fiction. He was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Non-Fiction in 2002 and for the Munsey Award in 2019–2022. He won the 2023 Munsey Award, given to “an individual or organization that has bettered the pulp community.” He is the son of bibliographer and publisher Everett F. Bleiler.
The Dictionary of Scientific Biography is a scholarly reference work that was published from 1970 through 1980 by publisher Charles Scribner's Sons, with main editor the science historian Charles Gillispie, from Princeton University. It consisted of sixteen volumes. It is supplemented by the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Both these publications are included in a later electronic book, called the Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
Philip George Furia was an American author and English literature professor. His books focus on the lyricists of the Tin Pan Alley era.
Douglas Smith Huyghue (1816-1891) was a British North American and Colony of Victoria poet, fiction writer, essayist, and artist.
Contemporary Authors is a reference work that has been published by Gale since 1962. The work provides short biographies and bibliographies of contemporary and near-contemporary writers and is a major source of information on over 116,000 living and deceased authors from around the world. The work is a standard in libraries and has been honored by the American Library Association as a distinguished reference title.
Theodore Russell Weiss was an American poet, and literary magazine editor.
David Samuel Nutt was an English book publisher and seller. Operating from various locations in London, Nutt specialized in the sale of imported foreign books, catering to prestigious institutions like the British Museum and private collectors. His firm ventured into publishing in the 1830s, with a focus on foreign market publications, religious and educational texts, antiquarian literature, and scholarly works. In 1851, Nutt formed a partnership with Nicholas Trübner, a German-English publisher.
Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. He was born in Chicago, Illinois and lived in the US until he was seven, when his parents separated and his Anglo-Irish mother brought him to live near London; he was educated at Dulwich College from 1900. After working briefly for the British Civil Service, he became a part-time teacher at Dulwich, supplementing his income as a journalist and writer—mostly for The Westminster Gazette and The Academy. His output—consisting largely of poems and essays—was not to his taste, and his biographer Paul Bishop considers the work as "lifeless", while Contemporary Authors describes it as "lofty in subject and mawkish in tone". Chandler returned to the US in 1912 where he trained to become an accountant in Los Angeles. In 1917 he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, saw combat in the trenches in France where he was wounded, and was undergoing flight training in the fledgling Royal Air Force when the war ended.
This is a list of encyclopedias and encyclopedic/biographical dictionaries published on the subject of business, information and information technology, economics and businesspeople in any language. Entries are in the English language except where noted.
James Terry White was an American publisher and poet. Given his wide range of interests and involvement in various businesses and cultural activities, he was reputed to be a Renaissance man. In 1862, he joined the San Francisco publishing firm H. H. Bancroft & Co. In 1869, White founded a publishing company bearing his name, James T. White Co. in San Francisco; and in 1886, with his son George Derby White, moved its headquarters to New York City. The firm published the first edition of The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography in 1891. At the death of his son in 1939, thirty-one volumes had been published, each containing about 1,000 biographies and 450 pages.
Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps (1815–1852) was an American writer of religiously themed articles, adult domestic fiction and books for children. She wrote eleven books as well as numerous articles and stories that were translated and published in many languages, and probably many more works that appeared anonymously. Phelps wrote "at the beginning of the transition in American women's writing from domestic sentimentality to regional realism" and was "among the earliest depicters of the New England scene, antedating the regional novels of her Andover neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe". In addition to being one of the earliest known authors to have penned a fiction series specifically for girls, her writing also focused on the burdens on women in their restrictive roles as mothers and wives. Her much anthologized 1852 semi-autobiographical short story, "The Angel Over the Right Shoulder", illustrates the repressive burdens frustrating a wife's creative ambitions and need to "cultivate her own mind and heart". The story is notable as "one of the rare woman's fictions of this time to recognize the phenomenon of domestic schizophrenia", says literary critic Nina Baym.