Saturday, January 30, 2010

Izaak Walton

Izaak Walton (1593-1683)

Izaak Walton (1593-1683)

Izaak Walton (9 August 1593 15 December 1683) was an English writer. Best known as the author of The Compleat Angler, he also wrote a number of short biographies which have been collected under the title of Walton's Lives.



[The Compleat Angler]


Tags: djuna barnes  charlotte lennox  john kessel  thomas hill  earl derr biggers  henri grgoire  giambattista della porta  frances a roe  dewitt parker  mack reynolds  

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Geoff Chapple

Geoff Chapple

Geoff Chapple is a New Zealand author and journalist. His article in a Sunday newspaper began the volunteer movement to put in place a New Zealand-long walking track. He mapped the track, then walked it and wrote the book 'Te Araroa - The New Zealand Trail' (Random House 2002). He founded Te Araroa Trust, the organisation that began construction of the various links for a continuous off-road track 2,920 kilometres long. Chapple was also a member of the music group From Scratch. Chapple was a leading figure in the anti-apartheid protests surrounding the 1981 springbok rugby tour. In 1984 Geoff Chapple published The Tour, a book chronicling the above events from the protesters perspective.



[The Fertility Of The Unfit]

Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies (1913-1995)

Robertson Davies (1913-1995) title=

William Robertson Davies, CC, O. Ont, FRSC, FRSL (born August 28, 1913, at Thamesville, Ontario, and died December 2, 1995 at Orangeville, Ontario) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best-known and most popular authors, and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", a term Davies is variously said to have gladly accepted for himself and to have detested. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.



[Foliage Various Poems]


Tags: daniel collins  alexander kinglake  george william thomson  william gilbert  henry savage  george fitch  mary mitford  william cleaver  aline murray kilmer  cale young rice  

John Lewis

John Lewis

John Lewis (January 17, 1858 - May 18, 1935) was a Canadian author and journalist who was, variously, editor of the Toronto Daily Star and the Toronto Globe and served in the Canadian Senate for the last ten years of his life. Lewis' father, John, was a Welshman who immigrated to Canada and worked as a teacher and school principal. Lewis himself was born on Bay Street in Toronto, Ontario, a few yards from the future site of Toronto's Old City Hall.



[The Makers Of Canada George Brown]


Tags: harry warner  ed earl repp  hans aanrud  william henley  william henry withrow  eino leino  henry brooks  a russell bond  edmund jones  

Alexander Ginzburg

Alexander Ginzburg

Alexander (Alik) Ilyich Ginzburg, was a Russian journalist, poet, human rights activist and dissident. During the Soviet period, Ginzburg edited the samizdat poetry almanac Sintaksis. Between 1961 and 1969 he was sentenced three times to labor camps. In 1979, Ginzburg was released and expelled to the United States, along with four other political prisoners and their families, as part of a prisoner exchange.



[Epistles On The Arian Heresy And The Deposition Of Arius | Of The Manichaeans]


Tags: william allan neilson  charles willeford  alvar nunez cabeza de vaca  arthur thomas quiller couch  gabriele dannunzio  albert pike  a mukerji  faustina da fonseca  

Washington Irving

Washington Irving (1783-1859)

Washington Irving (1783-1859)

Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 November 28, 1859) was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He was best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle", both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra. Irving also served as the U.S. minister to Spain from 1842 to 1846. He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819. He continued to publish regularlyand almost always successfullythroughout his life, and completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death, at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York. Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper, was among the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving was also admired by some European writers, including Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Francis Jeffrey, and Charles Dickens. As America's first genuine internationally best-selling author, Irving advocated for writing as a legitimate profession, and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement.



[Astoria | Old Christmas | The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow | Abbotsford And Newstead Abbey | La Legendo De Dorm Valeto | Little Britain | The Crayon Papers]


Tags: garrett serviss  charles warren stoddard  elizabeth keckley  michel de montaigne  william smyth  ernest raymond  alexandre vinet  fearing burr  arthur scott  

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Adam Mller Guttenbrunn

Adam Mller Guttenbrunn

Adam Mller-Guttenbrunn was an Austrian author.



[The Upanishads Vol 2 | The Upanishads Vol I]


Tags: henry savage landor  gerald drayson adams  andrew murray campaigner  blair worden  william hudson  antonio gutirrez  albert kahn  von schmid  virginia sharpe patterson  

Algis Budrys

Algis Budrys (1931-2008)

Algis Budrys (January 9, 1931 June 9, 2008) was a Lithuanian-American science fiction author, editor, and critic. He was also known under the pen names "Frank Mason", "Alger Rome", "John A. Sentry", "William Scarff", and "Paul Janvier."



[Citadel | The Barbarians | The Stoker And The Stars]


Tags: charles stearns  djuna barnes  charlotte lennox  john kessel  thomas hill  earl derr biggers  walter mansfield  giambattista della porta  frances a roe  

Monday, January 25, 2010

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection. He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The scientific community and much of the general public came to accept evolution as a fact in his lifetime, but it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed that natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life. Dobzhansky 1973 Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. Studies at the University of Cambridge encouraged his passion for natural science. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author. Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin investigated the transmutation of species and conceived his theory of natural selection in 1838. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority. He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay which described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories. Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. In 1871, he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil. In recognition of Darwin's pre-eminence as a scientist, he was one of only five nineteenth-century non-royal personages from the United Kingdom to be honoured by a state funeral, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton.



[De Lorigine Des Especes | El Origen De Las Especies | Observations Geologiques Sur Les Iles Volcaniques | On The Origin Of Species | Geological Observations Of Volcanic Islands | Geologische Beobachtungen ber Die Vulcanischen Inseln Mit | Movements And Habits Of Climbing Plants | The Autobiography Of Charles Darwin | The Formation Of Vegetable Mould Through The Action Of Worms | Geological Observations On Volcanic Islands | Insectivorous Plants | On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection | The Descent Of Man And Selection In Relation To Sex | The Effects Of Cross Self Fertilisation In The Vegetable Kingdom | The Expression Of Emotion In Man And Animals | The Formation Of Vegetable Mould Through The Action Of Worms With Observations Of Their Habits | The Foundations Of The Origin Of Species | The Movements And Habits Of Climbing Plants | The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection | The Power Of Movement In Plants | The Structure And Distribution Of Coral Reefs | The Variation Of Animals And Plants Under Domestication Volume 1 | The Variation Of Animals And Plants Under Domestication Volume 2 | The Variation Of Animals And Plants Under Domestication Volume Ii | The Voyage Of The Beagle]


Tags: anna brownwell jameson  daniel brinton  charles goddard  edward bouv  eino leino  william lighton  edwin sidney hartland  elliott chaze  william heyliger  

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Hans Aanrud

Hans Aanrud

Hans Aanrud title=

Hans Aanrud (3 September 1863 11 January 1953) was a Norwegian author. He wrote plays, poetry, and stories depicting rural life in his native Gudbrandsdal, Norway.



[Lisbeth Longfrock]

Friday, January 22, 2010

Alexander Scott Withers

Alexander Scott Withers

Alexander Scott Withers title=

Alexander Scott Withers (12 October 1792, near Warrenton, Virginia 23 January 1865, near Parkersburg, West Virginia) was the author of Chronicles of Border Warfare (1831), a history of (and important primary source on) the early white settlement of western Virginia and consequent conflicts with American Indians.



[Chronicles Of Border Warfare]


Tags: virginia sharpe  epes sargent  savage landor  adam guttenbrunn  albert kahn  henry vere stacpoole  tobias buckell  arvalo jordn  ann blair  charles scott wood  

Bill Mason

Bill Mason (1929-1988)

Bill Mason (1929-1988)

Bill Mason was an award-winning Canadian naturalist, author, artist, filmmaker, and conservationist, noted primarily for his popular canoeing books, films, and art as well as his documentaries on wolves. Mason was also known for including passages from Christian sermons in his films. He was born in 1929 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and graduated from the University of Manitoba School of Art in 1951. He developed and refined canoeing strokes and river-running techniques, especially for complex whitewater situations. He canoed all of his adult life, ranging widely over the wilderness areas of Canada and the United States. Called "wilderness artist," in one book about him, Mason left a legacy that includes books, films and artwork on canoeing and wild nature. He died of cancer in 1988.


E Mason's Books:


[The Empty Door]


Tags: walther rathenau  arthur zagat  gustave droz  fitzjames brien  enrique larreta  cao xueqin  clare howard  ah phelps  helen zimmern  henry lee mitchell pike  

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

George Henry Weiss

George Henry Weiss

George Henry Weiss (1898-1946) was an American poet, writer and novelist. His science fiction stories and poetry appeared under the pseudonym "Francis Flagg" in the magazines Amazing Stories, Astounding, Tales of Wonder, Weird Tales and others. His novel The Night People was published by Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc. in 1947.



[The Heads Of Apex]


Tags: benjamin keach  charlotte elizabeth  clyde fitch  benjamin constant  henry de vere stacpoole  thomas more  jack taylor  elliott donnell  andrew woods williamson  

Alex Boyd

Alex Boyd (1969-now)

Alex Boyd (born 1969) is a Canadian poet, essayist, editor, and critic. His essays and articles have appeared in the Globe and Mail,, and Danforth Review. From 2003 to 2008, he hosted the IV Lounge Reading Series in Toronto, presenting fiction readers alongside poets, and eventually co-editing IV Lounge Nights, an anthology to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the series. He established Northern Poetry Review, a site for poetry articles and reviews, in April 2006.


A H Boyd's Books:


[The Recreations Of A Country Parson]


Tags: hjalmar bergman  fredrika bremer  frances browne  frederick jackson turner  conrad ferdinand meyer  ethel watts mumford  ek jarvis  elise whitlock rose  lafcadio hearn  

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Alexander O Smith

Alexander O Smith

Alexander O. Smith (born February 8, 1973) is a professional English/Japanese translator and author. While his output covers many areas such as adaptation of Japanese novels, manga, song lyrics, anime scripts and various academic works, he is best known for his software localizations of Japanese video games. Smith is multilingual, with fluency in English and Japanese, basic knowledge of Cantonese Chinese, Korean, Dutch and French, and reading knowledge of Anglo Saxon, Old Norse, Classical Chinese and Classical Japanese. He currently resides in Mitaka, Tokyo, where he operates his own contract localization business, Kajiya Productions.



[Dreamthorp]

Monday, January 11, 2010

Eric S Raymond

Eric S Raymond (1957-now)

Eric S Raymond (1957-now)

Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is a computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. His name became known within the hacker culture when he picked up maintenance of the "Jargon File" in 1990. After the 1997 publication of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Raymond became, for a number of years, an unofficial spokesman of the open source movement.



[The Cathedral And The Bazaar]


Tags: young allison  daniel jackson  desiderius erasmus  peter watts  sterling lanier  dora sigerson  gaston maspero  george tucker  edgar guest  winifred faraday  

Saturday, January 9, 2010

William Langland

William Langland

William Langland title=

William Langland (ca. 1332 ca. 1386) is the conjectured author of the 14th-century English dream-vision Piers Plowman.



[Piers Plowman]

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Ferno Lopes De Castanheda

Ferno Lopes De Castanheda

Ferno Lopes de Castanheda (c.1500 Santarm, 1559 Coimbra) was a Portuguese historian in the early Renaissance. His "History of the discovery and conquest of India", full of geographic and ethnographic objective information, was widely translated throughout Europe.



[Chronica De El Rei D Pedro I]

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton (1946-now)

Bill Clinton (1946-now)

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III, August 19, 1946) is the former 42nd President of the United States and served from 1993 to 2001. At 46 he was the third-youngest president. He became president at the end of the Cold War, and was the first baby boomer president. His wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is currently the United States Secretary of State. Each received a Juris Doctor (J.D. ) from Yale Law School. Clinton has been described as a New Democrat. Some of his policies, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and welfare reform, have been attributed to a centrist Third Way philosophy of governance, while on other issues his stance was left of center. Clinton presided over the continuation of an economic expansion that would later become the longest period of peace-time economic expansion in American history. The Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus in 2000, the last full year of Clinton's presidency. After a failed attempt at health care reform, Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 1994, for the first time in forty years. Two years later, in 1996, Clinton was re-elected and became the first member of the Democratic Party since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second full term as president. Later he was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with a scandal involving a White House intern, but was subsequently acquitted by the U.S. Senate. Clinton left office with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any U.S. president since World War II. Since then, he has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work. Based on his philanthropic worldview, Clinton created the William J. Clinton Foundation to promote and address international causes such as treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS and global warming. In 2004, he released his autobiography My Life, and was involved in his wife Hillary's 2008 presidential campaign and subsequently in that of President Barack Obama. In 2009, he was named United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti. In the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Clinton teamed with George W. Bush to form the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.



[Untechnological Employment]


Tags: charles sprague  charles fort  charles klein  alexander hislop  andr maurois  ann maria hall  frederick swainson  edwin ranck  

Monday, January 4, 2010

Florbela Espanca

Florbela Espanca (1894-1930)

Florbela Espanca (1894-1930)

Florbela Espanca (birth name Flor Bela de Alma da Conceio), Portuguese poet (Vila Viosa, December 8, 1894 - Matosinhos, December 8, 1930). Precursor of the feminist movement in Portugal, she had a tumultuous and eventful life that shaped her erotic and feminine writings. The daughter of Antnia da Conceio Lobo, she was baptized as the child of an "unknown" father. After the death of her mother in 1908, Florbela was taken into the care of Maria Espanca and Joo Maria Espanca, for whom Antnia had worked as a maid. Joo Maria Espanca, who always provided for Florbela (she referred to him in a poem as "dear Daddy of my soul"), officially claimed his paternity in 1949, 19 years after Florbela's death. Florbela's earliest known poem, A Vida e a Morte (Life and Death), was written in 1903. Her first marriage, to Alberto Moutinho, was celebrated on her 19th birthday, December 8, 1913. After graduating with a literature degree in 1917, she became the first woman to enroll at the law school of the University of Lisbon. In the year of 1915-1917 she collected all her poems and wrote "O livro D'ele" (His book) that she dedicated to his brother. She had a miscarriage in 1919, the same year that Livro de Mgoas (The Book of Sorrows) was published. Around this time, Florbela began to show the first serious symptoms of Neurosis. In 1921 she divorced her first husband, which exposed her to significant social prejudice. She married Antnio Guimares in 1922. The work Livro de Soror Saudade (Sister Saudade's Book) was published in 1923. Florbela had a second miscarriage, after which her husband divorced her (according to Rui Guedes, a very remarkable person on her studies, Antnio Guimares hit her). In 1925 she married Mrio Lage (a doctor that treated her for a long time). Her brother Apeles Espanca died in an airplane accident (some believe he committed suicide, due to his fiances death), which deeply affected her and inspired the writing of As Mscaras do Destino (The Masks of Destiny). In October and November 1930, Florbela twice attempted suicide, shortly before the publication of her last book Charneca em Flor (Heath in Bloom). Having been diagnosed with a pulmonary edema, Florbela died on December 8, 1930, her 36th birthday. Her precarious health and complex mental condition make the actual cause of death a question to this day. Charneca em Flor was published in January 1930. After her death in 1931 Reliquiare, name given by the Italian professor Guido Battelli, was published with the poems she wrote on a further version of "Charneca em Flor.



[Livro De Mgoas | Livro De Mguas | Livro De Magoas]


Tags: william lyon phelps  christopher hare  filippo tommaso marinetti  william cobbett  francois ren de chateaubriand  elseo reclus  henry northam  hugh fullerton  charles mccellan stevens  

William J Mann

William J Mann

William J. Mann is an American novelist, biographer, and Hollywood historian best known for his biography of Katharine Hepburn, Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn (2006). Kate was declared the "definitive" work about Hepburn by The Sunday Times and was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2006 by The New York Times. Mann was born in Connecticut and, after working briefly as a Capitol Hill aide, received his Master's degree at Wesleyan University. He worked as a journalist at Metroline magazine, New England's oldest gay publication, from 1992 to 1995. Mann published his first novel, The Men From the Boys, in 1997, and continued with a series of books set in Provincetown, although he has also set his fiction in Palm Springs and Los Angeles. In addition, Mann has written the nonfiction books Wisecracker (1998), a biography of film star William Haines, for which he won the Lambda Literary Award, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood (2001), and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger (2005). Mann's most recent biography, How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood, was published by Houghton Mifflin on October 1, 2009. "Reading this life is like gorging on a chocolate sundae," Publishers Weekly wrote of the book. In 2009 Mann also published a novel, Object of Desire, about which Instinct Magazine said, "Mann's writing is smart, aware and cognizant enough to take a well-practiced theme and give it a shot in the arm."



[Esperanto Self Taught With Phonetic Pronunciation]

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Charles A Beard

Charles A Beard (1874-1948)

Charles A Beard (1874-1948) title=

Charles Austin Beard (November 27, 1874 September 1, 1948) was, with Frederick Jackson Turner, one of the most influential American historians of the first half of the 20th century. He published hundreds of monographs, textbooks and interpretive studies in both history and political science. His works included radical re-evaluation of the founding fathers of the United States, who he believed were more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, written with his wife Mary Beard, was the wide-ranging and bestselling The Rise of American Civilization (1927), which had a major influence on American historians. Beard was famous as a political liberal, but he strenuously opposed American entry into World War II, for which he blamed Franklin D. Roosevelt more than Japan or Germany. Fellow scholars repudiated his foreign policy and dropped his materialistic model of class conflict. Richard Hofstadter concluded in 1968: "Today Beard's reputation stands like an imposing ruin in the landscape of American historiography. What was once the grandest house in the province is now a ravaged survival."



[The Black Wolf Pack]