Baraka (1984).
Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) Barnes was born in New York state and joined the colony of American expatriates in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. She was associated with the avant-garde and the bohemian, in terms of both her life and her art. Barnes's fiction gives free expression to her family traumas, her bisexuality, and her feminism. Sometimes published under the pseudonym Lydia Steptoes, Barnes's ironic, frequently grotesque works include The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), Ryder (1928), and Nightwood (1936).
John Barth (1930-) Born in Maryland, Barth originally studied at the Juilliard School of Music. This early affinity for music is reflected in his first novel, The Floating Opera (1956). He was associated, by his own admission, with existentialism, and later with the postmodernist movement. Barth's challenging work rejects conventional conceptions of both narrative structure and truth. His novels include The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Chimera (1972), The Friday Book (1984), and The Tidewater Tales (1987).
Donald Barthelme (1931-89) Born in Philadelphia, Barthelme and his family moved to Houston where his father practiced architecture, a subject later important to Barthelme's fiction. After serving two years in Korea, Barthelme relocated to New York where he soon achieved notoriety for his innovative minimalist stories that appeared in The New Yorker. A prominent postmodernist, Barthelme published his first collection of -758- metafictional stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, in 1964, followed by Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Amateurs (1976), Great Days (1979), and Sixty Stories (1981). His novels are Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1976).
Saul Bellow (1915-) The son of a Russian Jewish émigré, and a Canadian by birth, Bellow came to Chicago when he was nine and grew up in the Midwest. He attended the University of Chicago and graduated from Northwestern University. A student of anthropology, Bellow began graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, but as his thesis persisted in 'turning out to be a story,' Bellow considered a career in literature. He worked on the WPA Federal Writers' Project where he became acquainted with a number of New York writers, notably Delmore Schwartz, and began teaching. Today regarded as a prominent American writer, Bellow received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976, following the publication of Humbolt's Gift (1975). His works include Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (1947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), The Dean's December (1982), and Some Die of Heartbreak (1987).
Thomas Berger (1924-) Presently a recluse and reluctant to reveal biographical details, Berger has lived in London and Manhattan. Frequently associated with the contemporary Western, Berger has written wide-ranging satiric fiction that often parodies iconographic images of American city and rural life. His novels include Little Big Man (1964), Neighbors (1980), and Changing the Past (1989).
Marie-Claire Blais (1939-) Blais was born in Quebec City, the eldest child of a working-class family. At her parents' urging she left a convent school to train for secretarial work (which she hated — she held nine clerical jobs in three years). However, her first novel, La belle bête (1959), was an imme-759- diate success, and she received a Canada Council grant that allowed her to spend a year in Paris, where she immersed herself in French cinema and literature. In the early 1960s, Blais lived and worked on artist Mary Meigs's farm at Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and in 1971 she and Meigs moved to Brittany, where they spent four years. Blais's award-winning Francophone work includes Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1966), Les manucripts de Pauline Archange (1968), and Le sourd dans la ville (1979; translated in 1980 as Deaf to the City).
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Born in Argentina, Borges was educated in Geneva, Switzerland. Upon completing his schooling, Borges returned to Buenos Aires in 1921. From 1939 to 1945 Borges worked as a librarian; and from 1955 to 1973 he worked as director of Biblioteca Nacional. From 1967 to 1968 Borges was the Elliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Primarily on the reputation of one book of stories — Labyrinths (1962) — Borges established his reputation as a masterful, highly original, and important writer. Borge's influential stories are unique in their erudition — Borges was a notorious bookworm who possessed an encyclopedic range of knowledge — and their challenging metafictional themes. His works include A Fever in Buenos Aires (1923), A Universal History of Infamy (1935), The Gardens of Forking Paths (1941), Doctor Brodie's Report (1970), The Book of Sand (1970), and A Borges Reader (1981).
Paul Bowles (1910-) Bowles was born in New York City. Acutely interested in music, he studied with composers Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. While traveling in Paris, Bowles became acquainted with Gertrude Stein and her circle of expatriates, who encouraged him to write. His works include The Sheltering Sky (1949), Next to Nothing (1976), Points in Time (1984), and A Distant Episode (1988). -760-
Richard Brautigan (1935-84) Born in Tacoma, Washington, Brautigan moved to San Francisco, where he became involved in the burgeoning Beat movement, before living in various locations in the Western states and Japan. Textual playfulness and whimsy characterize his extensive body of fiction. Trout Fishing in America created an international sensation when it appeared in 1967. Brautigan committed suicide in 1984. His novels include The Abortion: An Historical Romance (1966) and The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980).
Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) Born in Philadelphia of a Quaker background, Brown was one of the first American professional authors. His writing career was brief, however, as economic pressures soon forced him to look elsewhere for his livelihood. Even so, he continued as editor and chief contributor to the Literary Magazine and American Review (1803-7) and to the American Register (1807-10). Brown was heavily influenced by the political and philosophical ideas of Thomas Jefferson and William Godwin, as demonstrated in his novels and in his treatise on the rights of women, Alcuin: A Dialogue (1798). His novels — Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (1799, 1800), Edgar Huntly (1799), Clara Howard (1801), and Jane Talbot (1801) — were the first to incorporate authentically American characters, settings, and concerns. Just as important, his works transform the supernatural conventions of the Gothic novel into close studies of psychological aberration.
William Wells Brown (ca. 1816–1884) A pioneering historian of African American history (The Black Man [1863]; The Rising Son [1874]), Brown was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and was perhaps the son of George Higgins, a white slaveholder. Raised in St. Louis, he was hired out for a time to the printshop of the St. Louis Times. In 1834 he escaped and, taking a job on a Lake Erie steamer, helped other fugitive slaves to freedom. Lacking formal schooling, he educated himself and in 1847 published his autobiographical Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave. -761- His novel
