- Industry: Printing & publishing
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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
(1914 – 1972) Berryman is America’s master of homostrophy—our Yeats, except smarter, hornier and more drunk. (Yeats’ smooth stanzas cure, Berryman’s fracture; Yeats documents dissociation, while Berryman gives caesura psychological meaning.) Berryman’s principle dramatic tool is an “interlocutor.” His first, a strict form, led to Berryman’s Sonnets (1946–7.) Next came Anne Bradstreet, conjured in his great Homage (1956). In the 1960s Berryman, minstrelsy’s “Mr Bones,” and the best-dressed naked alter-ego in poetry, “Henry,” sang The Dream Songs. Later, Berryman borrowed from group therapy to “confront” his life. Like his father, Berryman committed suicide.
Industry:Culture
(1914 – 1986) Pulitzer-prize winning novelist and short-story author, born in Brooklyn, whose works chronicle many facets of the Jewish experience in America, as well as themes of memory justice, race and class relations and baseball (The Natural, 1942). Power-fully written in elegant prose with poignant characters and encounters, these seminal works also include The Fixer (1966), The Tenant (1971), Dubin’s Lives (1979) and God’s Grace (1982). His complete collected stories were published in 1983.
Industry:Culture
(1914 – 1994) Novelist best known for his 1952 novel, Invisible Man. Set between 1930 and 1950, and covering some of the events in Ellison’s own life, Invisible Man struck a chord with many African Americans, who felt that white America failed to see them, except only as stereotyped characters or figments of their own imaginations. Born in Oklahoma, Ellison had attended Tuskegee Institute before moving to New York City in 1936 to become a writer. After his first work was published in Richard Wright’s journal, Ellison worked with the New York Writer’s Project. In 1999 Ellison’s long-awaited unfinished novel, Juneteenth, drafts of which had previously been destroyed by fire, was edited for publication by John F. Callahan.
Industry:Culture
(1914 – 1996) Doctor/medical researcher who led the team that discovered the first viable polio vaccine. Son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Salk became a public hero despite reserve within the wider scientific and medical community. His vaccine, based on dead virus, received wide use after 1954 until it was replaced by Albert Sabin’s oral, livevirus vaccine. As a public celebrity, Salk founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, which he envisioned as a center for research and philosophy In the 1990s, he also became interested in a similar AIDS vaccine.
Industry:Culture
(1914 – 1997) Novelist and icon of gay and drug subcultures. Burroughs befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, key members of the beat generation, in New York City, NY in the 1940s, became a heroin addict and accidentally shot his wife dead in Mexico (1951).
Ginsberg was instrumental in the publication of Junky (1953), a pitiless account of addiction. Best remembered for the inventive, hallucinatory Naked Lunch (1959), which was subject to a legal battle in the United States after it was censored by the US Post Office, Customs Service and a state government. He also invented “cutups,” a literary equivalent to collage.
Industry:Culture
(born 1915) A leading American playwright since the success of All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949), the latter earning him a Pulitzer Prize. His dramas are often familial in setting, but engage with political concerns. The early plays dealt with issues arising out of the postwar prosperity, suggesting that this often brought with it unacceptable moral compromises, the 1947 play describing a man who had profited at the expense of the lives of American soldiers, Death focusing on the emotionally sterile life of a salesman in New York City (Miller’s birthplace). In The Crucible (1953) Miller wrote about the Salem witch-trials, implying a parallel with the intolerance of the ongoing McCarthy trials, while A View from the Bridge (1955) questioned US immigration laws.
Remembered also for a short-lived marriage to Marilyn Monroe, Miller has continued to be a prolific writer and outspoken political and cultural critic.
Industry:Culture
(born 1915) Jewish American writer based at the University of Chicago, Bellow is considered a path-breaker for a number of other Jewish writers, such as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. His first novel, Dangling Man was published in 1944, but his best-known works were written in the following three decades—Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964) and Humboddt’s Gift (1975), which earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. These works explore themes of alienation and the modern predicament, the place of Jewish spiritual understanding in cities that seem to have lost their bearings and his own role and responsibility as a Jewish writer.
Industry:Culture
(1915 – 1968) Prolific American poet, essayist and author of The Seven-Storey Mountain (1948), his memoir of modern spiritual discovery Born in Prades, France, but educated in the United States and England, Merton converted to Catholicism in the late 1930s. In 1941 he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky. As a Trappist, the pull between inward experience and the outside world continued in Merton’s life. He became increasingly attracted to Eastern mysticism in the 1960s, all the while involving himself in the Anti-Vietnam War movement and other left-wing political causes. Merton died in an accident while at a religious conference in Thailand.
Industry:Culture
(1915 – 1983) Electric bluesman, born on a sharecropping farm in Mississippi, who garnered his nickname from playing as a child in a local creek. Waters was discovered in 1940 by folk-song archivists Alan Lomax and John Work. In 1943 Waters moved to Chicago, IL where he took up electric guitar and his countrified urban blues became a staple of the South Side club circuit and, in the 1950s, the Chess label. Touring constantly and appearing at every major blues, jazz and folk festival, Waters was a key influence on the British bands of the 1960s blues revival.
Industry:Culture
(1915 – 1985) One of America’s most revered film-makers, Orson Welles was already an accomplished director and actor before he made his first movie at age twenty-four.
Welles initially received wide acclaim for his stage direction, and notoriety for his 1938 radio adaptation of War of the Worlds. Told through a series of simulated news bulletins, it sparked nationwide panic. Welles achieved his greatest success with his first movie Citizen Kane (1941), hailed by some as the greatest motion picture ever made.
Unfortunately although Welles continued to enjoy periodic success in films as both director and actor, the remainder of his life consisted of losing battles for the right to control his subsequent films, and ultimately to make films at all.
Industry:Culture
