Resultado narrado por "Ghizela Rowe" em Todas as categorias

John William Polidori was born on 7th September 1795, in London, to Gaetano Polidori. In 1816 Dr Polidori was given the job of Byron’s personal physician and accompanied him on a trip through Europe. The publisher John Murray offered Polidori £500 to keep a diary of their travels. At the Villa Diodati, Byron’s rented villa at Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the pair met with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. The Russian Literary Tradition has justly earned a magnificent reputation. The Russian Empire of the Czars was a huge and disparate patchwork of peoples ruled by an overbearing elite that employed a middle-class bureaucracy to keep the working class firmly underfoot. Within its vaulted ranks are a role call of many of the greatest literary talents of the ages.

Ernest Bramah was born on 20th March 1868. He was an intensely private man and very little about his life was ever released. He obtained success in his own right with the creation of the storyteller Kai Lung with humourous tales set in China, usually laced with fantasy elements. There seems to have been a certain vogue for stories with an oriental element at this time, which Bramah was happy to take advantage of. In 1914 Bramah created the blind detective Max Carrados. Despite the obvious obstacle to his deductive powers, he was a literary and commercial success.

James Thomson was born in Port Glasgow, Scotland, on the 23rd November 1834. Possessing a powerful and unique writing gift, unfortunately, his own demons curtailed him from leaving a larger literary legacy. Stories, essays and poems were submitted to various publications during his life and undoubtedly the creative high point of his life is ‘The City of Dreadful Night’. Within its bleak verse are the struggles of Thomson’s own chaotic tortures with depression, insomnia and alcoholism in the uncaring world that surrounded him.

Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born on August 28th, 1814, at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, into a literary family with Huguenot, Irish and English roots. Between 1838 and 1840 Le Fanu had written and published twelve stories which purported to be the literary remains of an 18th-century Catholic priest called Father Purcell. Set mostly in Ireland they include classic stories of gothic horror, with grim, shadowed castles, as well as supernatural visitations from beyond the grave, together with madness and suicide.

William Hope Hodgson was born in Essex, England, on November 15th, 1877. Over his short career he produced a large body of work which explored and covered many genres. From horror, to science fiction, to stories on the sea, where he had spent much of his early life. One of his most memorable creations was his Carnacki, Supernatural Detective creation. This fused together his passion for sleuthing and interest in the Occult. It was a memorable success.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 19th January 1809. Poe is also one of a number of authors credited with inventing the detective genre with his Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. He's featured in three stories, including the legendary ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, and by sheer deduction, logic and a touch of Gallic arrogance revealed what was hidden to the rest of us.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 19th January 1809. Poe is also one of a number of authors credited with inventing the detective genre with his Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. He's featured in three stories, including the legendary ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, and by sheer deduction, logic and a touch of Gallic arrogance revealed what was hidden to the rest of us.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died. Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. Amongst F. Scott Fitzgerald's many short story gems is ‘The Four Fists’. It follows a life, from boyhood to maturity, and how an occasional brush with physical force influences and changes that life.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 22nd May 1859. His literary career burst into life in November 1886 with ‘A Study In Scarlet’, the first of the fabulously successful Sherlock Holmes stories. In 1891 tired of writing Holmes stories, he began a series of historical novels and even went so far as to apparently kill off Holmes in a lethal brawl with his arch-nemesis, Moriarty.

Pearl Zane Grey was born on 31st January 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio. From an early age, he was intrigued by history, fishing, baseball, and writing. Grey was an avid reader of adventure stories, consuming dime store novels by the dozen. His first magazine article, about one of his fishing expeditions, was published in 1902. It was not until 1910 that he wrote his first Western, ‘The Heritage of the Desert’. It was a breakthrough title and quickly became a bestseller.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on 4th July 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, a town synonymous with the earlier Salem Witch Trials. It was instrumental in Hawthorne’s later use of American Gothic and dark romanticism in his writing. ‘Rapaccinni’s Daughter’ is a classic piece of literature from his pen. Set in Italy, it is an unsettling story of romance destroyed by science.

Katherine was born on the 14th October 1888 into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand, the middle child of five. At 19 Katherine left for England, where she met and befriended the modernist writers D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, amongst others. She then travelled to Europe before returning to New Zealand. There she began to write the short stories that she would later become so famous for. But there was another less-heralded side to Katherine’s writings; that of poetry. Her verse certainly reflects much of the themes of her life and interests.

Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson was born on 22nd September 1847 in Barnes, London. In 1876 she married Wilfred Meynell, the newspaper publisher and editor, and together they set up and published a number of magazines as well as publishing the initial works of several poets including Francis Thompson. As the new century dawned, she along with many other artists began to question the colonial needs of Empire with its segregation and oppression. In particular she sought and gained a role in the Women’s Suffrage movement as it attempted to obtain greater equality for women.

Edward Everett Hale was born on April 3rd, 1822, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a prodigy, gifted with extraordinary literary skills. At only 13 he graduated from Boston Latin School and enrolled at Harvard College. There, he settled in with the literary set, won two Bowdoin prizes and was elected Class Poet. He graduated in 1839. His literary career started quite late. It wasn’t until 1859 that he was first published in the Atlantic with his short story "My Double and How He Undid Me." In 1863 the Atlantic published perhaps his best-known work "The Man Without a Country."

Susan Keating Glaspell was born on July 1st, 1876 in Davenport, Iowa. Glaspell, a precocious child, was an active student at Davenport High School. By 18 she was earning a salary at the local newspaper as a journalist, and by 20 she was the author of a weekly 'Society' column. With her husband Glaspell founded the Provincetown Playhouse for plays that reflected contemporary issues. Her first play, ‘Trifles’ (1916), was based on the murder trial she covered as a young reporter and later adapted as the short story ‘A Jury of Her Peers’. S

John Griffith Chaney was born on January 12th, 1876, in San Francisco. In late 1876 his mother married John London and the young child was brought to live with them as they moved around the Bay area, eventually settling in Oakland where now, calling himself Jack, he completed grade school. In the Klondike Jack began to gather material for his writing. During the late 1890s Jack was regularly publishing short stories and by the turn of the century full-blown novels.

O Henry is perhaps the master of the American short story across his 600 works. Slices of life, vignettes of narrative are told with verve and poise and words that simply flow as he wanders through society revealing characters and stories of instant appeal.

Two Gentlemen of Verona is believed to be one of Shakespeare's early comedies and as a result provides us with the first examples of a number of themes and devices that are further explored in many of his plays. These include loyalty, friendship and the nature of love.

The Tempest has the ingredients of a cracking good story - magic, power, and love - and they kick up a storm. The magician Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, are banished by his jealous brother, Antonio, with the help of Alonso, the king of Naples. Prospero conjures up a tempest than ensures justice is done.