Writers

John Burroughs occupies a permanent place in American literature. Though he was a leading literary critic in his day, he was a pioneer in the new school of nature writing and the most popular writer of his period in the field he made his own. Burroughs' legacy of some twenty-five volumes, of which more than a million and a half copies were sold during his lifetime, has had a profound influence on our appreciation of nature.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was a major scholar of the English language, specialising in Old and Middle English. Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford, he also wrote a number of stories, including most famously The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), which are set in a pre-historic era in an invented version of the world which he called by the Middle English name of Middle-earth. This was peopled by Men (and women), Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs (or Goblins) and of course Hobbits. He has regularly been condemned by the Eng. Lit.

Kurt Vonnegut's Fantastic Faces

By Peter Reed
(reprinted from Volume 10, Issue No. 1 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts,  copyright 1999 Florida Altantic University, Boca Raton, Florida)

Most readers interested in the fantastic in literature are familiar with Kurt Vonnegut, particularly for his uses of science fiction. Many of his early short stories were wholly in the science fiction mode, and while its degree has varied, science fiction has never lost its place in his novels.

Max Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is usually classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement.

In the 1920s he was associated with the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism.