Donna Tartt

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh /ˈwɔː/ , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer. His best-known works include his early satires Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust , his novel Brideshead... Revisited and his trilogy of Second World War novels collectively known as Sword of Honour . Waugh is widely recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century. The son of a publisher, Waugh was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a schoolmaster before becoming a full-time writer. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends, and developed a taste for country house society that never left him. In the 1930s he travelled extensively, often as a special newspaper correspondent; he was reporting from Abyssinia at the time of the 1935 Italian invasion. He served in the British armed forces throughout the Second World War, first in the Royal Marines and later in the Royal Horse Guards.
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Thomas Stearns Eliot OM was a publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century." Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. The... poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement, and was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion , The Waste Land , The Hollow Men , Ash Wednesday , and Four Quartets . He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral . He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot was born into the Eliot family, a middle class family originally from New England, who had moved to St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware Eliot , was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis.
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Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the 26 most translated authors in the... world. He has been greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins." Stevenson was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 13 November 1850, to the former Margaret Isabella Balfour and Thomas Stevenson , a leading lighthouse engineer. Lighthouse design was the family profession: Thomas's own father was the famous Robert Stevenson, and Thomas's maternal grandfather, Thomas Smith, and brothers Alan and David were also among those in the business.
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Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in Bombay, in the... Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. Kipling is best known for his works of fiction, including The Jungle Book , Just So Stories , Kim , many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" ; and his poems, including Mandalay , Gunga Din , The White Man's Burden and If— . He is regarded as a major "innovator in the art of the short story"; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and his best works are said to exhibit "a versatile and luminous narrative gift". Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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