Ford Madox Ford

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of... the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses , a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominently the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners , and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake . His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. Joyce was born to a middle class family in Dublin, where he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, then at University College Dublin. In his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich.
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Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction,... while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of these are considered classics of American literature. Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school he reported for a few months for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to enlist with the World War I ambulance drivers. In 1918, he was seriously wounded and returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1922, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives.
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Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France. Gertrude Stein, the youngest of a family of five... children, was born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania to upper-class German Jewish parents, Daniel and Amelia Stein. Her father was a railroad executive whose investments in streetcar lines and real estate made the family wealthy. When Gertrude was three years old she and her family moved to Vienna and then Paris. They returned to America in 1878, settling in Oakland, California, where Stein attended First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland's Sabbath school. Her mother died in 1888, and her father in 1891. Michael, her eldest brother, took over the family business holdings. He arranged for Gertrude, and another sister, Bertha, to live with their mother's family in Baltimore after the deaths of their parents. In 1892, she lived with her uncle David Bachrach. Bachrach had married Fanny Keyser, sister of Gertrude's mother Amelia, in 1877. In Baltimore, Stein met Claribel Cone and Etta Cone, who held Saturday evening salons that she would later emulate in Paris.
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Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and a major figure of the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry... began with his promotion of Imagism, a movement that derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. His best-known works include Ripostes , Hugh Selwyn Mauberley , and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos . Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the publication in 1915 of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and for the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote of him in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ...
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