James Salter

Thomas Clayton Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early 20th century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books,... written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, reflect vividly on American culture and mores of the period, albeit filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated and hyper-analytical perspective. He became very famous during his own lifetime. After Wolfe's death, his chief contemporary William Faulkner said that Wolfe may have had the best talent of their generation. Wolfe's influence extends to the writings of famous Beat writer Jack Kerouac, authors Ray Bradbury and Philip Roth, among others. He remains one of the most important writers in modern American literature, as he was one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction. He is considered North Carolina's most famous writer. Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of eight children of William Oliver Wolfe and Julia Elizabeth Westall .
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Jean Genet – April 15, 1986 was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest, The Thief's Journal,... and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Blacks, The Maids and The Screens. Genet's mother was a young prostitute who raised him for the first year of his life before putting him up for adoption. Thereafter Genet was raised in the provinces by a carpenter and his family who, according to Edmund White's biography, were loving and attentive. While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft . After the death of his foster mother, Genet was placed with an elderly couple but remained with them less than two years.
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches .He was a French writer and physician. The name Céline was the first name of his grandmother. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that... modernized both French and world literature. The only child of Ferdinand-Auguste Destouches and Marguerite-Louise-Céline Guilloux, he was born Louis-Ferdinand-Auguste Destouches in 1894 at Courbevoie, just outside Paris in the Seine département . His father was a minor functionary in an insurance firm and his mother was a lacemaker. In 1905 he was awarded his Certificat d'études, after which he worked as an apprentice and messenger boy in various trades. Between 1908 and 1910 his parents sent him to Germany and England for a year in each country in order to acquire foreign languages for future employment. From the time he left school, until the age of eighteen, Céline worked various jobs, leaving or losing them after only short periods of time.
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Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant was a French essayist, novelist and one of the leading French dramatists of the twentieth century. His early successes were works such as Les Célibataires in 1934, and the tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles , which sold millions... of copies and was translated into 13 languages. At this time, Montherlant traveled regularly, mainly to Spain, Italy, and Algeria. He wrote plays such as La Reine morte , Pasiphaé , Le Maître de Santiago , Port-Royal and Le Cardinal d'Espagne . He is particularly remembered as a playwright. In his plays, as well as in his novels, he frequently portrayed heroic characters displaying the moral standards he professed. In Le Songe he described the courage and camaraderie of soldiers, based on his experiences in World War I. In the 1930s, he wrote numerous articles and books advocating intervention against Nazi Germany. During the German Occupation, his book L'Équinoxe de Septembre was banned by the German authorities.
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