Robert Anton Wilson

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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Brian O'Nolan was an Irish novelist, playwright and satirist regarded as a key figure in postmodern literature. Born in Strabane, County Tyrone, he is best known for English language novels such as At Swim-Two-Birds, and The Third Policeman as well as many satirical columns in The Irish Times... and an Irish language novel An Béal Bocht . O'Nolan wrote prodigiously during his years as a student at University College Dublin where he was an active, and controversial, member of the well known Literary and Historical Society. He contributed to the student magazine Comhthrom Féinne under various guises, in particular the pseudonym Brother Barnabas. Significantly, he composed a story during this same period entitled "Scenes in a Novel by Brother Barnabas", which anticipates many of the ideas and themes later to be found in his novel, At Swim-Two-Birds.
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Robert William Chambers was an American artist and writer. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to William P. Chambers , a famous lawyer, and Caroline Chambers , a direct descendant of Roger Williams, the founder of Providence, Rhode Island. Robert's brother was Walter Boughton Chambers, the world... famous architect. Robert was first educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute,and then entered the Art Students' League at around the age of twenty, where the artist Charles Dana Gibson was his fellow student. Chambers studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, and at Académie Julian, in Paris from 1886 to 1893, and his work was displayed at the Salon as early as 1889. On his return to New York, he succeeded in selling his illustrations to Life, Truth, and Vogue magazines. Then, for reasons unclear, he devoted his time to writing, producing his first novel, In the Quarter . His most famous, and perhaps most meritorious, effort is The King in Yellow, an 1895 collection of weird short stories, connected by the theme of the fictitious drama The King in Yellow, which drives those who read it insane. E. F.
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Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was a proponent, in the 19th century, of American individualist anarchism, which he called "unterrified Jeffersonianism", and editor and publisher of the individualist anarchist periodical Liberty. Tucker was born on April 17, 1854 in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. In... 1872, while a student at M.I.T., Tucker attended a convention of the New England Labor Reform League in Boston, chaired by William B. Greene, author of Mutual Banking . At the convention, Tucker purchased Mutual Banking, True Civilization, and a set of Ezra Heywood's pamphlets. Furthermore, Free-love anarchist, Ezra Heywood introduced Tucker to William B. Greene and Josiah Warren, author of True Civilization . He also started a relationship with Victoria Woodhull, which lasted for 3 years. Tucker made his debut into radical circles 1876, when Heywood published Tucker's first ever English translation of Proudhon's classic work What is Property?. In 1877-1878, Tucker published his original journal, Radical Review, which ran for only four issues.
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