Salman Rushdie

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. He is a MacArthur Fellow noted for his dense and complex novels, and both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including the fields of history, science, and mathematics. For his most... praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. , The Crying of Lot 49 , Gravity's Rainbow , and Mason & Dixon . Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s. Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, one of three children of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr.
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Govindas Vishnoodas Desani or G. V. Desani, was a Kenyan-born, British-educated Indian writer and Buddhist philosopher. The son of a merchant, he began his career as a journalist, and achieved fame with the cult novel All About H. Hatterr , considered one of the finest examples of literature in... English and a novel that compares favourably with Joyce's Ulysses. He was for a time a university professor in America, and spent many years engaged in meditation at various monasteries. A second volume, Hali and Collected Stories, was published in 1991. Born in 1909 of Indian parents in Nairobi, Kenya, Govindas Vishnoodas Desani spent his childhood in Sindh, now Pakistan. Known as a child prodigy, between his 7th and 12th year, he managed to run away from home twice and was expelled from school at thirteen as unteachable. At the third attempt to escape, he reached England. Not yet 18, and a minor, at the personal recommendation of the then Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in the British House of Commons, George Lansbury, he was admitted as a reader in the library of the British Museum. At 19, he was one of the foreign correspondents serving newspapers from London.
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Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE was an English humorist, whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics, and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years and his many writings continue to be... widely read. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of pre-1914 English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by modern writers such as Stephen Fry, Douglas Adams, Zadie Smith, J. K. Rowling, and John Le Carré . Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of 15 plays and of 250 lyrics for some 30 musical comedies, many of them produced in collaboration with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton.
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Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the... Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a "huge literary influence.
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