Biography of Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born the son of Isaiah Okafo, a evangelical Christian churchman, and Janet N. Achebe November 16, 1930 in Ogidi, Nigeria. Although both his parents were Christians, they heavily inundated him with traditional Ibo values. He married Christie Chinwe Okoli, September 10, 1961, and now has four children: Chinelo, Ikechukwu, Chidi, and Nwando. He attended Government College in Umuahia from 1944 to 1947 and University College in Ibadan from 1948 to 1953.

He then received a B.A. from London University in 1953. He studied broadcasting at the British Broadcasting Corp. in London in 1956, and was later the director of External Broadcasting for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service. Achebe has received numerous honors, such as Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and well over 20 honorary doctorates.

He is also recipient of the Nigerian National Merit Award, signifying high intellectual achievement that has shaped the culture of Nigeria. From 1972 - 1976 and from 1897-1988 he was Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and also at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He later taught at Bard College.

Katherine Mansfield (1888 - 1923)

• Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction.

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964)

Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru was born on November 14, 1889, in Allahabad, India. In 1919, he joined the Indian National Congress and joined Indian Nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi’s independence movement. In 1947, Pakistan was created as a new, independent country for Muslims. The British withdrew and Nehru became independent India’s first prime minister. Nehru is considered to be the architect of the modern Indian nation-state; a sovereign, socialist,secular, and democratic republic. He died on May 27, 1964, in New Delhi, India.

The First Prime Minister of Independent India

Domestic Policy:

The importance of Jawaharlal Nehru in the context of Indian history can be distilled to the following points: he imparted modern values and thought, stressed secularism, insisted upon the basic unity of India, and, in the face of ethnic and religious diversity, carried India into the modern age of scientific innovation and technological progress. He also prompted social concern for the marginalized and poor and respect for democratic values.

Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was a great thinker, a famous social philosopher and the first sociologist. His real name was Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte. He was born at Montpellier, France, on January 19,1798, a decade after French Revolution. 

It was Comte who laid the foundations of sociology and is acclaimed as the "father of sociology". Comte was also the founder of French positivism and he was the one who coined the term sociology. 

Comte was born a Catholic, but somewhere around the age of fourteen, he apparently stopped believing in God. At the same time, he left the ideals of his royalist family behind and became a republican. From the very beginning Comte exhibited extra-ordinary mental ability, a strong character and a tendency to go against authority. He is often described as "brilliant and recalcitrant".

Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg

• Carl Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He was the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and another for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat".

• Carl Sandburg, born Carl August Sandburg, was born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1878. His father was a railroad blacksmith and his mother worked as a maid in a Chicagoland hotel. The Sandburgs were hardworking middle class people who had to provide for Carl and his six siblings.

• Carl Sandburg only attended public school until the age of 14, when he left the eighth grade and began to do small jobs around town. At the age of 18, he embarked on his first trip to the city of Chicago with a pass he had borrowed from his father. Within a year, he had joined the masses of railroad stowaways who traveled the Midwest looking for work.

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

• Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941) is one of India's most beloved writers. 

• He won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 and was respectfully addressed as Gurudev.

• He was a poet, novelist, artist and musician, philosopher, teacher and reformer. 

• He has also shaped the Bengali literature and music. 

• He began to write at a very young age and is well known for his lyrics and songs on nature, love and childhood. 

• He set hundreds of poems to music and founded the "world university" Santiniketan outside Calcutta.

• This story "The Cabuliwallah" comes from Tagore's collection Galpaguccha ("A Bunch of Stories"), which describe humble lives and their small miseries. Cabuliwallahs are peddler or fruitseller from Kabul, Afghanistan. This story called is about the beautiful friendship of a young girl named Mini and a peddler named Rahman, which develops despite rank, class or age.

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964)

Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru was born on November 14, 1889, in Allahabad, India. In 1919, he joined the Indian National Congress and joined Indian Nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi’s independence movement. In 1947, Pakistan was created as a new, independent country for Muslims. The British withdrew and Nehru became independent India’s first prime minister. Nehru is considered to be the architect of the modern Indian nation-state; a sovereign, socialist,secular, and democratic republic. He died on May 27, 1964, in New Delhi, India.

Pre-Political Life

Jawaharlal Nehru was born in Allahabad, India in 1889. His father was a renowned lawyer and one of Mahatma Gandhi's notable lieutenants. A series of English governesses and tutors educated Nehru at home until he was 16. He continued his education in England, first at the Harrow School and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned an honors degree in natural science. He later studied law at the Inner Temple in London before returning home to India in 1912 and practicing law for several years. Four years later, Nehru married Kamala Kaul; their only child, Indira Priyadarshini, was born in 1917. Like her father, Indira would later serve as prime minister of India under her married name: Indira Gandhi. A family of high achievers, one of Nehru's sisters, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, later became the first woman president of the UN General Assembly.

David Herbert Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his "savage pilgrimage". At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, "The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation". 

Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. Lawrence is now valued by many as a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._H._Lawrence

Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for hisepigrams and plays, and the circumstances of his imprisonment which was followed by his early death.

Wilde's parents were successful Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles. 

As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art", and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day.