Zachary Scott

Zachary Scott was an American actor who was known for his roles as villains and "mystery men".

Scott was born in Austin, Texas, the son of Sallie Lee (Masterson) and Zachary Thomson Scott, a doctor.

Scott intended to follow his father into medicine, but after attending the University of Texas at Austin he dropped out at age 19 and worked as a seaman on an England-bound freighter. There he appeared in almost two dozen repertory theatre productions in 18 months.

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne met Scott and his wife Elaine Anderson in Austin, Texas, where Scott was completing his degree, and then wrote to Lawrence Langer about summer jobs for both at the Westport [CT] Playhouse, which led to Scott's engagements in New York. He made his debut in a revival of Ah, Wilderness! in 1941 with a small role as a bartender. He was also in The Damask Cheek (1942), The Rock (1943), and Those Endearing Young Charms (1943).

Jack L. Warner saw Scott perform in Those Endearing Young Charms and signed him to his first film contract, which led to his screen debut in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944).

Scott was one of the many Warners stars who had small roles in Hollywood Canteen (1944). He was loaned out to United Artists to play the lead in The Southerner (1945) directed by Jean Renoir.

Back at Warners, Scott was cast in Mildred Pierce (1945) and received much acclaim for his duplicitous performance as the lover of both Joan Crawford and her daughter; his mysterious murder forms the basis of the plot.

Scott co-starred with Faye Emerson in Danger Signal (1945) and was with Janis Paige and Dane Clark in Her Kind of Man (1946). In 1946 exhibitors voted Scott the third most promising "star of tomorrow."

Scott supported Ann Sheridan in The Unfaithful (1947) and Ronald Reagan and Alexis Smith in Stallion Road (1947). MGM borrowed him to support Lana Turner and Spencer Tracy in Cass Timberlane (1947).

He had the lead in a noir for Eagle Lion, Ruthless (1948), then returned to Warners for Whiplash (1948) with Clark. He supported Virginia Mayo in Flaxy Martin (1949) and Joel McCrea in the independent South of St. Louis (1949). He was reunited with Crawford in Flamingo Road (1949).

Warners tried Scott in a comedy with Alexis Smith, One Last Fling (1949). He starred in some films outside the studio, Guilty Bystander (1950) and Shadow on the Wall (1950). At Warners he supported Randolph Scott in Colt .45 (1950). He did Born to Be Bad (1950) for Nicholas Ray and Pretty Baby (1950) for Warners.

Scott appeared on a variety of television series such as Armstrong Circle Theatre (1950) and Pulitzer Prize Playhouse (1951). He did Lightning Strikes Twice (1951) for King Vidor and The Secret of Convict Lake (1951).

Scott's first film after he left Warners was Stronghold (1951) with Veronica Lake. He followed it with Let's Make It Legal (1951). He was on TV in Tales of Tomorrow (1951) and Betty Crocker Star Matinee (1952) and went to England to make Wings of Danger (1952).

In Hollywood he was in Studio One in Hollywood (1953), and Medallion Theatre (1953) on TV, and Appointment in Honduras (1953), directed by Jacques Tourneur. He was in The Revlon Mirror Theater (1953), Chevron Theatre (1953), Suspense (1954), Schlitz Playhouse (1954), The Motorola Television Hour (1954), Campbell Summer Soundstage (1954), The United States Steel Hour (1954), Omnibus (1954), Climax! (1955), General Electric Theater (1955), Robert Montgomery Presents (1956, playing Philip Marlowe in a version of The Big Sleep), Science Fiction Theatre (1955), The Star and the Story (1956), Celebrity Playhouse (1956), Theatre Night (1957) and Pursuit (1958).

He made the occasional film such as Treasure of Ruby Hills (1955), Shotgun (1955), Flame of the Islands (1956), The Counterfeit Plan (1957), and Man in the Shadow (1957).

Scott returned to Broadway with Requiem for a Nun (1959).

Scott was in The Young One (1960) directed by Luis Buñuel. He guest starred on The Chevy Mystery Show (1960), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1960) and Diagnosis: Unknown (1960). In 1961, he portrayed White Eyes, a Native American Chief, in the Rawhide episode "Incident Before Black Pass".

Scott married his second wife, actress Ruth Ford. They had a child together, and he also adopted her daughter from a previous marriage.

He was in the film Natchez Trace (1960) and had roles in The DuPont Show of the Month (1961), Play of the Week (1961), The New Breed (1961), The Defenders (1961) and The DuPont Show of the Week (1962).

Scott's last roles included It's Only Money (1962) with Jerry Lewis, the TV movie The Expendables (1962), and episodes of The Doctors and the Nurses (1962) and The Rogues (1965). He returned to Broadway for A Rainy Day in Newark (1963) by Howard Teichmann. He then moved back to Austin.

Scott died on October 3, 1965 from a malignant brain tumor at the home of his mother in Austin, Texas, at the age of 51.

Peter Tinniswood

Peter Tinniswood was an English radio and TV comedy scriptwriter, and author of a series of popular novels.

Tinniswood  was born in Liverpool, but grew up above a dry cleaner's on Eastway in Sale, Cheshire. He attended Sale Boys' Grammar School. His career began in journalism. He spent four years in Sheffield from 1958, first working for The Star, and then for the Sheffield Telegraph, where he was a leader writer and specialised in feature writing. He won widespread admiration for a week-long series Travels with a Donkey, an account of a tramp round the Peak District with a reluctant donkey.

In 1964, Tinniswood collaborated with his long-term writing partner David Nobbs on the BBC sketch show The Frost Report[1] and the comedy Lance At Large, a sitcom starring Lance Percival in which Percival's character, Alan Day, was involved in different scenarios and meeting different people in each episode. The short-lived ITV series Never Say Die (1970) drew on Tinniswood's days as a hospital porter. Set in Victoria Memorial Hospital, the show focused on the comedy created between the patients and staff. It starred Reginald Marsh and Patrick Newell. Tinniswood based the BBC comedy I Didn't Know You Cared (1975–1979) on his novels. Featuring the Brandons, a dour northern family, the programme ran until 1979, and featured Liz Smith, Robin Bailey, John Comer and Stephen Rea. In 1980, the BBC produced a series based on other Tinniswood books, featuring the character the Brigadier, an erstwhile cricketer and over-the-top raconteur, played by Robin Bailey. Some of the stories were adapted for BBC Radio 4. The series was remade in 1985 for Channel 4.

For ITV in 1983, Tinniswood wrote The Home Front, again set in the north of England. It starred Brenda Bruce as Mrs Place, a nosey, arrogant mother who lorded it over her three children. Two years later ITV produced Mog, based on Peter's 1970 novel and starring Enn Reitel as the title character. The episodes were written by Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, but it was not a success. Also in 1985, was South Of The Border starring Brian Glover as Edgar Rowley, a Yorkshireman forced to migrate to the south of England.

In later years, Tinniswood's output was mostly for Radio 4 and included the continuing adventures of Uncle Mort and Carter Brandon in Uncle Mort's North Country, Uncle Mort's South Country and Uncle Mort's Celtic Fringe and a series about poacher Winston Hayballs, his "bit of fluff" Nancy and her family adapted from his novel "Winston". Liz Goulding, his second wife, played Rosie.

Peter Tinniswood died on January 9, 2003 at the age of 66. 

Louis Rubin

Louis Decimus Rubin Jr. was a noted American literary scholar and critic, writing teacher, publisher, and writer.

He is credited with helping to establish Southern literature as a recognized area of study within the field of American literature, as well as serving as a teacher and mentor for writers at Hollins College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and for founding Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a publishing company nationally recognized for fiction by Southern writers. He died on November 16, 2013 in Pittsboro, North Carolina and is buried at the Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina.

Willy Ronis

Willy Ronis was a French photographer. His best-known work shows life in post-war Paris and Provence.

Ronis was born in Paris; his father, Emmanuel Ronis, was a Jewish refugee from Odessa, and his mother, Ida Gluckmann, was a refugee from Lithuania, both escaped from the pogroms. His father opened a photography studio in Montmartre, and his mother gave piano lessons. The boy's early interest was music and he hoped to become a composer. Ronis' passion for music has been observed in his photographs.

Returning from compulsory military service in 1932, his violin studies were put on hold because his father's cancer required Ronis to take over the family portrait business. The work of photographers, Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams inspired Ronis to begin exploring photography. His father died in 1936, whereupon Ronis sold the business and set up as a freelance photographer, his first work being published in Regards.

In 1937 he met David Seymour and Robert Capa, and did his first work for Plaisir de France; in 1938–39 he reported on a strike at Citroën and traveled in the Balkans. With Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ronis belonged to Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, and remained a man of the left. In 1946 Ronis joined the photo agency Rapho, with Brassaï, Robert Doisneau and Ergy Landau, and was instrumental in forming the professional association Le Groupe des XV, and later joined Les 30 x 40, Club Photographique de Paris. Ronis became the first French photographer to work for Life.

Ronis' nudes and fashion work (for Vogue and Le Jardin des modes) show his appreciation for natural beauty; meanwhile, he remained a principled news photographer, resigning from Rapho for a 25-year period when he objected to the hostile captioning by The New York Times to his photograph of a strike.

Despite stiff competition from Robert Doisneau and others, the Oxford Companion to the Photograph terms Ronis "the photographer of Paris par excellence."

Ronis began teaching in the 1950s, and taught at the School of Fine Arts in Avignon, Aix-en-Provence and Saint Charles, Marseilles.

In 1953, Edward Steichen included Ronis, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Izis, and Brassaï in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art titled Five French Photographers. In 1955, Ronis was included in The Family of Man exhibition. The Venice Biennale awarded him its Gold Medal in 1957. Ronis began teaching in the 1950s, and taught at the School of Fine Arts in Avignon, Aix-en-Provence where he met Pierre-Jean Amar and Saint Charles, Marseilles. In 1979 he was awarded the Grand Prix des Arts et Lettres for Photography by the Minister for Culture. Ronis won the Prix Nadar in 1981 for his photobook, Sur le fil du hasard.

Ronis continued to live and work in Paris, although he stopped photography in 2001, since he required a cane to walk and could not move around with his camera. He also worked on books for the publisher Taschen.

In 2005–2006 the Paris city hall held Willy Ronis in Paris, a retrospective exhibition of his work, that had more than 500,000 visitors. There was also an exhibition at Rencontres d'Arles festival, Arles, France, in 2009.

Ronis died at age 99, on 12 September 2009

Norman McKinnel

Norman McKinnel was a Scottish stage and film actor and playwright, active from the 1890s until his death. He appeared in many stage roles in the UK and overseas as well as featuring in a number of films, the best known of which is Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 production Downhill. 

McKinnel was born in 1870 at Maxwelltown, Kirkcudbrightshire (since incorporated into Dumfries) and originally intended to follow his father into the engineering business before deciding to enter the acting profession. As a playwright he is known for the play, The Bishop's Candlesticks, an adaptation of a section of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.

McKinnel's first stage appearance was in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex in 1894 and he soon based himself in London to further his career. He became known over the course of his career for playing many Shakespearian roles, and his stage work took him the U.S., Australia and South Africa.

McKinnel's film career began in 1899 in King John, the earliest known example of Shakespeare on film. The work consisted of four brief scenes from the play, and a two-minute fragment survives at the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam. McKinnel did not act on screen again until the mid-1910s, when he began to make further film appearances fitted in around his stage work. He played the title character in the original London production of Hobson's Choice in 1916. Notably, he appeared as the same character (Nathaniel Jeffcote) in three separate film versions of the same play Hindle Wakes, in 1918 and 1927 silent adaptations and again in 1931 in sound. In 1919 he played Paul Dombey in the first screen version of the Charles Dickens novel Dombey and Son.

McKinnel died of a heart attack in London on 29 March 1933, aged 62.

Thomas Carnduff

Thomas Carnduff was an Irish playwright and poet

Carnduff was born on January 30, 1886.  He spent his early childhood in Dublin, where he was educated at the Royal Hibernian School and the Royal Military College. He worked as a butcher's boy, in a thread and needle factory, in a printing house, as a drover in a linen factory, and in the Belfast shipyards. While working in the Belfast Steam Print Company from 1906 to 1914 he reveled in the camaraderie of his well-versed, articulate co-workers. He read widely in order to contribute to their stimulating levels of daily debate on the social issues of the time. In 1914 he started work as a plater’s helper at Workman, Clark and Co.

He joined the Young Citizens' Volunteers and in 1916 enlisted in the Royal Engineers, serving at Ypres and Messines. On leaving the army in 1919 he was re-employed at Workman’s, remaining there until the firm was wound up in 1935. It was hard, dangerous work, which often involved working at heights – the fear of which Carnduff never entirely overcame. Accidents were a daily occurrence in the yard, and on one occasion he was taken to hospital after suffering injuries from a heavy spanner which had been dropped from 40 feet.

Carnduff was involved in the Labour and trade union movements and active in the Independent Orange Order. He was a friend of Peadar O'Donnell and supported the Connolly Association. All his life he had written poetry, and in 1936 he formed the Young Ulster Literary Society and was a member of the Irish Pen Club. He wrote for several newspapers, including the Bell and published books of poems, one of which was Songs from the Shipyard and Other Poems published in 1924. He wrote many plays: The First Warrant (1930); Workers (1932); Traitors (1934); Castlereagh (1935); Birth of a Giant (1937); The Stars Foretell (1938) and Murder at Stranmillis. Some of these were performed in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and the Empire Theatre, Belfast; The Birth of a Giant was a play written for radio. His later years were spent working as a caretaker in the Linen Hall Library, where his portrait now hangs. 

Thomas Carnduff died on April 17, 1956.

Carlo Alianello

Carlo Alianello was an Italian writer and screenwriter.

He was born in Rome to a family of Basilicatese origins, his father Antonio, an army officer, was originally from Potenza, while his mother Luisa Salvia was from Tito. On his paternal side, Alianello descended from a family loyal to the Bourbon dynasty; on his maternal side, his ancestors were nobles with secular and liberal ideals, who, after the Risorgimento, actively participated in the political life of the new Italian state.

Carlo lived his childhood and adolescence without a permanent home due to his father's work. At the age of two, he moved with his parents to La Maddalena ( Sardinia ), attending elementary school. Subsequently he emigrated to Florence , where he enrolled in the lower secondary school. During his stay in Florence he enrolled in the Marian Congregation of the Jesuits , which he also continued to practice throughout his life when he returned to Rome. In the capital he attended high school and, eager to follow in his father's footsteps, tried to pursue a career in the army but his dream was thwarted due to severe short-sightedness.

After finishing high school, Alianello enrolled in university, earning a degree in literature and, having obtained the teaching post, was a teacher in the high schools of Rieti, Camerino and Rome. He also began to collaborate for newspapers such as Il Mondo di Giovanni Amendola and Nuovo Convito, owned by a noblewoman from Basilicata, the Marquise Maria Del Vasto Celano. Later he worked as a publicist for other newspapers such as Corriere della Sera, Il Giornale d'Italia, Il Messaggero and Il Caffè.

During the last stage of his career, he held the position of inspector at the Ministry of Education. He was also the author of several poems as well as a painter, dedicating himself, in his spare time, to the creation of self-portraits and landscapes. Initially Alianello's literary interests were oriented towards the theatre.

In 1925 he wrote a play which was performed at Anton Giulio Bragaglia 's "Teatro degli Indipendenti" and in 1928 he published his first essay entitled Il teatro di Maurizio Maeterlinck. In 1931, Alianello wrote a drama, Giuditta, which was never published. In the late 1930s, he abandoned the theater field to return briefly in 1955, with another drama entitled Luna sulla Gran Guardia , which was also broadcast on the radio.

After leaving the theater, Alianello devoted himself to the historical novel, focusing on the theme of national unification. In some of his subsequent productions, he revisited the history of Basilicata and the south in general, drawing inspiration from the memories and history of his ancestors: through his father and, even more, through his grandfather, a former Bourbon officer originally from Missanello who , out of fidelity to his flag, refused to take the oath to the Savoyard army, when Francis II was dethroned by unitary troops.

His activity consists of a sort of narrative "triptych", on the story of the historical events of the collapse of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies . Alianello's historical, cultural and narrative objective is a revisitation of the Risorgimento process, reinterpreted as a dramatic moment in which a foreign power occupies a sovereign state. In his writings, Alianello, with a sharp and irreverent tone, accused the winners of historical manipulation but without denying the unitary value, with the sole purpose of exposing his own version of the facts on the unification process. However, he suffered harsh criticism and accusations of pro-Bourbonism, which led to his marginalization from the literary majority current, even if his works met with success and earned him some important awards.

His first revisionist book, L'Alfiere ( 1942 ), was a countercurrent work that questioned the myth of the Risorgimento, telling an alternative story to the "official" one, published during the Fascist period , in which the unification of Italy and Giuseppe Garibaldi 's exploits were considered untouchable subjects. According to some biographers, for this stance against the dictates of fascism, Alianello risked confinement, which was averted by the fall of the regime. According to others, it is hardly credible that in 1942 the regime could persecute a novelist who had not in any way attacked power, also considering that narrative works and essays of an anti-Risorgimento nature had already been published. With the advent of the Republic, the writer published other revisionist works such as Soldiers of the King ( 1952 ), The legacy of the prioress ( 1963 ), considered by some to be the most important in his bibliography, and The Conquest of the South ( 1972 ).

Alongside the Risorgimento theme, another topic very dear to Alianello is religion. In The Disappointed Magician ( 1947 ), the author highlights the comparison between faith and rationalism. The novel is about a young atheist and materialist professor who moves to a southern town for work reasons, staying with a family devoted to mysticism. This experience will arouse serious doubts in the professor, which will distance him more and more from his skeptical thinking.

Other novels of religious inspiration are Mary and the Brothers ( 1955 ), the re-reading of the story of Jesus , which describes his pain for the incomprehension of his disciples and for the world's indifference to the law of charity; Birth of Eve ( 1966 ), focusing on the biblical figure of Adam's companion.

Other works follow such as The writer or of solitude ( 1970 ), an autobiographical novel; Il galletto rosso ( 1971 ), a collection of short stories for children; The catch ( 1973 ), his last testimony set in the post-Risorgimento period, during the battle of Adua and the Banca Romana scandal . In his latest book, the author explains his thoughts on the persistent political-cultural division among Italians despite national unification.

Two literary works by Alianello have been transposed into television screenplays broadcast by RAI : ​​L'Alfiere ( 1956 ), with Aroldo Tieri , Domenico Modugno, Maria Fiore and The legacy of the prioress ( 1980 ), with Alida Valli, Evelina Nazzari and Giancarlo Prete . Both were directed by director Anton Giulio Majano and Alianello participated in the screenplays and subjects.

The writer also collaborated in the making of other films such as Maddalena ( 1951 ) by Augusto Genina , Senso ( 1954 ) by Luchino Visconti and Viva l'Italia ( 1961 ) by Roberto Rossellini.

The author died in Rome on 1 April 1981 , at the age of 80. 

Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Clayton Wolfe was an American novelist of the early 20th century.

Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels as well as 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, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective.

After Wolfe's death, contemporary author William Faulkner said that Wolfe might have been the greatest talent of their generation for aiming higher than any other writer. He remains an important writer in modern American literature, as one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction, and is considered North Carolina's most famous writer.

Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of eight children of William Oliver Wolfe (1851–1922) and Julia Elizabeth Westall (1860–1945). Six of the children lived to adulthood. His father, a successful stone carver, ran a gravestone business.

W. O. Wolfe's business used an angel in the window to attract customers. Thomas Wolfe "described the angel in great detail" in a short story and in Look Homeward, Angel. The angel was sold and, while there was controversy over which one was the actual angel, the location of the "Thomas Wolfe angel" was determined in 1949 to be Oakdale Cemetery in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

Wolfe's mother took in boarders and was active in acquiring real estate. In 1904, she opened a boarding house in St. Louis, Missouri, for the World's Fair. While the family was in St. Louis, Wolfe's 12-year-old brother, Grover, died of typhoid fever.

In 1906 Julia Wolfe bought a boarding house named "Old Kentucky Home" at nearby 48 Spruce Street in Asheville, taking up residence there with her youngest son while the rest of the family remained at the Woodfin Street residence. Wolfe lived in the boarding house on Spruce Street until he went to college in 1916. It is now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. Wolfe was closest to his brother Ben, whose early death at age 26 is chronicled in Look Homeward, Angel. Julia Wolfe bought and sold many properties, eventually becoming a successful real estate speculator.

Wolfe began to study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) when he was 15 years old. A member of the Dialectic Society and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity, he predicted that his portrait would one day hang in New West near that of celebrated North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, which it does today. Aspiring to be a playwright, in 1919 Wolfe enrolled in a playwriting course. His one-act play, The Return of Buck Gavin, was performed by the newly formed Carolina Playmakers, then composed of classmates in Frederick Koch's playwriting class, with Wolfe acting the title role. He edited UNC's student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel and won the Worth Prize for Philosophy for an essay titled "The Crisis in Industry". Another of his plays, The Third Night, was performed by the Playmakers in December 1919. Wolfe was inducted into the Golden Fleece honor society.

Wolfe graduated from UNC with a bachelor of arts in June 1920, and in September, entered Harvard University, where he studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker. Two versions of his play The Mountains were performed by Baker's 47 Workshop in 1921.

In 1922, Wolfe received his master's degree from Harvard. His father died in Asheville in June of that year. Wolfe studied another year with Baker, and the 47 Workshop produced his 10-scene play Welcome to Our City in May 1923.

Wolfe visited New York City again in November 1923 and solicited funds for UNC, while trying to sell his plays to Broadway. In February 1924, he began teaching English as an instructor at New York University (NYU), a position he occupied periodically for almost seven years.

Wolfe was unable to sell any of his plays after three years because of their great length. The Theatre Guild came close to producing Welcome to Our City before ultimately rejecting it, and Wolfe found his writing style more suited to fiction than the stage. He sailed to Europe in October 1924 to continue writing. From England he traveled to France, Italy and Switzerland.

On his return voyage in 1925, he met Aline Bernstein (1880–1955), a scene designer for the Theatre Guild. Twenty years his senior, she was married to a successful stockbroker with whom she had two children. In October 1925, she and Wolfe became lovers and remained so for five years.[8] Their affair was turbulent and sometimes combative, but she exerted a powerful influence, encouraging and funding his writing.

Wolfe returned to Europe in the summer of 1926 and began writing the first version of an autobiographical novel titled O Lost. The narrative, which evolved into Look Homeward, Angel, fictionalized his early experiences in Asheville, and chronicled family, friends, and the boarders at his mother's establishment on Spruce Street. In the book, he renamed the town Altamont and called the boarding house "Dixieland". His family's surname became Gant, and Wolfe called himself Eugene, his father Oliver, and his mother Eliza. The original manuscript of O Lost was over 1,100 pages (333,000 words) long, and considerably more experimental in style than the final version of Look Homeward, Angel. It was submitted to Scribner's, where the editing was done by Maxwell Perkins, the most prominent book editor of the time, who also worked with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He cut the book to focus more on the character of Eugene, a stand-in for Wolfe. Wolfe initially expressed gratitude to Perkins for his disciplined editing, but he had misgivings later. It has been said that Wolfe found a father figure in Perkins, and that Perkins, who had five daughters, found in Wolfe a sort of foster son.

The novel, which had been dedicated to Bernstein, was published 11 days before the stock market crash of 1929. Soon afterward, Wolfe returned to Europe and ended his affair with Bernstein. The novel caused a stir in Asheville, with its over 200 thinly disguised local characters. Wolfe chose to stay away from Asheville for eight years because of the uproar; he traveled to Europe for a year on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Look Homeward, Angel was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and Germany. Some members of Wolfe's family were upset with their portrayal in the book, but his sister Mabel wrote to him that she was sure he had the best of intentions.

After four more years writing in Brooklyn, the second novel Wolfe submitted to Scribner's was The October Fair, a multi-volume epic roughly the length of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. After considering the commercial possibilities of publishing the book in full, Perkins opted to cut it significantly and create a single volume. Titled Of Time and the River, it was more commercially successful than Look Homeward, Angel. In an ironic twist, the citizens of Asheville were more upset this time because they had not been included. The character of Esther Jack was based on Bernstein. In 1934, Maxim Lieber served as his literary agent.

Wolfe was persuaded by Edward Aswell to leave Scribner's and sign with Harper & Brothers. By some accounts, Perkins' severe editing of Wolfe's work is what prompted him to leave. Others describe his growing resentment that some people attributed his success to Perkins' work as editor. In 1936, Bernard DeVoto, reviewing The Story of a Novel for Saturday Review, wrote that Look Homeward, Angel was "hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribners."

Wolfe spent much time in Europe and was especially popular and at ease in Germany, where he made many friends. However, in 1936 he witnessed incidents of discrimination against Jews, which upset him and changed his mind about the political developments in the country. He returned to America and published a story based on his observations ("I Have a Thing to Tell You") in The New Republic. Following its publication, Wolfe's books were banned by the German government, and he was prohibited from traveling there.

In 1937, "Chickamauga", his short story set during the American Civil War battle of the same name, was published. Wolfe returned to Asheville in early 1937 for the first time since publication of his first book.

In 1938, after submitting over one million words of manuscript to his new editor, Edward Aswell, Wolfe left New York for a tour of the Western United States. On the way, he stopped at Purdue University and gave a lecture, "Writing and Living", and then spent two weeks traveling through 11 national parks in the West, the only part of the country he had never visited. Wolfe wrote to Aswell that while he had focused on his family in his previous writing, he would now take a more global perspective. In July, he became ill with pneumonia while visiting Seattle, spending three weeks in hospital there. His sister Mabel closed her boarding house in Washington, D.C. and went to Seattle to care for him. Complications arose, and Wolfe was eventually diagnosed with miliary tuberculosis.

On September 6, he was sent to Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital for treatment by Walter Dandy, the most famous neurosurgeon in the country, but an operation revealed that the disease had overrun the entire right side of his brain. Without regaining consciousness, he died 18 days before his 38th birthday.

Sir V.S. Pritchett

Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett was a British writer and critic. He was particularly known for his short stories, collected in a number of volumes. His most famous books are the memoirs A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971).

Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born in Suffolk, the first of four children of Walter Sawdon Pritchett and Beatrice Helena (née Martin). His father, a London businessman, relocated to Ipswich to establish a newspaper and stationery shop. The business ran into difficulty and his parents were lodging over a toy shop at 41 St Nicholas Street in Ipswich where Pritchett was born on 16 December 1900. Beatrice had expected a girl, whom she planned to name after Queen Victoria. Pritchett disliked his first name, hence he always preferred being styled by his initials "VSP", despite formally becoming "Sir Victor Pritchett" after being knighted.

Pritchett's father was a steady Christian Scientist but unsteady in all else. Walter and Beatrice moved to Ipswich to be near her sister, who had married money and lived in Warrington Road. Within a year Walter was declared bankrupt, the family moved to Woodford, Essex, then to Derby and he began selling women's clothing and accessories as a travelling salesman. Pritchett was soon sent with his brother Cyril to live with their paternal grandparents in Sedbergh, where the boys attended their first school. Walter's business failures, his casual attitude to credit and his easy deceitfulness[a] obliged the family to move frequently. The family was reunited, but life was always precarious. They tended to live in London suburbs with members of Beatrice's family, but returned to Ipswich in 1910 to live for a year near Cauldwell Hall Road, trying to evade Walter's creditors. At this time Pritchett attended St John's School. Subsequently, the family moved to East Dulwich and he attended Alleyn's School, but when his paternal grandparents came to live with them at age 16, he was forced to leave school to work as a clerk and leather buyer in Bermondsey. At the same time his father enlisted to work in Hampshire at an aircraft factory to help the war effort. After the Great War[2][failed verification] Walter turned his hand to aircraft design, about which he knew nothing, and his later ventures included art needlework, property speculation and faith healing.

The leather work lasted from 1916 until 1920 when he moved to Paris to work as a shop assistant. In 1923 he started writing for The Christian Science Monitor, which sent him to Ireland and Spain. From 1926 he wrote reviews for that paper and for the New Statesman, later being appointed its literary editor.

Pritchett's first book, Marching Spain (1928), describes a journey across Spain, and his second book, Clare Drummer (1929), is about his experiences in Ireland. While he was there he met Evelyn Vigors, who he later married.

Pritchett published five novels, but he said he did not enjoy writing them. His reputation was established by a collection of short stories, The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories (1932).

In 1936 he divorced his first wife and married Dorothy Rudge Roberts, by whom he had two children; the marriage survived until Pritchett's death in 1997, although they both had other relationships. Their children include the journalist Oliver Pritchett, whose son is the cartoonist Matt Pritchett MBE, and daughter is screenwriter Georgia Pritchett.

During the Second World War Pritchett worked for the BBC and the Ministry of Information while continuing to write weekly essays for the New Statesman. After World War II he wrote extensively and embarked on various university teaching positions in the United States: Princeton (1953), the University of California (1962), Columbia University and Smith College. Fluent in French, German and Spanish, he published acclaimed biographies of Honoré de Balzac (1973), Ivan Turgenev (1977), and Anton Chekhov (1988).

Pritchett was appointed a Knight Bachelor in 1975 for "services to literature" and a Companion of Honour in 1993. His other awards included FRSL (1958), CBE (1968), the Heinemann Award (1969), the PEN Award (1974), the W.H. Smith Literary Award (1990) and the Golden PEN Award (1994). He was President of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers and the oldest human rights organisation from 1974 until 1976.

Sir V. S. Pritchett died of a stroke in London on 20 March 1997.