In 1968, when an interviewer asked Jorge Luis Borges what he thought of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, the great explorer of the literary labyrinth responded, "Who is he?" Portugal, alas, is one of the most overlooked outposts of Europe. The North's snobbery towards the South is one of the caus
In contrast to the political poetry that epitomized so much of the 1970s, Martin Espada's work kicks aside the pulpit and abandons the megaphone. Espada calls his readers to action in a more indirect fashion -- he envisions a free world without idealizing and describes social horrors without repriman
The laughter he brought to the lives of others equaled the sufferings he experienced in his own. Born in the eternally gray London of 1889, Charlie Chaplin started out bleakly. He was to endure some very tough years of childhood before his sweetly infectious stage persona and razor-sharp characteriza
Goudy started out as a bookkeeper who just wasn't very satisfied with accounting. He milled around South Dakota and then Minnesota aimlessly bookkeeping. Finally, when he found work in a small bookstore in Chicago, something clicked. These books weren't filled with dull numbers but with marbled pages