In July of 1883, an average middle-class Jewish family in an average suburb of Prague (then in Austria) ushered into the average world a new creature: Franz Kafka. He would never forgive them for this unnatural act of torture.
Franz kept his neurosis quietly to himself throughout his childhood, r
According to Lotte Lenya, longtime leading lady and intermittent wife of collaborator Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht was a brilliant and shameless appropriator of other writers' material. Whether a brilliant reinterpreter or shrewd plagiarizer -- the critics have been divided -- there's been no debate
America's premier poet of twentieth-century theater dominated the stage for almost 20 years. Despite his fall into ignominy and artistic disfavor in the final years of his career, Tennessee Williams is still considered one of the world's finest dramatists. Together with Arthur Miller, Williams pionee
Revolutionizing journalism, Hunter S. Thompson created his own brand of reporting -- more like reportage from a cockroach's-eye-view -- with an exaggerated style that reflected the chaotic period of American history he was not just observing but living. Thompson, never a proponent of moderation, thre