Born in Ireland in 1909, Francis Bacon spent his formative years in a nation wracked by the Sinn Fein uprising, an event that haunted him long after his family moved to England. He never trained formally as a painter but began to pursue art in London in the late 1920s, eventually
David Cronenberg has perfected the art of making us simultaneously cringe with disgust and stare with furtive fascination. With an early career marked by restless explorations in low-budget horror, he is no stranger to shocking cinema -- in fact, his biggest claim-to-fame may be the notorious explodi
Sylvia Plath, one of the best-known names in American women's literature, signed her first and her last books with pseudonyms. A poet since childhood, she published her debut volume "A Winter Ship" relatively late, in 1960. After studying at Smith College and later at Newnham College in Cambridge (a
Sex, melodrama, and a raunchy, dark comedy -- audiences can expect to find excesses of all these types in the works of Pedro Almodovar, a Spanish filmmaker whose homegrown popularity rivals that of Luis Bunuel. Born poor and unable to afford tuition to film school (all of which were, at any rate, clo