Sometimes an artist's greatest works arise out of a short whirlwind of creative activity, a kind of concentrated period of labor. For example, Faulkner produced his most acclaimed novels in the short span of eight years. Carol Reed is another prime example -- between 1947 and 1952, this director mad

Dark, Moody, Sublime, Tense

Kipling was never one to pity the vanquished or cry for the victim. He preferred to praise the victors, fortify the reign of imperialism, legitimize and rationalize colonial order. Having lived in both Bombay and England, Kipling came to see English civilization as the only hope for a dirty, barbaric

Dark, Dense, Eclectic, Masculine, Modernist literature, Modernist poetry, Tense

To call Terre Thaemlitz experimental is a generalization of the worst kind. Thaemlitz is a musical experimenter, to be sure. But he's also a social experimenter, a technological experimenter, and a gender experimenter. Thaemlitz is a philosopher who uses his sonic thinkscapes as social treatises and

Anxiety, Dense, Layered, Political, Self-reflection, Sophisticated, Tense

The man who would be Papa began his life in 1899 as Ernest Miller Hemingway, born in his grandfather's house in Chicago, Illinois. His father raised him to be a sporting man, a man equipped to survive in nature, with a love of hunting, fishing, and adventure (Hemingway would cultivate this image in h

Bombast, Masculine, Modernist literature, Rough, Tense, The lost generation