Besides having one of the most terrifyingly brutal pun-ready names in the English language, Pound was one of the 20th century's great American poets. This dude was important for single-handedly cra...

Ol' T.S. was a piece of work. He was your classic Modernist overachiever—doing multi-duty as a poet, essayist, playwright, and critic. He was indisputably a genius. He was also a jerk.No, we're n...

An Irishman from Dublin, Joyce is mostly known for his novels, though he wrote poetry, plays, and essays. His multi-lingual allusions and puns have given many a reader conniptions—there should be...

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Um, besides Edward Albee… pretty much everyone. She's super-intimidating.Woolf was an important pioneer of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Though the mind o...

Contrary to popular belief, Kafka was not half-man, half-bug. Nor did he have an airport named after him.He actually had a pretty quiet (and pretty miserable) life. Kafka was a German Jew living in...

Although Yeats' poetic technique couldn't be called Avant-garde (since he generally wrote metrically regular verse and frequently used fixed poetic forms), he shared some of the major concerns of t...

There's probably only one writer who can rival Henry James for the stupendous length of his sentences. Meet Marcel Proust. He really likes cookies.Like Kafka and Yeats, Proust was a retiring sort o...

"No ideas but in things" is the very American slogan of William Carlos Williams, a poet and medical doctor from New Jersey. Hearing him read his poems on the many audio files littering the Internet...

Ol' Willy Faulkner invented a world. It wasn't just that each of his novels created full fictional universes, but that he envisioned and even mapped out a detailed imaginary place in which he set s...