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obedience to spiritual healing to religious tolerance.
His most important work, Hind Swaraj or Indian
Home Rule (1909), is a compilation of essays on his
philosophies and political goals. He was also an ed-
itor and contributor to several journals, including
an English weekly called Young India and a Gujarati
monthly called Navajivan (New Life).
Gandhi spent his later years in and out of
prison. In 1948, on his way to evening prayers,
he was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic. This event
seems, even today, an ironic and tragic end to a
life spent spreading the cause for peace and nonvi-
olence.
Other Works by Mohandas K. Gandhi
All Men Are Brothers. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1969.
Mahatma Gandhi: Selected Political Writing. Edited by
Dennis Dalton. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co.,
1996.
A Work about Mohandas K. Gandhi
Wolpert, Stanley. Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and
Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
Gao Xingjian (Kao Tsing-jen) (1940– )
novelist, playwright
Gao Xingjian was born on January 4 in Ganzhou
in China’s Jiangxi Province. Although he was not
formally educated, both his parents were interested
and educated in the arts, and his mother taught
him to read and write. When he entered Nanjing
High School in 1951, he wrote prolifically. He
graduated with a degree in French from Beijing
Foreign Studies University in 1962 and took a job
translating books.
Like most Chinese youth of the period, Gao
Xingjian became a Red Guard under Mao Ze-
dong’s Communist rule and entered cadre schools
in Henan and Anhui in 1969. Although China was
in the middle of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Gao
Xingjian continued to write, largely for psycho-
logical relief from the politically oppressive envi-
ronment, although he later burned all his work
from that period.
After the Cultural Revolution, Gao Xingjian was
able to publish essays and short stories. In 1975,
he was asked to head the French section for the
magazine China Reconstructs, which helped him
build important contacts in the French and West-
ern literary worlds. He made further connections
while handling external liaison affairs for the Chi-
nese Writers Association in 1977.
During this time, Gao Xingjian also focused on
his own literary endeavors, becoming a playwright
for the Beijing People’s Art Theater. Absolute Sig-
nal, his first play, about a thief and his girlfriend,
takes place in a train car. It was performed in 1982
and combined traditional dramatic methods with
methods used by modern Western playwrights. His
1983 absurdist play Bus Stop is based on Samuel
BECKETT’s Waiting for Godot and is about a bus that
never comes and the hapless passengers who even-
tually wait years for it. Also interpreted as a cri-
tique of the Communist leadership, the play placed
Gao Xingjian squarely in the middle of China’s de-
bate over MODERNISM. He also authored a piece of
critical theory, “A Rough Study of Techniques in
Modern Fiction Writing,” (1981) which further
raised controversy about his sympathy with mod-
ern and Western influences. In 1986, Gao
Xingjian’s plays were banned by the Chinese gov-
ernment from being performed after uproar over
the staging of his avant-garde play, The Other
Shore, essentially a conversation between ambigu-
ous actors struggling to use a rope to cross from
one side of water to another. The dialogue is vague
and fluid, a characteristic critics found pointless
and subversive.
The next year, Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with
terminal lung cancer. The diagnosis turned out to
be incorrect, but the brush with mortality and his
fear of further persecution by the government
drove him to seek spiritual renewal by journeying
into the wild, mountainous forests of the Sichuan
province.After his wilderness travels, he journeyed
to Europe on the invitation of a German organi-
zation and became a Chinese exile. He moved to
158 Gao Xingjian
France, of which he is now a citizen. He has been
the recipient of France’s prestigious Chevalier
d’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres award and has fre-
quently worked on government commissions. He
recorded his Sichuan-mountain experiences in his
novel, Soul Mountain (1990), which fictionalizes
his journey through the wilderness and his quest
for truth and spiritual rebirth. The novel is also
known for its innovative voice: The narrator’s
voice alternately assumes the use of different pro-
nouns—I, you, he, and she—to create multiple per-
spectives.
Gao Xingjian is also an accomplished painter.
While he has been the recipient of much critical at-
tention and acclaim in the West for his literary
work, he has earned his living with his misty and
evocative brush paintings that often grace the cov-
ers of his volumes.
In 2001, Gao Xingjian became the first Chinese
writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature. He
accepted the prize as a Chinese writer in exile, and
the Chinese government denounced the Swedish
Academy for its choice of a writer unknown in
China. In awarding the prize, the academy praised
Gao Xingjian’s “oeuvre of universal validity, bitter
insights, and linguistic ingenuity.”
Another Work by Gao Xingjian
The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian. Translated
by Gilbert Fong. Hong Kong: The Chinese Univer-
sity Press, 1999.
A Work about Gao Xingjian
Tam, Kwok-kan. Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on
Gao Xingjian. Hong Kong: The Chinese University
Press, 2001.
García Lorca, Federico (1898–1936) poet,
playwright
Federico García Lorca was born in Fuente Vaque-
ros, Spain, to a well-to-do family. He was given an
excellent education and the opportunity to pursue
his artistic interests, which included painting,
music, and, most of all, poetry. He spent his child-
hood in the Andalusian city of Granada, which in-
stilled in him a love of that region’s folk traditions.
This folk influence would later be seen in his plays
and poetry and a series of folksongs he collected
and anthologized.
In 1919, he moved to Madrid and, within a
short time, earned a reputation as one of the most
talented young poets in Spain. His reputation
spread throughout the Spanish-speaking world,
and such Latin American poets as Pablo
NERUDA
were inspired and influenced by him.
García Lorca’s international reputation had
been established, and his career was progressing in
Spain. However, personal conflicts and politics
within the Spanish literary world caused him to
travel to the United States for a year, where he at-
tended Columbia University.
He found New York to be a nightmare, if an ex-
citing one, and he wrote the surrealistic and ex-
pressionistic work Poet in New York (1940), which
was not published until after his death. A castiga-
tion of the inhumanity of the modern world, Poet
in New York remains one of García Lorca’s most
popular poems in the English-speaking world. It
uses surrealist techniques, but unlike the French
surrealism of André BRETON, it is filled with emo-
tion and passion.
When García Lorca returned to Spain, he be-
came increasingly involved in theater and wrote a
series of plays that reveal the folkloric influences of
his youth, creating a theater of strong emotions
and symbolism. He also directed a traveling theater
company called La Barraca, which performed
Spanish theater classics in rural areas that had little
exposure to culture. This project was one of many
liberal political activities in which García Lorca
was engaged during the period of the Spanish re-
public and before the Spanish civil war.
It was also at this time that García Lorca became
particularly interested in the emerging women’s
rights movement. His reputation and fame grew
exponentially during this period.
In 1936, while on a trip to Granada to visit his
family, García Lorca was trapped by the outbreak
of the Spanish civil war and went into hiding. He
García Lorca, Federico 159
was captured within a few weeks and executed
without trial. The presumed reason was his homo-
sexuality, a crime at the time. However, his liberal
agenda was undoubtedly a strong factor as well.
Critical Analysis
García Lorca was obsessed with expressing the in-
tense, vital energy of life, which he did by using
subconscious images and strong musical language.
In his works, he constantly examined the struggle
of opposing forces and the power of dialectical op-
posites such as good and evil or freedom and re-
pression. These themes interact with his politics to
create three major trends in his work: examinations
of individuals oppressed by the need to conform to
social norms, minorities oppressed by uncaring
majorities, and life oppressed by death itself.
In the play The House of Bernarda Alba (1936),
García Lorca recounts the power relationship be-
tween a controlling mother, Bernarda Alba, and
her daughter Adela. Bernarda Alba’s attempts to
separate Adela from her lover end tragically, as do
all García Lorca’s plays, with her daughter’s suicide.
Bernarda Alba is a larger-than-life figure who ends
up destroying everything she seeks to preserve. The
play has distinctive feminist overtones and, along
with IBSEN’s Hedda Gabler, is one of the great early
works of feminist literature.
Blood Wedding (1933) recounts the struggle be-
tween Leonardo and the citizens of the village in
which he lives who react to his nonconformity
with murderous rage. The villagers are not given
proper names but called only Mother, Father, and
so on, indicating that they are not real people but
symbols of the rigid conventions of an unjust so-
cial morality. Like The House of Bernarda Alba,
Blood Wedding ends with the tragic death of its
most noble character.
In García Lorca’s collection of poems Gypsy
Ballads (1928), he explores the problematic cul-
tural identity of the gypsies in Spain. These
poems critique Spanish society for its unfair mar-
ginalization of the gypsies. Gypsy Ballads also cel-
ebrates the beauty and poetry of gypsy culture,
pointing out that many things that are quintes-
sentially Spanish, in fact, originated with the
gypsies.
Dirge for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1937) brings
García Lorca’s celebration of the power of life into
a confrontation with its opposite, the power of
death. Ignacio Sánchez Mejías was a friend of Gar-
cía Lorca’s who was tragically killed in a bullfight.
In the dirge, García Lorca celebrates the matador’s
vitality and emphasizes the beauty of living on the
tightrope between life and death.
García Lorca is one of the most influential poets
of the 20th century. NERUDA, PAZ, and many other
20th-century Spanish-speaking poets owe García
Lorca a tremendous debt as the central figure of a
type of surrealism that is uniquely expressive of
emotions. His tragic death at the hands of fascists
also stands as an important historical symbol for
the need for freedom of expression. He may be
seen as a forerunner of the Civil Rights and
women’s movements of the latter 20th century, but
more important, he was a writer of exquisite
poems and plays that truly reveal the preciousness
of human life on the edge of death.
Other Works by García Lorca
A Season in Granada: Uncollected Poems & Prose.
Edited and translated by Christopher Maurer.
London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1998.
Four Major Plays. Translated by John Edmunds;
introduction by Nicholas Round; notes by Ann
MacLaren. New York: Oxford University Press,
1997.
A Work about García Lorca
Wellington, Beth. Reflections on Lorca’s Private
Mythology: Once Five Years Pass and the Rural
Plays. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.
García Márquez, Gabriel (Gabo)
(1928– ) novelist, short-story writer,
screenplay writer, journalist
Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca,
Colombia, a small town near a banana plantation
called Macondo. His father, Gabriel Eligio García,
160 García Márquez, Gabriel
was a telegraph operator who had courted his
mother in secret by telegraph when she would
write home from school. García Márquez lived in
Aracataca until the age of eight. During that time,
his closest connections were to his maternal
grandparents, who had initially tried to prevent
their daughter from marrying Gabriel Eligio Gar-
cía because of his conservative political affiliations.
García Márquez’s grandmother was a highly su-
perstitious woman and also a brilliant storyteller.
She would tell García Márquez the most incredi-
ble, exaggerated, and impossible things with the
deadpan manner of someone explaining that Earth
has a north and a south pole. As a child, García
Márquez believed everything she told him and, on
some level, never stopped believing. This early ex-
perience of blending the real with the fantastic
later led García Márquez to develop his unique
style of MAGIC REALISM.
His grandfather, who had been a colonel in the
Colombian civil war, was a local official. He would
spend a great deal of time with his young grandson
and often took him to the circus. García Márquez
has stated that his grandfather was the most im-
portant person in his life and his best friend. The
colonel died when García Márquez was eight years
old, but García Márquez drew more inspiration for
his books from these eight years than from any
other period of his life.
García Márquez was sent to boarding school
and won a scholarship to go to college in Bogotá,
the capital of Colombia. After studying law, he
worked as a journalist, traveling throughout South
America, Europe, and the United States, eventually
settling in Mexico City in 1961.
In Mexico City, he wrote film scripts, including
a western in collaboration with Carlos
FUENTES
titled Tiempo de Morir (A Time to Die), to support
himself and his wife Mercedes, whom he had
married in 1958.
García Márquez had written an unsuccessful
first novel called Leaf Storm (1955) about life in
Macondo, a fictionalized version of García
Márquez’s birthplace. The novel spans the period
from the turn of the century to the 1930s. Though
it contains many of the themes in García
Márquez’s later works, the novel is poorly struc-
tured and remains flat.
No One Writes to the Colonel (1961), however,
is in many ways García Márquez’s first master-
piece. It is a novella that depicts an elderly colonel
who waits for a government pension that never
arrives. The colonel, lovingly based on García
Márquez’s grandfather, is a magnificent literary
character filled with humor and vitality. It is
in this work that García Márquez’s control of
language and his stylistic innovations caught up
with his psychological perception. The combina-
tion created a new sort of literature, which was
fantastic in its details and yet deeply true in its
emotions.
Critical Analysis
The imaginary town of Macondo is the setting of
most of García Márquez’s novels and stories. In
this way, Macondo is a literary device like the Yok-
napatawpha County of William Faulkner. Both
places are imaginary worlds, closely based on the
setting of the author’s childhood, that by being
written about repeatedly become literary micro-
cosms, self-contained realities. García Márquez has
often spoken of his sense of kinship with Faulkner.
He has even said that Faulkner, who grew up in
Mississippi near the Gulf of Mexico, is a fellow
Caribbean writer.
It was in 1965 that García Márquez began to
write his single greatest work One Hundred Years of
Solitude (1967). He was driving to the beach with
his family when suddenly all of the themes that he
had been developing since he was a boy solidified
into a clear structure. He returned home immedi-
ately and began to write.
One Hundred Years of Solitude revisits all of
the themes of García Márquez’s earlier work as
episodes within the epic story of six generations of
the Buendia family, the founding family of the
town of Macondo.
The book is subtly structured in four sections
of five unnumbered chapters each. Each section
corresponds to an abstract historical category.
García Márquez, Gabriel 161
The first section explores the mythic and utopian
prehistory of the town. Mythical narratives from
both the biblical and classical traditions are
woven with local superstitions and García
Márquez’s own inventions. Macondo, though it is
a place that seems full of promise, has been
founded by José Arcadio Buendia because of a
murder he has committed and is trying to forget.
This evokes the story of Cain and Abel and shows
that Macondo is a place created by an act of
transgression.
The second section of the book moves into
what could be called historical time. The events
in this section closely parallel the history of the ac-
tual Columbian civil war in which García
Márquez’s grandfather fought. However, García
Márquez continues to write in his magical style.
This combination of historical fact and fantasy
has an extraordinarily dramatic effect and is, above
all, what makes One Hundred Years of Solitude the
quintessential example of magic realism.
The third section is an account of how, after the
Columbian civil war, a U.S. company comes to Ma-
condo to exploit its banana industry. Though this
section can also be said to take place in historical,
as opposed to mythic, time, it is different from the
previous section. History in the third section has
been corrupted by language, particularly the prop-
aganda and media manipulation the banana com-
pany uses to exploit the citizens of Macondo. By
the time the company is finished, Macondo has
been reduced to a wasteland, barely holding on to
what is left of its previous vitality.
In the fourth section, the book returns to
mythic time, not the utopian time of the begin-
ning but the apocalyptic time of the true end of
the world. The final Buendia, the great-great-
grandson of the first José Arcadio, lives in Ma-
condo disconnected from history. He does not
even know his origins or that he is a Buendia by
blood. He spends his time trying to decipher a
magical manuscript that holds the secret of his
origins and his fate.
García Márquez went on to write multiple nov-
els of the highest literary merit, including Love in
the Time of Cholera (1988) and Chronicle of a
Death Foretold (1981). In 1982, he was awarded the
world’s highest literary award, the Nobel Prize. In
his acceptance speech, he spoke of his hopes for a
positive political future for Latin America. He em-
phasized that magic realism is merely an accurate
depiction of the miraculous occurrences that take
place in Latin American life, occurrences of super-
human wonder and terror.
Other Works by Gabriel García Márquez
Collected Novellas. Translated from the Spanish by
Gregory Rabassa and J. S. Bernstein. New York:
HarperPerennial, 1991.
The General in His Labyrinth. Translated from the
Spanish by Edith Grossman. New York: Knopf,
1990.
A Work about Gabriel García Márquez
Miller, Yvette E., and Charles Rossman. Gabriel
García Márquez. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Department of
Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University
of Pittsburgh, 1985.
Gautier, Théophile (1811-1872) poet,
novelist
Théophile Gautier was born in Tarbes on August
31. He moved as a young child to Paris with his
family, where he studied to become a painter. In
June 1829, however, Gautier met with the great
novelist Victor
HUGO, which prompted him to
change his aspirations and become a writer. Five
months later, his first collection, Poetries (1836),
was published on the same day that the barricades
were erected in Paris.
For financial reasons, Gautier took a position
as a journalist in 1836, working as an art critic
while continuing to write fiction. His novel Made-
moiselle de Maupin (1835) caused quite a scandal
when it first appeared on account of its descrip-
tion of sexual ambiguity. It is also credited for
founding the concept of art for art’s sake, a phrase
Gautier uses in his prologue to the book. The next
year, he wrote La Mort amoureuse (translated into
162 Gautier, Théophile
English as Clarimonde), about a priest who be-
comes obsessed with a beautiful vampiress. Gau-
tier also continued to write poetry, publishing the
collection The Comedy of Death (1838), which
shows influences of Shakespeare, GOETHE, and
Dante.
In 1839, Gautier decided to try to write for the
theater. He created numerous tales of fantasy, but
the one for which he is most remembered is his li-
bretto for the ballet Giselle, which opened in Paris
on June 28, 1841, to overwhelming popular and
critical acclaim. Giselle continues to be performed
frequently in the 21st century.
Gautier was a proponent of the idea of art for
art’s sake, which is evident in the fact that he orig-
inally wanted to be a painter. His love of the visual
has transferred to his written works as well.
Others Works by Théophile Gautier
Gautier on Dance. Translated by Ivor Guest. London:
Dance, 1986.
Gentle Enchanter: Thirty-Four Poems. Translated by
Brian Hill. London: R. Hart Davis, 1960.
A Work about Théophile Gautier
Tennant, Philip E. Théophile Gautier. London:
Athlone Press, 1975.
Generation of 1898
A group of writers who shared a common concern
for Spain’s national identity and who worked to re-
vitalize the social, political, and aesthetic structures
of their country. The Spanish-American War of
1898 brought an end to the period of Spanish im-
perialism in the New World. Spain, which had
been a world power for hundreds of years, had to
face the new reality of being a small provincial na-
tion. The Generation of 1898 urged their fellow
compatriots to turn away from the trappings of
empire and to search for the “true” Spain of their
medieval and Arabic heritage.
ORTEGA Y GASSET, the Spanish philosopher and
critic, attributes a span of 15 years to the genera-
tion as a movement and further divides it into
two groups. The first group includes the forerun-
ners Miguel de
UNAMUNO and Ángel Ganivet y
García (1865–98); the second group includes the
secondary members of the movement such as Pío
BAROJA.
Perhaps the difficulty of conclusively saying
who is and is not a member of this movement
comes from the fact that one of the main charac-
teristics that members of the Generation of 1898
shared is a strong sense of individuality and non-
conformism. The central figures, however, would
unquestionably include Baroja, Unamuno, Gani-
vet, Antonio MACHADO, and the Latin American
poet Rubén DARÍO, who spent a great deal of time
traveling in Europe. Other members include
Azorín (José Martínez Ruiz, 1873–1967), who was
the first to identify the Generation of ’98
as a group; Ramón Maria del Valle-Inclán
(1866–1936); Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958),
who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1956; and
Ramón Pérez de Ayala (1880–1962).
These authors, in addition to individualism,
shared strong national feelings mixed with literary
and formal experimentation. Out of their rejec-
tion of the decedent features of Spanish culture,
they embraced MODERNISM in hope that it would
cleanse the dead tissue from Spanish art. In poli-
tics, they shared a sense of apathy and a mistrust
of government control over the individual. In so-
ciety, they rejected refined manners and taboos.
They called for bringing Spanish culture down to
earth and embracing Arab and flamenco influ-
ences. They wanted a return to the culture of the
people rather than the aristocrats. Finally, in art,
they introduced new structures and difficult but
vital modes of expression.
The writers of the Generation of 1898 opened
up the structures of literature and showed the ex-
citing possibilities of experimentation. They influ-
enced 20th-century authors as diverse as
GARCÍA
LORCA and Ernest Hemingway.
A Work about the Generation of 1898
Shaw, Donald Leslie. The Generation of 1898 in Spain.
New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975.
Generation of 1898 163
Genet, Jean (1910–1986) novelist,
playwright
A convicted felon who went on to become one of
the leaders in the avant-garde theater movement,
Jean Genet was born in Paris as the illegitimate son
of a woman who abandoned him shortly after
birth. Raised in state institutions, he embarked on
a life of crime, turning to theft at age 10. He spent
time at the Mettray Reformatory, escaping from
there at age 19 to join the foreign legion, a posi-
tion he soon abandoned. From there, Genet wan-
dered throughout Europe spending time in several
prisons on charges of vagrancy, theft, homosexual-
ity, and smuggling.
In 1939, Genet began to write about his experi-
ences. His subsequent novels detailed and glorified
the underworld, homosexuality, male prostitutes,
convicts, and other social outcasts. He wrote his
first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (1943; trans-
lated 1963), a fictional creation based on the events
in his life while he was in prison.
In 1948, Genet was once again convicted of bur-
glary. This, his 10th offense, resulted in an auto-
matic sentence of life imprisonment. By this time,
however, his works had gained the attention of fel-
low writers Jean Paul SARTRE, André GIDE, and Jean
COCTEAU. On hearing of Genet’s sentence, they pe-
titioned the president of the republic for Genet’s
release. His parole was granted, after which his life
changed dramatically.
Encouraged by the show of support from such
prominent writers, Genet determined to dedicate
his life to writing and to abandon crime perma-
nently. He continued to glorify the underworld in
which he had lived in his works, but he also began
to focus on the beauty and sadness of homosexual
love.
In the 1940s, Genet turned his attention to the
theater, writing several plays that, at the time,
were considered too controversial to be per-
formed in France. His first play, The Maids (1947;
translated 1954), made a significant impact on the
rising trend toward the
THEATRE OF THE ABSURD.It
was based on a true story of two sisters, both
maids for the same woman, who murder their
mistress. This play was followed by Deathwatch
(1949; translated 1954), which takes the prison
setting so commonly seen in his novels and uses it
as a backdrop from which to explore despair and
loneliness.
Genet began to abandon traditional ideas of
what should constitute acceptable character, plot,
and motivation within a theatrical piece. He
began to focus on conflicts within society—be-
tween illusion and reality, good and evil, and other
cultural oppositions—with a fervor that can al-
most be described as religious. His plays are ritu-
alistic in structure, aimed at arousing the
audience’s innermost feelings and then offering
them the opportunity to undergo a transforma-
tion or to reach a catharsis alongside the charac-
ters on the stage. Filled with an energy largely
created by violence and cruelty, his plays, while
shocking, were never vulgar and were diverse in
both setting and subject. The Balcony (1956; trans-
lated 1957), for instance, was set in a brothel; The
Blacks (1959) in a fantastical court; and The
Screens (1961; translated 1962) in the middle of
the French–Algerian war. All three works, how-
ever, focused on the inherent paradoxes of an
imperfect life.
Genet’s autobiography, The Thief’s Journal
(1949; translated 1964), is a record of his remark-
able life and the misery and degradation he suf-
fered at the hands of a bourgeois society. He gave
up writing in the 1960s to devote himself to lectur-
ing and supporting the emerging radical activist
fervor of the decade. He continued to support rad-
ical causes until his death on April 15.
Other Works by Jean Genet
Funeral Rites. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New
York: Grove Press, 1969.
Prisoner of Love. Translated by Barbara Bray. Hanover.
Mass.: University Press of New England, 1992.
Rembrant. Translated by Randolph Hough. New
York: Hanuman Books, 1988.
Works about Jean Genet
Knapp, Bettina. Jean Genet. Boston: Twayne, 1968.
164 Genet, Jean
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
White, Edmund. Genet: A Biography. New York:
Knopf, 1993.
George, Stefan (1868–1933) poet
Stefan George was born in the German village of
Rüdesheim to Stephan and Eva George. His father
was a prosperous wine merchant. George attended
secondary school in Darmstadt and graduated in
1888. He studied modern languages at the Univer-
sity of Berlin for three semesters. Deciding early in
life to be a poet, George never engaged in another
profession or trade. He rarely remained in one
place, frequently traveling to the countries of cen-
tral and western Europe. While in Paris, he found
formative influences in Stéphane MALLARMÉ and
other French symbolist poets.
George published his first volume of poetry in
1890. In 1892, he founded the journal Blätter für
die Kunst (Journal of the Arts). George formed
many close friendships among the literati, includ-
ing the Austrian writer Hugo von
HOFMANNSTHAL.
He soon attracted a group of disciples known as
the George Circle. After the turn of the century,
George increasingly saw himself as an educator to
lead the reform of a decadent culture. A brief
friendship with a 15-year-old boy, Maximin, fur-
ther focused George’s attention on the beauty and
the renewing potential of an elite group of youth.
By the 1910s, George’s poetry had moved into a
prophetic phase. His volume Der neue Riech (The
Kingdom Come, (1928) revealed his vision for a
new Germany. The Nazis sought to use George as a
symbol of their state, but he refused their honors
and awards. He moved to Switzerland, where he
died in December 1933.
George became famous for writing beautiful
lyrical poems on such themes as landscape,
friendship, and art. He sometimes used terse and
forceful language but still produced balladesque
works. Early in his career, George wrote of the
artist’s isolation from nature, but he later sought
to teach that man was divine and capable of per-
fection. He left a lasting influence on German lyri-
cal poetry and expressionist writers. His biogra-
phers, Michael and Erika Metzger, explain that
George’s works “bear witness to the unremitting
striving of a man of unique poetic and intellectual
powers to find a higher meaning in his existence
and ours.”
Another Work by Stefan George
The Works of Stefan George. Translated by Olga Marx
and Ernst Morwitz. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1974.
A Work about Stefan George
Metzger, Michael M., and Erika A Metzger. Stefan
George. Boston: Twayne, 1972.
Gh¯alib, Mirz¯a (1797–1869) poet
Mirz¯a Asadull¯ah Kh¯an Gh¯alib was born in Agra,
India. His grandfather immigrated to India from
Asia Minor and belonged to a long line of soldiers.
Gh¯alib’s father was also a soldier and was killed in
battle when Gh¯alib was five years old. After his fa-
ther’s death, he grew up with his mother’s family,
who were wealthy landowners. Gh¯alib was given a
private education in languages and sciences and, at
age 13, was married and moved to Delhi, where he
spent the rest of his life.
Much of Gh¯alib’s finest poetry is in Persian,
though he also wrote in Urdu. Gh¯alib started writ-
ing poetry at a very young age and was already
moving among literary circles by the time of his
marriage. When he was young, he used the name
Asad and later adopted the name Gh¯alib. He was
always hesitant about his choice to become a poet,
and he was the first male in his family who did not
want to be a soldier. In one of his letters, he de-
scribes this decision by comparing his poetic
words with the weapons of war. He states that his
poetry will be “his ship upon the illusory sea of
verse . . . and the broken arrows of my ancestors
become my pens.” Characteristically witty, Gh¯alib’s
allusions are often obscured by the strict rhyme
and rhythm constraints of the ghazal. (A ghazal is
Gh¯alib, Mirz ¯a 165
defined as a short poem consisting of up to a
dozen couplets in the same meter, with a specific
rhyme scheme.) Often, however, this necessity only
further liberated Gh¯alib’s deliberate play with
words and sounds.
Gh¯alib was never rich, but in middle age, he was
invited to join the court of Bah¯adur Sh¯ah Zafar,
the last of the Moghul emperors. Under Bah¯adur
Sh¯ah Zafar’s patronage, he began to make a com-
fortable living from his poetry. The British
takeover of India from the Moghuls after the Sepoy
Mutiny in 1857 (also known as the First War of In-
dian Independence) had a tremendous impact on
Gh¯alib’s life and work: He lost his position as court
poet and instead began writing copious letters to
his friends, who were now spread across the sub-
continent. Although they were written for private
reading, they were collected and published, the
first volume of them in the year before he died.
Written in Urdu in a colloquial style, these letters
are his subjective responses to current events and
allow modern readers a glimpse into his time,
while taking Urdu literature into a new direction
by showing that profound literature could exist
outside of the formal ghazal and its emphasis on
idealism, romance, and universalism.
Another Work by Mirz¯a Gh¯alib
Ghazals of Gha¯lib. Translated by Aijaz Ahmad. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1971.
A Work about Mirz¯a Gh¯alib
Russell, Ralph. Gh¯alib. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1969.
Ghosh, Amitav (1956– ) novelist
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta, India, but
grew up in Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan).
As a child, and while on fieldwork research, Ghosh
spent much of his time living in many countries,
including Sri Lanka, Iran, England, Egypt, and the
United States. Despite his diverse interests (he has
studied and taught philosophy, literature, and so-
cial anthropology), Ghosh has said that his creative
work best captures his ideas. As a child, during
summer holidays in Calcutta, Ghosh would spend
hours reading books from his uncle’s library in his
grandfather’s house. Because of this initiation into
reading and literature, he has acknowledged the
lasting influence of Rabindranath
TAGORE and the
Bengali literary tradition in his own writing.
Today, Ghosh is a writer, a journalist, and a teacher
at Columbia University.
After graduation in India, Ghosh went to Ox-
ford University to study social anthropology,
where he received a masters, and a doctorate in
philosophy in 1982. On his return to India, he
began to work for the Indian Express newspaper in
New Delhi while working on his first novel, The
Circle of Reason (1986). This and his next novel,
Shadow Lines (1988), are about the seamlessness of
geographical boundaries, and much of the plot of
Shadow Lines hinges on the question of national
identity. The main character suffers from a sud-
den identity crisis after he is thrown into a situa-
tion where he must decide which country (India or
Bangladesh) is his, which culture defines him, and
which place he can ultimately call his own. This
novel won Ghosh India’s prestigious Sahitya
Akademi Award in 1990.
Many of Ghosh’s novels have been the result of
years spent in different countries while conducting
field research for his college degrees. In an Antique
Land (1993), for instance, comes out of his re-
search in 1980 while living in a small village in
Egypt. The Glass Palace (2000), tells the story of an
orphaned Indian boy, developed alongside the
story of the royal family’s exile in India after the
British invasion of the kingdom of Mandalay
(Burma) in 1885.
Ghosh refused the Commonwealth Writers
Prize for this novel in 2001 in protest against being
classified as a “commonwealth” writer. Accepting
the award, he said in his letter to the Common-
wealth Foundation, would have placed “contem-
porary writing not within the realities of the
present day...but rather within a disputed aspect
of the past.” His works reflect the elements of uni-
versal humanity. The cross-cultural references he
166 Ghosh, Amitav
makes to different nations and cultures render in-
significant physical or political boundaries.
Another Work by Amitav Ghosh
The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delir-
ium, and Discovery. New York: HarperCollins,
1998.
Works about Amitav Ghosh
Bhatt, Indira, and Indira Nityanandan, eds. The Fic-
tion of Amitav Ghosh. New Delhi: Creative Books,
2001.
Dhawan, R. K. The Novels of Amitav Ghosh. New York:
Prestige Books, 1999.
Gide, André (1869–1951) novelist
André Gide was born in Paris on November 22. His
father, a law professor at the University of Paris,
died when André was 11. Gide was subsequently
raised by his wealthy mother on her family’s estate
near Rouen. Overly protective of her son and con-
cerned over what she believed to be his delicate
health, she withdrew him from school and hired
private tutors. He was brought up in a strict Protes-
tant tradition, memorizing passages from the Bible
at an early age, and undergoing periods of religious
fervor. He also developed an abiding affection for
his cousin, Madeleine Rondeux, whom he married
in 1895. The two stayed married 42 years in what
is, according to some accounts, the longest uncon-
summated marriage in recorded history.
In 1889, after completing his studies and pass-
ing his required exams, Gide, never needing to
worry about supporting himself financially, de-
cided to devote his life to writing and traveling.
He published his first work, The Notebooks of
André Walter (1891), in the style that was to be-
come his signature: the intimate confessional. He
also began to attend gatherings of intellectuals at
the Paris apartment of symbolist poet Stéphane
MALLARMÉ. This was followed by a trip to North
Africa in 1893 with a young painter, Paul Albert
Laurens. The effect of this journey proved critical
to both Gide’s life and his works.
Liberated from the confinement of the society
in which he was born and raised, he began to ex-
amine certain truths about himself, including his
homosexuality. When he returned to Paris, how-
ever, he quickly began to deny many of these reve-
lations. He took a second trip to North Africa,
during which he met Oscar Wilde, an intellectual
experience that would forever shape his life and his
work. The result of these sexual and intellectual
awakenings was the novel The Fruits of the Earth
(1897).
Although Gide had begun to make discoveries
about himself, he was unable to reconcile the
reality of his life with his strict moral religious
upbringing. On returning to Paris once again, he
married his cousin Madeleine Rondeux. The
marriage was largely a pretense and fraught with
difficulties, as is revealed in his novels The
Immoralist (1902) and Strait Is the Gate (1909).
Both works examine the tension between social
responsibility and the desire to remain true to
the self.
During World War I, Gide worked with the Red
Cross in Paris, where he met and fell in love with
Marc Allegret. When Madeleine learned of this,
she destroyed all the letters Gide had ever sent to
her, an act that greatly hurt Gide. In response, he
published Corydon (1924), a defense of homosex-
uality, and If I Die (1924), his autobiography.
These two works shocked and scandalized his
closest friends and resulted in Gide’s alienation
from his previously close social groups. Gide,
however, felt personally vindicated by his decision
to admit openly his homosexuality and sold his
estates to move with Allegret to French Equator-
ial Africa.
In the 1930s, Gide began to look favorably on
principles of marxism and by 1932 had embraced
communism largely because of Lenin’s decriminal-
ization of homosexuality. However, a visit to the
Soviet Union in 1934 left him disillusioned.
A firm antifascist, he spent most of World War
II living in North Africa. He was awarded the
Nobel Prize in literature in 1947 and, at the time of
his death in 1951, he was one of only two authors
Gide, André 167