Arthur hailey (1920-2004)

British/Canadian/American/Bahamiannovelist.

Born in Luton,Bedfordshire,England, Hailey served in theRoyal Air Forcefrom the start ofWorld War IIin 1939 until 1947, when he went to live in Canada. After working at a number of jobs and writing part-time, he became a full-time writer in 1956, encouraged by the success of theCBCtelevisiondrama,Flight into Danger (in print as Runway Zero Eight). Following the success of Hotel in 1965, he moved to California; in 1969, he moved to theBahamas.

Each of his novels has a different industrial or commercial setting and includes, in addition to dramatic human conflict, carefully researched information about the way that particular environments and systems function and how these affect society and its inhabitants.

Critics often dismissed Hailey's success as the result of a formulaic style in which he centered a crisis on an ordinary character, then inflated the suspense by hopping among multiple related plotlines. However, he was so popular with readers that his books were guaranteed to become best-sellers.

He would spend about one year researching a subject, followed by six months reviewing his notes and, finally, about 18 months writing the book. That aggressive research — tracking rebel guerrillas in the Peruvian jungle at age 67 for The Evening News (1990), or reading 27 books on the hotel industry for Hotel – gave his novels a realism that appealed to readers, even as some critics complained that he used it to mask a lack of literary talent.

Many of his books have reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller listand more than 170 million copies have been sold worldwide in 40 languages. Many have been made intomoviesandHotel was made into a long-running television series.Airport became a blockbuster movie with stunning visual effects.

Karen hewitt

Karen Hewitt (The Oxford University Institute for Slavonic Studies) is a literary critic, a specialist in study of culture an honorary professor at Perm University. She is the author of the well-known and highly appreciated book Understanding Britain published in Great Britain as well as in Russia. This book is a personal account of Britain and of British life specially written for the Russian reader. The author tried to answer some of the questions put to her by readers about the differences between British society and “Russian- in-Transition”. Karen Hewitt published several books, among them:Understanding English Literature, Contemporary British Stories (introduction and commentary).

David herbert lawrence (1885-1930)

D.H. Lawrence was an important and controversial English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output includednovels,short stories,poems,plays,essays,travel books, paintings, translations,literary criticismand personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects ofmodernityandindustrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and instinctive behavior. His novelsSons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920) made him one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century.

Lawrence's first two novels, first play, and most of his early short stories, including such masterpieces as Odour of Chrysanthemums and Daughters of the Vicar (collected in The Prussian Officer, and Other Stories, 1914), use early experience as a departure point. Sons and Lovers carries this process to the point of quasi-autobiography. The whole narrative turns Lawrence's own life history into a powerful psychoanalytic study of a young man's Oedipal attraction toward his mother and its consequences on his relations with other women.

During World War I Lawrence and his wife were trapped in England and living in poverty. At this time he was engaged in two related projects. The first was a vein of philosophical writing that he had initiated in the Foreword to Sons and Lovers and continued in Study of Thomas Hardy (1914) and later works. The other, more important project was an ambitious novel of provincial life that Lawrence rewrote and revised until it split into two major novels: The Rainbow, which was immediately suppressed in Britain as obscene; and Women in Love, which was not published until 1920.

The Rainbow extends the scope of Sons and Lovers by following the Brangwen family (who live near Eastwood) over three generations, so that social and spiritual change are woven into the chronicle. The Brangwens begin as farmers so attached to the land and the seasons as to represent a premodern unconsciousness, and succeeding genera­tions in the novel evolve toward modern consciousness, self-con­sciousness, and even alienation. Women in Love takes up the story, but across the gap of changed consciousness created by World War I.

The search for a fulfilling sexual love and for a form of marriage that will satisfy a modern consciousness is the goal of Lawrence's early novels and yet becomes increasingly problematic. None of his novels ends happily: at best, they conclude with an open question.

After World War I Lawrence and his wife went to Italy (1919), and he never again lived in England. He soon embarked on a group of novels consisting of The Lost Girl (1920), Aaron's Rod (1922), and the uncompleted Mr. Noon (published in its entirety only in 1984). In 1921 the Lawrences decided to leave Europe and go to the United States, but eastward, via Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Australia. Since 1917 Lawrence had been working on Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), which grew out of his sense that the American West was an uncorrupted natural home. His other nonfiction works at this time include Movements in European History (1921) and two treatises on his psychological theories, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922).

In 1926 he embarked on the first versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Privately published in 1928, Lady Chatterley's Lover led an underground life until legal decisions in New York (1959) and London (1960) made it freely available – and a model for countless literary descriptions of sexual acts. The London verdict allowing publication capped a trial at which the book was defended by many eminent English writers. In the novel Lawrence returns for the last time to Eastwood and portrays the tender sexual love, across barriers of class and marriage, of two damaged moderns. Lawrence had always seen the need to relate sexuality to feeling, and his fiction had always extended the borders of the permissible – and had been censored in detail. In Lady Chatterley's Lover he now fully described sexual acts as expressing aspects or moods of love, and he also used the colloquial four-letter words that naturally occur in free speech.

D.H. Lawrence was first recognized as a working-class novelist showing the reality of English provincial family life, and – in the first days of psychoanalysis – as the author-subject of a classic case-history of the Oedipus complex. In subsequent works, Lawrence's frank handling of sexuality cast him as a pioneer of a "liberation" he would not himself have approved. From the beginning readers have been won over by the poetic vividness of his writing and his efforts to describe subjective states of emotion, sensation, and intuition. This spontaneity and immediacy of feeling coexists with a continual, slightly modified repetition of themes, characters, and symbols that express Lawrence's own evolving artistic vision and thought. His great novels remain difficult because their realism is underlain by obsessive personal metaphors, by elements of mythology, and above all by his attempt to express in words what is normally wordless because it exists below consciousness. Lawrence tried to go beyond the "old, stable ego" of the characters familiar to readers of more conventional fiction. His characters are continually experiencing transformations driven by unconscious processes rather than by conscious intent, thought, or ideas.

Lawrence's unsettling opinions earned him many enemies and he endured hardships, official persecution, censorshipand misrepre­sentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage". At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant repre­sentative ofmodernismin English literature, although somefeministsobject to the attitudes toward women and sexuality found in his works.