Who is Dan Brown?

Dan Brown

Dan Brown is an American author of thriller fiction. He is best known for the 2003 bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code.

Early life

He was born on June 22, 1964,  in Exeter, New Hampshire, USA. He is the eldest of three children. His early life was influenced by his parents:

• His father, Richard G. Brown, was a teacher of mathematics, and wrote textbooks from 1968 until his retirement in 1997.
• In Addition both of his parents are also singers and musicians, having served as church choir masters.

After graduating from Phillips Exeter, Brown attended Amherst College. Brown spent the 1985 school year abroad in Seville, Spain, where he was enrolled in an art history course at the University of Seville. Brown graduated from Amherst in 1986. 1991, he moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as singer, songwriter and pianist. It was there that he met Blythe Newlon, a woman 12 years his senior, who later became his wife. Dan Brown Started teaching to support himself.

Secrets and Puzzles

The presenece of secrets and puzzles in Dan Brown's novels has their origine in his childhood. In fact, mathematics, music and languages were a common characteristic of his education. When he was a child, he participated in elaborate treasure hunts devised by their father on birthdays and holidays. For example on Christmas Brown and his siblings did not find gifts under the tree, but followed a treasure map with codes and clues throughout their house and even around town to find the gifts. In addition this, Brown spent a lot of time working out anagrams and crossword puzzles.

Career

After dabbling with a musical career, Dan Brown started writing. He read Sidney Sheldon's novels and was influenced by his style especially in the novel The Doomsday Conspiracy. He was inspired to become a writer of thrillers and started working on Digital Fortress, setting much of it in Seville, Spain, where he had studied in 1985. His wife, with whom he co wrote a book with his wife, 187 Men to Avoid: A Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman, did much of the promotion of the novel when it was released.
Brown subsequently wrote Deception Point and Angels & Demons, the latter of which was the first to feature the lead character, Harvard symbology expert Robert Langdon.
Brown's first three novels had little success. However, when he released The Da Vinci Code, it quickly became a bestseller, going to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list during its first week of release in 2003. It is now credited with being one of the most popular books of all time, with 81 million copies sold worldwide as of 2009.
Brown's next novel featuring Robert Langdon, The Lost Symbol, was released on September 15, 2009.It had a huge success and according to the publisher, on its first day the book sold over one million in hardcover and e-book versions in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. The story takes place in Washington D.C. over a period of 12 hours, and features the Freemasons.

Writing habits

Because Dan  Brown does a lot of research, he spends years writing his novels. He has a habit of rising at 4:00am when there are no distractions (a practice he began with Digital Fortress when he had two daytime teaching jobs) and when he feels most productive, in order to give symbolic importance to the first order of business each day. He keeps an antique hourglass on his desk in his lof where he does his writing, so that he can stop briefly every hour to do push-ups, sit-ups and stretching exercises to keep his blood flowing.
Recuring themes in his books include Chritianity, historical events, codes, puzzles, treasure hunts, secretive organizations and academic lectures on obscure topics.

Bibliography

• Digital Fortress, 1998
• Angels & Demons, 2000
• Deception Point, 2001
• The Da Vinci Code, 2003
• The Lost Symbol, 2009

Who is Abdelkebir Khatibi?

Abdelkebir Khatibi

Abdelkebir Khatibi (11 February 1938 – 16 March 2009) was a Moroccan literary critic, novelist and playwright. He was born on February 11, 1939 in the Atlantic port city of El Jadida and died on March 16, 2009. He was greaty influenced by  the rebellious spirit of 1960s counterculture in his late twenties. In his writings, he challenged  the social and political norms upon which the countries of the Maghreb region were built.

His career

A native of the Atlantic port city of El Jadida, Abdelkebir Khatibi was born in the middle period of Morocco's 44-year (1912–56) status as a French protectorate. A French-speaking member of the educated class, he studied sociology at the Sorbonne, receiving a doctorate in 1967. His dissertation, Le Roman maghrébin (The Maghribian Novel), which examines the question of how a novelist could avoid propagandizing in the context of a postrevolutionary society, and its follow-up, Bilan de la sociologie au Maroc (Assessment of Sociology Concerning Morocco) were both published shortly after the Paris Spring unrest of May 1968. He won numerous awards including the Grand Prix de l'Académie française (1994), the Grand Prix of Morocco (1998), Award of l'Afrique méditerranéenne/Maghreb (2003), and the prize of la Société des Gens de Lettres (2008) awarded for the first time to an arab author.

Bibliography

Major books

• Études sociologiques sur le Maroc [Sociological Studies Regarding Morocco] (1971)
• La Mémoire tatouée [Tattooed Memory] (1971) ISBN 2-264-00220-4
• La Blessure du nom propre [The Wound Under Its Own Name] (1974)
• Le Livre du sang [The Book of Blood] (1979) Gallimard ISBN 2-07-028677-0
• De la mille et troisième nuit [From the Thousand and Third Night] (1980)
• Amour bilingue [Bilingual Love] (1983); Love in Two Languages (1990 English translation by Richard Howard, published by University of Minnesota Press)
• Un été à Stockholm' [A Summer in Stockholm] (1992), Flamarion ISBN 2-08-066473-5
• Triptyque de Rabat [Rabat Triptych] (1993)

Plays

• La Mort des artistes [The Death of the Artists] (1964)
• Le Prophète voilé [The Veiled Prophet] (1979)

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Who is Antoine de Saint-Exupery

• Saint-Exupery, Antoine de (1900-1944), was a French writer and aviator. He is best known for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince), and for his books about aviation adventures, including Night Flight and Wind, Sand and Stars.
• He was a successful commercial pilot before World War II, 
• He joined the Armée de l'Air (French Air Force) on the outbreak of war.
• He disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean in July 1944.

Early life

• Antoine de Saint Exupéry was born in Lyon to an old family of provincial nobility, the third of five children of Marie de Fonscolombe and Viscount Jean de Saint Exupéry, an insurance broker who died before his son was even four.
• After failing his final exams at preparatory school, Saint-Exupéry entered the École des Beaux-Arts to study architecture.
• In 1921, Saint Exupery began his military service with the 2nd Regiment of Chasseurs (light cavalry), and was then sent to Strasbourg for training as a pilot. 
• The following year, he obtained his license and was offered transfer to the air force. 
• He became one of the pioneers of international postal flight, in the days when aircraft had few instruments.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Crash

On 30 December 1935 at 14:45 after a flight of 19 hours and 38 minutes Saint-Exupéry, along with his navigator, André Prévot, crashed in the Libyan Sahara desert en route to Saigon.They survived the crash and Exupéry's fable The Little Prince, which begins with a pilot being marooned in the desert, is in part a reference to this experience.

Selected books

• L'aviateur (The Aviator, 1926)
• Courrier sud (Southern Mail, 1929)
• Vol de nuit (Night Flight, 1931) 
• Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939)
• Pilote de Guerre (Flight to Arras, 1942 )
• Lettre à un Otage (Letter to a Hostage, 1943) 
• Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince, 1943)
• Citadelle (The Wisdom of the Sands, posthumous - 1948),

who is Tahar Benjeloun?

Tahar Benjeloun is a Moroccan novelist and poet. The entirety of his work is written in French, although his first language is Arabic.

Early life and studies

• Tahar benjeloun was born in Fes on December 1st, 1944.
• After first having attended the local coranic school, he switched to the bilingual (French-Moroccan) primary school the age of 6.
• Ben Jalloun studied French in Tangier, Morocco until he was 18 years old.
• He obtained my baccalaureate in 1963 and continued his studies in philosophy at Mohammed-V University in Rabat.
• On March 23, 1965 because of student demonstrations in larger Moroccan cities there were a lot of repression and arrests.
• On July 1966 his philosophy studies were interrupted; he was sent to a disciplinary camp run by the army together with 94 other students suspected of having organized the March 65 demonstrations.
• In January 1968, he was liberated and returned to university.
• In October 1968 he got his first teaching assignment. The same year he published his first poem “l’Aube des dalles” in the magazine “Souffles”. He wrote the poem in secret at the camp.
• After this point, he worked as a teacher in Morocco, teaching philosophy first in Tetouan and then in Casablanca. 
• Then he left teaching after the arabization of the philosophy department, unable or unwilling to teach in Arabic. He moved to Paris to continue his studies in psychology, and began to write more extensively. 
• Starting in 1972, he began to write articles and reviews for the French newspaper [Le Monde], and in 1975 he received his doctorate in social psychiatry. Using his experience with psychotherapy as both a reference and an inspiration, he wrote the book La Réclusion solitaire in 1976.
• n 1985 he published the novel "L'Enfant de sable," which was widely celebrated. He won the Prix Goncourt in 1987 for his novel La Nuit Sacrée. 
• In 1997 he saw his novel Le Racisme expliqué à ma fille published, wherein he "explains racism to his daughter," using his family as inspiration for his novels. Ben Jalloun is regularly asked to give speeches and lectures at universities worldwide - both in Morocco, and all over Europe.
• In 2004 he was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for This Blinding Absence of Light (translated from the French by Linda Coverdale). He was rewarded the Prix Ulysse in 2005 for the entirety of his work
• In September 2006, he was awarded a special prize for "peace and friendship between people" at Lazio between Europe and the Mediterranean Festival.
• On 1 February 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy awarded him the Cross of Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur.
• Ben Jelloun is married and father of 4 children. He lives in Paris.
• In his novel, Leaving Tangier, Ben Jelloun writes about a Moroccan brother and sister who leave their impoverished home in search of better lives in Spain.
• His novels L'Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée are translated into 43 languages. Le racism expliqué à ma fille has been translated into 33 languages. He has participated in translating many of his works.  

Selected works

• Solitaire (1976)
• The Sand Child (1985)
• The Sacred Night (1987)
• Silent Day in Tangiers (1990)
• With Downcast Eyes (1991)
• Corruption (1995)
• The Fruits of Hard Work (1996)
• Praise of Friendship (1996)
• L'Auberge des pauvres, (1997)
• Racism Explained to My Daughter (1998)
• Islam Explained (2002)
• This Blinding Absence of Light (2003)
• La Belle au bois dormant, (2004)
• The last friend, (2006)
• Yemma, (2007)
• Leaving Tangier, (2009)
• The Rising of the Ashes, (2009)

Source:Wikipedia and Tahar Benjelloun's official site

Gabriel García Márquez

 

Gabriel García Márquez

• Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist.  
• García Márquez, affectionately known as Gabo throughout Latin America, is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. 

Early life

• Gabriel José de la Concordia "Gabo" García Márquez was born March 6, 1927.
• When his parents fell in love, their relationship met with resistance from Luisa Santiaga Marquez's father, the Colonel. 
• Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: he (Gabriel Eligio) was a Conservative, and had the reputation of being a womanizer.
• He was brought up by his grandparents who had an important influence on his education.
  

Success

• In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
•  He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism.
•  He started as a journalist, and has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best-known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).
• From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics.
• Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. 
• His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magical realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. 
• Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo, and most of them express the theme of solitude.

Illness

• Gabriel García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in 1999. 
• His impeding death was was incorrectly announced by Peruvian daily newspaper in 2000. 
• Later newspapers published Garcia Marquez’s alleged farewell poem, “La Marioneta” (“the puppet”). 
• However shortly afterwards García Márquez denied being the author of the poem. 
• In fact, it was was the work of a Mexican ventriloquist. The poem is republished below. I think it may constitute a very good piece of material to teach English.

Works

Novels

• In Evil Hour 1962
• One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967
• The Autumn of the Patriarch 1975
• Love in the Time of Cholera 1985
• The General in His Labyrinth 1989
• Of Love and Other Demons 1994

Novellas

• Leaf Storm 1955
• No One Writes to the Colonel published 1961 in Spanish (written in 1956-1957)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold 1981
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores 2004

Short Story Collections

• Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories 1978
• Collected Stories 1984
• Strange Pilgrims 1993

Non Fiction

• The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor 1970
• The Solitude of Latin America 1982
• The Fragrance of Guava 1982, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza
• Clandestine in Chile 1986
• News of a Kidnapping 1996
• A Country for Children 1998
• Living to Tell the Tale 2002

Related Links about Gabriel García Márquez

• Wikipedia
• Gabriel García Márquez - Alleged poem

Who is Ernest Hemingway?

Ernest Hemingway

• Ernest Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois on July 21, 1899.
• He was an American writer and journalist.
• When he left high school, he worked for a few months as a reporter.
• He later became an ambulance driver during World War I.
• His first novel, The Sun Also Rises>, was written in 1924.
• He returned to the United Sates in the following year because he was seriously wounded.
• Ernest Hemingway married 4 times.
  
• He first married Hadley Richardson in 1922 with whom he travelled to Paris.
• In Paris he met famous expatriate who who formed a community called the lost generation.
• After divorcing Hadley Richardson in 1927 Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer.
• They divorced following Hemingway's return from covering the Spanish Civil War.
• After the Spanish Civil war he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls.
• He then married Martha Gellhorn in 1940, but he left her for Mary Welsh Hemingway after World War II,
• During World War II, was present at D-Day and the liberation of Paris.
• In 1952 Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in a plane crash that left him in pain or ill-health for much of the rest of his life.
• Before he went to Africa, he published The Old Man and the Sea. for which he got a Nobel Prize in 1954.
  
• In 1959 he moved from Cuba to Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961.
• Hemingway's distinctive writing is called the iceberg theory is characterized by economy and understatement.
• Hemingway's fiction is considered successful because the characters he presents exhibit an authenticity that reverberates with the audience.

Works

Some of Ernest hemingway's works:

• "Indian Camp" (1926)
• The Sun Also Rises (1927)
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1935)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
• The Old Man and the Sea (1951)
• True at First Light (1999)

Who is Charles Baudelaire?

Charles Pierre Baudelaire

• Charles Baudelaire was born on April 9, 1821.
• He died on August 31, 1867.
• He was a nineteenth-century French poet, critic, and translator.
• Famous for his book of poetry Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil)
• Baudelaire's father, François Baudelaire, a senior civil servant and amateur artist, was 34 years older than his mother, Caroline.
  
• Baudelaire's father died during his childhood and remained very close to his mother.
• Charles Baudelaire's relationship with his mother was comlex and dominated his life.
• His mother married Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Aupick a year after his father's death.
• Charles Baudelaire was forced to to board away from his mother (even during holidays) and accept his stepfather's rigid methods.
• Baudelaire
  
• Baudelaire's stepfather was concerned about his future.
• At 18 years old, Charles was still undecided about his future.
• He began to frequent prostitutes.
  
• Trying to change Charles' mind and behavior, his stepfather sent him to India.
• The arduous trip, however, did nothing to turn Baudelaire's mind away from a literary career or from his casual attitude toward life.
• He retuned home and spent a life of and squandred his money and his inheritance and even gone into depth.
• The most important work Baudelaire wrote was "Les fleurs du mal". When it was first published it was criticised and found a small, appreciative audience. But later "Les fleurs du mal" was supported by a number of notables like Victor Hugo and Flaubert
  

Charles Baudelaire's Work

BEAUTY
by: Charles Baudelaire

AM as lovely as a dream in stone,

And this my heart where each finds death in turn,

Inspires the poet with a love as lone

As clay eternal and as taciturn.




Swan-white of heart, a sphinx no mortal knows,

My throne is in the heaven's azure deep;

I hate all movements that disturb my pose,

I smile not ever, neither do I weep.




Before my monumental attitudes,

That breathe a soul into the plastic arts,

My poets pray in austere studious moods,




For I, to fold enchantment round their hearts,

Have pools of light where beauty flames and dies,

The placid mirrors of my luminous eyes.

'Beauty' is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919.
More poems here:
Poems by Charles Baudelaire