702 words
Yukio Mishima
My Friend Hitler and Other Plays of Yukio Mishima
Translated by Hiroaki Sato
New York: Columbia University Press, 2002
Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) is best known as a novelist and Right-wing activist who famously and publicly committed ritual suicide in 1970 one day after he had finished his tetralogy The Sea of Fertility. He was, however, a very prolific playwright with more than sixty plays to his name, (more…)
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Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) is probably best known today for Brideshead Revisited, his 1945 novel of fin-de-siècle longing and Catholic apologetics that has received both television and cinematic adaptations. He made his fame in the 1930s, however, by penning some of the most biting, satirical novels of the British upper class and its various hangers-on. Waugh was brutally honest about the inferiority of the Negro race and its incompatibility with Western civilization. (more…)
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Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) is considered to be Norway’s greatest novelist. Along with Ibsen and Strindberg, Hamsun brought Scandinavia to the forefront of literary modernism. Eschewing realism for penetrating psychological insights, Hamsun’s subjective style proved to be extremely influential for a variety of writers ranging from Thomas Mann to Ernest Hemingway and even to Isaac Bashevis Singer. (more…)
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Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) was a prominent member of the German nationalist Conservative Revolutionary movement of the 1920s that was opposed to the feckless Weimar Republic. The son of a wealthy chemist, Jünger rejected the staid bourgeois world of his upbringing and instead sought adventure wherever he could find it. Running away from home and joining the French Foreign Legion while a minor, Jünger was sent to Algeria and Morocco. Through the intercession of his father, Jünger got out of the Legion in time to join the German Army at the outbreak of World War I. (more…)
August Strindberg by Edvard Munch
August Strindberg by Edvard Munch
925 words
Although best known as a playwright, the Swedish author August Strindberg (1849–1912) was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, poetry, and essays. The official edition of his collected works comes to more than seventy volumes. In 1888 Strindberg attended a series of lectures about the then little-known philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. He quickly became a devotee of Nietzsche and even started up a brief correspondence with the philosopher. (more…)