Francis S.Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise

Fransis Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940)

Born in St Paul, Minnesota, USA. He studied at Princeton, but left it for the army. He wrote This Side of Paradise (1920), Flappers and Philosophers (1920),Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), The Vegetable (1923), The Great Gatsby (1925), All the Sad Young Men (1926), Tender is the Night (1934), The Crack-Up (1945), and the unfinished  The Last Tycoon (1941).

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O'Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under, six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family's life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in "taking care" of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn't and couldn't understand her.

William S. Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence

William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965)

Born in Paris, France. He studied at Canterbury and Heidelberg, qualified as a surgeon at St Thomas's Hospital, London. He wrote Liza of Lambeth (1897), Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Circle (1921), The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), East of Suez (1922), Cakes and Ale (1930), The Complete Short Stories (3 vols) in 1951.  

I confess that when first I made acquaintance with Charles Strickland I never for a moment discerned that there was in him anything out of the ordinary.  Yet now few will be found to deny his greatness.  I do not speak of that greatness which is achieved by the fortunate politician or the successful soldier; that is a quality which belongs to the place he occupies rather than to the man; and a change of circumstances reduces it to very discreet proportions.  The Prime Minister out of office is seen, too often, to have been but a pompous rhetorician, and the General without an army is but the tame hero of a market town. 

Robert Stevenson - Treasure Island (+Movie)

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894)

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. He studied at Edinburgh, dropped the profession of lawyer and began to write travel sketches and short stories. He wrote Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), the unfinished Weir of Hermiston (1896), others.

Squire Trelawney, Doctor Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—, and go back to the time when my father kept the "Admiral Benbow" Inn, and the brown old seaman, with the saber cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pig-tail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the saber cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:

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Robert Stevenson - Across the Plains

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894)

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. He studied at Edinburgh, dropped the profession of lawyer and began to write travel sketches and short stories. He wrote Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889), the unfinished Weir of Hermiston (1896), others.

Monday. — It was, if I remember rightly, five o’clock when we were all signalled to be present at the Ferry Depot of the railroad.  An emigrant ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night, another on the Sunday morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a fourth early on Monday; and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday a great part of the passengers from these four ships was concentrated on the train by which I was to travel.  There was a babel of bewildered men, women, and children.  The wretched little booking-office, and the baggage-room, which was not much larger, were crowded thick with emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the atmosphere of dripping clothes.  Open carts full of bedding stood by the half-hour in the rain.  The officials loaded each other with recriminations.  A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to have been an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full of brimstone, blustering and interfering.  It was plain that the whole system, if system there was, had utterly broken down under the strain of so many passengers.

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice (+Video)

Jane Austen (1775 – 1817)

Born in Steventon, Hampshire, England. Later she lived in Bath, Southampton, Chawton, and Winchester. She wrote Love and Friendship, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Persuasion and Northanger Abbey (1818).

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters.

Rafael Sabatini - Captain Blood

Rafael Sabatini (1875 – 1950)

Born in Jesi, Italy. In 1905 he settled in England, wrote in English The Tavern Knight (1904), The Sea Hawk (1915), Scaramouche (1921), Captain Blood (1922), others.

PETER BLOOD, bachelor of medicine and several other things besides, smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums boxed on the sill of his window above Water Lane in the town of Bridgewater. Sternly disapproving eyes considered him from a window opposite, but went disregarded. Mr. Blood's attention was divided between his task and the stream of humanity in the narrow street below; a stream which poured for the second time that day towards Castle Field, where earlier in the afternoon Ferguson, the Duke's chaplain, had preached a sermon containing more treason than divinity.