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Buxtehude, Dietrich

(Encyclopedia)Buxtehude, Dietrich dēˈtrĭkh bo͝oksˌtəho͞oˈdə [key], c.1637–1707, Danish composer and organist. From 1668 until his death he was organist at Lübeck, where he established a famous series of...

chaconne and passacaglia

(Encyclopedia)chaconne päˌsəkälˈyə [key], two closely related musical forms popular during the baroque period. Both are in triple meter time and employ a characteristic recurring harmonic pattern or actual ba...

Waller, Fats

(Encyclopedia)Waller, Fats, 1904–43, American jazz musician, singer, and composer, whose original name was Thomas Wright Waller, b. New York City. Waller began playing the piano as a child, and later studied with...

Styron, William

(Encyclopedia)Styron, William, 1925–2006, American novelist, b. Newport News, Va., grad. Duke, 1947. His fiction is often powerful, deeply felt, poetic, and elegiac. He became well known for his novel The Confess...

Rao, Raja

(Encyclopedia)Rao, Raja rou [key], 1909–2006, Indian novelist, b. Hassan, Mysore (now Karnataka), as Raja. Rao took his surname as an adult, and was educated in India and France and for many years divided his ti...

Sebald, W. G.

(Encyclopedia)Sebald, W. G. (Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald), 1944–2001, German novelist, grad. Freiburg Univ. (1965). Sebald's novels are dense, elegiac, and meditative. They mingle fiction with history and th...

Andersen, Hans Christian

(Encyclopedia)Andersen, Hans Christian, 1805–75, Danish poet, novelist, and writer of fairy tales. Born to an illiterate washerwoman and reared in poverty, he left Odense at 14 for Copenhagen, where he lived with...

Hurston, Zora Neale

(Encyclopedia)Hurston, Zora Neale, 1891?–60, African-American writer, b. Notasulga, Ala. She grew up in the pleasant all-black town of Eatonville, Fla., and graduated from Barnard College, where she studied with ...

Jolliet, Louis

(Encyclopedia)Jolliet or Joliet, Louis both: jōˈlēĕtˌ, jōˌlēĕtˈ, Fr. lwē zhôlyāˈ [key], 1645–1700, French explorer, joint discoverer with Jacques Marquette of the upper Mississippi River, b. Quebec ...

Kafka, Franz

(Encyclopedia)Kafka, Franz fränts käfˈkä [key], 1883–1924, German-language novelist, b. Prague. Along with Joyce, Kafka is perhaps the most influential of 20th-century writers. From a middle-class Jewish fami...
 

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