CLEMENTE PALMA (1872-1946) was born in Lima, Peru. He was the son of famous Peruvian author and scholar Ricardo Palma and Ecuadorian Clemencia Ramínez. His half-sister Angélica Palma was also a writer.
In 1897 he obtained a degree in Letters from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, and also obtained a doctorate from this university with a thesis on philosophy and art and became a professor at the university subsequently. In 1899 he obtained a bachelor of law degree from the same university. During his university studies, he worked as curator of the National Library of Peru and started his activities as a writer. One of the first adherents of modernism in Peru, he made a great contribution to the development of the short story and science fiction in Peru and introduced new themes in its literature. His stories deal mostly with fantastic themes, psychological horror and science fiction. He was attracted to the morbid and many of his characters are abnormal and perverse. His two short story collections CUENTOS MALÉVOLOS (1904) and HISTORIETAS MALIGNAS (1925) are in the style of Villers de L'Isle-Adam; influenced by decadent themes and subject matter, they are filled with dark humor, blasphemy and the supernatural. |
PAUL MADSACK (1881-1949) was born in Reval in the Russian Empire, and was a German journalist, painter, writer, lawyer.
He attended the Lyceum II, today's Goethegymnasium, and after graduating from high school studied law at the University of Munich, the University of Bonn, the University of Heidelberg and at the Georg-August University in Göttingen. He first worked as a judge at the district court in Hanover and as a lawyer. Madsack also began training as a painter and completed this in Paris in 1913. During the First World War, Madsack was taken prisoner by the French and he described his war experiences in his first book published, VAE VICTIS..., in 1918 He wrote "whimsical, little-noticed novels" such as THE BLACK MAGICIAN in 1924 and THE METAPHYSICAL WAX FIGURE in 1930 . His most demanding work appeared in 1931 under the title TAMOTUA: THE CITY OF THE FUTURE. Madsack's friend Alfred Kubin created the illustrations for his works. He became a member of the NSDAP (National Socialists) in 1937 and was temporarily a supporting member of the SS. |
COELHO NETO (1864-1934) was born Henrique Maximiano Coelho Neto in the city of Caxias, Maranhão. He was Brazilian writer and politician, who founded and occupied the second chair of the Brazilian Academy Of Letters from 1897 until his death in 1934 and was also its president in 1926.
After abandoning his legal studies in 1885, he became part of a group of bohemians, the history of which h wrote on his novels A CONQUISTO (1899) and FOGO FÁTUO (1929). He was also a practitioner of the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira and on August 6, 1888, at a speech by Quinto Bocaiuva, he disarmed an attack by hitmen led by an infamous street capoeirista Benjamim. In 1890, he married Maria Gabriela Brandão, daughter of educator Alberto Olympio Brandão, and they had 14 children. He wrote under numerous pseudonyms, including Anselmo Ribas, Caliban, Ariel, Amador Santelmo, Blanco Canabarro, Charles Rouget, Democ, N. Puck, Tartarin, Fur-Fur and Manés. He was active in virtually all literary genres and was for many years the most widely read writer in Brazil, however, he and his work were attacked by the Modernists during the Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922, and this probably contributed to his later neglect by publishers and the Brazilian public. |
FROYLÁN TURCIOS (1875-1943) was born in Juticalpa, Olancho in Honduras. He was Minister of Interior, Member of the National Congress of Honduras and delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva.
He was private secretary of guerrilla Augusto César Sandino in Nicaragua, and a personal friend of Rubén Darío, Juan Ramón Molina and many other intellectuals and philosophers. He directed the Tegucigalpa daily paper El Tiempo and founded the journals, El Pensamiento (1894), Revista Nueva (1902), Arte y Letras (1903) and Esfinge (1905), among others. In Guatemala he published the newspapers El Tiempo ( 1904), El Domingo (1908) and in Honduras El Heraldo (1909), El Nuevo Tiempo (1911), and Boletín de La Defensa Nacional (1924). He is considered one of the most important Honduran intellectuals of the early 20th century. His literature tended to be violent stories, influenced by the Italian decadent writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, with strong plots. |
KORNEL MAKUSZYŃSKI (1884-1953) was born in Stryj in the Austrian partition of Poland (now the Ukraine). He started writing at the age of 14 (poetry) and was published at age 18 in the newspaper Słowo Polskie (Polish Word), soon becoming their theater critic. After University he ran the Polish Theatre and was the chairman of the Polish writers and journalist community. He moved to Warsaw in 1918 and became a professional writer. While he published widely, his children books and fairy tales (particularly those featuring the goat Koziołek Matołek – Silly The Billy Goat) have enduring popularity not just in Polish Popular Culture, but also amongst Polish Jews who translated Makuszyński’s books into Hebrew and popularized them in Israel. He was an elected member of the prestigious Polish Academy of Literature between the wars. He wass blacklisted for a time after World War II, presumably in retribution by his chief rival at the Polich Academy Of Literature, Wincenty Rzymowski, who had been removed for plagiarism. In 1948, socialist realism was decreed in Polish literature and Makuszyński managed to publish only one new book, Letter From That World (Gebethner i Wolff, 1946), only thanks to the existence of the last private publishing houses, and found himself (previously one of the most beloved and well-known literary figures) forced into obscurity. He died in 1953 in Zakopane, Poland.