Born in Daresbury, England,in 1832, Charles Luthwidge Dodgson is better known by his pen mane of Lewis Carroll. He became a minister of the Church of England and a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was the author, under his own name, of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), Symbolic Logic (1896), and other scholarly treatises which would hardly have given him a place in English literature. Charles Dodgson might have been completely forgotten but for the work of his alter ego, Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll, shy in the company of adults, loved children and knew and understood the world of the imagination in which the most sensitive of them lived. So he put the little girl Alice Liddell into a dream-story and found himself famous as the author of Alice in Wonderland (1865). Through the Looking Glass followed in 1871. In recent years Carroll has been taken quite seriously as a major literary artist for adults as well. His works have come under the scrutiny of critics who have explained his permanent attractiveness in terms of existential and symbolic drama: The Alice books dramatize psychological realities in symbolic terms, being commentary on the nature of the human predicament rather than escape from it. In addition to his writing, Carroll was also a pioneering photographer, and he took many pictures of young children, especially girls, with whom he seemed to empathize.

"I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England, where I studied French literature, before spending fifteen years in Germany. I came to America in 1940 and decided to become an American citizen and made America my home." So writes Nabokov---novelist, dramatist, poet, essayist, English teacher (famous for his incredibly difficult exams), literary critic, translator, and lepidopterist. Nabokov is considered one of the most brilliant and fascinating writers of the twentieth century. His mixed identities have contributed to his reputation as one of the most unsettling and difficult writers of his time."The best writer of English prose at present holding American citizenship," was John Updike's description of Nabokov. Although he began his literary career as a poet, Nabokov is probably best known for his novels, most notoriously Lolita (1955)."He is a major force in the contemporary novel" wrote Anthony Burgess in The Novel Now: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction. Although some critics find his work so distinctive that they consider it to comprise its own species of novel, Nabokov's work is more usefully seen as a self-conscious extension and reinvention of a European novelistic tradition, from Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, through Proust and Joyce, with whom he shared a taste for elaborate wordplay and arcane allusion. Nabokov's works have tended to provoke the awe as well as the discomfort of numerous critics. Alfred Kazin, for instance, described himself as "floundering and traveling in the mind of that American genius" during his bout with Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), Nabokov's most ambitious novel. "In that novel, as in almost all of his works," Kazin wrote, "Nabokov intentionally laced the narrative with obscure literary allusions and tri-lingual puns that pivot on an understanding of Russian, and to a lesser degree French, language and culture. Though helpful, even a broad knowledge of European literature would not make Nabokov's creations entirely clear for, as an artist, he enjoyed playing tricks on the reader." What has been called his "artistic duplicity" is perhaps explained by Nabokov's theory of narrative as being an intricate interplay between author and reader. " . . . [R]ead books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art," he advised in a series of lectures at Cornell; one reads "to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its au-thor. . . ." The discomfort provoked by Nabokov's works was not due solely to his technique, however; Lolita, about a middle-aged man's passion for and seduction of 12-year-old Lolita ("the loveliest nymphet")---all in obsessive, hilarious detail---struggled into print after being rejected on both sides of the Atlantic. Shocking to many, Lolita, like James Joyce's Ulysses, is the author's masterpiece, a work that continues to generate contradictory interpretations and open-mouthed astonishment.