San Antonio College Library

In hindsight, Dylan Thomas' precocious use of romantic but morbid imagery-epitaphs, worms, an early death-proved a self-fulfilling prophecy. This program traces the poet's life and works, artfully blending manuscripts, first editions, family photos, and location footage with interviews and readings of his poems and letters. Highlights include Thomas reading many of his poems, such as "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"; interviews with actress...

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney has been judged by Robert Lowell to be the most important Irish poet since Yeats. This classic program looks back over Heaney's career at the time his best-selling collection Seeing Things-a return to the rural childhood territory of his very first book-was published, offering a rare opportunity to hear the poet read and discuss his work. Through poems including "Death of a Naturalist," "The Toome Road," "Wheels Within...

An author who defies classification, Doris Lessing has plowed both wide and deep, combining acute observation of everyday life with a concern for broad issues such as how society should be organized, the value of politics, the role of women, and the nature of individuality. In this vintage program, biographer and critic Claire Tomalin and science fiction author Brian Aldiss talk with Lessing about her life and her work, with a special focus on her...

Anthony Burgess examines Orwell's achievement, starting with the accuracy of his predictions for the future. Burgess shows how the novel 1984 sprang from the main concerns of Orwell's earlier work and suggests that Orwell identified areas in which human freedom has always been, and continues to be, threatened.

As a poet, T.S. Eliot did not just modernize, he revolutionized. As critic and publisher, he informed literary theory and promoted a generation of major young writers. This richly resourced program provides a concise biography of Eliot, tracing the key events of his life and highlighting his many contributions to English literature. The program features readings and excerpts from his major poems and critical work, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred...

Lawrence's letters, essays, and autobiographical sketches provide the sound track of this biography of the man who is arguably the greatest and certainly the most controversial English novelist of our century, while the artifacts and scenes of his life provide the visuals. The ideas that permeate Lawrence's work are shown here as they develop through the dominant figures in his life-the father from whom he cannot distance himself, his possessive mother,...

This overview of Virginia Woolf's life and work from the Famous Author's series introduces the writer's upperclass family and their many literary friends who cultivated her talents and later inspired characters. The film takes a look at Woolf's response to the early loss of her mother and sister and her mental health struggles thereafter. Woolf secured an important position in London literary circles, and was part of the famous Bloomsbury group, and...

In this overview of D.H. Lawrence's life and work from the Famous Authors series, viewers are introduced to the conditions of the mining town in England in which Lawrence was born and to his relationship with his mother, both which reappear in Sons and Lovers and his other fiction. The film follows Lawrence and his wife Frieda through their many moves, the inspiration he gained from their travels, their struggles with money, literary success, the...

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. So spoke Virginia Woolf in 1929 as she discussed the problems of the writer and of women in general. Woolf's talk represents perhaps the most persuasive of all her writings on liberty, literature, and the role of women in her society. Woolf spoke not only about writing, but about writing as a woman-speaking in an age when women were deprived of virtually every possibility of...

Seamus Heaney, one of the finest poets writing in the English language, and the late Richard Ellmann, biographer of Joyce and Wilde, and critic of Yeats, in literary dialogue about these three brilliant Dublin writers. The literary dialogue between Heaney and Ellmann uses documentary material pertaining to Joyce, Yeats, and Wilde, and was filmed at such literary landmarks as the Hill of Howth, Sandymount Green, Trinity College, and the Joyce Tower...