Cicely Isabel Fairfield (21 December 1892 – 15 March 1983), known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II and Communist traitors; The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to British letters.
Read more about Rebecca West: Biography, Politics, Religion, Quotes, Cultural References
Famous quotes by rebecca west:
“All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)