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:
“No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“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)
“International relationships are ... preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)