This Companion examines English-language writers and writing throughout the twentieth century, in all major genres and from all around the world. All the great literary figures are included, whether American or Australian, British, Irish, or Indian, African or Canadian or Caribbean, among them Samuel Beckett, Edith Wharton, Patrick White, T S Eliot, Derek Walcott, D H Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Wole Soyinka, Sylvia Plath, as well as a wealth of less obviously canonical writers, from Anaïs Nin to L M Montgomery, Bob Dylan to Terry Pratchett. Fiction, plays, poetry, and a whole range of non-fictional writing are explored; also included are entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works. This is the most comprehensive single-volume guide to modern (and postmodern) literature in English.