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Saint Augustine of Hippo (3 November 354 – 28 August 430 AD) was a Roman African, early Christian theologian and Neoplatonic philosopher from Numidia whose writings influenced the development of the Western Church and Western philosophy, and indirectly all of Western Christianity. He was the bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa and is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church for his writings in the Patristic Period. Among his most important works are The City of God, De doctrina Christiana, and Confessions.According to his contemporary, Jerome, Augustine "established anew the ancient Faith". In his youth he was drawn to Manichaeism and later to neoplatonism. After his baptism and conversion to Christianity in 386, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and perspectives. Believing that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, he helped formulate the doctrine of original sin and made seminal contributions to the development of just war theory. When the Western Roman Empire began to disintegrate, Augustine imagined the Church as a spiritual City of God, distinct from the material Earthly City. His thoughts profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. The segment of the Church that adhered to the concept of the Trinity as defined by the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople closely identified with Augustine's On the Trinity.Augustine is recognized as a saint in the Catholic Church, the Eastern Christian Church, and the Anglican Communion and as a preeminent Doctor of the Church. He is also the patron of the Augustinians. His memorial is celebrated on 28 August, the day of his death. Augustine is the patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians, and a number of cities and dioceses. Many Protestants, especially Calvinists and Lutherans, consider him to be one of the theological fathers of the Protestant Reformation due to his teachings on salvation and divine grace. Protestant Reformers generally, and Martin Luther in particular, held Augustine in preeminence among early Church Fathers. Luther himself was, from 1505 to 1521, a member of the Order of the Augustinian Eremites.In the East, his teachings are more disputed, and were notably attacked by John Romanides. But other theologians and figures of the Eastern Orthodox Church have shown significant approbation of his writings, chiefly Georges Florovsky. The most controversial doctrine associated with him, the filioque, was rejected by the Orthodox Church as Heretic Teaching. Other disputed teachings include his views on original sin, the doctrine of grace, and predestination. Nevertheless, though considered to be mistaken on some points, he is still considered a saint, and has even had influence on some Eastern Church Fathers, most notably Saint Gregory Palamas. In the Orthodox Church his feast day is celebrated on 15 June. Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has written: "[Augustine's] impact on Western Christian thought can hardly be overstated; only his beloved example Paul of Tarsus, has been more influential, and Westerners have generally seen Paul through Augustine's eyes." (wikipedia.org)

Aiden Wilson Tozer (April 21, 1897 – May 12, 1963) was an American Christian pastor, author, magazine editor, and spiritual mentor. For his work, he received two honorary doctoral degrees.Tozer hailed from a tiny farming community in western La Jose, Pennsylvania. He converted to Christianity as a teenager, in Akron, Ohio; while on his way home from work at a tire company, he overheard a street preacher say, "If you don't know how to be saved ... just call on God, saying, 'Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.'" Upon returning home, he climbed into the attic and heeded the preacher's advice.In 1919, five years after his conversion and without formal theological training, Tozer accepted an offer to serve as pastor of his first church. That began 44 years of ministry, associated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA), a Protestant Evangelical denomination, 33 served as a pastor in a number of churches. His first pastorate was in a small storefront church in Nutter Fort, West Virginia. Tozer also served as pastor for 30 years at Southside Alliance Church, in Chicago (1928 to 1959), and the final years of his life were spent as pastor of Avenue Road Church, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In observing contemporary Christian living, he felt the church was on a dangerous course toward compromising with "worldly" concerns.Born into poverty, Tozer was self-educated and taught himself what he missed in high school and college.In May 1950, Tozer was elected as the editor of the Alliance Weekly magazine, now Alliance Life, a role he filled until his death in 1963. Alliance Life is the official publication of the C&MA and is currently a bi-monthly magazine. From his first editorial, titled Quality vs Quantity dated June 3, 1950, Tozer wrote, "It will cost something to walk slow in the parade of the ages, while excited men of time rush about confusing motion with progress. But it will pay in the long run and the true Christian is not much interested in anything short of that."Among the more than 60 books that bear his name, most of which were compiled after his death from sermons he preached and articles he wrote, at least two are regarded as Christian classics: The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy. Many of his books impress on the reader the possibility and necessity for a deeper relationship with God. (wikipedia.org)

Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey; c. February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time, he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.Douglass wrote several autobiographies. He described his experiences as a slave in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which became a bestseller, and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). After the Civil War, Douglass remained an active campaigner against slavery and wrote his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. First published in 1881 and revised in 1892, three years before his death, it covered events during and after the Civil War. Douglass also actively supported women's suffrage, and held several public offices. Without his approval, Douglass became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States as the running mate and Vice Presidential nominee of Victoria Woodhull, on the Equal Rights Party ticket.Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was also a believer in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, and in the liberal values of the U.S. Constitution. When radical abolitionists, under the motto "No Union with Slaveholders", criticized Douglass' willingness to engage in dialogue with slave owners, he replied: "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong." (wikipedia.org)

Andrew Lang, (born March 31, 1844, Selkirk, Selkirkshire, Scot.—died July 20, 1912, Banchory, Aberdeenshire), Scottish scholar and man of letters noted for his collections of fairy tales and translations of Homer.Educated at St. Andrews University and at Balliol College, Oxford, he held an open fellowship at Merton College until 1875, when he moved to London. He quickly became famous for his critical articles in The Daily News and other papers. He displayed talent as a poet in Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872), Helen of Troy (1882), and Grass of Parnassus (1888) and as a novelist with The Mark of Cain (1886) and The Disentanglers (1902). He earned special praise for his 12-volume collection of fairy tales, the first volume of which was The Blue Fairy Book (1889) and the last The Lilac Fairy Book (1910). His own fairy tales, The Gold of Fairnilee (1888), Prince Prigio (1889), and Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia (1893) became children’s classics.Lang also did important pioneer work in such volumes as Custom and Myth (1884) and Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887). Later he turned to history and historical mysteries, notably Pickle the Spy (1897), A History of Scotland from the Roman Occupation, 4 vol. (1900–07), Historical Mysteries (1904), and The Maid of France (1908). His lifelong devotion to Homer produced well-known prose translations of the Odyssey (1879), in collaboration with S.H. Butcher, and of the Iliad (1883), with Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers. He defended the theory of the unity of Homeric literature, and his World of Homer (1910) is an important study. (wikipedia.org)

Martin Eden is a novel by American author Jack London, about a proletarian young autodidact struggling to become a writer. It was first serialized in the Pacific Monthly magazine from September 1908 to September 1909, and subsequently published in book form by Macmillan in September 1909.This book is a favorite among writers, who relate to Martin Eden's speculation that when he mailed off a manuscript, 'there was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps,' returning it automatically with a rejection slip.[citation needed] The central theme of Martin Eden's developing artistic sensibilities puts the novel in tradition of the Künstlerroman genre, in whici is narrated the formation and development of an artist.( wikipedia.org)

That Printer of Udell's is a 1903 work of fiction by Harold Bell Wright.Wright, who served as a minister before becoming a writer, created a story with Christian themes. In the story, Dick Falkner, who comes from a broken home, sees his father under the influence of alcohol and his mother starving. After his parents die, Dick goes to Boyd City in the Midwestern United States to become employed. Dick believes that "Christians won't let me starve." A printer named George Udell hires Dick; both of them decide to become Christians and Dick becomes a revered member of the religious community due to his public speaking abilities and optimism. At the end of the book, Dick gets a political job in Washington, D.C.Ronald Reagan read the book at age 11 after his mother, a member of the Protestant Disciples of Christ Church, gave him the book. Reagan says that the book inspired him to become an evangelical Christian; he became baptized by his mother's congregation. At age 66 Reagan said that the book "left an abiding belief in the triumph of good over evil. (wikipedia.org)

The Romance of the Forest is a Gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe that was first published in 1791. It combines an air of mystery and suspense with an examination of the tension between hedonism and morality. The novel was her first major, popular success, going through four editions in its first three years. Furthermore, "this novel also established her reputation as the first among her era's writers of romance. There is surprisingly little essential difference in characterization, Gothic décor, or plot outline to distinguish this novel from its predecessors. Its superior merit lies in the expansive and subtle use which the author makes of these elements so that the characters are relatively well realized, the Gothic décor is blended into the sensibility of the reader rather than imposed upon it, and the plot is an intricate and often dramatic series of congruent incidents and living tableaux, not a congeries of barely related and stillborn scenes and surprises.” Most critics who have given any attention to Mrs. Radcliffe as a novelist have decided that she is important chiefly for her use of the supernatural, and for her emphasis upon landscape. Her use of the supernatural and emphasis upon landscape can clearly be seen throughout this novel. We see the aforementioned when confronted with the principal character in the novel, Adeline. She is a "highly-interesting character, whom the writer conducts through a series of alarming situations, and hair-breadth escapes, in which she has skillfully contrived to hold the reader’s curiosity continually in suspense, and at the same time to keep their feelings in a state of perpetual agitation.” (wikipedia.org)

Space Viking is a science fiction novel written by H. Beam Piper and is set in his Terro-Human future history. It tells the story of one man's search for his wife's murderer and its unexpected consequences. The story was originally serialized in Analog magazine.BackgroundTen thousand refugees from the losing side of The Big War (The System States War of The Cosmic Computer) fled far beyond the boundaries of the Terran Federation and colonized the planet Excalibur. By the beginning of Space Viking, they had expanded to a handful of Sword Worlds (so-called because they are named after legendary swords) and had grown to a total population of three and a half billion, organized in a feudal system of kingdoms, duchies, and other small states, ruled by frequently-warring noblemen. Despite their isolation and the political instability, the inhabitants managed to retain a high level of technology, including space flight.One day, a starship rediscovered the Old Federation. Civilization had collapsed, presumably due to the war; many of the planets had regressed to varying stages of semi-barbarism. Taking advantage of the situation, "Space Vikings" (reminiscent of Norse vikings) proceeded to raid the poorly defended Federation worlds over the next three hundred years for loot.

Woolf's best-selling spoof biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's lap dog, Flush, has until recently received relatively little serious critical attention. Flush: A Biography has been read as an allegory of class war, lesbian love, the plight of women writers, and much else besides. In the context of the recent rise in animal studies, this work is ripe for reappraisal. The present essay argues for the novel's significant contribution to the understanding, in Woolf's era and our own, of pressing questions concerning animality in relation to writing, gender and feminism. Woolf's 'little brown dog' speaks to some notorious feminist antivivisectionist cultural works and political interventions in the first decades of the twentieth-century as well as to more recent feminist philosophical interests in animality, and canine animality in particular. (Wiley Online library)

Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, writing dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, satire, biography, and autobiography, and even including two books on recreational war games. He is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called a "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback.During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction". Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption – dubbed “Wells’s law” – leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 as "O Realist of the Fantastic!". His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907). Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.The Island of Doctor Moreau is an 1896 science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. The text of the novel is the narration of Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man rescued by a passing boat who is left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection. The novel deals with a number of philosophical themes, including pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, and human interference with nature. Wells described it as "an exercise in youthful blasphemy."The Island of Doctor Moreau is a classic of early science fiction and remains one of Wells' best-known books. The novel is the earliest depiction of the science fiction motif "uplift" in which a more advanced race intervenes in the evolution of an animal species to bring the latter to a higher level of intelligence. It has been adapted to film and other media on many occasions, with Charles Laughton (1933), Burt Lancaster (1977), and Marlon Brando (1996) as the mad doctor. (wikipedia.org)

Joseph Alexander Altsheler (April 29, 1862 – June 5, 1919) was an American newspaper reporter, editor and author of popular juvenile historical fiction. He was a prolific writer, and produced fifty-one novels and at least fifty-three short stories. Thirty-two of his novels were part of his seven series.Although each of the thirty-two novels constitutes an independent story, Altsheler suggested a reading order for each series (i.e., he numbered the volumes). The remaining nineteen novels can be read in any order. [Note, however, that A Knight of Philadelphia was later expanded through the addition of nineteen chapters and some minor tweaks to become Mr. Altsheler's novel In Hostile Red.]The short stories, of course, can be read in any order. However, some readers might prefer to read them in the order in which they were published. The short story list below is displayed in chronological order with the publication dates shown alongside the titles.Altsheler was born in Three Springs, Hart County, Kentucky, to Joseph and Louise (née Snoddy) Altsheler. He attended Liberty College in Glasgow, Kentucky, before entering Vanderbilt University.In 1885, he took a job at the Louisville Courier-Journal as a reporter and later worked as an editor. He started working for the New York World in 1892, first as the paper's Hawaiian correspondent and then as the editor of the World's tri-weekly magazine. Due to a lack of suitable stories, he began writing children's stories for the magazine.Altsheler married Sarah Boles on May 30, 1888; they had one son, Sidney.Altsheler and his family were in Germany in 1914 when World War I began, and they were forced to remain in Germany for a time. The hardships the Altshelers endured in returning to the U.S. damaged Altsheler's health and rendered him a semi-invalid until his death. Upon returning to the U.S., he wrote The World War Series of books based on his ordeal.Altsheler died in New York City on June 5, 1919, aged 57; his obituary appeared in The Evening World, on June 6, 1919. His widow, Sarah, died 30 years later. Both are buried at the Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky. (wikipedia.org)