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This article presents a step-by-step procedure of researching term paper topics in literature. The first step is to narrow the topic. The second step is to research main ideas. Step 3 is to form a thesis statement and outline. Each step is discussed in detail and tips are given for completing the steps.

The article presents a research guide on the biography and works of dramatist Manuel Tamayo Y Baus. He was born on September 15, 1829 in Madrid, Spain to José Tamayo, leading actor and theatre director, and Joaquina Baus, a leading lady of the theatre who encouraged her son to follow a career as a playwright. Since Tamayo requested that his personal papers be burned after his death, very little autobiographical material is extant. There are a number of letters and a few papers which have appeared, and the fact that he was very well-known during his lifetime has allowed scholars to compile some facts about his life.

This article presents a selection of works about playwright Clifford Odets. The best brief biographical treatment of Odets is in Gerald Weales' Clifford Odets: Playwright, which is both biographical and critical. R. Baird Shuman's Clifford Odets, the first book-length study of Odets, covers similar ground but is less extensive than the Weales book. Certainly the most ambitious biography to date is Margaret Brenman-Gibson's Clifford Odets: American Playwright, The Years From 1906-1940, the first volume of a proposed two-volume study. Brenman-Gibson, who as Odets' literary executor has access to all of his unpublished papers, has produced a well-documented biographical study.

The article presents a research guide on the life and works of author Edith Wharton. Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862 to wealthy, socially prominent parents in New York City, New York. In 1885, she married Edward Wharton, a wealthy Bostonian playboy. She started her writing career with the publication of two stories in 1891. Wharton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the book The Age of Innocence in 1921. She died in 1937 following a stroke, leaving papers to Yale University with stipulation that they not be opened until 1968.

The article presents a research guide on the life and works of author Jonathan Swift. He was born on November 30, 1667 in Dublin, Ireland. He started his career in literary writing in 1704 and published his satiric prose, entitled A Tale of a Tub. His works include: The Bickerstaff Papers published in 1708, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in 1708, The Conduct of the Allies in 1711, A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture in 1720, and The Drapier's Letters in 1724. Jonathan Swift has been both blessed and cursed by constant biographical attention. The almost microscopic investigation of Swift, begun even before his death, has yielded a great deal of useful information about the many mysteries and puzzles of his life, including his shifting political allegiances, curiously ambivalent relationships to two young women he nicknamed Stella and Vanessa, and lifelong mental and physical complaints, ending in what has often been called the madness of his last few years.

The article presents a research guide on the life and works of author Upton Sinclair. He was born on September 20, 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland. He started his career as an author in 1901. The article also cited several of his novels which include: Springtime and Harvest in 1901, The Journal of Arthur Stirling in 1903, and The Jungle in 1906. Because Sinclair saved everything he wrote, biographical material is not hard to find. The problem is selecting that which is important from among the plethora of material. Almost all scholarly articles about Sinclair are biographical. Nearly all of Sinclair's papers written before March 16, 1907 were destroyed by fire. The Lilly Library at Indiana University, however, contains more than eight tons of Sinclair materials, including more than 250,000 letters. Also, the article contains an overview and evaluation of several autobiographical sources and criticism on his works.

The paper presents a research guide to the life and works of author Edna Saint Vincent Millay. She was born on February 22, 1892 in Rockland Maine. Millay gained national recognition with the publication of Renascence. She received a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In 1944 she suffered a nervous breakdown, stops writing for two years. Much of the biographical material written on Millay is either overly simplistic and exuberant or overly concerned with her Greenwich village lovers. Written for a juvenile audience, Tony Shafter's biography concentrates on Millay's childhood. The most complete biography to date is Jean Gould's The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay wrote no autobiography, however, because her poetry is so personal, much of it could be considered autobiographical. In prose, the closest source to an autobiography would be Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, edited by Allan Ross Macdougall.

The paper presents a research guide to the life and works of poet John Lydgate. He was born about 1370 in the small village of Lydgate in Suffolk, England. In 1412 he was commissioned by Prince Henry to write the story of Troy. Lydgate returns from France in 1429, and celebrated the coronation of Henry VI in a number of occasional poems. A literary biography of Lydgate is near impossible for there is little sense of self-expression or inner development in his poems which are written more in adherence to conventional literary models than in response to particular events in his life. The one book that can be regarded as definitive is Walter F. Schirmer's John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, translated from German by Ann E. Keep. Alain Renoir's The Poetry of John Lydgate argues Lydgate's role as a transitional figure and precursor of the Renaissance in England. In place of the negative modem image of the poet, Derek Pearsall established a picture of a highly professional and skillful craftsman in a wide range of poetic genres.

This article presents a research guide to the life and works of author John Milton. Because of his controversial views on divorce, eloquent defense of the regicide position, and growing literary reputation, Milton was the subject of several contemporary and near-contemporary biographies. These have been collected by Helen Darbishire in The Early Lives of Milton. Much knowledge of Milton's character, physical person, and way of life is gathered from these early biographies. Next in importance is H. J. Todd's Some Account of the Life and Writings of John Milton: Derived Principally from Documents in his Majesty's State-Paper Office. The most important breakthrough in Milton biography was the massive study by David Masson, The Life of John Milton 1859-1880. Other seminal studies included James Holly Hanford's study of Milton as a specifically English poet, John Milton, Englishman.

This paper presents a research guide to the life and works of author Herman Melville. He was born on August 1, 1819 in New York City to Allan and Maria Melville. In 1840 he signed on the whaling ship, Acushnet. Melville was briefly imprisoned in Tahiti for joining with the crew's rebellion. His first novels attracted considerable attention, but during the last 35 years of his life he published little and his literary reputation faded. Lewis Mumford's Herman Melville stood as the authoritative biography for two decades. The mid-century explosion of interest in Melville has created a mature body of criticism that now comprises over 300 book-length studies and 1,000 articles. In Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth, Edgar A. Dryden argues that Melville believed that only fiction could safely convey truth because it allows the reader an indirect revelation of existence.

The paper presents a research guide to the life and works of poet Andrew Marvell. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, England in 1633. Marvell contributed Greek and Latin poems to a Cambridge volume on the birth of Princess Anne in 1637. During 1663-1665 Marvell went to Russia as secretary for Earl of Carlisle's embassy. Only a few of Marvell's poems were published during his lifetime. His collected lyrics first saw print in the posthumous Miscellaneous Poems of 1681. During his own day Marvell was known primarily for his prose. Charles Lamb in 1818 urged Marvell's value as a lyric poet, and others from time to time commented upon the neglected excellencies of his lyrics and his Cromwell poems, or admired him as a nature poet or as a staunch parliamentary defender of liberty, but it was not until the 300th anniversary of his birth that his reputation as a lyric poet began to become really substantial. Because most of his work is in a wide variety of eight-syllable stanza forms, he has been recognized as the master of the octosyllabic.

This paper presents a research guide to the life and works of author Louis MacNeice. He was born on September 12, 1907 in Belfast, Ireland to Anglo-Irish parents. His first collection of poetry Blind Fireworks was published in 1929. In 1957 MacNeice was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire. There are few biographies of MacNeice that are not also studies of his poetry. His life, especially his childhood, played an important role in forming his concern for beliefs, and his difficulty in having any of his own. In Louis MacNeice: The Skeptical Vision, Terrence Brown combines MacNeice's biography with criticism of his poetry to establish what he terms MacNeice's skepticism. MacNeice's works are very personal and do reveal much about the poet, so Brown's approach works well, doing justice to both the man and the poetry. Louis MacNeice in the BBC, by Barbara Coulton, is a comprehensive survey of his radio career. Her writing style is enjoyable, and her chapter on MacNeice's trip to India is especially well written.

This article presents biographical and bibliographical information on novelist and author John Buchan. Buchan was born on August 26, 1875 in Perth, Scotland, the son of a Free Church minister. He entered Brasenose College, Oxford in 1895 and from 1899 to 1903 studies for the Bar in London and wrote for the periodical "Spectator." In 1934 he was appointed High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Adam Smith, a friend of Buchan and his family, covers all phases of Buchan's career with accuracy and sympathy, using documents, letters, private papers, and interviews.William Buchan provides little analysis or background information on Buchan's writings, but he does complain of modern critical coldness to Buchan, based, he feels, on the critical shift away from the well told story to more experimental fictional techniques and the unfashionableness of Buchan's conservative values.

The article presents a research guide to the life and works of playwright George Etherege. The chief source for information about Etherege's life is his letters. Two of his official letter books are at Harvard University; other letters can be found in the Middleton Papers at the British Museum. Despite Etherege's small output of only three plays, an increasing number of articles and especially dissertations have been written about his work. Early commentary concentrated on the immorality of his works; modern critics have been more interested in Etherege's rake heroes, strong-minded heroines, type characters, his treatment of marriage, and his sources.

This article presents a research guide to the life and works of literary author Dorothy L. Sayers. She was born on June 13, 1893 in Oxford, England. She attended Somerville College at Oxford University in 1912 and was awarded a degree in Modern Languages in 1915. Some of her works are: Op. 1; Whose Body?; and, Clouds of Witness. Despite Sayers' request that no biography of her be published until 50 years after her death, several biographies have been written since 1975. The first, Janet Hitchman's Such a Strange Lady, is highly speculative because of the author's inability to gain access to Sayers' personal papers.

This paper presents a research guide to the life and works of author Thomas Babington Macaulay. He was born on October 25, 1800 in Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, England. In 1839 he was elected to the parliament for Edinburgh, Scotland and became Secretary-at-War. His first authorized collection of essays appeared in 1943. G. O. Trevelyan's The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay has set the tone for all subsequent biographical studies. No one has, as yet, tried to supplant it as the definitive study of Macaulay's life. John Clive's Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian is a bio-critical work that focuses on the development of Macaulay's literary and public careers to 1839. Macaulay wrote to reach a large audience, many critics have seemingly faulted him for this and have denigrated his work as decidedly middlebrow. Other critics have admired Macaulay's rhetorical skill and his vivid imagery. Twentieth-century admirers of Macaulay have generally followed the lead of the nineteenth-century critics in emphasizing his narrative style.

This article presents bibliographical sources on the life and works of author Sir Richard Steele. In the book Educating the Audience: Addison, Steele, and Eighteenth-Century Culture, Edward A. Bloom, Lillian Bloom, and Edmund Leites examine the role of the imagination and contemplation in the life and works of Steele. In his book Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance & Form in the "Spectator" Papers, Michael G. Ketcham attempts to explain why The Spectator was the most successful, polished, and influential periodical of the eighteenth century.

The article presents a research guide on the life and works of poet Archibald MacLeish. The book, Archibald MacLeish: Reflections, edited by Bernard Drabeck and Helen Ellis, is a compilation of interviews with MacLeish conducted between 1976 and 1981. MacLeish called these discussions the autobiography of his professional life. The interviews touch on all of the major events of his career. On the other hand, The Proceedings of the Archibald MacLeish Symposium, May 7-8, 1982, edited by Bernard A. Drabeck, et al., is a collection of twenty papers and twenty short tributes offers a personal portrait of MacLeish as writer and former Librarian of Congress.

This article presents a research guide to biography and criticism on the works of author Leigh Hunt. "The Life and Times of Leigh Hunt," edited by Robert A. McCown, is a collection of papers delivered at the University of Iowa to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Hunt's birth. Topics include: Charles Dickens' portrayal of Hunt as Harold Stimpole in Bleak House; gender criticism--specifically how Hunt connected female beauty to innocent incest, and how this affects the way women read him; his success on the stage; his personal essays; his contribution to cultural influence during the high Victorian age; and his association with libraries.

The article evaluates selected biography and criticism of author and playwright John Galsworthy. John Galsworthy's Life and Art: An Alien's Fortress by James Gindin describes the playwright as being rooted in earlier traditions and out of step with the modernism of his own times. Drawing on family papers and other archival materials, Gindin has produced a biography of Galsworthy that attempts to carve an appropriate niche for him in literary history. John Galsworthy by Sanford Sternlicht is a thorough and interesting introduction to the life and works of Galsworthy, who was considered the most accessible writer of his generation.

This article presents a selection of works about poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In the biography, Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time, Barry Silesky argued that Ferlinghetti's life and poetry have been shaped by how the outsider was an inextricable part of his identity. Silesky had access to Ferlinghetti's journals, papers and personal comments in compiling his work. The main drawback in the book, Constantly Risking Absurdity: The Writings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is that it is excessively annotated with bibliographic citations, quotations and references.

The article present a research guide on the life and works of author Joseph Addison. In Educating the Audience: Addison, Steele and Eighteenth-Century Culture, Edward A. Bloom and Lillian Bloom examine the role of the imagination and contemplation in the life and works of Addison and Steele. Edmund Leites, on the other hand, focuses on the ethics of Steele on issues of marriage and the civilities of social life. In Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance & Form in the Spectator Papers, Michael G. Ketcham attempts to explain why The Spectator was the most successful, polished and influential periodical of the eighteenth century.