Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was among the first to emphasize scie…
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosop…
Neal Stephenson is the author of Reamde, Anathem, and the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World), as well as Cryptonomicon, The Diamon…
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review were important in the development of early 20th-century English and Amer…
David Foster Wallace was an acclaimed American writer known for his fiction, nonfiction, and critical essays that explored the complexities of consciousness, irony, and the human condition. Widely reg…
James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his …
Vladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Pete…
Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts …
Robert Walser, a German-Swiss prose writer and novelist, enjoyed high repute among a select group of authors and critics in Berlin early in his career, only to become nearly forgotten by the time he c…
Tony Kushner is an award-winning American playwright most famous for his play Angels in America, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is also co-author, along with Eric Roth, of the screenp…
László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter who is known for critically difficult and demanding novels, often labelled as postmodern, with dystopian and bleak melancholic themes. He …
Carole Angier is the award-winning biographer of Jean Rhys (1985 & 1990). Her biography of the great Italian writer Primo Levi was published in the UK and the US in 2002 to critical acclaim. Carole wa…
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short…
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told…
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. She was awarded the 2018 No…
Lucy Ellmann was born in Evanston, Illinois, the daughter of biographer Richard Ellmann and writer Mary Ellmann (née Donahue). She moved to England at the age of 13 and was educated at Falmouth School…
Many works, including Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life; he won t…
Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's …
The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics…