Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in…
Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu , known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (195…
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, usually known as just Tocqueville, was a French aristocrat, diplomat, sociologist, political scientist, political philosopher, and historian. He is b…
Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country and abroad. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, rea…
Prague-born writer Franz Kafka wrote in German, and his stories, such as "The Metamorphosis" (1916), and posthumously published novels, including The Trial (1925), concern troubled individuals…
Diaries and novels, such as The Immoralist (1902) and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914), of noted French writer André Gide examine alienation and the drive for individuality in an often disapprovin…
Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu, was a Romanian playwright and dramatist; one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays …
Genevan philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau held that society usually corrupts the essentially good individual; his works include The Social Contract and Émile (both 1762).
Thomas Hobbes was a British philosopher and a seminal thinker of modern political philosophy. His ideas were marked by a mechanistic materialist foundation, a characterization of human nature based on…
Work on the Encyclopédie (1751-1772), supreme accomplishment of French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot, epitomized the spirit of thought of Enlightenment; he also wrote novels, plays, critica…
After Napoleon III seized power in 1851, French writer Victor Marie Hugo went into exile and in 1870 returned to France; his novels include The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables…
Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later sym…
Adam Smith FRSA FRS FRSE was a Scottish philosopher and economist who was a pioneer in thinking on political economy and a key figure during the Scottish…
Irène Némirovsky was born in Kyiv in 1903 into a successful banking family. Trapped in Moscow by the Russian Revolution, she and her family fled first to a village in Finland, and eventually to France…
Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev (Russian: Леонид Николаевич Андреев; 1871-1919) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who led the Expressionist movement in the national literature. He was acti…
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand was a French writer, politician and diplomat. He is considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature.
He has also been mistakenly given the forename Fr…
Annemarie Selinko (September 1, 1914 - July 28, 1986) was an Austrian novelist who wrote a number of best-selling books in German from the 1930s through the 1950s. Although she had been based in Germa…
John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an eth…
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and literary critic. In the 1830 Revolution, he chose to stay with friends in the Doyenné district of Paris, living a…
Alfred Louis Charles de Musset-Pathay (11 December 1810 – 2 May 1857) was a French dramatist, poet, and novelist. Along with his poetry, he is known for writing La Confession d'un enfant du siècle (Th…
Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremos…
Christian Bobin is a French author and poet. He received the 1993 Prix des Deux Magots for the book Le Très-Bas (translated into English in 1997 by Michael H. Kohn and published under two titles: The …
Hirai Tarō (平井 太郎), better known by the pseudonym Rampo Edogawa ( 江戸川 乱歩), sometimes romanized as "Ranpo Edogawa", was a Japanese author and critic who played a major role in the development of Japane…
