Michael Andrew Screech was a cleric and a professor of French literature with special interests in the Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne and François Rabelais.
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including hi…
Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking wo…
Plato (Greek: Πλάτων), born Aristocles (c. 427 – 348 BC), was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of t…
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's…
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…
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…
Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933, grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and…
Dr. Sigismund Freud (later changed to Sigmund) was a neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. He is regarded a…
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…
Widely regarded as England's most influential living literary critic & theorist, Dr. Terry Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster and…
Early work of Blaise Pascal of France included the invention of the adding machine and syringe and the co-development with Pierre de Fermat of the mathematical theory of probability; later, he, a Jans…
Alain de Botton is a writer and television producer who lives in London and aims to make philosophy relevant to everyday life. He can be contacted by email directly via www.alaindebotton.com
Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was probably born a slave at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present day Pamukkale, Turkey), and lived in Rome until his exile to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, whe…
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems …
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 …
Richard J. Evans is one of the world's leading historians of modern Germany. He was born in London in 1947. From 2008 to 2014 he was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University, and from 2020 …
Epicurus (Greek: Ἐπίκουρος, Epikouros, "upon youth"; Samos, 341 BCE – Athens, 270 BCE; 72 years) was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism. Only …
Byung-Chul Han, also spelled Pyŏng-ch'ŏl Han (born 1959 in Seoul), is a German author, cultural theorist, and Professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) in Berlin, Germany.
Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, …
Roman mathematician Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, imprisoned on charges of treason, wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, his greatest work, an investigation of destiny and free will, while a…
Early church father and philosopher Saint Augustine served from 396 as the bishop of Hippo in present-day Algeria and through such writings as the autobiographical Confessions in 397 and the volum…
William Knowlton Zinsser is an American writer, editor, literary critic, and teacher. He began his career as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked as a feature writer, drama ed…
