Most famous for his 1962 essay "Notes on the Auteur theory" which popularized this film criticism technique in America. He wrote for the Village Voice criticing films and literature before bringing th…
Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of la…
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…
Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in…
Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold milli…
Peter Biskind is an American cultural critic, film historian, and journalist, best known for his tenure as executive editor of Premiere magazine from 1986 to 1996. He attended Swarthmore College and a…
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…
Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, poet, and, of late, disc jockey who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan…
Guy Ernest Debord was a French theorist, writer, filmmaker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International. In broad terms, Debord's theories att…
Michael John Parenti, Ph.D. (Yale University) is an American political scientist, academic historian and cultural critic who writes on scholarly and popular subjects. He has taught at universities as …
William Patrick Kinsella, OC, OBC was a Canadian novelist and short story writer. His work has often concerned baseball and Canada's First Nations and other Canadian issues.
Ronald Bergan is a regular contributor to The Guardian and the author of several critically acclaimed books on film, including biographies of directors Francis Ford Coppola, Jean Renoir, Sergei Eisens…
Tom Schatz is the Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair (and interim chairman) of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has been on the faculty since 1976,…
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an Academy Award- and Palme d'Or-winning American film director, screenwriter and actor. He rose to fame in the early 1990s as an independent filmmaker whose films used non…
For most of his early adulthood, Bolaño was a vagabond, living at one time or another in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France and Spain. Bolaño moved to Europe in 1977, and finally made his way to Spain…
French writer Honoré de Balzac (born Honoré Balzac), a founder of the realist school of fiction, portrayed the panorama of society in a body of works, known collectively as La comédie humaine.
Jeanine Basinger holds a BS and MS from South Dakota State University. She is a film historian, professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University and curator and founder of The Cinema Archives at Wesle…
Mark Harris’s first book, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, was published this year. He writes the “Final Cut” column for Entertainment Weekly and has also writ…
Miguel de Cervantes y Cortinas, later Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His novel Don Quixote is often considered his magnum opus, as well as the first modern novel.
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung, and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, statesman…
Matthew Gregory Lewis was an English novelist and dramatist, often referred to as "Monk" Lewis, because of the success of his classic Gothic novel, The Monk.
Isaac Butler is the author of the NBCC Award winner The Method and the coauthor of The World Only Spins Forward. Butler’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, Slate, American…
Michael Schulman is the author of the New York Times bestseller "Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep." He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has contributed since 2006. His work has also appea…