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…
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); …
Michael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, D.C., he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the Uni…
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890…
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Su…
Jean Anouilh was a French dramatist and screenwriter whose career spanned five decades, producing works that ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, though he is best remembered for his 1944 produc…
Irish-born British writer, university lecturer and prolific and highly professional novelist, Iris Murdoch dealt with everyday ethical or moral issues, sometimes in the light of…
Thomas Lanier Williams III, better known by the nickname Tennessee Williams, was a major American playwright of the twentieth century who received many of the top theatrical awards for his work. He mo…
The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman and photographer.
Boris Vian was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. He is best remembered for novels such as L’Écume des jours and L'Arrache-cœur (trans…
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre i…
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and one of the most distinctive contemporary writers in English. Born in Toronto in 1950, she studied Classics at the University of To…
People best know British playwright John James Osborne, member of the Angry Young Men, for his play Look Back in Anger (1956); vigorous social protest characterizes works of this group of English …
Literary reputation of Irish-born British writer Oliver Goldsmith rests on his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), the pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770), and the dramatic comedy Sh…
Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938) is an English dramatist known for her use of non-naturalistic techniques and feminist themes, dramatisation of the abuses of power, and exploration of sexual po…
Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class differenc…
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…
Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. Hi…
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often deals with the lives of marginalized people. She is a professor of Playwriting at Columbia University. She was the first woman to have won the P…
Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan, CBE was a British dramatist. He was one of England's most popular mid twentieth century dramatists. His plays are typically set in an upper-middle-class background. He is …
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 …
Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of h…
