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…
Aristophanes (Greek: Αριστοφάνης; c. 446 – c. 386 BC) was an Ancient Greek comic playwright from Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. He wrote in total forty plays, of which eleven survive virtually…
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…
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking writer from Prague whose work became one of the foundations of modern literature, even though he published only a small part of his writing during his lifetime. Born …
Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933) was an American Presbyterian clergyman, educator, and author. He graduated from Princeton in 1873, and from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1874. He was pastor of the Bric…
William John Locke was a British novelist, dramatist and playwright, best known for his short stories. His works have been made into 24 motion pictures, the most recent of which was Ladies in Lavender…
Clark Ashton Smith was a poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. It is for these stories, and his literary friendship with H. P. Lovecraft from 1922 un…
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.
Countee Cullen was was an American poet who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He was raised in a Methodist parsonage. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York and began writin…
Russian writer Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov (Russian: Алексей Максимович Пешков) supported the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and helped to develop socialist realism as the officially accepted literary a…
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…