Philippe Ariès (21 July 1914 – 8 February 1984) was a French medievalist and historian of the family and childhood, in the style of Georges Duby. He wrote many books on the common daily life. His most…
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the "long 19th centur…
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…
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…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philol…
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and, although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, …
Works of Simone de Beauvoir, French writer, existentialist, and feminist, include The Second Sex in 1949 and The Coming of Age, a study in 1970 of views of different cultures on the old.
Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. He went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but …
Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. He married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit', a c…
Marguerite Yourcenar, original name Marguerite de Crayencour, was a french novelist, essayist, poet and short-story writer who became the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française (French Ac…
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).
Chrétien de Troyes, commonly regarded as the father of Arthurian romance and a key figure in Western literature, composed in French in the latter part of the twelfth century. Virtually nothing is know…
Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫) was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944 an…
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told…
Nacido en 1904 en una familia católica de clase media, del sur de Francia, Marrou realizó sus estudios en la Escuela Normal Superior de París sobre la calle Ulm, y obtuvo la agregación de historia en …
José de Sousa Saramago (16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Portuguese novelist and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony…
Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer and speaker, who held both a Master's in Theology and a Doctorate of Divinity. Famous for his research on comparative religion, he was best known as…
A preoccupation with sexual violence characterizes novels, plays, and short stories that Donatien Alphonse François, comte de Sade but known as marquis de Sade, of France wrote. After this writer deri…
The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics…
