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…
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was the primary a…
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems. Born into the prominent Huxle…
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spe…
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 …
Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a re…
Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 - 1599) was an important English poet and Poet Laureate best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem celebrating, through fantastical allegory, the Tudor dynasty and Elizabet…
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. Educated at Harvard and the Cambridge Divinity School, he became a Unitarian minister in 1826 at the Second Church Unitarian. The congregation, with Chr…
Eugene Bondurant Sledge (November 4, 1923 – March 3, 2001) was a United States Marine, university professor, and author. His 1981 memoir With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa chronicled his comba…
Christopher Columbus (c. 1451–1506) was a Genoese navigator, colonizer and explorer whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean led to general European awareness of the American continents in the Western …
Thomas Paine was an English-American political activist, author, political theorist and revolutionary. As the author of two highly influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, he ins…
Spanish colonial administrator Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored parts of present-day Florida, Texas, and Mexico and aroused interest in the region with his vivid stories of opportunities.
1635 -1711 Mrs. Mary White Rowlandson was a Puritan resident of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who was captured by Native Americans and held for 11 weeks before being ransomed in 1676. Her later memoir o…
A master of poetry, drama, and the novel, German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent 50 years on his two-part dramatic poem Faust, published in 1808 and 1832, also conducted scie…
The term Founding Fathers of the United States of America refers broadly to the individuals of the Thirteen British Colonies in North America who led the American Revolution against the authority of t…
Sir Thomas More (1477-1535), venerated by Catholics as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He was a councillor to Henry VII…
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.
Dante Alighieri, or simply Dante (May 14/June 13 1265 – September 13/14, 1321), is one of the greatest poets in the Italian language; with the story-teller, Boccaccio, and the poet, Petrarch, he forms…
