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…
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a Scottish writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about…
Written in stolen moments under truck chassis and on park benches to a soundtrack of The Downward Spiral and Pablo Honey, Fight Club came into existence. The adaptation of Fight Club was a flop at the…
Emily Dickinson was an American poet who, despite the fact that less than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime, is widely considered one of the most original…
A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (19…
Mary Shelley (née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, often known as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, travel writer, and editor of the…
Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as S…
After Napoleon III seized power in 1851, French writer Victor Marie Hugo went into exile and in 1870 returned to France; his novels include The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables…
Public condemned Les fleurs du mal (1857), obscene only volume of French writer, translator, and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire; expanded in 1861, it exerted an enormous influence over later sym…
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer. He is one of the fathers of the modern short story. A protege of Flaubert, Maupassant's short stories are characterized by…
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ball…
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…
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…
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of English literature. He was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges…
Herbert George Wells was born to a working class family in Kent, England. Young Wells received a spotty education, interrupted by several illnesses and family difficulties, and became a draper's appre…
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…
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…
