Edith Wharton emerged as one of America’s most insightful novelists, deftly exposing the tensions between societal expectation and personal desire through her vivid portrayals of upper-class life. Dra…
John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors t…
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); …
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…
Kate Chopin was an American author whose fiction grew out of the complex cultures and contradictions of Louisiana life, and she gradually became one of the most distinctive voices in nineteenth centur…
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. He is seen as a key figure in the development of American literature for his tales of the nation's colonial history.
Such volumes as Cabbages and Kings (1904) and The Four Million (1906) collect short stories, noted for their often surprising endings, of American writer William Sydney Porter, who used the pe…
James Fenimore Cooper was a popular and prolific American writer. He is best known for his historical novel The Last of the Mohicans, one of the Leatherstocking Tales stories, and he also wrote politi…
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…
Caustic wit and a strong sense of horror mark works, including In the Midst of Life (1891-1892) and The Devil's Dictionary (1906), of American writer Ambrose Gwinett Bierce.
Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
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…
Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American novelist, poet and journalist, best known for the novel, The Red Badge of Courage. That work introduced the reading world to Crane's striking prose, a mix of …
Anthony Horowitz, OBE is ranked alongside Enid Blyton and Mark A. Cooper as "The most original and best spy-kids authors of the century." (New York Times). Anthony has been writing since the age of ei…
Sarah Orne Jewett was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for her local color works set in or near South Berwick, Maine, on the border of New Hampshire, which in her day was a decl…
Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.
Charles Waddell Chesnutt was an author, essayist and political activist, best known for his novels and short stories exploring complex issues of racial and social identity.
Willam Dean Howells (1837-1920) was a novelist, short story writer, magazine editor, and mentor who wrote for various magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Magazine.
Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 – July 27, 1948) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actress, director, novelist, biographer and poet. She was a founding member of the Provincetown…
1798-1839, also known as William Apes. Methodist preacher, writer and political activist of Pequot and mixed heritage. His book A Son of the Forest was among the first published autobiographies by a N…
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…
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…
