Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84 BC – ca. 54 BC) was a Roman poet of the 1st century BC. His surviving works are still read widely, and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art. Catullus inv…
Homer (Greek: Όμηρος born c. 8th century BC) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer …
Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horatius, with whom he…
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, …
Wang Wei (Chinese: 王維, 699-761) was a Chinese poet, painter, musician, and politician of the Tang dynasty, widely regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential literary figures of his time.…
Emily Brontë was an English novelist and poet whose singular contribution to literature, Wuthering Heights, is now celebrated as one of the most powerful and original novels in the English language. B…
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…
Charles Robert Darwin of Britain revolutionized the study of biology with his theory, based on natural selection; his most famous works include On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent o…
Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascina…
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, commonly known as Suetonius (ca. 69/75 - after 130), was a Roman historian belonging to the equestrian order in the early Imperial era. His most important surviving work i…
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1532-1592) was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. Montaigne is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. He became famous for his ef…
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…
Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.
Constantine P. Cavafy (also known as Konstantin or Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, or Kavaphes; Greek Κ.Π. Καβάφης) was a major Greek poet who worked as a journalist and civil servant. His consciously in…
Work of Greek lyric poet Sappho, noted for its passionate and erotic celebration of the beauty of young women and men, after flourit circa 600 BC and survives only in fragments.
Ramanujan was an Indian poet, scholar and author, a philologist, folklorist, translator, poet and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and …
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (Cyrillic: Иван Сергеевич Тургенев) was a novelist, poet, and dramatist, and now ranks as one of the towering figures of Russian literature. His major works include the short…
Richard Hakluyt (c. 1552 or 1553 - 1616) was an English writer. He is principally remembered for his efforts in promoting and supporting the settlement of North America by the English through his work…
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…
Baltasar Gracián y Morales, SJ, formerly Anglicized as Baltazar Gracian, was a Spanish Jesuit and baroque prose writer and philosopher. He was born in Belmonte, near Calatayud (Aragón). His proto-exis…
German philologist and folklorist Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm in 1822 formulated Grimm's Law, the basis for much of modern comparative linguistics. With his brother Wilhelm Karl Grimm (1786-1859), he coll…
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as Seneca or Seneca the Younger); ca. 4 BC – 65 AD) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tuto…
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…
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (芥川 龍之介) was one of the first prewar Japanese writers to achieve a wide foreign readership, partly because of his technical virtuosity, partly because his work seemed to represent …
Yoshida Kenkō (吉田 兼好, 1283? – 1350?) was a Japanese author and Buddhist monk. His most famous work is Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), one of the most studied works of medieval Japanese literature.…
Hāfez (حافظ) (Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī) was a Persian poet whose collected works (The Divan) are regarded as a pinnacle of Persian literature and are to be found in the homes of mo…
