Alfred Victor de Vigny (1797-1863) was born in Loches (a town to which he never returned) into an aristocratic family. His father was an aged veteran of the Seven Years' War who died before Vigny's 20…
Bio Joy Harjo Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. She has released four award-winning CD's of original music and won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for B…
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 …
Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country and abroad. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, rea…
Umberto Eco was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of t…
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British and American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migration…
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…
Anne Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family. Anne's two novels, written in a sharp and ironic style, are completely different from the romanticism f…
French humanist François Rabelais wrote satirical attacks, most notably Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), on medieval scholasticism and superstition.
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…
Jean Genet was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright. His work, muc…
Guatemalan poet, novelist, diplomat, and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1967. Asturias's writings combine the mysticism of the Maya with epic impulse toward social protest. His most famou…
Jean Giono, the only son of a cobbler and a laundress, was one of France's greatest writers. His prodigious literary output included stories, essays, poetry, plays, film scripts, translations and over…
Leslie Feinberg was a transgender activist, speaker, and author. Feinberg was a high ranking member of the Workers World Party and a managing editor of Workers World newspaper.
Herculine Barbin (November 8, 1838 – February 13, 1868) was a French intersex person who was assigned female at birth and raised in a convent, but was later reclassified as male by a court of law, aft…
Henri Michaux was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian poet, writer and painter who wrote in the French language. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his b…
Ernst Jünger was a decorated German soldier and author who became famous for his World War I memoir Storm of Steel. The son of a successful businessman and chemist, Jünger rebelled against an affluent…
Works, such as the novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), of Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Albert Camus concern the absurdity of the human condition; he won the Nobel …
Russian writer Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov (Russian: Алексей Максимович Пешков) supported the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and helped to develop socialist realism as the officially accepted literary a…
Neige Sinno is a French writer who has studied American literature in the United States and Mexico, and worked as a translator and literature professor. She is the author of two previous books, Le Cam…
