Alan Lee is an English book illustrator and movie conceptual designer. He was born on 20 August 1947 in Middlesex, England and studied at the Ealing School of Art, specialising in illustration, and ha…
John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". …
Sir Simon Michael Schama is an English historian and television presenter. He specialises in art history, Dutch history, Jewish history, and French history. He is a Professor of History and Art Histor…
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…
Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter was an English biographer, writer, and radio broadcaster. He is known especially for his biographies of J.R.R. Tolkien and other members of the literary society th…
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…
Hayao Miyazaki (Japanese: 宮崎 駿) is a celebrated Japanese animator, filmmaker, screenwriter, and manga artist, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of animation. He is …
Wayne G. Hammond was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in the suburb of Brooklyn. In 1975 he received his Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors from Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio, where he majo…
Camille Anna Paglia is an American social critic, author and teacher. Her book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published in 1990, became a bestseller. She is a p…
John Howe is a Canadian book illustrator, living in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. One year after graduating from high school, he studied in a college in Strasbourg, France, then at the École des arts décora…
Born June 14, 1958 in Glendale, California. Raised in Palo Alto, the youngest of five children of Joanna and Robert Gurney (a mechanical engineer). Earned a B.A. in Anthropology in 1979 with Phi Beta …
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short…
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Revie…
David Greig is a Scottish dramatist. He was born in Edinburgh in 1969 and brought up in Nigeria. He studied drama at Bristol University and is now a well-known writer and director of plays. He has bee…
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien: writer, artist, scholar, linguist. Known to millions around the world as the author of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien spent most of his life teaching at the University of Ox…
Brandon Stanton graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in History. He traded bonds in Chicago for three years, before losing his job and moving to New York. In November of 2010, he sta…
Robert Foster (b. 1949 in Brooklyn, New York) is the author of the Guide to Middle-earth (1971), originally covering The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. After the publication of Tolkien's The Silmar…
