- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, poet, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the early nineteenth century. - Walt Whitman
Walter Whitman was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. Proclaimed the "greatest of all American poets" by many foreign observers a mere four years after his death, he is viewed as the first urban poet. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and Realism, incorporating both views in his works. His works have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. - Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf (née Stephen was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels "Mrs Dalloway" (1925), "To the Lighthouse" (1927), and "Orlando" (1928), … - Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862; born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, and philosopher who is best known for "Walden", a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, "Civil Disobedience", an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. - Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill (November 10, 1871-March 12, 1947) was an American novelist. - George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856-2 November 1950) was an Irish dramatist, literary critic, and socialist. During his career Shaw wrote more than sixty plays. He was uniquely honoured by being awarded both a Nobel Prize (1925) for his contribution to literature and an Oscar (1938) for "Pygmalion". He was a strong advocate for socialism and women's rights, a vegetarian and teetotaller, and a harsh critic of formal education. - Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson LL.D. (13 December 1784), often referred to simply as Dr Johnson, is one of England's best known literary figures : a poet, essayist, biographer, lexicographer and a critic of English literature. He was also a great wit and prose stylist, well known for his "aphorisms". Dr Johnson is the most quoted of English writers after Shakespeare and has been described as one of the outstanding figures of 18th-century England. - Gore Vidal
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (born October 3 1925) (pronounced, occasionally, , etc) is an American author of novels, stage plays, screenplays, and essays. The offspring of a prominent political family, Gore is an outspoken critic of the American political establishment. Gore wrote the "The City and the Pillar" in 1948, which created controversy as the first major American novel to feature unambiguous homosexuality. - Thomas Mann
Paul Thomas Mann (June 6, 1875 - August 12, 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and often ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul use modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, … - Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 - July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Nicknamed "Papa", he was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris known as "the Lost Generation", as described in his memoir "A Moveable Feast." He led a turbulent social life, was married four times, and allegedly had various romantic relationships during his lifetime. - Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban was an English philosopher, statesman, and essayist, but is best known as a philosophical advocate and defender of the scientific revolution. Indeed, his dedication brought him into a rare historical group of scientists who were killed by their own experiments. His works established and popularized an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry, often called the "Baconian method" or simply, the scientific method. - Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer (born January 31, 1923) is an American novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. - Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer. Best-known in the English speaking world for his short stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, translator and man of wisdom. He was influenced by authors such as Dante Alighieri, Miguel de Cervantes, Franz Kafka, H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Schopenhauer and G. K. Chesterton. - William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 - 18 September 1830) was an English writer remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, often esteemed the greatest English literary critic after Samuel Johnson. Indeed, Hazlitt's writings and remarks on Shakespeare's plays and characters are rivaled only by those of Johnson in their depth, insight, originality, and imagination. - John Updike
John Hoyer Updike (born March 18 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania) is an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series ("Rabbit, Run"; "Rabbit Redux"; "Rabbit Is Rich"; "Rabbit At Rest"; and "Rabbit Remembered"). "Rabbit is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest" both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, … - Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian, whose work was hugely influential during the Victorian era. Coming from a strictly Calvinist family, Carlyle was expected by his parents to become a preacher. However, while at the University of Edinburgh, he lost his Christian faith; nevertheless, Calvinist values remained with him throughout his life. - James Baldwin
James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, and essayist, best known for his novel "Go Tell It on the Mountain". Most of Baldwin's work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century United States. - Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11 1922 - April 11 2007) (pronounced) was an American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction, such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1969), "Cat's Cradle" (1963), and "Breakfast of Champions" (1973). - Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 - November 22, 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. - George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological perspicacity. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works were taken seriously. Female authors published freely under their own names, … - Joan Didion
Joan Didion (born December 5, 1934) is an American writer, known as a journalist, essayist, and novelist. Didion contributes regularly to "The New York Review of Books". With her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, she collaborated on several screenplays. She lives in New York City. Didion was born in Sacramento, California and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956 with a BA in English. - Michel de Montaigne
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne-Delecroix (February 28 1533-September 13 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 effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography - and his massive volume "Essais" (translated literally as "Attempts") contains, to this day, … - Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934, Henry County, Kentucky) is an American man of letters, academic, cultural and economic critic, and farmer. He is a prolific author of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is also an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. - Herman Melville
Herman Melville (August 1 1819 - September 28 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His earliest novels were bestsellers, but his popularity declined precipitously only a few years later. By the time of his death he had been almost completely forgotten, but his longest novel, "Moby-Dick" - largely considered a failure during his lifetime, … - Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish cleric, satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for Whigs then for Tories), and poet, famous for works like "Gulliver's Travels", "A Modest Proposal", "A Journal to Stella", "The Drapier's Letters", "The Battle of the Books", and "A Tale of a Tub". Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language, although he is less well known for his poetry. - Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem. As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas of historical materialism, German idealism, … - Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, a monumental work of twentieth-century fiction published in seven volumes from 1913 to 1927. - John Milton
John Milton (December 9, 1608 - November 8, 1674) was an English poet, prose polemicist, and civil servant for the English Commonwealth. Most famed for his epic poem "Paradise Lost", Milton is celebrated as well for his eloquent treatise condemning censorship, "Areopagitica". - E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster, OM (January 1, 1879 – June 7, 1970), was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel "Howards End": "Only connect." Forster was homosexual, … - Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American poet, short story writer, playwright, editor, critic, essayist and one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of the macabre and mystery, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. He is also credited with contributing to the emergent science fiction genre. Poe died at the age of 40. - Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. She is the author of more than 50 works of fiction, an indefatigable reviewer, a creator of essays, plays, diaries and, under two pseudonyms, psychological thrillers. - Seamus Heaney
Seamus Justin Heaney 's attempts to develop poetic language in which meaning and sound are intimately related result in concentrated, sensually evocative poems characterized by assonant phrasing, richly descriptive adjectives, and witty metaphors. Heaney's poems also tend to mirror social and cultural divisions in contemporary Northern Ireland. - Washington Irving
Washington Irving was an American author of the early 19th century. Best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip van Winkle" (both of which appear in his book "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon"), he was also a prolific essayist, biographer and historian. Irving and James Fenimore Cooper were the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving is said to have encouraged authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, … - Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich (born August 26 1941, in Butte, Montana) is a prominent American writer, columnist, feminist, socialist and political activist. - Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison was an English politician and writer. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded "The Spectator" magazine. - Joseph Joubert
Joseph Joubert (born May 7, 1754 in Montignac, Périgord and died May 4 1824 in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne) was a French moralist and essayist, remembered today largely for his "Pensées" published posthumously. From age 14 Joubert attended a religious college in Toulouse, where he later taught until 1776. In 1778 he went to Paris where he met D'Alembert and Diderot, among others, and later became friends with young writer and diplomat Chateaubriand. - David Sedaris
David Sedaris (born December 26, 1956) is an American humorist and radio contributor. Much of his humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating, and it often concerns his family life, Greek heritage, various jobs, education, drug use, homosexuality and his life as an expatriate in France with his partner, Hugh. - Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens (born April 13, 1949, in Portsmouth , England ) is a journalist, author and literary critic. Hitchens received degrees in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College , Oxford , in 1970. From 1971-1981, he worked in Britain as book reviewer for The Times newspaper. He emigrated to the United States in 1981, and has written regularly, or been a contributing editor for Harper's , Vanity Fair and The Nation . - Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb (London, 10 February 1775 - Edmonton, 27 December 1834) was an English essayist with Welsh heritage, best known for his "Essays of Elia" and for the children's book "Tales from Shakespeare", which he produced along with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764–1847). Lamb was the youngest child of John Lamb, a lawyer's clerk. He was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, London, and spent his youth there, later going away to school at Christ's Hospital. - Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner (22 May 1813 - 13 February 1883) was a German composer, conductor, music theorist, and essayist, primarily known for his operas (or "music dramas" as they were later called). Unlike most other great opera composers, Wagner always wrote the scenario and libretto for his works himself. Wagner's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their contrapuntal texture, rich chromaticism, harmonies and orchestration, …
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