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People known for
essay
  • arts, visual
  • education
  • entertainment
  • history and society
  • literature
  • philosophy and religion
  • sciences
  • sports and recreation
  • technology
658 Biographies
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German author
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era....
Mark Twain
American writer
Mark Twain was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on...
Samuel Johnson
English author
Samuel Johnson was an English critic, biographer, essayist, poet, and lexicographer, regarded as one of the greatest figures of 18th-century life and letters. Johnson once characterized literary biographies...
Charles Dickens
British novelist
Charles Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian era. His many volumes include such works as A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two...
William Blake
British writer and artist
William Blake was an English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such...
Francis Bacon
British author, philosopher, and statesman
Francis Bacon was the lord chancellor of England (1618–21). A lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and master of the English tongue, he is remembered in literary terms for the sharp worldly wisdom of a few...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Swiss-born French philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Swiss-born philosopher, writer, and political theorist whose treatises and novels inspired the leaders of the French Revolution and the Romantic generation. Rousseau was the...
Virginia Woolf
British writer
Virginia Woolf was an English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre. While she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway...
Alexander Hamilton
United States statesman
Alexander Hamilton was a New York delegate to the Constitutional Convention (1787), major author of the Federalist papers, and first secretary of the treasury of the United States (1789–95), who was the...
John Ruskin
English writer and artist
John Ruskin was an English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical...
French writer and philosopher
Michel de Montaigne was a French writer whose Essais (Essays) established a new literary form. In his Essays he wrote one of the most captivating and intimate self-portraits ever given, on a par with Augustine’s...
Charles Baudelaire
French author
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and...
D.H. Lawrence
English writer
D.H. Lawrence was an English author of novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. His novels Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920) made him one...
T.S. Eliot
American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic
T.S. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot exercised...
Bob Dylan
American musician
Bob Dylan is an American folksinger who moved from folk to rock music in the 1960s, infusing the lyrics of rock and roll, theretofore concerned mostly with boy-girl romantic innuendo, with the intellectualism...
English poet
John Donne was a leading English poet of the Metaphysical school and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London (1621–31). Donne is often considered the greatest love poet in the English language. He is also...
Jonathan Swift
Anglo-Irish author and clergyman
Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish author, who was the foremost prose satirist in the English language. Besides the celebrated novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he wrote such shorter works as A Tale of a...
Jack Kerouac
American writer
Jack Kerouac was an American novelist, poet, and leader of the Beat movement whose most famous book, On the Road (1957), had broad cultural influence before it was recognized for its literary merits. On...
Plutarch
Greek biographer
Plutarch was a biographer and author whose works strongly influenced the evolution of the essay, the biography, and historical writing in Europe from the 16th to the 19th century. Among his approximately...
Blaise Pascal
French philosopher and scientist
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose. He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities, formulated what came to be known as Pascal’s...
Walt Whitman
American poet
Walt Whitman was an American poet, journalist, and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, is a landmark in the history of American literature. Walt Whitman was born into...
American literary critic
Paul de Man was a Belgian-born literary critic and theorist, along with Jacques Derrida one of the two major proponents of deconstruction, a controversial form of philosophical and literary analysis that...
Robert Louis Stevenson
British author
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish essayist, poet, and author of fiction and travel books, best known for his novels Treasure Island (1881), Kidnapped (1886), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr....
Anton Chekhov
Russian author
Anton Chekhov was a Russian playwright and master of the modern short story. He was a literary artist of laconic precision who probed below the surface of life, laying bare the secret motives of his characters....
Edward Gibbon
British historian
Edward Gibbon was an English rationalist historian and scholar best known as the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), a continuous narrative from the 2nd century...
Émile Zola.
French author
Émile Zola was a French novelist, critic, and political activist who was the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. He was noted for his theories of naturalism, which underlie his monumental...
Gotthold Lessing, detail of an oil painting by Georg May, 1768; in the Gleimhaus, Halberstadt, Ger.
German author
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German dramatist, critic, and writer on philosophy and aesthetics. He helped free German drama from the influence of classical and French models and wrote plays of lasting...
Pound, Ezra
American poet
Ezra Pound was an American poet and critic, a supremely discerning and energetic entrepreneur of the arts who did more than any other single figure to advance a “modern” movement in English and American...
James Joyce
Irish author
James Joyce was an Irish novelist noted for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods in such large works of fiction as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce is...
Matthew Arnold
British critic
Matthew Arnold was an English Victorian poet and literary and social critic, noted especially for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the “Barbarians” (the aristocracy), the...
Henry David Thoreau
American writer
Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher renowned for having lived the doctrines of Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork, Walden (1854), and for having been...
Percy Bysshe Shelley
English poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet whose passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English...
Thomas Mann
German author
Thomas Mann was a German novelist and essayist whose early novels—Buddenbrooks (1900), Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), and Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize...
Henry James
American writer
Henry James was an American novelist and, as a naturalized English citizen from 1915, a great figure in the transatlantic culture. His fundamental theme was the innocence and exuberance of the New World...
Dimitry Levitzky: portrait of Denis Diderot
French philosopher
Denis Diderot was a French man of letters and philosopher who, from 1745 to 1772, served as chief editor of the Encyclopédie, one of the principal works of the Age of Enlightenment. Diderot was the son...
American author
Tillie Olsen was an American writer and social activist known for her powerful fiction about the inner lives of the working poor, women, and minorities. Her interest in long-neglected women authors inspired...
Thomas Carlyle
British essayist and historian
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish historian and essayist, whose major works include The French Revolution, 3 vol. (1837), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), and The History of Friedrich...
William Butler Yeats, c. 1915.
Irish author and poet
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats’s father,...
French critic
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was a French literary historian and critic, noted for applying historical frames of reference to contemporary writing. His studies of French literature from the Renaissance...
Marcel Proust
French writer
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, author of À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; In Search of Lost Time), a seven-volume novel based on Proust’s life told psychologically and allegorically. Marcel...
Thomas Babington Macaulay, detail of an oil painting by J. Partridge, 1840; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
English politician and author
Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Macaulay was an English Whig politician, essayist, poet, and historian best known for his History of England, 5 vol. (1849–61); this work, which covers the period 1688–1702,...
Theodore Dreiser
American author
Theodore Dreiser was a novelist who was the outstanding American practitioner of naturalism. He was the leading figure in a national literary movement that replaced the observance of Victorian notions...
George Orwell
British author
George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). The latter of these is a profound anti-utopian novel that examines...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
American author
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American lecturer, poet, and essayist, the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism. Emerson was the son of the Reverend William Emerson, a Unitarian clergyman and friend...
Adams, Henry
American historian
Henry Adams was a historian, man of letters, and author of one of the outstanding autobiographies of Western literature, The Education of Henry Adams. Adams was the product of Boston’s Brahmin class, a...
Newman, John Henry
British theologian
St. John Henry Newman ; canonized October 13, 2019; feast day October 9) was an influential churchman and man of letters of the 19th century, who led the Oxford movement in the Church of England and later...
Joseph Addison
English author
Joseph Addison was an English essayist, poet, and dramatist, who, with Richard Steele, was a leading contributor to and guiding spirit of the periodicals The Tatler and The Spectator. His writing skill...
Taine, portrait by Léon Bonnat, 1889
French critic and historian
Hippolyte Taine was a French thinker, critic, and historian, one of the most-esteemed exponents of 19th-century French positivism. He attempted to apply the scientific method to the study of the humanities....
Luigi Pirandello
Italian author
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention of the “theatre within the theatre” in the play Sei personaggi...
Albert Camus
French author
Albert Camus was a French novelist, essayist, and playwright, best known for such novels as L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger), La Peste (1947; The Plague), and La Chute (1956; The Fall) and for his work...