PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: short story
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....
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...
Spanish writer
Miguel de Cervantes was a Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet, the creator of Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and the most important and celebrated figure in Spanish literature. His novel Don Quixote has been...
French philosopher and author
Voltaire was one of the greatest of all French writers. Although only a few of his works are still read, he continues to be held in worldwide repute as a courageous crusader against tyranny, bigotry, and...
Russian writer
Leo Tolstoy was a Russian author, a master of realistic fiction and one of the world’s greatest novelists. Tolstoy is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77),...
Russian author
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had...
Russian author
Isaac Babel was a Russian short-story writer known for his cycles of stories: Konarmiya (1926, rev. ed. 1931, enlarged 1933; Red Cavalry), set in the Russo-Polish War (1919–20); Odesskiye rasskazy (1931;...
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...
Russian author
Aleksandr Pushkin was a Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer; he has often been considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin’s father...
American author
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, best known for his novels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851). Melville’s heritage and youthful experiences were...
Russian author
Ivan Turgenev was a Russian novelist, poet, and playwright whose major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On...
American author
William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the eldest of the four sons of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner, William Faulkner...
Irish author
Samuel Beckett was an author, critic, and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote in both French and English and is perhaps best known for his plays, especially En attendant...
British writer
Joseph Conrad was an English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent, whose works include the novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and the short story “Heart of...
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....
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....
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...
French author
Honoré de Balzac was a French literary artist who produced a vast number of novels and short stories collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). He helped to establish the traditional form...
French author
Stendhal was one of the most original and complex French writers of the first half of the 19th century, chiefly known for his works of fiction. His finest novels are Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red...
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...
French author
Gustave Flaubert was a novelist regarded as the prime mover of the realist school of French literature and best known for his masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1857), a realistic portrayal of bourgeois life,...
German-language writer
Franz Kafka was a German-language writer of visionary fiction whose works—especially the novel Der Prozess (1925; The Trial) and the story Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis)—express the anxieties...
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...
British writer
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet who set much of his work in Wessex, his name for the counties of southwestern England. Hardy was the eldest of the four children of Thomas Hardy, a stonemason...
Russian writer
Maxim Gorky was a Russian short-story writer and novelist who first attracted attention with his naturalistic and sympathetic stories of tramps and social outcasts and later wrote other stories, novels,...
American writer
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous...
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...
American writer
Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the greatest fiction writers of 19th-century American literature. A master of the allegorical and symbolic tale, he remains best known for the novels The Scarlet Letter (1850)...
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...
American writer
Edgar Allan Poe was an American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. His tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) initiated the...
Ukrainian-born writer
Nikolay Gogol was a Ukrainian-born humorist, dramatist, and novelist whose works, written in Russian, significantly influenced the direction of Russian literature. His novel Myortvye dushi (1842; Dead...
French writer
Guy de Maupassant was a French naturalist writer of short stories and novels who is by general agreement the greatest French short-story writer. Maupassant was the elder of the two children of Gustave...
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...
French author
Alfred-Victor, count de Vigny was a poet, dramatist, and novelist who was the most philosophical of the French Romantic writers. Vigny was born into an aristocratic family that had been reduced to modest...
Swedish dramatist
August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, who combined psychology and Naturalism in a new kind of European drama that evolved into Expressionist drama. His chief works...
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...
American author
Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian-born American novelist and critic and the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955), feature...
British author
H.G. Wells was an English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and such comic novels as Tono-Bungay...
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...
British writer
Rudyard Kipling was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for...
English author
J.R.R. Tolkien was an English writer and scholar who achieved fame with his children’s book The Hobbit (1937) and his richly inventive epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). At age four Tolkien,...
Irish author
Oscar Wilde was an Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose enduring fame rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance...
French author
Marquis de Sade was a French nobleman whose perverse sexual preferences and erotic writings gave rise to the term sadism. His best-known work is the novel Justine (1791). Related to the royal house of...
American writer
F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American short-story writer and novelist famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), his most brilliant novel being The Great Gatsby (1925). His private life, with...
British author
Dylan Thomas was a Welsh poet and prose writer whose work is known for its comic exuberance, rhapsodic lilt, and pathos. His personal life, punctuated by reckless bouts of drinking, was notorious. Thomas...
French author
Alphonse Daudet was a French short-story writer and novelist, now remembered chiefly as the author of sentimental tales of provincial life in the south of France. Daudet was the son of a silk manufacturer....
American writer
Stephen Crane was an American novelist, poet, and short-story writer, best known for his novels Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and the short stories “The Open...
Chinese writer
Lu Xun was a Chinese writer, commonly considered the greatest in 20th-century Chinese literature, who was also an important critic known for his sharp and unique essays on the historical traditions and...
British author
Graham Greene was an English novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist whose novels treat life’s moral ambiguities in the context of contemporary political settings. His father was the headmaster...
German writer
Gerhart Hauptmann was a German playwright, poet, and novelist who was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912. Hauptmann was born in a then-fashionable Silesian resort town, where his father...