PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: dramatic literature
English author
William Shakespeare, English poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet and considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. Shakespeare occupies a position unique in...
German author
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era. Goethe...
English author
Samuel Johnson, 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...
British novelist
Charles Dickens, 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 Cities,...
Spanish writer
Miguel de Cervantes, 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 translated,...
French philosopher and author
Voltaire, 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...
French dramatist
Molière, French actor and playwright, the greatest of all writers of French comedy. Although the sacred and secular authorities of 17th-century France often combined against him, the genius of Molière...
Italian statesman and writer
Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian Renaissance political philosopher and statesman, secretary of the Florentine republic, whose most famous work, The Prince (Il Principe), brought him a reputation as an atheist...
French dramatist
Jean Racine, French dramatic poet and historiographer renowned for his mastery of French classical tragedy. His reputation rests on the plays he wrote between 1664 and 1691, notably Andromaque (first performed...
Russian author
Isaac Babel, 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; Tales...
French philosopher and author
Gabriel Marcel, French philosopher, dramatist, and critic who was associated with the phenomenological and existentialist movements in 20th-century European philosophy and whose work and style are often...
American actor and director
Woody Allen, American motion-picture director, screenwriter, actor, comedian, playwright, and author, best known for his bittersweet comic films containing elements of parody, slapstick, and the absurd...
English writer
D.H. Lawrence, 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 of...
American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic
T.S. Eliot, 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...
Greek dramatist
Euripides, last of classical Athens’s three great tragic dramatists, following Aeschylus and Sophocles. It is possible to reconstruct only the sketchiest biography of Euripides. His mother’s name was Cleito;...
Irish dramatist and critic
George Bernard Shaw, Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. (Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)...
British poet and critic
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817)...
French writer
Victor Hugo, poet, novelist, and dramatist who was the most important of the French Romantic writers. Though regarded in France as one of that country’s greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such...
Greek dramatist
Sophocles, with Aeschylus and Euripides, one of classical Athens’s three great tragic playwrights. The best known of his 123 dramas is Oedipus the King. Sophocles was the younger contemporary of Aeschylus...
Spanish author
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, dramatist and poet who succeeded Lope de Vega as the greatest Spanish playwright of the Golden Age. Among his best-known secular dramas are El médico de su honra (1635; The...
Russian author
Aleksandr Pushkin, 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 came...
Greek dramatist
Aeschylus, the first of classical Athens’ great dramatists, who raised the emerging art of tragedy to great heights of poetry and theatrical power. Aeschylus grew up in the turbulent period when the Athenian...
Russian author
Ivan Turgenev, 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 the Eve...
English actor, poet, and producer
David Garrick, English actor, producer, dramatist, poet, and comanager of the Drury Lane Theatre. Garrick was of French and Irish descent, the son of Peter Garrick, a captain in the English army, and Arabella...
Spanish author
Lope de Vega, outstanding dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, author of as many as 1,800 plays and several hundred shorter dramatic pieces, of which 431 plays and 50 shorter pieces are extant. Lope de...
American dramatist
Eugene O’Neill, foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long string...
German writer
Friedrich Schiller, leading German dramatist, poet, and literary theorist, best remembered for such dramas as Die Räuber (1781; The Robbers), the Wallenstein trilogy (1800–01), Maria Stuart (1801), and...
Irish author
Samuel Beckett, 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 Godot...
Spanish writer
Federico García Lorca, Spanish poet and playwright who, in a career that spanned just 19 years, resurrected and revitalized the most basic strains of Spanish poetry and theatre. He is known primarily for...
Russian author
Anton Chekhov, 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....
German author
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 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 importance....
Norwegian dramatist and poet
Henrik Ibsen, major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century who introduced to the European stage a new order of moral analysis that was placed against a severely realistic middle-class background...
Irish author
James Joyce, 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, the eldest...
British critic
Matthew Arnold, 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 “Philistines”...
French author
Gustave Flaubert, 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, which...
English poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 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...
French poet and dramatist
Pierre Corneille, French poet and dramatist, considered the creator of French classical tragedy. His chief works include Le Cid (1637), Horace (1640), Cinna (1641), and Polyeucte (1643). Pierre Corneille...
English author
Henry Fielding, novelist and playwright, who, with Samuel Richardson, is considered a founder of the English novel. Among his major novels are Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). Fielding was born...
American writer
Henry James, 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 in clash...
English poet
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, English poet often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. He was raised to the peerage in 1884. Tennyson was the fourth of 12 children, born into an...
Russian writer
Maxim Gorky, 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, and...
British poet
Robert Browning, major English poet of the Victorian age, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture. His most noted work was The Ring and the Book (1868–69), the story of...
Italian philosopher
Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, and occultist whose theories anticipated modern science. The most notable of these were his theories of the infinite universe and the multiplicity...
British author
John Dryden, English poet, dramatist, and literary critic who so dominated the literary scene of his day that it came to be known as the Age of Dryden. The son of a country gentleman, Dryden grew up in...
French philosopher
Denis Diderot, 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 of a...
American writer
Ernest Hemingway, American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely...
English writer
Ben Jonson, English Stuart dramatist, lyric poet, and literary critic. He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I. Among...
English writer
Christopher Marlowe, Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare’s most important predecessor in English drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank verse. Marlowe was the second child...
Irish author and poet
William Butler Yeats, 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, John Butler...
Portuguese poet
Luís de Camões, Portugal’s great national poet, author of the epic poem Os Lusíadas (1572; The Lusiads), which describes Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India. Camões had a permanent and...