PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: short story
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...
American writer
Mark Twain, 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 the...
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...
Russian writer
Leo Tolstoy, 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, 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 an immense...
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...
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...
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...
American author
Herman Melville, 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 perhaps...
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...
American author
William Faulkner, 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, 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...
British writer
Joseph Conrad, 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 Darkness”...
British author
Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish essayist, poet, and author of fiction and travel books, best known for his novels Treasure Island (1881), Kidnapped (1886), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886),...
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....
French author
Émile Zola, 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, 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 of...
French author
Stendhal, 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 and...
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...
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...
German-language writer
Franz Kafka, 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 and...
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...
British writer
Thomas Hardy, 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 and...
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...
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...
American author
Tillie Olsen, 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, American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale. One of the greatest fiction writers in American literature, he is best known for The...
French writer
Marcel Proust, 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 was...
American writer
Edgar Allan Poe, 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 modern...
Ukrainian-born writer
Nikolay Gogol, Ukrainian-born humorist, dramatist, and novelist whose works, written in Russian, significantly influenced the direction of Russian literature. His novel Myortvye dushi (1842; Dead Souls)...
French writer
Guy de Maupassant, 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 and Laure...
American author
Theodore Dreiser, 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 of propriety...
French author
Alfred-Victor, count de Vigny, 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 circumstances...
Swedish dramatist
August Strindberg, 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 include...
Italian author
Luigi Pirandello, 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, Russian-born American novelist and critic, the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955), feature stylish,...
British author
H.G. Wells, 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 and The...
French author
Albert Camus, 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 in leftist...
British writer
Rudyard Kipling, 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 children....
English author
J.R.R. Tolkien, 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, with...
Irish author
Oscar Wilde, Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of...
French author
Marquis de Sade, 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 Condé,...
American writer
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 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 his wife,...
British author
Dylan Thomas, 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 spent...
French author
Alphonse Daudet, 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, 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 Boat,”...
Chinese writer
Lu Xun, 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 modern...
British author
Graham Greene, 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, 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 owned...