PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: literature
William Shakespeare
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......
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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......
John Milton
English poet
John Milton, English poet, pamphleteer, and historian, considered the most significant English author after William Shakespeare. Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, widely regarded as the greatest......
Winston Churchill
prime minister of United Kingdom
Winston Churchill, British statesman, orator, and author who as prime minister (1940–45, 1951–55) rallied the British people during World War II and led his country from the brink of defeat to victory.......
Mark Twain
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......
Samuel Johnson
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......
Charles Dickens
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,......
Martin Luther
German religious leader
Martin Luther, German theologian and religious reformer who was the catalyst of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. Through his words and actions, Luther precipitated a movement that reformulated......
Francis Bacon
British author, philosopher, and statesman
Francis Bacon, 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 dozen essays;......
Michelangelo
Italian artist
Michelangelo, Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist......
William Blake
British writer and artist
William Blake, 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 as Visions......
Dante
Italian poet
Dante, Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy).......
St. Augustine
Christian bishop and theologian
St. Augustine, ; feast day August 28), bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430, one of the Latin Fathers of the Church and perhaps the most significant Christian thinker after St. Paul. Augustine’s adaptation......
Karl Marx
German philosopher
Karl Marx, revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and economist. He published (with Friedrich Engels) Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848), commonly known as The Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated......
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Swiss-born French philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 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 least......
Miguel de Cervantes
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,......
Molière
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......
Voltaire
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......
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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......
Benedict de Spinoza
Dutch-Jewish philosopher
Benedict de Spinoza, Dutch Jewish philosopher, one of the foremost exponents of 17th-century Rationalism and one of the early and seminal figures of the Enlightenment. His masterwork is the treatise Ethics......
Leo Tolstoy
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),......
Virginia Woolf
British writer
Virginia Woolf, 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 (1925)......
Niccolò Machiavelli
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......
Isaac Babel
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......
Jean Racine
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......
Woody Allen
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......
Geoffrey Chaucer
English writer
Geoffrey Chaucer, the outstanding English poet before Shakespeare and “the first finder of our language.” His The Canterbury Tales ranks as one of the greatest poetic works in English. He also contributed......
St. Thomas Aquinas
Italian Christian theologian and philosopher
St. Thomas Aquinas, ; canonized July 18, 1323; feast day January 28, formerly March 7), Italian Dominican theologian, the foremost medieval Scholastic. He developed his own conclusions from Aristotelian......
Emily Dickinson
American poet
Emily Dickinson, American lyric poet who lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two......
Gabriel Marcel
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......
Erasmus
Dutch humanist
Erasmus, Dutch humanist who was the greatest scholar of the northern Renaissance, the first editor of the New Testament, and also an important figure in patristics and classical literature. Using the philological......
Bertrand Russell
British logician and philosopher
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Russell’s......
Michel de Montaigne
French writer and philosopher
Michel de Montaigne, 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......
John F. Kennedy
president of United States
John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States (1961–63), who faced a number of foreign crises, especially in Cuba and Berlin, but managed to secure such achievements as the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty......
Alexander Hamilton
United States statesman
Alexander Hamilton, 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 foremost......
Vincente Minnelli
American director
Vincente Minnelli, American motion-picture director who infused a new sophistication and vitality into filmed musicals in the 1940s and ’50s. He was born to Italian-born musician Vincent Minnelli and French......
Charles Baudelaire
French author
Charles Baudelaire, 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 influential......
Dwight D. Eisenhower
president of United States
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States (1953–61), who had been supreme commander of the Allied forces in western Europe during World War II. Eisenhower was the third of seven sons of......
Thomas Cranmer
archbishop of Canterbury
Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury (1533–56), adviser to the English kings Henry VIII and Edward VI. As archbishop, he put the English Bible in parish churches, drew up the Book......
Horace
Roman poet
Horace, outstanding Latin lyric poet and satirist under the emperor Augustus. The most frequent themes of his Odes and verse Epistles are love, friendship, philosophy, and the art of poetry. Horace was......
George Gershwin
American composer
George Gershwin, one of the most significant and popular American composers of all time. He wrote primarily for the Broadway musical theatre, but important as well are his orchestral and piano compositions......
Euripides
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;......
D.H. Lawrence
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......
John Ruskin
English writer and artist
John Ruskin, 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 prose......
Victor Hugo
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......
John Bunyan
English author
John Bunyan, celebrated English minister and preacher, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the book that was the most characteristic expression of the Puritan religious outlook. His other works include......
George Meredith
English novelist
George Meredith, English Victorian poet and novelist, whose novels are noted for their wit, brilliant dialogue, and aphoristic quality of language. Meredith’s novels are also distinguished by psychological......
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Roman statesman, scholar, and writer
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, and writer who vainly tried to uphold republican principles in the final civil wars that destroyed the Roman Republic. His writings include books......
Edmund Spenser
English poet
Edmund Spenser, English poet whose long allegorical poem The Faerie Queene is one of the greatest in the English language. It was written in what came to be called the Spenserian stanza. Little is certainly......
John Donne
English poet
John Donne, 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 noted......
