Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including hi…
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's…
Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in…
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternativel…
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spe…
David Foster Wallace was an acclaimed American writer known for his fiction, nonfiction, and critical essays that explored the complexities of consciousness, irony, and the human condition. Widely reg…
James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his …
Judith Butler is an American philosopher, feminist, and queer theorist whose work has profoundly shaped gender studies, political philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, and literary theory. Born in Cleve…
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a prolific 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian. Kierkegaard strongly criticised both the Hegelianism of his time and what he saw as the empty formalities of the …
Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and received…
William York Tindall was an American Joycean scholar with a long and distinguished teaching career at Columbia University. Several of Tindall's classic works of criticism, including A Reader's Guide t…
Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing pro…
Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a re…
William Gaddis was the author of five novels. He was born in New York December 29, 1922. The circumstances why he left Harvard in his senior year are mysterious. He worked for The New Yorker for a spe…
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems …
Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫) was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944 an…
László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter who is known for critically difficult and demanding novels, often labelled as postmodern, with dystopian and bleak melancholic themes. He …
Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told…
Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's …
Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremos…
Siddhartha Mukherjee (Bengali: সিদ্ধার্থ মুখার্জী) is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia Univer…
William Seward Burroughs II, (also known by his pen name William Lee) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generatio…
