PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: biography
prime minister of United Kingdom
Winston Churchill was a 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....
English author
Samuel Johnson was an 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 author, philosopher, and statesman
Francis Bacon was the 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...
British writer
Virginia Woolf was an 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...
Greek biographer
Plutarch was a biographer and author whose works strongly influenced the evolution of the essay, the biography, and historical writing in Europe from the 16th to the 19th century. Among his approximately...
Italian poet
Petrarch was an Italian scholar, poet, and humanist whose poems addressed to Laura, an idealized beloved, contributed to the Renaissance flowering of lyric poetry. Petrarch’s inquiring mind and love of...
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...
Italian poet and scholar
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian poet and scholar, best remembered as the author of the earthy tales in the Decameron. With Petrarch he laid the foundations for the humanism of the Renaissance and raised...
Scottish biographer
James Boswell was a friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson (Life of Johnson, 2 vol., 1791). The 20th-century publication of his journals proved him to be also one of the world’s greatest diarists. Boswell’s...
American author
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American lecturer, poet, and essayist, the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism. Emerson was the son of the Reverend William Emerson, a Unitarian clergyman and friend...
American historian
Henry Adams was a historian, man of letters, and author of one of the outstanding autobiographies of Western literature, The Education of Henry Adams. Adams was the product of Boston’s Brahmin class, a...
French philosopher and humanist
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet was a French philosopher of the Enlightenment and advocate of educational reform and women’s rights. He was one of the major Revolutionary formulators...
French poet
Paul Verlaine was a French lyric poet first associated with the Parnassians and later known as a leader of the Symbolists. With Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire, he formed the so-called Decadents....
British adventurer and writer
Sir Ranulph Fiennes is a British adventurer, pioneering polar explorer, and writer, who, among his many exploits, in 1979–82 led the first north-south surface circumnavigation of the world (i.e., along...
American writer and activist
John Oliver Killens was an American writer and activist known for his politically charged novels—particularly Youngblood (1954)—and his contributions to the Black Arts movement and as a founder of the...
American author
Edmund White was an American writer of novels, short fiction, and nonfiction whose critically acclaimed work focuses on male homosexual society in America. His studies of evolving attitudes toward homosexuality...
Argentine author
Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer whose works became classics of 20th-century world literature. Borges was reared in the then-shabby Palermo district of Buenos Aires,...
Canadian political leader
Michael Ignatieff is a Canadian author, literary critic, and politician who represented the Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding in the Canadian House of Commons (2006–11) and who served as leader of the Liberal...
English author
Robert Southey was an English poet and writer of miscellaneous prose who is chiefly remembered for his association with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, both of whom were leaders of the...
French scholar
Georges Duby was a member of the French Academy, holder of the chair in medieval history at the Collège de France in Paris, and one of the 20th century’s most prolific and influential historians of the...
French author
Michel Houellebecq is a French writer, satirist, and provocateur whose work exposes his sometimes darkly humorous, often offensive, and thoroughly misanthropic view of humanity and the world. He is one...
French dramatist, novelist, and actress
Yasmina Reza is a French dramatist, novelist, director, and actress best known for her brief satiric plays that speak to contemporary middle-class anxieties. Reza was the daughter of Jewish parents who...
American historian and author
Robert Caro is an American historian and author whose extensive biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Moses went beyond studies of the men who were their subjects to investigate the practice of political...
American author
Ishmael Reed is an author of poetry, essays, novels, and plays who is perhaps best known for his fictional works, which are marked by surrealism, satire, and political and racial commentary. His novels...
German author
Arno Schmidt was a novelist, translator, and critic, whose experimental prose established him as the preeminent Modernist of 20th-century German literature. With roots in both German Romanticism and Expressionism,...
American historian, journalist, and author
Garry Wills is an American historian, journalist, and author of provocative books on Roman Catholicism, history, and politics. Wills grew up in Wisconsin and Michigan, where he spent his childhood immersed...
English poet
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet and critic, outstanding for prosodic innovations and noteworthy as the symbol of mid-Victorian poetic revolt. The characteristic qualities of his verse are...
American author
Paul Auster was an American novelist, essayist, translator, screenwriter, and poet whose complex novels, several of which are mysteries, are often concerned with the search for identity and personal meaning....
Chinese American writer
Ha Jin is a Chinese American writer who uses plain, unadorned English prose to explore the tension between the individual and the family, the modern and the traditional, and personal feelings and duty....
English biographer
Izaak Walton was an English biographer and author of The Compleat Angler (1653), a pastoral discourse on the joys and stratagems of fishing that has been one of the most frequently reprinted books in English...
American author
John Edgar Wideman is an American writer regarded for his lyrical, intricate literary style in novels about the experiences of African American men in contemporary urban America. Many of Wideman’s novels...
French and American pianist, journalist, and diplomat
Ève Curie was a French and American concert pianist, journalist, and diplomat, a daughter of Pierre Curie and Marie Curie. She is best known for writing a biography of her mother, Madame Curie (1937)....
South African activist, educator, and author
Fatima Meer was a South African antiapartheid and human rights activist, educator, and author. From the mid-20th century, she was one of the most prominent women political leaders in South Africa. Meer...
French writer
Romain Rolland was a French novelist, dramatist, and essayist, an idealist who was deeply involved with pacifism, the fight against fascism, the search for world peace, and the analysis of artistic genius....
American author
Ambrose Bierce was an American newspaperman, wit, satirist, and author of sardonic short stories based on themes of death and horror. His life ended in an unsolved mystery. Reared in Kosciusko county,...
American poet
Genevieve Taggard was an American poet and biographer of Emily Dickinson who was much admired for her lyric verse that deftly and passionately mingles intellectual, personal, social, and aesthetic concerns....
English author
John Evelyn was an English country gentleman, author of some 30 books on the fine arts, forestry, and religious topics. His Diary, kept all his life, is considered an invaluable source of information on...
British historian
James Anthony Froude was an English historian and biographer whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 12 vol. (1856–70), fundamentally altered the whole direction...
French writer and political theorist
Charles Maurras was a French writer and political theorist, a major intellectual influence in early 20th-century Europe whose “integral nationalism” anticipated some of the ideas of fascism. Maurras was...
American author
Pearl S. Buck was an American author noted for her novels of life in China. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Pearl Sydenstricker was raised in Zhenjiang in eastern China by her Presbyterian...
American author
Sarah Josepha Hale was an American writer who, as the first female editor of a magazine, shaped many of the attitudes and thoughts of women of her period. Sarah Josepha Buell married David Hale in 1813,...
Roman author
Suetonius was a Roman biographer and antiquarian whose writings include De viris illustribus (“Concerning Illustrious Men”), a collection of short biographies of celebrated Roman literary figures, and...
British author
Penelope Fitzgerald was an English novelist and biographer noted for her economical, yet evocative, witty, and intricate works often concerned with the efforts of her characters to cope with their unfortunate...
Italian artist and author
Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, architect, and writer who is best known for his important biographies of Italian Renaissance artists. When still a child, Vasari was the pupil of Guglielmo de Marcillat,...
British poet and author
Andrew Motion is a British poet, biographer, and novelist who was especially noted for his narrative poetry. He served as poet laureate of England from 1999 to 2009. Motion attended Radley College and...
American novelist
William Gilmore Simms was an outstanding Southern novelist. Motherless at two, Simms was reared by his grandmother while his father fought in the Creek wars and under Jackson at New Orleans in 1814. Simms...
American historian
David McCullough was an American historian whose exhaustively researched biographies were both popular and praised by critics. McCullough earned a B.A. (1955) in English literature from Yale University....
Australian author
Colleen McCullough was an Australian novelist who worked in a range of genres but was best known for her second novel, the sweeping romance The Thorn Birds (1977; television miniseries 1983), and for her...
Russian author
Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky was a Russian poet, novelist, critic, and thinker who played an important role in the revival of religious-philosophical interests among the Russian intelligentsia. After...
American author
Louis Auchincloss was an American novelist, short-story writer, and critic, best known for his novels of manners set in the world of contemporary upper-class New York City. Auchincloss studied at Yale...