PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: literature
English author
William Shakespeare was a poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet. He is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. (Read: The Shakespeare Authorship Question)...
German author
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era....
English poet, pamphleteer, and historian
John Milton was an 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...
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....
American writer
Mark Twain was an 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...
British novelist
Charles Dickens was an 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...
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...
German religious leader
Martin Luther was a 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...
Italian artist
Michelangelo was one of the towering figures of the Italian Renaissance, celebrated as a sculptor, painter, and architect of extraordinary range and ambition. Renowned for his mastery of the human form...
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...
English engraver, artist, and poet
William Blake was an 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...
Italian poet
Dante was an 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...
Christian bishop and theologian
St. Augustine ; feast day August 28) was the bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430, one of the Latin Fathers of the Christian church, and perhaps the most significant Christian thinker after St. Paul. Augustine’s...
political philosopher, economic theorist, and revolutionary
Karl Marx was a revolutionary, sociologist, historian, and economist. He published (with Friedrich Engels) Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848), commonly known as The Communist Manifesto, the most...
Swiss-born French philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a 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...
Spanish writer
Miguel de Cervantes was a 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...
French dramatist
Molière was a French actor and playwright who became the greatest of all writers of French comedy. Although the sacred and secular authorities of 17th-century France often combined against him, the genius...
French philosopher and author
Voltaire was 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 author
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a 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...
Dutch-Jewish philosopher
Benedict de Spinoza was a 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...
Russian writer
Leo Tolstoy was a Russian author, a master of realistic fiction, and one of the world’s greatest novelists. He is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77),...
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...
Italian statesman and writer
Niccolò Machiavelli was an 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...
Russian author
Isaac Babel was a 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;...
French dramatist
Jean Racine was a 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...
English writer
Geoffrey Chaucer was the outstanding English poet before William Shakespeare and “the first finder of our language.” His masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, ranks as one of the greatest poetic works in...
American director, writer, and actor
Woody Allen is an American motion-picture director, screenwriter, actor, comedian, playwright, and author who is best known for his bittersweet comic films containing elements of parody, slapstick, and...
American poet
Emily Dickinson was an 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...
Italian Christian theologian and philosopher
St. Thomas Aquinas ; canonized July 18, 1323; feast day January 28, formerly March 7) was an Italian Dominican theologian and the foremost medieval Scholastic. He developed his own conclusions from Aristotelian...
British poet
Lord Byron was a British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe, making him one of the first great literary celebrities. With Percy Bysshe Shelley and...
French philosopher and author
Gabriel Marcel was a French philosopher, dramatist, and critic who was associated with the phenomenological and existentialist movements in 20th-century European philosophy. His work and style are often...
Dutch humanist
Erasmus was a 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...
35th president of the United States
John F. Kennedy was the 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...
British logician and philosopher
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, a founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950....
French writer and philosopher
Michel de Montaigne was a 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...
American statesman
Alexander Hamilton was a 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...
American director
Vincente Minnelli was an American motion-picture director who infused a new sophistication and vitality into filmed musicals in the 1940s and ’50s. (Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)...
English writer
D.H. Lawrence was an 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...
English author
William Wordsworth was an English poet whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement. The principles he outlines in the preface to the...
French author
Charles Baudelaire was a 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...
34th president of the United States
Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 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...
archbishop of Canterbury
Thomas Cranmer was 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...
Roman poet
Horace was an 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...
American composer
George Gershwin was 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...
Greek dramatist
Euripides was the 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...
English writer and artist
John Ruskin was an 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...
American abolitionist, orator, publisher, and author
Frederick Douglass was an African American abolitionist, orator, newspaper publisher, and author who is famous for his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,...
French philosopher and historian
Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian, one of the most influential and controversial scholars of the post-World War II period. The son and grandson of a physician, Michel Foucault was...
French writer
Victor Hugo was a 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...
Irish author
James Joyce was an Irish novelist noted for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods—in particular, stream of consciousness—in such works of fiction as Ulysses (1922) and...