PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: dramatic 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....
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...
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
MoliĂšre 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...
Italian statesman and writer
NiccolĂČ 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 (1919â20); 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...
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...
Irish author and poet
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer who is considered one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. A key participant in the Modernist movement and the...
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...
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...
Greek dramatist
Euripides was the last of classical Athensâs three great tragic dramatists, following Aeschylus and Sophocles. It is possible to reconstruct only the sketchiest biography of Euripides. His motherâs name...
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 countryâs 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 methodsâin particular, stream of consciousnessâin such works of fiction as Ulysses (1922) and...
British poet and critic
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria...
American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic
T.S. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor who became a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry with such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943)....
Russian author
Aleksandr Pushkin was a Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer; he has often been considered his countryâs greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkinâs father...
American illustrator and author
Growing up in Chicago, Shel Silverstein always planned on being an artist, but he never set out to become an icon of childrenâs literature. A man of many rolesâartist, poet, songwriter, and playwrightâhe...
Russian author
Ivan Turgenev was a Russian novelist, poet, and playwright whose major works include the short-story collection A Sportsmanâs Sketches (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On...
Irish dramatist and critic
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. (Read George Bernard Shawâs 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)...
Greek dramatist
Sophocles was, along with Aeschylus and Euripides, one of classical Athensâs three great tragic playwrights. The best known of his 123 dramas is Oedipus the King. Sophocles was the younger contemporary...
Spanish author
Pedro Calderón de la Barca was a dramatist and poet who succeeded Lope de Vega as the greatest Spanish playwright of the Golden Age. Among his best-known secular dramas are El médico de su honra (1635;...
Greek dramatist
Aeschylus was the first of classical Athensâ great dramatists, who raised the emerging art of tragedy to great heights of poetry and theatrical power. Aeschylus grew up in the turbulent period when the...
Spanish author
Lope de Vega was an outstanding dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, author of as many as 1,800 plays and several hundred shorter dramatic pieces, of which 431 plays and 50 shorter pieces are extant. Lope...
American dramatist
Eugene OâNeill was a foremost American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His masterpiece, Long Dayâs Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), is at the apex of a long...
Norwegian dramatist and poet
Henrik Ibsen was a major Norwegian playwright of the late 19th century who introduced to the European stage a new order of moral analysis that was placed against a severely realistic middle-class background...
English actor, poet, and producer
David Garrick was an English actor, producer, dramatist, poet, and comanager of the Drury Lane Theatre. Garrick was of French and Irish descent, the son of Peter Garrick, a captain in the English army,...
German writer
Friedrich Schiller was a leading German dramatist, poet, and literary theorist, best remembered for such dramas as Die RĂ€uber (1781; The Robbers), the Wallenstein trilogy (1800â01), Maria Stuart (1801),...
English poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English poet who, with John Keats and Lord Byron, was a major figure among the second generation of English Romantic writers. Of the three, Shelley was the most politically...
Russian author
Anton Chekhov was a 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....
German author
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was a German dramatist, critic, and writer on philosophy and aesthetics. He helped free German drama from the influence of classical and French models and wrote plays of lasting...
Irish author
Samuel Beckett was an Irish playwright, author, and critic who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote in both French and English and is best known for his plays on existential themes, especially...
French philosopher
Denis Diderot was a French man of letters and philosopher who, from 1745 to 1772, served as chief editor of the Encyclopédie, one of the principal works of the Age of Enlightenment. Diderot was the son...
British critic
Matthew Arnold was an English Victorian poet and literary and social critic, noted especially for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the âBarbariansâ (the aristocracy), the...
American writer
Henry James was an 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...
English author
Henry Fielding was a novelist and playwright, who, with Samuel Richardson, is considered a founder of the English novel. Among his major novels are Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). Fielding...
French poet and dramatist
Pierre Corneille was a French poet and dramatist, considered the creator of French classical tragedy. His chief works include Le Cid (1637), Horace (1640), Cinna (1641), and Polyeucte (1643). Pierre Corneille...
Dutch statesman and scholar
Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist and scholar whose masterpiece De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625; On the Law of War and Peace) is considered one of the greatest contributions to the development of international...
French author
Gustave Flaubert was a 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,...
American writer
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous...
English poet
Alfred, Lord Tennyson was an English poet often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. He was raised to the peerage in 1884. Among his famous works are âThe Lotos-Eaters,â...
British poet
Robert Browning was a major English poet of the Victorian age, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture. His most noted work was The Ring and the Book (1868â69), the story...
Russian writer
Maxim Gorky was a 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,...
British author
John Dryden was an English poet, dramatist, and literary critic who so dominated the literary scene of his day that it came to be known as the Age of Dryden. The son of a country gentleman, Dryden grew...
English writer
Ben Jonson was an English Stuart dramatist, lyric poet, and literary critic. He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James...
Italian philosopher
Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, and occultist whose theories anticipated modern science. The most notable of these were his theories of the infinite universe and the...