People Known for: literature - short story

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....

Junot Díaz

Dominican-born American writer

Junot Díaz is a Dominican-born American author whose work centers on the experience of immigrants in their home countries and in the United States. Known for his swaggering prose, he incorporates pop culture...

Mark Twain

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...

Miguel de Cervantes

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...

Voltaire

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...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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...

Leo Tolstoy

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),...

Isaac Babel

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;...

D.H. Lawrence

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...

Herman Melville

American author

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet best known for his novels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851). Melville’s heritage and youthful experiences were...

James Joyce

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...

Edgar Allan Poe

American writer

Edgar Allan Poe was an American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. His tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) initiated the...

Aleksandr Pushkin

Russian author

Aleksandr Pushkin was a Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer; he has often been considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin’s father...

Ivan Turgenev

Russian author

Ivan Turgenev was a Russian novelist, poet, and playwright whose major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On...

William Faulkner

American author

William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. A masterful stylist and mythmaker, Faulkner combined stream-of-consciousness writing...

Stendhal

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...

Joseph Conrad

British writer

Joseph Conrad was an English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent whose works include the novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and the novella Heart of Darkness...

Honoré de Balzac

French author

Honoré de Balzac was a French literary artist who produced a vast number of novels and short stories collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). He helped to establish the traditional form...

Stephen King

American novelist

Stephen King is an American novelist and short-story writer whose books are credited with reviving the genre of horror fiction in the late 20th century. King began publishing novels in the 1970s, starting...

Franz Kafka

German-language writer

Franz Kafka was a German-language writer of visionary fiction whose works—especially the novel Der Prozess (1925; The Trial) and the story Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis)—express the anxieties...

Anton Chekhov

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....

Samuel Beckett

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...

Black and white portrait of French novelist Emile Zola with glasses, a full beard, and mustache, wearing a suit and looking to the side.

Émile Zola

French author

Émile Zola was a French novelist, critic, and political activist who was the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. He was noted for his theories of naturalism, which underlie his monumental...

Robert Louis Stevenson

British author

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish essayist, poet, and author of fiction and travel books, best known for his novels Treasure Island (1881), Kidnapped (1886), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr....

Henry James

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...

Gustave Flaubert

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,...

Ernest Hemingway

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...

Maxim Gorky

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,...

John Steinbeck

American novelist

John Steinbeck was an American novelist best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory farmworkers....

Nathaniel Hawthorne

American writer

Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the greatest fiction writers of 19th-century American literature. A master of the allegorical and symbolic tale, he remains best known for the novels The Scarlet Letter (1850)...

Marcel Proust

French writer

Marcel Proust was a French novelist and the author of À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27; In Search of Lost Time), a seven-volume novel based on Proust’s life. The novel explores its subject matter...

Thomas Hardy

British writer

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet who set much of his work in Wessex, his name for the counties of southwestern England. Hardy was the eldest of the four children of Thomas Hardy, a stonemason...

Tillie Olsen

American author

Tillie Olsen was an American writer and social activist known for her powerful fiction about the inner lives of the working poor, women, and minorities. Her interest in long-neglected women authors inspired...

Nikolay Gogol

Ukrainian-born writer

Nikolay Gogol was a Ukrainian-born humorist, dramatist, and novelist whose works, written in Russian, significantly influenced the direction of Russian literature. His novel Myortvye dushi (1842; Dead...

Guy de Maupassant

French writer

Guy de Maupassant was a French naturalist writer of short stories and novels who is by general agreement the greatest French short-story writer. Maupassant was the elder of the two children of Gustave...

Oscar Wilde

Irish author

Oscar Wilde was an Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose enduring fame rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance...

James Baldwin

American author

James Baldwin was an essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him one of the most important voices of the 20th century. A writer of exceptionally...

Margaret Atwood

Canadian author

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer best known for her prose fiction and for her feminist perspective. Among Atwood’s many acclaimed works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, her most celebrated is the...

Vigny, lithograph by Antoine Maurin, 1832

Alfred-Victor, count de Vigny

French author

Alfred-Victor, count de Vigny was a poet, dramatist, and novelist who was the most philosophical of the French Romantic writers. Vigny was born into an aristocratic family that had been reduced to modest...

J.R.R. Tolkien

English author

J.R.R. Tolkien was an English writer and scholar who achieved fame with his children’s book The Hobbit (1937) and his richly inventive epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). At age four Tolkien,...

Theodore Dreiser

American author

Theodore Dreiser was a novelist who was the outstanding American practitioner of naturalism. He was the leading figure in a national literary movement that replaced the observance of Victorian notions...

Bret Easton Ellis

American author

After his debut in 1985 with the novel Less Than Zero, American writer Bret Easton Ellis was declared by many critics as the “voice of a generation.” Ellis’s darkly sardonic first novel captured the jaded...

Sylvia Plath

American author

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist whose best-known works, such as the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and the novel The Bell Jar, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction...

Roald Dahl

British author

Roald Dahl was a British writer known for his ingenious and irreverent children’s books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and Matilda (1988), both of which were adapted into popular films....

Vladimir Nabokov

American author

Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian-born American novelist and critic and the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955), feature...

Khushwant Singh

Indian writer

Khushwant Singh was one of the best-known writers of India. He wrote novels such as Train to Pakistan (1956) and I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale (1959), several essays and short stories, and a definitive...

August Strindberg

Swedish dramatist

August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, who combined psychology and Naturalism in a new kind of European drama that evolved into Expressionist drama. His chief works...

J.D. Salinger

American author

J.D. Salinger was an American writer whose novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) won critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the post-World War II generation of college students. His corpus...

H.G. Wells

British author

H.G. Wells was an English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and such comic novels as Tono-Bungay...

Luigi Pirandello

Italian author

Luigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his invention of the “theatre within the theatre” in the play Sei personaggi...

PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: short story