Jean Racine was a French dramatist, one of the "big three" of 17th century France (along with Molière and Corneille), and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition. Racine was primarily a tragedian, though he did w...

Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was a celebrated Venetian playwright and librettist, whom critics today rank among the European theatre's greatest authors. His works, along with those of the modernist Luigi Pirandello, include some of Italy's most fa...

German poet, novelist, playwright, courtier, and natural philosopher, one of the greatest figures in Western literature. Throughout his life Goethe was interested in a variety of studies and pursuits. He made important discoveries in connec...

Johann Christoph Friedrich (later: von) Schiller, was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and dramatist. During the last several years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller struck a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous...

Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet. Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North A...

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and p...

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus. Owing to his keen observation of detail and u...

Victor Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. Hugo is considered to be one of the greatest and best-known French writers. Outside of France, his most famous works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862,...

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist, novelist and short story writer. Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in...

English poet Robert Browning was born in a suburb of London on May 7, 1812. He wrote his first book of poetry at the age of twelve, and was fluent in four languages by the age of fourteen. At sixteen, he began his studies at University Coll...

Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, in the little village of Skien. After a brief flirtation with poetic drama, he would go on to become Norway's most famous playwright, changing the face of world drama with his rea...

Machado de Assis was a pioneer Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer, widely regarded as the greatest writer of Brazilian literature. Nevertheless, Assis did not achieve widespread popularity outside Brazil during his...

Émile Zola was a French novelist, playwright, journalist, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political lib...

Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, and essayist. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time wrote over 60 plays and more than 30...

Oscar Wilde, Irish poet and dramatist whose reputation rests on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Among Wilde's other best-known works are his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gr...