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...

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist who held both Irish and British citizenship. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He...

Theodor Herzl, also known in Hebrew as Khozeh HaMedinah, lit. "Visionary of the State", was an Austro-Hungarian journalist and writer. He is the father of modern political Zionism and in effect the foundation of the State of Israel....

Anton Chekhov wrote both plays and short stories. He is generally listed in the first rank of Russian playwrights and in the high second rank (a notch below Pushkin and Tolstoy) as a writer of prose. His most famous plays include The Seagul...

Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM, more commonly known as J. M. Barrie, was a Scottish novelist and dramatist. He is best remembered for creating Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, whom he based on his friends, the Llewelyn...

Rudolf Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, literary scholar, architect, playwright, educator, and social thinker. He is the founder of anthroposophy, "a movement based on the notion that there is a spiritual world comprehensible to pure th...

Herman Heijermans was a Dutch writer. His novels and tales include Trinette (1892), Fles (1893), Kamertjeszonde (2 vols, 1896), Interieurs (1897), Diamantstad (2 vols, 1903). He created great interest by his play Op Hoop van Zegen (1900), a...

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and civil servant. Yeats was one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. His early work tended towards romantic lushness...

Baroness Emma Orczy was a British novelist, playwright and artist of Hungarian noble origin. She was most notable for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel. In 1903, she and her husband wrote a play based on one of her short...

Alfred Jarry was a French symbolist writer best known for coining the term and philosophical concept of 'pataphysics. In his lifetime, though associated with the Symbolist movement, Jarry was best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), which...

Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM was a British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, work...

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands w...

Bertolt Brecht, German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer, one of the most prominent figures in the 20th-century theatre. In his works Brecht have been concerned with encouraging audiences to think rather than becoming too involved i...

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writer...

Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright, essayist, and figure in twentieth-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (195...