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...

Paul van Ostaijen was a Flemish poet and writer. Van Ostaijen was born in Antwerp. His nickname was Mister 1830, because of his habit of walking along the streets of Antwerp clothed as a dandy from that year. His poetry shows influences by...

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded by many as one of the greatest American writers of the 2...

Grace Marguerite, Lady Hay Drummond-Hay was a British journalist who was the first woman to travel around the world by air, in a Zeppelin. Although she was not an aviator herself at first, she certainly contributed to its glamour and the ge...

Jean Giono was a French author renowned for his works of fiction set in the Provence region of France. Among his most famous writings are the three novels of his "Pan Trilogy", which allude to the Greek God Pan and pantheism: Colline, Un de...

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer, novelist, philosopher, and prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College at the University of Oxford with a first class honours degree in English literature. The aut...

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor who is best known as the author of the classic high-fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. He served as the Rawl...

Howard Phillips Lovecraft — known as H. P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy, poetry and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction. Lovecraft's guiding aesthetic and philosophical principle was w...

Boris Pasternak was a Soviet Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russian, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life (1917), is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language....

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian and Soviet poet of Jewish descent, novelist and translator of Goethe and Shakespeare. In Russia, Pasternak is most celebrated as a poet. My Sister Life, written in 1917, is one...

From the 1920s until the 1970s Agatha Christie was the world's most popular mystery author, reportedly selling more than one billion books worldwide. While other mystery authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett came and went, Chri...

Abel Gance was a French film director and producer, writer and actor. He is best known for three major silent films: J'accuse, La Roue, and the monumental Napoléon. He worked in the cinema from 1909, finally winning acclaim with Mater do...

Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, CB, DSO, known professionally as T.E. Lawrence and, later, T.E. Shaw, but most famously as "Lawrence of Arabia," gained international renown for his role as a British liaison officer during the Ara...

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isola...

Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch artist, practicing in painting, writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl. Although he considered himself to be a modern painter at that time, his early work is in...