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...

José Julián Martí Pérez was a leader of the Cuban independence movement as well as a renowned poet and writer. Active in the Cuban independence movement from boyhood, he was deported to Spain in 1871, returning in 1878. Exiled again for con...

Charles Henry Dow was an American journalist who co-founded Dow Jones & Company with Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresser. Dow also founded The Wall Street Journal, which has become one of the most respected financial publications in the w...

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh’s New Town in 1850. He died 44 years later on a small Samoan island in the Pacific. During his short life he travelled the world, defied convention, and made himself one of the most famous writer...

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...

Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish author, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, wh...

Georges Auguste Escoffier was a French chef, restaurateur and culinary writer who popularized and updated traditional French cooking methods. He is a legendary figure among chefs and gourmets, and was one of the most important leaders in t...

Karl Friedrich May was a popular German writer, noted mainly for adventure novels set in the American Old West, (best known for the characters of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand) and similar books set in the Orient and Middle East (with Kara B...

Sir Henry Morton Stanley was a journalist and explorer famous for his exploration of Africa and his search for David Livingstone. Stanley travelled to Zanzibar and outfitted an expedition with the best of everything, requiring no fewer than...

Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was a French statesman, physician and journalist. He served as the Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1908, and again from 1916 to 1920. For nearly the final year of World War I he led France, and was one of t...

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...

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...

John Muir was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Ca...

Edwin Abbott Abbott, English schoolmaster and theologian, is best known as the author of the mathematical satire and religious allegory Flatland (1884): A Romance of Many Dimensions which describes a two-dimensional world and explores the n...

Abraham Kuijper generally known as Abraham Kuyper, was a Dutch politician, journalist, statesman and theologian. He founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party and was prime minister of the Netherlands between 1901 and 1905....