Wilhelm (later William) Steinitz was an Austrian and later American chess Master player, and the first undisputed world chess champion from 1886 to 1894. He was also a highly influential writer and chess theoretician. When discussing che...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist this country has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the fa...

Paul Belloni du Chaillu was a French-American traveler and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa. He later researched th...

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Although part of a prominent family with strong ties to its community, Dickinson lived much of her life in reclusive isolation. After studying at...

Hector Malot, writer of children's stories, whose novel Sans famille (Nobody's Boy, 1878) is one of the great popular classics of French culture. The moral and didactic adventure story of the boy Rémi, a foundling who goes in search of his...

Mathilde Wesendonck was a German poet and author. She is best known as the friend and possibly mistress of Richard Wagner, who set five songs to her words, called the Wesendonck Lieder. By 1857, Wagner had become infatuated with Mathilde. I...

Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the...

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...

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the...

Charles-Theodore-Henri De Coster was a Belgian novelist whose efforts laid the basis for a native Belgian literature. His masterpiece was The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak (1867), a 16th-century romance, in which Belgian patr...

Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing na...

Gustave Flauber, French novelist. Flaubert is regarded as one of the supreme masters of the realistic novel. He was a scrupulous, slow writer, intent on the exact word (le mot juste) and complete objectivity. The son of a surgeon, he studie...

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. A Slavo...

Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS was a British geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explorations wi...

Multatuli is the pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-1887). After 18 years of civil service in the Dutch East Indies, he returned to Europe in 1856 a disillusioned man. The way the natives were treated by their own as well as by the Du...