Authors
by donnysimon | created - 04 Jan 2019 | updated - 6 days ago | Public1. Philip K. Dick
Writer | Blade Runner
Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in December 1928, along with a twin sister, Jane. Jane died less than eight weeks later, allegedly from an allergy to mother's milk. Dick's parents split up during his childhood, and he moved with his mother to Berkeley, California, where he lived for most of...
2. Mark Twain
Writer | Big River
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri in 1835, grew up in Hannibal. He was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Throughout his career, Twain served as a writer, lecturer, reporter, editor, printer, and prospector. Twain took his pen name from an alert cry used on his...
3. Ray Bradbury
Writer | The Ray Bradbury Theater
Ray Bradbury was an American science fiction writer whose works were translated in more than 40 languages and sold millions of copies around the world. Although he created a world of new technical and intellectual ideas, he never obtained a driver's license and had never driven an automobile.
He was...
4. George Orwell
Writer | Nineteen Eighty-Four
Born the son of an Opium Agent in Bengal, Eric Blair was educated in England (Eton 1921). The joined the British Imperial Police in Burma, serving until 1927. He then travelled around England and Europe, doing various odd jobs to support his writing. By 1935 he had adopted the 'pen-name' of 'George...
5. Aldous Huxley
Writer | A Woman's Vengeance
Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, at Laleham in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was the third of four children. His brother Julian Huxley was a biologist known for his theories of evolution. His grandfather, named Thomas Henry Huxley, was a naturalist known as "Darwin's Bulldog." His ...
6. Jules Verne
Writer | 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905) was one of the most famous French novelists of all time. His major work is the "Extraordinary Journeys", a series of more than sixty adventure novels including "Journey to the Center of the Earth", "Around the World in 80 Days", "20.000 Leagues under the Seas" and "...
7. H.G. Wells
Writer | The War of the Worlds
Writer, born in Bromley, Kent. He was apprenticed to a draper, tried teaching, studied biology in London, then made his mark in journalism and literature. He played a vital part in disseminating the progressive ideas which characterized the first part of the 20th-c. He achieved fame with scientific...
8. Frank Herbert
Writer | Dune
Frank Herbert was born on October 8, 1920 in Tacoma, Washington, USA. He was a writer, known for Dune (2021), Dune (1984) and Dune: Part Two (2024). He was married to Theresa Shackleford, Beverley Ann Stuart and Flora Parkinson. He died on February 11, 1986 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
9. Robert A. Heinlein
Writer | Starship Troopers
At the age of 17, Heinlein graduated from Central High School in Kansas City, Missouri. He spent one year at the University of Missouri before he entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, from which he graduated as the 20th best among the 243 cadets. He spent five years in the Pacific ...
10. Arthur Conan Doyle
Writer | Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle was a British writer of Irish descent, considered a major figure in crime fiction. His most famous series of works consisted of the "Sherlock Holmes" stories (1887-1927), consisting of four novels and 56 short stories. His other notable series were the "Professor Challenger" ...
11. Arthur C. Clarke
Writer | 2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke was born in the seaside town of Minehead, Somerset, England in December 16, 1917. In 1936 he moved to London, where he joined the British Interplanetary Society. There he started to experiment with astronautic material in the BIS, write the BIS Bulletin and science fiction. During ...
12. Isaac Asimov
Writer | I, Robot
Isaac Asimov was born Isaak Judah Ozimov, on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi shtetl, near Smolensk, Russia. He was the oldest of three children. His father, named Judah Ozimov, and his mother, named Anna Rachel Ozimov (nee Berman), were Orthodox Jews. Ozimov family were millers (the name Ozimov ...
13. Edgar Rice Burroughs
Writer | John Carter
His father had been a major in the Union army during the Civil War. Edgar Rice Burroughs attended the Brown School then, due to a diphtheria epidemic, Miss Coolie's Maplehurst School for Girls, then the Harvard School, Phillips Andover and the Michigan Military Academy. He was a mediocre student ...
14. William S. Burroughs
Actor | Drugstore Cowboy
William S. Burroughs, one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation (the other two being his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. He grew up in patrician surroundings ...
15. Jack Kerouac
Writer | On the Road
Jack Kerouac was born into a French-Canadian family and spoke French before he learned English. His father was a printer and a local businessman. His first story was inspired by the radio show "The Shadow". As a young writer he styled himself after Thomas Wolfe, and attended Columbia University. ...
16. Allen Ginsberg
Soundtrack | Beginners
Louis Ginsberg, the moderate Jewish Socialist and his wife Naomi, who was a radical Communist and irrepressible nudist are the parents of Irwin Allen Ginsberg, the poet and man of many other things eg. actor. Poems he written eg. Howl, Six gallery, Sunflower Sutra ... His themes: drugs, against ...
17. William Faulkner
Writer | To Have and Have Not
William Faulkner, one of the 20th century's most gifted novelists, wrote for the movies in part because he could not make enough money from his novels and short stories to support his growing number of dependants. The author of such acclaimed novels as "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom...
18. Ernest Hemingway
Writer | To Have and Have Not
Ernest Hemingway was an American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954) for his novel The Old Man and the Sea, which was made into a 1958 film The Old Man and the Sea (1958).
He was born into the hands of his physician father. He was the second of six ...
19. Arthur Koestler
Writer | Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler was born on September 5, 1905 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary [now Hungary]. He was a writer, known for Darkness at Noon, Producers' Showcase (1954) and Le téléthéâtre de Radio-Canada (1954). He was married to Cynthia May Jefferies, Mamaine Paget and Dorothee...
20. Hermann Hesse
Soundtrack | The Hours
Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877 in Calw, Germany. He was a writer, known for The Hours (2002), Siddhartha (1972) and Poem: I Set My Foot Upon the Air and It Carried Me (2003). He was married to Ninon Ausländer, Ruth Wenger and Maria Bernoulli. He died on August 9, 1962 in Montagnola, ...
21. D.H. Lawrence
Writer | Lady Chatterley's Lover
David Herbert Lawrence was born in Nottinghamshire, England, 11 September 1885. His father was a coal miner, his mother a genteel woman who sought education and refinement for her son. Lawrence earned a university degree and taught school for a short time. While still a student he began to publish ...
22. Herman Melville
Writer | The Enigma of Benito Cereno
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. Although his ...
23. George Eliot
Writer | Middlemarch
Mary Anne Evans was born on 22 November 1819 at South Farm, Arbury Hall near Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Her parents were Robert Evans, the manager of Arbury Hall, and Christina Evans. She had four siblings: Robert, Fanny, Chrissy and Isaac. Mary was always considered a serious child and she always had...
24. Mary Shelley
Writer | Young Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin; 30 August 1797 - 1 February 1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel "Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus" (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her...
25. Jane Austen
Writer | Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen was born on December 16th, 1775, to the local rector, Rev. George Austen (1731-1805), and Cassandra Leigh (1739-1827). She was the seventh of eight children. She had one older sister, Cassandra. In 1783 she went to Southampton to be taught by a relative, Mrs. Cawley, but was brought ...
26. Charlotte Brontë
Writer | Jane Eyre
Charlotte was born 1816, the third of the six children of Patrick Brontë, an Anglican clergyman, and his wife Maria Branwell Brontë. After their mother's death in 1821, Charlotte and her sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, were sent to Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters' School, which Charlotte would later ...
27. Anne Brontë
Writer | Novela
The youngest of the talented Brontë siblings, Anne was born January 17th, 1820 to Rev. Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë. Her mother died of cancer when she was only a year old, and growing up Anne was especially close to her elder sister Emily Brontë. Along with their other sister, ...
28. Emily Brontë
Writer | Wuthering Heights
The dreamiest of the talented Brontë clan, Emily Jane Brontë was born in 1818. Her mother died when she was barely more than a toddler, and Emily and her younger sister, Anne, became very close. Along with their other siblings, 'Charlotte Bronte' and Branwell Bronte, they invented the make-believe ...
29. Edgar Allan Poe
Writer | Stonehearst Asylum
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, named David Poe Jr., and his mother, named Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were touring actors. Both parents died in 1811, and Poe became an orphan before he was 3 years old. He was adopted by John Allan, a tobacco ...
30. Nathaniel Hawthorne
Writer | Graves and Goblins
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that town. Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi ...
31. Lewis Carroll
Writer | Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles L. Dodgson, author of the children's classics "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass."
Born on January 27, 1832 in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, Charles Dodgson wrote and created games as a child. At age 20 he received a ...
32. C.S. Lewis
Writer | The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis was born in 1898 and brought up in a very strict, religious household. While he was quite young, his mother died of cancer but the "stiff upper lip" in favour at the time meant he wasn't allowed to grieve. He became an Oxford don and led a sheltered life. He seriously questioned his ...
33. Sinclair Lewis
Writer | Elmer Gantry
Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was a colossus of American letters in the first half of the last century. Arguably, he is the first major "modern" writer of the 20th century, as there is American literature before "Main Street" (1920) and after that seminal...
34. John Updike
Writer | The Witches of Eastwick
John Updike is among the leading novelists of the late 20th century, having twice won the Pulitzer Prize. Updike graduated Harvard College in 1954 to the staff of the New Yorker, with whom he has worked ever since as a contributor and reviewer. Updike has published 15 novels and lives in ...
35. James Joyce
Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, on 2 February 1882. His father invested unwisely, and the family's fortunes declined steadily. Joyce graduated from University College Dublin (UCD), in 1902. He briefly studied medicine in Paris but his mother's impending death from cancer ...
36. Henry James
Writer | What Maisie Knew
Henry James was born 15 April 1843, to a wealthy family. He was born in New York, New York USA. His parents were Henry James Sr. and Mary Robertson Walsh; He had one brother William James (January 11 1842-August 26 1910) and one sister Alice James. When Henry James was a young boy he would enjoy ...
37. Thomas Hardy
Writer | Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840 in Upper Bockhampton, Dorset, England, UK. He was a writer, known for Far from the Madding Crowd (2015), Tess (1979) and Maiden No More. He was married to Florence Emily Dugdale and Emma Lavinia Gifford. He died on January 11, 1928 in Dorchester, Dorset, ...
38. Charles Dickens
Writer | Great Expectations
Charles Dickens' father was a clerk at the Naval Pay Office, and because of this the family had to move from place to place: Plymouth, London, Chatham. It was a large family and despite hard work, his father couldn't earn enough money. In 1823 he was arrested for debt and Charles had to start ...
39. John Fowles
Writer | The Collector
John Fowles was born on March 31, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England, UK. He was a writer and actor, known for The Collector (1965), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and Bilanggo sa dilim (1986). He was married to Sarah Smith and Elizabeth Whitton. He died on November 5, 2005 in Lyme Regis, ...
40. Richard Adams
Writer | Watership Down
Richard Adams spent his first 52 years in relative anonymity. And when he did complete a book that he wrote, he struggled to find anyone to publish it.
Richard George Adams was born on 9 May 1920, in Newbury, Berkshire. He was the son of a country doctor and was brought up in the rolling countryside...
41. Barbara Kingsolver
Writer | The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955 in Kentucky, USA. She is a writer and producer, known for The Poisonwood Bible, Channel 4 News (1982) and The Rosie O'Donnell Show (1996). She has been married to Steven Hopp since 1985. They have two children.
42. John le Carré
Writer | The Constant Gardener
John le Carré was born in Poole, Dorset in England on 19 October, 1931. He went to Sherborne School and, later, studied German literature for one year at University of Bern. Later, he went to Lincoln College, Oxford and graduated in Modern Languages. From 1956 to 1958, he taught at Eton and from ...
43. Mario Vargas Llosa
Writer | Pantaleón y las visitadoras
Mario Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936 in Arequipa, Peru. He is a writer and director, known for Pantaleon (1976), Captain Pantoja and the Special Services (1999) and Tune in Tomorrow... (1990). He has been married to Patricia Llosa since 1965. He was previously married to Julia Urquidi.
44. Gabriel García Márquez
Writer | El año de la peste
Major Latin-American author of novels and short stories, a central figure in the so-called magical realism movement in Latin American literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. Studied law and journalism in Bogotá and Cartagena. He began his career as a journalist in 1948, ...
45. Bram Stoker
Writer | Dracula
Bram Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1847, and gained fame for his novel "Dracula" about an aristocratic vampire in Transylvania. The sequel, "Dracula's Guest," was not published for 17 years after the publication of "Dracula," two years after Stoker's death. Stoker also wrote "The Mystery ...
46. William Styron
Writer | Sophie's Choice
William Styron was born on June 11, 1925 in Newport News, Virginia, USA. He was a writer, known for Sophie's Choice (1982), Lie Down in Darkness and Playhouse 90 (1956). He was married to Rose Burgunder. He died on November 1, 2006 in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, USA.
47. William Golding
Writer | Lord of the Flies
William Golding was born on September 19, 1911 in St Columb Minor, Cornwall, England, UK. He was a writer, known for Lord of the Flies (1990), Lord of the Flies (1963) and Alkitrang dugo (1975). He was married to Ann Brookfield. He died on June 19, 1993 in Perranarworthal, Cornwall, England, UK.
48. J.D. Salinger
Writer | My Foolish Heart
U.S. writer whose novel "The Catcher in the Rye" (1951) won critical acclaim and devoted admirers, especially among the post-World War II generation of college students. His entire corpus of published works consists of that one novel and 13 short stories, all originally written in the period 1948-...
49. Vladimir Nabokov
Writer | Lolita
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 22, 1899, the eldest of five children in a wealthy aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia. His grandfather was a Justice Minister to the Czar Alexander II. His father, named Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal political leader, the ...
50. Daniel Defoe
Writer | Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Born the eldest son and third child of James and Mary Defoe, Defoe received a very good education, as his father intended him to become a Presbyterian minister, but he chose to become a merchant instead. In 1684 he joined the army of the rebel Duke of Monmouth, but when the rebellion failed, Defoe ...
51. Alexandre Dumas
Writer | The Count of Monte Cristo
His paternal grandparents were Marie Cessete Dumas (a Haitian slave) and Marquis Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie. Antoine disapproved of their son, Thomas-Alexandre, joining the French army under the "Davy de la Pailleterie" name, so Thomas-Alexandre used his mother's surname instead. He became a ...
52. Victor Hugo
Writer | Les Misérables
Although Hugo was fascinated by poems from childhood on, he spent some time at the polytechnic university of Paris until he dedicated all his work to literature. He was one of the few authors who were allowed to reach popularity during his own lifetime and one of the leaders of French romance.
After...
53. Fyodor Dostoevsky
Writer | The Double
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Russia. He was the second of seven children of Mikhail Andreevich and Maria Dostoevsky. His father, a doctor, was a member of the Russian nobility, owned serfs and had a considerable estate near Moscow where he lived with his ...
54. Lev Tolstoy
Writer | Anna Karenina
Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, in his ancestral estate Yasnaya Polyana, South of Moscow, Russia. He was the fourth of five children in a wealthy family of Russian landed Gentry. His parents died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his elder brothers and ...
55. Anton Chekhov
Writer | Kis Uykusu
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860, the third of six children to a family of a grocer, in Taganrog, Russia, a southern seaport and resort on the Azov Sea. His father, a 3rd-rank Member of the Merchant's Guild, was a religious fanatic and a tyrant who used his children as slaves. Young Chekhov...
56. Ivan Turgenev
Writer | Theatre Macabre
Ivan Turgenev was born into a wealthy landowning family with many serfs, in the city of Oryol in Southern Russia. His father, a cavalry colonel, died when he was 15, and he was raised by his abusive mother, who ruled her 5000 serfs ruthlessly with a whip. He never married, but fathered a daughter ...
57. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Writer | Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer who was imprisoned for his criticism of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and later exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile.
He was born Aleksandr Isaakovich Solzhenitsyn on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Southern ...
58. Henri Charrière
Writer | Papillon
Henri Charrière was born in 1906. He grew up in the south of France where his father was the master of a village school. After completing his military service in the navy, Charrière moved to Paris. His acquired nickname "Papillon" soon became a respected one in the underworld.
At the age of ...
59. Albert Camus
Writer | Bajo la metralla
Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, Algeria. His parents were Spanish-French-Algerian (pied noir) colonists. His father, Lucien, died in the Battle of Marne (1914) during WWI. His mother, named Catherine Helene Sintes was of Spanish origin, she was a deaf mute due to a stroke, ...
60. Franz Kafka
Writer | Le procès
Franz Kafka was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Austrian Empire, in 1883. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a business owner and a domestic tyrant, frequently abusing his son. Kafka later admitted to his father, "My writing was all about you...". He believed that his father broke ...
61. Rudyard Kipling
Writer | The Man Who Would Be King
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, Maharashtra, India, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, a museum director and author and illustrator. This was at the height of the "British Raj", so he was brought up by Indian nurses ("ayahs"), who taught him something of the beliefs and tongues of India. He was ...
62. Robert Louis Stevenson
Writer | Muppet Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer from Edinburgh. His most popular works include the pirate-themed adventure novel "Treasure Island" (1883), the poetry collection "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885), the Gothic horror novella "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr ...
63. Boris Pasternak
Writer | Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow on February 10, 1890 into an artistic family of Russian-Jewish heritage. His father was an acclaimed artist named Leonid Pasternak, who converted to Christianity, and his mother was a renown concert pianist named Rosa Kaufman. Their home was open to family friends...
64. Nikolay Gogol
Writer | Burnt Hickory
Nikolai (Mykola) Gogol was a Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist of Ukrainian origin. His ancestors were bearing the name of Gogol-Janovsky and claimed belonging to the upper class Polish Szlachta. Gogol's father, a Ukrainian writer living on his old family estate, had five other children. He...
65. Norman Mailer
Writer | Tough Guys Don't Dance
Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn-born and -bred writer who fought for what he characterized as the "heavyweight championship" of American letters after the 1961 death of Ernest Hemingway, never came close to his dream of writing the Great American novel, but he was a colossus of American culture and ...
66. Gore Vidal
Actor | GATTACA
Gore Vidal was born Eugene Louis Vidal in 1925 in West Point, New York, to Nina (Gore) and West Point aeronautics instructor and aviation pioneer Eugene Luther Vidal. The Vidals endured a rocky marriage divorcing ten years after Gore's birth. Young Gore spent much of his childhood with his blind ...
67. Michael Crichton
Writer | Jurassic Park
Michael Crichton was born in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in Roslyn, New York. His father was a journalist and encouraged him to write and to type. Michael gave up studying English at Harvard University, having become disillusioned with the teaching standards--the final straw came when he ...
68. Jean-Paul Sartre
Writer | Les orgueilleux
Jean-Paul Charles-Aymard Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, France. His father, Jean-Baptiste Sartre, was an officer in the French Navy. His mother, Anne-Marie Schweitzer, was the cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Sartre was one year old when his father died. He was ...
69. Honoré de Balzac
Writer | Intimità proibita di una giovane sposa
Honoré de Balzac was a French writer whose works have been made into films, such as, Cousin Bette (1998) starring Jessica Lange, and television serials, such as Cousin Bette (1971), starring Margaret Tyzack and Helen Mirren.
He was born on March 20, 1799, in Tours, France. His father, Bernard ...
70. Émile Zola
Writer | Bakjwi
Émile Zola was born on April 2, 1840, in Paris, France. His father was an Italian engineer. Young Zola studied at the Collége Bourbon in Provence, where his schoolmate and friend was Paul Cezanne. In 1858 Zola returned to Paris and became a student at the Lycée Saint-Louis, from which he graduated ...
71. Marcel Proust
Writer | La captive
Marcel Proust was a French intellectual, author and critic, best known for his seven-volume fiction 'In search of Lost Time'. He coined the term "involuntary memory", which became also known as "Proust effect" in modern psychology.
He was born Valentin Louis Georges Eugéne Marcel Proust, on July 10, ...
72. Tom Wolfe
Writer | The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe was born on March 2, 1930 in Richmond, Virginia, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Right Stuff (1983), The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He was married to Sheila Berger. He died on May 14, 2018 in New York, USA.
73. Saul Bellow
Actor | Zelig
Saul Bellow was born on July 10, 1915 in Lachine, Québec, Canada [now Lachine, Montréal, Québec, Canada]. He was a writer and actor, known for Zelig (1983), Henderson the Rain King and Thirty-Minute Theatre (1965). He was married to Janis Bellow, Alexandra Ionesco Tuleca, Susan Glassman, Alexandra ...
74. Elie Wiesel
Writer | L'aube
Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in the Kingdom of Romania and emigrated after WWII to the United States. Wiesel is famous as a writer and human rights activist. He is a survivor of the Holocaust and his books often deal with this subject. In 1985 Wiesel was awarded the Congressional Gold...
75. Sholom Aleichem
Writer | Fiddler on the Roof
Sholom Aleichem (translated from Hebrew as a greeting "Peace be with you") was the pseudonym of Sholom Yakov Rabinovitz. He was born on February 18, 1859, in Pereyaslav near Kiev, Ukraine, in the Russian Empire. His father was a religious scholar and the family was trilingual. After his mother died...
76. Philip Roth
Writer | The Human Stain
Philip Roth was born on March 18, 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Human Stain (2003), The Plot Against America (2020) and American Pastoral (2016). He was married to Claire Bloom and Margaret Elna (Martinson) Williams. He died on May 22, 2018 in ...
77. Joseph Conrad
Writer | Untitled Amazon Rainforest Project
Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Kiev Province, now the Ukraine, to Polish parents Apollo Korzeniowski and Ewa Bobrowska. His father was a political activist and he and his family were exiled after he was suspected of involvement with revolutionary activities. Conrad had no friends as a child ...
78. Jack London
Writer | The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Jack London was the best-selling, highest paid and most popular American author of his time.
He was born John Griffith Chaney, on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco. He was raised by his mother Flora Wellman and his stepfather John London (he didn't know who his father was until his adulthood). ...
79. Graham Greene
Writer | The Fallen Idol
Graham Greene was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century and his influence on the cinema and theatre was enormous. He wrote five plays and almost all of his novels, including "Brighton Rock", "The Ministry of Fear" and "The End of the Affair", have been brought to the screen. A superb ...
80. Anne Frank
Writer | Anne Frank Remembered
Born in Germany in 1929 and raised and raised in Germany and Amsterdam. In 1942, shortly after receiving a diary for her 13th birthday, she and her family were forced to go into hiding to escape Hitler's persecution of the Jews. Hiding with another family and a dentist in an annex behind the ...
81. Jorge Luis Borges
Writer | Invasión
Borges was born into an upper class family, and received his education in Buenos Aires, Cambridge, and Geneva. He began writing as a student, and when in 1918 he settled in Spain, it was as a member of an experimental literary group. He returned to Argentina in 1921, and had his first poems ...
82. William Shakespeare
Writer | The Tragedy of Macbeth
William Shakespeare's birthdate is assumed from his baptism on April 25. His father John was the son of a farmer who became a successful tradesman; his mother Mary Arden was gentry. He studied Latin works at Stratford Grammar School, leaving at about age 15. About this time his father suffered an ...
83. Ken Kesey
Writer | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Kesey burst into the literary scene with the "Cuckoo's Nest" in 1962 which he wrote from his experiences working at a veterans hospital. During this period, he volunteered for the testing on the drug LSD. After writing his second novel, "Sometimes A Great Notion," he bought an old school bus dubbed...
84. Stephen King
Writer | Maximum Overdrive
Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, at the Maine General Hospital in Portland. His parents were Nellie Ruth (Pillsbury), who worked as a caregiver at a mental institute, and Donald Edwin King, a merchant seaman. His father was born under the surname "Pollock," but used the last name ...
85. John Steinbeck
Writer | Lifeboat
John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 ...
86. Zane Grey
Writer | The Last Duane
Born Pearl Zane Gray on January 31, 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio--a town founded by his mother's family--famed western novelist Zane Grey was an athlete and outdoorsman from an early age, with his main interests being fishing and baseball. He attended the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball ...
87. Pearl S. Buck
Writer | The Big Wave
Daughter of Christian missionaries, Pearl Buck was reared and educated in China. She received her university education in America but returned to China in the mid-1910s. She became a university instructor and writer, eventually authoring novels about China, some of which were turned into Hollywood ...
88. Agatha Christie
Writer | Les petits meurtres d'Agatha Christie
Agatha was born as "Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller" in 1890 to Frederick Alvah Miller and Clara Boehmer. Agatha was of American and British descent, her father being American and her mother British. Her father was a relatively affluent stockbroker. Agatha received home education from early childhood ...
89. Ian Fleming
Writer | Casino Royale
Born into a wealthy and influential English family, Ian Fleming spent his early years attending top British schools such as Eton and Sandhurst military academy. He took to writing while schooling in Kitzbuhel, Austria, and upon failing the entrance requirements for Foreign Service joined the news ...
90. Christopher Isherwood
Writer | Cabaret
Christopher Isherwood was born on August 26, 1904 in Cheshire, England, UK. He was a writer and actor, known for Cabaret (1972), A Single Man (2009) and Frankenstein: The True Story (1973). He died on January 4, 1986 in Santa Monica, California, USA.
91. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writer | The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
"There are no second acts in American lives," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, who himself went from being the high priest of the Jazz Age to a down-and-out alcoholic within the space of 20 years, but not before giving the world several literary masterpieces, the most famous of which is "The Great Gatsby...
92. Oscar Wilde
Writer | The Picture of Dorian Gray
A gifted poet, playwright and wit, Oscar Wilde was a phenomenon in 19th-century England. He was illustrious for preaching the importance of style in life and art, and of attacking Victorian narrow-mindedness.
Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin before ...
93. James Fenimore Cooper
Writer | The Last of the Mohicans
Favorite writer of generations of Americans, Cooper was born on Tuesday, September 15th, 1789, and grew up on his family's huge wooded settlement, in Cooperstown, New York, which his father, William Cooper, a prominent Federalist, had founded before this son's birth. His days as a Yale student were...
94. Homer
Writer | Troy
Homer is the name traditionally ascribed to the brilliant Greek bard that authored, most notably, the Iliad and the Odyssey (Western civilization's first complete stories). Nothing concrete is known of his life, but he is traditionally thought to be blind and was probably born in either Chios or ...
95. Walter Scott
Soundtrack | Zombieland: Double Tap
Sir Walter Scott was born August 15, 1771, in Edinburgh, Scotland, as the ninth child (and the fourth surviving) of Walter Scott, a solicitor, and his wife Anne Rutherford. Polio, contracted when he was two, resulted in a crippled left leg, but even this illness did not prevent Scott from growing ...
96. Thomas Mann
Writer | Morte a Venezia
Thomas Mann was probably Germany's most influential author of the 20th century, receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Born on 6 June 1875 in Lübeck, his family moved to Munich in 1893, where he lived until 1933 and wrote some of his most successful novels like "Buddenbrocks" (1901), "...
97. Kingsley Amis
Writer | The New Adventures of Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis was born on April 16, 1922 in London, England, UK. He was a writer, known for The New Adventures of Lucky Jim (1982), The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim (1967) and Take a Girl Like You (1970). He was married to Elizabeth Jane Howard and Hilary Ann Bardwell. He died on October 22, ...
98. Arthur Miller
Writer | The Crucible
Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City, one of three children born to Augusta (nee Barnett) and Isidore Miller. His family was of Austrian Jewish descent. His father manufactured women's coats, but his business was devastated by the Depression, seeding his son's ...
99. Eugene O'Neill
Writer | Long Day's Journey Into Night
Eugene O'Neill, the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, is widely considered the greatest American playwright. No one, not Maxwell Anderson, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, nor Edward Albee, approaches O'Neill in terms of his artistic achievement or ...
100. Friedrich Nietzsche
Soundtrack | Die Höhenluft - für Alle und Keinen
Friedrich Nietzsche was raised having five women around him - his mother, grandmother, two aunts and a sister, all living together. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died when Nietzsche was 5 years old. After a Catholic school he studied music and Greco-Roman culture at the famous Schulpfora from 1858...
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