English speaking countries: List of significant authors

English and Scottish authors

Irish authors
American authors
Canadian authors

1. Beowulf
a long poem in Old English, probably written in the 8th century. It tells how the hero Beowulf kills two monsters and finally dies killing a third. It was the first major
European poem that was not written in Latin or Greek.

2. William Shakespeare
(15641616) the English poet and playwright (= writer of plays) who is often described as the greatest writer in the English language. He was born in Stratford-uponAvon, the son of a wealthy glove maker and merchant and married Anne Hathaway in 1582 and they had three children. In 1588 Shakespeare moved to London and
joined a leading theatre company called the Chamberlains Men. He quickly established a reputation as a writer of plays and appeared in his own dramas at the Globe
theatre. He wrote 36 plays for the London stage including comedies such as A Midsummer Nights Dream and As You Like It, tragedies such as Hamlet, Othello,
Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, history plays including Richard II and Henry IV and two romances, The Winters Tale and The Tempest. The plays are written mainly
in verse and are greatly admired for their poetic language, dramatic technique and literary style. He also wrote poems, the best known of which are The Sonnets,
famous for their beautiful language and strong emotion. Shakespeare returned to Stratford-upon-Avon in about 1611 and died there in 1616. Today his plays are
regularly performed all over the world. In Britain, they are often performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and around the country, and at
the Globe Theatre in London.

3. Geoffrey Chaucer
(c. 13431400) an English poet. He is often called the father of English poetry because he was the first major poet to write in English rather than Latin or French. His
best-known work is The Canterbury Tales.

4. John Milton
(160874) one of the most famous of all English poets. He is best known for his great poem Paradise Lost, which he completed in 1667. This was based on the Old
Testament story of the Garden of Eden, and its central character is Satan. It was followed by Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, published together in 1671.
His earlier works of poetry included LAllegro and Il Penseroso (both 1631) and Lycidas (1638), and he also wrote political articles supporting Parliament against the
king, and the freedom of the press.

5. Daniel Defoe
(16601731) an English writer who is considered to be the first English writer of novels. His most famous novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), was followed by Moll
Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) set during the Great Plague of London, and Roxana (1724). For most of his life Defoe worked as a political
journalist, and he did not begin writing his novels until he was nearly 60.

6. Jane Austen
(17751817) an English writer whose novels have had a strong influence on the development of English literature. In them she describes the personal relationships
and social life of the English upper middle class of her time with gentle humour. She herself never married. Her best-known books are Sense and Sensibility (1811),
Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1816) and Persuasion (1818). Many of her novels have been made into films.

7. The Bront sisters

Charlotte Bront (181655), Emily Bront (181848) and Anne Bront (182049), three British writers who lived most of their lives in Haworth, a small village in
Yorkshire, England, where their father was the local Anglican priest. They began to write poetry and novels when they were very young, creating imaginary worlds
when they were alone in the Yorkshire countryside. They died before their best-known books, including Charlottes Jane Eyre, Emilys Wuthering Heights and Annes
Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), became the famous works of English literature that they are today.

8. Walter Scott
(17711832) a Scottish author and poet. Most of his poetry and his historical novels are based on the traditions and history of Scotland, especially the border region.
His most famous poems include The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake, and his best-known novels include Waverley, Rob Roy and Ivanhoe. All were
extremely popular during his life and influenced writers in Britain and Europe. Scott was made a baronet in 1820.

9. Charles Dickens
(181270) an English writer of novels who combined great writing with the ability to write popular stories full of interesting characters, such as Scrooge, Fagin and the
Artful Dodger. His many books are mostly about life in Victorian(1) England and often describe the harsh conditions in which poor people lived. His early novels, which
include Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, were written in parts for magazines published each week or each month. His later books include David Copperfield, A Tale
of Two Cities and Great Expectations.

10. Mary Shelley

(17971851) an English writer, best known as the author of Frankenstein. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, and is also remembered for having run away
with the poet Shelley at the age of 16. She married Shelley after his first wife killed herself in 1816.

11. Lewis Carroll

(183298) an English writer, best known for his childrens books Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He also wrote nonsense verse and taught
mathematics at Oxford University. His real name was Charles Dodgson.

12. Arthur Conan Doyle

(18591930) a Scottish writer. He is best known as the creator of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes, but he also wrote historical novels and science fiction. He
began his working life as a doctor but gave this up after the success of his first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet (1887). He was made a knight in 1902.

13. Rudyard Kipling

(18651936) an English writer. He was born in India, where many of his books are set (e.g. The Jungle Book and Kim), and worked there as a journalist in the 1880s.
He wrote in a wide range of forms, including novels, short stories and poems for adults and children. Many of his poems are still very popular, including If, Gunga Din
and Mandalay (1892). The characters in his work are often soldiers in parts of the British Empire, and he has been accused of taking too much pride in the British
Empire and its use of military force. In 1907 Kipling became the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature.

14. Herbert George Wells

(18661946) an English author known especially as a writer of early science fiction novels. These include The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) and
The War of the Worlds (1898). He also wrote successful comic novels about life in Britain, including Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). Wells believed
strongly in the importance of science and the need for social change and world peace.

15. Virginia Woolf

(18821941) an English writer of novels. She is well known for the experimental style of many of her books. She was one of the first writers to use the stream of
consciousness, a way of describing a persons thoughts and feelings as a flow of ideas as the person would have experienced them, without using the usual methods
of description. She was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and is considered an important early writer about feminism (= the idea that women should have the same
rights and opportunities as men). Her best-known novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928).

16. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

(18821973) an English writer, best known as the author of The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (19545). Tolkien was also a professor at Oxford University.

17. George Orwell

(190350) an English writer of essays and novels. He was born in India and educated at Eton. His first job was with the British police in Burma (19227), but he
reacted against his background and spent the next few years living with very little money in Paris and London. He wrote about his experiences among poor people
there in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). His next book, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), described working-class life in Britain during the Depression. He
joined the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and wrote about this in Homage to Catalonia (1938). His two best-known novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty-Four, were written in the 1940s. In their different ways, they both show his disappointment with the results of socialist revolutions, especially in the Soviet
Union.

18. William Golding

(191193) an English writer of novels. He is best known for his first novel, The Lord of the Flies (1954). Like many of his other works, it is concerned with human
cruelty. He won the Booker Prize for the novel Rites of Passage (1980), and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983. He was made a knight in 1988.

19. Kingsley Amis

(192295) an English writer and poet. His most famous book is the comic novel Lucky Jim (1954). In 1986 he won the Booker Prize with The Old Devils. Most of his
novels are angry but humorous attacks on aspects of modern life. He was the father of Martin Amis and was made a knight in 1990.

20. Jonathan Swift

(16671745) an Irish writer, best known as the author of Gullivers Travels. He was the dean (= priest in charge of the other priests) of St Patricks Cathedral in
Dublin, but also spent much time in London, where he knew many important writers and politicians. He is considered one of the greatest satirists (= writers who use
humour to criticize people and things such as the social and political systems) in English literature. He also wrote poetry.

21. Oscar Wilde

(18541900) an Irish writer of plays, poetry and one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). He became famous after moving to London, where he wrote his most
successful comedy plays, including Lady Windermeres Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest. He is also well known for his humorous and intelligent
remarks, and for being homosexual. In 1895 he was sent to prison for his homosexuality, which was illegal at the time. He described his prison experience in the
poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. After he was released he lived the rest of his life in France and Italy. Many of his clever and amusing remarks are still repeated
today: As Wilde said to the customs officer, I have nothing to declare but my genius.

22. George Bernard Shaw

(18561950) an Irish writer of plays, novels and articles about music and literature who lived in England for much of his life. He is best known for his plays, which are
full of intelligent and amusing remarks and criticisms of society. He is also famous for his campaigns for social change. He was one of the earliest members of the
Fabian Society and a supporter of feminism (= womens rights) and vegetarianism (= not eating meat). His best-known works include The Devils Disciple (1897),
Major Barbara (1905) and Pygmalion (1913). He was given the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. When he died he left money for the invention of a new alphabet that
would make the English spelling system simpler.

23. William Butler Yeats

(18651939) a leading Irish writer of poetry, plays and stories. His best-known works of poetry include The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), The Winding Stair (1933)
and Collected Poems (1933). His plays include The Land of Hearts Desire (1894) and The Green Helmet (1910), and several were written to be performed at the
Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which he helped to establish. His book of stories, The Celtic Twilight, created a lot of interest in traditional Irish stories. Yeats was also much
involved in politics as a nationalist and became a Senator in the Irish parliament (19228). He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.

24. James Joyce

(18821941) an Irish author who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He left Ireland in 1904 and spent the rest of his life abroad, in
Trieste, Zrich and Paris. His novels Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) introduced new ways of writing fiction, particularly the stream of consciousness
style, which presents a persons rapidly changing thoughts. He also made use of invented words and unusual sentence structures. His work was not well understood
during his life and Ulysses was banned in Britain and the US until 1936 because it was considered offensive. Earlier books by him include Dubliners (1914) (a
collection of short stories) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (191415), which reflects Joyces own experiences of growing up in Dublin, and the play Exiles
(1918).

25. Samuel Beckett

(190689) an Irish writer of plays, novels and poetry. He is best known for his plays, including Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1957). He settled in France
early in his career and much of his work was written in French. He was given the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969.

26. Washington Irving

(17831859) the first US writer to gain an international reputation. He is best known for two short stories, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, which
were published in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1820). He also wrote the comic History of New York (1809) under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker.
Irving was later the US ambassador to Spain (18426).

27. James Fenimore Cooper

(17891851) the first major US writer of novels. He wrote mostly about frontiersmen and Native Americans. His best-known books include The Last of the Mohicans
(1826) and The Deerslayer (1841). He also wrote novels about sailors and histories of the US Navy.

28. Nathaniel Hawthorne

(180464) a US writer of novels and short stories. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and set his novels in New England during the time of the Puritans. The
most famous are The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and his best-known collections of short stories are the two volumes of TwiceTold Tales (1837 and 1842). He lived in Europe for seven years and was US consul in Liverpool in 1853.

29. Edgar Allan Poe

(180949) a US writer of short stories and poems. His best remembered works are frightening stories of mystery and death, including The Fall of the House of Usher
(1839) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1843). He is also regarded as having invented the modern detective story on the basis of such stories as The Murders in the
Rue Morgue (1841). His poems include The Raven (1845) and Annabel Lee (1849). Poe drank too much alcohol and died young. There have been film versions of
many of his stories.

30. Herman Melville

(181991) a US writer of novels whose early life as a sailor provided the material for many of his books, including his best-known novel, Moby-Dick. His other books
include Typee (1846), Omoo (1847) and the short novel Billy Budd (1924), published after he died. Melvilles books were not popular during his life, and he died in
poverty. His importance as a writer was not recognized until the 1920s.

31. Walt Whitman

(181992) a major US poet who wrote about individual freedom, equal rights and sexual love, as well as about his love for America. Though many readers thought his
poems were immoral, he had a strong influence on later American poets, especially the beat generation. He used the new form of free verse, in which lines do not
rhyme. His best-known works are Leaves of Grass, Drum Taps (1865) and a collection of writings, Democratic Vistas (1871).

32. Emily Dickinson

(183086) an American poet whose work has had a strong influence on modern poetry. Her poems were often about religion and death, and they contain impressive
images. She wrote nearly 1 800 of them, but only seven were published during her life. Dickinson spent the last half of her life alone in her home in Amherst,
Massachusetts, writing secretly.

33. Mark Twain

(18351910) the leading US humorous writer of the 19th century. His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He is best known for the novels The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), but he also wrote travel books and essays, many of them based on his experiences of life on the
Mississippi River. His other books include the historical novels The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court (1889), and Life on
the Mississippi (1889), an account of his early life.

34. Francis Scott Fitzgerald

(18961940) a US writer of novels and short stories about the Jazz Age, a name he invented. The life of fun and immoral behaviour led by many rich people in those
years are described in his best-known novel, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda (190148) lived a wild life themselves. She developed a mental illness,
and he drank too much alcohol, experiences he used in Tender is the Night (1934). In 1936 Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood to write films. His last novel, The Last
Tycoon, was not finished when he died.

35. Ernest Hemingway

(18991961) a US writer of novels and short stories. He created a style of writing using short, simple sentences, and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.
Hemingway drove an ambulance during World War I and later worked in France and Spain as a journalist reporting on World War II and the Spanish Civil War. His
novels were about the loves and adventures of tough men. They included The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Hemingway became ill and shot himself at his home in Idaho.

36. John Steinbeck

(190268) a US author who received the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature. He often wrote about poor farmers in California. His best-known books include Of Mice and
Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row (1945) and East of Eden. Many of his books were made into films.

37. Jack Kerouac

(192269) a US writer of novels, the son of French-Canadian parents, who has been called the spokesman for the beat generation of the 1950s. His best-known
novel is On the Road (1957), about a journey across America by a young person who is opposed to traditional American values. His other novels include The Town
and the City (1950), The Subterraneans (1958) and Big Sur (1962). He also wrote poetry.

38. Ray Bradbury

(1920 ) a US science fiction writer who first became known for his novel The Martian Chronicles 1950. His best-known books include Fahrenheit 451, The October
Country (1955), Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).

39. Truman Capote

(192484) a US writer. His best-known works are Breakfast at Tiffanys (1958) and the non-fiction novel In Cold Blood (1966). Film versions were made of both
books. Capote became popular with members of New York society but was later rejected after writing unpleasant things about them.

40. Stephen Leacock

(1869-1944) the most famous Canadian humorist and writer. He was born in England but moved to Canada at the age of six. He worked as a secondary school and
later as a university teacher. His most famous book is a humorous short stories collection called Literary Lapses.

We would like to apologise to all the significant authors that we skipped. For example, gentlemen like Pope, Marlowe, More, Shelley (he would probably be pretty
unhappy about the fact that his wife made it to the list and he didnt), Conrad, Huxley, Saroyan, Styron, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, Carver, Lawrence, Dahl, Stoppard,
Lear, Heller, Nabokov and many many others.