Biography of Poets, Novelists, Playwrights, Essayists and Theorists
William Blake was an engraver, a painter and a poet. A self-taught man, he wrote poetry which he himself painted and illustrated. As a mystic and a visionary, he expressed himself in simple language so that readers could feel the depth of common ever ...More
William Stafford was born in the U.S.A in 1914. The eldest of three children, Stafford grew up with an appreciation for nature and books. During the Depression the family moved from town to town as Earl Stafford searched for jobs. William helped to s ...More
William Stanley Merwin is an American poet, essayist and literary translator who has written nearly 50 books of poetry, translations and essays. He is best known for his unique style of writing in indirect and unpunctual narration. He was greatly inf ...More
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a prosperous leather merchant in the village of Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire England. He is not only regarded as the father of English drama, but also known as the greatest English poet, and actor. He i ...More
William Wordsworth, English poet and worshipper of nature and simplicity, was born in the Lake District. He spent some time in France, where he became an enthusiastic republican until disillusioned by the Terror which followed the French Revolution.More
Wole Soyinka, whose real name is Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, was born in a Yoruba family in West Nigeria in 1934. He is a well-known playwright, novelist, essayist and poet whose literary excellence was awarded in 1986 when he was rewarded w ...More
Wystan Hugh Auden, the son of a doctor, was born in York and educated at Gresham School, Holt and Christ Church, Oxford. After leaving the University, he visited Germany and worked as a school teacher for a short time in England and Scotland. By the ...More
James Ingram Merrill was a famous poet of America, especially well known for his craftsmanship in wit, lyric, moral sensibilities, and stylish elegance. He was born in a wealthy family of the investor Charles E. Merrill as a son. His childhood was sp ...More
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, is an American poet, whose work is known for its savage imagery and themes of self-destruction, and for the violent protest of a feminist persona generalizing male as the agent of all sorts of oppressio ...More
Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats was one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. The Nobel laureate and leader of the Irish Renaissance was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865. He went to school in London and Dublin, where he studied pa ...More
Robert Frost is a famous modern American poet who is known for his simple poems which have deeper levels of meanings. He was influenced by the British Romantic poets in his early days, but he later was to become the most originally American poet of h ...More
Henry Reed was an English war-poet of Second World War, translator, radio broadcaster, dramatist and journalist. He did his schooling at King Edward VI School and went to the University of Birmingham, where he came into contact with the famous poet W ...More
Robert Hayden was an African-American poet, essayist, and educator, born in the Paradise Valley Slum section in Detroit. His father left his mother before his birth and after his birth, his mother gave him to the family of Sue Ellen Westerfield and W ...More
Patrick Kavanagh was the outstanding 20th century Irish poet and novelist, born to father James Kavanagh and mother Bridget Quinn. His father was a shoemaker and he learned this skill from his father and also helped him in the farm. He left school at ...More
Countee Cullen was one of the most important Harlem Renaissance poets, novelist, anthologist, children's writer, translator and playwright. He was one of the African American poet who won most of the prestigious awards from his high school days that ...More
Florence Margaret Smith, generally recognized as Stevie Smith was one of the famous female English poet and novelist. She was born in Yorkshire, England. Her father was a businessman of shipping company, but when his business started to get loss he w ...More
Allen Tate was a distinguished man of letters from the American South, who was a dominant figure in poetry, criticism, essay and ideas. Tate was born as the youngest son of John Orley and Eleanor Varnell Tate in Kentucky. Because of the frequent migr ...More
James Farl Powers was born in Jacksonville, Illinois and educated at Quincey College Academy, Illinois and Northwestern University, Chicago. In 1938, he edited The Illinois Historical Records Survey.More
Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet of the First World War who was born in the family of Lithuanian Jewish Barnett and Hacha Rosenberg in Bristol. At the age of 14, he left the school and became a trainee engraver as he was much more inclined to visu ...More
John Crowe Ransom was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor, born in the family of Methodist father, John James Ransom and mother Sara Ella (Crowe) Ransom in Pulaski, Tennessee. Until the age of ten he did not go t ...More
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was an English poet, writer, and a soldier who was awarded with CBE i.e. Commander of British Empire and MC i.e. Military Cross. He was born in a well to do Jewish family and lived a very relaxing life hunting foxes and writ ...More
Ezra Pound, an American Poet and critic, was educated at Pennsylvania State University, where he took a master's degree in Romance languages. He was appointed lecturer in French and Spanish at Wabash College in 1907, but was dismissed from this post ...More
Amy Lowell was one of the most important Imagists in the World War I period. She was born as the daughter to the family of father, Augustus Lowell and mother Katherine B Lowell. Her identity ranges from a poet to the propagandist, translator, lectur ...More
Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey. He was the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister, who named him after an ancestor who had signed the Declaration of Independence. After his father died, he went to the Hudson River Institute at Clavera ...More
Charlotte Mary Mew was born as the daughter of Frederick Mew and Anna Kendall in Bloomsbury, London. Her father was a famous architect who designed Hampstead Town Hall. Her family gave her a nick name Lotti. When she went to Gower Street School, she ...More
Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the most reputed African American poet, playwright and a novelist who was born to the parents who were slaves in Kentucky before the Civil War. His father, Joshua was a runaway slave before the end of the civil war and ...More
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most influencing and notable female poets of Victorian era. She was born as the daughter of Mary Graham Clarke and Edward Moulton Barrett at Coxhoe Hall, County Durham. Her father owned Jamaican sugar plantat ...More
William Cullen Bryant a born puritan was a great American Romantic poet. He was born in the family of father Peter Bryant and mother Sarah Snell in Massachusetts. At the age of 16, he joined Williams College, but just after two years he left it and s ...More
Born in Liverpool, England, in 1793 and died in 1835 Romantic poet Felicia Dorothea Hemans was the daughter of a merchant and a granddaughter of the Venetian consul, and the fourth of six children. The family relocated to Wales following a period of ...More
Joanna Baillie was a Scottish poet and a playwright, born as the daughter of mother Dorothea Hunter Baillie and father Rev. James Baillie in Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Scotland. Very few women writers got recognition during her time, but she became excep ...More
William Collins was one of the most influential English poet of the mid-18th century literature. He was born as the son of a mayor and was educated in The Prebendal School and Megdalen College.More
Phillis Wheatley was born in Senegal in 1753 and she was brought in a slave ship to Boston, Massachusetts. She was then bought by John Wheatley for his wife. Phillis was given a chance to education because of her intelligence and Mary Wheatley, the d ...More
Virginia Woolf was the daughter of the eminent Victorian critic and scholar, Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Stephen, and was one of the great women writers of the 20th century. She occupies a position of importance in 20th century fiction, for she gave ...More
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English letter writer and a poet who was from the aristocratic family of father Evelyn and mother Mary Pierrepont. As she was denied from the formal education for being a woman, she was educated at home. She learnt La ...More
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea was an English poet and a courtier in the court of King James II. She was born in the family of Sir William Kingsmill his wife Anne Haslewood as the third child. She was given a good and equal education by her pare ...More
Aphra Behn was an English Restoration poet, playwright, translator and a novelist who proudly became the first professional woman writer to earn living through writing. She became one inspirational figure for the later generation of woman writer who ...More
Richard Lovelace was an English Cavalier poet of the 17th century. He was a devotional supporter of the King Charles I in the Civil War. He was born in the well to do family of Sir William Lovelace and Anne Barne Lovelace as the eldest son. Though hi ...More
George Herbert was an English poet born in Welsh, also known as the orator, Anglican priest, devotional lyricist, and broadly significant figure in his era who died early at the age of 39. As he was born in a rich family of Sir Richard Herbert and mo ...More
Robert Herrick was a 17th century famous English lyric poet ever born. He was born in the family of goldsmith Nicholas Herrick and Julia Stone as the seventh child in Cheapside, London. He was just one year old, his father died in a fall from the win ...More
Algernon Charles Swinburne is one of the great Pre-Raphaelite poets influenced from Greek, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His subjects were derived from romanticism, medievalism, and his hatred towards the conventional morality.More
Lady Mary Wroth was one of the English poets of the Renaissance. She was born in the family that have extended relationship with the Elizabethan Court. Though her education was informal, she had written The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, which to ...More
Sir Philip Sidney was a model noble man, scholar, poet, critic, diplomat, and courtier. He was at once a man of affairs and a high idealist, regarded in his own lifetime as the epitome of Knighthood. As a Renaissance man, his branch of knowledge is i ...More
Sir Walter Raleigh was born in 1552 in the family of Walter Raleigh and Catherine Champernowne. He was a writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy and explorer. He was also famous for popularizing tobacco in England. He had spent some time in ...More
As the most striking personality and the most impressive dramatist among the University Wits, Christopher Marlower wrote Tamburlaine the Great with the main theme of the lust for power. He deserves mention in the Elizabethan Age due to his rebel agai ...More
Robert Lowell was a leading American poet. Lowell often is considered a 'confessional' poet because he used material from his private life to generate an image of modern culture. His poetry dramatizes the pain and tenderness of personal relationships ...More
Franz Kafka, a Jewish Czechoslovakian who wrote in German, ranks among the twentieth-century’s most acclaimed writers. He is often cited as the author whose works best evoke the bewildering oppressiveness of modern life, and though his writing acco ...More
Thomas Gray was born on 26 December 1716 as the fifth child to Philip Gray and Dorothy Antrobus in Cornhill, London. He was a poet, letter-writer, classical scholar, and professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. His famous Elegy Written in a Country ...More
Joan Didion was born and raised in Sacramento, California, to a well-established land-owning family whose roots in the area date back to the settlement of the Sacramento Valley during the 1840s. Didion received an undergraduate degree from the Univer ...More
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the pen name of Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri, of a Virginian family. The family soon moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain was brought up. At school, according to his own words, he "excelled ...More
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts on July 12, 1817. As an American born essayist, poet, philosopher, naturalist, historian, editor and social critic; Thoreau had been deeply influenced by Emerson’s Nature (1836) and he remained ...More
Edward Morgan Forster known as E. M. Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle class-family at London on 1st January 1879. As an English novelist, short story writer and essayist, many of his writings deal with human relationship, class d ...More
Elwyn Brooks White was one of the most celebrated American writer. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York as the youngest child of Samuel Till White and Jessie Hart White on July 11, 1899. He graduated from Cornell University in 1921.More
Nora Ephron was born in New York City, to a Jewish family as the eldest of four daughters. She graduated from Beverly High School in 1958, and from Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1962. Ephron first started her career as an essayist ...More
Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, was born on March 30, 1909, Vienna, is one of the most leading art historians of the twentieth century. He introduced art to a greater number of audiences through his best known book, The Story of Art (1950). His father was ...More
Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840 and established himself as a novelist and a critic. He was the leading figure in the French naturalistic movement in the nineteenth century. He is still remembered for his theories of naturalism and hence called ...More
Peacock (1785-1866) was an essayist, poet, satirist and a novelist. He was famous for his seven novels. His Nightmare Abbey (1818) is considered as the most famous novel which depicts cultural and political aspects of society during the 19th century ...More
Denis Diderot (1713-84) was a leading Enlightenment thinker, editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia. He was remarkable versatile, writing novels, satires, dramas, critical essays on art and literature, essays on natural science and medicine, and letters ...More
Joshua Reynolds was born on July 16, 1723 in Devon, England as the son of a schoolmaster. He was one of the most renowned portraitists of the 18th century.More
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) was the leading dramatist and literary theorist of the German Enlightenment, particularly noted for his Laokoon 1766 in which he discusses the relation between poetry and the plastic arts. In his aesthetic writing ...More
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux was a French critic, poet and a historian. He was born in 1636 and died at the age of 75, in 1711. He is widely known as just Boileau. His literary work of art was massively impressed by Horace and he brought many reformati ...More
Samuel Johnson often known as Dr. Johnson holds a magisterial status among English literary critics. He was a man of his age. As a critic, Dr. Johnson's popularity and authority waned with the rise of romanticism because his views and opinions suffe ...More
Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) was one of the greatest dramatists of France during the seventeenth century. He is considered as the greatest dramatist along with Moliere and Jean Racine. Possessing an inborn interest in plays, Corneille paved the new r ...More
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is regarded as the best known English political philosopher and a representative critic of the time. He is famous for his book Leviathan (1651) where he develops his famous political and aesthetic theory.More
Henry Reynolds (1564-1632) was an English poet and a literary critic of the seventeenth century. The author of "Mythomystes" defends the ancient writers against the modern writers and poets. Like Sidney, he defends poetry because of its allegorical c ...More
Francis Bacon (1561- 1626) an English lawyer, statesman and philosopher, traditionally regarded as the first important figure in the history of British empiricism and in the development of the modern scientific world-view. He planned to write a major ...More
Tasso is the greatest Italian poet of the late Renaissance, celebrated for his heroic epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (1581; "Jerusalem Liberated"), dealing with the capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. In 1573, he wrote the pastoral drama L ...More
Edmond Rostand (1868-1918) was born in Marseilles, the Southern seaport of France. Encouraged by a wealthy father to cultivate his literary talents, he became a well-known poet and dramatist. His most famous work is Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), a tragi ...More
Giacopo (Jacopo) Mazzoni was born in Cesena, Italy on November 27, 1548. He was educated in Bologna, where he studied Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Rhetoric and Poetics. Later Mazzoni attended the University of Padua in 1563 where he studied philosophy and J ...More
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He qualified as a doctor and practiced medicine for a time. But his interest was in writing stories. He became immensely famous for his novels about an amateur detective named Sherlo ...More
William Motter Inge was born on May 3, 1913 in Independence, Kansas, America. He is one of the best American playwright and his most of the plays were adopted to films. He completed his education at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. He had been a ...More
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-1673) was born in the French family in Paris, France. He had a comfortable childhood as his father worked in the palace of the King for supplying the furniture. He is mostly known by his stage name Moliere. He is regarde ...More
Luigi Pirandello is a playwright, novelist and short story writer who was born on June 28, 1867 in Sicily, Italy. He studied philosophy at Rome and Bonn, becoming a lecturer in literature in Rome. He is regarded as the precursor of the absurdist thea ...More
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, Ireland. His father was a civil servant. As he hated organized training, he could not get a regular formal education. In 1876, as a young man, he went to London, where he struggled financially and l ...More
Lodovico Castelvetro (1505-1571) is a dominant literary critic of the Italian Renaissance, particularly noted for his translation of and independently rendered conclusions from Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he defended the dramatic unities of time, ...More
Boethius (480-524 AD) is a Roman scholar, Christian philosopher, and statesman, and the author of the celebrated De consolation philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), a largely Neoplatonic work in which the pursuit of wisdom and the love of Go ...More
The last of great Greco-Roman philosopher Plotinus was born in Algeria. He liked philosophy as a result he started reading Platonic theory, Pythagorean theory, Aristotle, mysticism, stoicism etc. He read one Pythagorean theory 'Melan Psychosis'.More
Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern Greece in 384 BC. Aristotle joined Plato's Academy in 367. Aristotle being disciple of Plato spent twenty years in the Academy as a student, lecturer and a writer. Aristotle's writings show the tireless effor ...More
Gaius Petronius Arbiter (c. 27 - 66 A.D) was a Roman writer who is believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel written during the Neronian era.More
Black Elk (1863-1950), a Sioux warrior and priest, was born into the Oglala division of the Teton Dakota. His youth coincided with the last years of territorial freedom for the plains Indians.More
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She settled in London and formed a close association with John Middleton Murry whom she married in 1918. In 1917 she contracted pleurisy and spent the rest of her short life on the ...More
Alice Adams (1926-1999) was one of the most prolific and successful short story writers in recent American literature.More
Chinua Achebe (1930 - 2013), the Nigerian novelist, poet, short story writer and essayist, was educated at Umuchia and Abadan.More
Plato (427-347B.C.), an Athenian of the ancient Greece, is the first major figure in the history of Western philosophy who is believed to be one of the most creative and influential thinkers in Western intellectual tradition.More
Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, to an English family that had emigrated to Ireland, Swift received an Anglo-Irish education, first at Kilkenny School, then at Trinity College, Dublin, where he took his B.A. in 1686.More
John Pepper Clark was born on 6, April 1935, in Kiagbodo, Nigeria. He is the son of an Ijaw tribal leader Clark Fuludu Bekederemo. Clark got his education from Government College in Ughelli then he got his Bachelor’s degree in English at the Univer ...More
Dennis Joseph Enright (1920-2002) a British poet, novelist and critic, was born in Royal Leaminton Spa, Warwickshire in 1920 and educated at Leaminton College and Downing College, Cambridge.More
Robinson Jeffers was born on January 10, 1887, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania a town which is now part of Pittsburgh. Jeffers travelled through Europe during his youth, which included schooling in Switzerland.More
Thomas Carew was born in 1595 AD at West Wickham, Kent as a third son of Sir Matthew Carew. He was one of the most important cavalier poets. He had completed his matriculation from Merton College, Oxford and did bachelors from Cambridge in 1612. In 1 ...More
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was an American novelist and playwright born on April 17th in Madison Wisconsin, USA. Educated at Yale University, Thornton Wilder became famous as a novelist as well as a dramatist. During World War II, Wilder served the ...More
John Millington Synge (1871-1909) was born on 16 April 1871 in Rathfarnham, near Dublin. He was an Anglo-Irish and a protestant. Though he had a religious background, he did not show any interest on being Bishop rather he devoted himself to the art a ...More
John O'Hara (1905-1970) was born on January 31, 1905 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He was considered in his day a gifted yet controversial writer of both novels and short stories. He spent time in Pennsylvania in the early part of his childhood until ...More
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois. His mother, Grace Hall, whom he never forgave for dressing him as a little girl in his youth, had an operatic career before marrying Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway; he taught his son to love out-door l ...More
Gore Vidal (1925-2012) grew accustomed at an early age to a life among political and social notables. He was born at the military academy in West Point, New York, where his father was an instructor. He was raised near Washington, DC, in the house of ...More
Henrik (John) Ibsen (1828-1906) was born in Norway. He was born in a small Norwegian timber port of Skein. His ancestors were sea captains and businessmen while his father was rich merchant, dealing in Lumber. In his writings later on we find the rec ...More
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was born in the city of Augsburg, Germany. Bercht's father Bertolt Friedrich Brecht was a Catholic worker in a paper factory and his mother, Wilhelmine Friederike Sophie Brezing, was a Protestant, ill with breast cancer. Be ...More
August Wilson (1945-2005) the African-American playwright, is the son of a white father who never lived with his family and a black mother who had come from North Carolina to a Pittsburgh slum, where she worked to keep her family together. He grew up ...More
Norman was born in September 21, 1947, in Louisville, Kentucky. Her family chose to isolate Norman rather than expose her ideas that challenged their own as religious fundamentalists. She received a B.A. from Agnes Scott College in Georgia in 1969, a ...More
Athol Fugard (1932) is born in the remote village of Middleburg, Cape Province, and grew up in Port Elizabeth, the setting for most of his plays. His full name is Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard and as a child, he was known as Hally before he decided he ...More
Eugene O'Neill (1888- 1953) was born in New York into an Irish-Catholic theatrical family. His early life was restless: his father, who was an actor, spent most of his career touring in the lead role of the popular melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo ...More
Arthur Miller is a Jewish American dramatist who has occupied a canonical status in the history of modern drama. He was born in 1915 in Harlem, New York city and died of heart failure at home in Roxbury, Connecticut, on February 10, 2005.More
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the small seaport of Taganrog, southern Russia to the son of a grocer. Chekhov's grandfather was a serf, who had bought his own freedom and that of his three sons in 1841. In 1879 Chekhov entered the Moscow Univers ...More
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi as a son to the former Edwina Estelle Dakin and Cornelius Coffin Williams. His father was a travelling salesman for a shoe company. He could trace his ancestry back to the French Huguen ...More
Aristophanes was born in 448 B.C. and was supposed to die in 388 B.C. Aristophanes was the son of Philippus, of the Deme Cydathenaus. It was uncertain where he was born. He was a contemporary comic playwright of Socrates and Thucydides. They all were ...More
Strindberg (1849 -1912) is the Swedish playwright. August was the third son of Carl Oscar Strindberg and Ulrika Eleanora Norling. The couple had nine more children. Strindberg's childhood was poor and miserable. He was shy and family tensions depress ...More
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) an Ireland born British dramatist was born in Dublin to unconventional parents. Wilde studied at Portora Royal School, in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (1864-71), Trinity College, Dublin (1871-74) and Magdalen College, Oxford ...More
William Congreve (1670-1729) was born at Bardsey, Yorkshire as the son of an army officer. He is one of the best English poet and playwright of the Restoration period in the 17th and 18th centuries. He had the wit and charm of the heroes of his plays ...More
Sophocles was one of the three great tragic dramatists of ancient Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Euripides. Unlike his younger contemporary, the often-misunderstood Euripides, Sophocles had the fortune of being revered for his genius durin ...More
Isabella, Lady Gregory (1852-1932), popularly called Lady Gregory, is an Irish playwright and promoter of Irish drama. She founded the Irish Literary Theatre with William Butler Yeats in 1898. This became the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902 an ...More
James Joyce (1882-1941) was born and educated in Dublin. Joyce found his early inspirations from the works of Henrik Ibsen, St. Thomas Aquinas and William Butler Yeats. He faces the implications of the loss of a world of public values in a very diffe ...More
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts. His father, was a sea captain and descendent of John Hawthorne, one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. He died when the young Nathaniel was four years old. Elizabeth ...More
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was born in Steventon, Hampshire, where her father, Rev. George Austen, was a rector. She was the second daughter and seventh child in a family of eight. The Austens did not lose a single one of their children. Cassandra Leigh ...More
Samuel Beckett (1906 –1989) was born in Dublin. He belonged to an upper-middle class Protestant family. He completed his school and university education in Dublin. While living in Dublin he had developed his intimacy with the French and the Italian ...More
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), America's first significant novelist, was born as the son of Quakers, Judge William Cooper and Elisabeth Fenimore Cooper in New Jersey. During his youth, James stayed partly on the family estate on the shores of Ots ...More
John Fowles (1926-2005), a British modern novelist, was born in Leigh-on-Sea, in the southeast of England, as the son of Robert Fowles, a prosperous cigar merchant, and Gladys Richards Fowles. Fowles received his formal education at Alleyn Court Scho ...More
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born in a part of Poland that was then under Russian rule. His father Apollo Korzeniowski was an aristocrat without lands, a poet and translator of Shakespeare and Dickens and French literature. The family estates had be ...More
Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010) was born as a son of a well to do family. His father was a Jewish importer of cheese and mother was Scotch-Irish. He was grown up in the fashionable apartment district of Manhattan, New York. In his childhood the you ...More
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was born in London. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was one of the first feminists, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and the novel The Wrongs of Woman, in which she wrote: "We cannot, ...More
William Faulkner (1897-1962) was as the first son of Murray Charles Faulkner and Maud Faulkner in New Albany, Mississippi. At the age of thirteen he began writing poetry. He did not complete his graduation, he dropped out the school in 1925 and start ...More
Toni Morrison (Born on February 18, 1931), novel prize winner writer, was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents had moved there to escape the problems of southern racism. Toni Morrison was brought up in the black community of Lorain ...More
Henry James (1843-1916), an American expatriate writer was born in New York City into a wealthy family. His father, Henry James Sr., was one of the best-known intellectuals in mid-nineteenth-century America, whose friends included Thoreau, Emerson an ...More
Mary Ann Evans whose, pen name is George Eliot (1819-1880) was born in Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire. Her father was a carpenter by profession who later became a land agent. When she was a few months old, the family moved to Griff, and there Eliot liv ...More
Daniel Defoe (1660-1771) first wrote common project, essays, verse satire, pamphlet, periodical, realistic account and so on. But his greatest success is his Robinson Crusoe. It was the first novel written in first person narrative. It records that i ...More
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is the best known of all the English novelists. Dickens was the first to introduce to the reading public, life of the poor and the oppressed. He has a very marked sympathy for the poor, and his appeal is to the heart rathe ...More
Richard Snyder was born in New York in 1916 and he was educated at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He began his career as administrative secretary of war and peace studies at the Council on Foreign ...More
Percy Bysshe Shelley is a Romantic poet. He was an atheist who refused to concretize his experience and intuition into a philosophy. Wordsworth recognized the artist in him when he praised his style. Shelley was the eldest son of a rich baronet. Born ...More
Thomas Sterne Eliot is the most influential poet of the twentieth century, and also a great dramatist and critic. Born in America, he became a citizen of England later, and began the modernist movement in English literature, which was especially mark ...More
Wallace Stevens was an American poet. Stevens had a unique writing style. Although his language is often difficult and abstract, his poems also have an extraordinary richness of imagery and sound. They are playful, colorful and philosophical.More
Walt Whitman is one of the most famous American poets. His work boldly asserts the worth of the individual and the oneness of all humanity; his defiant break with traditional poetic concerns and style exerted a major influence on American thought and ...More
Thomas Kinsella is an Irish poet, whose work is marked by deep symbolism, mythological allusion, and a sense of nostalgia. Kinsella was born in Dublin. In 1946 he left Dublin’s University College to work in the Irish Civil Service, where he stayed ...More
Thom Gunn is an English poet who belongs to the mid twentieth-century school of poets called The Movements Poets. Gunn was born in Kent, England, but moved frequently as a child in the wake of his father, a journalist.More
Theodore Roethke an American poet, was born in Saginaw, Michigan. He is a unique twentieth century Romantic poet of America who was influenced by the nature, especially the greenhouses his father owned in Michigan where he was a child. As a boy, he r ...More
Ted Hughes was born on 17th August 1930 in Yorkshire, United Kingdom. His father, William Hughes had fought on the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915. William Hughes was one of the only seventeen survivors of the battalion, which participated in that ...More
William DeWitt Snodgrass was born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, in 1926. He served in the US navy before he studied at the University of Iowa, where he attended Robert Lowell’s poetry workshops.More
William Cowper (1731-1800) was born on November 15, 1731 in England. He was sent to Dr. Pittman’s Baoding School after his mother’s death when Cowper was only six years old. He enrolled in the Middle Temple in order to get a law degree in 1748. More
William Carlos Williams is an American poet, essayist, novelist, and short story writer. He was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. He studied in Geneva and at Pennsylvania University, and became a doctor. He received an M.D. degree from the University o ...More
Wilfred Owen is one of the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century Britain. He is best remembered for his war poems in which he revealed the horrors of war. From early youth he wrote poetry, much of it at first inspired by religion. He became i ...More
Rupert Brooke was a poet born to distinction. Son of a Rugby master, he studied at his father's school and at King's College, Cambridge, and won many academic honors. He was born into a well-to-do-academic family. After graduation he settled down at ...More
Roy Campbell is a South African poet, known for his dynamic, witty verses. He was born in Durban and moved to Britain while in his teens. Campbell earned critical acclaim for his first volumes of poetry.More
Ronald Stuart Thomas is a Welsh poet who is best known for his imagist poems. Thomas was born in Cardiff, Wales and grown up in Holyhead.More
Stanley Kunitz is an American writer best known for his intensely personal poetry. His 'Selected Poems' written from 1928 to 1958 won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In the 1980s Kunitz received several poetry awards, including the Lenore Marshal ...More
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature. Heaney was born in a small agricultural town in Mossbawn, County Derry, Northern Ireland to a Catholic farmer and his wife. In 1957 he went to Belfast to study literature at ...More
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in rural Ottery saint Mary Devonshire in 1772. He is considered to be the great romantic poet who was precociously dreamy, imaginative, enthusiastic and eloquent even as a schoolboy. Attending Jesus College, Cambridge ...More
Rita Dove is an American writer who served as poet laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. She was the first African American writer to become poet laureate. Born in Akron, Ohio, Dove graduated from Miami University in Ohio in 1973 and from ...More
Robert Pinsky was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1940. He was educated at Rutgers University and Stanford University, where he studied under the poet Yvor Winters and earned a Ph.D. He has taught at Wellesley College, the University of Californi ...More
Robert Creeley is a well-known American poet, who is best known for his association with the influential Black Mountain Poets. The group was centered at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, during the 1950s. Creeley was born in Arli ...More
Robert Burns (1759-1796) was born in Scotland. The son of a poor farmer, Burns became Scotland’s national poet. At his father’s death in 1784 he continued farming in partnership with his brother.More
Robert Browning one of the major poets of the Victorian Age was born in a rich family in London. He chose poetry as his vocation; but his early poems attracted little attention. In 1846 he married the poet Elizabeth Barrett and went to live with her ...More
Ray Young Bear (born in 1950) is an American and Indian poet and novelist. He was born and raised on the Tama Indian Reservation in Iowa, in the Mesquaki tribe, where his grandmother instructed him in the stories and traditions of his people. He star ...More
Randall Jarrell is an American poet, who was noted for his acerbic, witty, and erudite criticism. But though he was best known as a literary critic, he was also respected as a poet. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he earned bachelors and master’s deg ...More
Ralph Waldo Emerson is an American poet, essayist and a leader of the philosophical movement of transcendentalism. Influenced by such schools of thought as English romanticism, Neo-Platonism, and Hindu philosophy, Emerson is noted for his skill in pr ...More
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was an Austrian lyric poet, born in Bohemia. He studied at Prague, Munich and Berlin. More
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) Bengali Indian poet, writer and philosopher, was born in Calcutta. He was educated mostly at home. Quite early from his pen began to flow novels, essays, short stories, and poetry. More
Philip Morin Freneau is one of the earliest American poets; he was also a journalist, known as the poet of the American Revolution. Born in New York City and educated at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton, University), Freneau is also remembere ...More
Philip Larkin is a noted British poet, novelist and critic. He was born in Coventry, England, and educated at the University of Oxford. Larkin treats the modern English setting in a withdrawn and non-sentimental manner, but often with considerable fe ...More
Paul Simon (born in 1941) was born in Newark, New Jersey, USA in 1941. A singer, songwriter and guitarist, he is also an excellent pop lyricist. The most successful album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, with one half of the duo Paul Simon and Art Garfun ...More
Richard Wilbur is an American poet and university professor, who was appointed the poet laureate of the United States in 1987. Wilbur was born in New York City and he grew up there. In his long career as a poet, dramatist and educationist, he is best ...More
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is a Victorian poet. He was also a great critic of his age. His voice is a true voice of the sensitive Victorian intellectual lamenting ever inevitable (something that can’t be stopped) loss of faith and the meaning of li ...More
Mark Strand (born in 1934) is a Canadian-born poet and educated in the US. He has taught at various universities. His poems of alienation, treating darkness and doubleness in man, are minimalist in style and affected by surrealism. Strand is consider ...More
Marianne Moore was born in St. Louis, and became a teacher and a librarian. As the editor of The Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929, Moore played an important part in encouraging young writers and publishing their work. Moore ranks with Emily Dickinson ...More
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet, who went to live in England and shifted later to America. He was influenced by Robert Frost’s 'strong, classic, lyric line' in style, but he continued to write about his own Irish experience. He also adopted the cinem ...More
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) Chilean poet and diplomat, was educated at the University of Chile. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. More
Navarre Scott Momaday is an American novelist, memoirist, and poet, who work in broad fields of Navy American history and cultural narrative. The range of Momaday’s works is underscored by his ability to fuse the experiences of opposing cultures in ...More
Michael Ondaatje is a Canadian writer and filmmaker whose novel The English Patient (1992) was co-winner of the 1992 Booker Prize, the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary award. Ondaatje was the first Canadian to receive the prize. Ondaatje wa ...More
May Swenson is an American lyric poet noted for her clearly defined imagery. Swenson was born in Logan, Utah. After graduating from Utah State University in Logan, she worked as an editor and was writer-in-residence at Purdue University in Indiana fr ...More
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, and critic, whose works often feature women examining their relationships and society. Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario. She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto in 196 ...More
Louis Simpson (1923-2012) immigrated to the United States from Jamaica at the age of seventeen. He joined the US Army during the Second World War, after which he earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He then taught in California and also in Long I ...More
Bogan (1897-1970) an American writer was educated at Boston University. She was the regular poetry reviewer for The New Yorker from 1931 to 1968, and in 1951 published the highly regarded Achievement in American Poetry 1900-1951. More
George Gordon Noel, Sixth Baron Byron is known as Lord Byron. Byron was born in London on January 22, 1788, and educated at Harrow School and the University of Cambridge. One of the most important and versatile writers of the romantic Movement, Byron ...More
Linda Pastan was born in 1932 to a Jewish family in Bronx. Patsan was graduated from Radcliff College and received her M.A. from Brandeis University. Patsan won the Mademoiselle Poetry Prize when she was in her senior class at Radcliff College. More
James Langston Hughes born in Missouri is a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He led a nomadic life in the U.S. and Europe until he began his prolific literary career with The Weary Blues published in 1926, poems on black themes in jazz rhythms ...More
Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a well known writer of children’s classic. Carroll was a renowned Victorian author born as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson at Daresbury in Cheshire County, England on January 27, 1832. His father ...More
Leslie Marmon Silko is a Native American author whose emergence in the 1970s coincided with a revival of interest in Native American culture in North America. Silko is of mixed white, Hispanic, and Native American ancestry. She is known for her stori ...More
Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909-1959) Nepali poet popularly acclaimed as “Mahakavi” (great poet), graduated in Arts in 1930 and in Law in 1933 both from Patna University, India.More
John Dryden an English poet, dramatist, and critic, was the leading literary figure of the Restoration, and also of the neo-classical period, along with Alexander Pope. John Dryden was not only the greatest literary man of his age, but also to a grea ...More
John Donne was a poet who made revolutionary changes in English poetry after Shakespeare. Donne was a brilliant intellectual who despised easy platitude, and hackneyed expressions. He changed everything of the Elizabethan courtly love lyrics, its for ...More
John Berryman is an American poet noted for asserting the importance of the personal element in poetry. Born in McAlester, Oklahoma, and educated at Columbia University, Berryman gained a national reputation with his long poem Homage to Mistress Brad ...More
John Ashbery is an American poet who came to prominence in the sixties and seventies in the United States. Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, and brought up in the farm near Lake Ontario.More
John Keats was born in north London as the son of Thomas Keats, who worked at a livery stable; he was the eldest of four sons, one of whom died in infancy, and a daughter. His father died when he was nine and his mother died when he was fifteen, due ...More
James Arlington Wright was a leading American poet whose work explored varieties of social isolation, despair and death. His early works features are regular meter, an emphasis on rhetoric, and the strong use of rhymes. His later work became more nat ...More
James Fenton was born in Lincoln in 1949 to Mary Hamilton Ingoldby Fenton and John Charles Fenton; an Anglican priest and theologian. At the age of nine Fenton was sent to a musical preparatory school. The importance of this early musical training ca ...More
James Dickey was one of the most well known and one of the least appreciated authors in America in the mid century; but Dickey’s first love was poetry. And strangely, despite being more popularly known for his fiction, it was in his poetry that Dic ...More
Gwendolyn Brooks is a Afro-American poet, who has been one of the renowned poets since the mid century. Brooks was born in Topeka, Kans. She grew up in the Chicago community called Bronzeville.More
Elizabeth Bishop is a famous twentieth century American poetess, who is best known for her poems that examine the physical extraordinary significance in ordinary events or things like looking at a fish. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop grew u ...More
Edwin Arlington Robinson is an American poet who was known as a man of reserved, quiet and introverted personality; he refused to seek popularity and never married. Robinson was the son of a rich businessman, and he attended the Harvard College.More
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Essex. In 1863, he entered Oxford University. There, he experienced a spiritual crisis that led him to join the Roman Catholic Church in 1866. Hopkins entered the Jesuit order in 1868. He then stopped writing and bur ...More
Geoffrey Hill born in 1932 is an English poet, whose verse mixes fact, fiction, and grave meditations on history. Hill was born in Bromsgrove, England and graduated from Keble College at the University of Oxford in 1953. From 1954 until 1980 he taugh ...More
Geoffrey Chaucer marks the first greatest development in the history of English poetry. He also marks the end of the medieval literature and the beginning of the modern English literature (in general) and Renaissance English literature (in particular ...More
Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930. He was raised on a farm, and educated at Reed College. In the early 1950s he worked as a logger, forest-fire lookout, trail-crew worker, carpenter, proofreader, seaman, and teacher. More
Galway Kinnell is an American poet and novelist known for his distinctly 'personal' poetic voice. Kinnell's poetry stresses the importance of daily experience; it also focuses on the physical aspects of existence and illustrates the intimate ties bet ...More
Federico Garcia Lorca is a Spanish poet and dramatist. His best-known works are his Gypsy Songs, Songs (1927) and The Gypsy Ballads (1928, 1935). However, he is particularly known for intense, poetic tragedies evoking the passionate emotions of Spani ...More
Emily Dickinson a very sensitive lyrical poet was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a well-known family. For one year she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now College), in nearby South Hadley, then withdrew and returned to Amherst because she ...More
Dylan Thomas is a Welsh poet, short-story writer, and playwright, renowned for the unique brilliance of his verbal imagery and for his celebration of natural beauty. Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, on October 27, 1914.More
Derek Walcott born in 1930 is a West Indian poet, and playwright. Born in Castries, the island of Saint Lucia was educated at St. Mary's College in Saint Lucia and at the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica.More
Denise Levertov is a British-born American poet and writer known for the mystical and lyrical quality of her writings. She was born in Elford, Essex (England) and educated at home. After working as a nurse in London during World War II, she immigrate ...More
David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England. He was an English novelist, poet, story writer, critic and painter. He holds the position of the greatest figures in the twentieth century English literature.More
Cynthia Zarin was born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia. She writes for a wide range of magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, where her poems frequently appear.More
Edward Estlin Cummings is an American poet of great lyrical intensity. He was a son of an English professor at Harvard who was later pastor of the Old South Church in Boston. Cummings took his B.A. and M.A. at Harvard, and then joined the Norton Harj ...More
Edmund Spenser is one of the greatest English poets, the poets' poet, the New Poet, and the great synthesizer of many 'heritages' of the European and British thought and literature. Spenser bridged the medieval and Elizabethan periods; he brought tog ...More
Edgar Allan Poe is an American writer, known as a poet and a critic both famous for his short stories, especially the tales of the mysterious and macabre. The literary merits of Poe’s writings have been debated since his death, but his works have r ...More
Christina Georgina Rossetti is of Italian origin. Rossetti was one of the most important nineteenth century English women poets. She was born in London on December 5, 1830. Rossetti was entirely educated at home and she could easily speak English and ...More
Cathy Song is a descendant of Korean immigrants born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and raised in Wahiawa, a village on the island of Oahu. She was educated at the University of Hawaii, Wellesley College, and Boston University, and her first book, Picture Brid ...More
Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois on January 6, 1878. He worked as a milkman, porter, stagehand, brick master, dishwasher, house painter, carpenter and a newspaper reporter. More
Arthur Guiterman, an American poet and journalist was born on November 20, 1871. He is best known for his humorous verse and ballads dealing with American history and legends. Guiterman graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1891. More
Anne Sexton is a twentieth century American poet known for the frank treatment of intimate and taboo subjects. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, Sexton attended Garland Junior in Boston, Massachusetts, from 1947 until 1948, when she married. In 1959 she ...More
Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. He was educated at Columbia University. After spending much time in Greenwich Village with William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and other Beat writers, he moved to San Francisco, where Lawrence Ferlinghetti� ...More
Andrew Marvell was a British politician who also belongs to the Metaphysical school of poets; but he was not known like Donne, as a poet during his lifetime. Marvell also belongs to a later age when the classical type of poetry had begun to be writte ...More
Amiri Baraka also known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka was born in Newark, New Jersey on October 7th 1934. He earned a B.A. from Howard University and an M.A from Columbia University. From 1954 until 1956 he lived in the United States Air Forc ...More
Alfred Edward Housman was born in Shropshire, England. He was a classical scholar, and he taught Latin at the University of London and at Cambridge University. Housman wrote apparently very simple lyrics, but usually kept an underlying level of irony ...More
Alfred Lord Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire and was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge, he soon became known for his poetic ability that won him the friendship of the young poet Arthur Henry Hallam. Later on, in 1833 Hallam died a ...More
Alexander Pope was the most influential poet and critic of the 18th century or the neoclassical period of English literature. He is the first professional poet of English literature also. Because the Catholics were not allowed to live within ten mile ...More
Alden Nowlan (1933-1983) was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, Canada. He served as news editor of The Observer and The Telegraph Journal. Since 1968 he has been writer-in residence at the University of New Brunswick.More
Adrienne Rich born in Baltimore, Maryland was an American poetess and essayist best known for her observation of the experiences of women in society. Her poems often deal with the historical development of women’s roles in society. During her caree ...More
Anne Bradstreet was the first poet in America to publish a volume of poetry. 'The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up' in America was published in England in 1650. This book is generally considered the first book of original poetry written in colonial Americ ...More
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