PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: novella
German author
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era....
Spanish writer
Miguel de Cervantes was a Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet, the creator of Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and the most important and celebrated figure in Spanish literature. His novel Don Quixote has been...
Russian writer
Leo Tolstoy was a Russian author, a master of realistic fiction and one of the world’s greatest novelists. Tolstoy is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77),...
Russian author
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had...
Russian author
Ivan Turgenev was a Russian novelist, poet, and playwright whose major works include the short-story collection A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852) and the novels Rudin (1856), Home of the Gentry (1859), On...
American author
William Faulkner was an American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the eldest of the four sons of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner, William Faulkner...
French author
Honoré de Balzac was a French literary artist who produced a vast number of novels and short stories collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). He helped to establish the traditional form...
Italian poet and scholar
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian poet and scholar, best remembered as the author of the earthy tales in the Decameron. With Petrarch he laid the foundations for the humanism of the Renaissance and raised...
German author
Thomas Mann was a German novelist and essayist whose early novels—Buddenbrooks (1900), Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), and Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize...
American writer
Henry James was an American novelist and, as a naturalized English citizen from 1915, a great figure in the transatlantic culture. His fundamental theme was the innocence and exuberance of the New World...
English author
J.R.R. Tolkien was an English writer and scholar who achieved fame with his children’s book The Hobbit (1937) and his richly inventive epic fantasy The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). At age four Tolkien,...
German writer
Gerhart Hauptmann was a German playwright, poet, and novelist who was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912. Hauptmann was born in a then-fashionable Silesian resort town, where his father...
American author
James Tiptree, Jr. was an American science fiction author known for her disturbing short stories about love, death, gender, and human and alien nature. When Alice Bradley was six years old, she and her...
Mexican writer and diplomat
Carlos Fuentes was a Mexican novelist, short-story writer, playwright, critic, and diplomat whose experimental novels won him an international literary reputation. The son of a Mexican career diplomat,...
American author
Truman Capote was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright whose early writing extended the Southern Gothic tradition, though he later developed a more journalistic approach in the novel...
New Zealand writer
Frank Sargeson was a novelist and short-story writer whose ironic, stylistically diverse works made him the most widely known New Zealand literary figure of his day. Davey was born into a conservative...
German author
Arno Schmidt was a novelist, translator, and critic, whose experimental prose established him as the preeminent Modernist of 20th-century German literature. With roots in both German Romanticism and Expressionism,...
German writer
Günter Grass was a German poet, novelist, playwright, sculptor, and printmaker who, with his extraordinary first novel Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum), became the literary spokesman for the German...
American novelist
Stephen King is an American novelist and short-story writer whose books are credited with reviving the genre of horror fiction in the late 20th century. King is the second of two sons born to Donald and...
American author
Harlan Ellison was an American writer of short stories, novels, essays, and television and film scripts. Though he eschewed genre categorization himself, his work was most frequently labeled science fiction....
American author
Saul Bellow was an American novelist whose characterizations of modern urban man, disaffected by society but not destroyed in spirit, earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Brought up in a...
Russian author
Ivan Bunin was a poet and novelist, the first Russian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933), and one of the finest of Russian stylists. Bunin, the descendant of an old noble family, spent his...
American novelist
John Steinbeck was an American novelist, best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression decade and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory...
French author
Prosper Mérimée was a French dramatist, historian, archaeologist, and master of the short story whose works—Romantic in theme but Classical and controlled in style—were a renewal of Classicism in a Romantic...
American author
Joyce Carol Oates is an American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist noted for her vast literary output in a variety of styles and genres. Particularly effective are her depictions of violence and...
New Zealand author
Witi Ihimaera is a Māori author whose novels and short stories explore the clash between Māori and Pākehā (white, European-derived) cultural values in his native New Zealand. Ihimaera attended the University...
Hungarian writer
Tibor Déry was a Hungarian novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright, one of the most respected and controversial figures in 20th-century Hungarian literature. He was imprisoned for his role in...
American author
Carson McCullers was an American writer of novels and stories that depict the inner lives of lonely people. At age 17 Lula Carson Smith, whose father was a modestly successful jeweler in Columbus, Georgia,...
American writer
Richard Wright was a novelist and short-story writer who was among the first African American writers to protest white treatment of Blacks, notably in his novel Native Son (1940) and his autobiography,...
Hungarian author
Péter Nádas is a Hungarian author, essayist, and playwright known for his detailed surrealist tales and prose-poems that often blended points of view or points in time. Nádas grew up in communist Budapest....
Chinese writer
Zhang Ailing was a Chinese writer whose sad, bitter love stories gained her a large devoted audience as well as critical acclaim. A descendant of the famous late Qing statesman Li Hongzhang, Zhang attended...
Russian author
Mikhail Bulgakov was a Soviet playwright, novelist, and short-story writer best known for his humour and penetrating satire. Beginning his adult life as a doctor, Bulgakov gave up medicine for writing....
Italian author
Cesare Pavese was an Italian poet, critic, novelist, and translator, who introduced many modern U.S. and English writers to Italy. Born in a small town in which his father, an official, owned property,...
German author
Uwe Johnson was a German author noted for his experimental style. Many of his novels explore the contradictions of life in a Germany divided after World War II. Johnson grew up during the difficult war...
Norwegian writer and musician
Jo Nesbø is a Norwegian writer and musician, best known internationally for a series of crime novels featuring hard-boiled detective Harry Hole (pronounced Hoo-la in Norwegian). Nesbø grew up in Molde,...
Senegalese writer and director
Ousmane Sembène was a Senegalese writer and film director known for his historical and political themes. (Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.) Sembène spent his early years as...
British author
Ian McEwan is a British novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter whose restrained, refined prose style accentuates the horror of his dark humour and perverse subject matter. McEwan graduated with...
Chinese American writer
Ha Jin is a Chinese American writer who used plain, unadorned English prose to explore the tension between the individual and the family, the modern and the traditional, and personal feelings and duty....
American author
Philip Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works are characterized by an acute ear for dialogue, a concern with Jewish middle-class life, and the painful entanglements of sexual...
Canadian author and educator
Alistair MacLeod was a Canadian author renowned for his mastery of the short-story genre. MacLeod’s parents were natives of Cape Breton Island in northeastern Nova Scotia, and, when MacLeod was 10 years...
American author
Katherine Anne Porter was an American novelist and short-story writer, a master stylist whose long short stories have a richness of texture and complexity of character delineation usually achieved only...
American author
Eudora Welty was an American short-story writer and novelist whose work is mainly focused with great precision on the regional manners of people inhabiting a small Mississippi town that resembles her own...
Egyptian author
Alaa al-Aswany is an Egyptian author known for his best-selling novels and for his vocal criticism of the Egyptian government, especially its former president Hosni Mubarak. Aswany was the son of Abbas...
American author
J.D. Salinger was an American 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 corpus...
Yiddish author
Chaim Grade was a Yiddish poet, short-story writer, and novelist who was one of the last surviving secularized Yiddish writers to have been educated in a European yeshiva (rabbinical seminary). His fiction...
American author
John Hawkes was an American author whose novels achieve a dreamlike (often nightmarish) intensity through the suspension of traditional narrative constraints. He considered a story’s structure his main...
French author
Georges Perec was a French writer, often called the greatest innovator of form of his generation. Perec was orphaned at an early age: his father was killed in action in World War II, and his mother died...
Russian poet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a poet and spokesman for the younger post-Stalin generation of Russian poets. His internationally publicized demands for greater artistic freedom and for a literature based on aesthetic...
Japanese writer
Banana Yoshimoto is a Japanese author who achieved worldwide popularity writing stories and novels with slight action and unusual characters. Yoshimoto was reared in a much freer environment than that...
American author
Jim Harrison was an American novelist and poet known for his lyrical treatment of the human struggle between nature and domesticity. Arguably his most famous work was Legends of the Fall (1979; films 1990...