Famous Authors/Poets/Playwrights Flashcards
Wrote Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys
Louisa May Alcott
Wrote Things Fall Apart, A Man of the People, Arrow of God
Chinua Achebe
Wrote Cairo Trilogy, and Children of the Alley
Naguib Mahfouz
Wrote Treasure Island, Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Wrote Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo
Joseph Conrad
Wrote Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, Doctor Faustus
Thomas Mann
Wrote House of Mirth, Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
Wrote Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey
JD Salinger
Wrote Death of a Salesman, the Crucible -> about Salem witchhunts but really is about mccarthy anti-communist “witchhunt”, All My Sons, married to Marilyn Monroe for a time
Arthur Miller
Wrote Moby Dick, Billy Budd
Herman Melville
Wrote Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, the Pearl
John Steinbeck
Wrote Scarlet Letter, House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wrote House for Mr. Biswas, Bend in the River
VS Naipaul
Wrote 1984, Animal Farm
George Orwell
Wrote Beloved, Bluest Eyes, Song of Solomon
Tori Morrison
Wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee
Madama Butterfly was opera by who?
Giacomo Puccini
Wrote Metamorphosis, The Castle
Franz Kafka
Wrote Streetcar Named Desire, Glass Menagerie -> horn on glass unicorn breaks, Orpheus Descending, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tenessee Williams
Wrote Picture of Dorian Grey, Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde
Wrote Ragged Dick, Strive and Succeed
Horatio Alger
Wrote “And I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, “And Still I Rise”
Maya Angelou
Wrote “Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded”, and “Clarissa Harlowe: Or, The History of a Young Lady”
Samuel Richardson
Wrote “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, “The Joke”
Milan Kundera
Wrote The Color Purple, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens
Alice Walker
Wrote “Call of the Wild”, White Fang
Jack London
Wrote “Infinite Jest”, “The Pale King”
David Foster Wallace
Wrote “I, Robot”, “Foundation”, Nightfall
Isaac Asimov
Wrote “Ulysses”, “Dubliners”
James Joyce
Wrote “Disgrace”, “Waiting for the Barbarians”, “Elizabeth Costello”
John Maxwell Coetzee
Wrote Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood
Wrote Mrs Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Wrote A Room with a View, A Passage to India
E. M. Forster
Wrote Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
Wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Minister’s Wooing
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Wrote The Sound and The Fury, Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
Wrote Invisible Man, Juneteenth, Shadow and Act
Ralph Ellison
Wrote Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 47
Thomas Pynchon
Wrote No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
Wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
Wrote War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, How Much Land Does a Man Need? , The Kreutzer Sonata
Leo Tolstoy
Wrote Wizard of Oz
L Frank Baum
Wrote Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
Wrote Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ
Lew Wallace
Irish playwright of Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World, Pegeen Mike falls in love with Christy Mahon, who claims to have killed his father, In Riders of the sea, someone gets thrown off a grey pony and drowns, wrote “In the shadow of the Glen”, “The Well of the Saints”
John Millington Synge
wrote The Pillowman, included The Lieutenant of Inishmore in his Aran Islands trilogy, wrote the film “In Bruges”
Martin McDonagh
poet of “I Hear America Singing” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” which appear in his book Leaves of Grass. wrote “Song of Myself”, “I Sing the Body Electric”
Walt Whitman
Wrote “Spanish Tragedy”
Thomas Kyd
Wrote “Einstein on the Beach”
Phillip Glass
Wrote “Bald Soprano” and “Rhinoceros”, character named Berenger that recurs in many of his plays, this character is a semi-autobiographical character,
Eugene Ionesco
Wrote “Don Quixote”
Miguel de Cervantes
Wrote “100 Years of Solitude”, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”
Gabriel García Márquez
Wrote “The Old Gringo”, “Terra Nostra”, “Death of Artemio Cruz”
Carlos Fuentes
Wrote “Count of Monte Cristo”, “Three Musketeers”
Alexandre Dumas
Wrote “Lady Chatterly’s Lover”, “The Rainbow”, “Women in Love”, “Sons and Lovers”
DH Lawrence
Wrote “Time Machine”, “War of the Worlds”, “Island of Dr. Moreau”
HG Wells
Wrote “Lord of the Flies”
William Golding
Wrote “Little Prince”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Wrote “Eugene Onegin”, “Captain’s Daughter”, short story “Queen of Spades” - three seven ace,
Alexander Pushkin
Wrote “Jew of Malta”, “Doctor Faustus” , often called the greatest dramatist before Shakespeare, stabbed to death in a barroom brawl over the payment of a dinner bill.
Christopher Marlowe
Wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
Ken Kesey
Wrote “Fences”, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”, “Ma Raimey’s Black Bottom”
August Wilson
wrote “Dead Souls”, “The Overcoat”, “Nevsky Prospekt”, “The Nose”
Nikolai Gogol
Wrote “The Bet”, “Ward No. 6”, “Lady with a Dog”, “Cherry Orchard”, said “…See how bad and dreary your lives are!”
Anton Chekhov
Wrote “Lolita”, “Pale Fire”
Vladimir Nabokov
Argentine short story writer who often dealt with meta-fictional themes. “The Library of Babel”, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,”“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”best-known stories appeared in the collections Ficciones and Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges
wrote “Slaughterhouse Five”, “Cat’s Cradle”
Kurt Vonnegut
novel Invisible Cities is framed as a conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, who describes 55 fictional cities to the Mongol ruler. 1979 novel If on a winter’s night a traveler, his fantastical short stories, some of which are collected in the volume Cosmicomics and narrated by an ancient being named Qfwfq
Italo Calvino
wrote Catch-22, Closing Time
Joseph Heller
wrote “White Noise” (professor of Hitler Studies) , “Libra” about Lee Harvey Oswald, wrote about the waste management executive Nick Shay in “Underworld”
Don DeLillo
wrote ‘Midnight’s Children”, “The Satanic Verses”
Salman Rushdie
wrote “White Teeth”, “NW”
Zadie Smith
wrote “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” -> supposed to be published 25 years after his death, “Mourning becomes Electra” (Trilogy), “Iceman Cometh”
Eugene O’ Neill
wrote “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Edward Albee
wrote “A Raisin in the Sun” -> the first play by an African American woman to be performed on Broadway
Lorraine Hansberry
wrote “The Little Foxes”
Lillian Hellman
“Father of Tragedy”, said Dionysius ordered him to write tragedies, Died, according to tradition, when eagle dropped turtle on his head. During a fictional poetry contest in Aristophanes’s The Frogs, this playwright beats Euripides.
Wrote Seven Against Thebes, Oresteia
Aeschylus
Won many prizes in dramatic competitions, even defeating Aeschylus once
Improved theatre by adding a 3rd actor and writing complete single tragedies
Invented skenographia-scene painting
Wrote more than 100 plays; only 7 complete tragedies survived. Wrote Oepidus Rex, Antigone
Sophocles
Last of the three great tragic poets of Greece
First of the realists, he focused on ordinary people, and his characters used everyday language
Pioneer in tragicomedy
Considered eccentric by his peers; wrote his tragedies in a cave
Wrote Medea, the Bacchae
Euripedes
Father of Modern Drama because of his works’ psychological and social realism
Plays did not follow the traditional framework
Plays: Brand, A Doll’s House, Peer Gynt, The Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck
Henrick Ibsen
An active Socialist and brilliant speaker, he formed the Fabian Society with others
Plays: Pygmalion, Saint Joan, Man and Superman
George Bernard Shaw
Born in Ireland Traveled to Paris and met James Joyce He and his wife Susan joined "The Resistance" after Paris was attacked. Most famous play: Waiting for Godot Krapp's Last Tape Endgame
Samuel Beckett
wrote A Man of All Seasons, Wrote script for Lawrence of Arabia
Robert Oxton Bolt
Wrote “Waiting for the Parade”
John Murrell
author of The Rover and Oroonoko, Women are urged to drop flowers on this author’s tomb in A Room of One’s Own, author of “The Emperor of the Moon”
Aphra Behn
wrote
- Les Miserables
- Notre-Dame de Paris
- Ruy Blas
Victor Hugo
wrote
- The Storm
- Don’t Live as You Like
- Dream on the Volga
Alexander Ostrovsky
Who wrote “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud”? author of the “Lucy” poems, “Tintern Abbey”“Lyrical Ballads”
William Wordsworth
American poet who wrote The Raven, The Bells, “Once upon a midnight dreary” in “The Raven.” bird who cried “Nevermore”, “Annabel-Lee”
Edgar Allen Poe
his poet of “The Oven Bird” and “Out, Out—.” poet of “Mending Wall” and “The Road Not Taken.” poet of “Home Burial,” “Birches,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Robert Frost
this reclusive poet of “I felt a funeral, in my brain” and “Because I could not stop for Death.” ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” “I heard a fly buzzed when I died,” known as the Belle of Amherst
Emily Dickinson
name this Harlem Renaissance poet of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” “The Weary Blues.”
Langston Hughes
this English poet who wrote “The Lotos Eaters” and “Ulysses.” poet of “In Memoriam A. H. H.” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Greek playwright of The Frogs, Lysistrata, The Birds, The Clouds
Aristophanes
Victorian novelist who wrote Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Far From the Maddening Crowd
Thomas Hardy
Guatemalan author of El Senor Presidente include The Cyclone, The Green Pope, and The Eyes of the Interred, which form his “Banana Trilogy.”
Miguel Angel Asturias
“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” is a story written by this American author, who penned Pale Horse, Pale
Rider, and wrote about the travels of Jenny Brown and Mary Treadwell on the title boat in Ship of Fools.
Katherine Anne Porter
Author of the Bone People, from New Zealand
Keri Hulme
Author of the “Garden Party”, from New Zealand, wrote “Bliss”, “Daughters of the Late Colonel” (Jug and Con cope with the death of their tyrannical father)
Katherine Mansfield
name this man who wrote the Prose Poems, the French author of The Flowers of Evil?
Charles Baudelaire
this Italian author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum.
Umberto Eco
This Spanish playwright and member of the Generation of ‘27 included Blood Wedding in his rural trilogy. His other works include The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and the historical play Marina Pineda.
Federico Garcia Lorca
Author of Brave New World, Doors of Perception, Island, Point Counter Point
Aldous Huxley
Welsh poet of “And Death Shall have no Dominion” and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”
Dylan Thomas
describes the title animal as “burning bright.”, poet of Marriage Between Heaven and Hell and “The Tyger”, marvels at the “fearful symmetry” of a beast “burning bright / In the forests of the night.” “weep! weep! weep! weep!”
William Blake
this author of “On the Pulse of Morning” and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie
Maya Angelou
poet of ‘In the bleak midwinter’ and ‘Goblin Market’, where goblins try to get Lizzie to eat fruit
Christina Rossetti
name this Southern Gothic author of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” (Grandmother is killed by the Misfit)
Flannery O’Connor
first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize, wrote “A Street in Bronzeville” (Chicago), “The Bean Eaters” and “We Real Cool.”(“Seven at the Golden Shovel” who “left school,” “lurk late,” and “strike straight.” )
Gwendolyn Brooks
name this poet of “Fog,” who wrote about the “Hog Butcher for the World” in his poem “Chicago.”, poet of “Grass” (“Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo” is the opening line)
Carl Sandburg
Wrote Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Wrote Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler
Wrote Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Wrote Dracula
Bram Stoker
Wrote “The Awakening”, “A Pair of Silk Stockings”
Kate Chopin
name this author of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Truman Capote
Wrote Americanah and “We Should All Be Feminists”, Purple Hibiscus, Half a Yellow Sun, TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story.”
Chimamanda Adichie
Wrote Our Town
Thornton Wilder
Wrote The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
Wrote the Red Badge of Courage, the Open Boat (details the time spent in the title structure by the Correspondent, the Cook, the Captain, and the Oiler. Crane was inspired to write this work after surviving the sinking of the SS Commodore.) , Blue Hotel (centers on the murder of the Swede at Pat Scully’s title establishment) , The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
Stephen Crane
Wrote Farewell to Arms, Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
Wrote Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte
Wrote Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
Wrote the Waste Land, Ash Wednesday
T.S. Eliot
Wrote Pilgrim’s Progress
John Bunyan
Wrote Penguin Island, the Gods are Athirst
Anatole France
Wrote Yellow Wallpaper, Herland
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Wrote In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust
Wrote about his experiences of the Holocaust in “Night”
Elie Wiesel
Wrote “The Dumb Waiter”
Harold Pinter
Wrote “Naked and the Dead”
Norman Mailer
Wrote “Winesburg, Ohio”
Sherwood Anderson
Wrote “Siddartha” and “Steppenwolf”
Herman Hesse
twentieth poem begins, “Tonight I can write the saddest lines.”, “It is the hour of departure” in a poem that repeats the refrain, “in you, everything sank!”, wrote of “white hills, white thighs” in “Body of a Woman.”, author of the Elemental Odes and Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Pablo Neruda
author of “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” “Essay on Criticism,” and “The Rape of the Lock.”
Alexander Pope
author of July’s People
Nadine Gordimer
first poem begins, “thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.” frequently addressed God in his collection Gitanjali. . He wrote of a place “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high” and asked that “into that heaven of freedom, Father, let my country awake.”
Rabindranath Tagore
author of the collection The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, described her marriage by saying “if ever two were one, then surely we”, wrote “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House”
Anne Bradstreet
name this German author who wrote about the struggle between Karl and Franz Moor in The Robbers and who penned “Ode to Joy.” also wrote William Tell
Friedrich Schiller
known for a collection beginning “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?,” his Duino Elegies. wrote Letters to a Young Poet
Ranier Marie Rilke
playwright of Barefoot in the Park (newlyweds Corie and Paul Bratter, Corie’s desire for Paul to be less uptight) and the Odd Couple (unlikely roommates Oscar and Felix)
Neil Simon
“The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” was written by this 16th century English poet. He attacked “men of high condition” and “church and court” in his poem “The Lie” and was ultimately executed for treason. led a failed attempt to establish a colony in Roanoke, North Carolina
Sir Walter Raleigh
Wrote A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
Wrote “The Stranger”, “The Plague”, Myth of Sisyphys, “Exile and the Kingdom”
Albert Camus
