Major Literary Figures Flashcards
Aesop
620-560 BCE
Ancient Greek fabulist who wrote allegorical fables.
Dante Alighieri
1265-1321 AD
Early Renaissance Italian writer - called the father of modern literature.
Ex. The Divine Comedy
Sherwood Anderson
1876-1941 AD
An American short story writer.
Ex. Winesburg, Ohio
Jane Austen
1775-1817 AD
19th century English author.
Ex. Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Pride and Prejudice
Honoré de Balzac
1799-1850 AD
Early 19th century French writer.
Ex. La Comédie Humaine
Samuel Beckett
1906-1989
An Irish-born French writer and play write of the Existentialist school.
Ex. Malloy; Waiting for Godot
Saul Bellow
1915-2005 AD
An American novelist awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.
Ex. Herzog; Humboldt’s Gift
William Blake
1757-1827 AD
A British poet, artist, and engraver.
Ex. Songs of Innocence and Experience
Charlotte Brontë
1816-1855 AD
English novelist who wrote under the pen name Currier Bell. Older sister of Emily Brontë.
Ex. Jane Eyre; Shirley
Emily Brontë
1818-1848 AD
An English writer who wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell. Younger sister of Charlotte Brontë.
Ex. Wuthering Heights
John Bunyan
1628-1688 AD
An English preacher and writer of allegorical stories.
Ex. The Pilgrim’s progress
Lord George Byron
1788-1824 AD
Prominent Romantic poet known for his adventurous life and writings.
Ex. Don Juan; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Albert Camus
1913-1960 AD
French writer and existentialist.
Ex. The Stranger; the Plague
Lewis Carroll
1832-1898 AD
The pen name of Charles Dodgson, an English writer, mathematician, and artist.
Ex. Through the Looking Glass; Alice in Wonderland
Miguel de Cervantes
1547-1616 AD
A Spanish writer.
Ex. Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer
1340-1400 AD
Early English poet.
Ex. The Canterbury Tales
Anton Pavlovich Checkov
1869-1904 AD
Late 19th century Russian play wright and short story teller.
Ex. The Seagull; the Cherry Orchard
Aeschylus
525-456 BCE
Ancient Greek dramatist specializing in tragedies.
Ex. Prometheus Bound
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772-1834 AD
One of the first English Romantics.
Ex: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Lyrical Ballads - with William Wordsworth
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
1873-1954 AD
French female author.
Ex: The Innocent Wife
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 AD
Polish-born English writer.
Ex: Heart of Darkness; Under Western Eyes
Stephen Crane
1871-1900 AD
American author.
Ex: Red Badge of Courage
Charles Dickens
1812-1870 AD
English author of the Victorian era and a contemporary of Thomas Hardy.
Ex: A Tale of Two Cities; Great Expectations; a Christmas Carol
Emily Dickinson
1830-1886 AD
An American poet whose emotional poems whose poems were not published in her lifetime.
John Donne
1572-1631 AD
English writer, essayist, and religious scholar who is considered the greatest metaphorical poet.
Ex: The Flea; Death Be Not Proud
Fyodor Dostoevsky
1821-1881 AD
A Russian novelist
Ex: Crime and Punishment; the Idiot
Theodore Dreiser
1871-1945 AD
An American writer of the naturalist school.
Ex: Sister Carrie; An American Tradegy
Mary Ann Evans
1819-1880 AD
The real name of George Eliot, a female Victorian realist author.
Ex: Middlemarch; Adam Bede
T.S. Eliot
1888-1965 AD
An American born English Modernist poet who wrote obscure and referential poems.
Ex: The Waste Land; The Love of J. Alfred Prufrock
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882 AD
An American Transcendentalist writer and philosophy. He was the mentor of Thoreau.
Ex: Nature
Euripides
480-406 BCE
A contemporary or Sophocles and Aeschylus.
William Faulkner
1897-1962 AD
American novelist who influenced on contemporary literature.
Ex: The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Absolom! Absolom!
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1896-1940 AD
A writer who chronicled the Jazz age.
Ex: The Great Gatsby
Gustave Flaubert
1821-1880 AD
French writer that coined the phrase “le mot juste” or “the perfect word”.
Ex: Madame Bovary
Robert Frost
1874-1963 AD
An American poet.
Ex: Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening; Mending Wall
Allen Ginsberg
1926-1997 AD
American Beat poet and political figure who became the face of his generation’s underground.
Ex: Howl
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749-1832 AD
German writer, critic, and scientist.
Ex: Faust
Tennessee Williams
1914-1983 AD
American playwright.
Ex: A Streetcar Named Desire; The Glass Menagerie.
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941 AD
British novelist who wrote with an unconventional “stream of consciousness” style.
Ex: To the Lighthouse; Mrs. Dalloway
William Wordsworth
1770-1850 AD
Poet of the English Romantic movement.
Ex: Lyrical Ballads
William Butler Yeats
1865-1939 AD
Irish playwright and poet.
Ex: The Winding Stair
Emile Zola
1840-1902 AD
French writer from the Naturalist school who decried the French government’s role in the Dreyfus Affair.
Ex: J’Accuse
Dashiell Hammett
1894-1961 AD
American writer of noir fiction.
Ex: Maltese Falcon; The Thin Man
Thomas Hardy
1840-1928 AD
English writer.
Ex: Far From the Madding Crowd; Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Nathaniel Hawthorne
1804-1864 AD
An American author of novels and short-stories.
Ex: The Scarlet Letter; “The Minister’s Black Veil.”
Ernest Hemingway
1899-1961 AD
A terse American author and journalist.
Ex: The Sun Also Rises; A Farewell to Arms
Hermann Hesse
1877-1962 AD
Swiss-born German writer who wrote of the duality of Life.
Ex: Siddhartha; Steppenwolf
Homer
Approx. 850 BCE
Ancient Greek writer called the Father of Literature.
Ex: The Illiad; the Odyssey
Langston Hughes
1902-1967 AD
African American poet who helped shape the Harlem Renaissance.
Ex: Weary Blues; Selected Poems
Victor Hugo
1802-1885 AD
Victorian French novelists.
Ex: Les Miserables
Henry James
1843-1916 AD
Expatriate American writer.
Ex: The Turn of the Screw; Daisy Miller.
Samuel Johnson
1709-1784 AD
An English writer who created the first modern dictionary.
James Joyce
1882-1941 AD
Irish author.
Ex: Ulysses; Finnegans Wake
Franz Kafka
1883-1924 AD
German existentialist.
Ex: The Metamorphosis.
John Keats
1795-1821 AD
English Romantic poet.
Ex: “Ode to a Nightingale”; “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Jack Kerouac
1922-1969 AD
American Beat poet and voice of a counterculture.
Ex: On the Road
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1807-1882 AD
American Romantic poet
Ex: Songs of Hiawatha.
Christopher Marlowe
1564-1593 AD
English playwright and influencer of Shakespeare.
Ex: Tamburlaine the Great; Dr. Faustus
Herman Melville
1819-1891 AD
An American novelist.
Ex: Moby Dick; “Bartleby the Scrivener”.
Arthur Miller
1915-2005 AD
American playwright.
Ex: Death of a Salesman; the Crucible.
Henry Miller
1891-1980 AD
American writer.
Ex: Tropic of Cancer
John Milton
1608-1674 AD
An English poet and essayist during the Reformation.
Ex: Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière
1622-1673 AD
French playwright and actor who helped shape modern theatre.
Ex: Tartuffe; The Misanthrope
Toni Morrison
1931-
African American writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1993.
Ex: Beloved; Song of Solomon
Vladimir Nabokov
1899-1977 AD
Russian American writer.
Ex: Lolita
Eugene O’Neill
1888-1953 AD
An American dramatic playwright.
Ex: Desire Under the Elms; The Hairy Ape; The Iceman Cometh.
Eric Blair (George Orwell)
1903-1950 AD
English satire writer.
Ex: Animal Farm; 1984.
Ovid
43 BCE - 17 AD
Roman poet who inspired the Renaissance and Baroque writers.
Ex: Metamorphoses
Petrarch
1304-1374 AD
Renaissance Italian poet whose love poems influenced British writers.
Sylvia Plath
1932-1963 AD
American poet of the confessional school whose life influenced her poems.
Ex: Daddy; The Bell Jar
Plutarch
46-120 AD
Greek essayist who influenced many, including Shakespeare.
Ex: The Parallel Lives
Edgar Allen Poe
1809-1849 AD
Father of Noir and Horror.
Ex: The Raven
Ezra Pound
1885-1972 AD
American poet and editor who typified the Modernist movement.
Marcel Proust
1871-1922 AD
French novelist who wrote complex novels.
Ex: remembrance of things past
Salman Rushdie
1947-
British novelist sentenced to death by the Ayatollah.
Ex: The Satanic Verses
Sappho
620 BCE
Greek female poet.
Sir Walter Scott
1771-1832 AD
Scottish novelist who wrote historical novels.
Ex: Ivanhoe
William Shakespeare
1564-1616 AD
English playwright and essayist.
Ex: Macbeth, Othello.
George Bernard Shaw
1856-1950 AD
Irish playwright and Nobel Prize winner.
Ex: Pygmalion; Saint Joan
Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822 AD
English Romantic poet and social critic; husband of Mary Shelley.
Ex: Prometheus Unbound
Sophocles
496-406 BCE
Greek dramatist who wrote tragedies.
Ex: Oedipus Rex
Edmund Spenser
1552-1599 AD
English poet and writer.
Ex: The Faerie Queen
Gertrude Stein
1874-1946 AD
An American writer who lived in Paris in the 1920’s who coined the term “Lost Generation” about her fellow expats.
John Steinbeck
1902-1968 AD
American novelist whose stories center on workers and won a Nobel Prize in 1962.
Ex: Grapes of Wrath; East of Eden
Robert Louis Stevenson
1850-1894 AD
English writer.
Ex: Treasure Island; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Jonathan Swift
1667-1745 AD
Irish born writer and satirist.
Ex: Gulliver’s Travels; A Modest Proposal
Henry David Thoreau
1817-1862 AD
American thinker and Transcendentalist.
Ex: Walden
Count Leo Tolstoy
1828-1910 AD
Russian novelist.
Ex: Anna Karenina; War and Peace
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
1835-1910 AD
American humorist and writer.
Ex: Huckleberry Finn; Tom Sawyer
John Updike
1932-2009 AD
American novelist.
Ex: Rabbit, Run; Bech at Bay
Virgil
70-19 BCE
Roman poet
Ex: Aeneid
Voltaire
1694-1778 AD
French writer who helped to shape the Age of Enlightenment.
Ex: Candide
Alice Walker
1944-
African American novel.
Ex: The Color Purple
Walt Whitman
1819-1892 AD
American poet.
Ex: Leaves of Grass
Oscar Wilde
1854-1900 AD
Irish writer.
Ex: The Importance of Being Earnest; Salomé
