Albert Camus was a French Algerian author, philosopher, and journalist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was a key philosopher of the 20th-century and his most famous work is the novel L'Étranger (The Stranger).
In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was a group opposed to some tendencies of the surrealistic movement of André Breton. Camus was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for L...
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist.
Angus Wilson was a British novelist and critic. He's best known for his novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and his critical work Understanding Fiction. Wilson's writing often explored themes of English society and its history.
Bret Harte is the author behind Prentice Hall Literature--Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes--The American Experience. His work focuses on American literature, offering readers a look into classic themes and voices.
Caroline Gordon is the author of Understanding Fiction. She writes about literature and how stories work.
Carson McCullers was an American writer. She wrote novels, short stories, and two plays, as well as essays and some poetry. Her first novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the South. Her other novels have similar themes and are all set in the South.
Source and more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_McCullers
Christopher Sykes is the author of Understanding Fiction. He writes about literature and how we read it.
Cleanth Brooks was a key figure in the New Criticism movement, a school of thought that focused on the close reading of literary texts. His influential work, Understanding Fiction, helped shape how students and readers approached analyzing stories.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, in the Burgundy Region of France. In 1893 she married Henri Gauthier-Villars, a famous wit known as "Willy", who was 15 years her senior. Her first books, the Claudine series, were published under the pen name of her husband, "Willy". In 1906 she left her husband and lived for a time with the American writer and salonist Natalie Barney. The two had a short affair, and remained friends until Colette's death. She then star...
D.H. Lawrence was an English author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct. ([Source][1].)
[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._H._Lawrence
Dino Buzzati was an Italian novelist and short-story writer. He's best known for his surreal and allegorical fiction, like The Tartar Steppe. Buzzati's work often explores themes of existentialism and the absurd.
Dylan Thomas is the author behind Prentice Hall Literature, a familiar name for many who've explored classic and contemporary writing. He's known for his work in educational literature, making complex texts accessible to readers.
Ernest Miller Hemingway (21 July 1899 – 2 July 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist whose spare, understated prose reshaped twentieth-century fiction. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he worked briefly as a reporter before serving as an American Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front in the First World War, where he was seriously wounded by mortar fire in July 1918 and decorated for helping other wounded men to safety.
He settled in Paris in the early 1920s as a...
Eudora Welty's work is featured in Prentice Hall Literature--Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes--The American Experience, offering readers a look into classic American literature. She's a writer whose selections are a great addition to any literary exploration.
O'Connor was American writer, particularly acclaimed for her stories which combined comic with tragic and brutal. Along with authors like Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition that focused on the decaying South and its damned people. O'Connor's body of work was small, consisting of only thirty-one stories, two novels, and some speeches and letters. ([Source][1].)
[1]: http://kirjasto.sci.fi/flannery.htm
Historian, eponymous son of the Unitarian cleric
Frank O'Connor (born Michael Francis O'Donovan) was an Irish writer of over 150 works, best known for his short stories and memoirs. The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award is named in his honor.
Franz Kafka (gelegentlich tschechisch František Kafka, 3. Juli 1883, Prag, Österreich-Ungarn-3. Juni 1924, Kierling, Österreich) war ein österreichisch-tschechoslowakischer Schriftsteller. Er gilt als einer der bedeutendsten Vertreter der Prager deutschen Literatur und der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Seine Werke – darunter die drei Romanfragmente Der Process, Das Schloss und Der Verschollene sowie zahlreiche Erzählungen – gehören zum Kanon der Weltliteratur. Kafkas Werk...
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the Twenties. He finished four novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night and his most famous, the celebrated classic, The Great Gatsby. A fifth, unfinished novel, *The Lov...
Guy de Maupassant, né le 5 août 1850 au château de Miromesnil près de Tourville-sur-Arques (France) et mort le 6 juillet 1893 dans le 16e arrondissement de Paris, est un écrivain et journaliste littéraire français. Lié à Gustave Flaubert et à Émile Zola, Maupassant a marqué la littérature française par ses six romans, dont Une vie en 1883, Bel-Ami en 1885, Pierre et Jean en 1887-1888, et surtout par ses nouvelles (parfois intitulées contes) comme Boule de Suif en 1880, les *Contes de la...
Hanson Weightman Baldwin is the author of Understanding Fiction. He's a writer who helps readers get a better grasp on the world of fiction.
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815. ([Source][1].)
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_de_Balzac
Irwin Shaw was an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author whose written works have sold more than 14 million copies. He is best known for two of his novels: The Young Lions (1948), about the fate of three soldiers during World War II, which was made into a film of the same name starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, and Rich Man, Poor Man (1970), about the fate of two brothers and a sister in the post-World War II decades, which in 1976 was made into a popular m...
Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (Russian: Исаак Эммануилович Бабель; 13 July) was a Russian writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, and has been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry." Babel was arrested by the NKVD on 15 May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage, and executed on 27 January 1940.
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) wrote works both in Danish and in English. She is best known, at least in English, for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed, Academy Award-winning motion pictures. In Denmark she is best known for her works Out of Africa (Danish Den afrikanske Farm) and Seven Gothic Tales (Danish Syv fantastiske Fortællinger; from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Blixen).
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century.
Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he utilised. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubl...
James Purdy - undifferentiated American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright
The author of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and the creator of numerous New Yorker magazine cover cartoons, was born in Columbus, Ohio on December, 8, 1894. One of the foremost American humorists of the 20th century, his inimitable wit and pithy prose spanned a breadth of genres, including short stories, modern commentary, fiction, children's fantasy and letters.
Thurber's father, Charles, was a civil clerk, and his mother, Mame, was an eccentric woman who would influence many of her son's...
Jesse Stuart is the author behind the popular Prentice Hall Literature series, including Platinum and Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes. His work focuses on making classic literature accessible for students.
John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born; and Italy, especially Rome. His short stories included The Enormous Radio, Goodbye, My Brother, The Five-Forty-Eight, The Country Husband, and...
John Collier is the author of the collection Short Stories from the New Yorker. His work often explores dark humor and the uncanny.
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born British novelist, who became a British subject in 1886. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and then always with a marked Polish accent). He wrote stories and novels, predominantly with a nautical or seaboard setting, that depict trials of the human spirit by the demands of duty and honor. ([Source][1].)
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad
"Katherine Anne Porter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil." - Wikipedia
Born Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, she moved to England at age 19, mixed with modernist writers there, lead a very modernist life there, and died relatively young of tuberculosis (Wikipedia).
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays.
He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd.
Marcel Aymé was a French writer celebrated for his witty and often darkly humorous short stories. His collection, Great Short Stories of the World, showcases his talent for blending the everyday with the fantastical. He's a master of the short fiction form, offering readers a unique perspective on human nature.
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was a prolific American author and humorist. Twain is best known for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). He is extensively quoted. Twain was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. ([Source][1].)
[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
Mary McCarthy is the author of Understanding Fiction. She writes about fiction.
O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings. ([Source][1].)
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._Henry
Sir Peter Courtney Quennell CBE (9 March 1905 – 27 October 1993) was an English biographer, literary historian, editor, essayist, poet, and critic. He wrote extensively on social history.
Born in Bickley, Kent, the son of architect (and author/illustrator) C. H. B. Quennell and Marjorie Quennell (historian/author/illustrator), he was educated at Berkhamsted Grammar School and at Balliol College, Oxford. While still at school some of his poems were selected by Richard Hughes for the antholog...
Ray Bradbury is one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think. His more than five hundred published works -- short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, and verse -- exemplify the American imagination at its most creative.
Once read, his words are never forgotten. His best-known and most beloved books, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, are masterworks that readers carry wi...
Ring Lardner was a sharp-witted American humorist whose work is collected in A Subtreasury of American Humor. He's known for his satirical take on everyday life and the foibles of human nature.
Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, literary critic and professor at Yale University.
Rudyard Kipling was a British author and poet. Born in Bombay, in British India, he is best known for his works of fiction "[The Jungle Book][1]" (1894). He is regarded as a major "innovator in the art of the short story"; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature. ([Source][2])
[1]: /works/OL15400121W/
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudyard_Kipling
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts.[2] He is the only writer to have won the National Book Award three times, and the only writer to have been nominated for it six times.
Source and more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow
Sherwood Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio on the 13th of September, 1876. He attended school only intermittently, while helping to support his family by working as a newsboy, housepainter, stock handler, and stable groom. At the age of 17 he moved to Chicago where he worked as a warehouse laborer and attended business classes at night. During the Spanish-American war Anderson fought in Cuba and returned after the war to Ohio, for a final year of schooling at Wittenberg College, Springfield. A...
Shirley Hardie Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) was an American writer, known primarily for her works of horror and mystery.
Source: [Shirley Jackson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Jackson) on Wikipedia.
A prolific American author (Wikipedia; Wikisource).
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.
His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich...
Thomas Wolfe is the author of Prentice Hall Literature--Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes--The American Experience. This work explores classic American literature.
Truman Capote was an American writer, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and In Cold Blood (1965), which he labeled a "nonfiction novel".
William Faulkner was a Nobel Prize-winning American author. One of the most influential writers of the 20th century, his reputation is based on his novels, novellas and short stories. He was also a published poet and an occasional screenwriter. ([Source][1].)
[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Faulkner
William Sansom is the author of Understanding Fiction. He's a writer who helps readers get a better handle on the stories they love.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: Антон Павлович Чехов) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov was a physician by profession. "Medic...