Browse the index
Filter by category and discipline, then by continent, country and century of birth. Countries not yet represented can be drafted at the research desk.
Category
Disciplines in Literature & Letters
Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.
Era
Countries (85)
8 figures
Geoffrey Chaucer
1343 – 1400Made English a literary language with The Canterbury Tales.
William Shakespeare
1564 – 1616Built the language most of the planet now negotiates in.
Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 – 1797A Vindication of the Rights of Woman founded feminist political theory.
Jane Austen
1775 – 1817Free indirect style and the social novel; still the most adapted author in English.
Mary Shelley
1797 – 1851Frankenstein invented science fiction and the ethics-of-creation debate.
James Allen
1864 – 1912Wrote As a Man Thinketh, the movement's most reprinted book.
Virginia Woolf
1882 – 1941Stream of consciousness and A Room of One's Own.
Iris Murdoch
1919 – 1999The Sovereignty of Good returned attention and love to moral philosophy.