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Category
Disciplines in Literature & Letters
Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.
Era
Countries (85)
15 figures
Benjamin Franklin
1706 – 1790Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.
Frederick Douglass
1818 – 1895His Narrative was abolition's most powerful weapon.
Walt Whitman
1819 – 1892Leaves of Grass invented American poetic voice.
Emily Dickinson
1830 – 18861,800 poems found in a drawer redefined lyric compression.
Prentice Mulford
1834 – 1891Essayist who popularised 'thoughts are things' and the idea of mental forces.
William Walker Atkinson
1862 – 1932Prolific author who named the law of attraction and wrote as Yogi Ramacharaka.
W. E. B. Du Bois
1868 – 1963The Souls of Black Folk and the concept of double consciousness.
Florence Scovel Shinn
1871 – 1940Illustrator turned teacher whose parables made affirmation practice everyday.
William Faulkner
1897 – 1962Built Yoknapatawpha County and the Southern conscience.
Ernest Hemingway
1899 – 1961Stripped English prose to the bone.
Rachel Carson
1907 – 1964Silent Spring launched the environmental movement and got DDT banned.
James Baldwin
1924 – 1987The Fire Next Time; the most precise prose on American race ever written.
Martin Luther King Jr.
1929 – 1968Letter from Birmingham Jail and a movement that rewrote American law.
Toni Morrison
1931 – 2019Wrote Black American interior life without explaining it to anyone.
Bob Dylan
b. 1941First songwriter awarded the literature Nobel.