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)
6 figures
Benjamin Franklin
1706 – 1790Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.
Cao Xueqin
1715 – 1763Dream of the Red Chamber, China's supreme novel, spawned its own academic field.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749 – 1832A poet who also did serious science, and defined what a modern European is.
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.