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The biographer who invented the idea that character makes history.

Emperor whose private Meditations founded modern Stoic self-help.

Abbess, composer, and author of the first known European medical texts by a woman.

Made a dialect into a nation's language and mapped the moral universe.

Made English a literary language with The Canterbury Tales.

Proved that art and science are one act of looking.

Don Quixote, the first modern novel and the most translated after the Bible.

Built the language most of the planet now negotiates in.

Weaponised satire for tolerance and free expression.

A poet who also did serious science, and defined what a modern European is.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman founded feminist political theory.

Free indirect style and the social novel; still the most adapted author in English.

Frankenstein invented science fiction and the ethics-of-creation debate.

Les Misérables made poverty a moral emergency for a continent.

Took the reader inside the mind that has decided to do the terrible thing.

War and Peace; his nonviolence doctrine directly shaped Gandhi.

A Doll's House detonated 19th-century assumptions about marriage.

Genealogy of morals, the will to power and the revaluation of all values.

First woman to win the literature Nobel.

Doctor-playwright who invented modern drama's subtext.

Wrote As a Man Thinketh, the movement's most reprinted book.

Stream of consciousness and A Room of One's Own.

Ulysses reorganised what a novel could attempt.

Kristin Lavransdatter; medieval Norway rendered with modern psychology.

Gave bureaucratic dread an adjective in every major language.

Wrote as dozens of invented authors; The Book of Disquiet.

Requiem memorised by friends because writing it down was fatal.

Poet and dramatist murdered by fascists; Spain's enduring wound.

Independent People gave a small nation a world literature.

Existentialism's public face; declined the Nobel Prize in 1964.

Crowds and Power analysed mass psychology and dictatorship.

The Second Sex founded modern feminist philosophy.

The Captive Mind dissected intellectual submission to totalitarianism.

The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus; absurdism as an ethic.

The Gulag Archipelago broke the Soviet system's moral standing.

Chemist whose Auschwitz testimony is the standard of moral witness.

The Sovereignty of Good returned attention and love to moral philosophy.

Blindness and the parable of institutional collapse.

Built a new documentary genre from thousands of interviews.

Flights and The Books of Jacob; constellation-form fiction.