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Era
14 figures
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.
Machado de Assis
1839 – 1908Wrote a novel narrated by a dead man in 1881; Brazil's greatest writer.
José Martí
1853 – 1895Poet-revolutionary whose essays founded Cuban and pan-American thought.
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.
Gabriela Mistral
1889 – 1957First Latin American to win the literature Nobel; teacher and diplomat.
William Faulkner
1897 – 1962Built Yoknapatawpha County and the Southern conscience.
Ernest Hemingway
1899 – 1961Stripped English prose to the bone.
Jorge Luis Borges
1899 – 1986Invented the labyrinth-library imagination that prefigured hypertext.
Miguel Ángel Asturias
1899 – 1974El Señor Presidente invented the Latin American dictator novel.