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Category
Era
12 figures
Halldór Laxness
1902 – 1998Independent People gave a small nation a world literature.
Jean-Paul Sartre
1905 – 1980Existentialism's public face; declined the Nobel Prize in 1964.
Elias Canetti
1905 – 1994Crowds and Power analysed mass psychology and dictatorship.
Simone de Beauvoir
1908 – 1986The Second Sex founded modern feminist philosophy.
Czesław Miłosz
1911 – 2004The Captive Mind dissected intellectual submission to totalitarianism.
Albert Camus
1913 – 1960The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus; absurdism as an ethic.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1918 – 2008The Gulag Archipelago broke the Soviet system's moral standing.
Primo Levi
1919 – 1987Chemist whose Auschwitz testimony is the standard of moral witness.
Iris Murdoch
1919 – 1999The Sovereignty of Good returned attention and love to moral philosophy.
José Saramago
1922 – 2010Blindness and the parable of institutional collapse.
Svetlana Alexievich
b. 1948Built a new documentary genre from thousands of interviews.
Olga Tokarczuk
b. 1962Flights and The Books of Jacob; constellation-form fiction.