US authors
Credited with inventing the modern detective story and know for his gothic tales and poems.
E. A. Poe
Served as an ambulance driver in World War I, an experience reflected in his novel.
E. Hemingway
Her novels satirize social class and women’s limited choices in early 19th-century England.
Jane Austen
His poetry celebrated nature and the individual’s emotional response to it, central to the Romantic movement.
William Wordsworth
His Mississippi River childhood inspired tales are world famous.
Mark Twain
Set most of his works in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, exploring the American South’s history and identity.
William Faulkner
His experience working in a factory as a child influenced his depictions of poverty and injustice in his major novel.
Charles Dickens
His novels set in “Wessex” depict rural life and often challenge Victorian moral values.
Thomas Hardy
Lived much of her life in isolation and published only a few of her nearly 1,800 poems during her lifetime.
Emily Dickinson
Her novel Beloved draws on the legacy of slavery and memory; she was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Toni Morrison
Wrote Frankenstein after a challenge to write a ghost story during a stay with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron in Geneva.
Marry Shelley
Imprisoned for “gross indecency,” he later wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol reflecting on his experiences in prison.
Oscar Wilde
His Leaves of Grass celebrated democracy, the human body, and the spirit of America.
Walt Whitman
Her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar and her poetry reflect her struggles with depression and identity.
Sylvia Plath
Fought in the Spanish Civil War, an experience that shaped his views on totalitarianism.
George Orwell
His controversial novels, including Lady Chatterley’s Lover, explore sexuality and industrialization’s impact on humanity.
D. H. Lawrence
In his best known novel, he captured the glamour and emptiness of the Jazz Age.
F. S. Fitzgerald
Spent much of his life in Europe and explored the contrast between American innocence and European sophistication.
Henry James
A leading figure in the Bloomsbury Group and a pioneer of stream-of-consciousness narration.
Virginia Woolf
Born in the US but settled in England, he became a major modernist poet known for The Waste Land and his conversion to Anglicanism.
T. S. Elliot