Literary Index
Authors
Explore our collection of timeless literary voices. Each author has been carefully selected for their enduring influence and masterful contributions to the canon.
24 voices available
August Strindberg
1849 - 1912
Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg’s...
Edgar Allan Poe
1809 - 1849
Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the mac...
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
1810 - 1865
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, includi...
Emily Brontë
1818 - 1848
Emily Jane Brontë was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature.
Ernest Hemingway
1899 - 1961
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while hi...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1896 - 1940
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess...
Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th...
Franz Kafka
1883 - 1924
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian writer of novels and short stories, regarded by critics as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Kafka strongl...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist, philosopher, and essayist. His literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritu...
H.P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird and horror fiction, who is known for his creation of what became the Cthulhu Mythos.
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in n...
Herman Melville
1819 - 1891
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. His best known works include Typee, a romantic account of his exp...
Hjalmar Söderberg
1869 - 1941
Hjalmar Söderberg was a Swedish author, playwright, and journalist. He is best known for his novels and plays, which often explore themes of love, jealousy, and the human c...
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde and is regarded as...
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th ce...
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer of children's fiction, notably Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel T...
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little
Marcel Proust
1871 - 1922
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost...
Mary Shelley
1797 - 1851
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. She also edited and promoted the works of her husban...
Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq is a French author, filmmaker, and poet. Having written poetry and a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, he published his first nove...
Oscar Wilde
1854 - 1900
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwri...
Victoria Benedictsson
1850 - 1888
Victoria Benedictsson was a Swedish author, playwright, and feminist. She is best known for her novels and plays, which are characterized by their naturalistic style and th...
Virginia Woolf
1882 - 1941
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness a...
William Shakespeare
1564 - 1616
William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist.