William Shakespeare is considered to be the greatest playwright in the English language and one of the most beloved playwrights in the world. His plays never grow old. He wrote 37 plays and many poems.
Very little is known about his personality and some people doubt that he had ever written anything at all – there must have been some other author, they argue.
Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England and was baptized on 26 April. He had three younger brothers and two younger sisters. His father was a glove maker who later became the mayor of Stratford. His mother was the daughter of a well-to-do local landowner.
At the age of 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, daughter of a farmer. The couple had a daughter the following year and twins in 1585.
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Jane Austen was the first English woman to become a famous author. She was one of the most important novelists of the 19th century. She was one of the major writers of the age of Romanticism. Although her novels received favorable reviews, she was not celebrated as an author during her lifetime.
Jane was born on December 16, 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire. She was one of eight children and began writing as a child to entertain her family. One of her brothers, Henry, was to later become her literary agent. Her books were about the daily lives of middle-class people in Bath, Bristol, London and the English countryside.
In 1795, she fell in love with Tom Lefroy, a student studying in London. Lefroy’s family, seeking a richer bride, intervened and sent Tom away. Jane was never to see him any more.
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James Joyce was an Irish writer and poet, representative of modernism. He was widely regarded as the most important novelist of the 20th century.
He didn’t believe in God and so it was difficult for him to live in a Catholic country. After his marriage in 1904 he went abroad. He worked as a teacher in Italy and later moved to Switzerland. Most of his novels, however, were set in his home town, Dublin. His most famous book, Ulysses, published in 1922, took him fourteen years to write. He worked on his last book, Finnegan’s Wake, for seventeen years. Joyce’s life was very unhappy: he never had much money; his son committed suicide; his daughter went mad; and as he grew older he became almost blind.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on February 2, 1882 in Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin. His father, an amateur actor and popular tenor, was employed first in a Dublin distillery, then as tax collector for the city of Dublin. His mother was a gifted pianist.
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Emily Dickinson was one of America’s greatest poets. She wrote about 2,000 poems, but only four were published in her lifetime. Her work was different from what other poets wrote. Dickinson became famous after her death.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts into a rich and well-known family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a lawyer and a politician, a US Congressman. Emily was the middle of three children: her brother William Austin was a year older than her, and sister Lavinia was three years younger. The house, where Emily was born, is now the Memorial Museum. Emily was shy and quiet. She read, worked in the garden, and wrote poetry.
Dickinson graduated from Amherst Academy in 1847.
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James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish playwright and novelist, author of the famous children’s fairy tale Peter Pan.
James Barrie was born on May 9, 1860 in the Scottish village of Kirriemuir. He was the ninth of ten children in the family of a weaver, and he grew up with stories of pirates and adventure.
He studied at Dumfries Academy, then at the University of Edinburgh. After graduation, he worked in the newspaper Nottingham Journal. In 1885 he began his literary career.
In 1889, the writer published a series of stories Auld Licht Idylls.
Then Barrie wrote an unsuccessful melodrama Better Dead (1888), novel The Little Minister (1891), Sentimental Tommy (1896), and its sequel Tommy and Grizel (1900), and the book about the mother Margaret Ogilvy (1896).
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Dante Alighieri was one of the greatest poets, scientists, philosophers and politicians. The Divine Comedy or Divina commedia of Dante is a classic of western literature. It is the greatest poetic composition of the Christian Middle Ages and the first masterpiece of world literature.
Dante was born in 1265 in Florence, Italy. His family was noble. His great-grandfather Cacciaguida had been knighted by Emperor Conrad III.
He attended the Franciscan school of Sta Croce and the Dominican school of S. Maria Novella in Florence.
In the 1290s, Dante collected the poems that he had been writing and brought them out as a little book (libello) that was to become famous: Vita nuova (The New Life).
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Helen Keller was an American writer, lecturer and political activist.
Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. At the age of nineteen months Keller suffered disease which resulted in completely lost of hearing and vision. When Helen was seven years old her parents decided to find a teacher for their daughter. Alexander Graham Bell examined the girl. He was a doctor for speech correction as well as being the inventor of the telephone. Bell sent a special teacher, Anne Sullivan, to stay with Helen as her governess.
After school Keller entered Radcliffe College, where she received a bachelor’s degree. Later she lived with her constant companion Sullivan.
Though both blind and deaf, Helen traveled the world over, crusading for improvement in the education and life of the physically handicapped.
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