M.A.
English
Jeffery Chaucer:
English poet
remembered as author of the Canterbury Tales (1340-1400)
John Milton:
English poet;
remembered primarily as the author of an epic poem describing humanity's
fall from grace (1608-1674)
Pope:
English poet and
satirist (1688-1744)
John Donne:
English
clergyman and metaphysical poet celebrated as a preacher (1572-1631)
Sophocles:
One of the great
tragedians of ancient Greece (496-406 BC)
Marlowe:
English poet and
playwright who introduced blank verse as a form of dramatic expression;
was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl (1564-1593)
William Shakespeare:
English poet and
dramatist considered one of the greatest English writers (1564-1616)
Francis Bacon:
English
statesman and philosopher; precursor of British empiricism; advocated
inductive reasoning (1561-1626)
J. Swift:
An English
satirist born in Ireland (1667-1745)
Russell:
English
philosopher and mathematician who collaborated with Whitehead (1872-1970)
Plato:
Ancient Athenian
philosopher; pupil of Socrates; teacher of Aristotle (428-347 BC)
Aristotle:
One of the
greatest of the ancient Athenian philosophers; pupil of Plato; teacher of
Alexander the Great (384-322 BC)
William Wordsworth:
A romantic
English poet whose work was inspired by the Lake District where he spent
most of his life (1770-1850)
Matthew Arnold:
English poet and
literary critic (1822-1888)
T S Eliot:
British poet
(born in the United States) who won the Nobel Prize for literature;
his plays are outstanding examples of modern verse drama (1888-1965)
Dickens:
English writer
whose novels depicted and criticized social injustice (1812-1870)
George Eliot:
British writer
of novels characterized by realistic analysis of provincial Victorian society
(1819-1880)
Hardy:
English novelist
and poet (1840-1928)
United States
slapstick comedian who played the pompous and overbearing member of the
Laurel and Hardy duo who made many films (1892-1957)
John Keats:
Englishman and
romantic poet (1795-1821)
Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Englishman and romantic poet (1792-1822)
William Blake:
Visionary
British poet and painter (1757-1827)
Robert Browning:
English poet and
husband of Elizabeth Barrett Browning noted for his dramatic
monologues (1812-1889)
Alfred Tennyson:
Englishman and
Victorian poet (1809-1892)
Robert Frost:
United States
poet famous for his lyrical poems on country life in New England
(1874-1963)
Sylvia Plath:
United States
writer and poet (1932-1963)
Arthur Miller:
United States
playwright (1915-2005)
Tony Morrison:
United States
writer whose novels describe the lives of African-Americans (born in 1931)
Jacques Derrida:
French philosopher and critic (born in
Algeria); exponent of deconstructionism (1930-2004)
Karl Marx
Founder of
modern communism; wrote the Communist Manifesto with Engels in 1848; wrote
Das Kapital in 1867 (1818-1883)
Adam Smith:
Scottish
economist who advocated private enterprise and free trade (1723-1790)
John Locke:
English
empiricist philosopher who believed that all knowledge is derived from sensory
experience (1632-1704)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel:
German
philosopher whose three stage process of dialectical reasoning was adopted by
Karl Marx (1770-1831)
Immanuel Kant:
Influential
German idealist philosopher (1724-1804)
Friedrich Engels:
Socialist who
wrote the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx in 1848 (1820-1895)
Adolf Hitler:
German Nazi
dictator during World War II (1889-1945)
Nikolai Lenin:
Russian founder
of the Bolsheviks and leader of the Russian Revolution and first head of
the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) (1870-1924)
(A former communist country in eastern
Europe and northern Asia; established in
1922; included Russia and 14 other soviet socialist republics (Ukraine and
Byelorussia and others); officially dissolved 31 December 1991)
Joseph Stalin:
Russian leader
who succeeded Lenin as head of the Communist Party and created a
totalitarian state by purging all opposition (1879-1953)
Sir Winston
Leonard Spenser Churchill
British
statesman and leader during World War II; received Nobel prize
for literature in 1953 (1874-1965)
Henrike Ibsen:
Realistic
Norwegian author who wrote plays on social and political themes (1828-1906)
George Bernard Shaw:
British
playwright (born in Ireland); founder of the Fabian Society (1856-1950)
Harold Pinter:
English
dramatist whose plays are characterized by silences and the use of inaction
(born in 1930)
Samuel Beckett:
A playwright and
novelist (born in Ireland) who lived in France; wrote plays for the
theatre of the absurd (1906-1989)
William Butler Yeats:
Irish poet and dramatist (1865-1939)
Ted Hughes:
English poet
(born in 1930)
Albert Camus:
French writer
who portrayed the human condition as isolated in an absurd world (1913-1960)
Hermann Hesse:
Swiss writer
(born in Germany) whose novels and poems express his interests in eastern
spiritual values (1877-1962)
Ivan Turgenev: Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
Russian writer
of stories and novels and plays (1818-1883)
Joseph Conrad: Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
English novelist
(born in Poland) noted for sea stories and for his narrative technique
(1857-1924)
Virginia Woolf: Adeline Virginia Stephen
Woolf
English author
whose work used such techniques as stream of consciousness and the interior monologue;
prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group (1882-1941)
Arthur Conan Doyle:
British author
who created Sherlock Holmes (1859-1930)
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien:
British philologist
and writer of fantasies (born in South Africa) (1892-1973)