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Featured Classic Writers
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis was famous both as a fiction writer beloved for his Chronicles of Narnia books, and as a renowned Christian thinker. Yet a large part of Lewis's appeal to both of his audiences lay in his ability to fuse imagination with instruction. "Let the pictures tell you their own moral," he once advised writers of children's stories. "But if they don't show you any moral, don't put one in."
Charles Dickens
With his darkly comic style and vivid depictions of life in Victorian England, Charles Dickens established himself long ago as Britain's most venerable novelist. It's said that there's a little bit of the real Dickens in each one of his memorable characters, from Oliver Twist to David Copperfield.
Oscar Wilde
The ever-quotable Oscar Wilde once said, "Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it." From his outsize celebrity in Victorian London to his authorship of fiction, drama, and poetry that uniquely captured his era, it's fair to say that Wilde succeeded on both counts with classics like The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Virginia Woolf
With her novel Mrs. Dalloway inspiring Michael Cunningham's buzzed-about bestseller, The Hours -- Virginia Woolf is being discovered by a new generation of readers. Find out more about this woman whose literary legacy endures.
James Joyce
Joyce's signature style -- marked by a rhythmical, often challenging flow of words -- was perhaps best captured in the epic Ulysses. Suppressed by British and American authorities before it was finally published in France in 1922, the book was banned in the United States until 1933.
Thomas Hardy
Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy focused much of his work -- including classics like The Return of the Native (1878) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) on man's futile struggle against unseen forces. Of his rather unromantic outlook on life, Hardy once said, "Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed."
Charles Darwin
Scientist Charles Darwin once asserted that "a scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections -- a mere heart of stone." Indeed, his objective take on evolution asserted in The Origin of Species shook the foundations of traditional religion to its core.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The literary prince of America's "Jazz Age," F. Scott Fitzgerald held a mirror to a generation's dreams with The Great Gatsby. It's hard to believe that in 1940, Fitzgerald received what was to be his last royalty statement, reporting sales of only 40 copies. It read, "Amount due author: $13.13."
Carson McCullers
A deeply feeling soul who managed to turn her troubled thoughts into breathtaking novels, Carson McCullers earned a reputation as one of the South's great literary talents with her 1940 masterpiece, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Ernest Hemingway
Renowned as much for his adventurous lifestyle (and infamous machismo) as he was for his writing -- which included masterpieces like the 1952 Pulitzer Prize–winning novella, The Old Man and the Sea -- Ernest Hemingway remains an enduring lion of modern American literature.
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