#7901
Jami
1414 - 1492 (78 years)
Nūr ad-Dīn 'Abd ar-Rahmān Jāmī , also known as Mawlanā Nūr al-Dīn 'Abd al-Rahmān or Abd-Al-Rahmān Nur-Al-Din Muhammad Dashti, or simply as Jami or Djāmī and in Turkey as Molla Cami, was a Sunni poet who is known for his achievements as a prolific scholar and writer of mystical Sufi literature. He was primarily a prominent poet-theologian of the school of Ibn Arabi and a Khwājagānī Sũfī, recognized for his eloquence and for his analysis of the metaphysics of mercy. His most famous poetic works are Haft Awrang, Tuhfat al-Ahrar, Layla wa Majnun, Fatihat al-Shabab, Lawa'ih, Al-Durrah al-Fakhirah. ...
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Agathias
536 - 582 (46 years)
Agathias Scholasticus was a Greek poet and the principal historian of part of the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian I between 552 and 558. Biography Agathias was a native of Myrina , an Aeolian city in western Asia Minor. His father was Memnonius. His mother was presumably Pericleia. A brother of Agathias is mentioned in primary sources, but his name has not survived. Their probable sister Eugenia is known by name. The Suda clarifies that Agathias was active in the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian I, mentioning him as a contemporary of Paul the Silentiary, Macedonius of Thessalonica an...
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Edmond Rostand
1868 - 1918 (50 years)
Edmond Eugène Alexis Rostand was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism and is known best for his 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand's romantic plays contrasted with the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century. Another of Rostand's works, Les Romanesques , was adapted to the 1960 musical comedy The Fantasticks.
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Christian Gottlob Heyne
1729 - 1812 (83 years)
Christian Gottlob Heyne was a German classical scholar and archaeologist as well as long-time director of the Göttingen State and University Library. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History.
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Maurice Leblanc
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc was a French novelist and writer of short stories, known primarily as the creator of the fictional gentleman thief and detective Arsène Lupin, often described as a French counterpart to Arthur Conan Doyle's creation Sherlock Holmes.
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Anthony Hope
1863 - 1933 (70 years)
Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, better known as Anthony Hope , was a British novelist and playwright. He was a prolific writer, especially of adventure novels but he is remembered predominantly for only two books: The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau . These works, "minor classics" of English literature, are set in the contemporaneous fictional country of Ruritania and spawned the genre known as Ruritanian romance, books set in fictional European locales similar to the novels. Zenda has inspired many adaptations, most notably the 1937 Hollywood movie of the same name and the 195...
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Paul Heyse
1830 - 1914 (84 years)
Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse was a distinguished German writer and translator. A member of two important literary societies, the Tunnel über der Spree in Berlin and Die Krokodile in Munich, he wrote novels, poetry, 177 short stories, and about sixty dramas. The sum of Heyse's many and varied productions made him a dominant figure among German men of letters. He was awarded the 1910 Nobel Prize in Literature "as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist and writer of world-reno...
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Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy
1883 - 1945 (62 years)
Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who wrote in many genres but specialized in science fiction and historical novels. Despite having opposed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, he was able to return to Russia six years later and live a privileged life as a highly paid author, reputedly a millionaire, who adapted his writings to conform to the line laid down by the communist party.
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Frances Hodgson Burnett
1849 - 1924 (75 years)
Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy , A Little Princess , and The Secret Garden . Frances Eliza Hodgson was born in Cheetham, Manchester, England. After her father died in 1853, when Frances was 4 years old, the family fell on straitened circumstances and in 1865 emigrated to the United States, settling in New Market, Tennessee. Frances began her writing career there at age 19 to help earn money for the family, publishing stories in magazines. In 1870, her mother died. In Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1873 she married Swan Burnett, who became a medical doctor.
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Sidonius Apollinaris
430 - 489 (59 years)
Gaius Sollius Modestus Apollinaris Sidonius, better known as Sidonius Apollinaris , was a poet, diplomat, and bishop. Born into the Gallo-Roman aristocracy, he was son-in-law to Emperor Avitus and was appointed Urban prefect of Rome by Emperor Anthemius in 468. In 469 he was appointed Bishop of Clermont and he led the defence of the city from Euric, King of the Visigoths, from 473 to 475. He retained his position as bishop after the city's conquest, until his death in the 480s. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic church, the Orthodox Church, and the True Orthodox Church, with his feast ...
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Hermann Usener
1834 - 1905 (71 years)
Hermann Karl Usener was a German scholar in the fields of philology and comparative religion. Life Hermann Usener was born at Weilburg and educated at its Gymnasium. From 1853 he studied at Heidelberg, Munich, Göttingen and Bonn.
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Charles Anthon
1797 - 1867 (70 years)
Charles Anthon was an American classical scholar. Anthon was a professor at Columbia College and became headmaster of its grammar and preparatory school. He produced classical works for schools, which contained assistance and translations in the notes. He had a disagreement with Martin Harris over an account where they discussed the authenticity of the Anthon Transcript of the Book of Mormon. Anthon was also an acquaintance of writer Edgar Allan Poe. He died in New York City at the age of 69.
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Tatsuji Miyoshi
1900 - 1964 (64 years)
Tatsuji Miyoshi was a Japanese poet, literary critic, and literary editor active during the Shōwa period of Japan. He is known for his lengthy free verse poetry, which often portray loneliness and isolation as part of contemporary life, but which are written in a complex, highly literary style reminiscent of classical Japanese poetry.
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Hans Fallada
1893 - 1947 (54 years)
Hans Fallada was a German writer of the first half of the 20th century. Some of his better known novels include Little Man, What Now? and Every Man Dies Alone . His works belong predominantly to the New Objectivity literary style, a style associated with an emotionless reportage approach, with precision of detail, and a veneration for 'the fact'. Fallada's pseudonym derives from a combination of characters found in the Grimm's Fairy Tales: The titular protagonist of Hans in Luck , and Falada the magical talking horse in The Goose Girl.
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Pierre de Marivaux
1688 - 1763 (75 years)
Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux , commonly referred to as Marivaux, was a French playwright and novelist. He is considered one of the most important French playwrights of the 18th century, writing numerous comedies for the Comédie-Française and the Comédie-Italienne of Paris. His most important works are Le Triomphe de l'amour, Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard and Les Fausses Confidences. He also published a number of essays and two important but unfinished novels, La Vie de Marianne and Le Paysan parvenu.
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Multatuli
1820 - 1887 (67 years)
Eduard Douwes Dekker , better known by his pen name Multatuli , was a Dutch writer best known for his satirical novel Max Havelaar , which denounced the abuses of colonialism in the Dutch East Indies . He is considered one of the Netherlands' greatest authors.
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Alphonse Daudet
1840 - 1897 (57 years)
Alphonse Daudet was a French novelist. He was the husband of Julia Daudet and father of Edmée, Léon and Lucien Daudet. Early life Daudet was born in Nîmes, France. His family, on both sides, belonged to the bourgeoisie. His father, Vincent Daudet, was a silk manufacturer — a man dogged through life by misfortune and failure. Alphonse, amid much truancy, had a depressing boyhood. In 1856 he left Lyon, where his schooldays had been mainly spent, and began his career as a schoolteacher at Alès, Gard, in the south of France. The position proved to be intolerable and Daudet said later that for months after leaving Alès he would wake with horror, thinking he was still among his unruly pupils.
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Mort Weisinger
1915 - 1978 (63 years)
Mortimer Weisinger was an American magazine and comic book editor best known for editing DC Comics' Superman during the mid-1950s to 1960s, in the Silver Age of comic books. He also co-created such features as Aquaman, Green Arrow, Johnny Quick, and the original Vigilante, served as story editor for the Adventures of Superman television series, and compiled the often-revised paperback 1001 Valuable Things You Can Get Free.
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Thomas Nashe
1567 - 1601 (34 years)
Thomas Nashe was an Elizabethan playwright, poet, satirist and a significant pamphleteer. He is known for his novel The Unfortunate Traveller, his pamphlets including Pierce Penniless, and his numerous defences of the Church of England.
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Stefan Żeromski
1864 - 1925 (61 years)
Stefan Żeromski was a Polish novelist and dramatist belonging to the Young Poland movement at the turn of the 20th century. He was called the "conscience of Polish literature". He also wrote under the pen names Maurycy Zych, Józef Katerla, and Stefan Iksmoreż.
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Else Lasker-Schüler
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Else Lasker-Schüler was a German-Jewish poet and playwright famous for her bohemian lifestyle in Berlin and her poetry. She was one of the few women affiliated with the Expressionist movement. Lasker-Schüler fled Nazi Germany and lived out the rest of her life in Jerusalem.
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Sheridan Le Fanu
1814 - 1873 (59 years)
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales, mystery novels, and horror fiction. He was a leading ghost story writer of his time, central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M. R. James described Le Fanu as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories". Three of his best-known works are the locked-room mystery Uncle Silas, the lesbian vampire novella Carmilla, and the historical novel The House by the Churchyard.
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Carlo Collodi
1826 - 1890 (64 years)
Carlo Lorenzini , better known by the pen name Carlo Collodi , was an Italian author, humourist, and journalist, widely known for his fairy tale novel The Adventures of Pinocchio. Early life Collodi was born in Florence on 24 November 1826. His mother Angiolina Orzali Lorenzini was a seamstress from Collodi, the town from which he later took the pen name, and his father Domenico Lorenzini was a cook. Both parents worked for the Ginori Lisci. Carlo was the eldest child in the family and he had ten siblings; seven died at a young age. He spent most of his childhood in the town of Collodi where his mother was born.
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Malik ibn Anas
711 - 795 (84 years)
Malik ibn Anas , whose full name is Mālik bin Anas bin Mālik bin Abī ʿĀmir bin ʿAmr bin Al-Ḥārith bin Ghaymān bin Khuthayn bin ʿAmr bin Al-Ḥārith al-Aṣbaḥī al-Ḥumyarī al-Madanī , reverently known as al-Imām Mālik by Sunni Muslims, was a Muslim jurist, theologian, and hadith traditionist. Born in the city of Medina, Malik rose to become the premier scholar of prophetic traditions in his day, which he sought to apply to "the whole legal life" in order to create a systematic method of Muslim jurisprudence which would only further expand with the passage of time. Referred to as the "Imam of Medi...
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Thomas Wolfe
1900 - 1938 (38 years)
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was an American novelist of the early 20th century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels as well as many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective.
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Georg Friedrich Creuzer
1771 - 1858 (87 years)
Georg Friedrich Creuzer was a German philologist and archaeologist. Life He was born at Marburg, the son of a bookbinder. After studying at Marburg and at the University of Jena, he went to Leipzig as a private tutor; but in 1802 he was appointed professor at Marburg, and two years later professor of philology and ancient history at Heidelberg. He held the latter position for nearly forty-five years, with the exception of a short time spent at the University of Leiden, where his health was affected by the Dutch climate. He was one of the principal founders of the Philological Seminary established at Heidelberg in 1807.
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Chikamatsu Monzaemon
1653 - 1725 (72 years)
Chikamatsu Monzaemon was a Japanese dramatist of jōruri, the form of puppet theater that later came to be known as bunraku, and the live-actor drama, kabuki. The Encyclopædia Britannica has written that he is "widely regarded as the greatest Japanese dramatist". His most famous plays deal with double-suicides of honor bound lovers. Of his puppet plays, around 70 are jidaimono and 24 are sewamono . The domestic plays are today considered the core of his artistic achievement, particularly works such as The Courier for Hell and The Love Suicides at Amijima . His histories are viewed less posi...
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Ogden Nash
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Frederic Ogden Nash was an American poet well known for his light verse, of which he wrote over 500 pieces. With his unconventional rhyming schemes, he was declared by The New York Times the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry.
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Théodore de Banville
1823 - 1891 (68 years)
Théodore Faullain de Banville was a French poet and writer. His work was influential on the Symbolist movement in French literature in the late 19th century. Biography Banville was born in Moulins in Allier, Auvergne, the son of a captain in the French navy. His boyhood, by his own account, was cheerlessly passed at a lycée in Paris; he was not harshly treated, but took no part in the amusements of his companions. On leaving school with but slender means of support, he devoted himself to letters, and in 1842 published his first volume of verse , which was followed by Les Stalactites in 1846. ...
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William Jones
1746 - 1794 (48 years)
Sir William Jones was a British philologist, orientalist and a puisne judge on the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, and a scholar of ancient India. He is particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among European and Indo-Aryan languages, which later came to be known as the Indo-European languages.
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Dositej Obradović
1742 - 1811 (69 years)
Dositej Obradović was a Serbian writer, biographer, diarist, philosopher, pedagogue, educational reformer, linguist, polyglot and the first minister of education of Serbia. An influential protagonist of the Serbian national and cultural renaissance, he advocated Enlightenment and rationalist ideas, while remaining a Serbian patriot and an adherent of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
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Lucian Blaga
1895 - 1961 (66 years)
Lucian Blaga was a Romanian philosopher, poet, playwright, poetry translator and novelist. He was a commanding personality of the Romanian culture of the interbellum period. Biography Blaga was born on 9 May 1895 in Lámkerék , near Gyulafehérvár , Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, his father being an Orthodox priest. He later described his early childhood, in the autobiographical The Chronicle and the Song of Ages, as "under the sign of the incredible absence of the word".
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George Abbott
1887 - 1995 (108 years)
George Francis Abbott was an American theatre producer, director, playwright, screenwriter, film director and producer whose career spanned eight decades. He received numerous honors including six Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1982. the National Medal of Arts in 1990. and was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
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Kenneth Grahame
1859 - 1932 (73 years)
Kenneth Grahame was a British writer born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is most famous for The Wind in the Willows , a classic of children's literature, as well as The Reluctant Dragon. Both books were later adapted for stage and film, of which A. A. Milne's Toad of Toad Hall, based on part of The Wind in the Willows, was the first. Other adaptations include Cosgrove Hall Films' The Wind in the Willows , and the Walt Disney films .
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Michael Madhusudan Dutt
1824 - 1873 (49 years)
Michael Madhusudan Dutt was a Bengali poet and playwright. He is considered one of the pioneers of Bengali literature. Early life Dutt was born in Sagardari, a village in Keshabpur Upazila, Jessore District of Bengal, to a Hindu family. His family being reasonably well-off, Dutt received an education in the English language and additional tutorship in English at home. Rajnarayan had intended for this Western education to open the doors for a government position for his son.
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Louis Zukofsky
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge around 1960 and become a significant influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.
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César Vallejo
1892 - 1938 (46 years)
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only two books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. He was always a step ahead of literary currents, and each of his books was distinct from the others, and, in its own sense, revolutionary. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante". The late British poet, critic and biographer Martin Seymour-Smith, a leading authority on world literature, called Vallejo "the greatest twentieth-c...
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Jan Kasprowicz
1860 - 1926 (66 years)
Jan Kasprowicz was a poet, playwright, critic and translator; a foremost representative of Young Poland. Biography Kasprowicz was born in the village of Szymborze within the Province of Posen, to an illiterate peasant family. From 1870 he studied in Prussian gymnasia in Inowrazlaw , Posen , Oppeln , Ratibor , and in 1884 graduated from Saint Mary Magdalene Gymnasium in Poznań. He studied philosophy and literature in German universities in Leipzig and Breslau. During his studies he began having articles and poetry published, working with various Polish magazines. For his activities in sociali...
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Machado de Assis
1839 - 1908 (69 years)
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis , often known by his surnames as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho , was a pioneer Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer, widely regarded as the greatest writer of Brazilian literature. In 1897, he founded and became the first President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was multilingual, having taught himself French, English, German and Greek later in life.
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Victorien Sardou
1831 - 1908 (77 years)
Victorien Sardou was a French dramatist. He is best remembered today for his development, along with Eugène Scribe, of the well-made play. He also wrote several plays that were made into popular 19th-century operas such as La Tosca on which Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca is based, and Fédora and Madame Sans-Gêne that provided the subjects for the lyrical dramas Fedora and Madame Sans-Gêne by Umberto Giordano. His play Gismonda, from 1894, was also adapted into an opera of the same name by Henry Février.
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George Chapman
1559 - 1634 (75 years)
George Chapman was an English dramatist, translator and poet. He was a classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism. William Minto speculated that Chapman is the unnamed Rival Poet of Shakespeare's sonnets. Chapman is seen as an anticipator of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. He is best remembered for his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and the Homeric Batrachomyomachia.
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Shinobu Orikuchi
1887 - 1953 (66 years)
Shinobu Orikuchi, also known as Chōkū Shaku, was a Japanese ethnologist, linguist, folklorist, novelist, and poet. As a disciple of Kunio Yanagita, he established an original academic field named "Orikuchiism", which is a mixture of Japanese folklore, Japanese classics, and Shintō. He produced many works in a diversity of fields covering the history of literature, folkloric performing arts, folklore itself, Japanese language, the classics study, Shintōology, ancient study, and so on. Yukio Mishima once called him the "Japanese Walter Pater".
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Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
1836 - 1870 (34 years)
Gustavo Adolfo Claudio Domínguez Bastida , better known as Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer , was a Spanish Romantic poet and writer , also a playwright, literary columnist, and talented in drawing. Today he is considered one of the most important figures in Spanish literature, and is considered by some as the most read writer after Miguel de Cervantes. He adopted the alias of Bécquer as his brother Valeriano Bécquer, a painter, had done earlier. He was associated with the romanticism and post-romanticism movements and wrote while realism was enjoying success in Spain. He was moderately well known during his life, but it was after his death that most of his works were published.
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George Crabbe
1754 - 1832 (78 years)
George Crabbe was an English poet, surgeon and clergyman. He is best known for his early use of the realistic narrative form and his descriptions of middle and working-class life and people. In the 1770s, Crabbe began his career as a doctor's apprentice, later becoming a surgeon. In 1780, he travelled to London to make a living as a poet. After encountering serious financial difficulty and being unable to have his work published, he wrote to the statesman and author Edmund Burke for assistance. Burke was impressed enough by Crabbe's poems to promise to help him in any way he could. The two be...
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Thomas Bernhard
1931 - 1989 (58 years)
Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet who explored death, social injustice, and human misery in controversial literature that was deeply pessimistic about modern civilization in general and Austrian culture in particular. Bernhard's body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II." He is widely considered to be one of the most important German-language authors of the postwar era.
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Sami Frashëri
1850 - 1904 (54 years)
Sami bey Frashëri or Şemseddin Sâmi was an Ottoman Albanian writer, philosopher, playwright and a prominent figure of the Rilindja Kombëtare, the National Renaissance movement of Albania, together with his two brothers Abdyl and Naim. He also supported Turkish nationalism against its Ottoman counterpart, along with secularism against theocracy.
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Georges Feydeau
1862 - 1921 (59 years)
Georges-Léon-Jules-Marie Feydeau was a French playwright of the Belle Époque era, remembered for his farces, written between 1886 and 1914. Feydeau was born in Paris to middle-class parents and raised in an artistic and literary environment. From an early age he was fascinated by the theatre, and as a child he wrote plays and organised his schoolfellows into a drama group. In his teens he wrote comic monologues and moved on to writing longer plays. His first full-length comedy, , was well received, but was followed by a string of comparative failures. He gave up writing for a time in the ear...
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Austin Warren
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Austin Warren was an American literary critic, author, and professor of English. Childhood and education Edward Austin Warren Jr. was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1899, as the elder of two sons by Edward Austin Warren, city alderman of Waltham and expert butcher, and Nellie Myra Anderson Warren. He attended public grammar school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, and briefly attended Waltham High School, where he received instruction in Latin and studied Esperanto independently. At the age of thirteen, Warren and his family relocated to a lonely farm in Stow, Massachusetts. He attend...
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Snorri Sturluson
1179 - 1241 (62 years)
Snorri Sturluson was an Icelandic historian, poet, and politician. He was elected twice as lawspeaker of the Icelandic parliament, the Althing. He is commonly thought to have authored or compiled portions of the Prose Edda, which is a major source for what is today known as Norse mythology, and Heimskringla, a history of the Norse kings that begins with legendary material in Ynglinga saga and moves through to early medieval Scandinavian history. For stylistic and methodological reasons, Snorri is often taken to be the author of Egil's saga. He was assassinated in 1241 by men claiming to be ag...
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Leonid Andreyev
1871 - 1919 (48 years)
Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer, who is considered to be a father of Expressionism in Russian literature. He is regarded as one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age literary period. Andreyev's style combines the elements of realist, naturalist, and symbolist schools in literature. Of his 25 plays, his 1915 play He Who Gets Slapped is regarded as his finest achievement.
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