501 Great Writers: A Comprehensive Guide to the Giants of Literature

Furnishes a collection of concise, informal biographies of more than five hundred of the world's greatest writers, spanning from ancient Greece to the twentieth century and encompassing every genre of literature, in a resource that also includes an analysis of the writer's cultural influence and literary innovations and a list of their major works.

(back cover)
Includes: Chinua Achebe  Kingsley Amis  Margaret Atwood  Donald Barthelme  William Blake  Vera Brittain  Mikhail Bulgakov  Albert Camus  Truman Capote  Giacomo Casanova  Geoffrey Chaucer  Noël Coward  Roald Dahl  Dante  Charles Dickens  Fyodor Dostoevsky  Marguerite Duras  Umberto Eco  T.S. Eliot  Bret Easton Ellis  Erasmus  Sebastian Faulks  Ian Fleming  Dario Fo  Max Frisch  Elizabeth Gaskell  Andre Gide  Robert Graves  Graham Greene  Dashiell Hammett  Thomas Hardy  Seamus Heaney  Patricia Highsmith  Homer  Victor Hugo  Kazua Ishiguro  Erica Jong  James Joyce  Ismail Kadare  Franz Kafka  Rudyard Kipling  Hanif Kureishi  Philip Larkin  Harper Lee  Primo Levi  Doris Lessing  Mario Vargas Llosa  Guy de Maupassant  Arthur Miller  Toni Morrison  Iris Murdoch  Vladimir Nabakov  George Orwell  Marcel Pagnol  Samuel Pepys  Harold Pinter  Sylvia Plath  Edgar Allan Poe  Arthur Ransome  Christina Rosetti  J.K. Rowling  Salman Rushdie  Jean-Paul Sartre  Siegfried Sassoon  William Shakespeare  Carol Shields  Sophocles  Bram Stoker  Dylan Thomas  Ivan Turgenev  John Updike  Jules Verne  Voltaire  Sarah Waters  Irvine Welsh  Oscar Wilde  Tennessee Williams  Virginia Woolf  William Wordsworth  Marguerite Yourcenar  à mile Zola

(front flap)
This enthralling, in-depth guide to 501 outstanding novelists, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and essayists spans the centuries as it describes writers from around the world. 501 Great Writers presents an informal illustrated history of the written word as it has been practiced by leading figures from different eras and cultures. Each biographical entry includes a critical appraisal of the artist s standing in the canon of world literature and an assessment of his or her literary innovations and cultural impact. An illustration accompanying each entry presents a portrait of the writer, and a supplementary list directs readers to recommended books by the author. Enhanced with enlightening quotes and intriguing asides, each and every entry is an entertaining and informative summary of the writer and his or her achievement.

Compiled by Professor Julian Patrick and written by an international team of literary critics, authors, teachers, and journalists, 501 Great Writers provides a truly comprehensive guide to the giants of world literature. Eclectic in its approach, this book describes a wide range of authors who have shaped the course of fiction, poetry, and philosophical thought, covering established figureheads as well as the latest firebrands. A comprehensive reference to the literary world, 501 Great Writers encourages you to gain a deeper understanding of the men and women behind many of the world s best-loved and most influential literary works.

(back flap)
For the past 25 years Julian Patrick, professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, has directed the Literary Studies program at Victoria College a historically innovative program of world literature, translation, philosophy, and literary theory. Educated at Toronto and Yale, he has edited books on Ben Jonson and on literary theory, and has published articles on literature from Shakespeare to Auden, as well as on psychoanalysis. His current research involves the overlap between traditional mimesis and new-style representation in early modern literature from Montaigne to La Princesse de Clèves.