Agatha Christie

Writer · 1859 – 1930

Arthur Conan Doyle was a British writer and physician who created Sherlock Holmes, the most famous detective in fiction, whose stories of brilliant deduction defined the detective genre and remain among the best-loved in the world.

• Sherlock Holmes
• The Hound of the Baskervilles

Why Creator of Sherlock Holmes, whose detective tradition Christie inherited and perfected.

Writer · 1809 – 1849

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer and poet, a master of the macabre, who invented the detective story, helped shape the modern short story and science fiction, and gave the world haunting tales and poems such as "The Raven".

• The Raven
• Detective fiction

Why The inventor of detective fiction, the genre Christie came to dominate.

Writer · 1854 – 1900

Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer and wit, one of the most celebrated playwrights of late-Victorian London, whose sparkling comedies, the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and famous epigrams made him a legend — before a scandalous trial destroyed his career.

• The Importance of Being Earnest
• The Picture of Dorian Gray

Why An earlier master of the witty, plot-perfect English drawing-room scene.

Novelist · 1547 – 1616

Miguel de Cervantes was a Spanish writer whose novel Don Quixote is widely regarded as the first modern novel and one of the greatest works in world literature.

• Don Quixote
• The first modern novel

Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact

Novelist · 1802 – 1870

Alexandre Dumas was a French writer whose swashbuckling historical novels — The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo — became some of the most popular and widely adapted stories in the world.

• The Three Musketeers
• The Count of Monte Cristo

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Writer · 1894 – 1963

Aldous Huxley was an English writer and philosopher whose dystopian novel Brave New World became one of the most influential warnings of the 20th century, imagining a future enslaved not by terror but by pleasure and conditioning.

• Brave New World
• The Doors of Perception

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Writer · 1847 – 1912

Bram Stoker was an Irish writer and theatre manager whose 1897 Gothic novel Dracula created the modern vampire and became one of the most influential works of horror fiction ever written.

• Dracula
• Creating the modern vampire

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Novelist · 1812 – 1870

Charles Dickens was an English novelist of the Victorian age, the most popular writer of his time and one of the greatest in the English language, whose vivid characters and social conscience defined the 19th-century novel.

• A Christmas Carol
• Oliver Twist

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Playwright · 1856 – 1950

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist, the leading dramatist of his age after Shakespeare, whose witty, idea-driven plays such as Pygmalion won him the Nobel Prize in Literature and, uniquely, an Academy Award.

• Pygmalion
• Saint Joan

Why Also a playwright & writer · Active in the same era

Writer · 1903 – 1950

George Orwell was an English writer and journalist whose novels Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm became the defining warnings against totalitarianism, giving the world terms such as "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "Orwellian".

• Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Animal Farm

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Writer · 1866 – 1946

H. G. Wells was an English writer, a founding father of science fiction, whose visionary novels — The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man — imagined time travel, alien invasion and other ideas that have shaped the genre ever since.

• The War of the Worlds
• The Time Machine

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Writer · 1892 – 1973

J. R. R. Tolkien was an English writer and Oxford philologist whose novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings created the modern genre of epic fantasy and built one of the most fully imagined fictional worlds ever conceived.

• The Lord of the Rings
• The Hobbit

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Novelist · 1797 – 1851

Mary Shelley was an English writer who, at just eighteen, conceived Frankenstein — a novel often called the first work of science fiction — and went on to a notable literary career while editing the works of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

• Frankenstein
• Founding science fiction

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Novelist · 1850 – 1894

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish writer whose adventure and Gothic tales — Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped — became enduring classics read around the world.

• Treasure Island
• Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Writer · 1865 – 1936

Rudyard Kipling was a British writer and poet, author of The Jungle Book and the poem "If—", who became the first English-language winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, though his association with British imperialism has made his legacy contested.

• The Jungle Book
• If—

Why Also a writer & novelist · Active in the same era

Writer · 1882 – 1941

Virginia Woolf was an English writer, a central figure of literary modernism, whose novels Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse pioneered stream of consciousness, and whose essay A Room of One's Own became a landmark of feminist thought.

• Mrs Dalloway
• To the Lighthouse

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Poet · 1799 – 1837

Alexander Pushkin was a Russian poet, playwright and novelist, regarded as the founder of modern Russian literature, whose verse novel Eugene Onegin and other works shaped the language and the writers who followed him.

• Eugene Onegin
• Boris Godunov

Why Also a novelist & playwright · Active in the same era

Writer · 1860 – 1904

Anton Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer — and a practising physician — widely regarded as among the greatest masters of both the short story and modern drama, whose plays like The Cherry Orchard transformed the theatre.

• The Cherry Orchard
• The Seagull

Why Also a playwright & writer · Active in the same era

Writer · 1899 – 1961

Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist and short-story writer whose spare, understated prose style revolutionized 20th-century fiction, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for works such as The Old Man and the Sea.

• The Old Man and the Sea
• A Farewell to Arms

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Novelist · 1896 – 1940

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist and short-story writer, the great chronicler of the Jazz Age, whose novel The Great Gatsby is often called the quintessential American novel.

• The Great Gatsby
• The Jazz Age

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Writer · 1883 – 1924

Franz Kafka was a German-language writer from Prague whose nightmarish, unsettling fiction — The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle — became so influential that "Kafkaesque" entered the language to describe bewildering, oppressive situations.

• The Metamorphosis
• The Trial

Why Also a writer & novelist · Active in the same era

Novelist · 1821 – 1881

Fyodor Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist whose psychologically penetrating works, including Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, probe faith, guilt, and freedom and helped shape modern existential thought.

• Crime and Punishment
• The Brothers Karamazov

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Novelist · 1927 – 2014

Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, the most celebrated figure of Latin American literature, whose masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude made magical realism world-famous and won him the Nobel Prize in Literature.

• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Magical realism

Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era

Playwright · 1828 – 1906

Henrik Ibsen was a Norwegian playwright, often called the "father of modern drama" and second only to Shakespeare in influence on the theatre, whose realistic plays like A Doll's House confronted the moral and social questions of his age.

• A Doll's House
• Hedda Gabler

Why Also a playwright & writer · Active in the same era