George Bernard Shaw

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 The pioneer of social drama whom Shaw championed and built upon.

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 A fellow Irish playwright and wit who conquered the London stage in the same era.

Writer · 1564 – 1616

William Shakespeare was an English playwright and poet widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist.

• Hamlet
• Romeo and Juliet

Why The dramatist to whom Shaw is most often ranked second in the English language.

Playwright · 480 BC – 406 BC

Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, whose psychologically searching, often unsettling plays such as Medea and The Bacchae made him the most modern-feeling dramatist of the ancient world.

• Medea
• The Bacchae

Why Also a playwright & writer · Comparable historical impact

Novelist · 1890 – 1976

Agatha Christie was an English writer, the best-selling novelist of all time, whose ingenious detective stories featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple made her the undisputed "Queen of Crime".

• Hercule Poirot
• Miss Marple

Why Also a writer & 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

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 writer & playwright · Active in the same era

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 Also a writer & critic · Active in the same era

Poet · 1888 – 1965

T. S. Eliot was an American-British poet, critic and playwright, a towering figure of literary modernism whose poem The Waste Land redefined 20th-century poetry and who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

• The Waste Land
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

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

Poet · 1865 – 1939

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and a driving force of the Irish Literary Revival, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature and helped found Ireland's national theatre.

• The Second Coming
• Irish Literary Revival

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

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 Also a 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 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 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 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 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 writer · Active in the same era

Writer · 1832 – 1898

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Dodgson, an English writer and mathematician whose Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass revolutionized children's literature with their playful logic, nonsense and imagination.

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Through the Looking-Glass

Why Also a 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 writer · Active in the same era

Writer · 1861 – 1941

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, writer, composer and polymath who reshaped Indian literature and music and, in 1913, became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

• Gitanjali
• Nobel Prize in Literature 1913

Why Also a 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 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 · 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 writer · Active in the same era

Poet · 1795 – 1821

John Keats was an English Romantic poet who, despite dying at just 25, produced some of the most beautiful and enduring poetry in the language, including a series of great odes that secured his place among the immortals of English verse.

• Ode to a Nightingale
• Ode on a Grecian Urn

Why Also a writer · Active in the same era