H. G. Wells

Novelist · 1828 – 1905

Jules Verne was a French novelist whose pioneering adventure stories — including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days — helped found science fiction and imagined technologies decades before they existed.

• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
• Around the World in Eighty Days

Why The other great founder of science fiction, often paired with Wells.

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 A later writer of speculative fiction influenced by Wells's social imagination.

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 A later author of dystopian fiction in the tradition Wells helped create.

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 · 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 novelist & 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 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

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 · 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

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 · 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

Novelist · 1819 – 1891

Herman Melville was an American novelist and poet whose Moby-Dick, neglected in his lifetime, is now regarded as one of the greatest novels ever written and a towering achievement of American literature.

• Moby-Dick
• Billy Budd

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

Novelist · 1882 – 1941

James Joyce was an Irish novelist whose experimental masterpiece Ulysses is widely regarded as the greatest novel of the 20th century, and whose innovations in language and stream of consciousness transformed modern literature.

• Ulysses
• Dubliners

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

Novelist · 1775 – 1817

Jane Austen was an English novelist whose witty, incisive novels of manners, including Pride and Prejudice and Emma, are masterpieces of English literature and remain enduringly popular.

• Pride and Prejudice
• Sense and Sensibility

Why Also a novelist & writer · From the same civilization

Novelist · 1871 – 1922

Marcel Proust was a French novelist whose monumental seven-volume In Search of Lost Time is one of the most celebrated novels of the 20th century, transforming fiction with its exploration of memory, time and consciousness.

• In Search of Lost Time
• Involuntary memory

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

Writer · 1835 – 1910

Mark Twain was an American writer and humorist, called the "father of American literature", whose novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn captured the voice of America and remain classics of world literature.

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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

Novelist · 1804 – 1864

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short-story writer whose dark, morally probing fiction — above all The Scarlet Letter — explored sin, guilt and hypocrisy in Puritan New England and helped found the American novel.

• The Scarlet Letter
• The House of the Seven Gables

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