Novelist · 1828 – 1910
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
If you're interested in Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, these historical figures share a similar impact, discipline, philosophy, or era. Each recommendation explains why the connection exists.
Similar Impact & Significance
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
91Fyodor 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.
Why His great contemporary and rival, the other towering figure of the Russian novel.
Mahatma Gandhi
93Mahatma Gandhi was the leader of India's independence movement, who pioneered the philosophy and practice of nonviolent civil disobedience and inspired movements for civil rights across the world.
Why Corresponded with Tolstoy and drew his philosophy of nonviolence partly from him.
Victor Marie Hugo
89Victor Hugo was a French novelist, poet, and dramatist, the towering figure of French Romanticism, whose novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame are monuments of world literature.
Why A fellow nineteenth-century novelist of vast social and moral scope whose work Tolstoy admired.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
90Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan-French philosopher, writer, and composer whose ideas on the social contract, the general will, and natural human goodness shaped modern political thought, education, and the Romantic movement.
Why An Enlightenment thinker whose ideas on nature and society deeply shaped the young Tolstoy.
Jane Austen
88Jane 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
Miguel de Cervantes
91Miguel 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact
Same Field or Discipline
Charles Dickens
86Charles 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Ernest Hemingway
82Ernest 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
James Joyce
82James 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Mark Twain
84Mark 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
George Orwell
84George 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".
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
J. R. R. Tolkien
84J. 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Aldous Huxley
80Aldous 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Alexandre Dumas
81Alexandre 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
F. Scott Fitzgerald
80F. 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Herman Melville
80Herman 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Marcel Proust
81Marcel 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Nathaniel Hawthorne
78Nathaniel 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Toni Morrison
81Toni Morrison was an American novelist whose richly poetic explorations of Black American life — above all Beloved — won her the Pulitzer Prize and made her the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Agatha Christie
81Agatha 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".
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Arthur Conan Doyle
81Arthur 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Bram Stoker
78Bram 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era
Franz Kafka
81Franz 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.
Why Also a writer & novelist · Active in the same era
Gabriel García Márquez
81Gabriel 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.
Why Also a novelist & writer · Active in the same era