Victor Marie Hugo

Novelist · 1828 – 1910

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian novelist and moral philosopher whose epics War and Peace and Anna Karenina rank among the greatest works of fiction, and whose later doctrine of nonviolence influenced Gandhi and King.

• War and Peace
• Anna Karenina

Why A contemporary novelist of vast moral scope who admired Hugo's social compassion.

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 A Russian novelist who deeply admired Hugo and his portrayal of the suffering poor.

Military Leader · 1769 – 1821

Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader who rose during the French Revolution, crowned himself Emperor, and dominated European affairs for over a decade.

• Napoleonic Wars
• The Napoleonic Code

Why The emperor whose legacy and the later Second Empire shaped Hugo's politics and his years of exile.

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 An earlier novelist of the age whose work, like Hugo's, helped define a national literature.

Writer · 1749 – 1832

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, poet, and statesman, widely regarded as the greatest figure in German literature and one of the towering minds of European culture.

• Faust
• The Sorrows of Young Werther

Why Also a writer & poet · Comparable historical impact

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 · 973 – 1014

Murasaki Shikibu was a Japanese noblewoman and writer of the Heian court whose Tale of Genji, written around 1010, is often called the world's first novel and a masterpiece of world literature.

• The Tale of Genji
• World's first novel

Why Also a novelist & writer · Comparable historical impact

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

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 & poet · 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

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

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 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 poet & novelist · 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 · 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

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 poet & writer · Active in the same era

Poet · 1788 – 1824

Lord Byron was an English Romantic poet, one of the most famous and scandalous figures of his age, whose works such as Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage created the brooding "Byronic hero" and made him a celebrity across Europe.

• Don Juan
• Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

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

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

Poet · 1792 – 1822

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet, among the greatest lyric poets in the language, whose visionary and politically radical verse — including Ozymandias and Prometheus Unbound — influenced generations of poets and reformers.

• Ozymandias
• Prometheus Unbound

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

Novelist · 1931 – 2019

Toni 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.

• Beloved
• Song of Solomon

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