Various Authors Basic Info

Author Project 1

1. Baldesar Castiglione also known as Baldassare Castiglione was born December 6, 1478 in Castatico (near Mantua, Italy), and died February 2, 1529 in Toledo, Spain (50 years of age). He wrote a book he was most known for, but also wrote sonnets and poems, and even a drama. Castiglione wrote multiple sonnets and poems about love and a love interest, but was best known for his dialogue II libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courier), published in 1528. He had a big influence on the Renaissance behavior mostly from his book; the book influenced behavior expectation of the courtier and what a wife should do in order to help her husband.
2. Marguerite De Navarre was born April 11, 1492 in Anguoulême, France, and died December 21, 1549 in Odos-Bigorre (57 years of age). She wrote many different types of work such as, poems, prayers, religious meditations, songs, as well as biblical and secular plays. She was best known as a poet and for writing poetry; her most important written work was the Heptaméron, published in 1558–59. Marguerite De Navarre was best known for her position in society along with her intelligence and enthusiasm for the arts was her greatest influence in the sixteenth century.
3. Francois Rabelais was born February 4, 1494 in Chinon, France, and died April 9, 1553 in Paris, France (59 years of age). He was best known for genres in fantasy, satire, the grotesque, and also bawdy jokes and songs. His most well-known works are Gargantua and Pantagruel, which was a series of four or five books. His greatest influence in literature was his grotesque sense of writing, it set an inspiration for other writers later in history.
4. Michel de Montaigne was born February 28, 1533 in Chateau de Montaigne, Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, France, and died September 13, 1592 in Chaeteau de Montaigne, Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, France (59 years of age). He wrote in essay genre; that is how he became so well known in the literacy world, he had created the essay style of writing. He was known for his large volume work “Essais,” which included most of the most influential essays of the time ever written.
5. Pedro Calderon de la Barca was born January 17, 1600 in Madrid, Spain, and died May 25, 1681 in Madrid, Spain (81 years of age). He wrote dramas—operas and plays—with religious and mythological themes to them; during his career, he had written several poems and around 120 three-act plays. His most famous pieces of work are El médico de su honra, La vida es sueno, El alcalde de Zalamea, and La hija del aire. In his later life, he worked with musical theater and had contributed to the development of opera in Spain.
6. Jean Racine was born December 22, 1639 in La Ferté-Milon, and died April 21, 1699 in Paris, France (59 years of age).  He was seen as the greatest tragedy writer of his time; he was a dramatic poet and also wrote plays. Most of his reputation was built from the plays he had written between 1664 and 1691; his most noteable plays were Andromaque (published 1668), Britannicus (published 1670), Berenice (published 1671), Bajazet (published 1670), Phèdre (published 1677), and Athalie (published 1691).
7. Francois Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand was born September 14, 1768 in Saint-Malo, Brittany, France, and died July 4, 1848 in Paris, Seine, France (79 years of age). Francois Rene, Vicomte de Chateaubriand wrote mainly novel, memoir, and essay genres. His most notable works were Atala, Genie de christianisme, Rene, and Memoirs d’Outre-Tombe. He is considered to be the founder of Romanticism in French literature.
8. Giacomo Leopardi was born June 29, 1798 in Recanati, Italy, and died June 14, 1837 in Naples, Italy (38 years of age).  Leopardi wrote mainly poetry, essay, and dialogue genres. He did not have many years to produce new writings so he has limited pieces of work; the one most known is I canti (a collection of 61 poems). He wrote other works such as the Operette morali, the Zibaldone, the Pensieri, and then also Leopardi’s Collected Letters. He was known as one of the greatest Italian poets; thus having an influence on Western Literature.
9. Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was born June 6, 1799 in Moscow, Russia, and died on February 10, 1837 in Saint Petersburg, Russia (37 years of age). Pushkin wrote mainly novels, novels in verse, poems, dramas, short stories, and fairytales. His most well-known works were Eugene Onegin, The Captain’s Daughter, Boris Godunov, and Rusland and Ludmila. He is best known for romanticism and realism thus him having an influence on Western Literature.
10. Gustave Flaubert was born December 12, 1821 in Rouen, France, and died on May 8, 1880 in Canteleu, France (58 years of age). Gustave Flaubert wrote fictional prose genre. His most recognized work of literature is Madame Bovary, a classic tale of romance and retribution. He is considered the leading exponent of literary realism, making him have an influence in literature.
11. Leo Tolstoy was born September 9, 1828 in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia, and died November 20, 1910 in Lev Tolstoy, Russia (82 years of age). Tolstoy wrote novels, short stories, playwrights, and essays. His most notable pieces of work are War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kingdom of God is Within You, and Resurrection. He was seen as one of the greatest European novelists of all time, thus him having an influence in Western Literature.
12. Georg Buchner was born October 17, 1813 in Riedstadt, Germany, and died February 19, 1837 in Zürich, Switzerland (23 years of age). Buchner wrote dramas and poetry; his most notable works were Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck. He was so young and well known that he was considered part of the Young Germany movement, thus him having a great influence in Western Literature.
13. Luigi Pirandello was born June 28, 1867 in Agrigento, Italy, and died December 10, 1936 in Rome, Italy (69 years of age).  He wrote mainly dramas, novels, and poetry. Pirandello’s notable works were The Late Mattia Pascal (1904), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Henry IV (1922), and One, NO One and One Hundred Thousand (1926). He is known for the Decadent movement thus having an influence in Western Literature.
14. Marcel Proust was born July 10, 1871 in Neuilly-Auteuil-Passy, and died November 18, 1922 in Paris, France (51 years of age). He wrote mainly novels, essays, and critics. Marcel Proust’s most notable work is IN Search of Lost Time. He is considered by critics and writers to be the most influential author of the 20th century, thus having an influence in Western Literature.
15. Thomas Mann was born June 6, 1875 in Free City of Lübeck, and died August 12, 1955 in Zürich, Switzerland (80 years of age).  He wrote mainly novels and novellas. Buddenbrooks, The magic Mountain, Death in Venice, Joseph and His Brothers, and Doctor Faustus were his most notable works of literature. His symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas had a great influence in the Western Literature world.
16. Rainer Maria Rilke was born December 4, 1875 in Prague, Czech Republic, and died December 29, 1926 in Montreaux, Switzerland (51 years of age).  He wrote mainly poems and novels. His best-known works in poetry were Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, a novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and a collection of ten letters under the title Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke wrote often with metaphors, metonymy, and contradictions; this gave him a great influence in the literature world at his time.
17. Anna Akhmatova was born June 23, 1889 in Odessa, Ukraine, and died March 3, 1966 in Domodedovo, Russia (76 years of age). Akhmatova wrote mainly poems; ranging from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles. She was most well known for her work Requiem; a tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her strong style of writing of the world she had seen around her is what impacted the literacy world.
18. Bertolt Brecht was born February 10, 1898 in Augsburg, Germany, and died August 14, 1956 in East Berlin (58 years of age). He wrote mainly epic theatre and Non-Aristotelian drama. His notable works were The Threepenny Opera, Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. He was considered an influential dramatist and poet, but also for his contribution in political and social philosophy; thus having a great influence in the literature world.
19. Albert Camus was born November 7, 1913 in French Algeria, and died January 4, 1960 in Villeblevin, France (46 years of age). He mainly wrote essays, books, plays, short stories, and novels. He is best known for his absurdist works, including The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947). He wrote in a pacifism manor, which gave him an influence in the Western Literature of the time.
20. Samuel Beckett was born April 13, 1906 in Foxrock, Republic of Ireland, and died December 22, 1989 in Paris, France (83 years of age). He wrote mainly drama, fiction, poetry, screenplays, and personal correspondence. Beckett’s notable works are Murphy (1938), Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), The Unnamable (1953), Waiting for Godot (1953), Watt (1953), Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), and How It Is (1961). He has a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existance, sometime coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, thus giving him a influence in Western Liturature.
21. Marguerite Duras was born April 4, 1914 in Gia Dinn Province, and died March 3, 1996 in Paris, France (81 years of age). She wrote mainly novel, drama, and film making. Hiroshima mon amour was a film she was best known for writing. For that piece of work, she received a nomination for Best Original Screenplay, thus having an impact on Western Liturature.
22. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk, Russia, and died August 3, 2008 in Moscow, Russia (89 years of age). He wrote mainly essays and novels. His most well-know works were One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Gulag Archipelage, Two Hundred Years Together, and The Red Wheel. Solzhenitsyn’s influence in his moral courage inspired younger dissidents to carry on the struggle.
23. Alain Robbe-Grillet was born August 18, 922 in Brest, France, and died February 18, 2008 in Caen, France (85 years of age). He wrote mainly and was most known for writing novels and film work. He is most commonly known for his first piece of work, The erasers (1953). His techniques in writing fiction is was influenced in Western Litureature.
24. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia, and died April 17, 2014 in Mexico City, Mexico (87 years of age).  He wrote mainly novels and short stories. Marquez’s most well-known works are One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patiriarch, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. He was considered one of the most significant authors or the 20th century and one of the best in the Spanish Language, thus having an influence in Western Literature.
25. Wole Soyinka was born July 13, 1934 in Abeokuta, Nigeria, and is still living to this day. Soyinka writes mainly dramas, novels, and poetry. His main works are The Lion and the Jewel, The trials of Brother Jero, Madmen and Specialists, Ake, The Memoirs of Childhood, The Strong Breed, Death and the King’s Horseman, A Dance of the Forests, Kongi’s Harvest, The Beautification of Area Boy, and King Baabu. He was the first African to be honored in receiving a Novel Prize for Literature, thus having a huge impact on Western Literature.
26. Carlos Fuentes was born November 11, 1928 in Panama City, Panama, and died May 5, 2012 in Mexico City, Mexico (83 years of age). He wrote mostly novels. The Death of Artemio Cruiz (1962), Terra Nostr (1975), and The Old Gringo (1985) were of his most notable pieces of work. He was described as “one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world,” and had an important influence on the Latin American Boom, thus having an influence in Western Literature.

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