Rabinderanath Tagore   Tagore was a Bengali poet, novelist and educator who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and was considered the greatest writer in the modern Indian literature. He was born in Kolkata into a wealthy and prominent Brahman family. His father was Maharishi Debendranath Tagore, a religious reformer and scholar, his mother Sarada Devi. His grandfather had established a huge financial empire for himself, and financed public...

Philip Massinger Philip Massinger was born in 1583 to Anne and Arthur Massinger. He was baptized in the church of St. Thomas, Salisbury, on November 24, 1583. Arthur Massinger was a long-time trusted servant first to Sir Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, and then to his heir Sir William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, until Arthur’s death in 1603. On May 14, 1602, Philip Massinger entered as a commoner of...

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse   (1881 – 1975) English comic novelist, short story writer, lyricist and playwright, best known as the creator of Jeeves, the perfect ‘gentleman’s gentle-man,’ Berrie Wooster of the Drones Club, a young bachelor aristocrat, and the absentminded Lord Emsworth of the Blandings Castle. Pelham. Grenville Wodehouse was born in Guildford, Surrey, as the son of Henry Ernest Wodehouse, a British judge in Hong Kong,- and Eleanor (Deane) Wodehouse....

Paul (Mark) Scott (1920 – 1978 ) Paul Scott was born in suburban North London. He was educated at Winchmore Hill Collegiate School, but was forced to abandon his studies at the age of 16 when the family’s money ran out. Scott started a career in accountancy and met an aesthetic estate agent called Gerald Armstrong, who became his lover. During these years he read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian...

Patrick (Victor Matindale) White (1912 – 1990) Patrick White was an Australian novelist, short story writer and playwright who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. In his work White combines myth, symbols and allegory. White’s international breakthrough novel was Voss, published in 1957. Riders In The Chariot, which contains a powerful indictment of Australian suburban life, established him as one of the most important modern writers. He was...

Oscar Wilde   (1854 -1900) Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet and dramatist whose reputation rests on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Among Wilde’s other best-known works are his only novel The Picture of Dorian. Gray (1891) and his fairy tales especially The Happy Prince. He was born on October 16, 1854 in Dublin to unconventional parents -his mother Lady Jane Francesca...

O. Henry (1862 – 1910) Henry, pseudonym of William Sydney Porter, prolific American short-story writer, a master of surprise endings, who wrote about the life of ordinary people in New York City. Typical for 0. Henry’s stories is a twist of plot, which turns on an ironic or coincidental circumstance. Although some critics were not so enthusiastic about his work, the public loved it. Porter was born in Greenboro, North Carolina....

Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol  (1809 — 1852) Gogol was a Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of the 19th-century Russian realist literature. Gogol was born on March 20, 1809, in Sorochintsy Mirgorod, Poltava Province, of cossack parents. In 1828 he went to Saint Petersburg, where he eventually secured employment in the civil service and became known in literary circles. Enthusiastic praise greeted his volume of...