Famous Authors

• An author doesn’t become famous because of his personality, but it is mainly the prize-winning possession of his thoughts and imagination which brings fame and name.
• Authors throughout history have helped capture something about their lives, their era, and the society around them.
• From Homer in the 8th century BC all the way until now, there is something in the works of these authors that can capture our imagination and help us expand our knowledge.

Here are some of the greatest authors and a little something about the works that they created.

Author	Information
William Shakespeare (Britain)	1. William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), English poet, dramatist, actor. 2. Some of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, such as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, are among the most famous literary works of the world.
Leo Tolstoy (Russia)	1. Leo (Lev Nikolayevich) Tolstoy was born at YasnayaPolyana, on August 28, 1828, in Russia’s Tula Province. 2. His best novels are War and Peace, Anna Karenina.
Charles Dickens (Britain)	1. Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on the 7th February of 1812. 2. He was an English writer and social critic. 3. His works includes The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.
J.K. Rowling (Britain)	1. Ms. J. K. Rowling was born on July 31st, 1965 in Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire, England. 2. Her given name at birth was Joanne Kathleen. Her best work includes Harry Potter, the Goblet of Fire.
George Orwell (Britain)	1. Orwell was born in on 25 June 1903 in India. 2. Orwell’s best-known books are Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russia)	1. Fyodor (1821 – 1881) was a Russian novelist, journalist, short-story writer. 2. Some of his books are: The House of the Dead (1862), Notes from The Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), and Devils (1871).
Oscar Wilde (Ireland)	1. Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde was born at Dublin, on 16 October 1854. 2. Some of his work includes play Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
Virginia Woolf	1. Adeline Virginia Woolf was born on the 25th January in 1882. 2. Her most famous works include To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando: A Biography and A Room of One’s Own.
Rabindranath Tagore	1. Even though Tagore received his education in law he took great interest in Shakespeare and his literature. 2. His most significant works include ‘Gitanjali’, ‘Galpaguchchha’.
Arundhati Roy	1. Writer, essayist and political activist, Arundhati Roy, is best known for her novel The God of Small Things. 2. Some of her other works include, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Kashmir: The Case for Freedom and Capitalism: A Ghost Story.
Khushwant Singh	1. He was a journalist, editor and novelist born in Hadali during the time of British India. 2. Some novels like Train to Pakistan (1956), Delhi: A Novel (1990), The Company of Women (1999), Truth, Love and a Little Malice (2002), The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous (2013).

Interesting Facts:

• James Joyce never set foot in Ireland after the year he turned 30.
• Toni Morrison didn’t start writing until her mid-thirties.
• Kafka never finished a novel.
• George Orwell borrowed the plot for ‘1984’ from a novel called ‘We.’
• It took Zadie Smith almost two years to write the first 20 pages of ‘On Beauty.’
• Fitzgerald received $55,000 in today’s dollars for a single short story.
• Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus when she was 18 years old.
• Victor Hugo ‘s Les Misérables wasn’t only popular with 19th century Parisians. This massive novel was one of the most widely read books amongst American soldiers in the Civil War.
• Irish author James Joyce loved Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s plays so much that he learned basic Norwegian just to send Ibsen a fan letter.
• Mark Twain was the next-door neighbor of Harriet Beecher Stowe in Hartford, Connecticut.
• George Eliot was actually a woman. Mary Ann Evans wrote under this pen name because women authors were not as highly regarded as men.
• Before he made it as a writer, Salman Rushdie wrote copy for Ogilvy & Mather.
• Cormac McCarthy wrote with the same typewriter for more than 50 years. When it broke, he auctioned it off to raise proceeds for the Sante Fe institute. It sold for over $250,000 in 2009.