The Write People in 1889

The Write People in 1889 January 13, 2025

1889 is the crossroads where the descendants, living persons and ancestors of previous, current and future influencers meet on the chronological timeline of earth’s history.

Please Note

Wikipedia in which the Catholic Bard quotes directly for all the bio descriptions read in these articles.

This article is part of a series of  Notable People Alive In 1889 

Scrooge. Alice. Holmes. The Wicked Witch. Dracula.  Father Brown. Peter Rabbit and a whole lot of other familiar characters were created by individuals who either alive in 1889 or had relatives alive in 1889.  Most of these books are now in the public domain.  This is why Wicked exists. This is why several low budget horror movies exist like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and Popeye the Slayer Man because their copyright has expired and anybody can use them in anyway they want.  As of 1925 all literature published before 1930 is now up for grabs to use in your own creations. Here are just some of those authors who existed at the same time as other famous authors 11 years before the start of the 20th century giving us lots of stories to read and use. Some of them like Ben Hur bringing Christian ideas we can enjoy and share.

And now….

Born in 18th Century

Jane Austen’s Nephews

Descendants of Some Famous People Not Alive in 1889

George Austen (1731-1805)  was the father of
Jane Austen –   (December 16, 1775 –July 18, 1817)
And her brother Francis William Austen (1774-1865)   who was the father of
Jane’s nephew George Austen (bef.1812-1903)  who was the father of
Jane’s great nephew Ernest Leigh Austen (1859-1939)

Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen’s plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage for the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works are implicit critiques of the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism.  Her use of social commentary, realism, and irony have earned her acclaim amongst critics and scholars.

The anonymously published Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816) were modest successes, but they brought her little fame in her lifetime. She wrote two other novels—Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1817—and began another, eventually titled Sanditon, but it was left unfinished upon her death. She also left behind three volumes of juvenile writings in manuscript, the short epistolary novel Lady Susan, and the unfinished novel The Watsons.

Since her death Austen’s novels have rarely been out of print. A significant transition in her reputation occurred in 1833, when they were republished in Richard Bentley‘s Standard Novels series (illustrated by Ferdinand Pickering and sold as a set). They gradually gained wide acclaim and popular readership. In 1869, fifty-two years after her death, her nephew’s publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced a compelling version of her writing career and her supposedly uneventful life to an eager audience. Her work has inspired a large number of critical essays and has been included in many literary anthologies. Her novels have also inspired many films, including 1940’s Pride and Prejudice, 1995’s Sense and Sensibility, and 2016’s Love & Friendship.

In 1977

A little bit of ivory : a life of Jane Austen  is published

by Elfrida Vipont
(July 3, 1902 – March 14, 1992)

She was an English writer of children’s literature. She was born in Manchester into a family of Quakers. As a children’s writer, she initially published under a man’s name, Charles Vipont, which was a common marketing device by publishers at the time. She later wrote as Elfrida Vipont, and after her marriage sometimes as E. V. Foulds. She was also a schoolteacher and a prominent Quaker.

In 2022

 Jane & Me: My Austen Heritage by Caroline Knight (born ab. 1970)

is published.

Caroline Jane Knight shares more than Jane Austen’s name and DNA. As a direct descendant of Jane’s brother, Edward Knight, Caroline is the last of the Austen Knight family to grow up at Chawton House on the estate where Jane Austen lived and enjoyed the most productive period of her writing career. Caroline explored the same places around Chawton House and its grounds as Jane did, dined at the same table in the same dining room, read in the same library and shared the same dream of independence. Caroline’s early life was filled with the delights of living in a sixteenth-century English manor, the good cheer of family gatherings and centuries-old Christmas traditions in the Great Hall of Chawton House, the beauty of a country life, and the joys of helping her Granny bake cakes and serve Jane Austen devotees in the Chawton House tea room. But when she was seventeen, Caroline and her family were forced to leave the home her family had lived in for centuries. Heartbroken, but determined to leave all things Austen behind her, Caroline eventually carved out a highly successful career in business. This is the story of Caroline’s tumultuous journey to success, her ultimate crisis, her rediscovery and embrace of her Austen heritage, and the creation of the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation.- Amazon Description

Born in 1800’s

Catharine Parr Traill
(January 9, 1802 –August 29, 1899)

Catharine wrote The Canadian Crusoes (1852) Considered the first Canadian novel for children.

John Greenleaf Whittier
(December 17, 1807 – September 7, 1892)

He was an American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Frequently listed as one of the fireside poets, he was influenced by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. Whittier is remembered particularly for his anti-slavery writings, as well as his 1866 book Snow-Bound.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(August 6, 1809 – October 6, 1892)

He was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria‘s reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, “Timbuktu”. He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, in 1830. “Claribel” and “Mariana“, which remain some of Tennyson’s most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although described by some critics as overly sentimental, his poems ultimately proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tennyson’s early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 
(August 29, 1809 – October 7, 1894)

He was an American physician, poet, and polymath based in Boston. Grouped among the fireside poets, he was acclaimed by his peers as one of the best writers of the day. His most famous prose works are the “Breakfast-Table” series, which began with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858). He was also an important medical reformer. In addition to his work as an author and poet, Holmes also served as a physician, professor, lecturer, inventor, and, although he never practiced it, he received formal training in law.

Born in 1810’s

James Fenimore Cooper’s Wife

James Fenimore Cooper
(September 15, 1789 – September 14, 1851)

He was an American writer of the first half of the 19th century, whose historical romances depicting colonial and indigenous characters from the 17th to the 19th centuries brought him fame and fortune. He lived much of his boyhood and his last fifteen years in Cooperstown, New York, which was founded by his father William Cooper on property that he owned. Cooper became a member of the Episcopal Church shortly before his death and contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society.

His best-known works are five historical novels of the frontier period, written between 1823 and 1841, known as the Leatherstocking Tales, which introduced the iconic American frontier scout, Natty Bumppo. Cooper’s works on the U.S. Navy have been well received among naval historians, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his more famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

He was the husband of

Susan Fenimore Cooper 
(April 17, 1813 – December 31, 1894)

She was an American writer and amateur naturalist. She founded an orphanage in Cooperstown, New York and made it a successful charity. The daughter of writer James Fenimore Cooper, she served as his secretary and amanuensis late in his life.

Charlotte Brontë’s Husband

(April 21, 1816 –   March 31, 1855)

She was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, which she published under the male pseudonym Currer BellJane Eyre went on to become a success in publication, and is widely held in high regard in the gothic fiction genre of literature.

Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (c. 1834). He painted himself among his sisters, but later removed his image so as not to clutter the picture.
National Portrait Gallery, London

She was the wife of

Arthur Bell Nicholls
(January 6, 1819 –  December 2, 1906)

He was the husband of the English novelist Charlotte Brontë. Between 1845 and 1861 Nicholls was one of Patrick Brontë‘s curates and was married to his eldest surviving child, Charlotte, for the last nine months of her life. He cared for Patrick Brontë after Charlotte Brontë’s death and spent the rest of his life in the shadow of her reputation. He returned to his native Ireland, remarried and left the ministry.

Herman Melville 
August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891)

He was an American novelistshort story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival.  Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.

Some notable adaptations of the book include

1976 theatrical re-release poster

Born in 1820’s

Dostoevsky’s Daughter

Fyodor Dostoevsky 
(November 11, 1821 –  February 9, 1881),

He was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist. Numerous literary critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature, as many of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces. Dostoevsky’s literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. His most acclaimed novels include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), The Adolescent (1875), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His 1864 novella Notes from Underground is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature.

Portrait by Vasily Perov, c. 1872

He is the father of…

Lyubov Dostoevskaya
(September 14, 1869 – November 10, 1926)

She was a Russian writer and memoirist. Lyubov Dostoevskaya is best known for the book Dostoyevsky as Portrayed by His Daughter also known as Dostoyevsky According to His Daughter), originally published in Munich in 1920. Her memoirs, written in French and published in German, were later translated into other European languages. In 1920 the book was released in Dutch (in Arnhem), the following year there were translations into Swedish and English, and in 1922 it was published in the United States and Italy. A Russian version, highly abridged, was published in 1922 by Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo (Saint Petersburg) under the title “Достоевский в изображении его дочери Л. Достоевской”.

The work contains many factual inaccuracies, partly because Lyubov was only 11 at the time of her father’s death, and partly because she based the memoirs on her mother’s stories. Many researchers tend to see this memoir as subjective and unreliable, citing as an example her bias in the description of the relationship between Dostoevsky and his first wife, Mariya Isayeva. Both Lyubov and her mother Anna expressed hatred towards Isayeva.

Lyubov Dostoevskaya as a child in the 1870s

Black Beauty Author’s Brother

Anna Sewell
(March 30, 1820 –  April 25, 1878)

She was an English novelist who wrote the 1877 novel Black Beauty, her only published work. It is considered one of the top ten best-selling novels for children, although the author intended it for adults. Sewell died only five months after the publication of Black Beauty, but long enough to see her only novel become a success.

Sewell was born on March 30, 1820, in Great YarmouthNorfolk, into a devout Quaker family. Her father was Isaac Phillip Sewell (1793–1879), and her mother, Mary Wright Sewell (1798–1884), was a successful author of children’s books. She had one sibling, a younger brother named Philip. The children were largely educated at home by their mother due to a lack of money for schooling.

Her brother was

Philip Edward Sewell
(1822-1906)

Thomas Hughes 
(October 20, 1822 –  March 22, 1896)

He was an English lawyer, judge, politician and author. He is most famous for his novel Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), a semi-autobiographical work set at Rugby School, which Hughes had attended. It had a lesser-known sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861).

Donald Grant Mitchell
(April 12, 1822 – December 15, 1908)

He was an American essayist and novelist who usually wrote under the pen name Ik Marvel. He retold part one of Gulliver’s Travels in the form of a short story for children, published in St. Nicholas magazine in 1874.

Alexandre Dumas’s Son

Alexandre Dumas fils 
(July 27,  1824 –  November 27, 1895)

Hewas a French author and playwright, best known for the romantic novel La Dame aux Camélias (The Lady of the Camellias), published in 1848, which was adapted into Giuseppe Verdi’s 1853 opera La traviata (The Fallen Woman), as well as numerous stage and film productions, usually titled Camille in English-language versions. Dumas fils (French for “son”)

Digital Capture

He was the son of

Alexandre Dumas père
(July 24, 1802 –December 5, 1870)

He was also a well-known playwright and author of classic works such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas fils was admitted to the Académie française (French Academy) in 1874 and awarded the Légion d’honneur (Legion of Honour) in 1894.

Eliza Allen Starr 
(August 29, 1824 – September 8, 1901)

She was an American artist, art critic, teacher, and lecturer. She was known throughout the United States and Europe for her books about Catholic art.

 George MacDonald
(December 10, 1824 – September 18, 1905)

He was a Scottish author, poet and Christian Congregational minister. He became a pioneering figure in the field of modern fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow-writer Lewis Carroll. In addition to his fairy tales, MacDonald wrote several works of Christian theology, including several collections of sermons.

MacDonald’s use of fantasy as a literary medium for exploring the human condition greatly influenced a generation of notable authors, including C. S. Lewis, who featured him as a character in his The Great Divorce.

MacDonald’s use of fantasy as a literary medium for exploring the human condition greatly influenced a generation of notable authors, including C. S. Lewis, who featured him as a character in his The Great Divorce.

The Complete Fairy Tales of George Macdonald (1977) is one book published that encompassed all his fairy tales.

He was the father of

Greville MacDonald 
(1856 in Bolton – 1944)

He was the son of influential fantasy writer George MacDonald and his wife Louisa (née Powell). He has provided some interesting insights into his father’s life and circle of friends. Greville was a notable ear, nose and throat doctor. In later life Greville became involved in the Peasant Art movement in Haslemere.

Greville is famous for having read Alice in Wonderland when “Uncle Dodgson” – Reverend Charles Dodgson, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll – was wondering whether to publish it. Louisa Powell MacDonald read the book to her children to gauge its worth if published, and Greville remembers his “braggart avowal that I wished there were 60,000 volumes of it”. Carroll was uncertain of its potential for publication until he tried the manuscript with the MacDonald children and learned of the enthusiastic reception.

Alex Munro  (October 26, 1825 – January 1, 1871) used Greville as a model for his 1865 sculpture in Hyde Park of a boy with a dolphin.

George was also the father of

Ronald MacDonald (1860–1933)
+ Actress Constance Robertson

= Philip MacDonald
(George MacDonald’s grandson)
(November 5, 1900 –   December 10, 1980)

He was a British-born writer of fiction and screenplays, best known for thrillers. He also wrote screenplays.

Harriet E. Wilson 
(March 15, 1825 – June 28, 1900)

She  was an African-American novelist. She was the first African American to publish a novel in North America.

Her novel Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black was published anonymously in 1859 in BostonMassachusetts, and was not widely known. The novel was discovered in 1982 by the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who documented it as the first African American novel published in the United States.

R. M. Ballantyne 
(April 24, 1825 –  February 8, 1894)

He was a Scottish author of juvenile fiction, who wrote more than a hundred books. He was also an accomplished artist: he exhibited some of his water-colours at the Royal Scottish Academy.

In 1847 Ballantyne returned to Scotland to discover that his father had died. He published his first book the following year, Hudson’s Bay: or, Life in the Wilds of North America, and for some time was employed by the publishers Messrs Constable. In 1856, he gave up business to focus on his literary career, and began the series of adventure stories for the young with which his name is popularly associated.[1]

The Young Fur-Traders (1856), The Coral Island (1857), The World of Ice (1859), Ungava: a Tale of Eskimo Land (1857), The Dog Crusoe (1860), The Lighthouse (1865), Fighting the Whales (1866), Deep Down (1868), The Pirate City (1874), Erling the Bold (1869), The Settler and the Savage (1877), and more than 100 other books followed in regular succession, his rule being to write as far as possible from personal knowledge of the scenes he described. The Gorilla Hunters. A tale of the wilds of Africa (1861) shares three characters with The Coral Island: Jack Martin, Ralph Rover and Peterkin Gay. Here Ballantyne relied factually on Paul du Chaillu‘s Exploration in Equatorial Guinea, which had appeared early in the same year.

The Coral Island is the most popular of the Ballantyne novels still read and remembered today, but because of one mistake he made in that book, in which he gave an incorrect thickness of coconut shells, he subsequently attempted to gain first-hand knowledge of his subject matter. For instance, he spent some time living with the lighthouse keepers at the Bell Rock before writing The Lighthouse, and while researching for Deep Down he spent time with the tin miners of Cornwall.

Carlo Lorenzini
(November 24, 1826 –  October 26, 1890)

Better known by the pen name Carlo Collodi  he was an Italian author, humourist, and journalist, widely known for his fairy tale novel The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Lew Wallace,
(April 10, 1827 – February 15, 1905)

He was an American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil Wargovernor of New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, artist, and author from Indiana. Among his novels and biographies, Wallace is best known for his historical adventure story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), a bestselling novel that has been called “the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century.”

Johanna Spyri
(June 12, 1827 –July 7, 1901)

She was a Swiss author of novels, notably children’s stories. She wrote the popular book Heidi. Born in Hirzel, a rural area in the canton of Zürich, as a child she spent several summers near Chur in Graubünden, the setting she later would use in her novels.

Jules Verne
(February 8, 1828 –  March 24, 1905)

He was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires,[3] a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well-researched according to the scientific knowledge then available, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time.

Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer
(September 9, 1828 – November 7, 1910)

He was a Russian writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time. He received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909.

Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy’s notable works include the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878),  often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction,[2] and two of the greatest books of all time. He first achieved literary acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, ChildhoodBoyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based upon his experiences in the Crimean War. His fiction includes dozens of short stories such as “After the Ball” (1911), and several novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Family Happiness (1859) and Hadji Murad (1912). He also wrote plays and essays concerning philosophical, moral and religious themes.

Henrik Johan Ibsen
(March 20, 1828 –  May 23, 1906)

He was a Norwegian playwright and theatre director. As one of the founders of modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as “the father of realism” and the most influential playwright of the 19th century, as well of one of the most influential playwrights in Western literature more generally. His major works include BrandPeer GyntEmperor and GalileanA Doll’s HouseGhostsAn Enemy of the PeopleThe Wild DuckRosmersholmHedda GablerThe Master Builder, and When We Dead Awaken. Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll’s House was the world’s most performed play in 2006.

Adeleide Johannessen in character as Nora, from A Doll’s House from a cigarette card of c. 1880 – c. 1882

Charles Dudley Warner 
(September 12, 1829 – October 20, 1900)

He was an American essayist, novelist, and friend of Mark Twain, with whom he co-authored the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.

Emily Dickinson’s Siblings

Emily Dickinson
(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)

She was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry.

Her brother was

William Austin Dickinson 
(April 16, 1829 – August 16, 1895)

He was an American lawyer who lived and worked in Amherst, Massachusetts. Known to family and friends as “Austin”, he was, notably, the older brother of poet Emily Dickinson.

Her sister  was

Lavinia Norcross Dickinson
(February 28, 1833 – August 31, 1899)

The Dickinson children (Lavinia on the right), c. 1840

Born in 1830’s

Victor Hugo’s Daughter

Victor Hugo
(February 26, 1802 –  May 22, 1885)

He was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms.

His most famous works are the novels The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). In France, Hugo is renowned for his poetry collections, such as Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages). Hugo was at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and drama Hernani. His works have inspired music, both during his lifetime and after his death, including the opera Rigoletto and the musicals Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris. He produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment and slavery.

He was the father of

Adèle Hugo 
(August 24, 1830 –  April 21, 1915)

She was the fifth and youngest child of French writer Victor Hugo. She is remembered for developing schizophrenia as a young woman, which led to a romantic obsession with a British military officer who rejected her. Her story has been retold in film and books, such as François Truffaut’s 1975 film The Story of Adèle H.

Mary Mapes Dodge
(January 26, 1831 – August 21, 1905)

She was an American children’s author and editor, best known for her novel Hans Brinker. She was the recognized leader in juvenile literature for almost a third of the nineteenth century.

Hans Brinker tying on his sister Gretel’s ice skates, in an illustration by Théophile Schuler from the 1876 French translation of the novel

Harriet Beecher Stowe
(American) (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896)

She was an American author and abolitionist. She came from the religious Beecher family and wrote the popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which depicts the harsh conditions experienced by enslaved African Americans. The book reached an audience of millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and in Great Britain, energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. Stowe wrote 30 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential both for her writings as well as for her public stances and debates on social issues of the day.

Lewis Carroll 
( January 27, 1832 – January 14, 1898)

He was an English author, poet, mathematician, photographer and Anglican priest. His most notable works are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems Jabberwocky (1871) and The Hunting of the Snark (1876) are classified in the genre of literary nonsense.

Wilhelm Busch
(April 14, 1832 –   January 9, 1908)

He was a German humorist, poet, illustrator, and painter. He published wildly innovative illustrated tales that remain influential to this day.

Max and Moritz: A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks is an inventive, blackly humorous tale, told entirely in rhymed couplets, about two boys who play pranks. It was written and illustrated by Wilhelm Busch and published in 1865. It is among the early works of Busch, yet it already featured many substantial, effectually aesthetic and formal regularities, procedures and basic patterns of Busch’s later works.

A scene from Max and Moritz

Horatio Alger
(January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899)

He was an American author who wrote young adult novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to middle-class security and comfort through good works. His writings were characterized by the “rags-to-riches” narrative, which had a formative effect on the United States from 1868 through to his death in 1899.

Louisa May Alcott’s Sister

 Louisa May Alcott
(November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888)

She was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for writing the, semi-autobiographical novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), and Jo’s Boys (1886). Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, including Margaret FullerRalph Waldo EmersonNathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Encouraged by her family, Louisa began writing from an early age.

Louisa’s family experienced financial hardship, and while Louisa took on various jobs to help support the family from an early age, she also sought to earn money by writing. In the 1860s she began to achieve critical success for her writing with the publication of Hospital Sketches, a book based on her service as a nurse in the American Civil War. Early in her career, she sometimes used pen names such as A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote lurid short stories and sensation novels for adults. Little Women was one of her first successful novels and has been adapted for film and television. It is loosely based on Louisa’s childhood experiences with her three sisters, Abigail May Alcott NierikerElizabeth Sewall Alcott, and

Anna Alcott Pratt.
(March 16, 1831 – July 17, 1893)

She was the basis for the character Margaret “Meg” of Little Women.

 

William Chester Minor
(June 22, 1834 –March 26, 1920)

He was an American army surgeon, psychiatric hospital patient, and lexicographical researcher. After serving in the Union Army during the American Civil War, Minor moved to England. Affected by delusions, he shot a man who he believed had broken into his room, and was consequently committed from 1872 to 1910 to a secure British psychiatric hospital.

While incarcerated, Minor became an important contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary. He was one of the project’s most effective volunteers, reading through his large personal library of antiquarian books and compiling quotations that illustrated how particular words were used.

Sarah Chauncey Woolsey 
(January 29, 1835 – April 9, 1905)

She was an American children’s author who wrote under the pen name Susan Coolidge. She is best known for her classic children’s novel What Katy Did (1872).

Augusta Wilson 
May 8, 1835 – May 9, 1909)

She  was an American author of Southern literature and a supporter of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Her books were banned by the American Library Association in 1881. She was the first woman to earn US$100,000 through her writing. 

Wilson was a native of Columbus, Georgia. Her first book, Inez, a Tale of the Alamo, was written when she was still young and published by Harpers. Her second book, Beulah, was issued in 1859 and became at once popular, still selling well when the American Civil War began

Mark Twain aka: Samuel Langhorne Clemens
(November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),

He was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He was praised as the “greatest humorist the United States has produced,” with William Faulkner calling him “the father of American literature.” Twain’s novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the “Great American Novel.” He also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.

John T. Lewis
(1835-1906)

Lewis was one of the real-life people upon whom he based the character of Jim, and it is even possible that his acquaintance with Lewis caused Twain to continue working on the novel after having earlier set it aside.

Twain’s friendship with Lewis was hardly atypical; of all the white authors in this period, he was the one most fully immersed in and appreciative of African American culture and the one most at home in the company of African Americans. The man who inspired Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” | Knitting and Crochet Forum

Bret Harte 
(August 25, 1836 – May 5, 1902)

He was an American short story writer and poet best remembered for short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he also wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches.

Harte moved from California to the eastern U.S. and later to Europe. He incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been those most often reprinted, adapted, and admired.

Bret Harte

James Murray (lexicographer)
(February 7, 1837 –   July 26, 1915)

He was a British lexicographer and philologist. He was the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from 1879 until his death.

Joseph Bell
(December 2, 1837 –October 4, 1911)

He was a Scottish surgeon and lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh in the 19th century. He is best known as an inspiration for the literary character, Sherlock Holmes.

Edwin Abbott Abbott
(December 20, 1838 –  October 12, 1926)

He  was an English schoolmastertheologian, and Anglican priest, best known as the author of the novella Flatland (1884).

Francis Pharcellus Church
(February 22, 1839 – April 11, 1906)

He was an American publisher and editor. In 1897, Church wrote the editorial “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus“. Produced in response to eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon‘s letter asking whether Santa Claus was real, the widely republished editorial has become one of the most famous ever written.

Ouida
(January 1, 1839 –  January 25, 1908),

Going by the name Marie Louise de la Ramée and known by the pseudonym Ouida wrote more than 40 novels, as well as short stories, children’s books and essays. Moderately successful, she lived a life of luxury, entertaining many of the literary figures of the day.

Under Two Flags (1867), one of her most famous novels, described the British in Algeria. It expressed sympathy for the French colonists – with whom Ouida deeply identified – and, to some extent, the Arabs. The novel was adapted for the stage, and was filmed six times. Her 1872 novel A Dog of Flanders is considered a children’s classic in much of Asia. The American author Jack London cited her novel Signa as one of the reasons for his literary success. Her lavish lifestyle eventually led her to penury, and her works were put up for auction to pay her debts. She died in Italy from pneumonia. Soon after her death, her friends organized a public subscription in Bury St Edmunds, her birthplace, where they had a fountain for horses and dogs installed in her name.

Children selling milk from a dogcart, Belgium, c. 1890

Mrs. Molesworth(Mary Louisa Molesworth)
(May 29, 1839 – January 20, 1921)

 She was an English writer of children’s stories who wrote for children under the name of Mrs Molesworth. Her first novels, for adult readers, Lover and Husband (1869) to Cicely (1874), appeared under the pseudonym of Ennis Graham. Her name occasionally appears in print as M. L. S. Molesworth.

Some of her books included

  • The Cuckoo Clock (1877)
  • The Tapestry Room (1879) as Ennis Graham
  • Christmas Tree Land (1884)

Born in 1840’s

Thomas Nast
(September 26, 1840– December 7, 1902)

He was a German-born American caricaturist and editorial cartoonist often considered to be the “Father of the American Cartoon”.

He created a modern version of Santa Claus (based on the traditional German figures of Saint Nicholas and Weihnachtsmann) and the political symbol of the elephant for the Republican Party (GOP). Contrary to popular belief, Nast did not create Uncle Sam (the male personification of the United States Federal Government), Columbia (the female personification of American values), or the Democratic donkey, although he did popularize those symbols through his artwork. Nast was associated with the magazine Harper’s Weekly from 1859 to 1860 and from 1862 until 1886. Nast’s influence was so widespread that Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Thomas Nast was our best teacher.”

Nast’s Santa Claus on the cover of the January 3, 1863, issue of Harper’s Weekly

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce
(June 24, 1842 – c. 1914)

He was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran. His book The Devil’s Dictionary was named one of “The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature” by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.  His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature”,  and his book Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (also published as In the Midst of Life) was named by the Grolier Club one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900.

Henry James (American)
(April 15, 1843 – February 28,1916)

He was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.

He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The AmbassadorsThe Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character’s psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.

His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as “The Jolly Corner“.

Charles Warren Stoddard
(August 7, 1843 – April 23, 1909)

He was an American author and editor best known for his travel books about Polynesian life.  Stoddard’s The Lepers of Molokai, according to Robert Louis Stevenson, did much to establish Father Damien’s position in public esteem. In 1867, soon after his first visit to the South Sea Islands, Stoddard was received into the Catholic Church. He told the story of his conversion in a small book, A Troubled Heart and How it was Comforted, of which he said: “Here you have my inner life all laid bare.”

Guinness Book of
World Records’ Creator’s Father

 

Hugh Edward Campbell Beaver (1844-1892) is the father of

Hugh Beaver
(May 4, 1890 – January 16, 1967)

He was an English-South African civil engineer, industrialist and bureaucrat, who founded the Guinness World Records (then known as Guinness Book of Records).  He was Director-General of the Ministry of Works and managing director at Guinness Brewery.

Andrew Lang  FBA
(March 31,  1844 –  July 20, 1912)

He  was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales including those of Hans Christian Anderson and The Brother’s Grimm.. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.

was an American author and editor best known for his travel books about Polynesian life.

Harriett Lothrop
(June 22, 1844 – August 2, 1924)

Harriett Lothrop was an American author also known by her pseudonym Margaret Sidney . In addition to writing popular children’s stories, she ran her husband Daniel Lothrop‘s publishing company after his death. After they bought The Wayside country house, they worked hard to make it a center of literary life. She published nothing until 1878 when, at the age of 34, she began sending short stories to Wide Awake, a children’s magazine in Boston. Two of her stories, “Polly Pepper’s Chicken Pie” and “Phronsie Pepper’s New Shoes”, proved to be very popular with readers. Ella Farman, the editor of the magazine, requested that Stone write more. The success of Harriett’s short stories prompted her to write Five Little Peppers and its 11 sequels. The Five Little Peppers is a book series created by American author Margaret Sidney which was published 1881 to 1916. It covers the lives of the five children in their native state and develops with their rescue by a wealthy gentleman who takes an interest in the family.

John Ames Mitchell
(January 17, 1845 – June 29, 1918)

He was an American publisher, architect, artist and novelist. He was co-founder, editor, and publisher of the original Life magazine, in which he was a contributing artist, and the author of several novels.

A cover of Life magazine in 1911

Julian Hawthorne – Wikipedia
(June 22, 1846 – July 14, 1934)

He was an American writer and journalist, the son of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody. He wrote numerous poems, novels, short stories, mysteries and detective fiction, essays, travel books, biographies, and histories.

Henryk Sienkiewicz 
(May 5 1846 – November 15,1916)

He was a Polish epic writer. He is remembered for his historical novels, such as the Trilogy series and especially for his internationally known best-seller Quo Vadis (1896).

  Bram Stoker
(November 8, 1847 – April 20, 1912)

He was an Irish author who is best known for writing the 1897 Gothic horror novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Sir Henry Irving (February 6, 1838 –   October 13, 1905), and business manager of the West End‘s Lyceum Theatre, which Irving owned.

Joel Chandler Harris  
(December 9, 1848 – July 3, 1908)

He was an American journalist and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years, Harris spent most of his adult life in Atlanta working as an associate editor at The Atlanta Constitution.

Harris led two professional lives: as the editor and journalist known as Joe Harris, he supported a vision of the New South with the editor Henry W. Grady (1880–1889), which stressed regional and racial reconciliation after the Reconstruction era; as Joel Chandler Harris, fiction writer and folklorist, he wrote many ‘Brer Rabbit‘ stories from the African-American oral tradition.

A.B. Frost illustration of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby from the 1895 version of Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings

Charles Ransom Miller
(January 17, 1849 – July 18, 1922)

He was an editor-in-chief of The New York Times. He was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, to Elijah and Chastina Hoyt Miller. Miller attended Dartmouth College and graduated in 1872. After working at the Springfield Republican, the New York Times hired him on July 7, 1875. Miller became the editor-in-chief of The New York Times when he was 34, and would remain in that position for the rest of his life (about forty years).

Frances Hodgson Burnett
(November 24, 1849 – 29 October 1924)

He was a British-American novelist and playwright. She is best known for the three children’s novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden (1911).

Born in 1850’s

Robert Louis Stevenson – Wikipedia
(November 13, 1850 – December 3, 1894)

He was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as Treasure IslandStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeKidnapped and A Child’s Garden of Verses.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Daughter

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882)

He was an American poet and educator. His original works include the poems “Paul Revere’s Ride“, “The Song of Hiawatha“, and “Evangeline“. He was the first American to completely translate Dante Alighieri‘s Divine Comedy and was one of the fireside poets from New England.

He is the father off

Alice Mary Longfellow 
(September 22, 1850 – December 7, 1928)

He was a philanthropistpreservationist, and the eldest surviving daughter of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She is best known as “grave Alice” from her father’s poem “The Children’s Hour

Print of Thomas Buchanan Read’s portrait of Longfellow’s three daughters

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Saintly Daughter

Nathaniel Hawthorne
(July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864)

He was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion. Hawthorne was predominantly a short story writer in his early career. Upon publishing Twice-Told Tales, however, he noted, “I do not think much of them,” and he expected little response from the public.[103] His four major romances were written between 1850 and 1860: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun (1860). Another novel-length romance, Fanshawe, was published anonymously in 1828.

The Scarlet Letter was one of the first mass-produced books in the United States. It was popular when first published  and is considered a classic work of American literature. Commonly listed among the Great American Novels, it has inspired numerous film, television, and stage adaptations. Critics have described The Scarlet Letter as a masterwork, and novelist D. H. Lawrence ( September 11, 1885 –  March 2, 1930) called it a “perfect work of the American imagination”

His wife was

Sophia Peabody 
September 21, 1809 – February 26, 1871)

She was an American painter and illustrator and published her journals and various articles.

Her and Nathaniel were the parents of

Venerable Rose Hawthorne Lathrop 
(May 20, 1851 – July 9, 1926),

She was an American Dominican religious sister, writer, social worker, and foundress of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.

Melvil Dewey
(December 10, 1851 – December 26, 1931)

He was an influential American librarian and educator, inventor of the Dewey Decimal system of library classification, a founder of the Lake Placid Club, and a chief librarian at Columbia University. He was also a founding member of the American Library Association. Although Dewey’s contributions to the modern library are widely recognized, his legacy is marred by his sexual harassment of female colleagues, as well as his racism and antisemitism.

Spine labels of The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, showing Dewey Decimal Classification call numbers (030=Encyclopedias)

Charles Dickens Son

Charles Dickens
(February 7, 1812 –  June 9, 1870)

He was an English novelistjournalistshort story writer and social critic. He created some of literature’s best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.

He was the father of

Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens
(March 13, 1852 –January 23, 1902)

He was the youngest son of English novelist Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine. He emigrated to Australia at the age of 16, and eventually entered politics, serving as a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly from 1889 to 1894. He died at the age of 49.

Alice Pleasance Liddell,
(May 4, 1852 – November 16, 1934)

She was an English woman who, in her childhood, was an acquaintance and photography subject of Lewis Carroll. One of the stories he told her during a boating trip became the classic 1865 children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She shared her name with “Alice“, the story’s protagonist, but scholars disagree about the extent to which the character was based upon her.

Henry van Dyke Jr. 
(November 10, 1852 – April 10, 1933)

 He was an American author, educator, diplomat, and Presbyterian clergyman. He officiated at the funeral of Mark Twain at the Brick Presbyterian Church on April 23, 1910.

Among his popular writings are the two Christmas stories, “The Other Wise Man” (1896) and “The First Christmas Tree” (1897). Various religious themes of his work are also expressed in his poetry, hymns and the essays collected in Little Rivers (1895) and Fisherman’s Luck (1899). He wrote the lyrics to the popular hymn “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee” (1907), sung to the tune of Beethoven‘s “Ode to Joy“. He compiled several short stories in The Blue Flower (1902), named after the key symbol of Romanticism introduced first by Novalis. He also contributed a chapter to the collaborative novelThe Whole Family (1908).

One of van Dyke’s best-known poems is titled “Time Is” (Music and Other Poems, 1904), also known as “For Katrina’s Sundial” because it was composed to be an inscription on a sundial in the garden of an estate owned by his friends Spencer and Katrina Trask. The second section of the poem, which was read at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, reads as follows:

Time is
Too slow for those who Wait,
Too swift for those who Fear,
Too long for those who Grieve,
Too short for those who Rejoice,
But for those who Love,
Time is not.

Howard Pyle
(March 5, 1853 – November 9, 1911)

He was an American illustratorpainter, and author, primarily of books for young people. He was a native of WilmingtonDelaware, and he spent the last year of his life in Florence, Italy.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Parents

Winfield Scott Lovecraft (1853 – 1898)
+ Sarah Susan Lovecraft (Phillips) (1857 – 1921)

= H. P. Lovecraft
(August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937)

He was an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Oscar Wilde
(October 16, 1854 –November 30, 1900)

He was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his children’s story The Selfish Giant and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts. Before his death Wilde was conditionally baptised into the Catholic Church by Fr Cuthbert Dunne, a Passionist priest from Dublin.

L. Frank Baum,
(May 15, 1856 – May 6, 1919)

He was an American author best known for his children’s fantasy books, particularly The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, part of a series. In addition to the 14 Oz books, Baum penned 41 other novels (not including four lost, unpublished novels), 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and at least 42 scripts. He made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and screen; the 1939 adaptation of the first Oz book became a landmark of 20th-century cinema.

Sir Henry Rider Haggard
 (June 22, 1856 – 14 May 14, 1925)

He was an English writer of adventure fiction romances set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa, and a pioneer of the lost world literary genre. He was also involved in land reform throughout the British Empire. His stories, situated at the lighter end of Victorian literature and including the eighteen Allan Quatermain stories beginning with King Solomon’s Mines, continue to be popular and influential.

George Bernard Shaw
(July 26, 1856 – November 2, 1950)

He  was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Kate Douglas Wiggin 
(September 28, 1856 – August 24, 1923)

She was an American educator, author and composer. She wrote children’s stories, most notably the classic children’s novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and composed collections of children’s songs. She started the first free kindergarten in San Francisco in 1878 (the Silver Street Free Kindergarten). With her sister during the 1880s, she also established a training school for kindergarten teachers. Kate Wiggin devoted her adult life to the welfare of children in an era when children were commonly thought of as cheap labor.

Poster for the stage adaptation of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm starring Edith Taliaferro produced by Klaw & Erlanger, 1910

Thomas Anstey Guthrie
(August 8, 1856 – 10 March 10, 1934)

He was an English writer (writing as F. Anstey or F.T. Anstey), most noted for his comic novel Vice Versa about a boarding-school boy and his father exchanging identities. His reputation was confirmed by The Tinted Venus and many humorous parodies in Punch magazine. Some of his books were

•Vice Versa; or, A Lesson to Fathers (1882)
•The Giant’s Robe (1884)
•The Tinted Venus, A Farcical Romance (1885)
•A Fallen Idol (1886)
•Tourmalin’s Time Cheques (1891) M. R. James
•The Brass Bottle (1900)
•Only Toys! (1903)
•Salted Almonds (1906)
•In Brief Authority (1915)

Charles Monroe Sheldon
(February 26, 1857 – February 24, 1946)

He was an American Congregationalist minister and a leader of the Social Gospel movement. His 1896 novel In His Steps introduced the principle “What would Jesus do?“, which articulated an approach to Christian theology that became popular at the turn of the 20th century and enjoyed a revival almost one hundred years later. The stretch of US-24 on the north side of Topeka, Kansas, between US-75 and K-4 is named the “Charles Sheldon Trafficway” in his honor.

Joseph Conrad
(December 3, 1857 –  August 3, 1924)

He was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he became a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature.[note 2] He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world.

J. Meade Falkner 
(May 8, 1858 –  July 22, 1932)

He was an English novelist and poet, best known for his 1898 novel Moonfleet. An extremely successful businessman, he became chairman of the arms manufacturer Armstrong Whitworth during World War I.

E. Nesbit 
(August 15, 1858 –  May 4, 1924)

She was an English writer and poet, who published her books for children as E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on more than 60 such books. She was also a political activist and co-founder of the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later affiliated to the Labour Party.

Among Nesbit’s best-known books are The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) and The Wouldbegoods (1901), which tell of the Bastables, a middle-class family fallen on relatively hard times. Nesbit has been cited as the creator of modern children’s fantasy. Her innovations placed realistic contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects (which would now be classed as contemporary fantasy) and adventures and sometimes travel to fantastic worlds.[26] This influenced directly or indirectly many later writers, including P. L. Travers (of Mary Poppins), Edward EagerDiana Wynne Jones and J. K. RowlingC. S. Lewis too paid heed to her in the Narnia series[27] and mentions the Bastable children in The Magician’s NephewMichael Moorcock later wrote a series of steampunk novels around an adult Oswald Bastable of The Treasure Seekers. In 2012, Jacqueline Wilson wrote a sequel to the Psammead trilogy: Four Children and It.

 (March 2  1859 – May 13, 1916)
He  was a Yiddish author and playwright who lived in the Russian Empire and in the United States. The 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof, based on Aleichem’s stories about Tevye the Dairyman, was the first commercially successful English-language stage production about Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
The Hebrew phrase שלום עליכם (shalom aleichem) literally means “[May] peace [be] upon you!” and is a greeting in traditional Hebrew and Yiddish.

  Kenneth Grahame,
(March 8,1859 – 6 July 6,1932)

He was a British writer best remembered for the classic of children’s literature The Wind in the Willows (1908).

Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle,
(May 22, 1859 – 7 July 7,1930)

He was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.

Doyle was a prolific writer. In addition to the Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle’s early short stories, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the brigantine Mary Celeste, found drifting at sea with no crew member aboard.

Father Francis J. Finn
(October 4, 1859 – November 2, 1928)

He was an American Jesuit priest who wrote a series of 27 popular novels for young people. The books contain fun stories, likeable characters and themes that remain current in today’s world. Each story conveys an important moral precept.
Tom Playfair; or, Making a Start (1890)

Born in 1860’s

Anton Chekhov
(January 29, 1860 –  July 15, 1904)

He was a Russian playwright and short-story writer. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov was a physician by profession. “Medicine is my lawful wife,” he once said, “and literature is my mistress.” 

Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavski‘s Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a “theatre of mood” and a “submerged life in the text.” The plays that Chekhov wrote were not complex, but easy to follow, and created a somewhat haunting atmosphere for the audience.

Chekhov at first wrote stories to earn money, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations that influenced the evolution of the modern short story.  He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.

Chekhov with Leo Tolstoy at Yalta, 1900

J. M. Barrie 
(May 9, 1860 –  June 19, 1937)

He was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan.

He was born and educated in Scotland and then moved to London, where he wrote several successful novels and plays. There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys, who inspired him to write about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens (first included in Barrie’s 1902 adult novel The Little White Bird), then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, a 1904 West End “fairy play” about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland.

Although he continued to write successfully, Peter Pan overshadowed his other work, and is credited with popularising the name Wendy.  Barrie unofficially adopted the Davies boys following the deaths of their parents. Barrie was made a baronet by George V on 14 June 1913, and a member of the Order of Merit in the 1922 New Year Honours.  Before his death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, which continues to benefit from them.

Owen Wister 
(July 14, 1860 – July 21, 1938)

He was an American writer and historian, considered the “father” of western fiction. He is best remembered for writing The Virginian and a biography of Ulysses S. Grant. He also wrote a parody of The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) by Johann David Wyss (May 28, 1743 –  January 11, 1818) called The New Swiss Family Robinson (1882).

Herminie Templeton Kavanagh
(1861 – 30 October 1933)

She was an Irish writer, most known for her short stories.

Her best known work, Darby O’Gill and the Good People was first published as a series of stories under the name Herminie Templeton in McClure’s magazine in 1901–1902, before being published as a book in the United States in 1903. A second edition, published a year before her death, was under the name Herminie T. Kavanagh. The Good People in the title refers to the fairies in Irish mythology; the English translation of aoine maithe is good people.

Her second published book, Ashes of Old Wishes and Other Darby O’Gill Tales  was published in 1926. In 1959, Walt Disney released a film based on these two books, called Darby O’Gill and the Little People.

Emilio Salgari
(August 21,  1862 – April 25, 1911)

He was an Italian writer of action adventure swashbucklers and a pioneer of science fiction. In Italy, his extensive body of work was more widely read than that of Dante Alighieri. In the 21st century, he is still among the 40 most translated Italian authors. Many of his most popular novels have been adapted as comics, animated series and feature films. He is considered the father of Italian adventure fiction and Italian pop culture, and the “grandfather” of the Spaghetti Western.

 O. HenryWilliam Sydney Porter
(September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910)

Short Story Author His works include “The Gift of the Magi“, “The Duplicity of Hargraves“, and “The Ransom of Red Chief“, as well as the novel Cabbages and Kings. Porter’s stories are known for their naturalistobservations, witty narration, and surprise endings.

Edward L. Stratemeyer
(October 4, 1862 – May 10, 1930)

He was a writer of children’s fiction, and founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. He was one of the most prolific writers in the world, producing in excess of 1,300[1] books himself, selling in excess of 500 million copies.  He also created many well-known fictional book series for juveniles, including The Rover Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew series, many of which sold millions of copies and are still in publication today. On Stratemeyer’s legacy, Fortune wrote: “As oil had its Rockefeller, literature had its Stratemeyer.”

1. The Rover Boys at School, or, The Cadets of Putnam Hall (1899) 30. The Rover Boys Winning a Fortune (1926)
1. The Bobbsey Twins, or Merry Days Indoors and Out (1904) 20. The Bobbsey Twins at Cherry Corners (1927)
1. Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle Or, Fun and Adventure on the Road (1910)  30. Tom Swift Circling the Globe (1927)  Tom Swift and His Talking Pictures (1928)

Richard F. Outcault
(January 14, 1863 – September 25, 1928)

He was an American cartoonist. He was the creator of the series The Yellow Kid and Buster Brown and is considered a key pioneer of the modern comic strip.

Washington Irving’s
Great Grand-Nephew

William Irving (August 15, 1766 – November 9, 1821) (great-grandfather) was was the eldest brother of author

Washington Irving
(April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859)

was an American short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He wrote the short stories “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), both of which appear in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of Oliver GoldsmithMuhammad, and George Washington, as well as several histories of 15th-century Spain that deal with subjects such as the AlhambraChristopher Columbus, and the Moors. Irving served as American ambassador to Spain in the 1840s.

One of Irving’s most lasting contributions to American culture is in the way that Americans celebrate Christmas. In his 1812 revisions to A History of New York, he inserted a dream sequence featuring St. Nicholas soaring over treetops in a flying wagon, an invention which others dressed up as Santa Claus. In his five Christmas stories in The Sketch Book, Irving portrayed an idealized celebration of old-fashioned Christmas customs at a quaint English manor which depicted English Christmas festivities that he experienced while staying in England, which had largely been abandoned.  He used text from The Vindication of Christmas (London 1652) of old English Christmas traditions, and the book contributed to the revival and reinterpretation of the Christmas holiday in the United States.

The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (1858) by John Quidor

His Grand-Nephew was

Temple Bowdoin 
(July 14, 1863 – December 2, 1914)

He was an American businessman. While an associate of J.P. Morgan & Company, he was elected a member of the New York Stock Exchange in 1909.

Edgar Allen Poe
(Aug 8, 1863 –  Jan 15, 1940) (aged 76)

Edgar Allen Poe Ohio, USA married Flora E. Kuhnle on February 25, 1889 in Montgomery County, Ohio.

W. W. Jacobs  (William Wymark Jacobs)
(September 8, 1863 –  September 1, 1943)

He was an English author of short fiction and drama. He is best known for his story

The Lady of the Barge (1902) including “The Monkey’s Paw“.

He also wrote
Odd Craft 1903) including The Money Box, basis of Laurel and Hardy film Our Relations (1935)
Sailors’ Knots (1909) including “The Toll House”

Eleanor Stackhouse Atkinson
(1863 – November 4, 1942)

She was an American writerjournalist and teacher. While she wrote both fiction and non-fiction, the former mostly romances and the latter mostly educational books, she is best known for her 1912 novel Greyfriars Bobby (1912). This popular work recounted the famous story of the eponymous dog; most of the modern versions of the story seem to stem from her form of the tale.

She also wrote…

  • Boyhood of Lincoln (1908) (also published as Lincoln’s Love Story)
  • Johnny Appleseed: The Romance of the Sower (1915)

Banjo Paterson
(February 17, 1864 –  February 5, 1941)

He was an Australian bush poet, journalist and author, widely considered one of the greatest writers of Australia’s colonial period.

Born in rural New South Wales, Paterson worked as a lawyer before transitioning into literature, where he quickly gained recognition for capturing the life of the Australian bush. A representative of the Bulletin School of Australian literature, Paterson wrote many of his best known poems for the nationalist journal The Bulletin, including “Clancy of the Overflow” (1889) and “The Man from Snowy River” (1890). His 1895 ballad “Waltzing Matilda” is regarded widely as Australia’s unofficial national anthem and, according to the National Film and Sound Archive, has been recorded more than any other Australian song.

Baroness Emmuska Orczy
(September 23,1865 –November 12,1947)

She was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright. She is best known for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, the alter ego of Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy English fop who turns into a quick-thinking escape artist in order to save French aristocrats from “Madame Guillotine” during the French Revolution, establishing the “hero with a secret identity” in popular culture

Fred Terry as Sir Percy Blakeney/The Scarlet Pimpernel in the 1905 West End theatre production.

Rudyard Kipling
(December 30, 1865 – 18 January 18, 1936)

He was an English journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.

Kipling’s works of fiction include the Jungle Book duology (The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895), Kim (1901), the Just So Stories (1902) and many short stories, including “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888).[2] His poems include “Mandalay” (1890), “Gunga Din” (1890), “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” (1919), “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), and “If—” (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story.[3] His children’s books are classics; one critic noted “a versatile and luminous narrative gift”

H G. Wells,
(September 21,1866 –August 13,1946)

by George Charles Beresford, black and white glossy print, 1920

He was an English writer, prolific in many genres. He wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography. Wells’ science fiction novels are so well regarded that he has been called the “father of science fiction”.

His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907), and the dystopian When the Sleeper Wakes (1910).

  Winsor McCay
(c. 1866–71 – July 26, 1934)

 He was an American cartoonist and animator. He is best known for the comic strip Little Nemo (1905–1914; 1924–1927) and the animated film Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). For contractual reasons, he worked under the pen name Silas on the comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend.

Beatrix Potter,
( July 28, 1866 –December 22,  1943)

She was an English writer, illustratornatural scientist, and conservationist. She is best known for her children’s books featuring animals, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which was her first commercially published work in 1902. Her books, including 23 Tales, have sold more than 250 million copies.[2][3] An entrepreneur, Potter was a pioneer of character merchandising. In 1903, Peter Rabbit was the first fictional character to be made into a patented stuffed toy, making him the oldest licensed character.

Laura Ingalls Wilder  
(February 7, 1867 – February 10, 1957)

She was an American writer. The Little House on the Prairie series of children’s books, published between 1932 and 1943, were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family. 

The television series Little House on the Prairie (1974–1983) was loosely based on the books, and starred Melissa Gilbert as Laura and Michael Landon as her father, Charles Ingalls.

In 1885, married Almanzo Wilder, a local homesteader 10 years her senior. In 1886, the couple had a daughter; their only other child, a son, died shortly after his birth in 1889.In June of 1889, Laura’s sister Mary Ingalls graduates from the Iowa College for the Blind after attending classes there for seven years.

Charlie McKeahnie
(April 29, 1868 – August 3, 1895)

He was an Australian horseman born in Gudgenby, ACT to Alexander and Mary McKeahnie into a family of five sisters. He is believed by some historians to be the inspiration for the poem “The Man from Snowy River” by Banjo Paterson.

Gaston Leroux,
(May 6, 1868 – 15 April 15, 1927)

He was a French journalist and author of detective fiction.

In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera (FrenchLe Fantôme de l’Opéra, 1909), which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, notably the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney and Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s 1986 musical. His 1907 novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room is one of the most celebrated locked room mysteries.

One of the five watercolors by André Castaigne illustrating the first American edition of the Phantom of the Opera (1911).

Edmond Rostand
(April 1, 1868 – 2 December 2,1918)

She was a French poet and dramatist. He is associated with neo-romanticism and is known best for his 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand’s romantic plays contrasted with the naturalistic theatre popular during the late nineteenth century. Another of Rostand’s works, Les Romanesques (1894), was adapted to the 1960 musical comedy The Fantasticks.

Founder of Time and Life’s Father

Henry W. Luce
June 24, 1868– December 7, 1941)

He was an American missionary and educator in China. He was the father of the publisher.

Henry Luce
(April 3, 1898 – February 28, 1967) 

He was an American magazine magnate who founded TimeLifeFortune, and Sports Illustrated magazines. He has been called “the most influential private citizen in the America of his day”.

Eleanor H. Porter
(December 19, 1868 – May 21, 1920)

She was an American novelist. She was best known as the creator of the Pollyanna series of books, starting with Pollyanna (1913), which were a popular phenomenon. 

Else Lasker-Schüler
(February 11, 1869 –January 22, 1945)

She was a German poet and playwright famous for her bohemian lifestyle in Berlin and her poetry. She was one of the few women affiliated with the Expressionist movement. Lasker-Schüler, who was Jewish, fled Nazi Germany and lived out the rest of her life in Jerusalem.

Felix Salten
(September 6, 1869 – October 8, 1945)

He was an Austro-Hungarian author and literary critic in Vienna. His most famous work is Bambi, a Life in the Woods, which was adapted into an animated feature film, Bambi, by Walt Disney Productions in 1942.

Born in 1870’s

Joaquim Osório Duque-Estrada
 (April 19, 1870 – February 5, 1927)

He was a Brazilian poet, essayist, journalist, literary critic and professor. He is famous for writing in 1909 a poem that would become the lyrics of the Brazilian National Anthem in 1922.

Saki (Hector Hugh Munro),
(December 13, 1870 –  November 14, 1916),

English short story writer and dramatist  who was killed in action in 1916 during a battle of WW 1.

Edward Wyke Smith
(April 12, 1871 – May 16, 1935)

He was an English adventurer, mining engineer and writer. He is known mainly for The Marvellous Land of Snergs, aproto-Hobbits) (1927) children’s fantasy novel he wrote as E. A. Wyke-Smith, whose “snergs” provided inspiration for Tolkien‘s creation of hobbits.

Lyonel Feininger
(July 17, 1871 – January 13, 1956)

He was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist.

Feininger’s career as cartoonist began in 1894. He was working for several German, French and American magazines. In February 1906, when a quarter of Chicago’s population was of German descent, James Keeley, editor of The Chicago Tribune traveled to Germany to procure the services of the most popular humor artists. He recruited Feininger to illustrate two comic strips “The Kin-der-Kids” and “Wee Willie Winkie’s World” for the Chicago Tribune. The strips were noted for their fey humor and graphic experimentation. He also worked as a commercial caricaturist for 20 years for various newspapers and magazines in the United States, Germany, and France. Later, Art Spiegelman wrote in The New York Times Book Review, that Feininger’s comics have “achieved a breathtaking formal grace unsurpassed in the history of the medium.”

The Kin-der-Kids (1906–07)

W. H. Davies 
(July 3, 1871 –  September 26, 1940)

He was a Welsh poet and writer, who spent much of his life as a tramp or hobo in the United Kingdom and the United States, yet became one of the most popular poets of his time. His themes included observations on life’s hardships, the ways the human condition is reflected in nature, his tramping adventures and the characters he met. His work has been classed as Georgian, though it is not typical of that class of work in theme or style.

Edgar Allan Poe’s distant relative

Edgar Allan Poe
(January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849)

He was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales involving mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as one of the central figures of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the United States, and of early American literature. Poe was one of the country’s first successful practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre. In addition, he is credited with contributing significantly to the emergence of science fiction. He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living by writing alone, which resulted in a financially difficult life and career.

His distant relative was

Edgar Allan Poe (attorney general)
(September 15, 1871 – November 29, 1961)

He was born in Baltimore, the son of former Maryland Attorney General John Prentiss Poe. He was named for his great uncle and second cousin, twice removed, the celebrated author Edgar Allan Poe, who died in 1849. Poe attended Princeton University, where he played varsity football. He was the quarterback of the 1889 team, which finished with a perfect 10–0 record. After that season, Poe was named the quarterback of the very first 1889 College Football All-America Team.

Stephen Crane (American)
(November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900)

Formal portrait of Stephen Crane, about March 1896

He was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism. He is recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation.

The ninth surviving child of Methodist parents, Crane began writing at the age of four and had several articles published by 16. Having little interest in university studies though he was active in a fraternity, he left Syracuse University in 1891 to work as a reporter and writer. Crane’s first novel was the 1893 Bowery tale Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, generally considered by critics to be the first work of American literary Naturalism. He won international acclaim for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895), considered a masterpiece by different critics and writers.

Jack Black 
1871–1932)

He was a Canadian and American hobo and burglar. Black is best known for his autobiography You Can’t Win (Macmillan, 1926), describing his days on the road and life as an outlaw. Black’s book was written as an anti-crime book urging criminals to go straight, but it is also his statement of belief in the futility of prisons and the criminal justice system, hence the title of the book. Jack Black was writing from experience, having spent thirty years (fifteen of which were spent in various prisons in Canada and the United States) as a travelling criminal, and offers tales of being a cross-country stick-up man, home burglar, petty thief, and opium addict. He gained fame as a prison reformer, writer, and playwright. He disappeared in 1932 in a likely suicide.

Robert Hugh Benson
(November 18, 1871 –October 19, 1914)

He was an English Catholic priest and writer. First an Anglican priest, he was received into the Catholic Church in 1903 and ordained therein the next year. He was also a prolific writer of fiction, writing the notable dystopian novel Lord of the World, as well as Come Rack! Come Rope!.

Ethel Turner
(January 24, 1872 –  April 8, 1958)

He was an English-born Australian novelist and children’s literature writer. Her best-known work is her first novel, Seven Little Australians (1894), which is widely considered a classic of Australian children’s literature and was an instant hit both in Australia and overseas. It is about a family of seven children growing up in Australia. The book, together with its sequels The Family at Misrule (1895) and Little Mother Meg (1902) deal with the lives of the Woolcot family, particularly with its seven mischievous and rebellious children, in 1880s Australia. A companion to “Seven Little Australians”, Judy and Punch was published in 1928.

Zane Grey
(January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939)

He was an American author and dentist. He is known for his popular adventure novels and stories associated with the Western genre in literature and the arts; he idealized the American frontierRiders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his best-selling book.

Leon Ray Livingston
(1872–1944)

He was a famous hobo and author, travelling under the name “A-No.1” and often referred to as “The Rambler.” He perfected the hobo symbols system, which let other hobos know where there are generous people, free food, jobs, vicious dogs, and so forth. He was not a poor man; he simply preferred a life of travelling the country by train to sitting at home. In his memoir The Ways of the Hobo, Livingston admitted that he was uneducated, but began his self-education at the age of 35.

Ernest Hemingway’s Mother

Grace Hall Hemingway
(June 15, 1872 – June 28, 1951)

She was an American opera singer, music teacher, and painter. She was Ernest Hemingway‘s mother.

Ernest and Grace Hemingway, 1899

Ernest Hemingway
( July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961)

He was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle and outspoken, blunt public image. Some of his seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works have become classics of American literature, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.

 Albert Payson Terhune
December 21, 1872 – February 18, 1942)

He was an American writer, dog breeder, and journalist. He was popular for his novels relating the adventures of his beloved collies and as a breeder of collies at his Sunnybank Kennels, the lines of which still exist in today’s Rough Collies.

Thornton Waldo Burgess
(January 17, 1874 – June 5, 1965)

He was an American conservationist and author of children’s stories. He was sometimes known as the Bedtime Story-Man, after his newspaper column Bedtime Stories. By the time he retired, he had written more than 170 books and 15,000 stories for the daily newspaper column.

Robert Frost
(March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963)

He was an American poet. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech,[2] Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. Some of his poems include “The Witch of Coös”, “Home Burial”, “A Servant to Servants”, “Directive”, “Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep”, “Provide, Provide”, “Acquainted with the Night“, “After Apple Picking“, “Mending Wall“, “The Most of It”, “An Old Man’s Winter Night”, “To Earthward”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening“, “Spring Pools”, “The Lovely Shall Be Choosers”, “Design” and “Desert Places“.

G. K. Chesterton  
(May 29, 1874 –June 14,1936)

He was an English authorphilosopherChristian apologist, and literary and art critic. 

Chesterton created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown, and wrote on apologetics, such as his works Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an orthodox Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting from high church Anglicanism.

Lucy Maud Montgomery
(November 30, 1874 – April 24, 1942)

She was a Canadian author best known for a collection of novels, essays, short stories, and poetry beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables. She published 20 novels as well as 530 short stories, 500 poems, and 30 essays. Anne of Green Gables was an immediate success; the title character, orphan Anne Shirley, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following. Most of the novels were set on Prince Edward Island, and those locations within Canada’s smallest province became a literary landmark and popular tourist site—namely Green Gables farm, the genesis of Prince Edward Island National Park.

Edgar Wallace  
(April 1, 1875 – February 10, 1932)

He was a British writer of sensational detective, gangster, adventure, and sci-fi novels, plays and stories. His last work of science fiction and the only one widely remembered today is the screenplay for King Kong. Edgar Wallace enjoyed writing science fiction but found little financial success in the genre despite several efforts. His constant need for income always brought him back to the more mundane styles of fiction that sold more easily. Out of the many scripts he penned for RKO, Merian C. Cooper’s “gorilla picture” had the most lasting influence, becoming the classic King Kong (1933).

Edgar Rice Burroughs  
(September 1, 1875 – March 19, 1950)

He was an American writer, best known for his prolific output in the adventurescience fiction, and fantasy genres. Best known for creating the characters Tarzan (who appeared in a series of twenty-four books by him) and John Carter (who was a recurring character in a series of eleven books), he also wrote the Pellucidar series, the Amtor series, and the Caspak trilogy.

Tarzan was immediately popular, and Burroughs capitalized on it in every possible way, including a syndicated Tarzan comic stripfilms, and merchandise. Tarzan remains one of the most successful fictional characters to this day and is a cultural icon. Burroughs’s California ranch is now the center of the Tarzana neighborhood in Los Angeles, named after the character. Burroughs was an explicit supporter of eugenics and scientific racism in both his fiction and nonfiction; Tarzan was meant to reflect these concepts.

Tarzan’s first appearance, in the October 1912 issue of The All-Story

RAFAEL SABATINI
(April 29, 1875 –February 13,1950)

He was an Italian-born British writer of romance and adventure novels.

He is best known for his worldwide bestsellersThe Sea Hawk (1915), Scaramouche (1921), Captain Blood (a.k.a. Captain Blood: His Odyssey) (1922), and Bellarion the Fortunate (1926). Several of his novels have been made into films, both silent and sound.

In all, Sabatini produced 34 novels, eight short story collections, six non-fiction books, numerous uncollected short stories, and several plays.

Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor
(October 28, 1875 – February 4, 1966)

He was the first full-time editor of the National Geographic magazine (1899–1954). Grosvenor is credited with having consolidated the nascent magazine.

As President of the National Geographic Society (1920-1954), he assisted its rise to one of the world’s largest and best known science and learning organizations, aided by the chronicling in its magazine of ambitious natural and cultural explorations around the globe.

National Geographic Magazine editor, Gilbert H. Grosvenor at work at the National Geographic Headquarters in Washington D.C., 1914.Photograph by Leet Brothers, National Geographic Creative

Jack London
(January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916)

He was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.

London was part of the radical literary group “The Crowd” in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of animal welfareworkers’ rights and socialism. London wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the AbyssWar of the Classes, and Before Adam.

His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in Alaska and the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories “To Build a Fire“, “An Odyssey of the North”, and “Love of Life”. He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as “The Pearls of Parlay” and “The Heathen“.

Lloyd C. Douglas,
(August 27, 1877 – February 13, 1951)

He was an American minister and author. Douglas was one of the most popular American authors of his time, although he did not write his first novel until he was 50. His works include The RobeThe Big FishermanMagnificent Obsession.

John Masefield
(June  1, 1878 – May, 12 1967)

She was an English poet and writer, and Poet Laureate from 1930 until his death in 1967. Among his best known works are the children’s novels The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, and the poems “The Everlasting Mercy” and “Sea-Fever“.

Norman Lindsay Norman Alfred William Lindsay
(February 22,  1879 – November 21, 1969)

He was an Australian artist, etcher, sculptor, writer, art critic, novelist, cartoonist and amateur boxer.  One of the most prolific and popular Australian artists of his generation, Lindsay attracted both acclaim and controversy for his works, many of which infused the Australian landscape with erotic pagan elements and were deemed by his critics to be “anti-Christian, anti-social and degenerate”

A vocal nationalist, he became a regular artist for The Bulletin at the height of its cultural influence, and advanced staunchly anti-modernist views as a leading writer on Australian art. When friend and literary critic Bertram Stevens argued that children like to read about fairies rather than food, Lindsay wrote and illustrated The Magic Pudding (1918), now considered a classic work of Australian children’s literature.

Frederic G. Melcher
 (April 12, 1879 – March 9, 1963)

He was an American publisher, bookseller, editor, and a major contributor to the library science field and book industry. He is particularly known for his contributions to the children’s book genre, including the Newbery Medal and Caldecott Medal.  Melcher was named as one of the most important 100 leaders in the library science field of the 20th century in an American Libraries article and has been described as “the greatest all-round bookman in the English-speaking world”.

Born in 1880’s

Tex O’Reilly
(August 15, 1880 –  December 9, 1946) 

He was an American soldier of fortune, writer, journalist, and film actor. He is said to have fought in ten wars under many flags. Initially serving in the U.S. Army in the Spanish–American War, the Philippine–American War, and the Boxer Rebellion, he would claim to fight in several conflicts in Central America and to have fought with Pancho Villa in Mexico and claimed to have fought in the Rif War with the Spanish Foreign Legion in North Africa. He worked as a reporter for the Associated Press. He wrote an autobiography, Roving and Fighting, and Lowell Thomas wrote Born to Raise Hell about him. The latter book has been reprinted and is distributed by The Long Riders’ Guild Press. He was the author of Pecos Bill.

Johnny Gruelle
(December 24, 1880 – January 9, 1938)

He was an American artist, political cartoonist, children’s book and comics author, illustrator, and storyteller. He is best known as the creator of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy dolls and as the author/illustrator of dozens of books.

Giovanni Papini
(January 9, 1881 – July  8, 1956)

He was an Italian journalist, essayist, novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, and philosopher.

He wrote Life of Christ (1921).

P G Wodehouse
(Oct 15, 1881 – Feb 14, 1975) 

He was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious PsmithLord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.

Margery Williams Bianco
(July 22,1881 – September 4, 1944)

She was an English-American author, primarily of popular children’s books. A professional writer since the age of nineteen, she achieved lasting fame at forty-one with the 1922 publication of the classic that is her best-known work, The Velveteen Rabbit. She received the Newbery Honor for Winterbound.

 A A Milne (Alan Alexander Milne)
(January 18, 1882 –  January 31, 1956)

Milne with his son Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear, at Cotchford Farm, their home in Sussex. Photo by Howard Coster, 1926.

He was an English writer best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, as well as for children’s poetry.

William B. Laughead
(1882-1958)

He was a logger, advertising manager for Red River Lumber Company, and amateur artist. Laughead’s chief claim to fame is the fact that he was the author of several advertising pamphlets for the Red River Lumber Company, which served to introduce the legendary folk hero Paul Bunyan to a wide, popular audience. Inventory of the William B. Laughead Papers, 1897 – 1958 – Forest History Society

The first ever Statue of Paul Bunyan and Babe th

Virginia Woolf 
(January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941)

She was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. During the inter-war period, Woolf was an important part of London’s literary and artistic society. In 1915, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her half-brother’s publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928). She is also known for her essays, such as A Room of One’s Own (1929).

James Joyce 
(February 2, 1882 –  January 13, 1941)

He was an Irish novelist, poet and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer‘s Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

Harold Knerr 
(September 4, 1882 – July 8, 1949)

He was an American comic strip creator, who signed his work H. H. Knerr. He was the writer-artist of the comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids for 35 years. The Katzenjammer Kids published its last original strip in 2006, but is still distributed in reprints by King Features Syndicate, making it the oldest comic strip still in syndication and the longest-running ever.

Initially named Hans und Fritz after the two naughty protagonist brothers, Dirks’ new feature debuted on June 7, 1914. It was called The Captain and the Kids from 1918 on. The Captain and the Kids was very similar to The Katzenjammer Kids in terms of content and characters, but Dirks had a looser and more verbal style than Knerr, who on the other hand often produced stronger, more direct gags and drawings. The Captain and the Kids soon proved equal in popularity to The Katzenjammer Kids. It was later distributed by the United Feature Syndicate, while Hearst’s King Features distributed The Katzenjammer Kids.

Johnston McCulley
(February 2, 1883 – November 23, 1958)

He was an American writer of hundreds of stories, fifty novels and numerous screenplays for film and television, and the creator of the character Zorro.

Napoleon Hill
(October 26, 1883 – November 8, 1970)

He was an American self-help author. He is best known for his book Think and Grow Rich (1937), which is among the best-selling self-help books of all time. Hill’s works insisted that fervid expectations are essential to improving one’s life. Most of his books are promoted as expounding principles to achieve “success”.

Hill is a controversial figure. Accused of fraud, modern historians also doubt many of his claims, such as that he met Andrew Carnegie and that he was an attorney.

American self-help writer Napoleon Hill (1883-1970) holding his book, “Think and Grow Rich”.

Arthur Ransome  CBE
(January 18, 1884 –  June 3, 1967)

He was an English author and journalist. He is best known for writing and illustrating the Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. The entire series remains in print, and Swallows and Amazons is the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water, the two lakes Ransome adapted as his fictional North Country lake.

He also wrote about the literary life of London, and about Russia before, during, and after the revolutions of 1917. His connection with the leaders of the Revolution led to him providing information to the Secret Intelligence Service, while he was also suspected by MI5 of being a Soviet spy.

Eric P. Kelly 
(March 16, 1884 – January 3, 1960)

He was an American journalist, academic and author of children’s books. He was a professor of English at Dartmouth College and briefly a lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He won the 1929 Newbery Medal recognizing his first published book, The Trumpeter of Krakow, as the preceding year’s most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature

Hugo Gernsback
(August 16, 1884 – August 19, 1967)

He was an American editor and magazine publisher whose publications included the first science fiction magazineAmazing Stories. His contributions to the genre as publisher were so significant that, along with the novelists Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, he is sometimes called “The Father of Science Fiction”. In his honor, annual awards presented at the World Science Fiction Convention are named the “Hugos

Gernsback demonstrating his television goggles in 1963 for Life magazine

Sinclair Lewis
(February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951)

He was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first author from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.” Lewis wrote six popular novels: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can’t Happen Here (1935).

Dorothea Mackellar  OBE
(July 1, 1885 –  January 14, 1968)

She was an Australian poet and fiction writer. Her poem “My Country” is widely known in Australia, especially its second stanza, which begins: “I love a sunburnt country / A land of sweeping plains, / Of ragged mountain ranges, / Of droughts and flooding rains.”

Walter R. Brooks
(January 9, 1886 – August 17, 1958)

He was an American writer, known for his children’s books about Freddy the Pig and the other anthropomorphic animal inhabitants of the Bean Farm in upstate New York, and also for his short stories about Mister Ed the talking horse, made into a television show after his death.

Hugh Lofting 
(January 14, 1886 –  September 26,  1947)

He was an English American writer, trained as a civil engineer, who created the classic children’s literature character Doctor Dolittle. The fictional physician to talking animals, based in an English village, first appeared in illustrated letters to his children which Lofting sent from British Army trenches in the First World War. Lofting settled in the United States soon after the war and before his first book was published.

Charles Williams,
(September 20, 1886 –  May 15, 1945)

He was an author that was part of the literary circle known as The Inklings which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Joyce Kilmer,
(December 6, 1886 – July 30, 1918)

He was an American writer and poet mainly remembered for a short poem titled “Trees” (1913), which was published in the collection Trees and Other Poems in 1914. Though a prolific poet whose works celebrated the common beauty of the natural world as well as his Catholic faith, Kilmer was also a journalistliterary criticlecturer, and editor. At the time of his deployment to Europe during World War I, Kilmer was considered the leading American Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation, whom critics often compared to British contemporaries G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) and Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953).[1]: p.27 [2][3] He enlisted in the New York National Guard and was deployed to France with the 69th Infantry Regiment (the famous “Fighting 69th”) in 1917. He was killed by a sniper‘s bullet at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918 at the age of 31. He was married to Aline Murray, also an accomplished poet and author, with whom he had five children.

Ronald Knox
(February 17, 1888 –  August 24, 1957)

He is remembered for his “Ten Commandments” for detective stories, which sought to codify a form of crime fiction in which the reader may participate by attempting to find a solution to the mystery before the fictional detective reveals it.

T. S. Eliot
(September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965)

He was a poetessayist and playwright.  He is considered to be one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His use of language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often reevaluated long-held cultural beliefs.

Philip Francis Nowlan
(November 13, 1888 – February 1, 1940)

He was an American science fiction writer, best known as the creator of Buck Rogers.

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