The Authors
An illustrated plate for every writer in the library — what they owned, where they worked and the scenes that made them. Where no portrait of an author survives, we say so and show the room instead of inventing a face.
61 authors · free to read
Abbé Prévost
1697–1763
the runaway monk who wrote the century's great love story
1 work
Agatha Christie
1890–1976
she hid the truth in plain sight
3 works
Alexandre Dumas
1802–1870
the storyteller who made history gallop
1 work
Andrew Lang
1844–1912
he gathered the world's fairy tales into one shelf
1 work
Ann Radcliffe
1764–1823
the architect of Gothic suspense
4 works
Arthur Conan Doyle
1859–1930
a doctor with no patients, and time to fill
7 works
Bram Stoker
1847–1912
he ran a theatre by day and built a nightmare by night
1 work
Bret Harte
1836–1902
he gave the Gold Rush its enduring voice
1 work
Charles Dickens
1812–1870
the man who made a nation read in monthly parts
5 works
Charlotte Brontë
1816–1855
she published as a man and outlived them all
1 work
David Graham Phillips
1867–1911
he named the senators who had been bought
1 work
Edgar Rice Burroughs
1875–1950
a failed businessman who thought he could do better
1 work
Egerton Castle
1858–1920
the novelist who brought a swordsman's eye to adventure
1 work
E. M. Forster
1879–1970
only connect
1 work
Ernest Hemingway
1899–1961
he cut the sentence down to the bone
1 work
Fergus Hume
1859–1932
he wrote the best-selling detective novel of the century and sold it for fifty pounds
1 work
Frances Hodgson Burnett
1849–1924
she found a locked garden and gave it to every child
2 works
Fyodor Dostoevsky
1821–1881
the novelist of conscience at the edge
1 work
Gaston Leroux
1868–1927
a reporter who swore the phantom was real
1 work
George Eliot
1819–1880
she made a whole town answer for every private choice
1 work
George Griffith
1857–1906
he was bombing London from airships before anyone had left the ground
1 work
George W. Gough
fl. 1917–1922
he told the Forty-five through a yeoman's eyes, and left barely a trace of himself
1 work
G. K. Chesterton
1874–1936
he argued for a living and made his opponents love him
13 works
Harry Harrison
1925–2012
he drew the future before he wrote it
1 work
H. de Vere Stacpoole
1863–1951
physician of the South-Sea romance
1 work
Henry David Thoreau
1817–1862
he went to the woods on purpose, and came back with an argument
1 work
Henry James
1843–1916
the American who wrote Europe from the inside
3 works
Herman Melville
1819–1891
he wrote the great American novel and then went to work at the docks
1 work
H. G. Wells
1866–1946
he escaped the draper's shop and invented the future
1 work
Homer
c. 8th century BC
the voice at the beginning of European literature
1 work
Honoré de Balzac
1799–1850
the man who wrote a whole world
8 works
H. P. Lovecraft
1890–1937
cartographer of cosmic dread
2 works
Jack London
1876–1916
he lived every page before he wrote it
3 works
James Malcolm Rymer
1814–1884
a trained engineer who built horrors by the penny
1 work
James Oliver Curwood
1878–1927
he hunted the north until the north spared him
1 work
Jane Austen
1775–1817
two inches of ivory, and the whole world on it
2 works
John Buchan
1875–1940
the architect of the modern thriller
1 work
John Galsworthy
1867–1933
the conscience of Edwardian England
1 work
Joseph C. Lincoln
1870–1944
the literary dean of Cape Cod
1 work
Joseph Conrad
1857–1924
the mariner of moral darkness
1 work
Lewis Carroll
1832–1898
a mathematics don who let the logic go pleasantly mad
1 work
L. Frank Baum
1856–1919
he failed at everything until he made a country up
1 work
L. M. Montgomery
1874–1942
she gave away a happiness she could not keep
1 work
Louisa May Alcott
1832–1888
she wrote to feed her family and fed the world instead
1 work
Marcus Aurelius
121–180 AD
the most powerful man alive, writing himself a private warning
1 work
Mark Twain
1835–1910
the Mississippi taught him everything, including the name
2 works
Mary Roberts Rinehart
1876–1958
a nurse who wrote her way out of a crash and never stopped
1 work
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
1797–1851
she was eighteen when she made the modern monster
1 work
Matthew G. Lewis
1775–1818
he wrote the century's great scandal at nineteen
1 work
Maurice Leblanc
1864–1941
he created a thief who stole his own author's name
1 work
Prosper Mérimée
1803–1870
he saved the cathedrals and invented Carmen
1 work
Robert Louis Stevenson
1850–1894
an invalid who wrote the healthiest adventures in English
5 works
Robert W. Chambers
1865–1933
painter of the beautiful and the uncanny
1 work
Rudyard Kipling
1865–1936
the storyteller who carried an empire in his ear
1 work
Sara Cone Bryant
born 1873
she wrote down how to say it out loud
1 work
Sir Walter Scott
1771–1832
he invented the historical novel and wrote himself to death paying for it
1 work
Stanley J. Weyman
1855–1928
a historian's eye for adventure
1 work
Tobias Smollett
1721–1771
the restless observer of the eighteenth-century road
1 work
Wilkie Collins
1824–1889
he made testimony itself part of the mystery
2 works
William Hope Hodgson
1877–1918
voyager beyond the known
1 work
William Shakespeare
1564–1616
a working player who wrote for money and hit eternity
1 work