William Shakespeare
1564-1616
William Shakespeare is the England's most famous playwright and poet. He wrote some comedies, tragedies and history plays, among which Macbeth, Hamlet, The Tempest and As You Like it. His plays have been translated many languages across the world, and are still performed and studied today.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
1804-1864
American writer born in Massachusetts. He was greatly influenced by European fiction, and in particular Gothic literature. His ancestors came from England and settled in the United States in the 17th Century. One of them was a prosecutor at the famous Salem Witch Trials in 1692.
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
Virginia Woolf was an English novelist who wrote many "modernist classics" like Mrs Dalloway (1925) or To the Light House (1928). In her work, she created a new writing style: "the stream of consciousness" and she dealt with many issues like feminism, madness and homosexuality.
Tennessee Williams
1911-1983
Tennessee Williams is an American playwright and poet whose most famous plays A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof focus on lonely characters whose essential flaw is to be too different to fit in society. Most of his plays also dramatize the dilemma between individual aspirations and social expectations.