Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

• Algebra
• Calculus
• Geometry
• Topology
• Trignometry
• Combinatorics
• Logic
• Number theory

Applied mathematics

• Dynamical systems and differential equations
• Mathematical physics
• Computing
• Information theory and signal processing
• Probability and statistics
• Game theory
• Operations research

Related Topics

• Electromagnetic Spectrum
• Linear Equations
• Applied Physics
• Nano Technology
• Engineering Sciences
• Mathematical Medicine
• Fluid dynamics
• Computational Mathematics
• Gamma Ray Optics
• Onfrared Optics
• Relative Velocity
• Iciam
• Intelligent Imaging Neuroscience
• Biomedical Engineering
• Neuroscience Research
• Quantum Cosmology
• Brain Research

• A Piece of Steak
• A Rose for Emily
• A Tale of a Tub
• Aesop
• Aesop's Fables
• Alan Moore
• Albert Camus
• Albrecht Dürer
• Allegory
• Allegory of the cave
• Ambrogio Lorenzetti
• Ana's Playground
• Anatomy of Criticism
• Animal Farm
• Anna Sewell
• Apartheid
• Arithmetic
• Arthur Miller
• Astrologic allegory
• August Wilson
• Avatar (2009 film)
• Battle Royale
• Bernard Malamud
• Bertold Brecht
• Black Beauty
• Blindness (novel)
• Book of Revelation
• Bronzino
• C. S. Lewis
• Cannibal Holocaust
• Catholicism
• Chariot Allegory
• Charles Dickens
• Children of Gebelawi
• Christendom
• Christine de Pizan
• Cormac McCarthy
• Cäcilia Rentmeister
• Daniel Handler
• Dante Alighieri
• Darmok
• Dawn of the Dead
• District 9
• Divine Comedy
• E. T. A. Hoffmann
• Eclogue
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Edmund Spenser
• Edward Topsell
• Edwin Abbott Abbott
• El Topo
• Encountering Trouble
• Euripides
• Everyman (play)
• Ezekiel
• Father Time
• Fences (play)
• Filippino Lippi
• Flatland
• Foodland (film)
• Fringe (TV series)
• Fritz Lang
• Galileo
• Gender
• George MacDonald
• George Orwell
• Godzilla (1954 film)
• Grapevine
• Graydon Parrish
• Greek language
• Gulliver's Travels
• Hebrew Bible
• Herman Melville
• High Renaissance
• His Dark Materials
• Horus
• Hualing Nieh
• Hugh of St Victor
• Hypnerotomachia
• Ingmar Bergman
• Isis
• J. M. Coetzee
• J. R. R. Tolkien
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• Jack London
• James Cameron
• Jan Vermeer
• Jingoism
• John Bunyan
• John Irving
• John Ray
• John Steinbeck
• Jonathan Swift
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Jose Saramago
• Joseph Addison
• Koushun Takami
• L. Frank Baum
• Lady Justice
• Latin
• Laurent de La Hyre
• Liberal arts
• Literary device
• Literary technique
• Livy
• Lord of the Flies
• Lost (TV series)
• Martianus Capella
• Masque
• Melencolia I
• Metaphor
• Metropolis (film)
• Michel Foucault
• Mohsin Hamid
• Mulberry and Peach
• Myth of Sisyphus
• Naguib Mahfouz
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Northrop Frye
• Of Mice and Men
• Pandorum
• Paradise Lost
• Paradox (literature)
• Pearl (poem)
• Peter Harrison
• Peter S. Beagle
• Phaedrus (dialogue)
• Phantastes
• Philip Pullman
• Piers Plowman
• Pilgrim's Progress
• Plato
• Plato's Republic
• Plot device
• Prudentius
• Psalm 80
• Psychomachia
• Qu Yuan
• Renaissance humanism
• Republic
• Rex Warner
• Rhetoric
• Roger Hargreaves
• Roman à clef
• Sandro Botticelli
• Semiotics
• Star Trek
• Symbol
• The Art of Painting
• The Babylon Lottery
• The Confidence-Man
• The Crucible
• The Divine Comedy
• The English School
• The Faerie Queene
• The Great Carbuncle
• The Grim Reaper
• The Holocaust
• The Last Unicorn
• The Library of Babel
• The Little Prince
• The Matrix
• The Natural
• The Order of Things
• The Pearl (novel)
• The Plague
• The Prisoner
• The Road
• The Seventh Seal
• The Stranger (novel)
• The Trojan Women
• The Twilight Zone
• The Wall (film)
• The War on Terror
• Theagenes of Rhegium
• Time (magazine)
• Titian
• Torture
• Typology (theology)
• Unam Sanctam
• V for Vendetta
• Vietnam War
• William Faulkner
• William Golding
• William Langland
• Works and Days
• World war
• Wu Cheng'en
• X-Men
• Young Goodman Brown
• 
  

• 
  Joseph Addison
  Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. He was a man of letters, eldest son of Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine.
  Addison was born in Milston, Wiltshire, but soon after his birth his father, Lancelot Addison, was appointed Dean of Lichfield and the Addison family moved into the cathedral close. He was educated at Charterhouse School, where he first met Richard Steele, and at The Queen's College, Oxford. He excelled in classics, being specially noted for his Latin verse, and became a Fellow of Magdalen College. In 1693, he addressed a poem to John Dryden, and his first major work, a book of the lives of English poets, was published in 1694. His translation of Virgil's Georgics was published the same year. Dryden, Lord Somers and Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax took an interest in Addison's work and obtained for him a pension of £300 to enable him travel to Europe with a view to diplomatic employment, all the time writing and studying politics. While in Switzerland in 1702, he heard of the death of William III, an event which lost him his pension, as his influential contacts, Halifax and Somers, had lost their employment with the Crown.
  
  wn.com/Joseph_Addison

• 
  Aesop
  Aesop (pronounced /ˈiːsɒp/ EE-sop, Greek: Αἴσωπος, Aisōpos, c. 620-564 BC) was a fabulist or story teller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as Aesop's Fables. Although his existence remains uncertain and (if they ever existed) no writings by him survive, numerous tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a storytelling tradition that continues to this day. In many of the tales, animals speak and have human characteristics.
  Scattered details of Aesop's life can be found in ancient sources, including Aristotle, Herodotus, and Plutarch. An ancient literary work called The Aesop Romance tells an episodic, probably highly fictional version of his life, including the traditional description of him as a strikingly ugly slave (δοῦλος) who by his cleverness acquires freedom and becomes an adviser to kings and city-states. Older spellings of his name have included Esop(e) and Isope. A later tradition (dating from the Middle Ages) depicts Aesop as a black Ethiopian. Depictions of Aesop in popular culture over the last 2500 years have included several works of art and his appearance as a character in numerous books, films, plays, and television programs.
  
  wn.com/Aesop
• 
  Alan Moore
  Alan Oswald Moore (born 18 November 1953) is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books, a medium where he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell. Frequently described as the best graphic novel writer in history, he has also been described as "one of the most important British writers of the last fifty years". He has occasionally used such pseudonyms as Curt Vile, Jill de Ray, and Translucia Baboon.
  Moore started out writing for British underground and alternative fanzines in the late 1970s before achieving success publishing comic strips in such magazines as 2000 AD and Warrior. He was subsequently picked up by the American DC Comics, and as "the first comics writer living in Britain to do prominent work in America", he worked on big name characters such as Batman (Batman: The Killing Joke) and Superman (Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?), substantially developed the minor character Swamp Thing, and penned original titles such as Watchmen. During that decade, Moore helped to bring about greater social respectability for the medium in the United States and United Kingdom, and has subsequently been credited with the development of the term "graphic novel" over "comic book". In the late 1980s and early 1990s he left the comic industry mainstream and went independent for a while, working on experimental work such as the epic From Hell, pornographic Lost Girls, and the prose novel Voice of the Fire. He subsequently returned to the mainstream later in the 1990s, working for Image Comics, before developing America's Best Comics, an imprint through which he published works such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the occult-based Promethea.
  
  wn.com/Alan_Moore
• 
  Albert Camus
  Albert Camus (French pronunciation: [albɛʁ kamy] ( listen); 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French author, journalist, and philosopher. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay "The Rebel" that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom.
  Although often cited as a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy with which Camus was associated during his own lifetime, he rejected this particular label. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."
  In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.
  Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times". He was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling, and the first African-born writer to receive the award. He is the shortest-lived of any Nobel literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award.
  
  wn.com/Albert_Camus
• 
  Albrecht Dürer
  Albrecht Dürer (German pronunciation: [ˈalbʁɛçt ˈdyːʁɐ]; 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528) was a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits, and copper engravings. His woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series (1498), retain a more Gothic flavour than the rest of his work. His well-known works include the Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and Melencolia I (1514), which has been the subject of extensive analysis and interpretation. His watercolours mark him as one of the first European landscape artists, while his ambitious woodcuts revolutionized the potential of that medium.
  Dürer's introduction of classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, has secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance. This is reinforced by his theoretical treatises, which involve principles of mathematics, perspective and ideal proportions.
  
  wn.com/Albrecht_Dürer
• 
  Ambrogio Lorenzetti
  Ambrogio Lorenzetti (or Ambruogio Laurati) (c. 1290 – 9 June 1348) was an Italian painter of the Sienese school. He was active between approximately 1317 to 1348. His elder brother was the painter Pietro Lorenzetti.
  His work shows the influence of Simone Martini, although more naturalistic. The earliest dated work of the Sienese painter is a Madonna and Child (1319, Museo Diocesano, San Casciano). His presence was documented in Florence up until 1321. He would return there after spending a number of years in Siena.
  The frescoes on the walls of the Room of the Nine (Sala dei Nove) or Room of Peace (Sala della Pace) in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena are one of the masterworks of early renaissance secular painting. The "nine" was the oligarchal assembly of guild and monetary interests that governed the republic. Three walls are painted with frescoes consisting of a large assembly of allegorical figures of virtues in the Allegory of Good Government. In the other two facing panels, Ambrogio weaves panoramic visions of Effects of Good Government on Town and Country, and Allegory of Bad Government and its Effects on Town and Country (also called "Ill-governed Town and Country"). The better preserved "well-governed town and country" is an unrivaled pictorial encyclopedia of incidents in a peaceful medieval "borgo" and countryside.
  
  wn.com/Ambrogio_Lorenzetti
• 
  Anna Sewell
  Anna Sewell (30 March 1820 – 25 April 1878) was an English novelist, best known as the author of the classic novel Black Beauty.
  Anna Mary Sewell was born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England into a devoutly 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 and was largely educated at home.
  At the age of twelve, the family moved to Stoke Newington, where Sewell attended school for the first time. Two years later, however, she slipped while walking home from school and severely injured both of her ankles. Her father took a job in Brighton in 1836, in the hope that the climate there would help to cure her. Despite this, and most likely because of mistreatment of her injury, for the rest of her life Anna was unable to stand without a crutch or to walk for any length of time. For greater mobility, she frequently used horse-drawn carriages, which contributed to her love of horses and concern for the humane treatment of animals.
  
  wn.com/Anna_Sewell
• 
  Arthur Miller
  Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (one-act, 1955; revised two-act, 1956).
  Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, a period during which he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Prince of Asturias Award, and was married to Marilyn Monroe.
  Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in Harlem, New York City, the second of three children of Isidore and Augusta Miller, Polish-Jewish immigrants. His father owned a women's clothing manufacturing business employing some 400 people. He became a wealthy and respected man in the community. (BBC TV Interview; Miller and Yentob; 'Finishing the Picture,' 2004) The family, including his younger sister Joan, lived on East 110th Street in Manhattan and owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens. They employed a chauffeur. In the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the family lost almost everything and moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn. As a teenager, Miller delivered bread every morning before school to help the family. After graduating in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School, he worked at several menial jobs to pay for his college tuition.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Miller
• 
  August Wilson
  August Wilson (April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each is set in a different decade, depicting the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the twentieth century.
  Wilson's maternal grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel, Jr. in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the fourth of six children, to Sudeten-German immigrant baker/pastry cook, Frederick August Kittel, Sr. and Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman, from North Carolina. Wilson's mother raised the children alone until he was five in a two-room apartment above a grocery store at 1727 Bedford Avenue; his father was mostly absent from his childhood. Wilson would go on to write under his mother's surname. The economically depressed neighborhood in which he was raised was inhabited predominantly by black Americans, and Jewish and Italian immigrants. Wilson's mother divorced and married David Bedford in the 1950s and the family moved from the Hill District to the then predominantly white working class neighborhood of Hazelwood, where they encountered racial hostility; bricks were thrown through a window at their new home. They were soon forced out of their house and on to their next home.
  
  wn.com/August_Wilson
• 
  Bernard Malamud
  Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986) was an author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in Tsarist Russia, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
  Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Max and Bertha (Fidelman) Malamud, Russian Jewish immigrants. A brother, Eugene, was born in 1917 . Malamud entered adolescence at the start of the Great Depression. From 1928 to 1932, Bernard attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. During his youth, he saw many films and enjoyed relating their plots to his school friends. He was especially fond of Charlie Chaplin's comedies.
  Malamud worked for a year at $4.50 a day as a teacher-in-training, before attending college on a government loan. He received his B.A. degree from City College of New York in 1936. In 1942, he obtained a Master's degree from Columbia University, writing a thesis on Thomas Hardy. He was excused from military service in World War II because he was the sole support of his widowed mother. He first worked for the Bureau of the Census in Washington D.C., then taught English in New York, mostly high school night classes for adults.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Bernard_Malamud
• 
  Bronzino
  Agnolo di Cosimo (November 17, 1503 – November 23, 1572), usually known as Il Bronzino, or Agnolo Bronzino (mistaken attempts also have been made in the past to assert his name was Agnolo Tori and even Angelo (Agnolo) Allori), was an Italian Mannerist painter from Florence. His sobriquet, Bronzino, in all probability refers to his relatively dark skin.
  Bronzino was born in Florence, the son of a butcher. According to his contemporary Vasari, Bronzino was a pupil first of Raffaellino del Garbo, and then of Pontormo, to whom he was apprenticed at 14. Pontormo is thought to have introduced a portrait of Bronzino as a child (seated on a step) into one of his series on Joseph in Egypt now in the National Gallery, London. Pontormo exercised a dominant influence on Bronzino's developing style, and the two were to remain collaborators for most of the former's life. An early example of Bronzino's hand has often been detected in the Capponi Chapel in the church of Santa Felicita by the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Pontormo designed the interior and executed the altarpiece, the masterly Deposition from the Cross and the sidewall fresco Annunciation. Bronzino apparently was assigned the frescoes on the dome, which however have not survived. Of the four empanelled tondi or roundels depicting each of the evangelists, two were said by Vasari to have been painted by Bronzino. His style however is so similar to his master's that scholars still debate the specific attributions.
  
  wn.com/Bronzino
• 
  Charles Dickens
  Charles John Huffam Dickens ( /ˈtʃɑrlz ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic who is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period and the creator of some of the world's most memorable fictional characters. During his lifetime Dickens' works enjoyed unprecedented popularity and fame, but it was in the twentieth century that his literary genius was fully recognized by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to enjoy an enduring popularity among the general reading public.
  Born in Portsmouth, England, Dickens left school to work in a factory after his father was thrown into debtors' prison. Though he had little formal education, his early impoverishment drove him to succeed. He edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Dickens
• 
  Christine de Pizan
  Christine de Pizan (also seen as de Pisan) (1363 – c. 1430) was a Venetian-born late medieval author who challenged misogyny and stereotypes prevalent in the late medieval culture. As a poet, she was well known and highly regarded in her own day; she completed 41 works during her 30 year career (1399–1429), and can be regarded as Europe’s first professional woman writer. She married in 1380, at the age of 15 and was widowed 10 years later. Much of the impetus for her writing came from her need to earn a living for herself and her three children. She spent most of her childhood and all of her adult life based in Paris and then the abbey at Poissy, and wrote entirely in her adoptive tongue of Middle French.
  Her early courtly poetry is marked by her knowledge of aristocratic custom and fashion of the day, particularly involving women and the practice of chivalry. Her early and later allegorical and didactic treatises reflect both autobiographical information about her life and views and also her own individualized and humanist approach to the scholastic learned tradition of mythology, legend, and history she inherited from clerical scholars and to the genres and courtly or scholastic subjects of contemporary French and Italian poets she admired. Supported and encouraged by important royal French and English patrons, she influenced 15th-century English poetry. Her success stems from a wide range of innovative writing and rhetorical techniques that critically challenged renowned male writers, such as Jean de Meun who incorporated misogynist beliefs within their literary works.
  
  wn.com/Christine_de_Pizan
• 
  Cormac McCarthy
  Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy; July 20, 1933) is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and Post-apocalyptic genres. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road (2006). His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For All the Pretty Horses (1992) he won both the U.S. National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. All the Pretty Horses and The Road were also adapted as motion pictures.
  Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005 and placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, and called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying". In 2010 The Times ranked The Road first on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years. McCarthy has been increasingly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  
  wn.com/Cormac_McCarthy
• Cäcilia Rentmeister
  Cäcilia (Cillie) Rentmeister (1948 in Berlin) is a German art historian, culture scientist and researcher of cultural conditions of women and of gender. In addition to studying the different realities in which men and women are living, she has concerned herself with the matriarchy.
  Rentmeister studied at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Cologne Art History, Archeology and American Studies. She received her PhD in 1980 at the University of Bremen. Rentmeister lives in Berlin and Brandenburg, and since 1994 teaches at the University of Applied Sciences Erfurt at the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences "Cross-cultural Gender Studies" and "Interactive Media".
  Rentmeister engaged since the early 1970s as activist in the Second-wave feminism. From 1974, she wrote articles and essays on feminist art history, archaeology and cultural studies, which were also published in other languages. From 1977 on she lectured in art schools, teacher colleges and universities in Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen. She was one of the initiators of the interdisciplinary women's summer programs ("Frauen Sommeruniversität") at the Technical University of Berlin, which were attended from 1976 to 1986 by about 30,000 women, and gave a sustained impetus for women's studies and gender research in all scientific disciplines.
  
  wn.com/Cäcilia_Rentmeister
• 
  Daniel Handler
  Daniel Handler (born February 28, 1970) is an American author, screenwriter and accordionist. He is best known for his work under the pen name Lemony Snicket.
  Handler was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Sandra Handler Day (née Walpole), an opera singer and retired City College of San Francisco Dean, and Lou Handler, an accountant. His father was a Jewish refugee from Germany, and his mother is distantly related to British writer Hugh Walpole. He has a younger sister, Rebecca Handler. He attended Commodore Sloat Elementary, Herbert Hoover Middle School and Lowell High School. Handler graduated from Wesleyan University in 1992. He is an alumnus of the San Francisco Boys Chorus.
  
  Handler is politically active and helped form LitPAC. In the June 10, 2007 edition of The New York Times Magazine, Handler reveals ambivalence toward his wealth, and the expectations it creates. He states he is often asked for money for charitable causes and often gives. He has supported the Occupy Wall Street movement. In an interview conducted by the 667 Dark Avenue fan site, Daniel Handler gave his personal philosophy as "Never refuse a breath mint".
  
  wn.com/Daniel_Handler
• 
  Dante Alighieri
  Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante (UK  /ˈdænti/, US /ˈdɑːnteɪ/; Italian: [ˈdante]; c1265–1321), was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem Commedia, later named La divina commedia (Divine Comedy), considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature.
  In Italy he is known as il Sommo Poeta ("the Supreme Poet") or just il Poeta. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also known as "the three fountains" or "the three crowns". Dante is also called the "Father of the Italian language".
  Dante was born in Florence, Italy. The exact date of Dante's birth is unknown, although it is generally believed to be around 1265. This can be deduced from autobiographic allusions in La Divina Commedia, "the Inferno" (Halfway through the journey we are living, implying that Dante was around 35 years old, as the average lifespan according to the Bible (Psalms 89:10, Vulgate) is 70 years; and as the imaginary travel took place in 1300, Dante must have been born around 1265). Some verses of the Paradiso section of the Divine Comedy also provide a possible clue that he was born under the sign of Gemini: "As I revolved with the eternal twins, I saw revealed from hills to river outlets, the threshing-floor that makes us so ferocious" (XXII 151-154). In 1265 the Sun was in Gemini approximately during the period of May 11 to June 11.
  
  wn.com/Dante_Alighieri
• 
  Edgar Allan Poe
  Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
  He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans. His publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".
  
  wn.com/Edgar_Allan_Poe
• 
  Edmund Spenser
  Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 – 13 January 1599) was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English language.
  Edmund Spenser was born in East Smithfield, London around the year 1552 though there is some ambiguity as to the exact date of his birth. As a young boy, he was educated in London at the Merchant Taylors' School and matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge he became a friend of Gabriel Harvey, and later consulted him, despite their differing views on poetry.
  In July 1580, Spenser went to Ireland in the service of the newly appointed Lord Deputy, Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton. Then he served with the English forces during the Second Desmond Rebellion. After the defeat of the native Irish he was awarded lands in County Cork that had been confiscated in the Munster Plantation during the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. Among his acquaintances in the area was Walter Raleigh, a fellow colonist.
  
  wn.com/Edmund_Spenser
• 
  Edward Topsell
  Edward Topsell (c. 1572 – 1625) was an English cleric and author best remembered for his bestiary.
  Topsell attended Christ's College, Cambridge, earned his B.A. and probably an M.A. as well, before beginning a career in the Church of England. He served as the first rector of East Hoathly, and subsequently became the perpetual curate of St. Botolph's in Aldersgate (1604). He was the author of books on religious and moral themes, including The Reward of Religion (1596) and Time's Lamentation (1599), among others.
  Topsell's The History of Four-footed Beasts (1607) and The History of Serpents (1608), both published by William Jaggard, were reprinted together as The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents in 1658. An eleven-hundred-page treatise on zoology, Topsell's work repeats ancient and fantastic legends about actual animals as well as reports of mythical animals. Topsell, not a naturalist himself, relied on earlier authorities, most notably the Historiae animalium of the Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner. "I would not have the Reader," Topsell writes, "... imagine I have ... related all that is ever said of these Beasts, but only [what] is said by many."
  
  wn.com/Edward_Topsell
• 
  Edwin Abbott Abbott
  Edwin Abbott Abbott (20 December 1838 – 12 October 1926),English schoolmaster and theologian, is best known as the author of the satirical novella Flatland (1884).
  Edwin Abbott Abbott was the eldest son of Edwin Abbott (1808–1882), headmaster of the Philological School, Marylebone, and his wife, Jane Abbott (1806–1882). His parents were first cousins.
  He was educated at the City of London School and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he took the highest honors in classics, mathematics and theology, and became a fellow of his college. In particular, he was 1st Smith's prizeman in 1861. In 1862 he took orders. After holding masterships at King Edward's School, Birmingham, he succeeded G. F. Mortimer as headmaster of the City of London School in 1865 at the early age of twenty-six. Here he oversaw the education of future Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. He was Hulsean lecturer in 1876.
  He retired in 1889, and devoted himself to literary and theological pursuits. Dr. Abbott's liberal inclinations in theology were prominent both in his educational views and in his books. His Shakespearian Grammar (1870) is a permanent contribution to English philology. In 1885 he published a life of Francis Bacon. His theological writings include three anonymously published religious romances - Philochristus (1891), where he tried to raise interest in Gospels reading, Onesimus (1882), and Silanus the Christian (1908).
  
  wn.com/Edwin_Abbott_Abbott
• 
  Euripides
  Euripides (Ancient Greek: Εὐριπίδης) (ca. 480 – 406 BC) was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived complete (there has been debate about his authorship of Rhesus, largely on stylistic grounds) and there are also fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly due to mere chance and partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined — he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes and Menander.
  Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. Yet he also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of...that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg," in which "...imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates", and yet he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
  
  wn.com/Euripides
• 
  Ezekiel
  Ezekiel ( /ɨˈziːki.əl/; Hebrew: יְחֶזְקֵאל‎‎, Y'ḥez'qel, Hebrew pronunciation: [jəħezˈqel]), Arabic:حزقيال Hazqiyal, 'God will strengthen' (from חזק, ḥazaq, [ħaˈzaq], literally 'to fasten upon,' figuratively 'strong,' and אל, el, [ʔel], literally 'God', and so figuratively 'The Almighty') is the central protagonist of the Book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible.
  In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Ezekiel is acknowledged as a Hebrew prophet. In Judaism and Christianity, he is also viewed as the author of the Book of Ezekiel that reveals prophecies regarding the destruction of Jerusalem and the Millennia Temple visions, or the Third Temple.
  The author of the Book of Ezekiel shows himself as Ezekiel, the son of Buzi,[Ezekiel 1:3] born into a priesthood (Kohen) lineage of the patrilineal line of Ithamar, and resident of Anathoth. The author dates ages, prophecies and visions by making references to the lengths of time King Jehoiachin of Judah was in exile. Under the direction of Nebuchadnezzar II, Babylonian armies exiled three thousand Jews from Judah, deposing King Jehoiachin in 597 BCE. In reference to Ezekiel being in his "thirtieth year... during the fifth year of King Jehoiachin’s exile",^{[Ezekiel 1:1, 2]} it could be determined that he was born c. 622 BCE.
  
  wn.com/Ezekiel
• 
  Filippino Lippi
  Filippino Lippi (Prato, c. 1457 – April 1504) was an Italian painter working during the High Renaissance in Florence, Italy.
  Born Filippo Lippi in Prato (Tuscany), the illegitimate son of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi and Lucrezia Buti, Filippino first trained under his father. They moved to Spoleto, where Filippino served as shop adjuvant in the construction of the Cathedral there. When his father died in 1469, he completed the frescos with Storie della Vergine (Histories of the Virgin) in the cathedral. Filippino Lippi completed his apprenticeship in the workshop of Botticelli, who had been a pupil of Filippino's father. In 1472, Botticelli also took him as his companion in the Compagnia di San Luca.
  His first works greatly resemble those of Botticelli's, but with less sensitivity and subtlety. The very first ones (dating from 1475 onwards) were initially attributed to an anonymous "Amico di Sandro" ("Friend of Botticelli"). Eventually Lippi's style evolved into a more personal and effective one in the years 1480-1485. Works of the early period include: the Madonnas of Berlin, London and Washington, the Journeys of Tobia of the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, Italy, the Madonna of the Sea of Galleria dell'Accademia and the Histories of Ester.
  
  wn.com/Filippino_Lippi
• 
  Fritz Lang
  Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. His most famous films are the groundbreaking Metropolis (the world's most expensive silent film at the time of its release) and M, made before he moved to the United States, his iconic precursor to the film noir genre.
  Lang was born in Vienna as the second son of Anton Lang (1860–1940), an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Pauline "Paula" Lang née Schlesinger (1864–1920). Fritz Lang himself was baptized on 28 December 1890 at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.
  Lang's parents were of Moravian^{[citation needed]} descent and practicing Roman Catholics. His mother was born Jewish, but had converted to Catholicism when Fritz was ten. His mother took this conversion seriously and was dedicated to raising Fritz as a Catholic. Lang never had an interest in his Jewish heritage and identified himself as Catholic. Although he was not a particularly devout Catholic, he "regularly used Catholic images and themes [in] his films".
  
  wn.com/Fritz_Lang
• 
  George MacDonald
  George MacDonald (10 December 1824 – 18 September 1905) was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister.
  Known particularly for his poignant fairy tales and fantasy novels, George MacDonald inspired many authors, such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, E. Nesbit and Madeleine L'Engle. It was C. S. Lewis who wrote that he regarded MacDonald as his "master": "Picking up a copy of Phantastes one day at a train-station bookstall, I began to read. A few hours later," said Lewis, "I knew that I had crossed a great frontier." G. K. Chesterton cited The Princess and the Goblin as a book that had "made a difference to my whole existence."
  Elizabeth Yates wrote of Sir Gibbie, "It moved me the way books did when, as a child, the great gates of literature began to open and first encounters with noble thoughts and utterances were unspeakably thrilling."
  Even Mark Twain, who initially disliked MacDonald, became friends with him, and there is some evidence that Twain was influenced by MacDonald.
  
  wn.com/George_MacDonald
• 
  George Orwell
  Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism.
  Considered perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945), which together have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author. His book Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, is widely acclaimed, as are his numerous essays on politics, literature, language and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
  Orwell's influence on popular and political culture endures, and several of his neologisms, along with the term Orwellian—a byword for totalitarian or manipulative social practices—have entered the vernacular.
  
  wn.com/George_Orwell
• Graydon Parrish
  Graydon Parrish (born April 3, 1970) is a realist painter living in Austin, Texas. He is both trained in and an exponent of the atelier method which emphasizes classical painting techniques.
  Graydon Parrish was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but spent the majority of his childhood in East Texas. His parents, collectors of American and European nineteenth-century art, exposed him to painting at a young age and influenced his choice to pursue an academic figurative style.
  Parrish attended the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and graduated in 1988. Unable to find further classical art training, he learned of the newly formed New York Academy of Art in the summer of that year created by Andy Warhol and Stuart Pivar. There, Parrish joined other students who have become leading figures in the classical art revival, including Jacob Collins, founder of the Grand Central Academy of Art where Parrish is now an instructor. At the New York Academy, Parrish met his mentor Michael Aviano, a student himself of illustrator and muralist Frank J. Reilly. Since then Parrish has remodeled color theories by Albert Munsell and Josef Albers to fit traditional painting methods. In some ways, he and his colleagues share the reformist attitude of the Stuckist movement in England and are likewise often at odds with mainstream critical taste.
  
  wn.com/Graydon_Parrish
• 
  Herman Melville
  Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick. His first three books gained much contemporary attention (the first, Typee, becoming a bestseller), and after a fast-blooming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the "Melville Revival" in the early 20th century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick, which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world literature. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America.
  Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, the third of eight children of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. After her husband Allan died (& between 1832 & 1834), Maria added an "e" to the family surname — seemingly at the behest of Melville's brother Gansevoort. Part of a well-established and colorful Boston family, Melville's father spent a good deal of time abroad as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods. The author's paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, an honored participant of the Boston Tea Party who refused to change the style of his clothing or manners to fit the times, was depicted in Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem "The Last Leaf". Herman visited him in Boston, and his father turned to him in his frequent times of financial need.
  
  wn.com/Herman_Melville
• 
  Ingmar Bergman
  Ernst Ingmar Bergman (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈɪŋmar ˈbærjman] ( listen); 14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. Described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera," he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and influential film directors of all time.
  He directed over sixty films and documentaries for cinematic release and for television, most of which he also wrote. He also directed over one hundred and seventy plays. Among his company of actors were Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow. Most of his films were set in the landscape of Sweden. His major subjects were death, illness, faith, betrayal, and insanity.
  Bergman was active for more than six decades. In 1976 his career was seriously threatened as the result of a botched criminal investigation for alleged income tax evasion. Outraged, Bergman suspended a number of pending productions, closed his studios, and went into self-imposed exile in Germany for eight years.
  
  wn.com/Ingmar_Bergman
• 
  Jack London
  John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life".^{[citation needed]} He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.
  London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel, The Iron Heel and his non-fiction exposé, The People of the Abyss.
  Jack London's mother, Flora Wellman, was the fifth and youngest child of Pennsylvania Canal builder Marshall Wellman and his first wife, Eleanor Garrett Jones. Marshall Wellman was a great-great-great-grandson of Puritan Thomas Wellman. Flora left Ohio and moved to the Pacific coast when her father remarried after her mother died. In San Francisco, Flora worked as a music teacher and spiritualist claiming to channel the spirit of an Indian chief.
  
  wn.com/Jack_London
• 
  James Cameron
  James Francis Cameron (born August 16, 1954) is a Canadian film director, film producer, deep-sea explorer, screenwriter, visual artist and editor. His writing and directing work includes Piranha II: The Spawning (1981), The Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), True Lies (1994), Titanic (1997), Dark Angel (2000–02), and Avatar (2009). In the time between making Titanic and Avatar, Cameron spent several years creating many documentary films (specifically underwater documentaries) and co-developed the digital 3D Fusion Camera System. Described by a biographer as part-scientist and part-artist, Cameron has also contributed to underwater filming and remote vehicle technologies. On March 26, 2012, Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean, in the Deepsea Challenger submersible.
  He has been nominated for six Academy Awards overall and won three for Titanic. In total, Cameron's directorial efforts have grossed approximately US$2 billion in North America and US$6 billion worldwide. Without adjusting for inflation, Cameron's Titanic and Avatar are the two highest-grossing films of all time at $2.16 billion and $2.78 billion respectively. In March 2011 he was named Hollywood's top earner by Vanity Fair, with estimated 2010 earnings of $257 million.
  
  wn.com/James_Cameron
• 
  John Bunyan
  John Bunyan (28 November 1628 – 31 August 1688) was an English Christian writer and preacher, who is well-known for his book The Pilgrim's Progress. Though he was a Reformed Baptist, he is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on August 30th, and on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (US) on August 29th.
  John Bunyan was born in 1628 to Thomas and Margaret Bunyan in Bunyan's End in the parish of Elstow, Bedfordshire, England. Bunyan's End was located approximately half way between the hamlet of Harrowden (one mile southeast of Bedford) and Elstow's High Street. He is recorded in the Elstow parish register as having been baptised John Bunyan, on 30 November 1628.
  On 23 May 1627, Thomas married his first wife, Margaret Bentley. Like Thomas, she was from Elstow and she was also born in 1603. In 1628, Margaret's sister, Rose Bentley, married Thomas' half-brother Edward Bunyan. They were ordinary villagers, with Thomas earning a living as a chapman but he may also have been a brazier - one who made and/or mended kettles and pots. Bunyan wrote of his modest origins, "My descent was of a low and inconsiderable generation, my father's house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families of the land".
  
  wn.com/John_Bunyan
• 
  John Irving
  John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt, Jr.; March 2, 1942) is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
  Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. Some of Irving's novels, such as The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, have been bestsellers. Five of his novels have been adapted to film. Several of Irving's books (Garp, Meany, A Widow for One Year) and short stories have been set in and around Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999 for his script The Cider House Rules.
  Irving was born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Helen Frances (née Winslow) and John Wallace Blunt, Sr., a writer and executive recruiter. Irving grew up in Exeter, as the stepson of an Exeter faculty member, Colin F.N. Irving (1941), and nephew of another, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell (1929). Irving was in the Exeter wrestling program both as a student athlete and as an assistant coach, and wrestling features prominently in his books, stories and life. Irving's biological father, whom he never met, had been a pilot in the Army Air Forces and during World War II was shot down over Burma in July 1943, but survived (an incident incorporated into the novel The Cider House Rules). Irving did not find out about his father's heroism until 1981.
  
  wn.com/John_Irving
• 
  John Ray
  John Ray (29 November 1627 – 17 January 1705) was an English naturalist, sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', after "having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him".
  He published important works on botany, zoology, and natural theology. His classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum, was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived, either/or type system, and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation. Thus he advanced scientific empiricism against the deductive rationalism of the scholastics. He was the first to give a biological definition of the term species.
  
  wn.com/John_Ray
• 
  John Steinbeck
  John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). He was an author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and five collections of short stories; Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
  John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck, Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, had shortened the family name to Steinbeck when he immigrated to the United States. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is still today named "Großsteinbeck."
  His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton, a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion of reading and writing. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church. Steinbeck lived in a small rural town that was essentially a frontier settlement, set amid some of the world's most fertile land. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels ranch. He became aware of the harsher aspects of migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in such works as Of Mice and Men. He also explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms.
  
  wn.com/John_Steinbeck
• 
  Jonathan Swift
  Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irishsatirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.
  He is remembered for works such as Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language, and is less well known for his poetry. Swift originally published all of his works under pseudonyms—such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M.B. Drapier—or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of two styles of satire: the Horatian and Juvenalian styles.
  Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. He was the second child and only son of Jonathan Swift (1640-1667) and his wife Abigail Erick (or Herrick), of Frisby-on-the-Wreake. His father, a native of Goodrich, Herefordshire, accompanied his brothers to Ireland to seek their fortunes in law after their Royalist father's estate was brought to ruin during the English Civil War. Swift's father died at Dublin before he was born, and his mother returned to England. He was left in the care of his influential uncle, Godwin, a close friend and confidante of Sir John Temple, whose son later employed Swift as his secretary.
  
  wn.com/Jonathan_Swift
• 
  Jorge Luis Borges
  Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986), known as Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈxorxe ˈlwis ˈβorxes]), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, animals, fictional writers, religion and God. His works have contributed to the genre of science fiction as well as the genre of magic realism, a genre that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century. In fact, critic Angel Flores, the first to use the term, set the beginning of this movement with Borges's Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy) (1935). Scholars have also suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.
  
  wn.com/Jorge_Luis_Borges
• 
  Joseph Addison
  Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. He was a man of letters, eldest son of Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine.
  Addison was born in Milston, Wiltshire, but soon after his birth his father, Lancelot Addison, was appointed Dean of Lichfield and the Addison family moved into the cathedral close. He was educated at Charterhouse School, where he first met Richard Steele, and at The Queen's College, Oxford. He excelled in classics, being specially noted for his Latin verse, and became a Fellow of Magdalen College. In 1693, he addressed a poem to John Dryden, and his first major work, a book of the lives of English poets, was published in 1694. His translation of Virgil's Georgics was published the same year. Dryden, Lord Somers and Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax took an interest in Addison's work and obtained for him a pension of £300 to enable him travel to Europe with a view to diplomatic employment, all the time writing and studying politics. While in Switzerland in 1702, he heard of the death of William III, an event which lost him his pension, as his influential contacts, Halifax and Somers, had lost their employment with the Crown.
  
  wn.com/Joseph_Addison
• Koushun Takami
  Koushun Takami (高見 広春, Takami Kōshun^?, born January 10, 1969) is a Japanese author and journalist. Best known for his 1999 novel Battle Royale, which was later adapted into two live-action films, directed by Kinji Fukasaku, and three manga series.
  Takami was born Koji Takami (高見宏治, Takami Kōji^?) on January 10, 1969 in Amagasaki, Hyōgo Prefecture near Osaka and grew up in the Kagawa Prefecture of Shikoku. After graduating from Osaka University with a degree in literature, he dropped out of Nihon University's liberal arts correspondence course program. From 1991 to 1996, he worked for the news company Shikoku Shimbun, reporting on various fields including politics, police reports, and economics.
  Battle Royale was completed after Takami left the news company. It was rejected in the final round of the 1997 literary competition Japan Grand Prix Horror Novel, due to its controversial content depicting Junior High School children forced to kill one another. When finally published in April 1999, it went on to become a bestseller, and only a year later was made into both a manga and a feature film.
  
  wn.com/Koushun_Takami
• 
  Laurent de La Hyre
  Laurent de La Hyre (February 27, 1606 – December 28, 1656) was a French Baroque painter, born in Paris.
  La Hyre was greatly influenced by the work of Italian artists who came to Paris. He became a pupil of Georges Lallemand and studied the works of Primaticcio at Fontainebleau, but never visited Italy. La Hyre's captivating use of color and delicately posed figures are a trademark of his early, painteresque style. He was an innovative artist who used his superior skills as a storyteller to portray rarely depicted subjects. La Hyre is associated with the transitional period before the introduction of the French Baroque by Simon Vouet.
  His picture of Pope Nicholas V opening the crypt in which he discovers the corpse of St. Francis of Assisi standing (located at the Louvre) was executed in 1630 for the Capuchin friars of the Marais; its gravity and sobriety seems to have been influential for the next generation of French painters, particularly Eustache Le Sueur. The Louvre contains eight other works, and paintings by La Hyre are in the museums of Strasburg, Rouen and Le Mans.
  
  wn.com/Laurent_de_La_Hyre
• 
  Livy
  Titus Livius Patavinus (59 BC – AD 17) — known as Livy in English — was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people. Ab Urbe Condita Libri, "Books from the Foundation of the City," covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome well before the traditional foundation in 753 BC through the reign of Augustus in Livy's own time. He was on familiar terms with the Julio-Claudian family, advising Augustus's grandnephew, the future emperor Claudius, as a young man not long before 14 AD in a letter to take up the writing of history. Livy and Augustus's wife, Livia, were from the same clan in different locations, although not related by blood.
  Livy was born as Titus Livius in Patavium in northern Italy, now modern Padua. There is a debate about the year of Titus Livius' birth, 64 BC or more likely 59 BC. At the time of Livy’s birth, his home city of Patavium was the second wealthiest city in the Italian peninsula. Patavium was a part of the province of Cisalpine Gaul at the time. In his works, Livy often expressed his deep affection and pride for Patavium, and the city was well known for its conservative values in morality and politics.
  
  wn.com/Livy
• 
  Martianus Capella
  Martianus Minneus Felix Capella was a pagan writer of Late Antiquity, one of the earliest developers of the system of the seven liberal arts that structured early medieval education. According to Cassiodorus, he was a native of Madaura—which had been the native city of Apuleius—in the Roman province of Africa (now Souk Ahras, Algeria), and he appears to have practiced as a jurist at Carthage.
  The lunar crater Capella is named after him.
  Martianus was active during the fifth century, composing his one famous book, De nuptiis—fundamental in the history of education, the history of rhetoric and the history of science—after the sack of Rome by Alaric I in 410, which he mentions, but apparently before the conquest of North Africa by the Vandals in 429. As early as the middle of the sixth century, Securus Memor Felix, a professor of rhetoric, received the text in Rome, for his personal subscription at the end of Book I (or Book II in many manuscripts) records that he was working "from most corrupt exemplars".
  
  wn.com/Martianus_Capella
• Michel Foucault
  Michel Foucault (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl fuko]), born Paul-Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and lectured at the University at Buffalo and the University of California, Berkeley.
  Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, social anthropology of medicine, the human sciences and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. His writings on power, knowledge, and discourse have been widely influential in academic circles.
  In the 1960s, he was associated with structuralism, a theoretical movement in social anthropology from which he later distanced himself. He also rejected the poststructuralist and postmodernist labels later attributed to him, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity rooted in Immanuel Kant. His project was particularly influenced by Nietzsche, his "genealogy of knowledge" being a direct allusion to Nietzsche's "genealogy of morality". In a late interview he definitively stated: "I am a Nietzschean."
  
  wn.com/Michel_Foucault
• Mohsin Hamid
  Mohsin Hamid (born 1971) is a Pakistani author best known for his novels Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007).
  Hamid spent part of his childhood in the United States, where he stayed from the age of 3 to 9 while his father, a university professor, was enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford University. He then moved with his family back to Lahore, Pakistan and attended the Lahore American School.
  At the age of 18, Hamid returned to the United States to continue his education. He graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1993, having studied under such writers as Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. Hamid wrote the first draft of his first novel for a fiction workshop taught by Morrison. He returned to Pakistan after college to continue working on it.
  Hamid then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1997. Finding corporate law boring, he repaid his student loans by working for several years as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in New York City. He was allowed to take three months off each year to write, and he used this time to complete his first novel Moth Smoke.
  
  wn.com/Mohsin_Hamid
• 
  Naguib Mahfouz
  Naguib Mahfouz (Arabic: نجيب محفوظ‎ Nagīb Maḥfūẓ, IPA: [næˈɡiːb mɑħˈfuːzˤ]; 11 December 1911 – 30 August 2006) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism. He published over 50 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films.
  Born to a lower middle-class Muslim family in the Gamaleyya quarter of Cairo, Mahfouz was named after Professor Naguib Pasha Mahfouz (1882–1974), the renowned Coptic physician who delivered him. Mahfouz was the seventh and the youngest child in a family that had five boys and two girls. The family lived in two popular districts of the town, in el-Gamaleyya, from where they moved in 1924 to el-Abbaseyya, then a new Cairo suburb; both provided the backdrop for many of Mahfouz's writings. His father, whom Mahfouz described as having been "old-fashioned", was a civil servant, and Mahfouz eventually followed in his footsteps. In his childhood Mahfouz read extensively. His mother often took him to museums and Egyptian history later became a major theme in many of his books.
  
  wn.com/Naguib_Mahfouz
• 
  Nathaniel Hawthorne
  Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer.
  Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a "w" to make his name "Hawthorne" in order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children.
  
  wn.com/Nathaniel_Hawthorne
• 
  Northrop Frye
  Herman Northrop Frye, CC FRSC (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991) was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
  Frye gained international fame with his first book, Fearful Symmetry (1947), which led to the reinterpretation of the poetry of William Blake. His lasting reputation rests principally on the theory of literary criticism that he developed in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), one of the most important works of literary theory published in the twentieth century. American critic Harold Bloom commented at the time of its publication that Anatomy established Frye as "the foremost living student of Western literature." Frye's contributions to cultural and social criticism spanned a long career during which he earned widespread recognition and received many honours.
  Frye was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec but raised in Moncton, New Brunswick. He was the third child of Herman Edward Frye and Catherine Maud Howard. His much older brother, Howard, died in World War 1 and he had a sister, Vera. Frye went to Toronto to compete in a national typing contest in 1929. He studied for his undergraduate degree at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. He then studied theology at Emmanuel College (which, like Victoria College, is a constituent part of the University of Toronto). After a brief stint as a student minister in Saskatchewan, he was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada. He then studied at Merton College, Oxford, before returning to Victoria College, where he spent the remainder of his professional career.
  
  wn.com/Northrop_Frye
• 
  Philip Pullman
  Philip Pullman CBE, FRSL (born 19 October 1946) is an English writer from Norwich. He is the best-selling author of several books, most notably his trilogy of fantasy novels, His Dark Materials, and his fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. The first book of His Dark Materials has been turned into the film The Golden Compass and the first two books from his Sally Lockhart series as well as his children's novel I was a Rat! or The Scarlet Slippers have been adapted for television.
  In 2008, The Times named Pullman in its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
  Philip Pullman was born in Norwich, England, the son of Audrey Evelyn Pullman (née Merrifield) and Royal Air Force pilot Alfred Outram Pullman. The family travelled with his father's job, including to Southern Rhodesia where he spent time at school.
  
  wn.com/Philip_Pullman
• 
  Plato
  Plato ( /ˈpleɪtoʊ/; Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "broad"; 424/423 BC – 348/347 BC) was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. In the words of A. N. Whitehead:
  The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
  Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts. Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics.
  
  wn.com/Plato
• Prudentius
  Aurelius Prudentius Clemens was a Roman Christian poet, born in the Roman province of Tarraconensis (now Northern Spain) in 348. He probably died in Spain, as well, some time after 405, possibly around 413. The place of his birth is uncertain, but it may have been Caesaraugusta Saragossa, Tarraco Tarragona, or Calagurris Calahorra.
  Prudentius practised law with some success, and was twice provincial governor, perhaps in his native country, before the emperor Theodosius I summoned him to court. Towards the end of his life (possibly around 392) Prudentius retired from public life to become an ascetic, fasting until evening and abstaining entirely from animal food. Prudentius later collected the Christian poems written during this period and added a preface, which he himself dated 405.
  The poetry of Prudentius is influenced by early Christian authors, such as Tertullian and St. Ambrose, as well as the Bible and the acts of the martyrs. His hymn Da, puer, plectrum (including "Corde natus ex parentis": "Of the Father's Love Begotten") and the hymn for Epiphany O sola magnarum urbium ("Earth Has Many a Noble City"), both from the Cathemerinon, are still in use today. The allegorical Psychomachia, however, is his most influential work and became the inspiration and wellspring of medieval allegorical literature.
  
  wn.com/Prudentius
• 
  Qu Yuan
  Qu Yuan (Chinese: 屈原; pinyin: Qū Yuán; Wade–Giles: Ch'ü Yüan) (339 BCE – 278 BCE) was a Chinese poet who lived during the Warring States Period in ancient China. He is famous for his contributions to the poetry collection known as the Chu-ci (also known as Songs of the South or Songs of Chu). The Chuci together with the Shi Jing are the two great collections of ancient Chinese verse.
  Historical details about Qu Yuan's life are few, and his authorship of many Chu-ci poems have been questioned at length. However, he is widely accepted to have written Li Sao, the most well-known of the Chu-ci poems, and possibly several others in the collection, as well. The first known reference to Qu Yuan appears in a poem written in 174 BCE by Jia Yi, an official from Luoyang who was slandered by jealous officials and banished to Changsha by Emperor Wen of Han. While traveling, he wrote a poem describing the similar fate of a previous "Qu Yuan." Eighty years later, the first known biography of Qu Yuan's life appeared in Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, though it contains a number of contradictory details.
  
  wn.com/Qu_Yuan
• Rex Warner
  Rex Warner (9 March 1905 – 24 June 1986) was an English classicist, writer and translator. He is now probably best remembered for The Aerodrome (1941), an allegorical novel whose young hero is faced with the disintegration of his certainties about his loved ones and with a choice between the earthy, animalistic life of his home village and the pure, efficient, emotionally detached life of an airman.
  He was born Reginald Ernest Warner in Birmingham, England and brought up mainly in Gloucestershire, where his father was a clergyman. He was educated at St. George’s School in Harpenden, and at Wadham College, Oxford, where he associated with W. H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis, and published in Oxford Poetry. After graduating in 1928, he spent time teaching, some of it in Egypt.
  His first collection, Poems, appeared in 1937. He was a contributor to Left Review, and his first novel, The Wild Goose Chase, is in part a dystopian fantasy of a tyrannical government which is overthrown in a heroic revolution. His second novel, The Professor, published around the time of the Nazi Anschluss, is the story of a liberal academic whose compromises with a repressive government lead eventually to his arrest, imprisonment and execution "while attempting to escape"; contemporary reviewers saw parallels with the Austrian leaders Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg. After Why Was I Killed? (1943), Warner abandoned contemporary allegory in favour of historical novels about Ancient Greece and Rome, including Imperial Caesar for which he was awarded the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
  
  wn.com/Rex_Warner
• Roger Hargreaves
  Charles Roger Hargreaves (9 May 1935 – 11 September 1988) was an English author and illustrator of children's books, best remembered for the Mr. Men and Little Miss series, intended for very young readers. The simple and humorous stories, with brightly-coloured, boldly drawn illustrations, have been part of popular culture since 1971, with sales of over 85 million copies worldwide in 20 languages.
  Hargreaves was born in a private hospital at 201 Bath Road, Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire to Alfred Reginald and Ethel Mary Hargreaves. He grew up in High Lees at 703 Halifax Road, Cleckheaton, outside of which there now is a commemorative plaque.
  Hargreaves spent a year working in his father's laundry and dry-cleaning business before gaining employment in advertising. His original ambition was to be a cartoonist, and in 1971, while working as the creative director at a London firm, he wrote the first Mr. Men book, Mr. Tickle. Initially he had difficulty finding a publisher, but once he did the books became an instant success, selling over one million copies within three years. In 1974 the books spawned a BBC animated television series, narrated by Arthur Lowe. A second series the following year saw newer titles transmitted in double bill format with those from the first series.
  
  wn.com/Roger_Hargreaves
• 
  Sandro Botticelli
  Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli (Italian pronunciation: [ˈsandro bottiˈtʃɛlli]; c. 1445 – May 17, 1510) was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine school under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later as a "golden age", a thought, suitably enough, he expressed at the head of his Vita of Botticelli. Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting. Among his best known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera.
  
  
  There are very few details of Botticelli's life, but it is known that he became an apprentice when he was about fourteen years old, which would indicate that he received a fuller education than other Renaissance artists. He was born in the city of Florence in a house in the Via Nuova, Borg'Ognissanti. Vasari reported that he was initially trained as a goldsmith by his brother Antonio. Probably by 1462 he was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi; many of his early works have been attributed to the elder master, and attributions continue to be uncertain. Influenced also by the monumentality of Masaccio's painting, it was from Lippi that Botticelli learned a more intimate and detailed manner. As recently discovered, during this time, Botticelli could have traveled to Hungary, participating in the creation of a fresco in Esztergom, ordered in the workshop of Filippo Lippi by János Vitéz, then archbishop of Hungary.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Sandro_Botticelli
• Theagenes of Rhegium
  Theagenes of Rhegium (Θεαγένης ὁ Ῥηγῖνος) was a Greek literary critic of the 6th century BC. He is noted for having defended the mythology of Homer, from more rationalist attacks. In so doing he became an early proponent of the allegorical method of reading texts.
  All that he wrote is lost to contemporary history.Information about his life has been available in the existing documents written by his contemporaries,and of those of future generations,these having felt his influence.
  Au vie siècle, Théagène de Rhegium a déjà engagé, sur les mythes d'Homère, ce travail d'exégèse allégorique qui, substituant aux données mêmes du récit des équivalents symboliques, en effectue la transposition dans le vocabulaire de la cosmologie, de la physique, de la morale ou de la métaphysique. Ainsi le mythe se trouve purifié des absurdités, des invraisemblances ou des immoralités qui faisaient le scandale de la raison, mais c'est au prix d'un renoncement à ce qu'il est en lui-même, en refusant de le prendre à la lettre et en lui faisant dire bien autre chose que ce qu'il entend tout bonnement raconter. Ce type d'herméneutique trouvera dans le stoïcisme et le néoplatonisme son expression la plus spectaculaire
  
  wn.com/Theagenes_of_Rhegium
• 
  Titian
  Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576) known in English as Titian ( /ˈtɪʃən/) was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno (in Veneto), in the Republic of Venice. During his lifetime he was often called da Cadore, taken from the place of his birth.
  Recognized by his contemporaries as "The Sun Amidst Small Stars" (recalling the famous final line of Dante's Paradiso), Titian was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of color, would exercise a profound influence not only on painters of the Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of Western art.
  During the course of his long life, Titian's artistic manner changed drastically but he retained a lifelong interest in color. Although his mature works may not contain the vivid, luminous tints of his early pieces, their loose brushwork and subtlety of polychromatic modulations are without precedent in the history of Western art.
  
  wn.com/Titian
• 
  William Faulkner
  William Cuthbert Faulkner (born Falkner, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career. He is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories, many of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, where he spent most of his childhood, and Holly Springs/Marshall County.
  Faulkner is one of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
  
  wn.com/William_Faulkner
• 
  William Golding
  Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. He was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth.
  In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
  William Golding was born in his grandmother's house, 47 Mountwise, Newquay, Cornwall and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up at his family home in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father (Alec Golding) was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement). Alec Golding was a socialist with a strong commitment to scientific rationalism, and the young Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended the school where his father taught. His mother, Mildred (Curnroe), kept house at 29, The Green, Marlborough, and supported the moderate campaigners for female suffrage. In 1930 Golding went to Oxford University as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English Literature.
  
  wn.com/William_Golding
• William Langland
  William Langland (ca. 1332 – ca. 1386) is the conjectured author of the 14th-century English dream-vision Piers Plowman.
  The attribution of Piers to Langland rests principally on the evidence of a manuscript held at Trinity College, Dublin (MS 212). This directly ascribes 'Perys Ploughman' to one 'Willielmi de Langlond', son of 'Stacy de Rokayle, who died in Shipton-under-Wychwood, a tenant of the Lord Spenser in the county of Oxfordshire'. Other manuscripts also name the author as 'Robert or William langland', or 'Wilhelmus W.' (most likely shorthand for 'William of Wychwood'). The poem itself also seems to point towards Langland's authorship. At one stage the narrator remarks: 'I have lyved in londe...my name is longe wille' (B.XV.152). This can be taken as a coded reference to the poet's name, in the style of much late-medieval literature (see, for instance, Villon's acrostics in Le Testament). Although the evidence may appear slender, Langland's authorship has been widely accepted by commentators since the 1920s. It is not, however, entirely beyond dispute, as recent work by Stella Pates and C. David Benson has demonstrated.
  
  wn.com/William_Langland

• timeline:
• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
• 2001

• timeline:
• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
• 2001