Authors
260 authors in the canon

Aeschylus
c. 525 BCE – c. 456 BCE (aged 69)
Ancient Greek

Aimé Césaire
1913 – 2008 (aged 95)
Martinican

Albert Camus
1913 – 1960 (aged 47)
French-Algerian

Aldous Huxley
1894 – 1963 (aged 69)
English

Alexander Pope
1688 – 1744 (aged 56)
English

Alexander Pushkin
1799 – 1837 (aged 38)
Russian

Alexandre Dumas
1802 – 1870 (aged 68)
French

Alfred Döblin
1878 – 1957 (aged 79)
German

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1809 – 1892 (aged 83)
English

Allen Ginsberg
1926 – 1997 (aged 71)
American

Andrew Marvell
1621 – 1678 (aged 57)
English

Anna Akhmatova
1889 – 1966 (aged 77)
Russian

Anne Frank
1929 – 1945 (aged 16)
German-Dutch

Anton Chekhov
1860 – 1904 (aged 44)
Russian

Aristophanes
c. 446 BCE – c. 386 BCE (aged 60)
Ancient Greek

Aristotle
c. 384 BCE – c. 322 BCE (aged 62)
Ancient Greek

Arthur Koestler
1905 – 1983 (aged 78)
Hungarian-British

Arthur Miller
1915 – 2005 (aged 90)
American

Arthur Schopenhauer
1788 – 1860 (aged 72)
German

August Strindberg
1849 – 1912 (aged 63)
Swedish

Bertolt Brecht
1898 – 1956 (aged 58)
German

Blaise Pascal
1623 – 1662 (aged 39)
French

Boethius
477 – 524 (aged 47)
Roman

Boris Pasternak
1890 – 1960 (aged 70)
Russian

Bruno Schulz
1892 – 1942 (aged 50)
Polish

C.P. Cavafy
1863 – 1933 (aged 70)
Greek

Cao Xueqin
1715 – 1763 (aged 48)
Chinese

Carson McCullers
1917 – 1967 (aged 50)
American

Charles Baudelaire
1821 – 1867 (aged 46)
French

Charles Darwin
1809 – 1882 (aged 73)
English

Charles Dickens
1812 – 1870 (aged 58)
English

Charlotte Brontë
1816 – 1855 (aged 39)
English

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1860 – 1935 (aged 75)
American

Chinua Achebe
1930 – 2013 (aged 83)
Nigerian

Christopher Marlowe
1564 – 1593 (aged 29)
English

Clarice Lispector
1920 – 1977 (aged 57)
Brazilian

Cormac McCarthy
1933 – 2023 (aged 90)
American

Czesław Miłosz
1911 – 2004 (aged 93)
Polish

D.H. Lawrence
1885 – 1930 (aged 45)
English

Daniel Defoe
1660 – 1731 (aged 71)
English

Danilo Kiš
1935 – 1989 (aged 54)
Serbian

Dante Alighieri
1265 – 1321 (aged 56)
Italian

David Foster Wallace
1962 – 2008 (aged 46)
American

Derek Walcott
1930 – 2017 (aged 87)
Saint Lucian

Dino Buzzati
1906 – 1972 (aged 66)
Italian

Djuna Barnes
1892 – 1982 (aged 90)
American

Don DeLillo
b. 1936 (age 90)
American

Dylan Thomas
1914 – 1953 (aged 39)
Welsh

E.M. Forster
1879 – 1970 (aged 91)
English

Edgar Allan Poe
1809 – 1849 (aged 40)
American

Edmund Spenser
1552 – 1599 (aged 47)
English

Edward Albee
1928 – 2016 (aged 88)
American

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806 – 1861 (aged 55)
English

Elizabeth Bishop
1911 – 1979 (aged 68)
American

Emily Brontë
1818 – 1848 (aged 30)
English

Emily Dickinson
1830 – 1886 (aged 56)
American

Epictetus
50 – 135 (aged 85)
Ancient Greek

Erich Maria Remarque
1898 – 1970 (aged 72)
German

Ernest Hemingway
1899 – 1961 (aged 62)
American

Eugène Ionesco
1909 – 1994 (aged 85)
Romanian-French

Eugene O'Neill
1888 – 1953 (aged 65)
American

Euripides
c. 480 BCE – c. 406 BCE (aged 74)
Ancient Greek

Evelyn Waugh
1903 – 1966 (aged 63)
English

Ezra Pound
1885 – 1972 (aged 87)
American

F. Scott Fitzgerald
1896 – 1940 (aged 44)
American

Federico García Lorca
1898 – 1936 (aged 38)
Spanish

Ferdowsi
940 – 1020 (aged 80)
Persian

Fernando Pessoa
1888 – 1935 (aged 47)
Portuguese

Flannery O'Connor
1925 – 1964 (aged 39)
American

Ford Madox Ford
1873 – 1939 (aged 66)
English

François Rabelais
1494 – 1553 (aged 59)
French

Franz Kafka
1883 – 1924 (aged 41)
Czech

Friedrich Engels
1820 – 1895 (aged 75)
German

Friedrich Nietzsche
1844 – 1900 (aged 56)
German

Fyodor Dostoevsky
1821 – 1881 (aged 60)
Russian

Gabriel García Márquez
1927 – 2014 (aged 87)
Colombian

Geoffrey Chaucer
1343 – 1400 (aged 57)
English

George Eliot
1819 – 1880 (aged 61)
English

George Orwell
1903 – 1950 (aged 47)
English

Georges Perec
1936 – 1982 (aged 46)
French

Gerard Manley Hopkins
1844 – 1889 (aged 45)
English

Giacomo Leopardi
1798 – 1837 (aged 39)
Italian

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
1896 – 1957 (aged 61)
Italian

Graham Greene
1904 – 1991 (aged 87)
English

Günter Grass
1927 – 2015 (aged 88)
German

Gustave Flaubert
1821 – 1880 (aged 59)
French

Guy de Maupassant
1850 – 1893 (aged 43)
French

H.G. Wells
1866 – 1946 (aged 80)
English

Halldór Laxness
1902 – 1998 (aged 96)
Icelandic

Hannah Arendt
1906 – 1975 (aged 69)
German-American

Haruki Murakami
b. 1949 (age 77)
Japanese

Henrik Ibsen
1828 – 1906 (aged 78)
Norwegian

Henry David Thoreau
1817 – 1862 (aged 45)
American

Henry James
1843 – 1916 (aged 73)
American

Herman Melville
1819 – 1891 (aged 72)
American

Hermann Hesse
1877 – 1962 (aged 85)
German-Swiss

Homer
c. 800 BCE – c. 701 BCE (aged 99)
Ancient Greek

Immanuel Kant
1724 – 1804 (aged 80)
German

Imre Kertész
1929 – 2016 (aged 87)
Hungarian

Iris Murdoch
1919 – 1999 (aged 80)
Irish-British

Isaac Bashevis Singer
1902 – 1991 (aged 89)
Polish-American

Italo Calvino
1923 – 1985 (aged 62)
Italian

Ivan Goncharov
1812 – 1891 (aged 79)
Russian

Ivan Turgenev
1818 – 1883 (aged 65)
Russian

J.D. Salinger
1919 – 2010 (aged 91)
American

J.M. Coetzee
b. 1940 (age 86)
South African

J.R.R. Tolkien
1892 – 1973 (aged 81)
English

Jack Kerouac
1922 – 1969 (aged 47)
American

James Baldwin
1924 – 1987 (aged 63)
American

James Joyce
1882 – 1941 (aged 59)
Irish

Jane Austen
1775 – 1817 (aged 42)
English

Jean Racine
1639 – 1699 (aged 60)
French

Jean Rhys
1890 – 1979 (aged 89)
Dominican-British

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712 – 1778 (aged 66)
Swiss

Jean-Paul Sartre
1905 – 1980 (aged 75)
French

Joan Didion
1934 – 2021 (aged 87)
American

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749 – 1832 (aged 83)
German

John Donne
1572 – 1631 (aged 59)
English

John Edward Williams
1922 – 1994 (aged 72)
American

John Keats
1795 – 1821 (aged 26)
English

John Milton
1608 – 1674 (aged 66)
English

John Steinbeck
1902 – 1968 (aged 66)
American

Jonathan Swift
1667 – 1745 (aged 78)
Irish

Jorge Luis Borges
1899 – 1986 (aged 87)
Argentine

José Saramago
1922 – 2010 (aged 88)
Portuguese

Joseph Conrad
1857 – 1924 (aged 67)
Polish-British

Joseph Heller
1923 – 1999 (aged 76)
American

Joyce Carol Oates
b. 1938 (age 88)
American

Juan Rulfo
1917 – 1986 (aged 69)
Mexican

Julio Cortázar
1914 – 1984 (aged 70)
Argentine

Karl Marx
1818 – 1883 (aged 65)
German

Kazuo Ishiguro
b. 1954 (age 72)
Japanese-British

Knut Hamsun
1859 – 1952 (aged 93)
Norwegian

Kōbō Abe
1924 – 1993 (aged 69)
Japanese

Kurt Vonnegut
1922 – 2007 (aged 85)
American

La Rochefoucauld
1613 – 1680 (aged 67)
French

Langston Hughes
1901 – 1967 (aged 66)
American

Laozi
c. 600 BCE – c. 500 BCE (aged 100)
Chinese

László Krasznahorkai
b. 1954 (age 72)
Hungarian

Laurence Sterne
1713 – 1768 (aged 55)
Irish

Leo Tolstoy
1828 – 1910 (aged 82)
Russian

Lewis Carroll
1832 – 1898 (aged 66)
English

Li Bai
701 – 762 (aged 61)
Chinese

Lord Byron
1788 – 1824 (aged 36)
English

Lorraine Hansberry
1930 – 1965 (aged 35)
American

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
1894 – 1961 (aged 67)
French

Lu Xun
1881 – 1936 (aged 55)
Chinese

Ludwig Wittgenstein
1889 – 1951 (aged 62)
Austrian-British

Luigi Pirandello
1867 – 1936 (aged 69)
Italian

Machado de Assis
1839 – 1908 (aged 69)
Brazilian

Malcolm Lowry
1909 – 1957 (aged 48)
English

Marcel Proust
1871 – 1922 (aged 51)
French

Marcus Aurelius
121 – 180 (aged 59)
Roman

Margaret Atwood
b. 1939 (age 87)
Canadian

Marguerite Duras
1914 – 1996 (aged 82)
French

Marguerite Yourcenar
1903 – 1987 (aged 84)
French-Belgian

Marilynne Robinson
b. 1943 (age 83)
American

Marina Tsvetaeva
1892 – 1941 (aged 49)
Russian

Mark Twain
1835 – 1910 (aged 75)
American

Martin Buber
1878 – 1965 (aged 87)
Austrian

Martin Luther King Jr.
1929 – 1968 (aged 39)
American

Mary Shelley
1797 – 1851 (aged 54)
English

Matsuo Bashō
1644 – 1694 (aged 50)
Japanese

Matthew Arnold
1822 – 1888 (aged 66)
English

Michel de Montaigne
1533 – 1592 (aged 59)
French

Miguel de Cervantes
1547 – 1616 (aged 69)
Spanish

Mikhail Bulgakov
1891 – 1940 (aged 49)
Russian

Mikhail Lermontov
1814 – 1841 (aged 27)
Russian

Milan Kundera
1929 – 2023 (aged 94)
Czech-French

Molière
1622 – 1673 (aged 51)
French

Murasaki Shikibu
978 – 1014 (aged 36)
Japanese

Naguib Mahfouz
1911 – 2006 (aged 95)
Egyptian

Nathaniel Hawthorne
1804 – 1864 (aged 60)
American

Natsume Sōseki
1867 – 1916 (aged 49)
Japanese

Niccolò Machiavelli
1469 – 1527 (aged 58)
Italian

Nikolai Gogol
1809 – 1852 (aged 43)
Russian

Orhan Pamuk
b. 1952 (age 74)
Turkish

Oscar Wilde
1854 – 1900 (aged 46)
Irish

Ovid
c. 43 BCE – 17 (aged 60)
Roman

Pablo Neruda
1904 – 1973 (aged 69)
Chilean

Paul Celan
1920 – 1970 (aged 50)
Romanian-French

Penelope Fitzgerald
1916 – 2000 (aged 84)
English

Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792 – 1822 (aged 30)
English

Philip Larkin
1922 – 1985 (aged 63)
English

Philip Roth
1933 – 2018 (aged 85)
American

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
1741 – 1803 (aged 62)
French

Plato
c. 428 BCE – c. 348 BCE (aged 80)
Ancient Greek

Primo Levi
1919 – 1987 (aged 68)
Italian

Rabindranath Tagore
1861 – 1941 (aged 80)
Indian

Rainer Maria Rilke
1875 – 1926 (aged 51)
Austrian

Ralph Ellison
1913 – 1994 (aged 81)
American

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803 – 1882 (aged 79)
American

Raymond Carver
1938 – 1988 (aged 50)
American

Richard Wright
1908 – 1960 (aged 52)
American

Robert Browning
1812 – 1889 (aged 77)
English

Robert Frost
1874 – 1963 (aged 89)
American

Robert Louis Stevenson
1850 – 1894 (aged 44)
Scottish

Robert Lowell
1917 – 1977 (aged 60)
American

Robert Musil
1880 – 1942 (aged 62)
Austrian

Roberto Bolaño
1953 – 2003 (aged 50)
Chilean

Rumi
1207 – 1273 (aged 66)
Persian

Saint Augustine
354 – 430 (aged 76)
North African

Salman Rushdie
b. 1947 (age 79)
Indian-British

Samuel Beckett
1906 – 1989 (aged 83)
Irish

Samuel Pepys
1633 – 1703 (aged 70)
English

Samuel Richardson
1689 – 1761 (aged 72)
English

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772 – 1834 (aged 62)
English

Sappho
c. 630 BCE – c. 570 BCE (aged 60)
Ancient Greek

Saul Bellow
1915 – 2005 (aged 90)
American

Seamus Heaney
1939 – 2013 (aged 74)
Irish

Sei Shōnagon
966 – 1025 (aged 59)
Japanese

Seneca
c. 4 BCE – 65 (aged 69)
Roman

Shirley Jackson
1916 – 1965 (aged 49)
American

Sigmund Freud
1856 – 1939 (aged 83)
Austrian

Simone de Beauvoir
1908 – 1986 (aged 78)
French

Simone Weil
1909 – 1943 (aged 34)
French

Sophocles
c. 496 BCE – c. 406 BCE (aged 90)
Ancient Greek

Søren Kierkegaard
1813 – 1855 (aged 42)
Danish

Susan Sontag
1933 – 2004 (aged 71)
American

Sylvia Plath
1932 – 1963 (aged 31)
American

T.S. Eliot
1888 – 1965 (aged 77)
American-British

Tayeb Salih
1929 – 2009 (aged 80)
Sudanese

Ted Hughes
1930 – 1998 (aged 68)
English

Tennessee Williams
1911 – 1983 (aged 72)
American

Thomas Bernhard
1931 – 1989 (aged 58)
Austrian

Thomas Gray
1716 – 1771 (aged 55)
English

Thomas Hardy
1840 – 1928 (aged 88)
English

Thomas Mann
1875 – 1955 (aged 80)
German

Thomas Paine
1737 – 1809 (aged 72)
English

Thomas Pynchon
b. 1937 (age 89)
American

Tom Stoppard
b. 1937 (age 89)
Czech-British

Tomas Tranströmer
1931 – 2015 (aged 84)
Swedish

Toni Morrison
1931 – 2019 (aged 88)
American

Truman Capote
1924 – 1984 (aged 60)
American

Umberto Eco
1932 – 2016 (aged 84)
Italian

Ursula K. Le Guin
1929 – 2018 (aged 89)
American

Victor Hugo
1802 – 1885 (aged 83)
French

Viktor Frankl
1905 – 1997 (aged 92)
Austrian

Virgil
c. 70 BCE – c. 19 BCE (aged 51)
Roman

Virginia Woolf
1882 – 1941 (aged 59)
English

Vladimir Nabokov
1899 – 1977 (aged 78)
Russian-American

Voltaire
1694 – 1778 (aged 84)
French

Vyasa
Indian

W.B. Yeats
1865 – 1939 (aged 74)
Irish

W.G. Sebald
1944 – 2001 (aged 57)
German

W.H. Auden
1907 – 1973 (aged 66)
English-American

Wallace Stevens
1879 – 1955 (aged 76)
American

Walt Whitman
1819 – 1892 (aged 73)
American

William Faulkner
1897 – 1962 (aged 65)
American

William Golding
1911 – 1993 (aged 82)
English

William James
1842 – 1910 (aged 68)
American

William Makepeace Thackeray
1811 – 1863 (aged 52)
English

William Shakespeare
1564 – 1616 (aged 52)
English

William Wordsworth
1770 – 1850 (aged 80)
English

Witold Gombrowicz
1904 – 1969 (aged 65)
Polish

Wole Soyinka
b. 1934 (age 92)
Nigerian

Yasunari Kawabata
1899 – 1972 (aged 73)
Japanese

Yukio Mishima
1925 – 1970 (aged 45)
Japanese

Zhuang Zhou
c. 369 BCE – c. 286 BCE (aged 83)
Chinese

Zora Neale Hurston
1891 – 1960 (aged 69)
American