French poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France.
In France, Hugo's literary reputation rests primarily on his poetic and dramatic output and only secondarily on his novels. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Legende des siecles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. In the English-speaking world his best-known works are the novels Les Miserables and Notre-Dame de Paris (sometimes translated into English as The Hunchback of ...

Scottish writer, most famous for The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the classics of children's literature. ...

Along with Fyodor Dostoevsky, one of the giants of 19th Century Russian literature, and widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina represent in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life and attitudes, the peak of realist fiction. Tolstoy's further talents as essayist, dramatist, and educational reformer made him the most influential member of the aristocratic Tolstoy ...

Naturalist, son of a physician, and grandson of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and of Josiah Wedgwood, the famous potter, was born and was at school at Shrewsbury. In 1825 he went to Edinburgh to study medicine, but was more taken up with marine zoology than with the regular curriculum. After two years he proceeded to Cambridge, where he graduated in 1831, continuing, however, his independent studies in natural history. In the same year came the opportunity of his life, his appointment to accompany the Beagle as naturalist on a survey of South America. To this voyage, which extended over nearly five years, he attributed the first real training of his mind, and after his return ...