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Born in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, in July 1899, Ernest Hemingway was a novelist, short story writer, and journalist, whose robust, efficient style brought him great success, both commercially and critically, and influenced generations of writers to come. His life was as adventurous and colorful as his literary works. In World War I, Hemingway enlisted as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross and was severely wounded in action. Post-war, he became a journalist and published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926.
Hemingway later covered the Spanish Civil War as a foreign correspondent, and in World War II documented the Normandy landings firsthand. He won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hemingway was also a voracious reader, with his personal library containing over nine thousand volumes. If you've ever been curious as to what the top writers read, below we've gathered just a few highlights from the master's own selection.
Virginia Woolf's inventive, experimental writing, in particular her pioneering stream of consciousness style, made her one of the most important writers of the 20th century. She was born in 1882 into something of a celebrity family—her father was well known in literary circles, her mother a recognized beauty who moved in high society.
Although Woolf married and earnestly loved a man (Leonard Woolf), she had many affairs with women and was part of the progressive Bloomsbury Group. Woolf suffered several episodes of depression and took her own life in 1941.
Born in Dublin in 1882, Irish author and poet James Joyce is one of the most studied writers of all time. His avant-garde classic, Ulysses (published in 1922) remains hotly debated.
To many, it's a deeply layered work of genius. For others, Ulysses and its counterpart, Finnegans Wake (1939), are deliberately impenetrable and unreadable novels. Whichever camp you stand in, Joyce's major works continue to inspire and confound in equal measure.
William Somerset Maugham's life reads like a novel itself. He was born in France in 1874 but schooled in England from the age of ten before further studies at university in Germany. Although he successfully qualified as a doctor, Maugham never practiced medicine, instead turning to the pen for a living.
His early success came as a playwright, but novels such as Liza of Lambeth (1897) and Of Human Bondage (1915), which chronicle the lives of the working classes in London, further extended his fame. During World War I, Maugham worked in Switzerland as an agent for the British Secret Service. Afterwards, his French home became a hub for influential creatives and politicians.
Of the three literary Brontë sisters—Emily, Anne, and Charlotte—Emily was the quietest, the most reserved, and the sibling about whom we know the least. She was a poet and author but only produced one novel—the dark and passionate Wuthering Heights, published in 1847.
Timid and somewhat reclusive, it seems Brontë channelled an extraordinary inner power and emotion into her writing. She loved to journey across her beloved Yorkshire moors alone and died of consumption in 1848, at the age of just thirty.
French writer Alexandre Dumas' swashbuckling tales, so beloved of many, took inspiration from the incredible real-life adventures of his father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas. A Haitian soldier, Thomas was the first person of color to become a general in the French army (where he earned the nickname, "Black Devil").
Alexandre's literary success came early, and of his many action-packed novels, two in particular, The Three Musketeers (1844), and The Count of Monte Cristo (1846), have become world-famous, adapted numerous times for television and film.
Poet and playwright, Thomas Stearns Eliot, who lived from 1888 until 1965, was something of an enigma. A deeply religious man who came to view his life as a spiritual quest, his peers often described him as wearing a mask that obscured his rich and seemingly never still inner life.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he moved to England in 1914, where he married, worked, and lived for the rest of his life. A winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Eliot's 1922 poem, The Wasteland, has come to be viewed as one of the most significant works of 20th-century literature.
The bare facts tell us that William Shakespeare was born in the beautiful town of Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in April 1564, that he died in that same place in April 1616, and that in-between he wrote plays, poems, and sonnets that became wildly popular.
His impact and legacy on English literature, and the English language itself, is incalculable. The structures, plots, and events he invented for plays such as Romeo and Juliet have been adapted, told, and retold countless times. That Shakespeare's tales continue to be enjoyed, four hundred years after his passing, pays tribute to his astonishing talent.
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