This influential and much admired writer, christened Jean-Louis Kerouac, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. His parents were French-Canadian from Quebec and Jack, as he became known, grew up speaking French and did not properly master the English language until he was sixteen years old. By this time he had done reasonably well in High School and won a scholarship ...
Author and poet Henry David Thoreau was born into an unremarkable New England family in Massachusetts in 1817. He is undoubtedly one of the most famous Americans of the 19th century, an ardent philosopher, abolitionist, and historian. His interests were many and varied and his best known literary works, Walden and Civil Disobedience, have had a strong influence on many ...
English lyric poet and politician, Andrew Marvell was born in 1621 in East Riding, Yorkshire. His father was a vicar and the family moved to Hull when he became a lecturer at Holy Trinity Church there. Initially tutored at a Hull grammar school, Andrew Marvell, at the age of 13, went to Cambridge to study. At the height of the English Civil ...
One of the most famous and celebrated novelists in India, Munshi Premchand was born as Dhanpat Rai Srivastav 31st July 1880 in Lamahi in Northern India. He was the fourth child of a post office clerk father, Ajaib Lal and Anandi Devi. He had one surviving sister; two of his siblings died ...
Louise Glück was a contemporary American poet born April 22nd 1943 in New York City to a Hungarian immigrant father, Daniel, an inventor. She was brought up in Long Island and currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her interest in writing poetry surfaced during her teens when, encouraged by her parents she would submit poems to magazines. In the mid 1960s she studied ...
Kamala Das was born in 1934 in India into an artistic family with a father who was managing editor of the Daily Mathrubhum and a mother who was a much respected poetess. She is noted for her honest poems and other writings that cover a wide range of issues. She was born in Kerala where Malayalam is spoken, an Indian dialect ...
A lyric poet and cleric who lived through the turmoil of the English Civil War, Robert Herrick was born in Cheapside in London in 1591. When he was just one year old, his father died after a fall from a window. The young Herrick was educated at the Merchant Taylor's School before, at the age of 16, going to work as ...
French poet Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 in the Ardennes and went on to influence many writers and singers of the 20th century including Dylan Thomas, Nabokov and even Bob Dylan. Reputed to have little moral sense and a deep restlessness, he began writing poems at a very early age but stopped suddenly when he was just 21 years ...
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, Derek Walcott was born in the West Indies in 1930. Perhaps best known for his epic work Omeros, a re-imagining of the Trojan War in modern times, Walcott first started out as a painter but developed a love of writing and published his first poem at the age of 14. Brought up in ...
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a painter and poet born in London in 1828 and was co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which attracted many of the most notable artists and writers of the day. His parents were Italian immigrants who home educated the young Rossetti, allowing him access to classic works by the likes of Shakespeare and Byron. He wanted to ...
