American novelist, short story writer and poet Herman Melville is probably best known for his novel Moby Dick, the most famous of his accounts of life at sea. The majority of his writing was done in his younger years and his work was largely forgotten until long after his death. Melville was born in New York City, August 1st 1819, the third child ...
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche will forever be known as one of the greatest ever philosophers but he was more than that. During his lifetime, which spanned the second half of the 19th century, he also wrote poetry and composed music. In direct contrast to his family background and upbringing he was an outspoken critic of popular religious concepts, believing more in life as ...
One of the giants of French literature, François-Marie Arouet, better known to the world as Voltaire, was born in Paris in 1694 and was perhaps one of the most versatile poets, wits and writers of his time. Fond of criticizing the establishment around him, he was known for his forward thinking views on the rights of the individual to express their views, ...
Born in Moldavia in 1896, but spending a large part of his life in France, Tristan Tzara was a poet and performance artist who had a role in many of the great movements of the early 20th Century including symbolism, cubism and the avant-garde. Raised in a Romanian Jewish family, Tzara went to school in Bucharest and by the age of ...
Etheridge Knight was an American poet who had a tough start to life and it didn’t get a lot better as he got older. He was one of seven children born into a poor family and his education was just about the bare minimum required in America. He followed a path that almost inevitably led him into drug dependency and prison by ...
