Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in the small seaport of Taganrog, southern Russia to the son of a grocer. Chekhov's grandfather was a serf, who had bought his own freedom and that of his three sons in 1841. In 1879 Chekhov entered the Moscow University Medical School. Chekhov was a doctor by profession. He started writing to support himself during medical school.
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) was born in Columbus, Mississippi as a son to the former Edwina Estelle Dakin and Cornelius Coffin Williams. His father was a travelling salesman for a shoe company. He could trace his ancestry back to the French Huguenots, and to politicians and soldiers in North Carolina and Tennessee.
Aristophanes was born in 448 B.C. and was supposed to die in 388 B.C. Aristophanes was the son of Philippus, of the Deme Cydathenaus. It was uncertain where he was born. He was a contemporary comic playwright of Socrates and Thucydides. They all were the next generation of Sophocles and Euripides. Aristophanes started to write his comedies after the rise of democracy in the Athens.
Strindberg (1849 -1912) is the Swedish playwright. August was the third son of Carl Oscar Strindberg and Ulrika Eleanora Norling. The couple had nine more children. Strindberg's childhood was poor and miserable. He was shy and family tensions depressed him.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) an Ireland born British dramatist was born in Dublin to unconventional parents. Wilde studied at Portora Royal School, in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (1864-71), Trinity College, Dublin (1871-74) and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874-78), where he was taught by Walter Pater and John Ruskin.
William Congreve (1670-1729) was born at Bardsey, Yorkshire as the son of an army officer. He is one of the best English poet and playwright of the Restoration period in the 17th and 18th centuries. He had the wit and charm of the heroes of his plays and was universally revered by people of all ages.
Sophocles was one of the three great tragic dramatists of ancient Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Euripides. Unlike his younger contemporary, the often-misunderstood Euripides, Sophocles had the fortune of being revered for his genius during his own lifetime.
Isabella, Lady Gregory (1852-1932), popularly called Lady Gregory, is an Irish playwright and promoter of Irish drama. She founded the Irish Literary Theatre with William Butler Yeats in 1898. This became the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902 and led to the establishment of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Throughout her life she remained the chief organizer.
James Joyce (1882-1941) was born and educated in Dublin. Joyce found his early inspirations from the works of Henrik Ibsen, St. Thomas Aquinas and William Butler Yeats. He faces the implications of the loss of a world of public values in a very different way.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts. His father, was a sea captain and descendent of John Hawthorne, one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. He died when the young Nathaniel was four years old. Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hawthorne, his mother, withdrew to a life of seclusion, which she maintained till her death. From Salem the family moved to Maine, where Hawthorne was educated at the Bowdoin College (1821-24).