Lady Mary Wroth was one of the English poets of the Renaissance. She was born in the family that have extended relationship with the Elizabethan Court. Though her education was informal, she had written The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, which today is regarded as the first surviving prose romance by an English female writer.
Sir Philip Sidney was a model noble man, scholar, poet, critic, diplomat, and courtier. He was at once a man of affairs and a high idealist, regarded in his own lifetime as the epitome of Knighthood. As a Renaissance man, his branch of knowledge is immense. Spenser has dedicated the Shepherd's Calendar to him.
Sir Walter Raleigh was born in 1552 in the family of Walter Raleigh and Catherine Champernowne. He was a writer, poet, soldier, politician, courtier, spy and explorer. He was also famous for popularizing tobacco in England. He had spent some time in Ireland and helped the Irish Government in the suppression of the rebellions.
As the most striking personality and the most impressive dramatist among the University Wits, Christopher Marlower wrote Tamburlaine the Great with the main theme of the lust for power. He deserves mention in the Elizabethan Age due to his rebel against established order, and challenge to the divine rule. He had 'earthly sort of belief instead of Godly sort of belief.
Robert Lowell was a leading American poet. Lowell often is considered a 'confessional' poet because he used material from his private life to generate an image of modern culture. His poetry dramatizes the pain and tenderness of personal relationships, and his belief that society has been distorted by its overemphasis on worldly things.
Franz Kafka, a Jewish Czechoslovakian who wrote in German, ranks among the twentieth-century’s most acclaimed writers. He is often cited as the author whose works best evoke the bewildering oppressiveness of modern life, and though his writing accommodate a vast range of interpretation, his general perspective is inevitably one of anxiety and alienation.
Thomas Gray was born on 26 December 1716 as the fifth child to Philip Gray and Dorothy Antrobus in Cornhill, London. He was a poet, letter-writer, classical scholar, and professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. His famous Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751 gave him name and fame. He issued only 13 poems and was offered the position of the Poet Laureate in 1757, but he rejected it.
Joan Didion was born and raised in Sacramento, California, to a well-established land-owning family whose roots in the area date back to the settlement of the Sacramento Valley during the 1840s. Didion received an undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley (1956), and then moved to New York City, to become associate editor of Vogue magazine.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the pen name of Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri, of a Virginian family. The family soon moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain was brought up. At school, according to his own words, he "excelled only in spelling". After his father's death in 1847, Twain was apprenticed to a printer. He also started his career as a journalist by writing for the Hannibal Journal. Later Twain worked as a licensed Mississippi river-boat pilot (1857-61).
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts on July 12, 1817. As an American born essayist, poet, philosopher, naturalist, historian, editor and social critic; Thoreau had been deeply influenced by Emerson’s Nature (1836) and he remained pure Transcendentalist all his life.