Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today.
William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Movies, TV, Art, Business and economy, Wars and warfare
Stan Lee was an American comic book writer, editor, publisher, and producer. He rose through the ranks of a family-run business to become Marvel Comics' primary creative leader for two decades, leading its expansion from a small division of a publishing house to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics industry.
Art, Sports, Geography, Traveling, Politics, Science
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was an American statesman and writer who served as the 26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909. He also served as the 25th Vice President of the United States from March to September 1901 and as the 33rd Governor of New York from 1899 to 1900. As a leader of the Republican Party during this time, he became a driving force for the Progressive Era in the United States in the early 20th century. His face is depicted on Mount Rushmore, alongside those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. In polls of historians and political scientists, Roosevelt is generally ranked as one of the five best presidents.
Ethan Green Hawke is an American actor, writer, and director. He has been nominated for four Academy Awards and a Tony Award. Hawke has directed three feature films, three Off-Broadway plays, and a documentary. He has also written three novels.
MacKenzie S. Tuttle Bezos is an American novelist and billionaire. She is the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to whom she was married from 1993 until their divorce in 2019. In 2014, she founded the anti-bullying organization Bystander Revolution, where she serves as executive director.
Joanne Rowling,, writing under the pen names J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, is a British novelist, philanthropist, film and television producer and screenwriter best known for writing the Harry Potter fantasy series. The books have won multiple awards, and sold more than 500 million copies, becoming the best-selling book series in history. They have also been the basis for a film series, over which Rowling had overall approval on the scripts and was a producer on the final films in the series.
Art, Politics, Business and economy
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time, he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.
Movies, TV, Entertainment, Art
Jerry Angelo Brooks, widely known as J. B. Smoove, is an American actor, writer, comedian, and voice actor. He started his career off with the television series Def Comedy Jam in 1995. He is best known for his role as Leon on the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm. He also starred on the CBS sitcom The Millers from 2013 to 2015. He most recently portrayed a fictionalized version of himself on the BET improv-comedy reality television parody Real Husbands of Hollywood.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. He was virtually unknown and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre.
Art, Science, Wars and warfare
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, who is best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers, and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include "Die Verwandlung", Der Process, and Das Schloss. The term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those found in his writing.
Aleister Crowley was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life.
Edna O'Brien, DBE is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. Philip Roth described her as "the most gifted woman now writing in English", while the former President of Ireland Mary Robinson cited her as "one of the great creative writers of her generation".
John Edmund Mulaney is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer and producer. He is best known for his work as a writer on Saturday Night Live and as a stand-up comedian with stand-up specials The Top Part, New in Town, The Comeback Kid, and Kid Gorgeous, for which he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special in 2018. He was the creator and star of the short-lived Fox sitcom Mulaney, a semi-autobiographical series about his life. Mulaney also performed as a character called George St. Geegland in a comedic duo with Nick Kroll, most recently in Oh, Hello on Broadway from September 2016 through early 2017. He is also known for his voice acting work as Andrew Glouberman in the Netflix original animated show Big Mouth. Mulaney made his film debut in 2018, voicing Peter Porker/Spider-Ham in the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.