Master of the macabre and inventor of the modern detective story. He lived on the edge of poverty, chasing perfection one verse at a time.

It made him a national sensation overnight. He was paid about nine dollars for it.

General, strategist, and philosopher of the Spring and Autumn period. His counsel: win first, then fight.

Thirteen chapters of strategy, still studied in war rooms and boardrooms 2,500 years later.

Playwright, poet, and part-owner of the Globe Theatre. He gave English more new words than any writer before or since.

His star-crossed lovers turned an old Italian tale into the most famous love story ever staged.

Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson by day, conjurer of nonsense by pen name. Logic and wordplay were the same game to him.

He invented the story aloud to amuse ten-year-old Alice Liddell, who begged him to write it down.

Riverboat pilot, prospector, printer, and the sharpest wit in American letters. Samuel Clemens took his pen name from a river depth call.

The whitewashed fence, the cave, the river: nearly all of it really happened, more or less.

Daughter of radical philosophers, she eloped at sixteen and out-imagined the finest poets of her age.

A ghost-story contest on a stormy night produced science fiction itself. She was eighteen.

She published anonymously, signed only "By a Lady," and observed her society so precisely it never quite recovered.

Publishers rejected the first draft unread. She spent sixteen years revising it into a masterpiece.

The blind bard of Greek tradition, whether one poet or many. All of Western literature descends from his verses.

Sung from memory for centuries before anyone wrote a line down. You transcribe Pope's English translation.

Abolitionist, Civil War nurse, and the engine of her family's income. She wrote pulp thrillers under false names before striking gold with the truth.

Her publisher wanted "a book for girls." She gave him her own sisters, barely disguised.

Son of a Revolutionary general, he wrote with a factory of collaborators and spent fortunes as fast as he earned them.

Paris mobbed the paper for each new installment of the great revenge story.