John Milton was an English Poet, Pamphleteer and Historian. He is best known for his poem paradise lost. Milton is considered as most significant English author after William Shakespeare

1.To be blind is not miserable; not to be able to bear blindness, that is miserable.

2. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

3. Better to reign in hell, than to serve in heaven.

4. Innocence, once lost, can never be regained. Darkness, once gazed upon, can never be lost.

5. Give me liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

6. Never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.

7. A good book is the precious life- blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

8. Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.

9. They also serve who only stand and wait.

10. Solitude sometimes is the best society.

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but essential for right thinking. -Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer, who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. He was also known as Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Anna Karina and War and Peace are his best novels. He was born on August 28, 1828, in Yasnaya Polyana, central Russia. At that time Tolstoy family was one of the oldest and wealthy families in Russia.

He lost his mother when he was two, and his father when he was nine. He was not good at studying and he left his studies without finishing his degree. After a few years, he started writing and in 1952 his first novel childhood was published. He also wrote plays and essays. Tolstoy joined the army in 1851 but the loss of life filled him with horror, as a result, he left the army’ in 1862, he got married to Sofia Andreyevna Behrs. His wife also helped him in his work. Tolstoy experienced a major spiritual crisis when he was sixty.

Tolstoy believed that violence is wrong and people should refuse to fight in the war. Mahatama Gandhi was greatly influenced by Leo Tolstoy’s ideas of non-violence resistance. Tolstoy died in 1910 from pneumonia, at the age of eighty-two.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…. would do this, it would change the earth.
-William Faulkner

Best known for his novels the sound and the fury and as I Lay Dying, William Faulkner was a Nobel prize-winning novelist. He was awarded the Nobel prize in(literature)1949. He also won two Pulitzers and two national book awards as well. Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in a small town of New Albany, Mississippi. In 1919 he enrolled at the University of Mississippi, where he started writing for the student newspaper.
Through his work, he highlighted controversial matters related to race, class sex, and social ideologies.

7 Best Books by William Faulkner Everyone Should Read

1. Sanctuary
2. Soldiers Pay
3. A Rose for Emily
4. The Sound and The Fury
5. Light in August
6. As I Lay Down
7. The Hamlet

William butler yeast was one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He was born on June 13, 1865, in Sandymount, Ireland

 He studied at Dublin’s metropolitan school of art while studying there he published his first work. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1923. His father was a lawyer and a well-known painter. His mother Susan Pollexfen was the daughter of a prosperous merchant.

Yeast joined the order of the golden dawn; it was an organization that explored topics related to mysticism and occult. He also wrote many plays.

William died in 1939, in France. He is remembered as one of the leading Western poets of the 20th century.

Some of his important works include 

• The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems
• Michael Robarets and The Dancer
• The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics
• In the Seven Woods.
• Responsibilities and Other Poems
• The Tower
• The Winding Stair and Other Poems
• The Wild Swans at Coole

Virginia wolf is considered as one of the most important modernist authors of the 20th century.

She is known for using the stream of consciousness in her writing. Woolf is best known for her novels, especially To The Lighthouse and Mrs.Dalloway.

Virginia Woolf’s best quotes

1. “Books are the mirrors of the soul.” From Between The Acts.
2. “I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun,” From A Writers Diary.
3. “If you don’t tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.” From The Moments and Other Essays.
4. “I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire.” From To The Lighthouse.
5. “I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words for me.” From The Waves.
6. “Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart, and his friends could only read the title.” From Jacobs Room.
7. .“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.” From A Room of One’s Own.
8. Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?” From A Room of One’s Own.
9.  “As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.” From Orlando.
10. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”From A Room of One’s Own.
11. “For most of history anonymous was a woman.” Virginia Woolf
12. “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”Virginia Woolf

Anglo-Irish playwright, novelists, poet, and critic oscar Wilde is regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the victorian era. He was born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin. Ireland.

Oscar Wilde in his lifetime wrote numerous poems, one novel, nine plays, short stories, and essays. He was imprisoned for his homosexual relationship because at that time it was considered a crime. His father sir Willam Wilde was an eye doctor and his mother jane Francisca Elgee was a poet and journalist. He published his first collection of poetry in 1881.

The picture of Dorian is his first and only novel. He attended oxford’s Magdalen college between 1874-1878 where he gets involved in the aesthetic movement and became an advocate for ‘art for art’s sake’.

Arts for art’s sake was an idea that art should not exist for any other motive than beauty. He also wrote children’s stories, the happy prince, and other tales.

The Picture of Dorian Gray( Poem), The Ballad of Reading Gaol (poem), and The Importance of Being Earnest (play) are some of his famous works.

Marry Shelly was born on 30 august 1797 in London, England. Frankenstein is her most famous novel. When the book was published she was only twenty-one years old. She also wrote two dramas, numerous short stories, travelogues, and biographies.

 Her father William Godwin was a philosophy and political writer. Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft died shortly after Shelley’s birth.

Mounseer Nongtonpow was her first poem, which was published in 1807. Mary met poet Percy Bysshe in 1812. They fell in love. The couple was married in 1816, after the suicide of Shelley’s wife.

In 1822 Percy selly died, and after his death, she returned to London. Mary also compiled the collection of poems by her husband.

She worked very hard to support herself and her only child Percy Florence. She wrote several novels before she died of brain cancer in 1851 at the age of 53.

Works:

Valperga(1823)

The last man (1826)

Lodore (1835)

Posthumously published Mathilde.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. -DANTE ALIGHIERI

Italian poet, literary theorist, prose writer, philosopher, and political thinker Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, Italy. Best known for his poem la Commedia.

La Commedia (the divine comedy) is considered as one of the world literature’s greatest poems. The divine comedy is about the journey through the afterlife, it’s a very long poem of about 14,233 lines.

It took 10 years Dante to write this poem. Dante to write this poem.

The poem is divided into 3 sections (each section consisting of 33 verses); Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. In La Commedia, he recounts his journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise. Beatrice was the lover of Dante, who died too soon at the age of 25. Virgil (Roman poet) guides Dante through Inferno(hell) and Purgatorio(purgatory), while Beatrice guides him through Paradiso(heaven).

After that Dante comes face to face with God himself and the journey ends with true heroic and spiritual fulfillment.

The poem is written from Dante’s perspective and follows Dante’s journey through hell, purgatory, and final heaven. Dante the character in the poem is a fictional creation of Dante the poet. Dante’s journey through the afterlife was his spiritual journey.

English Victorian novelist George Eliot was born in rural Warwickshire. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans. George Eliot was her pen name. When her mother died, she left school to help run her father’s household. When her father died in 1849, she moved to London to pursue a career in journalism.

In 1850 she published a review for the Westminster Review and later in 1851 she became assistant editor of the Westminster Review. while in London she met many well-known people, henry Lewis was one of them. She fell in love with henry Lewis, a drama critic and author. Later they both decided to live together, their relationship caused a scandal because Lewis was already married to Agnes Jervis. Lewis encouraged her to write.

She published her first collection of short stories in 1858. After one year Her book Adam Bede was published. But in 1878 Lewis died.  Later in 1880, she married John Walter cross who was a banker, but due to a throat infection, she died the same year.

Notable works

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Silas Marner (1861)

Romola (1862–1863)

Middlemarch (1871–72)

Felix Holt (1866)

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

Adam Bede (1859)

The Spanish Gypsy

 John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London, was an English romantic poet. he published fifty-four novels. He was the oldest of four children. His father was a livery-stable keeper. When he died Keats was only eight years old. After six years his mother also died.

Keats was a licensed apothecary but he never practiced his profession. Keats published his first volume of poem( poems by John Keats), in 1817.  In the same year his Endymion, a four thousand line erotic romance novel got published.in

July 1820 he published his third volume of poetry (Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of st. Angnes, and other poems).

Keats is also famous for his letters, His famous letters include; To Charles Cowden Clarke, To George and Thomas Keats, To Charles Cowden Clarke“, ”To Benjamin Robert Haydon.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art is one of his best poems, this poem written three year before his death.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

James Joyce is one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. He is known for his unique and complex writing.

1. Your battles inspired me-not the obvious battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

2. I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am what I established yesterday or some previous day.

3. First we feel. Then we fall

4. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. 

5. Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

6. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

7. There’s no friends like the old friends.

8. Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.

9.  All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.

10. Absence, the highest form of presence.

James Joyce was born into a middle-class, catholic family on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. He was the oldest of ten children who survived childhood.

After he completed his graduation in 1902, he went to Paris to study medicine, but he soon abandoned his study. He returns to Dublin when he received a telegram saying that his mother is deathly ill. After his mother’s died, he started teaching and writing book reviews.

 In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, who later became his wife. His first published book was chamber music( a collection of poetry). It took him 10 years to write Dubliners(a short story collection book), which was published in 1914.

On his 40th birthday, his famous novel Ulysses was published. The book is famous for its use of the stream of consciousness technique.

Joyce’s final book, Finnegans Wake was published in 1939, and like his other novels, it’s also considered puzzling because the book is written in several languages at once. Innovative use of symbolism, attention to language, and the use of interior monologue make him a great writer.

Some of his major works include Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(It is a semi-autobiographical novel ), Exiles,(It is the only play by James Joyce, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake.