Writers Who Changed History

This visual celebration of the world’s most celebrated thinkers tells the fascinating stories of their lives and pioneering ideas.

Writers Who Changed History places well-known writers in their historical and cultural context, showing you how they came to influence literature as we know it today. This illustrated guide is ideal for those interested in literature, writing, poems, and novels or who want to broaden their general understanding of literature and writers’ lives.

Inside this book on writers, you’ll find:

-An overview of the lives and works of around 100 of the world’s most important novelists, poets, and playwrights - from the Middle Ages to the present

-Eight pages of brand-new content with 12 new entries, including Charles Waddell Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston

-Portraits of each writer alongside photographs of their homes and studios, original manuscripts, notebooks, letters, first editions

In this literature guide, each writer is introduced with a realistic portrait and biographical entries that trace the friendships, loves, and rivalries that inspired and influenced their work, revealing insights into the larger-than-life characters, plots, and evocative settings they created. Entries explore each individual’s key ideas and working methods and set their ideas in context, conveying a powerful sense of the place and the period of history in which they lived. Writers Who Changed History provides revealing insights into what drove each individual to develop new ways of understanding the world.

James Naughtie is an award-winning radio host and broadcaster, James Naughtie began his career as a journalist before moving to radio in 1986. For over 20 years he co-hosted BBC Radio 4’s Today program, and he has chaired Radio 4’s monthly book-club since it began in 1997. James Naughtie has chaired both the Booker and Samuel Johnson judging panels and written a number of books including The Rivals: The Intimate Story of A Political Marriage; The Accidental American: Tony Blair And The Presidency; The Making Of Music; The New Elizabethans; and The Madness of July.