Info about Authors
Authors: Carving out Great Monuments in Words
In traditional writing the word author represented male and authoress female. Today, with the use of more nondiscriminatory words in every day parlance the word author is used for male and female. In fact author is a very broad term compassing in its understanding all persons who are responsible for the existence of anything. In a narrow sense an author is the originator of a written work which are technical as well as aesthetic. There are many works which have unknown authorship or they have an anonymous origin.
It is a daunting task to make a brief survey of all the authors both in the technical realm as well as in the aesthetic world. It is also too far fetched to try the authors in all languages. However, a brief survey of the authors in literature in English could be tried. Modern English originated from the Anglo-Saxon which came into existence around the 6 to 7th century AD after a process of mingling of many languages. Anglo-Saxon was considered a vulgar language of the common man. It was not considered fit for serious writing so nothing great was written in that tongue. However, there were some authors who tried their hands like Caedmon, Bede, Alfred and Cynewulf. The biographical information about these authors is somewhat scarce. With the passage of time more authors gain prominence like William Langland famous for his creation called Piers Plowman. With the coming of Geoffrey Chaucer English poetry shoots into prominence. His best known work is The Canterbury Tales.
In the early 16th century Francis Bacon came into prominence as a great essayist. In the realm of Drama we have authors like Christopher Marlowe who is today remembered for Doctor Faustus. The name that eclipsed all the great names of the past and future was the name of William Shakespeare who excelled as a poet as well as a playwright laying his hands in all genres, tragedy and comedy He is considered as the greatest playwright of the world enriching the world with his works like Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Merchant of Venice etc. He also authored a string of great sonnets exploring all the sentiments that man experienced hither to.
17th century was somewhat dull in the annals of English Literature. However, authors like John Donne, Ben Johnson and John Bunyan shot into prominence. !8th century was hailed as the age of prose and reason and the great authors of these times were Dr. Samuel Johnson the great English lexicographer and poet. Alexander Pope is another luminary of that era. By the turn of the 19th century English poetry recaptured its emotional content which found out let in poetry and fiction. In poetry we have great authors like William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, John Keats, P.B. Shelly etc. It was also the time when fiction flourished producing such immortal names of the genre like Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Jane Austin and indeed the greatest of all Charles Dickens.
In the twentieth century England gifted the world authors like Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Graham Greene in the novel, Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett in drama. Poetry had great names like that of Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, W.H.Auden, T.S.Eliot Ted Huges and many more.