19th-century and earlier novelists

Dmitry Merezhkovsky

Dmitry Merezhkovsky (Дмитрий Сергеевич Мережковский) is a Russian novelist, critic, and religious thinker whose Christ and Antichrist trilogy revived the Russian historical novel; he opposed the Bolsheviks and died in exile in 1941.

Dora Melegari

Dora Melegari, full name Dorette Marie Melegari (1849–1924), was a Swiss-born novelist and journalist who wrote in French and Italian and co-founded Italy's national council of women.

Eça de Queirós

Eça de Queirós, born José Maria de Eça de Queiroz (1845–1900), was a Portuguese novelist and diplomat regarded as the leading realist in Portuguese literature.

Edmondo De Amicis

Edmondo De Amicis (1846–1908) was an Italian writer, soldier, and journalist whose schoolboy novel Cuore (1886) became the first best-seller of unified Italy, translated into more than 25 languages.

Édouard Rod

Édouard Rod (Louis-Édouard Rod) was a French-Swiss novelist and critic, born at Nyon in 1857, who wrote psychological novels, championed comparative literary study, and died in 1910.

Eliza Orzeszkowa

Eliza Orzeszkowa, born Eliza Pawłowska, was a Polish novelist and essayist, the leading woman writer of the Warsaw Positivism movement, whose masterpiece is Nad Niemnem (1888).

Emil Strauß

Emil Strauß (1866–1960) was a German novelist and dramatist, best known for the school novel Freund Hein (1902) and later controversial for his Nazi ties.

Émile Zola

Émile Zola was a French novelist and journalist, the leading figure of literary naturalism, author of Les Rougon-Macquart and of "J'accuse…!" (1898), his defining intervention in the Dreyfus Affair.

Emilia Pardo Bazán

Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921) was a Spanish novelist, journalist, and critic who introduced literary naturalism to Spain; her masterpiece, Los pazos de Ulloa (1886), portrays rural Galicia.

Eugène Sue

Eugène Sue (Marie Joseph Sue, 1804–1857) was a French novelist and socialist deputy. His serialized romans-feuilletons Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43) and Le Juif errant (1844–45) were best sellers; arrested in the 1851 coup, he died in exile at Annecy.

Ferdinand von Saar

Ferdinand von Saar (1833–1906) was an Austrian writer, playwright, and poet, regarded with Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach as a leading realist narrator of late nineteenth-century Austrian literature.

Fernán Caballero

Fernán Caballero was the pen name of Spanish novelist Cecilia Böhl de Faber (1796–1877), who debuted with La Gaviota in 1849 and pioneered the realist novel in Spain.

François Rabelais

François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553), French Renaissance humanist, physician, and author of Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534), satirical giant chronicles condemned by the Sorbonne; wrote as Alcofribas Nasier.

François-René de Chateaubriand

François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), French writer, diplomat, and politician; author of Atala, Le Génie du christianisme, René, and the posthumous Mémoires d'outre-tombe; founder of French Romanticism, foreign minister in 1822, elected to the Académie française in 1811.

Fredrika Bremer

Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865) was a Swedish novelist born in Finland, the first Swedish fiction writer with an international reputation, whose 1856 novel Hertha helped win unmarried women legal majority.

Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald

Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882) was an Estonian writer, physician, and folklorist, author of the national epic Kalevipoeg and a central figure of the Estonian national awakening.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский)

Fyodor Dostoevsky (Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский), 1821–1881, Russian novelist and journalist; author of Poor Folk, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov, serialized in Katkov's Russian Messenger, distinguished by Siberian exile, Bakhtin's polyphony interpretation, and 1880 Pushkin speech.

George Sand

George Sand, pen name of Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin (1804-1876), French novelist of Indiana, La Mare au Diable and about seventy books; feminist, 1848 republican, friend of Flaubert and lover of Chopin.

Giovanni Verga

Giovanni Verga (1840–1922), Catania novelist and short-story writer, leading exponent of Italian verismo; author of I Malavoglia, Mastro-don Gesualdo, Vita dei campi, and Cavalleria rusticana.

Gleb Uspensky

Gleb Uspensky, full name Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky (Глеб Иванович Успенский), was a Russian prose writer and publicist, born in Tula in 1843, whose village sketch cycles made him an authority on the peasant question.

Gottfried Keller

Gottfried Keller (1819–1890) was a Swiss novelist and poet of German expression, born and died in Zürich, best known for Der grüne Heinrich and Die Leute von Seldwyla.

Gustav Freytag

Gustav Freytag (1816–1895), German novelist, dramatist, and journalist of Die Grenzboten; author of Soll und Haben, Die Journalisten, Die Ahnen, and Die Technik des Dramas, source of Freytag's pyramid.

Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), French novelist of Croisset, author of Madame Bovary (1857, tried for obscenity and acquitted), Salammbô, L'Éducation sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pécuchet; known for le mot juste and free indirect style.

Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) was a French writer, disciple of Flaubert, author of nearly 300 short stories and six novels including Boule de suif, Bel-Ami, Pierre et Jean, and Le Horla.

Gyula Krúdy

Gyula Krúdy (Krúdy Gyula, 1878–1933) was a Hungarian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, a master of modern Hungarian prose best known for the Szindbád cycle.

Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil

Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, also written Halit Ziya, was a Turkish novelist and founder of the modern Turkish novel, author of Mai ve Siyah and Aşk-ı Memnu.

Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen

Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (c. 1622–1676) was a German Baroque novelist whose picaresque Simplicissimus, set in the Thirty Years' War, became the era's most widely read German novel.

Hendrik Conscience

Hendrik Conscience (1812–1883) was a Flemish writer who published the first Dutch-language novel in Belgium and gave Flanders its national epic, De Leeuw van Vlaenderen (1838).

Henrik Pontoppidan

Henrik Pontoppidan (1857–1943) was a Danish realist novelist who shared the 1917 Nobel Prize in Literature with Karl Gjellerup; his major works include Lykke-Per and De dødes rige.