6,282 articles
John Gay
John Gay (1685–1732) was an English poet and dramatist best known for The Beggar's Opera (1728), a record-breaking ballad opera satirizing Italian opera and Robert Walpole's government.
John Gower
John Gower (c. 1330–1408) was an English poet and friend of Geoffrey Chaucer who wrote major works in French, Latin, and English, best known for the Confessio Amantis.
John Green
John Green (born 1977, Indianapolis) is the American #1 NYT bestselling author of Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars, of nonfiction including Everything is Tuberculosis, and of the 2026 adult debut Hollywood, Ending; co-creator of Vlogbrothers and Crash Course, distinct from the cartoonist John Green.
John Greenleaf Whittier
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) was an American poet, editor, and abolitionist from Massachusetts, one of the Fireside Poets, whose long narrative poem Snow-Bound (1866) sold twenty thousand copies.
John Gregory Dunne
John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003), American novelist, journalist, and screenwriter, husband of Joan Didion; author of The Studio, True Confessions, and Monster, and co-writer of Panic in Needle Park.
John Grisham
John Grisham, formally John Ray Grisham Jr., is an American novelist and former Mississippi lawyer and legislator whose legal thrillers like The Firm have sold over 400 million copies.
John Gwynne (author)
John Gwynne (born 1968) is a British epic fantasy author of The Faithful and the Fallen, Of Blood and Bone, and the Norse-inspired Bloodsworn Saga; Malice won the 2012 David Gemmell Morningstar Award, and The Fury of the Gods was an instant New York Times bestseller.
John Harington (writer)
Sir John Harington (1560-1612), Elizabeth I's godson, English courtier and writer; first English translator of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1591), author of The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) with a flush-toilet design, and manuscript-circulated epigrams published posthumously 1615-1618.
John Hersey
John Hersey (1914–1993) was an American journalist and novelist whose 1946 book Hiroshima is often called the first nonfiction novel; he won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for A Bell for Adano.
John Heywood
John Heywood was a Tudor dramatist and court musician who served four monarchs. He was condemned for denying the Royal Supremacy in 1543 and died in exile.
John Irving
John Irving (born 1942, Exeter, New Hampshire) is an American novelist, author of The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and The Cider House Rules; National Book Award and Oscar winner, sixteen novels, lives in Toronto.
John Joseph Mathews
John Joseph Mathews (1894–1979) was an Osage writer, historian, and tribal councilman from Oklahoma whose 1932 Book-of-the-Month Club selection Wah'Kon-Tah made him one of the first American Indian authors to gain national renown.
John Keats
John Keats (1795–1821), English Romantic poet and trained surgeon-apothecary at Guy's Hospital. Author of the 1819 odes, Endymion, and the 1820 volume; coined negative capability; died of tuberculosis at 25.
John Kennedy Toole
John Kennedy Toole (1937–1969), New Orleans novelist, wrote A Confederacy of Dunces, failed to publish it, died by suicide, and won the posthumous 1981 Pulitzer Prize after Walker Percy's intervention.
John Malalas
John Malalas (Ἰωάννης Μαλάλας) was a sixth-century Greek-speaking chronicler born in or near Antioch, whose eighteen-book Chronographia, written in colloquial Greek, runs from the Creation to Justinian I.
John Marrs (author)
John Marrs is a British author of psychological thrillers and speculative fiction from Northamptonshire, best known for The One, translated into 35 languages and adapted as a Netflix series.
John Marston
John Marston (1576–1634) was an English playwright, poet, and satirist best known for the plays The Malcontent and The Dutch Courtesan and for his feud with Ben Jonson.
John Masefield
John Edward Masefield (1878–1967), English poet, novelist, and playwright from Ledbury, Herefordshire; UK Poet Laureate 1930–1967, author of Salt-Water Ballads, The Everlasting Mercy, Reynard the Fox, The Midnight Folk, and The Box of Delights.
John Masters
John Masters (1914-1983), British soldier-novelist born in Calcutta, author of Nightrunners of Bengal and Bhowani Junction and of the Savage family cycle of historical novels on British India; Gurkha officer, Chindit veteran, later US citizen in Santa Fe.
John McGahern
John McGahern (1934–2006) was an Irish novelist and short story writer whose spare realist fiction about rural Ireland included Amongst Women, shortlisted for the 1990 Booker Prize.
John McPhee
John McPhee, full name John Angus McPhee, is an American writer of creative nonfiction, a New Yorker staff writer since 1965, and winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World.
John Middleton Murry
John Middleton Murry (1889–1957) was an English critic and editor of the Athenaeum and founder of The Adelphi, husband of Katherine Mansfield, Eliot's romanticism rival, and critic of Keats, Dostoevsky, and Lawrence.
John Milton
John Milton (1608–1674), English poet, polemicist, and Commonwealth Secretary for Foreign Tongues; author of Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and Areopagitica; blind from 1651–1652, dictated his late epics.
John Mortimer
Sir John Mortimer (1923-2009), English barrister, playwright, and novelist, creator of Horace Rumpole in Rumpole of the Bailey, author of A Voyage Round My Father and the 1981 Brideshead Revisited adaptation, and a noted free-speech defense counsel.
John O'Farrell (author)
John O'Farrell, British satirist and author of Things Can Only Get Better; wrote for Spitting Image and Have I Got News For You, Chicken Run screenplays, Guardian and Independent columns, and novels including Family Politics (2024).
John Perkins (author)
John Perkins is an American author and critic who served as a chief economist from 1971 to 1981. His 2004 book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, details his work.
John Rechy
John Rechy (Juan Francisco Rechy, born 1931, El Paso, Texas) is a Mexican American gay novelist whose 1963 bestseller City of Night pioneered gay literature; also The Sexual Outlaw, UCLA Medal 2019.
John Ringo
John Ringo (born 1963, Miami) is an American military science fiction author and 82nd Airborne veteran, creator of the Posleen War, Troy Rising, Black Tide Rising, and Empire of Man series published by Baen Books.
John Rollin Ridge
John Rollin Ridge, who wrote as Yellow Bird, was a Cherokee writer and editor whose 1854 Joaquín Murieta novel was the first by a Native American author.
John Sandford (novelist)
John Sandford is the pen name of John Roswell Camp (born 1944), Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of the Lucas Davenport Prey thrillers, Virgil Flowers and Letty Davenport series, Kidd novels, and Saturn Run.