Rat Race Reader

The writers

Authors

The people behind the books, oldest first.

Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus (born Marcus Annius Verus) · 121–180 · Roman

A bookish boy who was handed the Roman Empire, ruled it for nineteen years through plague, rebellion and almost constant war, and kept himself sane by writing private notes on how to be a decent human being.

Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1547–1616 · Spanish

A Spanish soldier who lost the use of his left hand at Lepanto, spent five years as a captive in Algiers and did time in a Seville jail over tax money, then, in his late fifties, wrote the book that made him immortal.

Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley · 1797–1851 · British

The daughter of two famous radicals, Mary Wollstonecraft (who died eleven days after her birth) and William Godwin, she ran off with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at sixteen, began Frankenstein at eighteen, buried three of her four children and her husband before she was twenty-five, and spent the rest of her life writing to support herself and her one surviving son.

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens · 1812–1870 · English

The most popular novelist of Victorian England, creator of Scrooge, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, who wrote about poverty, prisons, money and kindness with a comic genius nobody has matched since.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (christened David Henry Thoreau) · 1817–1862 · American

A Concord pencil-maker, surveyor and handyman with a Harvard degree and no wish for a career, who spent two years in a cabin he built himself and came back with the most argued-over book about work and money in American literature.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville (born Herman Melvill) · 1819–1891 · American

A New Yorker who went to sea as a young man, deserted a whaler in the South Seas, got briefly famous for island adventure books, poured everything into Moby-Dick to near silence, and spent nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks before the world rediscovered him decades after his death.

George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans · 1819–1880 · English

Mary Ann Evans, a Warwickshire woman who translated radical German theology, edited a London review and lived openly for nearly twenty-five years with a married man, George Henry Lewes; she wrote her novels as “George Eliot” (George for Lewes) so they would be judged apart from her other work, her sex and the scandal.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1821–1881 · Russian

A Russian novelist who was led out to be shot for reading forbidden books, reprieved at the last moment, sent to four years of hard labour in Siberia, and came back to write, under crushing debts and epileptic fits, the most feverish and searching novels of the nineteenth century.

Leo Tolstoy

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy · 1828–1910 · Russian

A Russian count who fought as an artillery officer at Sevastopol, wrote two of the greatest novels ever made, then spent his last decades trying to give away his fortune and live like a peasant.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche · 1844–1900 · German

A brilliant classics professor who quit at 34 because of crippling illness, wrote his most daring books as a lonely wanderer in Swiss and Italian boarding houses, and collapsed into madness at 44, never knowing how famous—and how misused—he would become.

Joseph Conrad

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski · 1857–1924 · Polish-British (born in Berdychiv, now in Ukraine)

A Polish-born merchant-navy captain who learned English as an adult and became one of its greatest novelists—and whose half-year in King Leopold’s Congo in 1890 marked him for life.

Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling · 1865–1936 · British (born in Bombay, India)

The Bombay-born storyteller of the British Empire—author of The Jungle Book, Kim and “If—”—who became the first English-language winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.

Make it yours

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness… — Dickens

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