290 authors,
one library.

Irving Bacheller was an American journalist who founded the first newspaper syndicate in the United States, buying serial rights and selling them on — he introduced Conan Doyle and Stephen C

Maturin M. Ballou founded Ballou's Pictorial and, with a partner, the first American story paper, turning out cheap romances of the Orient and the sea by the yard.

Honoré de Balzac set out to do for French society what a naturalist does for a species: describe every specimen.

John Kendrick Bangs edited Harper's humour pages and invented a genre that still bears his name: Bangsian fantasy, in which the famous dead — Shakespeare, Boswell, Cleopatra — squabble on a

Amelia E. Barr lost her husband and three sons to yellow fever in Texas in a single epidemic, went to New York a widow with three daughters and no money, and began writing at forty-nine.

Rex Beach joined the Klondike gold rush at twenty-two, failed to strike anything, and mined the experience instead — The Spoilers, drawn from a real conspiracy to steal miners' claims, was f

Max Beerbohm was an English essayist and caricaturist whom Shaw dubbed the incomparable Max.

Edward Bellamy was an American journalist whose utopian romance Looking Backward (1888) sold hundreds of thousands of copies and spawned more than 160 Bellamy Clubs devoted to bringing its c

Arnold Bennett was an English novelist and journalist from the Staffordshire pottery towns he made his subject in The Old Wives' Tale and the Clayhanger books.

Arthur Christopher Benson wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory, was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and kept a diary of four million words — the longest in English.

Robert Hugh Benson was an English priest and writer, son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose conversion to Rome in 1903 was a public sensation.

Thérèse Bentzon was Marie-Thérèse Blanc, one of the most powerful critics in France: her reviews in the Revue des Deux Mondes introduced Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Henry James to French read

Charles de Bernard was a French novelist and journalist from Besançon, drawn into literature by Balzac, who read his admiring review and befriended him.

Sarah Bernhardt was the most famous actress who ever lived — the Divine Sarah, who slept in a coffin, kept a cheetah, toured America nine times, and went on playing Hamlet and Camille after

Earl Derr Biggers created Charlie Chan after reading about a real Honolulu detective, and meant him as a rebuke: a Chinese hero at a time when American fiction allowed the Chinese only to be

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson won the second Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote the words Norwegians still sing as their national anthem, and quarrelled publicly with almost everyone — Ibsen included

R. D. Blackmore was an English novelist who grew fruit for a living in Teddington and wrote in the evenings, insisting the market garden mattered more.

George Borrow was an English writer and traveller who mastered some dozen languages, tramped across Spain selling Bibles for a missionary society, and lived among Romani people whose speech

B. M. Bower was Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, and the initials were deliberate: readers of her sixty-odd westerns assumed for years that the creator of the Flying U ranch hands was a man.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was an English novelist who acted on stage under a false name to support her mother, then wrote more than eighty novels.

Percy James Brebner wrote swordplay and small kingdoms for readers who could not get enough of them after The Prisoner of Zenda — princesses in danger, loyal Englishmen abroad, thrones resto

Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist, the eldest of the three sisters who survived childhood at Haworth parsonage, and the one who lived to see success.

Emily Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the fifth of six children raised in a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors that shaped everything she wrote.

Rhoda Broughton was a Welsh-born novelist whose frank, high-spirited heroines shocked the 1860s: her books were kept off the shelves of Oxford drawing rooms while everyone read them.

Charles Brockden Brown was the first American to make a profession of authorship, abandoning the law for it against his family's wishes.

Charles Neville Buck was an American novelist and lawyer from Kentucky who set his fiction in the mountain feud country of his state, among moonshiners and blood debts carried across generat

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was an English novelist, playwright and politician, hugely popular in his day and served by an ear for the memorable phrase: the pen is mightier than the sword, the grea

John Bunyan was an English preacher and writer, a tinker's son with little schooling who served in the parliamentary army as a teenager.

Clara Louise Burnham was an American novelist and the daughter of a composer, who trained as a musician before turning to fiction and wrote some forty gentle, humorous novels of New England

Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American writer who failed at ranching, gold dredging and selling pencil sharpeners before, at thirty-five, he decided he could do better than the magazine fictio

Katharine Newlin Burt married a poet, moved to a Wyoming ranch, and wrote some forty novels of the mountain West — snowbound cabins, branding irons, women who choose badly and survive it — w

Ellis Parker Butler wrote Pigs Is Pigs, a six-page joke about a railway clerk and two guinea pigs that multiplied out of control — it sold in the millions and followed him everywhere.

Samuel Butler quarrelled with his clergyman father, emigrated to New Zealand, doubled his money farming sheep, and came home to spend the rest of his life attacking everything he had been ra

Isabel Coston Byrum wrote for the Gospel Trumpet, the press of the Church of God at Anderson, Indiana, which her husband ran.