290 authors,
one library.

Abraham Cahan fled Tsarist Russia after the 1881 pogroms and became the founding editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, which he ran for half a century and built into the largest Yiddish newspa

Willa Cather was an American novelist who moved to the Nebraska prairie at nine, among Czech and Scandinavian homesteaders whose lives became her subject.

Robert W. Chambers was an American writer who trained as an artist in Paris before turning to fiction.

Anton Chekhov was a Russian writer who practised medicine throughout his career, calling it his lawful wife and literature his mistress.

Victor Cherbuliez was a Genevan who took French citizenship at fifty and was elected to the Académie française six years later.

G. K. Chesterton was an English writer of enormous output and enormous size — six foot four and twenty stone — who created Father Brown, the priest-detective modelled on a friend who had hea

Kate Chopin was an American writer widowed at thirty-two with six children, who began publishing to support them and drew on the Louisiana Creole world she had married into.

Agatha Christie was an English writer and the best-selling novelist of all time, with some two billion copies in print.

Winston Churchill was an American novelist — no relation to the British statesman, who was so often confused with him that the two agreed the Englishman would sign himself Winston S.

Jules Claretie was a French novelist, journalist and, for twenty-eight years, director of the Comédie-Française.

J. Storer Clouston was a Scottish writer from Orkney, a barrister who turned to comic fiction with The Lunatic at Large and its sequels — farces about an escaped madman that were filmed repe

Dickens (1812–1870) and Collins (1824–1889) were friends, collaborators and travelling companions for fifteen years, and Collins's brother married Dickens's daughter.

Wilkie Collins was an English novelist who, in two extraordinary books, established the shape of the modern suspense novel.

Ralph Connor was the pen name of Charles William Gordon, a Presbyterian minister who served as a missionary in the mining camps and ranches of the Canadian Rockies and wrote to raise funds f

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born British novelist who did not learn English properly until his twenties and wrote all his fiction in it, his third language.

James Fenimore Cooper was thrown out of Yale for a prank with gunpowder, served at sea, and wrote his first novel on a bet with his wife that he could do better than the book he was reading

François Coppée was a French poet, dramatist and novelist called the poet of the humble for his verse about clerks, seamstresses and the Paris poor.

Marie Corelli was the best-selling English novelist of her age, outselling Wells, Kipling and Conan Doyle combined, and the favourite of Queen Victoria and Gladstone.

F. Marion Crawford was an American novelist who lived most of his life in Italy, in a villa above Sorrento, and wrote more than forty books at a pace that alarmed his admirers.

Samuel Rutherford Crockett was a Scottish novelist and Free Church minister who gave up the pulpit after his fiction succeeded, and wrote some sixty books in twenty years.

Victoria Cross was Annie Sophie Cory, born in Rawalpindi to a British army family and determined to write what respectable women were not supposed to know.

James Oliver Curwood was expelled from school, sold his first story at sixteen, and was paid by the Canadian government to travel the far north and write about it — which he did, thirty-thre