290 authors,
one library.

Jeffery Farnol worked as a scene painter in New York theatres and wrote his first novel on scraps between shifts, after a brass foundry in Birmingham fired him for insubordination.

George Manville Fenn was an English writer, printer and schoolmaster who produced some 175 books, most of them adventure stories for boys set in mines, jungles and at sea.

Edna Ferber was an American novelist and playwright, a reporter at seventeen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for So Big.

Octave Feuillet was the favourite novelist of the Second Empire — Empress Eugénie kept him at Fontainebleau as her librarian, and critics called him the family Musset for writing passion tha

Henry Fielding wrote farces until Walpole's government passed a licensing act to shut his theatre down, so he read for the bar and turned novelist out of spite and necessity — Tom Jones is t

Alexandre Dumas fils was a French novelist and dramatist, the illegitimate son of the author of The Three Musketeers, who spent his childhood taunted for it and his career writing about wome

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist and short-story writer who both chronicled and embodied the Jazz Age.

Edmund Flagg was an American writer, journalist, lawyer and diplomat who served as United States consul in Venice and wrote a valuable early account of travel on the Illinois and Missouri fr

May Agnes Fleming was a New Brunswick schoolteacher who became one of the first Canadians to make a living entirely by the pen, selling sensation novels to New York story papers at fifteen a

J. S. Fletcher was a Yorkshire journalist who wrote more than two hundred books — histories, pastorals, and the detective novels that made his name when President Woodrow Wilson publicly dec

Homer Eon Flint was an American pulp writer who left school at fourteen and sold interplanetary romances to All-Story in the 1910s, imagining travel to Venus and the Moon.

Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, editor and grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter whose name he took.

E. M. Forster was an English novelist whose father died when he was a baby, leaving him to be raised by women and an inheritance from a great-aunt that freed him to write.

Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué was a Prussian cavalry officer of Huguenot descent who fought Napoleon and wrote German Romanticism's most enduring fairy tale, Undine — the water spirit who mar

John Fox, Jr. was an American novelist who left New York for the Kentucky coalfields, lived among mountain families and wrote the feud country from the inside.

Anatole France was a French novelist and critic, the son of a Paris bookseller, who grew up among the quays and secondhand stalls that fill his fiction.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman wrote the definitive stories of New England's stubborn, straitened women — A New England Nun and Other Stories made her reputation and still holds it.