290 authors,
one library.

Henry Rider Haggard was an English novelist who invented the lost-world adventure and, with it, a template that ran through the whole of twentieth-century popular fiction.

Emanuel (1888–1951) sold literature by the ton: his Little Blue Books, five cents each, put Shakespeare and Darwin into the overalls pockets of American workmen — some three hundred million

Ludovic Halévy wrote the words the nineteenth century sang: with Henri Meilhac he made the libretti for Offenbach's operettas and, above all, for Carmen.

Morley (1890–1957) was a Rhodes Scholar, a founder of the Saturday Review, and the essayist who made bookishness charming to a generation of Americans.

Thomas Hardy trained as an architect and restored churches for a living before the novels supported him, and the buildings show: his books are constructed, and their catastrophes arrive with

Henry Harland was an American writer who reinvented himself in London as the literary editor of The Yellow Book, the quarterly that defined the 1890s with Beardsley's drawings.

Bret Harte made the California gold rush into literature — The Luck of Roaring Camp gave America its gamblers, its whores with consciences, and its snowbound miners, and made him the best-pa

Julian Hawthorne was an American writer and the son of Nathaniel, who grew up among Emerson, Thoreau and Melville and wrote about them all.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist who could not stop writing about guilt and the way it is inherited.

Lafcadio Hearn was born on a Greek island to an Irish surgeon, abandoned by both parents, blinded in one eye at school, and worked as a Cincinnati crime reporter before New Orleans and the C

Charlotte B. Herr — christened Charlotte Bronte Herr, which was either prophecy or a heavy load for a child — wrote for American children and for readers who liked their romance wrapped in l

Hermann Hesse was a German-born novelist and poet who fled a seminary at fourteen and trained instead as a bookseller.

Maurice Hewlett was an English novelist, essayist and poet who worked as Keeper of the Land Revenue Records before The Forest Lovers made him famous in 1898.

Robert Hichens was an English novelist and music critic who made his name at twenty-nine with The Green Carnation, an anonymous satire on Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas so exact that it

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a minister who helped storm a courthouse to free a fugitive slave, funded John Brown, and commanded the first regiment of freed slaves in the Civil War.

John Oliver Hobbes was the pen name of Pearl Richards Craigie, an American-born writer raised in London who published epigrammatic novels and plays in the 1890s.

James Hogg was a Scottish poet and novelist known as the Ettrick Shepherd, a self-taught farm labourer who had almost no schooling and herded sheep into his thirties.

Mary Jane Holmes sold something like two million books — outsold in her century by almost no American woman except Harriet Beecher Stowe — with orphan heiresses, cruel relations and country

Oliver Wendell Holmes was an American physician, poet and essayist who coined the term anaesthesia and argued, years before Semmelweis was heeded, that doctors themselves carried childbed fe

Anthony Hope was the pen name of Anthony Hope Hawkins, an English barrister who conceived The Prisoner of Zenda while walking home from a court case and wrote it in a month.

Charles Klein (1867–1915) wrote The Lion and the Mouse, the biggest Broadway hit of its decade — a drama in which a young woman takes on a ruthless millionaire — and Arthur Hornblow (1865–19

E. W. Hornung was an English writer and Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, who created Raffles, the gentleman burglar — deliberately inverting Holmes and Watson into a thief and his admiring acco

William Dean Howells was an American novelist and, as editor of The Atlantic Monthly and columnist for Harper's, the most powerful literary broker in the country — he championed Twain, James

W. H. Hudson was a naturalist and writer born on the Argentine pampas to American settlers, who came to England at thirty-three and spent years in poverty writing about birds.

Fergus Hume was a New Zealand-raised barrister who wrote The Mystery of a Hansom Cab in Melbourne in 1886, published it himself when nobody would touch it, and watched it become the best-sel

Joris-Karl Huysmans was a French novelist of Dutch descent who spent thirty-two years as a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior while writing the most exquisite books in France.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne was an English writer and a Cambridge man who travelled the world before settling to fiction — he claimed to have visited every continent.