290 authors,
one library.

Marie-Madeleine de La Fayette was a French aristocrat and writer at the court of Louis XIV, close to the moralist La Rochefoucauld, who read her drafts.

D. H. Lawrence was an English novelist, poet and painter, the son of a Nottinghamshire miner and a schoolteacher, whose whole work turns on the war between them.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of ghost stories and mysteries, known in Dublin as the Invisible Prince for the seclusion of his later years.

Richard Le Gallienne was the beautiful young poet of the 1890s — long hair, Yellow Book circle, close to Wilde and Beardsley — who survived his decade and spent forty more years writing for

Maurice Leblanc was a French writer who worked without much notice for years until a magazine asked him, in 1905, for a crime story.

Jennette Lee taught English at Smith College and wrote quiet, widely loved American fiction; Uncle William, her portrait of a Maine fisherman too easygoing to prosper, became a bestseller in

Gaston Leroux was a French journalist turned novelist who reported from revolutionary Russia before he wrote fiction.

Matthew Gregory Lewis was an English novelist who wrote The Monk in ten weeks, at nineteen, while serving as a junior diplomat in The Hague.

Ottilie A. Liljencrantz was a Chicago writer of Swedish descent who spent her short career on the Norse sagas, retelling the voyages of Leif Ericson as full-blooded historical romance for Am

Joseph Crosby Lincoln was an American writer who made a career out of one small place: Cape Cod, whose retired sea captains, stubborn widows and summer visitors fill some forty novels.

Natalie Sumner Lincoln was an American writer of detective novels set in the Washington she knew from the inside, the daughter of a capital family and for years a society reporter.

David Lindsay was a Scottish writer whose A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) sold fewer than six hundred copies in his lifetime and left him convinced he had failed.

William John Locke was an English novelist born in Barbados who worked as an architect's secretary for a decade before his fiction took hold.

Jack London was an American writer who was an oyster pirate, a hobo, a seal hunter and a Klondike prospector before he was twenty-four, and used all of it.

Pierre Loti was the pen name of Julien Viaud, a French naval officer who rose to captain and wrote from every port the service sent him to — Turkey, Senegal, Tahiti, Japan.

Percy Lubbock was an English critic and essayist, a friend of Henry James who edited his letters after his death.

Edna Lyall was Ada Ellen Bayly, a clergyman's daughter who took a near-anagram of her own name and used it to write novels that argued: for the rights of atheists, for Irish Home Rule, for w