290 authors,
one library.

Harold MacGrath was an American newspaperman from Syracuse who became one of the highest-paid popular novelists of his day and among the first serious writers to work for the movies, scripti

Arthur Machen was a Welsh author of supernatural and weird fiction whose boyhood among the Roman ruins of Gwent shaped everything he wrote.

Hector Malot abandoned law for journalism and wrote some seventy novels, but one outlived them all: Sans Famille, the story of a boy sold to a travelling showman, which became required readi

George Marsh was an American writer of northern adventure, setting his novels among the fur posts, dog teams and canoe routes of Hudson Bay and Labrador, country he travelled himself.

A. E. W. Mason was an English novelist, actor and Member of Parliament who served as a naval intelligence officer in Spain and Mexico during the Great War, running counter-espionage against

Mary Murdoch Mason left almost no trace beyond Mae Madden, her 1876 novel of a headstrong American girl loose in Italy, published with an introductory poem by Joaquin Miller.

Philippe de Massa was a cavalry officer and marquis who wrote revues for the private theatres of the Second Empire, entertaining the court he belonged to.

Guy de Maupassant was a French writer trained by Flaubert, a friend of his mother, who made him rewrite for seven years before allowing him to publish.

Margaret Mayo was an actress who turned playwright and gave Broadway one of its most durable farces — Baby Mine ran for hundreds of performances and was filmed three times, including once wi

Margaret Hill McCarter taught school in Kansas and then wrote the state into fiction — prairie romances of sunflowers, drought and small colleges that sold in the hundreds of thousands.

Justin Huntly McCarthy sat in Parliament for Irish Home Rule, then left politics for the theatre and the historical romance.

Nellie L. McClung wrote comic, warm-hearted novels of prairie towns and used the fame they brought her to win women the vote in Manitoba — she was one of the Famous Five whose case made Cana

George Barr McCutcheon was an American novelist who invented the imaginary kingdom of Graustark, launching a whole vogue for Ruritanian romance in America.

Herman Melville was an American novelist who shipped out on a whaler at twenty-one, jumped ship in the Marquesas and lived among islanders — the adventures that made his early books popular.

George Meredith was a poet and novelist admired by other novelists more than by the reading public, and he knew it.

Prosper Mérimée was a French novelist and, for nearly twenty years, inspector-general of historical monuments, a post in which he saved Vézelay, Carcassonne and Notre-Dame from ruin.

Henry Seton Merriman was Hugh Stowell Scott, a Lloyd's underwriter who hid behind a pen name so his City colleagues would not learn he wrote novels.

Frank Frankfort Moore was a Belfast journalist who wrote some sixty books — society comedies, sea stories and biographies — and married Bram Stoker's sister, which put him at the centre of l

Christopher Morley was an American writer, a Rhodes Scholar and a founder of the Saturday Review of Literature, who wrote some fifty books and adored bookshops above all subjects.

William Morris was a poet, novelist, translator, designer, printer and revolutionary socialist, and he refused to treat any of those as separate occupations.

Luise Mühlbach was the pen name of Clara Mundt, a German novelist who produced historical fiction on an industrial scale and was translated into English almost as fast as she wrote.

Talbot Mundy was born William Lancaster Gribbon in London and spent his twenties in India and East Africa as an ivory poacher and confidence man, jailed more than once, before reinventing hi

Neil Munro was a Scottish novelist and journalist from Inveraray, born illegitimate to a kitchen maid, who left for Glasgow at eighteen and rose to edit the Evening News.