290 authors,
one library.

Frank L. Packard was a Montreal railway engineer who turned his working years on the line into fiction, then created Jimmie Dale — a wealthy idler by day, the safe-cracking Gray Seal by nigh

Gertrude Page emigrated to Rhodesia with her husband and farmed there for twenty years, writing the novels that told Britain what the colony was like — and telling the colony some things it

Thomas Nelson Page was born on a Virginia plantation and became the most popular voice of the Old South's afterlife — stories told by devoted former slaves who mourn the world that owned the

Gilbert Parker was a Canadian-born novelist who settled in England, sat in Parliament for eighteen years and was knighted.

Walter Pater was an English essayist and critic at Oxford whose conclusion to The Renaissance — that we should burn with a hard, gemlike flame — became the creed of the aesthetes and so alar

Thomas Love Peacock spent his days as an official of the East India Company and his evenings mocking everyone he knew.

Charles Edward Pearce was an English writer and journalist who turned out historical romances, crime stories and popular histories of the London stage.

Howard Pease was an English writer from Northumberland, a barrister by training who devoted himself to the history, ballads and folklore of the Border country.

Elia Wilkinson Peattie became a reporter at the Chicago Tribune in the 1880s, when women were not, and then ran the Chicago Tribune's literary page for a decade — the most powerful book crit

Margaret Pedler was an English novelist and trained musician who wrote some thirty romances between the wars, most of them set among country houses and concert halls and turning on a misunde

David Graham Phillips was the muckraker whose Treason of the Senate so enraged Theodore Roosevelt that the President coined the word muckraker to insult him — and the exposure helped bring a

Eleanor H. Porter trained as a singer in Boston before turning to fiction, and in 1913 gave the language a word: Pollyanna, whose relentless gladness made the book a phenomenon and its autho

Elizabeth Prentiss was an American minister's wife who lost two children in a single year and wrote out of that grief the hymn More Love to Thee, O Christ.

Antoine François Prévost was a French novelist who moved between the Benedictine order and the world outside it more than once, fleeing to England and Holland when his position became untena

Marcel Proust was a French novelist who spent the last years of his life in a cork-lined bedroom in Paris, writing through the night to escape noise and asthma.

E. R. Punshon spent years as a labourer in Canada and America before settling to write detective novels — some seventy of them, most featuring Bobby Owen, a constable who climbs to commander

Alexander Pushkin is where Russian literature begins — every writer after him works in the language he made.