290 authors,
one library.

Rafael Sabatini was born in Italy to an English mother and an Italian father, both opera singers, and grew up multilingual.

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was a French engineer and naturalist who spent three years on the Île de France, now Mauritius, and set his one famous book there.

George Saintsbury was an English critic and professor at Edinburgh, a man of prodigious reading who wrote histories of criticism, of English prosody and of the French novel.

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, born in Burma and raised by two tyrannical aunts he spent his career avenging in print.

George Sand was the pen name of Amantine Aurore Dupin, a French novelist who left her husband at twenty-seven, wore men's clothes to get into places women could not, and smoked in public whe

Leroy Scott was an American novelist who worked in a New York settlement house on the Lower East Side and turned what he saw there into fiction about labour racketeers, tenement life and the

Walter Scott was a Scottish novelist and poet who effectively invented the historical novel with Waverley (1814) and published it anonymously for years while serving as a sheriff and clerk o

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist, the daughter of philosopher William Godwin and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, and the wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Henryk Sienkiewicz was a Polish novelist writing for a country that did not exist on the map, and said he worked to strengthen the hearts of his readers under partition.

Mrs. J. M. Simpson was a nineteenth-century novelist writing for the popular market, whose fiction turns on a wronged heroine, a disputed inheritance and a long-deferred vindication.

Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover in the Chicago stockyards and wrote The Jungle to make America care about the men in them; the country was revolted by the meat instead, and Congr

Francis Hopkinson Smith built the foundation of the Statue of Liberty and the Race Rock Lighthouse, painted watercolours good enough to hang in major museums, and did not publish his first n

John Philip Sousa was the March King — leader of the U.S.

Émile Souvestre was a Breton lawyer's son who failed as a publisher, taught school, and found his subject in the quiet lives of ordinary Parisians.

Catherine Helen Spence emigrated from Scotland to South Australia at fourteen and became the colony's conscience: Australia's first woman novelist, its first female political candidate, a pr

Flora Annie Steel spent twenty-two years in India as the wife of a colonial official, learned Punjabi, served as an inspector of girls' schools and collected the folk tales she later publish

Chester K. Steele was never a person. It was a house name of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the fiction factory behind Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, used on a short line of adult mysteries writ

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish writer who abandoned engineering and the law, spent his life in flight from tuberculosis, and drew the map of Treasure Island for his stepson before wri

Frank R. Stockton was a wood engraver who turned to writing and produced, in The Lady, or the Tiger?, the most argued-over short story in American literature — he refused to say which came o

Bram Stoker was an Irish writer who spent twenty-seven years as business manager to the actor Henry Irving, running London's Lyceum Theatre and writing at night.

Gene Stratton-Porter was an American novelist and naturalist who photographed birds in the Limberlost swamp of Indiana, wading in with a heavy plate camera, and wrote the wetland into fictio

Hesba Stretton was Sarah Smith of Shropshire, who took her pen name from her sisters' initials and a village on the map.

Howard Overing Sturgis was an American-born writer raised in England, a friend of Henry James and Edith Wharton, who kept an open house at Windsor where the literary world gathered.

Van Tassel Sutphen was an American writer and editor at Harper's who wrote mysteries, a post-apocalyptic romance called The Doomsman, and a good deal about golf, a game he loved and helped p