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Some Important Foreign Writers and their Books

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In SSC, Banking, LIC, Railways, and other competitive exams, the General Awareness section plays an important role nowadays since it is a very scoring section. In this article, we will cover one of the topics of this section i.e “Some Important Foreign Writers and Their Books”. This is a very easy topic and if students read it comprehensively they will score good marks and the possibility of their selection will increase.

Some Important Facts about Books and their Authors:

  • Jane Austen, one of England’s greatest writers, nearly died at the age of seven. Both Jane and her sister Cassandra contracted diphtheria in Oxford. Luckily, Jane’s cousin, Jane Cooper, sent a letter to Jane’s mother, who rushed to her two daughters with a herbal remedy. 
     
  • Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll was in dire financial straits. Despite paying his debts on time, he often overran by more than £7,500. This is even more ironic considering that Carroll was a mathematics student at Oxford. 
     
  • Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus at the age of 18. It was released just two years later. 
     
  • Les Miserables by Victor Hugo was not only popular with Parisians in the 19th century. This powerful novel was one of the most read books among American soldiers in the Civil War. The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud once attended a lecture by the American icon Mark Twain. The subject of Twain’s lecture, however, had nothing to do with the complexity of the human psyche. Mark Twain was  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s neighbour in Hartford, Connecticut. 
     
  • George Eliot was a woman. Mary Ann Evans wrote under this pseudonym because women authors were not as highly regarded as men. Like George Eliot, Evans wrote several novels that rank among the best of all time. 
     
  • Vladimir Nabokov was not only a world-famous author, but also a serious lepidopterist, or butterfly researcher. He was a comparative zoology researcher at Harvard, where much of his butterfly collection survives today. 
     
  • Before he found success as a writer, Salman Rushdie wrote for Ogilvy and Mather. He has dreamed up  several famous campaigns, including ‘cheeky but nice’ and ‘irresistible!” 
     
  • William Shakespeare’s legacy lives on not only in his many works but also in his contributions to the English language. 
     
  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the Sherlock Holmes series, had a very public friendship with master illusionist Harry Houdini. However, when Houdini heard that Doyle believed in spiritualism and thought that Houdini had real magical powers, the friendship quickly ended. 
     
  • American author William Faulkner wrote the draft of one of his novels on the walls of his office in Oxford, Mississippi. Visitors to Faulkner’s Rowan Oak can still see the author’s handwritten notes for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Fable on these walls. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, helped establish a significant commune near Boston in 1841. However, Hawthorne left that commune a few months later after finding it difficult to write with all the blisters he got from cutting straw and shovelling manure. His lesser-known novel, The Blithedale Romance, tells of this experience. 
     
  • The French writer Stendhal has a clinically recognized disease named after him: Stendhal Syndrome. Symptoms of this disease include fainting, shortness of breath, and palpitations when viewing exquisite works of art. Stendhal’s name was chosen for this illness because he nearly fainted after seeing the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence.

List of Important Foreign Writers and Their Books:

Writer

Books

Adam Smith Wealth of Nations
Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf
Albert Einstein The World as I See it
Alexander Solzhenitsyn August 1914
A.L.Basham The Wonder that was India
Anton Chekhov Cherry Orchard
Arthur Hailey Airport
Aristotle Politics
Boris Pasternak Doctor Zhivago 
David Baldacci Absolute Power
Dante Divine Comedy
E. M. Foster A passage to India
Homer Odyssey, Iliad
H. G. Wells  shape of Things to Come
Harold Evans Good Times, Bad Times
Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer
Issac Newton Principia
Katherine Mayo Mother India
Machiavelli The Prince
Maxim Gorky Mother
Plato Republic
Jean J. Rousseau The Social Contract
John Milton Paradise Lost, Lycidas
Winston Churchill Gathering Storm
George Orwell Farm House, Animal Farm
Charles Darwin Descent of Man, 
Charles Darwin Origin of Species
William Shakespeare Comedy of Errors
William Shakespeare as you like it
William Shakespeare A Mid Summer Night Dream
William Shakespeare Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare Hamlet
William Shakespeare King Lear
William Shakespeare Othello
George Bernard Shaw Major Barbara
George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman
George Bernard Shaw Apple Carte
George Bernard Shaw Arms and The Man
George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw Caesar and Cleopatra
George Bernard Shaw Candida
Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens David Copperfield
J. K. Galbraith Affluent Society
J. K. Galbraith Ambassador Journal
J. K. Galbraith The Triumph
Harold J. Laski Grammar of Politics
Harold J. Laski The dilemma of Our Time
J. M. Barrie Hindu Civilization
J. M. Barrie Peter Pan
Gunnar Myrdal Against the Stream
Gunnar Myrdal Asian Drama
Leo Tolstoy War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy The Kingdom of God is Within You
Z. A. Bhutto Great Tragedy
Vladimir Nabokov Lolita
Mao-Tse Tung On Contradiction
Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea
Gunter Grass The Tin Drum
William Goldings The Lord of the Files
J. K. Rowling Harry Potter
Yann Martel Life of Pi


Last Updated : 10 Oct, 2022
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