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 |