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Horacio Silvestre Quiroga Forteza (31 December 1878 - 19 February 1937) was an Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story writer. He wrote stories which, in their jungle settings, use the supernatural and the bizarre to show the struggle of man and animal to survive. He also excelled in portraying mental illness and hallucinatory states. His influence can be seen in the Latin American magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the postmodern surrealism of Julio Cortázar. Horacio Quiroga was born in 1878 as the sixth child and second son of Prudencio Quiroga and Pastora Forteza, a middle-class family. At the time of his birth, his father worked for 18 years as head of the Vice-Consulate Argentine Break. Before Quiroga was two and a half months old, on March 14 of 1879 his father accidentally fired a gun he carried in his hand and died. Quiroga was baptized just about three months later in the parish of his birth town. Quiroga finished school in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. During this time, he worked in a repair shop and it was under the influence of the owner's son that he became interested in philosophy. He described the man as a, 'frank and passionate soldier of materialistic philosophy.' When he was 22, Quiroga put out his poetic feelers and discovered the poetry of Leopoldo Lugones and Edgar Allan Poe and would become a personal friend of the former. The discovery of these authors moved him to dabble in various schools and styles: post-romanticism, Symbolism and modernism. Armed with this background, he soon began to publish his poems in his hometown. As he continued studying, working with publications and Reform Magazine he improved his style and became well-known. During a carnival of 1898, the young poet met his first love, a girl named Mary Esther Jurkovski, who would inspire two of his most important works: The Slaughter (1920) and A Season of Love. Sadly, the misunderstandings caused by the parents of the young girl, who disapproved of the relationship because Quiroga wasn't Jewish, reached a crisis and the parents separated them. In his hometown he founded a magazine called Revista de Salto (1899). In the same year, his stepfather committed suicide by shooting himself and Quiroga found the body. With the money he received as inheritance he went on a four month trip to Paris. The trip was a failure and he came back sad and discouraged. Upon returning to his country, Quiroga gathered his friends Federico Ferrando, Alberto Brignole, July Jaureche, Fernandez Saldaña, Jose Hasd and Asdrubal Delgado, and with them founded the 'Consistorio del Gay Saber' (The Consistory of The Gay Science), a literary laboratory for their experimental writing where they found new ways to express themselves and their modernist goals. In 1901, Quiroga published his first book, Los Arrecifes de Coral ('Coral Reefs'), but this achievement was overshadowed by the deaths of his two brothers, Prudencio and Pastora, who were victims of typhoid fever in Chaco. The fateful year of 1901 still held another horrible surprise for the writer: his friend Federico Ferrando, had received bad reviews from Germain Papini, a Montevideo journalist, and challenged him to a duel. Quiroga, worried about the safety of Ferrando, offered to check and clean the gun that was to be used. Unexpectedly, while inspecting the weapon, he accidentally fired off a shot that hit Ferrando in the mouth, killing him instantly. When the police arrived, Quiroga was arrested, interrogated and transferred to a correctional prison. The police investigated the unfortunate circumstances of the homicide and deemed the incident accidental, releasing Quiroga after four days of detention. He was eventually exonerated. Racked with grief and guilt over the death of his beloved friend, Quiroga dissolved 'The Consistory' and moved from Uruguay to Argentina. He crossed the Rio de la Plata in 1902 and went to live with Mary, one of his sisters. In Buenos Aires, the artist reached professional maturity, which would reach its climax during his stays in the jungle. In addition, his sister introduced him to pedagogy, and found him work as a teacher under contract on the board of examination for the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. He was appointed professor of Castilian in the British School of Buenos Aires in March 1903. He wrote the story el hijo. In June of that year, Quiroga, already an experienced photographer, would follow Leopoldo Lugones on an expedition, funded by the Ministry of Education, in which the famous Argentine poet planned to investigate some ruins of Jesuit missions in the province. The jungle missionary left a profound impression on Quiroga that marked his life forever: he spent six months and the last of his inheritance (seven thousand pesos) on some land for cotton in Chaco, located seven kilometers from Resistance, next to the Saladito River. The project failed, due to problems with his aboriginal workers, but Quiroga's life was enriched by experiencing life as a country man for the first time. His narrative benefited from his new knowledge of country people and rural culture; this permanently changed his style. Upon returning to Buenos Aires after his failed experience in the Chaco, Quiroga embraced the short story with passion and energy. In 1904 he published a book of stories called The Crime of Another, which was heavily influenced by the style of Edgar Allan Poe. Quiroga did not mind these early comparisons with Poe, and until the end of his life he would often say that Poe was his first and principal teacher. Quiroga worked for the next two years on a multitude of stories, many were about rural terror, but others were delightful stories for children. During this time he wrote the magnificent horror story, 'The Feather Pillow'. It was published in 1907 by a famous magazine in Argentina, Caras y Caretas ('Faces and Masks'), which went on to publish eight of his other stories that year. Shortly after it was published, Quiroga became famous and his writings were eagerly sought by thousands of readers. In 1906 Quiroga decided to return to his beloved jungle. Taking advantage of the fact that the government wanted the land to be used, Quiroga bought a farm (with Vincent Gozalbo) of 185 hectares in the province of Misiones, on the banks of the Upper Parana, and began making preparations, while teaching Castilian and Literature nearby. He moved in during the winter of 1908. Quiroga fell in love with one of his teenage students, Ana Maria Cires, to whom he would dedicate his first novel, entitled, History of a Troubled Love. Quiroga insisted on the relationship despite the opposition of her parents, eventually garnering their permission to marry her and take her to live in the jungle with him. Quiroga's parents-in-law were concerned about the risks of living in Misiones, a wild region, and that is why they decided to join their daughter and son-in-law, and live close by in order to help them. So, Ana Maria's parents and a friend of her mother, moved into a house near Quiroga. In 1911, Ana Maria gave birth to the couple's first child, at their home in the jungle; they named her Egle Quiroga. During the same year the writer began farming in partnership with his friend, fellow Uruguayan, Vicente Gozalbo, and was also appointed Justice of the Peace in the Civil Registry of San Ignacio. This job was t the best fit for Quiroga who, forgetful, disorganized and careless, took to the habit of jotting down deaths, marriages and births on small pieces of paper and 'archived' them in a cookie tin. Later, a character of one of his stories was given a similar trait. The following year Ana Maria gave birth to a son, named Darius. Quiroga decided, just as the children were learning to walk, that he would personally take care of their education. Stern and dictatorial, Quiroga demanded that every little detail was done according to his requirements. From a young age, his children got used to the mountains and jungle. Quiroga exposed them to danger (risk-free danger) so that they would be able to cope alone and overcome any situation. He even went as far as to leave them alone one night in the jungle, or another time made them sit on the edge of a cliff with their legs dangling in the void. The daughter learned to breed wild animals and the son to use the shotgun, ride a bike and sail alone in a canoe. Quiroga's children never refused to be part of these experiences and, actually, enjoyed them. Their mother, however, was terrified and exasperated. Between 1912 and 1915 the writer, who already had experience as a cotton farmer and herbalist, undertook a bold pursuit to increase the farming and maximize the natural resources of their lands. He began to distill oranges, produce coal and resins, as well as, many other similar activities. Meanwhile, he raised livestock, domesticated wild animals, hunted and fished. Literature continued to be the peak of his life: in the journal Fray Mocho de Buenos Aires Quiroga published numerous stories, many set in the jungle and populated by characters so naturalistic that they seemed real. But Quiroga's wife was not happy: although she had become well adapted to life in the jungle the relationship between her and her husband was fraught with discord. Clashes between the couple occurred frequently and although the cause was usually trivial their excessive arguments became daily setbacks. These incidences, accentuated by Quiroga's volatile nature, excacerbated his wife so greatly that she became severely depressed. So Ana Maria would become a new tragedy in Quiroga's life when, after a violent fight with the writer, she ingested a fatal dose of 'sublimado' or Mercury(II) chloride. Unfortunately, the poison did not kill her instantly; instead she was forced to endure terrible agony for eight days before finally dying in her husband's arms on December 14, 1915. The tragedy of Ana Maria's painful death left Quiroga and his two children, five-year-old Eglé and four-year-old Darío, plunged into dark despair. After this tragedy, Quiroga quickly left for Buenos Aires with his children where he became an Under-Secretary General Accountant in the Uruguayan Consulat, thanks to the efforts of some of his friends who wanted to help. Throughout the year 1917 Quiroga lived in a basement with his children on Avenue Canning, alternating his diplomatic work with setting up a home office and working on many stories, which were being published in prestigious magazines. Quiroga collected most of the stories in several books, the first was Tales of Love, Madness and Death (1917). Manuel Galvez, owner of a publishing firm, had suggested that he write it and the volume immediately became a huge success with audiences and critics, consolidating Quiroga as the true master of the Latin American short story. The following year he settled in a small apartment on Calle Agüero, while he published Jungle Tales (1918, a collection of children's stories featuring animals and set in the Misiones rainforest). Quiroga dedicated this book to his children, who accompanied him during that rough period of poverty in the damp basement. 1919 was a good year for Quiroga, with two major promotions in the consular ranks and the publication of his new book of stories, The Wild. The next year, following the idea of 'The Consistory', Quiroga founded the Anaconda Association, a group of intellectuals involved in cultural activities in Argentina and Uruguay. His only play, The Slaughtered, was published in 1920 and was released in 1921, when Anaconda was released (another book of short stories). An important Argentine newspaper, La Nación (The Nation), also began to publish his stories, which by now already enjoyed impressive popularity. Between 1922 and 1924, Quiroga served as secretary of a cultural embassy to Brazil and he published his new book: The Desert (stories). For a while the writer was devoted to film criticism, taking charge of the magazine section of 'Atlantis, The Home and The Nation'. He also wrote the screenplay for a feature film (The Florida Raft) that was never filmed. Shortly thereafter, was invited to form a School of Cinematography, by Russian investors, but it was unsuccessful. After Quiroga returned to Misiones. He was in love again, this time with a 22-year-old Ana Maria Palacio. He tried to persuade her parents to let her go to live in the jungle with him. The constant refusal of the parents and the consequent failure of love inspired the theme of his second novel, Past love (published later, in 1929). The novel contains autobiographical elements of the strategies he used himself to get the girl, like, leaving messages in a hollowed branch, sending letters written in code and trying to dig a long tunnel to her room with thoughts of kidnap. Finally the parents grew tired of Quiroga's attempts and took her away so he was forced to renounce his love. In the workshop in his home where he would build a boat baptized Gaviota. His home was on the water and he used the boat to go from San Ignacio downriver to Buenos Aires and on numerous river expeditions. In early 1926, Quiroga returned to Buenos Aires and rented a villa in a suburban area. At the very apex of his popularity, a major publisher honored him, along with other literary figures of the time such as Arturo Capdevila, Baldomero Fernandez Moreno, Benito Lynch, Juana de Ibarbourou, A lover of classical music, Quiroga came often to the concerts of the Wagner Association. He also tirelessly read technical texts, manuals on mechanics, and books on arts and physics. In 1927, Quiroga decided to raise and domesticate wild animals, while publishing his new book of short stories, Exiles. But the amorous artist had already set his eyes on what would be his last and final love: Maria Elena Bravo, a classmate of his daughter Egle, who married him that year, not even 20 years old (He was 49). In 1932 Quiroga last settled in Misiones, where he would retire, with his wife and third daughter (Maria Elena, called Pitoca ', who was born in 1928). To do this, he got a decree transferring his consular office to a nearby city. He was devoted to living quietly in the jungle with his wife and daughter. But due to a change of government, his services were declined and he was expelled from the consulate. To exacerbate Quiroga's problems, his wife did not like living in the jungle, so fighting and violent discussions became a daily activity. In this time of frustration and pain he published a collection of short stories titled Beyond (1935). From his interest in the work of Munthe and Ibsen, Quiroga began reading new authors and styles, and began planning his autobiography. In 1935 Quiroga began to experience uncomfortable symptoms, apparently related to prostatitis or other prostate disease. With the pain intensifying and difficulty urinating, his wife managed to convince him to go to Posadas, where he was diagnosed with prostate hypertrophy. But the problems continued for the Quiroga family: his wife and daughter left him permanently, leaving him alone and sick in the jungle. They went back to Buenos Aires, and the writer's spirits fell completely in the face of this serious loss. When he could not stand the disease anymore, Quiroga traveled to Buenos Aires for treatment. In 1937, an exploratory surgery revealed that he suffered from an advanced case of prostate cancer, untreatable and inoperable. Maria Elena and his large group of friends came to comfort him. When Quiroga was in the emergency ward, he had learned that a patient was shut up in the basement with hideous deformities similar to those of the infamous English Joseph Merrick (the 'Elephant Man'). Taking pity, Quiroga demanded that the patient, named Vicent Batistessa, be released from confinement and moved into his room. As expected, Batistessa befriended and paid eternal gratitude to the great storyteller. Feeling desperate about his present suffering and realizing that his life was over, he told Batistessa his plan to shorten his suffering and Batistessa promised to help. That morning (February 19, 1937) in the presence of his friend, Horacio Quiroga drank a glass of cyanide that killed him within minutes of unbearable pain. His body was buried in the grounds of the Casa del Teatro de la Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (SADE), of which he was the founder and vice president, though, his remains were later repatriated to his homeland. Follower of the modernist school founded by Rubén Darío and being an obsessive reader of Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, Quiroga was attracted to topics covering the most intriguing aspects of nature, often tinged with horror, disease, and suffering for human beings. Many of his stories belong to this movement, embodied in his work Tales of Love, Madness and Death. Quiroga was also inspired by British writer Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book), which is shown in his own Jungle Tales, a delightful exercise in fantasy divided into several stories featuring animals. His Ten Rules for the Perfect Storyteller, dedicated to young writers, provides certain contradictions in his own work. While the Decalogue touts economic and precise style, using few adjectives, natural and simple wording, and clarity of expression, in many of his own stories Quiroga did not follow his own precepts, using ornate language, with plenty of adjectives and at times ostentatious vocabulary. As he further developed his particular style, Quiroga evolved into realistic portraits (often anguished and desperate) of the wild nature around him in Misiones: the jungle, the river, wildlife, climate, and terrain make up the scaffolding and scenery in which his characters move, suffer, and often die. Especially in his stories, Quiroga describes the tragedy that haunts the miserable rural workers in the region, the dangers and sufferings to which they are exposed, and how this existential pain is perpetuated to succeeding generations. He also experimented with many subjects considered taboo in the society of the early twentieth century. In his first book, Coral Reefs, consisting of 18 poems, 30 pages of poetic prose, and four stories, Quiroga shows his immaturity and adolescent confusion. On the other hand, he shows a glimpse of the modernist style and naturalistic elements that would come to characterize his later work. His two novels: History of a Troubled Love and Past Love deal with the same theme that haunted the author in his personal life: love affairs between older men and teenage girls. In the first novel Quiroga divided the action into three parts. In the first, a nine-year-old girl falls in love with an older man. In the second part, it is eight years later, and the man, who had noticed her affection, begins to woo her. The third part is the present tense of the novel, in which it has been ten years since the young girl left the man. In Past Love history repeats itself: a grown man returns to a place after years of absence and falls for a young woman he had loved as a child. Knowing the personal history of Quiroga, the two novels feature some autobiographical components. For example, the protagonist in History of a Trouble Love is named Egle (the name of Quiroga's daughter, whose classmate he later married). Also, in these novels there is a great deal of emphasis on the opposition of the girls' parents, rejection that Quiroga had accepted as part of his life and that he always had to deal with. The critics never liked his novels and called his only play, The Slaughtered, 'a mistake.' They considered his short stories to be his most transcendent works, and some have credited them with stimulaing all Latin American short stories after him. This makes sense since Quiroga was the first to be concerned about the technical aspects of the short story, tirelessly honing his style (for which he always returns to the same subjects) to reach near-perfection in his last works. Though clearly influenced by modernism, he gradually begins to turn the decadent Uruguayan language to describing the natural surroundings with meticulous precision. But he makes it clear that Nature's relationship with man is always one of conflict. Loss, injury, misery, failures, starvation, death, and animal attacks plague Quiroga's human characters. Nature is hostile, and it almost always wins. Quiroga's morbid obsession with torment and death is much more easily accepted by the characters than by the reader: in the narrative technique the author uses, he presents players accustomed to risk and danger, playing by clear and specific rules. They know not to make mistakes because the forest is unforgiving, and failure often means death. Nature is blind but fair, and the attacks on the farmer or fisherman (a swarm of angry bees, an alligator, a bloodsucking parasite, etc.) are simply obstacles in a horrible game in which Man tries to snatch property or natural resources (reflecting Quiroga's efforts to in life), and Nature absolutely refuses to let go, an unequal struggle that usually ends with the human loss, dementia, death, or simply disappointment. Sensitive, excitable, given to impossible love, thwarted in his commercial enterprises but still highly creative, Quiroga waded through his tragic life and suffered through nature to construct, with the eyes of a careful observer, narrative work that critics considered 'autobiographical poetry'. Perhaps it is this 'internal realism' or the 'organic' nature of his writing that created the irresistible draw that Quiroga continues to have on readers.

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 Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 - 18 January 1936) was an English short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including 'The Man Who Would Be King' (1888). His poems include 'Mandalay' (1890), 'Gunga Din' (1890), 'The Gods of the Copybook Headings' (1919), 'The White Man's Burden' (1899), and 'If - ' (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting 'a versatile and luminous narrative gift'. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: 'Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.' In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date. Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined. Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century. George Orwell called him a 'prophet of British imperialism'. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: 'He [Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.'

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Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin (27 January 1826 - 10 May 1889), was a major Russian satirist of the 19th century. He spent most of his life working as a civil servant in various capacities. After the death of poet Nikolay Nekrasov, he acted as editor of the well-known Russian magazine, Otechestvenniye Zapiski, until it was banned by the government in 1884. His best known work is the novel The Golovlyov Family (1876).

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Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-52), Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of 19th-century Russian realist literature. 

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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky 11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. 

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Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (9 September 1828 - 20 November 1910), also known as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright and philosopher who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Tolstoy was a master of realistic fiction and is widely considered one of the greatest novelists of all time. He is best known for two long novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). Tolstoy first achieved literary acclaim in his 20s with his semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856) and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based on his experiences in the Crimean War. His fiction output also includes two additional novels, dozens of short stories, and several famous novellas, including The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murad. In addition to novels and short stories, he also wrote plays and philosophical essays on Christianity, nonviolent resistance, art and pacifism. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker, social reformer, and Georgist. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Bevel.

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Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 - February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, to a middle-class family, Thompson had a turbulent youth after the death of his father left the family in poverty. He was unable to formally finish high school as he was incarcerated for 60 days after abetting a robbery. He subsequently joined the United States Air Force before moving into journalism. He traveled frequently, including stints in California, Puerto Rico, and Brazil, before settling in Aspen, Colorado, in the early 1960s. Thompson became internationally known with the publication of Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967). For his research on the book he had spent a year living and riding with the Angels, experiencing their lives and hearing their stories first-hand. Previously a relatively conventional journalist, with the publication in 1970 of 'The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved' he became a counter cultural figure, with his own brand of New Journalism which he termed 'Gonzo', an experimental style of journalism where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. The work he remains best known for, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), constitutes a rumination on the failure of the 1960s counterculture movement. It was first serialized in Rolling Stone, a magazine with which Thompson would be long associated, and was released as a film starring Johnny Depp and directed by Terry Gilliam in 1998. Politically minded, Thompson ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, in 1970, on the Freak Power ticket. He became well known for his inveterate hatred of Richard Nixon, whom he claimed represented 'that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character' and whom he characterized in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Thompson's output notably declined from the mid-1970s, as he struggled with the consequences of fame, and he complained that he could no longer merely report on events as he was too easily recognized. He was also known for his lifelong use of alcohol and illegal drugs, his love of firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism. He remarked: 'I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.' While suffering a bout of health problems, Thompson committed suicide at the age of 67. Per his wishes, his ashes were fired out of a cannon in a ceremony funded by his friend, Johnny Depp, and attended by a host of friends including then Senator John Kerry and Jack Nicholson. Hari Kunzru wrote that, 'the true voice of Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist ... one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.'

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Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American essayist, novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. Initially a well-regarded cult writer, the publication in 1985 of White Noise brought him widespread recognition, and is considered to be his breakthrough work. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist for Mao II and Underworld (1992 and 1998, respectively), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992 (receiving a further PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for The Angel Esmeralda in 2012), and was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010. DeLillo has described his fiction as being influenced by ‘[...] the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times', and in a 2005 interview declared, ‘Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments [...] I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.'

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John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 - December 20, 1968) was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Red Pony (1937). The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939), widely attributed to be part of the American literary canon, is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece. In the first 75 years since it was published, it sold 14 million copies. The winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been called 'a giant of American letters'. His works are widely read abroad and many of his works are considered classics of Western literature. His leftist political tendencies and the relatively provincial setting of his works has made him a very polarizing writer, both in the United States and in international literary circles. Until recently, the mandated teaching of his works in the British educational system has been controversial. Most of Steinbeck's work is set in southern and central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.

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Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., THE CRYING OF LOT 49, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, SLOW LEARNER, a collection of short stories, VINELAND and MASON & DIXON. He received the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

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John Locke (29 August 1632 - 28 October 1704), was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and known as the "Father of Classical Liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau, and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.

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Bertrand Arthur William Russell (18 May 1872 - 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic and political activist. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these in any profound sense. He was born in Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Britain. In the early 20th century, Russell led the British 'revolt against idealism'. He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G. E. Moore, and his protEgE Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. With A. N. Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics. His philosophical essay 'On Denoting' has been considered a 'paradigm of philosophy'. His work has had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science (see type theory and type system), and philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Russell was a prominent anti-war activist; he championed anti-imperialism and went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. Later, he campaigned against Adolf Hitler, then criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950 Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 'in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.'

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Alfred North Whitehead (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English  mathematician and philosopher. He created the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which has been applied in a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology,  theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology. In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. He wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), with his former student Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library. Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of  Western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another. Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy. Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us." For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in the 21st century has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb.

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Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. 

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