Thinkers Timeline

William Shakespeare was an English writer. He is often called the greatest writer in the English language. He was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, a small town in England. He died there in 1616. We do not know everything about his life. He came from a fairly ordinary family. His father was a glove-maker and a local official. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway when he was eighteen. They had three children. At some point Shakespeare moved to London. There he worked in the theatre. He was an actor, a writer, and part-owner of a theatre company. The company built a famous theatre called the Globe. Shakespeare wrote plays for it, and the plays were performed for large, mixed crowds. In about twenty years, Shakespeare wrote around 38 plays and over 150 short poems called sonnets. His plays include tragedies, comedies, and histories. Some of the most famous are 'Hamlet', 'Romeo and Juliet', 'Macbeth', and 'King Lear'. Shakespeare was successful in his own time. He made enough money to buy a large house back in Stratford. After he died, two friends collected his plays into one book, called the First Folio, in 1623. Without that book, many of his plays might have been lost forever.

John Milton was an English poet, political writer, and government official. He wrote one of the greatest poems in the English language, Paradise Lost. He was also one of the most important defenders of free speech, religious liberty, and republican government in the 17th century. He was born in 1608 in London. He died there in 1674, aged 65. He came from a comfortable middle-class family. His father was a scrivener (a kind of legal copyist and money-lender) who loved music. Milton received an unusually thorough education. He studied at St Paul's School in London, then at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he earned his master's degree in 1632. After Cambridge, he spent six years in private study at his father's country house, reading widely in classical Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and modern languages. He became one of the most learned poets in English history. In 1638-1639 he travelled in Italy. He met Galileo, then under house arrest. The meeting impressed him. He returned to England as the country was sliding into civil war. He chose the side of Parliament against King Charles I. He wrote pamphlets defending republican government, religious liberty, and free speech. His pamphlet Areopagitica (1644) is one of the great defences of free expression in any language. When the king was executed in 1649 and a republic established, Milton served as Latin Secretary to the new government. He wrote official letters to foreign powers and defended the regicide in major published works. He went blind in his early forties, possibly from glaucoma, while still in government service. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Milton was in danger. He went into hiding briefly. He was eventually pardoned but lost his position. He spent his last years in poverty and obscurity, dictating his greatest poems to assistants. Paradise Lost was published in 1667. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes followed in 1671.

Aphra Behn was an English writer. She is the first woman known to have earned her living by writing in English. Almost every fact about her early life is uncertain. She was born around 1640, probably in Kent in the south of England. Her family was not rich. Her father may have been a barber called Johnson. As a young woman, she travelled to Surinam, a small English colony in South America (it later became Dutch). There she seems to have met people whose stories she used later in her writing. By 1664 she was back in England. She married a man called Behn, possibly a German or Dutch merchant. He died or left her within a few years. She then used the name Mrs Behn for the rest of her life. In the 1660s, King Charles II sent her to Antwerp in the Netherlands as a spy. Her job was to get information about English enemies. She sent messages back to London using the code name 'Astrea'. The king did not pay her enough. She ended up in debt. She may have spent time in a debtors' prison in London. From about 1670 she began writing plays. They were witty, often funny, and sometimes about sex. She wrote about 19 plays in total. Her most famous play is The Rover (1677). She also wrote poems, novels, and translations. Her novel Oroonoko (1688) is one of the first novels in English. It tells the story of an African prince sold into slavery. She died on 16 April 1689, aged about 48 or 49. She is buried at Westminster Abbey, a rare honour for a writer. Virginia Woolf later said that every woman who writes owes something to Aphra Behn.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was a British writer, philosopher, and early advocate for women's rights. She grew up in poverty and educated herself by reading widely and working as a teacher and governess. In 1792 she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman — one of the first serious arguments that women deserved the same education and political rights as men. She died at the age of 38, shortly after giving birth to her daughter Mary, who would later write Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft's ideas were ignored or mocked for much of the century after her death, but she is now recognised as one of the founders of modern feminism.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was an English novelist whose Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, written when she was eighteen years old, is widely regarded as the founding work of science fiction and one of the most influential novels in the English language. She was born in London to William Godwin, the political philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her mother died days after giving birth to her, and Mary grew up in a household filled with books and visitors from the radical circles of her father. At sixteen she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the summer of 1816, during a cold and rainy holiday at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Lord Byron proposed that each member of their company write a ghost story. Over the following months Mary wrote Frankenstein, published in 1818. Her life was marked by loss: three of her four children died in infancy or childhood, her husband drowned in 1822, and she was left at twenty-four to raise her surviving son alone and to support herself by writing. She produced further novels, including The Last Man, a post-apocalyptic narrative written after Percy's death, as well as travel writing, short stories, biographical essays, and careful editions of her husband's poetry. She died of a brain tumour in 1851, aged fifty-three.

Harriet Martineau was an English writer and social theorist. Many scholars now call her the first woman sociologist. She was born on 12 June 1802 in Norwich, England. Her family were Unitarians, a religious group that valued education for girls and liberal ideas. She was the sixth of eight children. From around the age of twelve she began to lose her hearing. By her twenties she was almost completely deaf. She used an ear trumpet (a kind of early hearing aid) for the rest of her life. Her father's cloth business failed before he died in 1826. The family lost most of its money. Most women of her class would have become governesses or wives. Martineau's deafness made teaching hard. She chose to write for a living instead. She succeeded. By the 1830s she was one of the most famous writers in Britain. In 1832-34 she published Illustrations of Political Economy. This was twenty-five short story books that taught economic ideas to ordinary readers. The series sold hugely. Queen Victoria invited her to her coronation in 1838. In 1834-36 she travelled around the United States. She met abolitionists, attended anti-slavery meetings, and wrote Society in America (1837). This book made her enemies in the American South. She kept writing for forty more years. She produced sociology, history, novels, children's books, travel writing, and around 1,600 newspaper articles. She died on 27 June 1876, aged 74, at her home in the English Lake District. Her Autobiography was published the next year.

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, and literary critic. She is one of the most important writers of the 20th century. She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 in London. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a famous editor and critic. Her mother, Julia, was a model for pre-Raphaelite painters. The household was full of books and writers. It was also full of suffering. Virginia's mother died when she was 13. Her half-sister died two years later. Her father died when she was 22. She had her first serious mental breakdown after each of these losses. She was taught at home. Unlike her brothers, she was not sent to school or university. She later wrote sharply about this unequal education. She read everything in her father's library. She began writing as a young woman. After her father's death, she moved with her siblings to the Bloomsbury area of London. There she was part of a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers known as the Bloomsbury Group. They believed in honest talk, personal freedom, and taking art seriously. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, a writer and political thinker. Together, in 1917, they founded the Hogarth Press, which published her own books and those of other important writers, including T.S. Eliot and translations of Freud. Her major novels appeared between the two world wars: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931), and Between the Acts (1941). She also wrote important essays: A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). She suffered from serious mental illness throughout her life. Her letters and diaries describe periods of depression and what was then called 'madness'. As the Second World War threatened England, and with Germany bombing London, her mental state worsened. On 28 March 1941, she filled her coat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex. She was 59. Her suicide note to Leonard said she could not face another breakdown.

T.S. Eliot was a poet and critic. His full name was Thomas Stearns Eliot. He is seen as one of the most important poets in English of the twentieth century. He was born in 1888 in St Louis, in the United States. He died in 1965 in London. Eliot came from a well-off American family. He studied at Harvard University and then in Europe. As a young man he settled in England, and he later became a British citizen. He spent the rest of his life there. Eliot did not begin as a full-time writer. For years he worked at a bank in London, writing poetry in his spare time. Later he became an editor at a publishing house, where he helped many other writers. His most famous poem is 'The Waste Land', published in 1922. It is a difficult, broken poem about a damaged world after the First World War. It made him famous. Later he wrote 'Four Quartets', a long, calmer poem about time and faith. Eliot also wrote important essays about poetry. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His first marriage was very unhappy and painful for both people. In his later years he found more peace, partly through his religious faith and a happy second marriage.

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, an English writer, journalist, and essayist. He is one of the most quoted writers of the 20th century. He was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal region of British India. His father worked for the British colonial government. His mother brought him back to England when he was a small child. He grew up in modest circumstances in what he later called the 'lower-upper-middle class'. He won scholarships to good English schools, ending up at Eton, one of the most elite schools in the country. He did not do well there academically. Instead of going to university, in 1922 he sailed to Burma (now Myanmar) and joined the Indian Imperial Police. He served for five years. What he saw changed his life. He watched British officers beat and humiliate Burmese people. He took part in colonial rule himself. He came to hate it. In 1927, he left the police, returned to England, and began writing. For years he was poor. He lived with tramps in London, washed dishes in Paris, picked hops in Kent, and taught in small schools. This experience became the material for his first books, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). In 1936, he went to Spain to fight against the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. He was shot in the throat by a sniper. His account of the war, Homage to Catalonia (1938), is one of the great books of 20th-century political writing. He spent the Second World War in London, working for the BBC and writing. His two most famous books came in his last years. Animal Farm (1945) was a satire on the Soviet Union. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was a novel about totalitarian rule. He had tuberculosis throughout these years. He died in London on 21 January 1950, aged 46, soon after finishing Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Christopher Hitchens was a British-American journalist, essayist, and writer. He was one of the most famous public intellectuals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He wrote about politics, literature, religion, and many other subjects. He was known for sharp arguments, beautiful prose, and a willingness to take unpopular positions. He was born in 1949 in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. He came from a middle-class British military family. His father was a navy officer. His mother was Jewish, though he only learned this as an adult. He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford from 1967. He was active in left-wing student politics. After university he became a journalist. He wrote for left-wing magazines including the New Statesman. In 1981 he moved to the United States. He wrote a regular column for The Nation, a major American left-wing magazine, for nearly 20 years. He became an American citizen in 2007. He wrote for many other publications including Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Slate. He was prolific. He wrote 17 books and thousands of articles. For most of his career, he was on the political left. He was a friend of writers like Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, his politics shifted. He supported the Iraq war in 2003. Many of his old left-wing friends saw this as betrayal. He defended his position fiercely. In 2007 he published God Is Not Great, an aggressive attack on religion. The book made him one of the New Atheists alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2010. He continued writing about his illness with extraordinary honesty. He died in December 2011, aged 62.