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1,874 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 27 of 32.

  1. Five Nobel nods, a private militia, and a contested legacyYukio Mishima—born Kimitake Hiraoka (1925–1970)—is among Japan’s major postwar stylists, known for early novels about a masked youth and a burned pavilion among other works. Nomin…
  2. Yoknapatawpha County won Faulkner the 1949 NobelWilliam Faulkner (25 September 1897 – 6 July 1962) mapped fictional Yoknapatawpha County onto real Mississippi clay. Raised in Oxford after a New Albany birth, he joined the Royal…
  3. A schoolmaster’s son turned schoolboys into a dark fableSir William Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) published Lord of the Flies in 1954 and twelve more fiction volumes afterward. Knighted in 1988 and ranked third among The T…
  4. Heminges and Condell saved the plays in the 1623 FolioWilliam Shakespeare (c. 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) of Stratford remains English drama’s measuring stick. Married at eighteen to Anne Hathaway, father of Susanna and twins Hamn…
  5. Lyrical Ballads with Coleridge lit the Romantic fuseWilliam Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850), with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, opened English Romanticism through Lyrical Ballads (1798). The Prelude—revised for decades and iss…
  6. Nigeria’s first literature Nobel still writes as witnessAkinwande Oluwole Soyinka, born 13 July 1934 in Abeokuta, is Nigeria’s playwright-poet who has issued novels, story collections, verse, some twenty-five plays, and memoirs. Yoruba…
  7. An orphaned Osaka novelist perfected hush on the pageYasunari Kawabata (11 June 1899 – 16 April 1972) wrote spare, shaded Japanese prose that won him the Nobel. Orphaned by age four and raised by grandparents in Osaka, he met his si…
  8. A Trinidad childhood fed a Booker-winning global eyeV. S. Naipaul, born in 1932 in a Trinidad sugar town to a family of indentured Indian migrants, became a British writer of more than thirty books. Comic island novels gave way to …
  9. Woolf turned Bloomsbury talk into modernist interiorsAdeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) helped invent modernist fiction’s stream of consciousness. After her father’s 1904 death she moved into bohem…
  10. Futurism’s loudest poet died by his own hand in 1930Vladimir Mayakovsky (19 July 1893 – 14 April 1930) was Russian futurism’s booming poet, playwright, and poster artist. He cheered Bolshevik ideology and Lenin yet fought the state…
  11. Nine Russian novels came before the English Lolita shockVladimir Nabokov (22 April 1899 – 2 July 1977), sometimes publishing as Sirin, fled Imperial Russia for Berlin, then reinvented himself in English. Nine Russian novels (1926–1938)…
  12. Voltaire tried at least 178 pen names; one of them stuck foreverFrançois-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), better known as Voltaire, was the Enlightenment’s tireless satirist and philosophe. He worked in almost every genre—plays, poems, novels, histor…
  13. An Anglo-Irish poet midwifed a national theatreWilliam Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) stood at the center of twentieth-century literature and the Irish Literary Revival. Protestant, Dublin-born, Sligo-haunted, h…
  14. Leaves of Grass made America hear itself chantingWalt Whitman (31 May 1819 – 26 March 1892) quit school at eleven for printing shops and classrooms, then rewrote American verse in long, bodily lines. Leaves of Grass kept expandi…
  15. A busy Edinburgh lawyer invented the historical novel boomSir Walter Scott (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) packed Clerk of Session duties and Selkirkshire shrievalty alongside the Waverley novels that remade European fiction. Tory E…
  16. Tang China’s painter-poet signed himself as VimalakirtiWang Wei (699–761), courtesy name Mojie, was a middle Tang musician, painter, poet, and official. Famous for fusing landscape painting with spare nature verse, he signed works Wan…
  17. Catherine Blake printed and coloured a “mad” genius’s booksWilliam Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) died obscure and was later crowned a Romantic prophet of word and image. Neighbors called him mad; posterity praised the mystical…
  18. Wessex novelist who insisted he was mainly a poetThomas Hardy (1840–1928), Victorian realist after George Eliot and touched by Wordsworthian Romanticism, scorned much Victorian social hypocrisy. Famous for novels such as Far fro…
  19. Hanseatic Nobel novelist who wrote in exileThomas Mann (1875–1955), 1929 Literature Nobel laureate, wrote ironic symbolic epics of bourgeois and artist psyches. Buddenbrooks (1901) sketched his Hanseatic clan; The Magic Mo…
  20. Lord Chancellor who died refusing Henry’s churchSir Thomas More (1478–1535), Renaissance humanist, lawyer, and Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor (1529–1532), wrote Utopia and fought Reformation theology. He refused to accept Henry a…
  21. Lorain’s Nobel novelist who began with The Bluest EyeToni Morrison (1931–2019), born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Bluest Eye (1970) opened a career crowned by Song of Solomon (1977 National Book…
  22. Dada’s Cabaret Voltaire poet who joined the ResistanceTristan Tzara (1896–1963), born Samy Rosenstock in Romania, became French avant-garde poetry’s Dada spark at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire and Waag hall during World War I. Paris afte…
  23. Varkari saint whose abhangas scolded caste powerTukaram, seventeenth-century Marathi Varkari saint also called Tuka or Tukoba, devoted himself to Vithoba and wrote abhanga lyrics still sung across Maharashtra. Born Tukaram Bolh…
  24. Rama’s poet who made Ramlila possible in HindiTulsidas (1511–1623), born Rambola Dubey, was a Ramanandi Vaishnava saint-poet of Rama whose works reshape North Indian culture through Ramlila, music, and vernacular speech. He l…
  25. Semiotician whose Name of the Rose went globalUmberto Eco (1932–2016)—medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist—reached English readers mainly through The Name of the Rose (1980), a historical mystery laced with signs t…
  26. The Jungle’s muckraker who nearly governed CaliforniaUpton Sinclair (1878–1968) wrote nearly one hundred books as muckraker and activist, running for California governor as Democrat in 1934. The Jungle (1906) exposed meatpacking fil…
  27. Anthropologists’ daughter who remapped speculative fictionUrsula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) built the Hainish science-fiction universe and Earthsea fantasy after publishing from 1959. Born in Berkeley to anthropologists Theodora and Alfred K…
  28. Romantic who wrote Notre-Dame and Les MisérablesVictor Hugo (1802–1885), French Romantic poet, novelist, playwright, and politician, is world-famous for the Notre-Dame novel of 1831 and for Les Misérables three decades later. F…
  29. Augustan poet of Eclogues, Georgics, and AeneidVirgil (70–19 BC), Publius Vergilius Maro, wrote Latin’s core trio—Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid—for the Augustan age. Already a classic in life, he displaced Ennius in schoo…
  30. St. Louis modernist who became a British subjectT. S. Eliot (1888–1965) remade English modernist poetry with bleak diction and fractured verse, winning the 1948 Nobel Prize. Born to St. Louis Boston Brahmins, he moved to Englan…
  31. Six Dynasties recluse who made farming a poetic idealTao Yuanming (365–427), also Tao Qian, was a Six Dynasties poet-official who spent much of life farming and reading in rural reclusion. His plain style bucked contemporary literar…
  32. Serf painter-poet who became Ukraine’s national voiceTaras Shevchenko (1814–1861) was a Ukrainian poet, artist, and national figure born to serfs under Russian rule. Art talent won him Imperial Academy fellowship in Saint Petersburg…
  33. Mississippi-born playwright of Glass Menagerie fameTennessee Williams (1911–1983), born Thomas Lanier Williams III, stands with O’Neill and Miller atop twentieth-century American drama. The Glass Menagerie in 1944 broke through af…
  34. Carthaginian slave whose six comedies schooled EuropePublius Terentius Afer (c. 195/185–c. 159 BC) wrote six Roman comedies adapted from Menander and Apollodorus—all surviving complete. Ancients said he was born in Carthage, enslave…
  35. Hungary's national poet vanished into battle fogSándor Petőfi (1823–1849) wrote the Nemzeti dal that helped spark Hungary's 1848 revolution against the Austrian Empire, then vanished at the Battle of Segesvár. His body was neve…
  36. Midnight's Children made him; Verses nearly killed himSalman Rushdie's 1981 Booker winner was twice named the prize's best ever—yet The Satanic Verses (1988) brought a fatwa, global bans, and, in 2022, a stabbing that cost him an eye…
  37. The only Nobel laureate who played first-class cricketSamuel Beckett (1906–1989) transformed modern theatre with Waiting for Godot, won the 1969 Nobel Prize, and remains the sole literature laureate listed in Wisden for first-class c…
  38. Nine years, 42,733 entries: Johnson's DictionarySamuel Johnson (1709–1784) left Oxford penniless, then spent nine hard years forging A Dictionary of the English Language with some 42,733 entries. The Oxford DNB calls him arguab…
  39. An opium dream, a knock, and Kubla Khan broke offSamuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) coined "suspension of disbelief," helped found English Romanticism with Wordsworth, and claimed Kubla Khan arrived in an opium reverie—until a …
  40. About 10,000 lines once; roughly 650 remainSappho of Lesbos (c. 630–c. 570 BC) was antiquity's celebrated "Tenth Muse," yet only the Ode to Aphrodite is certainly complete today. Of some 10,000 lines she probably wrote, ab…
  41. Three National Book Awards, then the NobelSaul Bellow (1915–2005) remains the only fiction writer to win three National Book Awards, then took the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature. From a Lachine immigrant childhood to Chic…
  42. Literature's first female Nobel laureate bought her childhood homeSelma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) published Gösta Berling's Saga at thirty-three, then in 1909 became literature's first female Nobel laureate. She later bought back her childhood estate…
  43. He wrote over 120 plays; seven survive completeSophocles (c. 497/496–406/405 BC) dominated Athens's dramatic festivals for nearly fifty years—entering thirty competitions, taking twenty-four wins, and never finishing below sec…
  44. A roll of dice that reshaped modern artStéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) taught English in poverty while Tuesday salons on the rue de Rome drew poets such as Yeats alongside Rilke and Valéry. His Un coup de dés (1897) scat…
  45. He gave superheroes bills, tempers, and girlfriendsStan Lee (1922–2018) turned Timely Comics into Marvel by letting heroes bicker among themselves, worry about rent, and even catch colds. With Kirby and Ditko he co-created Spider-…
  46. He shaved daily on the retreat from MoscowMarie-Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal (1783–1842), kept his sang-froid and a morning shave during Napoleon's disastrous Russian winter retreat. Later, as The Red and the Bla…
  47. Tabitha pulled Carrie from the trash canStephen King tossed early Carrie pages; his wife Tabitha fished them out and told him he had something. The 1974 debut made the "King of Horror," whose Maine childhood, addictions…
  48. Exile named him Dongpo and freed his best verseSu Shi (1037–1101) passed the jinshi exam at nineteen with his brother, then spent a career in factional exile. On a Huangzhou farm called Eastern Slope he took the name Dongpo—an…
  49. Confessional poetry's fiercest voice burned briefSylvia Plath (1932–1963) helped define confessional poetry with The Colossus, Ariel, and The Bell Jar, published a month before her death at thirty. In 1982 her Collected Poems wo…
  50. Rudaki wrote a hundred eighty thousand verses—few remainRudaki (about 858–940/41), court poet of the Samanids, is hailed as New Persian poetry’s founder and Tajik literature’s father. Sources credit him with more than 180,000 verses; a…
  51. Kipling won the Nobel at forty-one—still the youngestRudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936), Bombay-born chronicler of empire and childhood, took the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first English-language winner …
  52. Shams’s disappearance turned a jurist into RumiJalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273) fled Mongol Central Asia for Konya and seemed destined for his father’s scholarly pulpit—until wandering dervish Shams Tab…
  53. Akutagawa’s grove gave cinema the Rashomon effectRyūnosuke Akutagawa (1 March 1892 – 24 July 1927), “father of the Japanese short story,” wrote about one hundred fifty tales before dying at thirty-five. Kurosawa’s 1950 film borr…
  54. Saadi’s Rose Garden still teaches after Mongol ruinSaadi of Shiraz (about 1209/10–1291/92), the “Master of Speech,” poured thirty years of travel into Bustan (1257) and Gulistan (1258). The Guardian ranked Bustan among the hundred…
  55. Tagore was the first Asian to win a Nobel PrizeRabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) remade Bengali letters and song, then startled Europe with Gitanjali. In 1913 he became the first Indian and non-European Nobel la…
  56. Rilke finished the Duino Elegies in a few weeksRainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926) remains a summit of German-language lyric. He drafted the Duino Elegies at Castle Duino in 1912, then stalled for a decade—…
  57. Fahrenheit 451 cost nine dollars eighty in rentalsRay Bradbury (22 August 1920 – 5 June 2012) made speculative tales feel like serious literature, mixing Martian dreams with book-burning dread. He expanded a Galaxy short called T…
  58. Chandler invented Marlowe after losing an oil jobRaymond Chandler (23 July 1888 – 26 March 1959) was forty-four, fired from a Depression-era oil executive post, when he taught himself pulp detective fiction. His first story hit …
  59. A dead mouse in gobstoppers seeded Matilda’s crueltyRoald Dahl (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) sold more than three hundred million books with macabre warmth for children and twist endings for adults. At eight, he and four f…
  60. Heinlein coined grok, waldo, and speculative fictionRobert A. Heinlein (7 July 1907 – 8 May 1988), often dubbed dean of science-fiction writers, pioneered hard SF and mainstream magazine sales. Four novels won Hugos; he minted word…

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