Essayist in the context of "Letter (message)"

Johan August Strindberg (/ˈstrɪn(d)bɜːrɡ/; Swedish: [ˈǒːɡɵst ˈstrɪ̂nːdbærj] ; 22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout his life, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and historical plays to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.

The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play – responded to the call-to-arms of Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by André Antoine's newly established Théâtre Libre (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in Copenhagen on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (/ˈbɛnjəmɪn/ BEN-yə-min; German: [ˈvaltɐ ˈbɛnjamiːn] ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western Marxism, and post-Kantianism, he made contributions to the philosophy of history, metaphysics, historical materialism, criticism, aesthetics and had an oblique but overwhelmingly influential impact on the resurrection of the Kabbalah by virtue of his life-long epistolary relationship with Gershom Scholem.

In popular culture and left journalism he often appears as an exemplar whose experience is representative of the tragedy of German-Jewish intellectuals under the Third Reich.

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument in favor of citizen disobedience against an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist and playwright. He was a leading figure in English-language Modernist poetry where he reinvigorated the art through his use of language, writing style, and verse structure. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there. He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39 and renounced his American citizenship.

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (/pruːst/ PROOST; French: [maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist best known for his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (translated in English as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), which was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century.

Proust was born in the Auteuil quarter of Paris, to a wealthy bourgeois family. His father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist who studied cholera. His mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was from a prosperous Jewish family. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith, though he later became an atheist. From a young age, he struggled with severe asthma attacks which caused him to have a disrupted education. As a young man, Proust cultivated interests in literature and writing while moving in elite Parisian high society salons frequented by aristocrats and the upper bourgeoisie. These social connections provided inspiration and material for his later novel. His first works, including the collection of stories Les plaisirs et les jours, were published in the 1890s to little public success.

Henry Louis Mencken (September 12, 1880 – January 29, 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. His satirical reporting on the Scopes Trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial", also earned him attention. The term Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose styles.

As a scholar, Mencken is known for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States. As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, censorship, populism, Prohibition, and representative democracy, the last of which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors. Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress and was critical of osteopathy and chiropractic. He was also an open critic of economics.

Tzvetan Todorov (/ˈtɒdərɔːv, -rɒv/; French: [tsvetan tɔdɔʁɔv, dzve-]; Bulgarian: Цветан Тодоров; 1 March 1939 – 7 February 2017) was a Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist and essayist. He was the author of many books and essays, which have had a significant influence in anthropology, sociology, semiotics, literary theory, intellectual history and culture theory.

Julio Florencio Cortázar (26 August 1914 – 12 February 1984; Latin American Spanish: [ˈxuljo koɾˈtasaɾ] ) was an Argentine and naturalised French novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and translator. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in America and Europe.

He is considered to be one of the most innovative and original authors of his time, a master of history, poetic prose, and short stories as well as the author of many groundbreaking novels, a prolific author who inaugurated a new way of making literature in the Hispanic world by breaking classical molds. He is perhaps best known as the author of multiple narratives that attempt to defy the temporal linearity of traditional literature.