Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, matemático, lógico y escritor británico más conocido  por el seudónimo de Lewis Carroll, nació en Daresbury, Cheshire, en 1832, y murió en Guildford en 1898. Durante cerca de cuarenta años fue profesor de matemáticas en Oxford, y junto con el también lógico George Boole procedió a una axiomatización de la lógica. Pero, sin duda, lo que le ha hecho universalmente conocido son sus historias para niños, historias donde desplegó todo su talento para jugar —y hacernos reflexionar— con el absurdo, el sinsentido y la magia de algunas paradojas lógicas. Carroll, que también gustaba de fotografiar niñas, y que ha dejado una galería de ambiguos retratos infantiles, es autor de Alicia en el país de las maravillas (1865), A través del espejo (1872), La caza del Snark (1876) y Silvia y Bruno (1889).

L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) es probablemente el creador del primer cuento de hadas genuinamente estadounidense, El Mago de Oz, que ha marcado el compás de las lecturas incipientes a decenas de generaciones.

Saki or Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916) is one of the undisputed English masters of the short story. Born in Burma, at the age of two he was sent to England after his mother’s death. He worked as a journalist and produced some of the finest short stories of the Edwardian era, distinguished by their satirical and macabre take on polite society. He was killed fighting on the Western Front during World War I, despite being officially too old to serve in the British army.

Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio (Madrid, 1562-1635), con su variada y prolífica obra, es uno de los autores más importantes de la historia de la literatura española. Aunque también escribió magníficas novelas, es en la lírica y en el teatro donde cultivó sus mayores éxitos. De hecho, su faceta como dramaturgo marcó un antes y un después: con centenares de comedias, consiguió hacer del teatro del Siglo de Oro un fenómeno de masasy sirvió como precedente a autores de la talla de Calderón de la Barca. Entre sus obras cabe destacar El castigo sin venganza, El caballero de Olmedo, El perro del hortelano, Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña, Fuenteovejuna, y Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) publicó catorce novelas, una cincuentena de cuentos y más de mil poemas. Atacado por la insólita crudeza sexual de muchos de sus libros, la falta de entusiasmo, cuando no la hostilidad, con que fue recibida Jude el Oscuro fue determinante en su abandono definitivo de la novela. A partir de 1895 Hardy se entregó de lleno a la poesía. De este modo consiguió el extraño honor de convertirse a la vez en el último novelista británico del XIX y en el primer gran poeta en lengua inglesa del siglo XX. Y la verdad es que, como novelista, y a pesar de mostrarse lúcido testigo de los orígenes de la modernidad, Hardy pertenece más apropiadamente al universo de Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevski o Galdós que al de Proust, Woolf, Joyce o Kafka. Los últimos quince años de su vida fueron testigos de un triunfo que le había sido tan esquivo como ahora le fue estrepitoso, y Hardy pudo vivir plenamente la experiencia de convertirse en el Gran Escritor de su tiempo.Murió en su mansión de Max Gate, cerca de Dorchester, a la que en sus últimos años acudían en peregrinación sus numerosos admiradores, entre los que se contaron R. L. Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, W. B. Yeats, John Cowper Powys, Virginia Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Graves, Ford Madox Ford, Walter de la Mare y Wilfrid Ewart. Sus cenizas se conservan en la abadía de Westminster, pero su corazón le fue extraído y enterrado en el cementerio de la parroquia de Stinsford, junto a los restos de sus dos mujeres.

William Makepeace Thackeray (Alipur, Calcuta, India, 18 de julio de 1811 - Londres, Inglaterra, 24 de diciembre de 1863) fue un novelista inglés del realismo.Thackeray es reconocido por su estilo en el retrato de los personajes y el empleo de la sátira. Posee un humor irónico corrosivo y un estilo realista y hábil en la estructura argumental.

El conde Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, generalmente conocido en inglés como Leo Tolstoy, fue un escritor ruso considerado como uno de los más grandes autores de todos los tiempos. Recibió nominaciones para el Premio Nobel de Literatura todos los años desde 1902 hasta 1906 y para el Premio Nobel de la Paz en 1901, 1902 y 1909.

Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) was a distinguished political scientist who became renowned for his literary parodies and satirical writings. His essays and short stories have ensured that he remains a major figure in the history of Canadian literature.

Santa was born a long, long time ago; really nobody knows how long ago. He was born in the North Pole, and he never left. But one night a year he travels North to South and East to West, And then back to home, where it's always the best. His father's name is Father Christmas, and he is the one who brought us Christmas. Like all the beautiful Christmas trees are green, the robe he is wearing is also green. His Mother's name is Mother Snow; She is the one who dresses the winter in a beautiful big blanket of snow. Santa has a big heart, and he gives to everybody all that he can. He leaves us all the presents we like because he knows us all so well. Once morning arrives, it takes us no time to unwrap all our gifts very fast. But I'm sure you are all familiar with this story from your years past. Of course, Santa went to school like every one of you. You can probably easily guess what his favorite subject was. It was in geography class which he excelled, and did so well. He knows all the countries on the map, without the use of Google map. Santa also has a sweet tooth, that is why he cannot say no to your goody, especially your Christmas cookie. But when you see him, don't you dare call him jelly-belly, just because of his big belly! Santa likes every animal, and every little creature he can speak with, and he is excited to share some of his animal adventures with you today in his new book Why Animals Love Santa.

Robert Browning (1812-1889) was born in Camberwell, London, the son of a clerk in the Bank of England. The strongest influence on his education were the books in his father's extensive library, particularly the writings of Byron and Shelley. His dramatic poem Paracelsus, published in 1835, established his reputation and brought him the friendship of the actor-manager William Macready. When Macready's eldest son Willie was ill in bed, Browning wrote for the boy's entertainment the poem of The Pied Piper, a story he remembered from his own childhood. After its appearance in print in 1842, it became a children's classic, attracting new illustrators in every generation.In 1846 Robert Browning married a fellow poet, Elizabeth Barrett, eloping with her to Italy where they lived until Elizabeth's death in 1861. He them returned to England to live with his only sister Sarianna, but later he went back to Italy, where he died at the Rezzonico Palace in Venice.Peter Washington is the editor of many of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, including Love Poems, and is the author of Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America.

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was an English academic best known for his mediaeval scholarship, holding the position of provost at King's College, Cambridge and later Eton, and his antiquarian ghost stories. He enjoyed entertaining his friends on Christmas Eve with his contemporary, realistic ghost stories that abandoned previous Gothic clichés. He even inspired a method of story telling known as Jamesian; elements often included in a Jamesian tale are an older scholar as the protagonist and an antique object that summons a supernatural presence.

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in South Ayrshire, Scotland, and died in 1796.Gerard Carruthers is Senior Lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is author of Robert Burns and co-editor of English Romanticism and the Celtic World.

Thomas Nelson Page was an American writer and lawyer, as well as the U.S. Ambassador to Italy during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Despite his family's wealthy lineage--both the Nelson and Page families were First Families of Virginia--Page was raised largely in poverty. Based on his own experiences living on a plantation in the Antebellum South, Page's writing helped popularize the plantation-tradition genre, which depicted an idealized version of slavery and presented emancipation as a sign of moral decline in society. Page's best-known works include the short story collections The Burial of the Guns and In Ole Virginia, the latter of which contains the influential story "Marse Chan." Thomas Nelson Page died in 1922.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts and at fifteen moved with her family to Brattleboro, Vermont. In 1884, left without any immediate family, she returned to Randolph, where she lived for almost twenty years with her childhood friend Mary Wales. She began to write seriously in the 1970s, & in the early 1880s her work began to appear in such popular magazines as Harper's Bazaar and Harper's Monthly Magazine. At forty-nine Mary E. Wilkins married Charles Manning Freeman, a New Jersey physician, and moved to Metuchen. Thereafter she wrote under the name Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. In April 1926, she received the William Dean Howells Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; later that year she was among the 1st women to be elected to membership in the Natl. Inst. of Art & Letters. Alfred Bendixen is Professor of English at Texas A&M University, and founder and executive director of the American Literature Association. Much of his scholarship focuses on the recovery of unjustly neglected literary texts and the exploration of neglected genres. He is the author of numerous books on American poetry and literature, including recent titles such as A Companion to the American Novel (2012); A Companion to the American Short Story (2010); and The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing (2009), co-edited with Judith Hamera.

Richmal Crompton was born in Lancashire in 1890. The first story about William Brown appeared in Home magazine in 1919, and the first collection of William stories was published in book form three years later. In all, thirty-eight William books were published, the last one in 1970, after Richmal Crompton's death.