Poet, novelist, biographer, critic, translator, editor, historian, antiquarian, and collector of literary curiosities, Scott was especially well loved for his representations of the culture and scenery of his native Scotland. His initial fame derived from Romantic poems such as The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810).

Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, also known as "Scipio Africanus the Elder," was a famed general and chief magistrate for the Roman Republic. He is primarily regarded for his strategic brilliance, which was most strongly evidenced in his defeat of Hannibal at the Battle of Zama during the Second Punic War.

Friedrich Schlegel was a poet, novelist, classicist, philologist, and literary critic. He was highly influential in the development of German Romanticism, especially through his contributions to his brother August Wilhelm's periodical The Athenäum.

Appointed professor at Jena in 1798, August Wilhelm von Schlegel was a poet, playwright, satirist, translator, literary critic, periodical editor, and propogandist. With his brother Friedrich he edited the periodical The Athenæum. His translations of Shakespeare's plays brought the English dramatist to a broad German audience. Schlegel's lectures beginning in Jena and continuing over the next fourteen years in Berlin and Vienna spread the Romantic aesthetic throughout Europe.

As a playwright and lyric poet, Schiller was the most important author in the German Sturm und Drang movement. Only after it was published anonymously in 1781 did Die Räuber, with its theme of taking from the rich to redress the wrongs done to the dispossessed, attract the attention of a director willing to bring it to the stage. His Der Geisterseher was published in 1788. Wallenstein (1799), the most successful among his many dramas, was translated in part by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as The Piccolomini (1800) and The Death of Wallenstein (1800).

Dramatist and novelist Paul Scarron is best remembered for his picaresque Le Roman Comique (1651-59).

Savage was best known for satirical poems and occasional verse, including The Authors of the Town (1725), The Bastard (a poem dedicated to his mother on his own illegitimate birth, 1728), The Wanderer (1729), and An Author to Be Lett (1729). He also authored two dramas, Love in a Veil: a Comedy (1719) and The Tragedy of Sir Thomas Overbury (1724). Savage lived a colorful life marked, among other events, by a conviction and later pardon on murder charges. He died destitute in prison.

French classical scholar known by Latin name "Claudius Salmasius." During the English Civil War, Salmasius published a defense of England's absolute monarchy. The popularity of this publication disturbed John Milton, who published his Defensio pro Populo Anglicano (Defence of the People of England) in response. Milton's publication included personal attacks of Salmasius and his wife.

The Lesbos-born Greek lyric poet, probably from the mid-seventh century B.C.E., widely viewed as the mother of all female poetic tradition, was especially noted for love poems to the boatman Phaon.

The pseudonym of nineteenth-century French author and feminist, Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, baronne Dudevant. Sand was a prolific and immensely popular writer of fiction, drama, travel accounts, and correspondence as well as autobiographical work. A political writer during the French Revolution of 1848, she was critical of the Napoleonic Code for its inequitable treatment of women. Unhappy in her marriage, she separated from her husband and pursued an unconventional lifestyle that included dressing as a man and affairs with many lovers, most notable being the composer Frédéric Chopin.