Showing results for "William Shakespeare" in Biographies

William Shakespeare is one of the most famous writers of all time. But little is known about the life of this playwright and poet.What we do know is that Shakespeare was born in 1564 in a town in the west of England called Stratford-Upon-Avon. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glove-maker who was also on the local council.

"All the world's a stage," William Shakespeare wrote. More than 400 years later, stages around the world still show Shakespeare's plays. But who was William Shakespeare? And what makes his plays so great?

This is a story from the Famous People in History collection.

Four hundred years ago, no one bothered to write down the exact words of stage plays. Characters’ lines were scribbled on small rolls of paper (as in, an actor’s role) and passed around, but no master script was saved for the future. The main reason we’ve heard of Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, and Shakespeare himself is that a group of people made the excellent choice to preserve the plays after the Bard died. If they hadn’t created the book known as the First Folio, Shakespeare and his works would surely have been lost to history.

Twenty literary luminaries, ranging from Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare to Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, are profiled in this entertaining and informative collection. Winner of A School Library Journal's Book of the Year Award, Lives of the Writers is both an indispensable reference tool and an exhilarating gossipfest. Author Kathleen Krull makes learning fun, painting realistic portraits of Hans Christian Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Hodgson Burnett, the Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, E.B. White, Jack London, Murasaki Shikibu, Miguel de Cervantes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Austen, and more. Krull serves up an outstanding introduction to the classics of literature for the whole family, while telling us all the real stories behind their writers.

This is a story from the Famous People in History collection.