Authors of the 19th Century

Authors who started their careers in the 19th century.

Authors:

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American

Louisa May Alcott: Author of Little Women and several other novels, which in modern works would probably be considered Young Adult Literature.
Horatio Alger, Jr.: Author of Ragged Dick and many other similar stories; the Trope Maker for Rags to Riches.
Ambrose Bierce: Author of The Devil's Dictionary and contributor to the Cthulhu Mythos.
Robert W. Chambers: Author of The King in Yellow, which inspired (and was subsumed into) the Cthulhu Mythos.
Kate Chopin
James Fenimore Cooper: The first American novelist to become a bestselling author worldwide and to influence the leading authors in Europe; father of the frontier novel and its offshoot, The Western (through his Leatherstocking Tales), as well as of the sea novel.
Emily Dickinson (poet)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lucy Hamilton Hooper
Nathaniel Hawthorne: best known for The Scarlet Letter
O. Henry, best known for his short fiction chock-full of twist endings.
William Dean Howells
Washington Irving
Henry James: Known for intimate, psychologically complex prose that helped lay a foundation for Modernism. Famous works include Daisy Miller, Washington Square, Portrait Of A Lady and The Turn of the Screw.
Jack London: Best known for The Call of the Wild.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Herman Melville: Author of Moby-Dick and the short story "Bartleby The Scrivener".
Edgar Allan Poe: Pretty much the horror story writer. Also wrote the first detective story.
Gene Stratton-Porter: Author of children's books.
Henry David Thoreau: Essayist and thinker, best known for Walden and Civil Disobedience.
Mark Twain: Author and humorist. Best known for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and for being endlessly quotable due to his rather... direct outlook on life. Other notable works include Puddnhead Wilson and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
Edith Wharton
Walt Whitman
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

Argentinian

Australian

Austrian

Brazilian

Machado de Assis

British Isles

John Yonge Akerman
Jane Austen
Matthew Arnold
Hilaire Belloc
William Blake
The Brontë sisters:
- Anne Brontë
- Charlotte Brontë
- Emily Brontë
Robert Browning
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Lord Byron (Trope Namer for Byronic Hero)
Thomas Carlyle
Lewis Carroll (Wrote Alice in Wonderland, which probably inspired the first use of the critique "What was he smoking?")
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Wilkie Collins: Author of The Moonstone, arguably the first detective novel in English literature, and The Woman in White.
Marie Corelli: Author of A Romance of Two Worlds, a very important novel in the origin of the New Age movement; and Ardath, a masterpiece of Worldbuilding. She also wrote a lot of Gothic Horror and Author Tract works exposing unfairness towards women, drug addiction and alcoholism, the hypocrisy of social classes and child suicide (via the evils of Cram School education). She believed in universal health care and women's right to vote. Like her friend Ouida, she was immensely popular and controversial.
Samuel Rutherford Crockett
Charles Darwin
Thomas De Quincey
Charles Dickens: Voluminous English writer known for A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, etc.; a great deal of his writings shine a spotlight on the social ills of his day.
Benjamin Disraeli (also known in his other career as a Prime Minister)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Creator of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger (from The Lost World (1912)).
George Eliot
Elizabeth Gaskell
H. Rider Haggard: Author of adventure stories including King Solomon's Mines and She
Thomas Hardy: English novelist and poet.
James Hogg
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Catholic priest and poet.
Joseph Jacobs: Fairy Tale collector
Montague Rhodes James
John Keats: Romantic poet with oodles of potential who popped his clogs at 25.
Rudyard Kipling: Widely prolific Indian-born author and poet, best known for The Jungle Book and a good deal of poetry.
Andrew Lang: Fairy Tale collector
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
George MacDonald
Arthur Machen
James Clarence Mangan
W. Somerset Maugham: first published in 1897.
William Morris
Amanda McKittrick Ros
E. Nesbit
John Henry Newman
Margaret Oliphant
Ouida: Author of Under Two Flags, A Dog of Flanders and forty other novels and many short stories featuring exceedingly well-dressed (and often bisexual) heroes, innocent young people, sexy villains, sensuous villainesses tragedies. Monumentally popular as well as controversial, and a Kindhearted Dog Lover.
John William Polidori: Author of The Vampyre.
Christina Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
John Ruskin
Walter Scott: Author of Ivanhoe, Rob Roy and a pile of 'Scottish novels'. He was the first to write historical novels in Europe.
Robert Louis Stevenson : Author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and other novels.
Bram Stoker: Author of Dracula.
Mary Shelley: Author of Frankenstein and mother of Science Fiction.
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Husband of Mary Shelley, friend of Lord Byron. Poet.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Anthony Trollope
H. G. Wells: British science fiction writer, who, along with Jules Verne, practically invented the genre. The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine are probably his two best known works.
Oscar Wilde: Author of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Known for his wit as well as his life's Downer Ending.
William Wordsworth
William Butler Yeats

Czech

Jára Cimrman – an unrecognised Czech genius.
Karel Jaromír Erben – a folklorist and a poet, the author of many fairy-tale collections and a poem collection A Bouquet which focuses on women's role in the society and includes folklore/fantasy/horror themes.
Karel Hynek Mácha - a romantic poet, author of a poem May.

Danish

Hans Christian Andersen: Known mostly for his fairy tales, such as "The Little Mermaid" and the "The Ugly Duckling".
Søren Kierkegaard, a writer, better known as the Ur-Example for existentialism, who wrote on the Christian religion, morality, and society using pseudonyms, parables, and irony.
Jens Peter Jacobsen

French

Honoré de Balzac, who wrote La Comédie Humaine.
Charles Baudelaire, who wrote The Flowers of Evil.
Léon Bloy
François-René de Chateaubriand
Alexandre Dumas, père: Wrote The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and a pile of other stuff.
Alexandre Dumas, fils, who wrote La Dame aux Camelias.
Paul Féval, author of John Devil, The Black Coats, The Vampire Countess, and Vampire City.
Georges Feydeau, master farceur.
Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary, Sentimental Education, Salammbo.
Théophile Gautier
Victor Hugo, author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables.
Joris Karl Huysmans
Guy de Maupassant, a pioneer of the modern short story.
Charles Peguy
Stendhal
Paul Verlaine
Jules Verne, Father of Science Fiction and author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Émile Zola

Galician

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

German

Wilhelm Busch
Theodor Fontane: poet, critic, and novelist, who among other things wrote Effi Briest and Der Stechlin.
The Brothers Grimm: while best known for publishing collections of fairy tales and folk stories, the Brothers Grimm were also prominent in linguistics.
E. T. A. Hoffmann: Germany's most prominent author of Gothic Horror and dark romanticism.
Heinrich Von Kleist, a German Romantic era writer who killed a terminally ill woman and himself in a suicide pact.
Kurd Laßwitz, an early science-fiction author; his Auf zwei Planeten told of a different kind of Martian invasion one year before The War of the Worlds.
Karl Marx, the catalyst of communism and socialism.
Karl May, famous in particular for the Winnetou novels and infamous for falsely claiming accuracy to his fans because he let them believe his novels were factual accounts of his own adventures, although he had no first-hand experience and rather imperfect knowledge of his books' settings when he wrote them.
Friedrich Nietzsche, prolific philosopher and writer who wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Trope Namer for Eternal Recurrence, God Is Dead, He Who Fights Monsters, Nietzsche Wannabe and Übermensch. Quoted too many times to count.
Franz Xaver von Schönwerth: Important collector of German fairy tales, folk stories and legends.