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Douglas Adams is the beloved creator of "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" and its various incarnations as books, audio progams, radio plays, and most recently a movie. LearnOutLoud.com is happy to present Adam's work on audio (most of which is read by the author) with the hope that you will find the same joy that millions of people have derived from Adams' work over the last 25 years. |
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Jane Austen is an English writer who added modern character to the novel form by writing about everyday events. She was born in 1775 in Steventon, Hampshire as a daughter of a clergyman and was raised to love literature. |
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Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born author who is widely regarded as one of the greatest English novelists. He is known for the depth of his prose and his depiction of life at sea. Conrad found inspiration for his tales of ocean voyage from his own real-life experience as a sailor in the French merchant navy. He also served in the British navy, traveling around the world from the East Indies to Bombay and Singapore. |
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Charles Dickens is the british writer most associated with England's 19th century Victorian era, and is one of the fathers of the modern novel. Dickens' novels are known for their social commentary, and hard criticism of poverty. He was against the stark divide between the rich and the poor in Victorian society, and while his tales were invariably entertaining, they also came laced with the acid tongue of a social satirist. |
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Born in 1859, Arthur Conan Doyle is the author most famous for creating the detective Sherlock Holmes and is renowned as the world's greatest crime fiction writer. It was during the failure of this first business venture that Doyle began writting to pass the time. With the creation of Sherlock Holmes, Doyle embarked on a series of crime stories that brought new levels of realism to a marginalized genre. |
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William Faulkner is one of the most esteemed writers in American history. Faulkner was born in Mississippi and lived in the state throughout his life. His writing is highly influenced by the culture of the South and of Mississippi. Throughout most of his life, Faulkner suffered from alcoholism that had very harmful impacts on his health and personal life. However, he was still able to produce some of America's most respected literary works. |
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F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, is the author of many novels and short stories. The writer was born to an upper middle class American family on September 24, 1896. In the 1920s, Fitzgerald traveled to Europe where he established a close friendship with fellow writer Ernest Hemingway. |
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Ernest Hemingway was an American author as well as a journalist. Most of his work was produced in the 1920s to 1950s and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. |
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Henry James, hailed as a master of American literary realism, was born in New York City on April 15, 1843. Following in the footsteps of his intellectual father, James published his first short story at age 21. He would go on to pen many fictional novels, biographies, travel books, works of criticism, and even plays. |
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C.S. Lewis was an Irish author and scholar, known for his non-fiction work on Christianity, and famously for his fantasy series "The Chronicles of Narnia". |
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Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney on January 12, 1876. He was an American author and journalist, also noted for his work in social activism. The native San Franciscan adopted the name Jack as a boy, and worked odd jobs that usually involved hard labor as a teenager. London was always an avid reader and began submitting his own stories and poems to many publications. |
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Arthur Miller was a famous American playwright. The child of two Jewish immigrants from Poland, he worked in an automotive parts warehouse to make money for college. He married his childhood sweetheart, a Catholic girl named Mary Slattery and had two children. On graduating, he wrote for Broadway, with the play that led to his fame being Death of a Salesman, first performed in 1949. |
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Edgar Allan Poe was a 19th century author and poet, best known for his Gothic short stories and mysteries, including the "Cask of Amontillado" and "The Purloined Letter". Poe was born in Boston and lost both of his parents in the first few years of his life. |
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Ayn Rand (first name rhymes with "mine") is the author of many celebrated books that revolve around the philosophical theory known as Objectivism. Her classics include, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, both of which are available on audio. |
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William Shakespeare is the British poet and playright widely considered to be the greatest ever to write in the english language. Indeed, Shakespeare has been voted one of the most important people of the last millenium and all writers are indebted to the vibrant characterization, innovative plotting and philosophical scope he brought to the art of writing.
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Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish author from the Victorian era most famous for his novels Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Due to an illness that began in childhood and left the author extraordinarily thin and somewhat eccentric, Stevenson had difficulty fitting in throughout his life. |
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J.R.R. Tolkien is now more famous than ever for being the man behind the classic Lord of the Rings trilogy of books. It is due to this series and other masterpieces like "The Hobbit" and "The Silmarillion" that Tolkien is now hailed as the undisputed godfather of high-fantasy literature. |
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Born in 1835, Samuel Clemens, A.K.A Mark Twain, is one of the most famous American writers of all time. His most popular book, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn now stands as a primary example of the "the american novel" and indeed most american authors look to him as the formative voice in american literature. |
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Herbert George Wells is one of a few visionary minds to be produced in the 20th Century. While Wells never lived to see many of the scientific luxuries we enjoy today, he nevertheless was farsighted enough to realize it didn't matter if he lived to see them or not: man's increased reliance on high-technology was inevitable. |
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Edith Wharton was the first woman to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for literature. The Age of Innocence, published in 1920 and currently available for audio download, garnered her the award. As a member of New York's upper class society, Edith was able to write her novel about the morals and lifestyle of the elite from the point of view of a person living within the very circle she portrayed in the book. |
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Oscar Wilde was a well renowned poet and playwright in 19th century England. Born in Dublin in 1854 Wilde left his homeland to study at Oxford University. While a student at Oxford, Wilde gained accolades as he received the Newdegate Prize for his poem "Ravenna" describing his feelings about the Italian city of the same name. |
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From the late 60's on, Tom Wolfe has lit a trail of fire throughout the literary world, writing books on the art world, the psychedelic 60's, teen sex, America's space program, and much more. Popular audio titles like The Painted Word, The Right Stuff and his newest work I Am Charlotte Simmons are all featured here in one helpful guide. |