Skip to content
Curated category

Literacy and society theorists

  • Charles DickensCharles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels onto pots of boot blacking in a tumble-down warehouse overrun with rats.
  • George OrwellEric Arthur Blair arrived in the world on the 25th of June 1903 within a house in Motihari, Bengal Presidency. His family belonged to what he called the…
  • Virginia WoolfAdeline Virginia Woolf entered the world on the 25th of January 1882 within a grand house in South Kensington, London. Her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, a…
  • Johann Wolfgang von GoetheJohann Wolfgang von Goethe was born on the 28th of August 1749 in a large house on Großer Hirschgraben in Frankfurt. His father, Johann Caspar Goethe, had…
  • Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis on the 11th of November 1922. He descended from a long line of German Americans whose family fortune rested on the…
  • Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Luis Borges was born on the 24th of August 1899 in Palermo, a poor neighborhood of Buenos Aires. His family lived in a large house filled with an…
  • Victor HugoVictor-Marie Hugo was born on the 26th of February 1802 in Besançon, a city in eastern France. His father Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo served as a general…
  • John MiltonJohn Milton was born on the 9th of December 1608 in Bread Street, London. His father, also named John Milton, had moved to London around 1583 after being…
  • Lev VygotskyLev Semyonovich Vygotsky was born on the 17th of November 1896 in Orsha, a town within the Mogilev Governorate of the Russian Empire.
  • Jean-Luc GodardJean-Luc Godard was born on the 3rd of December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. His father Paul Godard worked as a Swiss physician while his mother…
  • Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss was born on the 28th of November 1908 in Brussels. His parents were French Jews who had moved there for his father's work as a portrait…
  • David AttenboroughDavid Frederick Attenborough was born on the 8th of May 1926 in Isleworth, Middlesex. He grew up in College House on the campus of University College…