Famous Playwrights a to z

Director, producer and playwright George Abbott lived to be 107 and participated in such Broadway productions as Boy Meets Girl, The Fall Guy and Our Town.

Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Edward Albee is best known for penning Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Zoo Story.

Rodolfo Anaya is a Mexican-American writer best known for his Chicano-themed books such as Bless Me, Ultima, Heart of Aztlán and Tortuga.

Antonin Artaud was a French actor, costume designer and writer who revolutionized drama with his idea of a Theater of Cruelty.

W.H. Auden was a literary chameleon known for his poetry but who also wrote librettos, essays and verse dramas.

Isaak Babel was a Russian writer of Jewish descent known for his masterful short stories. He was imprisoned and executed in the Stalin era.

Imamu Amiri Baraka is an African-American poet and scholar. He has served as professor emeritus of Africana Studies at the State Unversity of New York at Stony Brook.

British playwright and screenplay writer Peter Barnes was well known for his unique, anti-naturalistic approach to theater and film.

Sir James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish dramatist, best known for writing the play Peter Pan.

Philip Barry is an American playwright best known for writing comedies of life. His most famous play is The Philadelphia Story.

English Restoration author, playwright and poet Aphra Behn wrote the short work of fiction Oroonoko, a love story about an African slave in Surinam.

Lord Byron is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and is best known for his amorous lifestyle and his brilliant use of the English language.

Broadway playwright Pddy Chayefsky picked up two Academy Awards for his films The Hospital and Network.

Anton Chekhov is best known for his short stories and plays, including The Proposal, The Wedding and The Anniversary.

Alice Childress is an African-American playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance. She is also the author of several young adult novels.

Agatha Christie was a mystery writer who was one of the world's top-selling authors with works like Murder on the Orient Express and The Mystery of the Blue Train.

After writing radio and television plays for the BBC, British playwright Caryl Lesley Churchill penned the controversial theatrical play Seven Jewish Children.

British actor, songwriter and playwright Noël Coward was one of the top figures of 20th century theater, using wit to deal with major social issues.

Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac was a French author and playwright best known for his political satire and science fantasy, including the play The Pedant Imitated (1654).

Aimé Césaire was a cofounder (with Léopold Sédar Senghor) of Negritude, an influential movement to restore the cultural identity of black Africans.

Ruby Dee is an American actress, playwright, screenwriter, activist, poet and journalist, perhaps best known for starring in the 1961 film A Raisin in the Sun. She's also known for her civic work with husband Ossie Davis.

Dame Daphne du Maurier was a novelist and playwright whose famous works Rebecca and The Birds were made into films by Alfred Hitchcock.

Alexandre Dumas was a 19th-century French novelist and playwright whose best known works are The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.

American actor Jesse Eisenberg is known for memorable performances in movies from indie drama The Squid and the Whale to Oscar contender The Social Network.

Henry Fielding was an English writer and justice of the peace who crafted novels like Tom Jones and Amelia.

Playwright Christopher Fry wrote a series of major plays in free verse, with undertones of religion and mysticism, including A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946).

Federico García Lorca is considered one of Spain's greatest poets and dramatists. One of his most successful poetry collections was The Gypsy Ballads.

Actor, playwright and screenwriter Spalding Gray wrote and performed his own roles in Monster in a Box and Gray’s Anatomy; both became feature films.

Playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun and was the first black playwright and the youngest American to win a New York Critics’ Circle award.

Václav Havel is a playwright who in 1989 became the president of Czechoslovakia, contining on after the country became the Czech Republic until 2003.

Seamus Henry is a renowned Irish poet and professor who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Lillian Hellman was a playwright and screenwriter whose dramas attacked injustice, exploitation and selfishness.

Journalist Theodor Herzl responded to the anti-Semitism he witnessed while covering the Dreyfus Affair by starting the World Zionist Organization.

Langston Hughes was an American poet, novelist, and playwright whose African-American themes made him a primary contributor to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Poet, playwright and novelist Victor Hugo was the heart of French Romanticism, with works such as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables.

Exiled Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler, the latter of which featured one of theater's most notorious characters.

William Inge was a playwright best known for his plays Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize; and Bus Stop.

American playwright George S. Kaufman co-wrote a number of Broadway hits, two of which received Pulitzer Prizes.

Actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah was introduced to U.K. households in 1999 as paramedic Finlay Newton on the BBC hospital drama Casualty.

Irish dramatist Lady Gregory, also known as Isabella Augusta, collaborated with William Butler Yeats and J.M. Synge to found the Irish National Theater and the Abbey Theater company.

D.H. Lawrence is best known for his infamous novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was banned in the United States until 1959, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Jerome Lawrence was an American playwright. He collaborated with Robert Edwin Lee for over 50 years. Inherit The Wind is their most well known play.

Author Ira Levin wrote some of the gripping novels of the 1960s and 1970s, including Rosemary's Baby and The Boys from Brazil.

David Mamet is a playwright and screenwriter known for such heady works as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross.

Herman J. Mankiewicz was a journalist and screenwriter who won an Academy Award for his work on the film Citizen Kane.

Actor, scriptwriter and improvisational comic Jason Mantzoukas has played Rafi on the FX show The League and co-starred with Sacha Baron Cohen in The Dictator.

Playwright, poet. Christopher Marlowe was a poet and playwright at the forefront of the 16th-century dramatic renaissance. His works influenced William Shakespeare and generations of writers to follow.

The work of Carson McCullers, author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, is must-read southern gothic fiction.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was such a bright young thing of the jazz age that she coined the term "my candle burns at both ends."

Arthur Miller was an American playwright whose bitting criticism of societal problems defined his genius. His best known play is Death of a Salesman.

Anthony Minghella was an Academy Award-winning director best known for his adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. Released in 1996, the film claimed the Oscar for best picture in 1997.

Moliere was a renowned 17th century French dramatist, actor, director and all-around artist known for his innovative stage comedies.

Irish nationalist and playwright Sean O’Casey wrote about life in the slums of Dublin, in plays like The Shadow of a Gunman and The Plough and the Stars.

British playwright John Osborne's Look Back in Anger ushered in a new movement in British drama and made him known as the first of the "Angry Young Men."

Writer, actor, producer, and director Tyler Perry has built an entertainment empire that consists of successful films, plays, and a best-selling book.

Harold Pinter is a renowned British playwright who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.