Creative Writing Resources: Authors

Now called Gale Literature: Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Provides more than 16,000 biographical and critical essays on the lives, works, and careers of some of the world's most influential literary figures from all eras and genres.
Note: The ability to cross-search Gale Literature Criticism, Gale Literature Resource Center, Gale Literature: Dictionary of Literary Biography, & Gale Literature: Something About The Author is available on the Gale Literature platform.

Provides online access to all volumes of Something About the Author (1971-present) and Something About the Author: Autobiography Series (1985-present).
Note: The ability to cross-search Gale Literature Criticism, Gale Literature Resource Center, Gale Literature: Dictionary of Literary Biography, & Gale Literature: Something About The Author is available on the Gale Literature platform.

Provides full-text, cross-searchable access to ten of Gale's literature criticism series that include a range of modern and historical views on authors and their works across regions, eras and genres. Titles included: Contemporary Literary Criticism; 20th-C. Literary Criticism; 19th-C. Literature Criticism; Shakespearean Criticism; Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism; Poetry Criticism; Short Story Criticism; Drama Criticism; Children's Literature Review; Literature Criticism 1400-1800.
Note: The ability to cross-search Gale Literature Criticism, Gale Literature Resource Center, Gale Literature: Dictionary of Literary Biography, & Gale Literature: Something About The Author is available on the Gale Literature platform.

Now called Gale Literature: Something About The Author.

Provides access to hundreds of thousands of reviews, letters, poems and articles from the most authoritative English-language publication covering the world of literary and cultural activities. This database includes issues of TLS from its inception in 1902 to 5 years ago.
Note: The ability to cross-search multiple primary source collections from the provider Gale is now available on the Gale Primary Sources platform.

Contains poems by African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

A collection of key texts of modern African literature including fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction prose, in English, or with English translation.

Includes access to numerous American dramatic works including plays in verse, farces, melodramas, minstrel shows, realist plays, frontier plays, temperance dialogues and a multitude of other genres from the years between 1714 and 1915. Dramatists include David Belasco, Rachel Crothers, Augustin Daly, Clyde Fitch, Edward Harrigan, James Herne, William Dean Howells and Joaquin Miller.

Now called Film Scripts Online.

Includes the works of more than 200 American poets from the colonial period to the early twentieth century.

Contains the full text of more than 1,700 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. More than 40 percent of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays by writers such as Langston Hughes, Ed Bullins, Willis Richardson, Amiri Baraka, Randolph Edmonds, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others.

A comprehensive collection of short stories and folktales from Africa and the African Diaspora, ranging thematically from oral traditions that date back many hundreds of years to contemporary tales of modern life. Also includes complete runs of selected literary magazines, such as Kyk-Over-Al and The Beacon as well as many early North American black-owned and edited journals and newspapers.

Provides full text access to fiction, poetry, and essays by black women from North America, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean; dates of the material range from the 1700s to contemporary works.

A collection of published letters and diaries from approximately 500 women, spanning from 1500 to 1900. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, and many geographical regions.

Includes over 1,000 movie scripts, with coverage ranging from the early twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. Film Scripts Online also allows searchable access to detailed information on the scenes, characters, and people related to the scripts.

Provides access to several hundred published volumes by a range of authors who wrote during Indiana's Golden Age of Literature (1880–1920), as well as the digitized 3–volume reference work, Indiana Authors and Their Books, which covers nearly two hundred years of Indiana's literary history (1816–1980), and contains information about approximately 7,000 authors, including citations to their works.

A searchable collection of prose, poetry, essays, and drama composed by women writing in Mexico, Central America, and South America.

Includes access to plays, prose, and poetry by Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and other Latin writers working in the United States. The vast majority of the materials are from the Chicano Renaissance to the present.

Provides full text access to over 150 plays as well as original essays, reviews, interviews, photographs, production histories, and articles on Native playwrights and plays. Plays in the collection depict traditional creation stories, oral histories, and rituals as well as modern issues such as tribal and individual searches for identity, spirituality and connections to nature, poverty and its accompanying struggles, and much more.

Provides detailed reference information on all aspects of Canadian and American theatre, as well as links to plays and related Web sites. Database also includes access to photographs, playbills, postcards, posters, scrapbooks, and other ephemera.

Provides searchable access to original plays by more than 300 women from colonial times to the present. Each play is extensively indexed, allowing both keyword and multi-field searching. Additional resources include selected playbills, photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.

A comprehensive and authoritative online resource that includes general reference data, full-text scholarly periodicals, reprinted criticism, primary source material and the full-text annotated works from The Arden Shakespeare, the world’s most recognized scholarly edition.

A collection of American novels published between 1851 and 1875. Authors in this collection include Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others.