Name: Paulo Coelho

Birth/Death: Aug 24, 1947 - death

Intro: A writer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His most popular book is The Alchemist. In total, Coelho has published 26 books. Two of them -- The Pilgrimage and The Valkyries -- are autobiographical, while the majority of the rest are fictional, although rooted in his life experiences. Others, like Maktub and The Manual of the Warrior of Light, are collections of essays, newspaper columns, or selected teachings. In total, Coelho has sold more than 100 million books in over 150 countries worldwide, and his works have been translated into 67 languages. He is the all-time bestselling portuguese language author.

Name: Alexandre Dumas

Birth/Death: Jul 24, 1802 - Dec 05, 1870

Intro: Alexandre Dumas, père, was a French writer, best known for his numerous historical novels of high adventure. One of the most widely read French authors in the world, many of his novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and The Man in the Iron Mask were serialized. Dumas' writing also included plays and magazine articles and was a prolific correspondent.

Name: Victor Hugo

Birth/Death: Feb 26, 1802 - May 22, 1885

Intro: Victor Hugo was a French poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France.

Name: Malcolm Gladwell

Birth/Death: Sep 03, 1963 - death

Intro: Malcolm Gladwell (born September 3, 1963) is a British-born Canadian journalist and author, based in New York City. He is best known as the author of the books ''The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference'' (2000), ''Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking'' (2005), and ''Outliers: The Story of Success'' (2008).

Name: Robert Louis Stevenson

Birth/Death: Nov 13, 1850 - Dec 03, 1894

Intro: Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov.

Name: Dale Carnegie

Birth/Death: Nov 24, 1888 - Nov 01, 1955

Intro: Born in poverty on a farm in Missouri, he was the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936, a thundering bestseller that remains popular today. Along with several other self-motivational books, he also wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln, entitled Lincoln the Unknown

Name: Charles Dickens

Birth/Death: Feb 07, 1812 - Jun 09, 1870

Intro: Pen-name Boz, was the foremost English novelist of the Victorian era, as well as a vigorous social campaigner. Considered one of the English language's greatest writers, he was acclaimed for his rich storytelling and memorable characters, and achieved massive worldwide popularity in his lifetime.

Name: Tim Sanders

Birth/Death: birth - death

Intro: Tim Sanders completed his undergrad at Loyola Marymount University and later attended the University of Arizona for graduate work. Early in his career(80s) he worked in the cellular phone industry and then went on to work for cable television in the 1990s.

Name: William Golding

Birth/Death: Sep 19, 1911 - Jun 19, 1993

Intro: A British novelist, poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1983), best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. He was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980, for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth.