Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811, the seventh child of a well-known Congregational minister, Lyman Beecher. The family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she met and married Calvin Stowe, a professor of theology, in 1836.

Living just across the Ohio River from the slave-holding state of Kentucky, and becoming aware of the plight of escaping slaves, led her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in book form in 1842. She wrote the novel amidst the difficulties of bringing up a large family of six children.

The runaway success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin made its author a well-known publish figure. Stowe died in 1896.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a celebrated American poet, chiefly known for his controversial and highly original poetry collection Leaves of Grass. Born in 1819 on Long Island, he worked as a journalist, teacher, government clerk, and volunteer nurse during the Civil War.

Whitman published his seminal work in 1855 with his own money, soon becoming one of the world's most popular and influential poets. After suffering a stroke in 1873 he retired to Camden, New Jersey, where he died nineteen years later - just two months after the final edition of Leaves of Grass appeared on sale.

A political firebrand and an unorthodox thinker during his lifetime, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was the author of a large body of poetical works that left a deep mark in his own and later generations of writers.

Andrew Lang was a Scots poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology.

He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales.

The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.

One of the great figures of the Romantic age, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 1834) is known both for his poetry and prose, and for producing Lyrical Ballads with William Wordsworth, a work which revolutionized English poetry.

Plagued by debts and laudanum addiction, he left many pieces unfinished, yet his extraordinary influence was felt in literary figures as diverse as Wordsworth, Mary Shelley and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

John Milton (1608 74) is best known for his epic masterpiece Paradise Lost and for his commitment to the republican cause.

He wrote the crucial justifications for the trial and execution of King Charles I and was Secretary for Foreign Tongues, thus becoming the voice of the revolution. His influence on English literature can only be rivalled by Shakespeare.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the pre-eminent poet of his day, and is most famous for his mockheroic poem The Rape of the Lock. With John Gay, Jonathan Swift and John Arbuthnot, he formed the Scriblerus Club

John Keats (1795-1821) was one of the most important poets of the Romantic period.

A doctor by training before, he was the author of some of the most widely-loved poems in the English language, including "Ode to a Nightingale", "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes."