We'll give it to you straight: Pope was a teeny-tiny guy. Due to health problems he had as a child that affected his growth, he grew up to be under five feet tall. As if that weren't bad enough, he...

Defoe was a dude with many talents. He was a writer, a businessman, and even a straight-up spy at one point. Given how busy he was, it's pretty incredible that, by the time he died in in 1731, he h...

Jonathan Swift was the king of satire. Yeah, all the Augustan writers were pretty good at satire, but Swift was the man in this arena. He was an Anglo-Irish writer who loved criticizing—among man...

Samuel Richardson didn't start off as a writer. He actually started off as a printer, which means that he made his living off of the growing publishing industry of the day.But Richardson became a s...

Okay, so Addison isn't as famous as his contemporaries Pope, Swift, Defoe, and Richardson. But along with his friend Richard Steele, he's still an important man in the period. Like these other dude...