Spot the Famous Author—Photo Face-Off (2)

[B] Publius Vergilius Maro | Roman busts immortalized poetry's founding father. Spent ten years perfecting the Aeneid, then wanted it burned—Augustus disagreed, thankfully.

[D] Julio Cortázar | Tall frame and pipe completed the jazz-loving Argentine's bohemian look. Wrote Hopscotch with chapters readers could shuffle like cards.

[A] Nazim Hikmet | High forehead and revolutionary fire marked Turkey's exiled poet. Wrote his best verses in prison, proving bars can't cage metaphors.

[C] Oscar Wilde | Aesthetic perfection from flowing hair to velvet jacket. Quipped his way through Victorian society until love letters became evidence.

[D] Jean de La Fontaine | 17th-century portraits show the fabulist's contemplative charm. Made animals teach morality while living quite immorally himself—delicious irony.

[C] Rainer Maria Rilke | Sensitive features matched the soul who advised living the questions. Wrote about angels while terrified of actual human intimacy.

[B] Lord Byron | Romantic curls and brooding beauty launched a thousand scandals. Mad, bad, dangerous to know—especially if you were his half-sister.

[B] Hans Christian Andersen | Gangly frame and prominent nose marked Denmark's eternal child. His fairy tales disguised autobiographical pain as talking mermaids and ugly ducklings.

[A] Thomas Mann | Mustache and three-piece suit embodied German bourgeois respectability. Wrote about decay while maintaining impeccable dinner party etiquette.

[B] Alexandre Dumas | Magnificent afro and mixed heritage scandalized 19th-century Paris. Employed a fiction factory of ghostwriters, still counts as literary genius.

[C] James Joyce | Eye patch and thin mustache—modernism's Irish exile. Ulysses required decades of scholarship to decode one Dublin day.

[C] Louis-Ferdinand Céline | Gaunt features reflected his misanthropic worldview perfectly. Revolutionary prose style, unfortunately paired with deplorable politics.

[A] Boris Pasternak | Soulful eyes witnessed Russian revolution's bitter aftermath. Doctor Zhivago earned him Nobel Prize and Soviet persecution simultaneously.

[A] Federico García Lorca | Dark Spanish features radiated theatrical passion. Fascists shot him for being gay, leftist, and talented—the trifecta.

[D] Pablo Neruda | Round face and sensual lips belonged to love's communist poet. Wrote odes to onions and socks between political manifestos.

[D] Borges | Argentine master of mind-bending short fiction—think labyrinths, mirrors, and infinite libraries. Author of “The Aleph” and “Ficciones,” later went almost completely blind and even served as Director of Argentina’s National Library; irony noted: “two gifts” of books and darkness.

[C] Beaumarchais | Powdered wig framed the face of revolution's playwright. Figaro mocked aristocracy so effectively, Marie Antoinette performed it herself.

[C] Naguib Mahfouz | Gentle Egyptian features hid steel-sharp social criticism. Nobel Prize came with fundamentalist death threats—he kept writing anyway.

[D] Ursula K. Le Guin | Wise eyes and silver hair crowned science fiction's anthropologist queen. Made dragons feminist and anarchism cozy in brilliant prose.

[A] Nikolay Gogol | Sharp Ukrainian features and haunted expression suited his gothic imagination. Burned Dead Souls' sequel, died convinced his nose would escape.

[D] Honoré de Balzac | Rotund figure fueled by 50 daily cups of coffee. Wrote 90 novels while dodging creditors—caffeine and debt powered literature.

[B] Ernest Hemingway | Bearded machismo incarnate, from Cuba to Kilimanjaro. Perfected iceberg prose theory while drunk on daiquiris.

[D] Neil Gaiman | Leather jacket and tousled hair—rock star of modern mythology. Makes gods work minimum wage jobs in American heartland.

[C] Jean Racine | Baroque portraits capture French tragedy's mathematical perfectionist. Made ancient Greeks speak perfect alexandrines at Versailles.

[B] Albert Camus | Cigarette and trench coat completed existentialism's matinee idol look. Proved life's absurdity while looking impossibly cool doing it.

[A] Jean-Paul Sartre | Wall-eyed philosopher who made nausea philosophical. Refused Nobel Prize, accepted Simone de Beauvoir's open relationship terms.

[C] Chingiz Aitmatov | Kyrgyz features bridged Soviet and Central Asian literature. Made readers cry over mankurt mothers and talking camels.

[B] John Steinbeck | Weathered California face matched his dust bowl prose. Grapes of Wrath made bankers angry, workers hopeful—mission accomplished.

[D] Milan Kundera | Czech exile's wry smile suggested life's unbearable lightness. Made Communist oppression sexy, philosophical, and weirdly funny.

[D] Jules Verne | Magnificent beard housed science fiction's optimistic grandfather. Predicted submarines and moon travel using pure Victorian confidence.