Photo: Ola Erikson / Forflex
Sample of authors
Eco, Umberto
Umberto Eco was an Italian author, literary scholar, historian and philosopher born in Alessandria in Piedmont. His surname may refer to the fact that his grandfather was a foundling at a time when children were sometimes registered in church records as "Ex Caelis Oblatus", which can be translated as "offered by the heavens".
His father was a clerk and his mother’s maiden name was Giovanna B...
Photo: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis Historical via Getty Images (1949)
Sample of authors
Blackwood, Algernon
The British author Algernon Henry Blackwood grew up in a strictly religious home in Kent. He soon abandoned his Christian faith for Buddhism, thereby laying the foundation for a life-long interest in Eastern mysticism, the occult and Theosophy. He spent a year between 1885 and 1886 with the Moravian Brethren in Germany, and after a failed business attempt he became a dairy farmer in Canada in...
