Notable Writers of LGBTQ+ Literature

---

---

Booklist Award Winner Top 10 Reference Title for 2024

ALA Dartmouth Honorable Mention for Outstanding Reference Title 2023

---

This set deals with the challenges (both literary and personal) writers in this tradition have faced as well as the ways those challenges were gradually diminished. It emphasizes the literary qualities of LGBTQ+ literature while also setting such literature in its social, historical, and cultural contexts.

The tradition of LGBTQ+ writing goes back almost to the beginning of literature itself. Readers, for instance, have long seen signs of it in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in Homer’s Iliad. The poems of Sappho of Lesbos, the island from which the term “lesbian” is derived, are universally considered some of the most beautiful lyrics ever composed in ancient Greece, themes also appear in works by Virgil, the greatest Roman poet. And, readers and playgoers have long seen in Shakespeare’s poems and plays evidence of numerous LGBTQ+ characters and topics.

By the eighteenth century, the “love that dare not speak its name” was increasingly prominent, and by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the floodgates had begun to open. In the last hundred years, LGBTQ+ literature has been written by thousands and read by millions.

Notable Writers of LGBTQ+ Literature is a collection with broad appeal.  It helps readers:

• Explore the earliest roots and later branches of this tradition;
• Discover the challenges writers in this tradition have long faced but have recently overcome;
• Learn about how LGBTQ+ writers have affected, and been affected by, broader, more conventional literary canons; and
• Follow how reviewers and scholars have responded to writers and writing

Detailed analyses of selected works by an author follow the biography, illuminating the artistry that makes these writings not only important LGBTQ+ works but also simply works of art in themselves, reflecting society in a particular historical moment but also timeless. Entries conclude with a comprehensive list of works by an author, a bibliography, and suggested further reading.

Incorporated throughout this volume are supplemental essays that help to place an author in context, either with another individual or with an important event. Many of these essays focus on writers who are at the start of their careers, or who have simply been neglected, sometimes for decades.

Each entry begins with a brief abstract describing how an author contributed to the recognition of LGBTQ+ writing and why they are included in this collection. Biographical details follow, addressing in particular where each artist falls on the spectrum—from secrecy to bold acknowledgment—of their connection to the LGBTQ+ community of their time.

Each essay is 1,000 to 2,000 words in length and includes the top matter information such as Name, by which the subject is best known; a Description of each author’s contributions and the type of writing they are best known for; and Birth and death dates and locations when available. Each essay identifies relevant genres and biographical data.

Relevant writers include:

• Homer, Sappho
• Virgil, Richard Barnfield
• William Shakespeare
• Aphra Behn
• John Cleland
• Lord Byron
• Walt Whitman
• Emily Dickinson
• Oscar Wilde

Back matter includes supporting features of particular interest to those studying LGBTQ+ writers:

• Bibliography
• Author Awards
• Author Birth and Death Information
• Subject Index

Designed to introduce readers at the high school and university levels to the rich world of LGBTQ+ literature, this set gives students access to careful research and resources so they can further explore this rich literary tradition.