Timeless Love: Poems, Stories, and Letters Audiobook

About the Authors

William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English poet and dramatist of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, is the most widely known author in all of English literature and often considered the greatest. He was an active member of a theater company for at least twenty years, during which time he wrote many great plays. Plays were not prized as literature at the time and Shakespeare was not widely read until the middle of the eighteenth century, when a great upsurge of interest in his works began that continues today.

John Keats (1795–1821) was an English romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death. During his life, his poems were not generally well received by critics; however, after his death, his reputation grew to the extent that by the end of the nineteenth century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He has had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers. His poetry is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popularly read and analyzed.

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is the author of the novels The Age of Innocence and Old New York, both of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was the first woman to receive that honor. In 1929 she was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. She was born in New York and is best known for her stories of life among the upper-class society into which she was born. She was educated privately at home and in Europe. In 1894 she began writing fiction, and her novel The House of Mirth established her as a leading writer.