WAshleigh Ellwood Brilliant is an author and syndicated cartoonist born in London, UK, and living in Santa Barbara, California. He is best known for his Pot-Shots, single-panel illustrations with one-line humorous remarks, which began syndication in the United States of America in 1975. Brilliant became a naturalized American citizen in 1969.
WEmma Amelia Cranmer was an American temperance reformer, woman suffragist, and author. A talented suffrage speaker and prohibition representative, she served as president of the South Dakota Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association. Some of her epigrams were published by the press.
WJohn Donne was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a Catholic family, a remnant of the Catholic Revival, who reluctantly became a cleric in the Church of England. He was Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621–1631). He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, and satires. He is also known for his sermons.
WAn epigram is a brief, interesting, memorable, and sometimes surprising or satirical statement. The word is derived from the Greek ἐπίγραμμα epigramma 'inscription' from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein 'to write on, to inscribe', and the literary device has been employed for over two millennia.
WMarcus Valerius Martialis was a Roman poet from Hispania best known for his twelve books of Epigrams, published in Rome between AD 86 and 103, during the reigns of the emperors Domitian, Nerva and Trajan. In these short, witty poems he cheerfully satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. He wrote a total of 1,561 epigrams, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets.
WJanez Menart was a Slovene poet, best known for his Intimist poetry. He translated a number of classic French and English poetry and drama works into Slovene, including Shakespeare's sonnets.
WPlato was an Athenian philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece, founder of the Platonist school of thought, and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.
WHector Hugh Munro, better known by the pen name Saki and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered by English teachers and scholars as a master of the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.
WEugene Luther Gore Vidal was an American writer and public intellectual known for his epigrammatic wit, patrician manner, and polished style of writing. Vidal was openly bisexual and his novels often dealt with LGBT characters, which was unusual at the time. Beyond literature, Vidal was heavily involved in politics. He twice sought office—unsuccessfully—as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the United States House of Representatives, and later in 1982 to the U.S. Senate.