Authors starting with B

- George Gordon Byron (January 22, 1788 - April 19, 1824) -

Ancestry: London, Great Britain

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond.

Byron's notability rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured aristocratic excesses, huge debts, numerous love affairs, and self-imposed exile. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad and dangerous to know". (It is odd, however, that generations of scholars have taken her at her word. As Francis Henry Gribble makes clear in his The Love Affairs of Lord Byron, chapter 11, she was herself not far from insane, morally highly equivocal, and capable of creating more than enough danger to convince any prudent man to stay well clear of her.) Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi in Greece.