Today Umberto Eco could have turned 86 years old. Eco was born in Alessandria on January 5, 1932. He is best known internationally for his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory. Umberto Eco touched upon a wide range of issues during a fruitful scientific career. He studied the medieval and modern aesthetics, mass culture, developed his own theory of semiotics. One of the central issues for him was the problem of interpretation: the relationship between the reader and the author, the "reader's role"
Eco's fiction has enjoyed a wide audience around the world, with many translations. His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, referent. Eco's fiction has enjoyed a wide audience around the world, with many translations. His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, references to literature and history. Eco's work illustrates the concept of intertextuality or the inter-connectedness of all literary works. Eco cited James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who have influenced his work the most.

Charles Samuel "Chas" Addams was an American cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters. Some of the recurring characters, who became known as The Addams Family, have been the basis for spin-offs in several other forms of media.

William Wilkie Collins was born on 8 January 1824. He was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His best-known works are The Woman in White and The Moonstone. Born into the family of painter William Collins in London, he lived with his family in Italy and France as a child and learned French and Italian. He worked as a clerk for a tea merchant. After his first novel, Antonina was published in 1850, he met Charles Dickens, who became a close friend, mentor, and collaborator. Some of Collins's works were first published in Dickens' journals All the Year Round and Household Words and the two collaborated on drama and fiction.
Collins published his best-known works in the 1860s and achieved financial stability and an international reputation. During that time he began suffering from gout. After taking opium for the pain, he developed an addiction. 

Gustav Meyer, an Austrian author, novelist, dramatist, translator, and banker, most famous for his novel The Golem. He has been described as the "most respected German language writer in the field of supernatural fiction". s also actively concerned with occult and Theosophical groups in Europe before and during World War I. Meyrink was born June 19, 1868 in Vienna but was later taken by his family to Prague, Czechoslovakia, where his mother's family owned a bank. As a young man, Meyrink worked in the bank, but he was attracted to occult teachings. By 1891 he joined the Theosophical Lodge of the Blue Star, whose members practiced various occult disciplines. Meyrink translated Nature's Finer Forces by Rama Prasad, one of the first works to introduce tantra to a popular audience in the West. In 1903 he published his first collection of short stories. Many of his writings have themes of fantasy or occultism, with echoes of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, and Franz Kafka.

George Gordon Noel Byron was born, with a clubbed right foot, in London on 22 January 1788, the son of Catherine Gordon of Gight, an impoverished Scots heiress, and Captain John ("Mad Jack") Byron, a fortune-hunting widower with a daughter, Augusta. The profligate captain squandered his wife’s inheritance, was absent for the birth of his only son, and eventually decamped for France, an exile from English creditors, where he died in 1791 at thirty-six, the mortal age for both the poet and his daughter Ada. The most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of the day. He created an immensely popular Romantic hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model

Robert Ervin Howard was an extraordinarily prolific and inventive writer of fiction and poetry during the 1920s and 1930s. Although best known as the creator of Conan, REH wrote hundreds of poems and over three hundred works of fiction in a wide range of genres – about half of which were published during his tragically short career.
REH's unique synthesis of historical adventure, fantasy, and horror created what we now known as sword and sorcery.

August Strindberg, in full Johan August Strindberg, (born Jan. 22, 1849, Stockholm, Swed.—died May 14, 1912, Stockholm), Swedish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer, who combined psychology and Naturalism in a new kind of European drama that evolved into Expressionist drama. His chief works include The Father (1887), Miss Julie(1888), Creditors (1888), A Dream Play(1902), and The Ghost Sonata (1907)

She is considered one of the foremost modernist authors of the 20th century and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Born in an affluent household in Kensington, London, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College and was acquainted with the early reformers of women's higher education.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, which includes the poem "Jabberwocky", and the poem The Hunting of the Snark – all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic and fantasy. There are societies in many parts of the world dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life.