Samuel Richardson

Born in 1689 in Derbyshire and later active in London, Samuel Richardson built his career first as a printer rather than as a novelist. That background mattered: he spent years in the world of books, journals, and publishing before turning to fiction, and he eventually became one of the most influential English novelists of the eighteenth century.

Richardson is especially associated with the epistolary novel, a form built from letters exchanged by characters. In Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753), he used that form to create intimacy, moral conflict, and psychological depth. Clarissa in particular has long been admired for its scale and emotional power.

He died in 1761, but his work continued to shape the history of the novel. Readers and writers after him saw in his fiction a new way of exploring private feeling, social pressure, and the inner lives of ordinary people.