Authors Like Hannah Arendt

Mary McCarthy

American · b. 1912 · Novelist and critic

McCarthy was a novelist, critic and one of the sharpest voices of the New York intellectual world. She met Arendt in 1944 and their letters, collected as Between Friends (1995), run from 1949 until Arendt's death. When Eichmann in Jerusalem was attacked, she defended it in “The Hue and Cry” in Partisan Review in 1964. After Arendt died in 1975 she became her literary executor and edited the first two volumes of The Life of the Mind (1978).

Walter Benjamin

German · b. 1892 · Essayist and critic

Benjamin was a Berlin-born critic and philosopher, a cousin of Arendt's first husband, Günther Anders. His essays include “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), and his unfinished Arcades Project was first published in 1982. Shortly before he died at Portbou in September 1940, fleeing the Nazis, he gave Arendt his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”; she carried them across the border, and in 1968 she edited and introduced Illuminations, the collection that brought him to English-speaking readers.

Simone Weil

French · b. 1909 · Philosopher

Weil was born in Paris in 1909, spent 1934–35 working in Paris factories to understand industrial labour, and joined a militia unit in Barcelona in 1936. Her essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” was written in 1940. She died in Ashford, Kent, in August 1943, aged 34, and almost all her books were published after her death: Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots and Waiting for God.

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George Orwell

English · b. 1903 · Novelist and essayist

Orwell, the pen name of Eric Blair, fought with the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War and was shot through the throat in 1937; Homage to Catalonia (1938) records how Stalinist forces turned on their own side. Animal Farm followed in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, two years before The Origins of Totalitarianism. He died in London in January 1950.

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Primo Levi

Italian · b. 1919 · Memoirist

Levi was a chemist from Turin who joined the anti-fascist resistance, was arrested in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz in February 1944, where he survived until liberation in January 1945. If This Is a Man (1947) is his account of the camp, The Periodic Table (1975) a memoir in twenty-one elements. The Drowned and the Saved (1986), his last book, contains the essay “The Grey Zone”.

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Czesław Miłosz

Polish · b. 1911 · Poet and essayist · Nobel 1980

Miłosz was born in Lithuania in 1911, served as a cultural attaché for communist Poland and defected to the West in 1951. The Captive Mind (1953) examines how Polish writers talked themselves into serving Stalinism. He taught at Berkeley from 1960, became an American citizen in 1970 and won the Nobel Prize in 1980; he died in Kraków in 2004.

James Baldwin

American · b. 1924 · Essayist and novelist

Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924 and wrote novels, plays and some of the most important essays of the American century. “Letter from a Region in My Mind” appeared in The New Yorker on 17 November 1962 and became the long essay in The Fire Next Time (1963). Four days after it was published, Arendt wrote to him arguing against its closing “gospel of love”: love, she said, has no place in politics.

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Susan Sontag

American · b. 1933 · Essayist · National Book Award 2000

Sontag was born in New York in 1933 and became the best-known American critic of her generation with Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977) and Illness as Metaphor (1978). In 1993 she staged Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo. Her novel In America won the National Book Award in 2000, although a researcher had identified passages in it adapted without credit from other books about its subject, Helena Modjeska; Sontag said she had transformed her sources.

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Anne Applebaum

American-Polish · b. 1964 · Historian · Pulitzer 2004

Applebaum was born in Washington in 1964 and has written the standard modern histories of Soviet repression: Gulag: A History (2003), which won the Pulitzer Prize, Iron Curtain (2012) and Red Famine (2017). Twilight of Democracy (2020) and Autocracy, Inc. (2024) turn to the present. She has held Polish citizenship since 2013 and received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2024.

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Timothy Snyder

American · b. 1969 · Historian

Snyder was born in Ohio in 1969 and taught at Yale until 2025, when he took up a chair at the University of Toronto. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) won him the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2013. Black Earth (2015) returns to the Holocaust; On Tyranny (2017), twenty short lessons from the twentieth century, became a bestseller.