Geoffrey Chaucer

Most people meet him through The Canterbury Tales — a collection of stories told by travellers, written in the English of his own day rather than the Latin or French that carried prestige. That choice is the reason his name still comes up: he is credited with making Middle English a literature, not just a spoken tongue.

He was born in London and worked as a civil servant alongside his writing. The two lives were not separate. Travel, correspondence and steady reading gave him material and method, and the habits of an administrator — patience with detail, an eye for how a whole structure holds together — show up in the poetry. His earliest work is remembered less for originality than for how clearly it was put; clarity became something closer to a working principle than a stylistic preference.

In mid-career he widened the range of what he attempted while tightening his technique. Rivals and critics supplied the pressure that sharpened his arguments, and what had been tentative hardened into statements others could quote and build on. He moved between analysis and construction rather than settling into one mode. Even the attempts that failed told him something useful about the next one.

Later he turned to putting his house in order — editions, notes, reflective pieces that tried to fix the best version of what he had worked out. The surviving drafts and corrections show the process was messier than the finished prose suggests. Readers have gone on reinterpreting him with each new set of tools, which is roughly the definition of a body of work that has not closed. He died in 1400.