This is a list of notable people described as autodidacts by the media. An autodidact is someone who is partially or wholly self-taught. Some people listed may have received a formal education, including some college, but not in the fields in which they became prominent.
Historical education levels
Because of the large increase in years of education since 1800, especially during the early 20th century, it is difficult to define autodidactism and to compare autodidacts during different time periods.
Artists and authors Sardoine Mia, Congolese artist and painter Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist writer, lecturer, and thinker at the turn of the 20th century Suzanne Valadon, self-taught artist of Bohemian Paris Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, self-taught scholar and poet of New Spain Benjamin Kidd (1858–1916), British sociologist, was not given a formal education.Henry Sturt, "Kidd, Benjamin (1858–1916), sociologist," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 1927. As a working adult, he attended some evening classes and he read incessantly.D. P. Crook, "Kidd, Benjamin (1858–1916)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford University Press, 2004). Kidd gained worldwide fame by the publication of Social Evolution in 1894. Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer, essayist, and poet. Winner of the Jerusalem Prize. Machado de Assis, often described as the greatest Brazilian writer, never attended a university and taught himself four foreign languages. Hermann Hesse, German-Swiss poet and novelist and Nobel laureate in literature Knut Hamsun, Norwegian writer and Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela, Spanish novelist, poet, story writer and essayist and Nobel laureate Eugene O'Neill, American playwright and Nobel laureate José Saramago, Nobel Prize for Literature. His parents were unable to pay for his studies at early age, and he was forced to abandon the baccalaureate. At the age of 13, he began to study mechanics to repair cars. He continued the next thirty years working as a locksmith for a metal company, and in an agency of social services. His first novel () was published in 1947 without any success at all. He stopped writing for publication, although he continued doing manuscripts for himself. At the end of the 1960s, he joined the Communist party, and after the fall of the Fascist dictatorship in Portugal of 1974, he was the director of the nationalized newspaper Diário de Notícias. Just a few years after the putsch of the left wing failed in 1975, he began to write again to survive. At this point, he began to receive more recognition for his work.Interview: José Saramago: Nada está mejorando, BBC Mundo, 22 June 2009. (In Spanish) In 1998 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize for Literature. A Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali, he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. William Blake was an English visionary artist and poet. He was initially educated by his mother prior to his enrollment in drawing classes but never received any formal schooling. Instead, he read widely on subjects of his own choosing. Sarah Josepha Hale was an American writer and editor of the most widely circulated magazine in the period before the Civil War, Godey's Lady's Book. John Clare was self-taught and rose out of poverty to become an acclaimed poet. Zakaria Tamer, a Syrian short story writer Charles Dickens' formal education stopped when he was fifteen years of age. He was an early supporter of self-education. G.V. Desani, British-Indian author and educator. His formal education ended in Sind, India (now Pakistan) when he was about thirteen years old. Henry Miller was a writer, expatriated in Paris at his flourishing. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms, developing a new type of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, explicit language, sex, surrealist free association, and mysticism. Truman Capote was a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, and actor. Many of Capote's short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized as literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a "nonfiction novel". At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories, and plays. Poerbatjaraka, an Indonesian self-taught philologist and professor, specialising in Javanese literature. Jack London was a novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first writers to become a worldwide celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction. Joseph Conrad, regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. William Faulkner, Nobel Prize for Literature. Dropped out of college."University of Mississippi: William Faulkner". Olemiss.edu. Retrieved 27 September 2010. Forensic facial reconstruction artist Frank Bender was self-taught."Frank Bender, 'Recomposer' of Faces of the Dead, Dies at 70" NY Times, 30 July 2011 His forensic career started off with a day trip to a morgue, asked to try to put a face on the deceased, brought measurements home, created a successful facial reconstruction that led to his first (of many) IDs. He took only one semester of sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Harlan Ellison, multi-award-winning speculative fiction author and screenwriter. Ellison attended Ohio State University for 18 months before being expelled for hitting a professor who criticized his writing, and claimed that for over 20 years thereafter, he sent the professor a copy of every work he published. Ellison wrote screenplays for a wide variety of television series such as Star Trek and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and won dozens of awards in the science fiction and fantasy genres. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, weird fiction writer and primogenitor of modern horror fiction, was a self-taught writer, critic and commentator. A pronounced child prodigy by the time he was of primary school age, reading memorized verse not long after learning how to walk, and composing and writing his own poetry by the time he was six. Growing up, Lovecraft attended school only in brief stints, his ill-health ending all scholastic endeavors prematurely. During this time Lovecraft read constantly, gifted with an abnormal talent for reading comprehension. Some of his favorite subjects were astronomy and chemistry, about both of which he went on to write amateur pieces of commentary and criticism. Not long after developing a great interest in the pulp magazines of his day, he began writing fiction himself—eventually becoming a preeminent writer of weird fiction in the pulp press, his work appearing in magazines such as Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. David Hume, philosopher, historian, economist and a prominent figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, dropped out of college.Harris 2004, p. 35. Maxim Gorky was a self-taught man who rose out of poverty to become a world-famous writer. Mukul Deva, a well-known Indian writer, keynote speaker and coach has been engaged in self-directed learning. Jose Carlos Mariategui, the most important Marxist thinker in Latin America, due to a chronic illness was absent from a proper education, both school and university. However, he changed the lack of formal studies into an advantage and developed a self-taught capacity, which made him a voracious reader contributing to mature promptly, as he would later say, from an "ephemeral childhood" to a "premature adolescence". Nazir Naji, a top Pakistani Urdu news columnist and intellectual best known for his progressive writings has never attended any formal school because of the abject poverty of his parents. He has been in journalism for 50 years, started many popular magazines including Akhbar-e-Jehan and also served as the speech writer for the former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Sir Terry Pratchett, a writer of science fiction, fantasy and children's books, is quoted as saying "I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did." Julio Cortázar was a novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom. Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe. Mark Twain, a self-taught writer.Philip S. Foner, Mark Twain: Social Critic (New York: International Publishers, 1958), p. 13, cited in Helen Scott's "The Mark Twain they didn't teach us about in school" (2000) in the International Socialist Review 10, Winter 2000, pp. 61–65 Faulkner called him "the father of American literature."Jelliffe, Robert A. (1956). Faulkner at Nagano. Tokyo: Kenkyusha, Ltd. Herman Melville, a writer best known for Moby Dick engaged in self-directed learning through his life in literature, aesthetics, criticism and art. Playwright August Wilson dropped out of school in the ninth grade but continued to educate himself by spending long hours reading at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, Nobel Prize for Literature. He left formal education while still in his mid-teens to become a clerk at an estate firm. He compared schools to prison and said that "I did not learn anything at school."Shaw, George Bernard. "Treatise On Parents And Children." Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize for Literature. The American novelist and short story writer, was primarily self-educated after high school. "... he read for hours at a time in bed", recounted his sister Marcelline. "He read everything around the house—all the books, all the magazines, even the AMA Journals from Dad's office downstairs. Ernie also took out great numbers of books from the public library."Brasch, James D. and Sigman, Joseph. "Hemingway's Library," Garland Publishing, 1981. His father wanted him to go to Oberlin for college, but Hemingway decided to become a reporter for the Kansas City Star."The Lessons of Youth: Ernest Hemingway as a Young Man," Literary Traveler Louis L'Amour, an author who left his home at the age of 15 to expand his horizons and worked many jobs while educating himself. J.A. Rogers, the Jamaican-American author, was able to educate himself after receiving only a few years' worth of primary education in Jamaica. He attended but never completed high school. While he was able to study commercial art at the Chicago Art Institute later in life, he got most of his knowledge in libraries and was able to produce many books based on race, history, sociology, and anthropology. He also mastered other languages such as Spanish, German, and French. Ray Bradbury, author of fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery novels, graduated from high school but did not attend college. Rudolph Dirks, one of the earliest and most noted comic strip artists, was an autodidact.http://einestages.spiegel.de/s/tb/25082/rudolph-dirks-erfinder-der-sprechblase.html Comic-Pionier Rudolph Dirks : Mickys deutscher Großvater by Tim Eckhorst (in German) He sold his first cartoon to a local newspaper when he was 13. For a while, he mainly designed ads. At 17 years old, he sold cartoons to magazines like Life and Judge. With jobs like cover images for pulp novels he made his living until the New York Journal hired him, where he earned fame as creator of The Katzenjammer Kids. Affandi (c. 1907 – 23 May 1990), an Indonesian painter. Alan Moore, creator of the graphic novels V for Vendetta and Watchmen.