English Literature

Gale Group, 2003.
Probably this source is the most detailed and convenient biography database available for literature students. You can search by author on the main page or try other searches by clicking "literary-historical timeline" beneath the search bar. Choosing the second option should bring up a horizontal menu offering a title search, a keyword search and an "encyclopedia of literature". The database organizes entries into biography, criticism and "additional resources". Contemporary Authors covers fiction writers, poets, dramatists, non-fiction writers, journalists, editors, screenwriters, television scriptwriters and other authors.

Proquest, 2020-.
This vast online library lets you search for biographies, as well as full-text works, bibliographies and criticism. For biography, this source is useful but not as wide-ranging as the Gale Literature Resource Centre.

Edited by Margaret Drabble.
7th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
This one-volume guide to literature written in English includes alphabetically arranged entries on authors, their works, fictional characters, and literary forms and periods. In addition to useful--albeit brief--biographies, these entries include plot summaries and publishing history, as well as details about literary societies, newspapers, periodicals, and critical terms and theories. The coverage in this book of composers, artists, historians, philosophers, and foreign authors important to English literature is more extensive than in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English.

Edited by James David Hart.
6th edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

By Ian Ousby.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Like the Oxford Companion, this one-volume guide provides brief biographies of writers in English from such places as the UK, North America, Australasia, Africa, and the Caribbean. You can also look up entries by book title or subject (e.g. post-modernism and simile).
See also the new 3rd edition.