Chrétien de Troyes

A French poet working sometime between 1160 and 1191, Chrétien wrote chivalric romances that seized on Arthurian material—Gawain, Perceval, the Grail—and shaped them into the forms that would define the genre for centuries. His major works included Erec and Enide, Lancelot, Perceval, and Yvain, each a narrative architecture so deliberate that scholars see in Yvain an early sketch of what the novel would become. He didn't invent Arthur, but he invented what Arthur meant: the code, the quest, the troubled knight. Medieval literature holds few names with a longer reach.