François Rabelais

Born somewhere between 1483 and 1494, Rabelais spent his early life as a Catholic priest and Greek scholar before retraining as a physician and diplomat. Living through the Reformation's upheaval, he admired Erasmus and wielded Christian humanism as a weapon against medieval scholasticism, skewering popes and princes in prose that mixed erudition with grotesque satire. His first two books traced the childhoods of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel in sprawling, bawdy bildungsroman; the later Third and Fourth Books grew darker and more philosophical. Though his contemporaries knew him mainly as a doctor and scholar, posterity remembered the novels - robust, extravagant, unsparing - and minted "Rabelaisian" to describe anyone who writes like the world can take a joke.