Edmund John Millington Synge was an Irish playwright, poet, writer, collector of folklore, and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. His best known play The Playboy of the Western World was poorly received, due to its bleak ending, depiction of Irish peasants, and idealisation of parricide, leading to hostile audience reactions and riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, which he had co-founded with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. His other major works include In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905), and The Tinker's Wedding (1909).
John Milton was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God's expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost elevated Milton's reputation as one of history's greatest poets. He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell.
John Mitchel was an Irish activist, author and journalist best known for his support for Irish nationalism. During the Great Famine of the 1840s, he was a leading writer for The Nation newspaper produced by the Young Ireland group, which splintered from Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, the Irish Confederation. As editor of his own paper, the United Irishman, in 1848 Mitchel was sentenced to 14-years penal transportation, the penalty for his advocacy of James Fintan Lalor's programme of co-ordinated resistance to exactions of landlords and to the continued shipment of grain harvests from Ireland to Britain.
John Mitchell Kemble, English scholar and historian, was the eldest son of Charles Kemble the actor and Maria Theresa Kemble. He is known for his major contribution to the history of the Anglo-Saxons and philology of the Old English language, including one of the first translations of Beowulf.
John Montroll is an American origami artist, author, teacher, and mathematician. He has written many books on origami, promoting the single-square, no-cut, no glue approach. Montroll taught mathematics at St. Anselm's Abbey School in Washington, D.C. from 1990 to 2021.
John Morreall is a Doctor of Philosophy and Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He has also taught at Northwestern University, Santa Clara University, Pennsylvania State University, University of South Florida and the Rochester Institute of Technology.