Rabindranath Tagore was the author of poems, short stories, songs, plays, and essays, and his works transformed Bengali literature. Like Tagore, George Orwell was born in India. Orwell became an English novelist best known for the social commentary embedded in his writing. Tagore and Orwell's fellow writers in the first half of the 20th century include the poets Robert Frost and Anna Akhmatova, the novelists Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, the playwrights Luigi Pirandello and Eugene O'Neill, and many others.