Polygraph (author)

This article is about an author that can write on a variety of different subjects. For the early 19th-century device used for duplication of writing, see Polygraph (duplicating device). For the modern forensic instrument, see Polygraph. For the automatic signing instrument, see Autopen.

Line engraving by C. Schuler

A polygraph (from Ancient Greek: πολύς, poly = "many" and γράφειν, graphein = "to write") is an author who writes in a variety of fields.

In literature, the term polygraph is often applied to certain writers of antiquity such as Aristotle, Plutarch, Varro, Cicero and Pliny the Elder. Polygraphs still existed in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but, other than writers of books for children, they have become rarer in modern times due to the specialisation of knowledge. Goethe and Boscovich are examples of modern polygraphs.

Polygraph writers

Classical Antiquity

• Xenophon
• Philostratus of Lemnos
• Duris of Samos
• Suetonius
• Apuleius
• Apion

Middle Ages

• Piero Valeriano Bolzani
• Jacob of Edessa
• Robert Grosseteste
• Bar-Hebraeus
• Al-Jahiz
• Abu Nuwas
• Nicole Oresme
• Isidore of Seville
• Michael Psellos

Early modern period (1500-1800)

• Carlo Amoretti
• Jean-François de Bastide
• Giuseppe Betussi
• Roger Joseph Boscovich
• Jacques Pierre Brissot
• Pierre-Jean Le Corvaisier
• Anton Francesco Doni
• Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Ferdinand Hoefer
• Athanasius Kircher
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Mathieu-François Pidansat de Mairobert
• Francesco Milizia
• Nicolas Edme Restif de La Bretonne
• César Vichard de Saint-Réal
• Francesco Sansovino
• Charles Sorel

Modern era (1800 onwards)

• Isaac Asimov
• Jean-Marie-Vincent Audin
• Arthur Conan Doyle
• Pierre Gévart
• Arthur de Gobineau
• Henry de Graffigny
• T. Proctor Hall
• Léon Halévy
• Vincent Labaume
• Paul Lacroix
• Gustave Le Rouge
• Simin Palay
• Christian Plume
• Claude Roy
• August Strindberg
• Ludwig Tieck

Other usage

The term can be used in a pejorative sense to mean a journalist who writes on many subjects but without expertise in any particular one. The composer Georg Telemann was considered, somewhat pejoratively, a polygraph by critics due to the vast number and variety of his musical compositions. Likewise, "polygraph" is one of Captain Haddock's insults, which he uses in Hergé's comic book The Calculus Affair.