Which Intuitive Author Has Your Myers-Briggs® Personality Type?

Writers do more than just tell stories; they leak their personalities all over the page. The way you string words together has as much to do with your brain wiring as it does with grammar rules your English teacher drilled into you.

Sensors tend to write like they’re building a road: steady, structured, with every detail neatly painted on the asphalt. Intuitives? We’re more like kids with glow sticks in a dark room; dancing with metaphors, leaping through time, scribbling symbols on the walls.

Carl Jung himself used to obsess over this stuff. He liked typing historical figures and authors, just to see how their minds worked under the hood. Later, David Keirsey joined the fun, analyzing famous authors by combing through their books, interviews, and journals.

So let’s do what we do best—people-watch our favorite authors through their writing. Ready? Let’s start with the mystics of the MBTI world: the INFJs.

Are you a sensor? Check out the sensor authors here!

I hope you enjoy this list! Please feel free to comment with your suggestions and thoughts!

Not sure what your personality type is? Take our personality questionnaire here. Or you can take the official MBTI® here.

INFJ Author – Dante Alighieri

“Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.”

Dante is known for writing about sins and virtue. But the truth is, he was writing out of his own heartbreak, exile, and vision. Born in Florence in 1265, he lost his mother young and was married off at twelve to a woman chosen for him. But his heart had already chosen someone else: Beatrice Portinari. Though he barely spoke with her in real life, he immortalized her in La Vita Nuova and later made her the radiant guide through heaven in The Divine Comedy. That’s pure INFJ: reality doesn’t stop you from shaping a soul-deep connection into a symbol of redemption.

Florence, meanwhile, was ripping itself apart. Dante fought at the Battle of Campaldino, then watched his beloved city collapse under endless factionalism. He sided with the White Guelphs, who resisted papal control, and when the Black Guelphs seized power, Dante was banished—his property seized, his name disgraced. He would never set foot in Florence again. Out of that devastation came his greatest work. The Divine Comedy isn’t just an epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—it’s the map of an exile’s soul, someone trying to make sense of justice, power, and salvation when the world had cast him aside.

The INFJ fingerprints are everywhere: symbols layered on symbols, every moment pointing to a hidden meaning; the obsession with how today’s choices ripple into eternity; the refusal to let go of ideals even when life strips everything else away. Dante didn’t choose to suck up to the elites by writing in Latin. Instead he wrote in Italian, the people’s language, because he wanted his vision of humanity’s moral arc to reach everyone. He invented terza rima to give his words a structure as elegant and unbreakable as his faith in meaning itself.

“Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.” – Dante Alighieri

Other INFJ Authors: Leo Tolstoy, Soren Kierkegaard, Emily Dickinson, Stephen King.

INFP Author – Edgar Allan Poe

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

If the INFP soul had a soundtrack, Poe would be the one composing it on a broken organ in a candlelit room. Nobody does “mysterious, poetic, slightly unhinged but also deeply tender” quite like him.

Poe wasn’t afraid to crawl into the darkest corners of the human psyche and pull out a story that still makes us shiver centuries later. The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher—these always seemed to me like emotional exorcisms. At the same time, he could write with aching romance, like a man who knew beauty and horror always hold hands.

That’s quintessential INFP: feelings dialed up to eleven, imagination spilling everywhere, symbolism layered in. His writing was an attempt to show the raw machinery of his inner world. And when INFPs write, you feel it. They’re here to make you wrestle with truth, grief, passion, and that strange, fragile thing called humanity.

James Oppenheim once said of Poe: “Everything about him suggests introversion, self-immersion, mood, mystery. Everything suggests a man seeking his own soul.” That’s the INFP in a nutshell: forever digging deeper, forever chasing meaning, forever hoping to turn pain into beauty.

“From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” – Edgar Allan Poe

Other INFP Authors: George Orwell, A.A. Milne, Albert Camus, William Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Bill Watterson, Franz Kafka, Hans Christian Andersen

ENFJ Author – Maya Angelou

“I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t exist. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.”

If INFJs are the mystics and INFPs are the dreamers, ENFJs are the fire-starters, the ones who see pain, injustice, beauty, and possibility and then say, “Okay, let’s actually do something about it.” Maya Angelou lived and breathed that energy. Every stage she stood on—whether a cabaret floor in the ’50s, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, or President Clinton’s inauguration—became a classroom in empathy and power.

Her childhood was extremely painful. After suffering sexual abuse, Angelou stopped speaking for nearly six years, believing her words had caused a man’s death. But even in silence, her mind was alive; memorizing Shakespeare and Poe, storing up the language that would later spill into some of the most important books of the 20th century. That’s the ENFJ gift: even in pain, they’re gathering insight, waiting for the moment to transform it into something that helps others.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Heart of a Woman, her poetry—it all carried her voice saying, “You are seen. You matter. Don’t give up.”

Angelou faced poverty, racism, and abuse, but instead of letting those experiences silence her, she turned them into fuel for compassion and activism. She wanted art to move people, but more than that, she wanted art to heal. That’s ENFJ power: the ability to blend insight with action, empathy with influence, beauty with purpose.

Angelou became the first African American woman to work as a streetcar conductor in San Francisco at just 16 (after showing up every single day for three weeks until they gave in—that’s ENFJ persistence). Later, she danced her way across the world, sang calypso, acted on Broadway, organized for civil rights, and eventually turned her life story into art with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It was raw, brave, and revolutionary—so much so that schools tried to ban it. But it cracked open space for survivors to tell their truths, proving again that when ENFJs speak, they have the power to liberate.

“I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t exist.” – Maya Angelou

Other ENFJ Authors: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Desiderius Erasmus

ENFP Author – Charles Dickens

“Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.”

Charles Dickens was, quite simply, the rock star of 19th-century literature. During his lifetime, nobody had reached the level of fame he did. His serialized novels were the binge-worthy TV shows of their day, gobbled up by everyone from factory workers to Queen Victoria. Crowds would line up to hear him read his work aloud. He was that guy.

And like many larger-than-life ENFPs, Dickens had his scruples. His personal life was… complicated. He could be mercurial, restless, not exactly the poster child for domestic bliss. His marriage crumbled, and his relationship with actress Ellen Ternan was quietly kept in the shadows for decades. He wasn’t always gentle in how he handled the people closest to him. For a man who wrote so passionately about compassion, Dickens sometimes missed the mark at home.

But here’s the thing: his writing never stopped caring. He carried the scars of his childhood; forced into factory work while his father sat in debtor’s prison, and he poured that pain onto the page with fiery empathy. He championed the poor, the oppressed, the forgotten child. His novels like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations weren’t just for fun. They were indictments of a society that let people slip through the cracks. Even when he leaned into sentimentality, he was doing it to wake readers up, to stir their hearts.

That’s the paradox of Dickens. Messy man, luminous writer. His ENFP spark showed up in his sprawling imagination, his theatrical flair, his humor, and his unrelenting belief that stories could change the world. And to a large degree, they did. Without Dickens, Christmas as we know it wouldn’t exist (A Christmas Carol basically rewrote the holiday spirit). Without Dickens, social reform in England might have trudged along a lot more slowly.

So yes, Dickens stumbled in his personal life—but he also gave voice to the voiceless. He embodied the ENFP drive to use art as both mirror and megaphone, entertaining us while nudging us toward a better version of ourselves.

Other ENFP Authors: Anne Frank, Upton Sinclair, Dr. Seuss

INTJ Author – Octavia Butler

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change.”

Octavia Butler was an author who designed futures no one else dared to imagine. Born in Pasadena in 1947, raised by a widowed mother who scrubbed floors so her daughter could have a library card, Butler grew up knowing two things: life was unfair, and stories could remake the world. Both truths fueled her writing.

She struggled with dyslexia, with loneliness, with teachers who dismissed her as “slow.” What she actually was? Obsessed. Determined. At ten years old she was carrying a notebook everywhere, scribbling down worlds while other kids played tag. At thirteen, she submitted her first story to a magazine. Rejected? Of course. Did she stop? Not for a second. Butler woke at 2 A.M. every day to write before clocking into jobs like telemarketer or warehouse worker. INTJ relentlessness: when the vision is clear, the grind doesn’t matter.

Her breakout came with Patternmaster in 1976, but it was Kindred (1979) that changed everything. This wasn’t your cliche time-travel story—she hurled a modern Black woman into slavery-era Maryland, forcing readers to confront history not as dates in a textbook but as blood, terror, and survival. She researched archives, walked the geography, and made sure every detail carried weight. The result was a book that still sits in classrooms today, unflinching and unforgettable.

Butler’s entire body of work wrestled with the big questions INTJs love: How do power systems rise and fall? What happens when survival collides with morality? How does humanity adapt—or fail to adapt—when the world itself is on fire? She bent science fiction away from silver-suited astronauts and toward Afrofuturism, writing herself and her people into futures where they had too long been excluded.

Her reward? Hugos, Nebulas, a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, and the rare MacArthur “Genius” Grant—the only sci-fi writer ever to win it. But awards were never the point. Butler’s oath was persistence: “Do the thing that you love and do it as well as you possibly can and be persistent about it.”

She died suddenly in 2006, but her books have only grown in reach, inspiring new generations of writers and sparking TV and film adaptations. Butler wrote with the core INTJ conviction that the future is not random—it’s built. And if you don’t like the blueprint you’ve been handed, then draft a new one.

Other INTJ Authors: Jane Austen, Isaac Asimov, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzsche

INTP Author – Henry David Thoreau

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kinds of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

If ever there was a man who took “think for yourself” to Olympic levels, it was Henry David Thoreau. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, he tried out the respectable paths—teaching, factory work, journalism—but none of them fit for long. INTPs aren’t built to clock in and nod politely to rules they don’t believe in. Case in point: Thoreau quit his first teaching job after two weeks because the superintendent insisted on corporal punishment. Thoreau basically said, “Yeah, no thanks,” and walked out.

Instead, he turned to what INTPs do best: experimenting with life. He lived with his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, soaked in Transcendentalist philosophy, then built himself a tiny cabin on Walden Pond to test a radical question: could a person work one day a week and spend the rest of their time thinking, walking, and writing? Spoiler: yes, but you’ll confuse the neighbors. Walden was his answer to the curious townsfolk, part memoir, part philosophy, part nature log.

But Thoreau wasn’t just a dreamy recluse scribbling by a pond. He was a sharp critic of authority and hypocrisy. When he refused to pay a poll tax to protest slavery and the Mexican-American War, he landed in jail for a night and later wrote “Civil Disobedience”—an essay that would go on to inspire Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. INTPs might seem quiet, but they have big ideas!

He also had a knack for the curious and the practical. He researched German pencil-making techniques and helped his family turn out the best pencils in America. He walked miles daily, keeping meticulous notes on plants, animals, and weather patterns—essentially a one-man data-collection machine long before climate science was a thing.

Thoreau died young, at 44, of tuberculosis, but he left behind shelves of journals, essays, and unfinished projects. His friend Emerson summed it up best: “His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world.”

Like many INTPs, Thoreau was skeptical of institutions, allergic to small talk, endlessly curious, stubbornly individualistic, and determined to turn thought into a way of life.

Other INTP Authors: Hannah Arendt, John Locke, Lemony Snicket

ENTP Author – Douglas Adams

“Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner.”

Douglas Adams rewired reality so that it could be slightly more ridiculous and slightly more profound at the same time. Born in Cambridge in 1952, he studied English at St. John’s College before unleashing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the world—a project that began as a BBC radio show and spiraled into novels, TV, stage plays, albums, a computer game, and eventually a cult-level franchise. ENTP energy at its finest: Why stick to one medium when you can conquer all of them?

Adams had the quintessential ENTP gift: turning skepticism into comedy and wild imagination into philosophy. He made readers laugh at bureaucrats, politicians, and even the universe itself while slipping in questions about meaning, technology, and humanity. His famous invention of the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” (spoiler: it’s 42) was perfectly Adams—satirical nonsense hiding a profound shrug at our need for neat answers.

But Adams wasn’t only about cosmic punchlines. He had a fierce curiosity about the natural world. In Last Chance to See (co-written with zoologist Mark Carwardine), he trekked across the globe to meet endangered species and delivered an eco-memoir that was equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking. He was also a passionate technophile, dabbling in computer games like Starship Titanic and founding an early digital community, h2g2, years before online collaboration became the norm.

His life was short—he died suddenly of a heart attack at 49—but the imprint he left is unmistakable: wit sharpened into a scalpel, ideas scattered everywhere, and a reminder that laughter itself can be a kind of rebellion. Adams made absurdity feel meaningful. He was able to take chaos, give it a voice, and make you laugh your way into seeing the truth.

Other ENTP Authors: Niccolò Machiavelli

ENTJ Author – George Bernard Shaw

“Until the men of action clear out the talkers, we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.”

If Dickens was the conscience of Victorian England, George Bernard Shaw was the megaphone blasting through the Edwardian dinner parties. Born in Dublin in 1856, Shaw had little patience for traditional education and even less for convention. He carved out his career first as a music and theater critic, then as a novelist, then as a playwright who turned stages into sparring rings of ideas.

Shaw was fearless in using his pen as a weapon. His “Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant” attacked social hypocrisy head-on. Mrs. Warren’s Profession skewered society’s exploitation of women; Major Barbara questioned the morality of charity funded by arms dealers. Even Pygmalion, later adapted into My Fair Lady, was more than a charming tale about phonetics—it was a biting commentary on class, morality, and the absurdities of middle-class pretensions.

Like many ENTJs, he loved to argue, to provoke, to force people into discomfort and then laugh while they squirmed. His wit was volcanic, his rationalism radical, his disregard for convention absolute. At times, his plays blurred into essays; dialogue giving way to debate, drama swallowed by discussion.

Shaw was not just a dramatist but a social engineer, a member of the Fabian Society and a man who believed political activity was the only true road to salvation. He despised passivity, mocked hypocrisy, and held every institution—church, medicine, marriage, even government—to a merciless spotlight. If an idea couldn’t survive Shaw’s attack, maybe it wasn’t worth keeping.

And yet, for all his sharpness, Shaw wasn’t heartless. Saint Joan—arguably his masterpiece—showed his ability to take a familiar story and remake it into something transcendent, connecting the Middle Ages to the modern world, using Joan’s passion to mirror humanity’s struggle for progress.

Shaw died in 1950, leaving behind more than sixty plays and a reputation as the sharpest tongue in English theater. Love him or hate him, he embodied ENTJ energy: blunt, commanding, impossible to ignore, and utterly committed to remaking the world in the image of his ideas.

Other ENTJ Authors: Sheryl Sandberg, Robert James Waller

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