Jean François Victor Aicard was a French poet, dramatist, and novelist.

Jean Carolyn Craighead George was an American writer of more than one hundred books for children and young adults, including the Newbery Medal-winning Julie of the Wolves and Newbery runner-up My Side of the Mountain. Common themes in George's works are the environment and the natural world. Beside children's fiction, she wrote at least two guides to cooking with wild foods and one autobiography published 30 years before her death, Journey Inward.

Jean de La Bruyère was a French philosopher and moralist, who was noted for his satire.

Jean de La Fontaine was a French fabulist and one of the most widely read French poets of the 17th century. He is known above all for his Fables, which provided a model for subsequent fabulists across Europe and numerous alternative versions in France, as well as in French regional languages.

Jean Froissart was a French-speaking medieval author and court historian from the Low Countries who wrote several works, including Chronicles and Meliador, a long Arthurian romance, and a large body of poetry, both short lyrical forms as well as longer narrative poems. For centuries, Froissart's Chronicles have been recognised as the chief expression of the chivalric revival of the 14th-century kingdoms of England, France and Scotland. His history is also an important source for the first half of the Hundred Years' War.

Jean Ingelow was an English poet and novelist, who gained sudden fame in 1863. She also wrote several stories for children.

Jean Paul was a German Romantic writer, best known for his humorous novels and stories.

Jean-Baptiste Racine was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille as well as an important literary figure in the Western tradition and world literature. Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing such "examples of neoclassical perfection" as Phèdre, Andromaque, and Athalie. He did write one comedy, Les Plaideurs, and a muted tragedy, Esther for the young.

Jean Toomer was an American poet and novelist commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, though he actively resisted the association, and with modernism. His reputation stems from his novel Cane (1923), which Toomer wrote during and after a stint as a school principal at a black school in rural Sparta, Georgia. The novel intertwines the stories of six women and includes an apparently autobiographical thread; sociologist Charles S. Johnson called it "the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation". He resisted being classified as a Negro writer, as he identified as "American". For more than a decade Toomer was an influential follower and representative of the pioneering spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff. Later in life he took up Quakerism.

Jean Webster was the pen name of Alice Jane Chandler Webster, an American author whose books include Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. Her best-known books feature lively and likeable young female protagonists who come of age intellectually, morally, and socially, but with enough humor, snappy dialogue, and gently biting social commentary to make her books palatable and enjoyable to contemporary readers.