Remy de Gourmont was a French symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic. He was widely read in his era, and an important influence on Blaise Cendrars and Georges Bataille. The spelling Rémy de Gourmont is incorrect, albeit common.

René François Nicolas Marie Bazin was a French novelist.

René Boylesve, born René Marie Auguste Tardiveau, was a French writer and a literary critic.

René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was central to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a Deist by critics, Descartes was Roman Catholic.

René Doumic, French critic and man of letters, was born in Paris, and after a distinguished career at the École Normale began to teach rhetoric at the Collège Stanislas de Paris.

René Rapin (1621–1687) was a French Jesuit and writer.

Reuben Gold Thwaites was an American librarian and historical writer.

Rex Ellingwood Beach was an American novelist, playwright, and Olympic water polo player.

Rex Todhunter Stout was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. His best-known characters are the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin, who were featured in 33 novels, and 41 novellas and short stories, between 1934 and 1975.

Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, FBA, or R. A. Nicholson, was an eminent English orientalist, scholar of both Islamic literature and Islamic mysticism and widely regarded as one of the greatest Rumi scholars and translators in the English language.