Some useful websites...

A couple (well four actually) of good websites I have found myself using on several occasions recently are:

Byliner
Byliner "allows you to keep up-to-date with your favourite writers. You can set up a personal list of writers and Byliner will look out for new articles by them. You can be sent daily or weekly emails containing links to these articles." There are also charts to see what are the most popular articles and writers, and links to sites regularly indexed by byliner. There are 1132 writers listed under the letter"A" alone.
www.byliner.com

NNDB
Describes itself as "an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead. Superficially, it seems much like a "Who's Who" where a noted person's curriculum vitae is available (the usual information such as date of birth, a biography, and other essential facts.)
But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been associating with." Currently contains over 24,000 profiles of variable length.
www.nndb.com

EServer Drama Collection
Full text plays, critical essays, and links to scholarly journals about drama. Read for example, Ben Jonson's amazing prologue to Bartholomew Fair.
http://drama.eserver.org/

The Literature Network
Full text works by a wide range of authors, fiction, classical literature, poems and short stories.
www.online-literature.com/