A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World is about real people. Historical figures who, with varying degrees of befuddlement, arrive in a world in which Pythagoreans, Whigs, and Dadaists seek converts through evangelical fast-food chains; armed followers of scientist and theologian Roger Bacon battle with powerful Cathars for rights to the untranslatable Voynich manuscript; and everyone is under threat from renegade "book groups" that hope to radicalise the middle classes.

What hubris to insert real people into works of fiction, what folly! An author can only fail: devotees despise the result, on principle; others dismiss the work, believing it relies too much on the words, and personalities, of greater minds.

Still, this is not the first time I've engaged in such folly, and it won't be the last. I gain comfort from other authors, some of them favorite authors, who share my writerly fascination with "real people" (real writers, to be specific).

I offer, then, 10 writings – novels, mostly – featuring writers from history.

1. Siegfried Sassoon in Regeneration by Pat Barker

Pat Barker's justly celebrated Regeneration concerns WHR Rivers, the innovative psychiatrist who found new ways to treat first world war officers suffering shell shock, among them the poet Siegfried Sassoon. In fact, Sassoon has been declared mentally unsound because, although a decorated officer, he has publicly declared that he is "finished" with the war, unable to continue supporting its aims. Playing a supporting role: the poet Wilfred Owen, with whom Sassoon exchanges poems. "'Owen, for God's sake, this is War Office propaganda.' 'No, it's not.' 'Read that line.' Owen read. 'Well, it certainly isn't meant to be.'"

2. John Clare in The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

John Clare actually is mentally ill. At the age of 44 he is admitted to a private asylum on the edge of Epping Forest. There he suffers delusions but still writes poetry and is allowed to wander the grounds more or less freely. Staying at the asylum for a few weeks with his brother is Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who mourns the death of a close friend. Both are consumed by loss; they do not meet. While Clare visits with gypsies, Tennyson takes long walks and is convinced to invest (disastrously) in an automated wood-carving device.

3. Novalis in The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

Another Romantic poet. Novalis is Friedrich von Hardenberg (or "Fritz"), a brilliant student of history and philosophy. He is 22 in 1794 when he falls in love with 12-year-old Sophie. His brother is blunt: he calls Sophie "empty-headed" and wonders that already she has a double chin. Too young to attend public balls, Sophie is "afraid" of marriage, but nonetheless becomes engaged to Fritz two days before her 13th birthday, only to [spoiler alert] die at the age of barely 15.

4. Heinrich von Kleist in No Place on Earth by Christa Wolf

What is it about the Romantics? Here it's an 1804 meeting between Kleist and the now-forgotten poet Karoline von Günderrode. "Happiness," thinks Kleist, "is the place where I am not"; she feels "no urge to do anything which maintains the world," its demands and laws being too "perverted". When they meet at a literary gathering, Karoline makes Kleist "uneasy," and immediately on meeting her he forgets her name. But soon "she seems to him the only person who is truly real in a horde of spectres," and she can read his thoughts.

5. Walt Whitman in Gob's Grief by Chris Adrian

Gob survives the Civil War, unlike his brother Tomo, who ran off to join the army at the age of 11 and died during his first battle. Walt Whitman, meanwhile, dreams his brother has been lost in the war, only to find him at a hospital just slightly wounded. When brother George is moved elsewhere, Walt lingers, making himself useful to doctors and nurses, first at this hospital, and then another, and another. He chats with wounded soldiers, reads to them, distributes oranges, writes letters, or just sits, watching "with excited worry". It is Whitman Gob turns to when he needs a man full of emotion to power a machine he has built to bring the Civil War dead back to life.

6. Gertrude Stein in The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

In this sensuous, language-drunk novel, Bính has answered an advertisement: "Two American ladies wish to retain a cook." The two American ladies are Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. Like his "Mesdames," Bính is an outsider on many counts – a Vietnamese exile in Paris, a servant, a homosexual. While he is aware of Stein's disdain for punctuation and her affection for rhyme, he is perhaps more interested in the details of their daily life – the two days it took Miss Toklas to cut off Stein's billowing hair, her unwillingness to answer the door, and Miss Toklas's glorious mustache.

7. Henry James in The Master by Colm Tóibín

Tóibín's novel covers just five years of James's expatriate life – from the disastrous debut of his play Guy Domville in London in January 1895 to January 1900, when his brother William leaves Henry's home in Rye. Henry writes, he travels, he recalls various losses. Asked on the cusp of the new century what he intends to write next, Henry says, "'I am a poor storyteller … a romancer, interested in dramatic niceties … Once I wrote about youth and America and now I am left with exile and middle age and stories of disappointment …'"

8. Franz Kafka in Kafka's Leopards by Moacyr Scliar

It is 1916, and Mousy, a Russian Jew on a Trotskyite mission, leaves his village to obtain a coded message. He's not a very able spy, and ends up believing Kafka to be the bearer of this message. He tries to visit him at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, where an officious secretary informs him that Dr Kafka cannot be seen without an appointment. Mousy arranges for Dr Kafka to leave the text at his hotel. Unable to make sense of the missive, Mousy considers a reprimand: "Can what is out of the reach of the majority of readers be revolutionary?" Indeed!

9. Franz Kafka in A Friend of Kafka by IB Singer

Kafka's presence here is even more attenuated: he doesn't appear at all except in the (frequent) reminiscences of Jacques Kohn, one-time actor and now a "sick and broken man". Broken and also broke: the narrator, a self-effacing writer, is always willing to lend Jacques a zloty to hear his marvellous stories. The centerpiece involves a bejeweled countess who pounds on the ancient Kohn's door in the wee hours, desperately trying to escape her murderous boyfriend; her eventual presence in Jacques' bed inspires a miracle. But always Kohn returns to Kafka: meeting him in Vienna; ("he spouted aphorisms and paradoxes"); his genius; his writings; his illusions about women; the advice he gave him; Kohn's attempt to bring the virginal Kafka to a brothel …

10. Marco Polo in Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Perhaps I cheat again, since Marco Polo's Travels was written by a ghostwriter, the romance writer Rustichello. In Invisible Cities, however, there is no Rustichello, only Polo, who enchants the Great Khan with tales of his travels to cities at the furthest reaches of the emperor's realm – thin cities, trading cities, continuous cities, hidden cities. There is, for example, Octavia, the spider-web city, its foundation a net suspended over an abyss. You haven't yet described Venice, Kublai Khan says toward the end of the book, and Marco replies, "What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?"