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The Literary 100:
A Ranking of the
Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time


Related pages:
- The Novel 100: The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time
- The Fictional 100 and 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900 (including info about authors who created the characters)
The list below is from the book The Literary 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time (Checkmark Books/Facts On File, Inc.: New York, 2001), written by Daniel S. Burt.

Burt holds a Ph.D from New York University with a specialty in Victorian fiction and was for nine years a dean at Wesleyan University, where he has also taught literature courses since 1989. He is also the author of The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time.




1 William Shakespeare 1564-1616 Catholic; Anglican
2 Dante Alighieri 1265-1321 Catholic
3 Homer fl. c. 750(?) B.C. Greek paganism
4 Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910 Russian Orthodox
5 Geoffrey Chaucer c. 1340-1400 Catholic
6 Charles Dickens 1812-1870 Anglican
7 James Joyce 1882-1941 Catholic (lapsed)
8 John Milton 1608-1674 Congregationalist
9 Virgil 70-19 B.C.  
10 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749-1832 Deist
11 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 1547-1616 Catholic
12 Murasaki Shikibu c. 978-1030 Buddhist/Shinto culture
13 Sophocles 496-406 B.C.  
14 William Faulkner 1897-1962 Presbyterian
15 Feodor Dostoevsky 1821-1881 Russian Orthodox
16 T.S. Eliot 1888-1965 Anglican
17 Marcel Proust 1871-1922 Jewish Catholic
18 Jane Austen 1775-1817 Anglican
19 George Eliot 1819-1880 Anglican; agnostic
20 William Butler Yeats 1865-1939 Church of Ireland (Anglican); astrology
21 Alexander Pushkin 1799-1837 Russian Orthodox
22 Euripides c. 480-406 B.C.  
23 John Donne 1572-1631 Anglican; Catholic
24 Herman Melville 1819-1891 Transcendentalist
25 John Keats 1795-1821 Anglican
26 Ovid 43 B.C.-17 A.D.  
27 Tu Fu 712-770  
28 William Blake 1757-1827 Swedenborgian; occult
29 Aeschylus c. 525-456 B.C.  
30 Gustave Flaubert 1821-1880 Catholic
31 Franz Kafka 1883-1924 Jewish
32 Moliere 1622-1673 Catholic
33 William Wordsworth 1770-1850 Anglican
34 Aristophanes c. 450-c. 385 B.C.  
35 Thomas Mann 1875-1955 Lutheran
36 Henrik Ibsen 1828-1906  
37 Anton Chekhov 1860-1904 Russian Orthodox
38 Henry James 1843-1916 Anglican
39 Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977 Russian Orthodox
40 Walt Whitman 1819-1892 Quaker; Humanist; Transcendentalist
41 Honore de Balzac 1799-1850 Catholic
42 Jonathan Swift 1667-1745 Church of Ireland (Anglican)
43 Stendhal 1783-1842 Catholic
44 Thomas Hardy 1840-1928  
45 George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950 Church of Ireland (Anglican); atheist, then mystic
46 Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961 Catholic
47 D. H. Lawrence 1885-1930  
48 Charles Baudelaire 1821-1867 Catholic
49 Samuel Beckett 1906-1989 Church of Ireland (Anglican)
50 Virginia Woolf 1882-1941 Neo-pagan
51 Alexander Pope 1688-1744 Catholic
52 Francois Rabelais c. 1494-1553 Catholic
53 Francesco Petrarch 1304-1374 Catholic
54 Emily Dickinson 1830-1886  
55 Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849  
56 Henry Fielding 1707-1754  
57 Joseph Conrad 1857-1924 Catholic; atheist
58 Robert Browning 1812-1889 Anglican
59 Albert Camus 1913-1960 Catholic; Existentialism
60 Charlotte Bronte 1816-1855 Anglican
61 Emily Bronte 1818-1848 Anglican
62 Jean Racine 1639-1699 Catholic
63 Mark Twain 1835-1910 Presbyterian
64 August Strindberg 1849-1912  
65 Emile Zola 1840-1902 Catholic
66 Jorge Luis Borges 1899-1986 Catholic; Quaker; agnostic
67 Cao Xueqin 1715-1763  
68 Giovanni Boccaccio 1313-1375 Catholic
69 Voltaire 1694-1778 raised in Jansenism; later Deist
70 Laurence Sterne 1713-1768 Church of Ireland clergyman (Anglican)
71 William Makepeace Thackeray 1811-1863  
72 Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822 Anglican; atheist
73 Eugene O'Neill 1888-1953 Catholic
74 Wallace Stevens 1879-1955 Catholic
75 Lord Byron (George Gordon) 1788-1824  
76 Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1928- Catholic
77 Walter Scott 1771-1832 Anglican
78 Pablo Neruda 1904-1973 Catholic
79 Robert Musil 1880-1942 Catholic
80 Alfred Lord Tennyson 1809-1892 Anglican
81 Flannery O'Connor 1925-1964 Catholic
82 Catullus c. 84-c. 54 B.C.  
83 Federico Garcia Lorca 1898-1936 Catholic (some Jewish ancestry)
84 Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864 Transcendentalist
85 Theodore Dreiser 1871-1945 Catholic; Congregationalist; Chrisitan Science
86 Ralph Ellison 1914-1994  
87 Anthony Trollope 1815-1882 Anglican
88 F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896-1940 Catholic
89 Victor Hugo 1802-1885 Catholic
90 Rabindranath Tagore 1961-1941 Hindu
91 Daniel Defoe 1660?-1731 Protestant Dissenter (Presbyterian)
92 Gunter Grass 1927- Catholic
93 Lu Xun 1881-1936  
94 E. M. Forster 1879-1970  
95 Isaac Bashevis Singer 1904-1991 Jewish
96 Tanizaki Jun'ichiro 1886-1965  
97 Richard Wright 1908-1960 Seventh-day Adventist; Communist
98 Gertrude Stein 1874-1946 Jewish
99 Zeami Motokiyo 1363-1443 Buddhist/Shinto culture
100 Oscar Wilde 1854-1900 Church of Ireland (Anglican); Catholic


Alternative spelling of names with diacritical marks: Molière (Moliere); Honoré de Balzac (Honore de Balzac); François Rabelais (Francois Rabelais); Charlotte Brontë (Charlotte Bronte); Emily Brontë (Emily Bronte); Émile Zola (Emile Zola); Gabriel García Márquez (Gabriel Garcia Marquez); Federico García Lorca (Federico Garcia Lorca); Günter Grass (Gunter Grass)
Webpage created 29 August 2005. Last modified 19 December 2005.
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