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- Sally Rooney, novelist. “It’s an uncomfortable thing to be generationally anointed (something about which I have some knowledge), but Rooney has proven herself immune to the mounting pressures: Beautiful World, Where Are You goes meta, grappling with philosophical questions around success, the disconnection of the internet age, and the complexity of adult friendships.
- Elizabeth Alexander, poet, philanthropist, and educator. “…she has put real investment into creating spaces that reflect the country’s rich diversity, and rethinking how we can embrace our cultural narratives, whether through physical monuments or the ways in which we tell our stories.”
- Emily Oster, economist and writer. “In best-selling books (Expecting Better, Cribsheet, and most recently The Family Firm), her popular newsletter, and social media, Oster weighs trade-offs, distinguishes trivial from substantial risks, and evaluates evidence for causation in a messy world.”
- Maya Lin, artist and writer. “Sometimes her work reveals the literally hidden, like underground rivers or the dramatic contours of San Francisco Bay. But it also reveals inconvenient truths long ignored: the costs of environmental degradation, the ravages of extinction, our long national history of exclusion in civil rights and gender equality.”
- Homer ~850 BCE. Scholars have debated whether Homer was one single author rather than a collection of oral stories but it is now thought that such an author existed.
- Sophocles 496-406 BCE. Sophocles, an ancient Greek dramatist, wrote plays that have stood as a model for tragic dramas, both by Greek and Roman writers and into the modern age, hugely influencing the playwrights of the golden age of Elizabethan drama in England, as well as modern dramatists.
- Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 70 BCE – 19 BCE. Virgil was a prolific Roman poet, best remembered for his epic, Aeneid. He Was to Rome what Homer was to Greece.
- The Evangelist, Mark (Author of the Gospel of St Mark) 1st Century CE. The identity of Mark is unknown but his great book, The Gospel of St Mark, was written in about the year 70 and has had the greatest impact on the world of any book ever written.
May 3, 2024 · This list features the best living writers who are producing some of the world’s best written work including, Philip Roth, J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, Stephen King, James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks, and Tom Wolfe. This list is all famous authors who are still alive.
- Overview
- Anna Karenina
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- The Great Gatsby
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- A Passage to India
- Invisible Man
- Don Quixote
- Beloved
- Mrs. Dalloway
Literary critics, historians, avid readers, and even casual readers will all have different opinions on which novel is truly the “greatest book ever written.” Is it a novel with beautiful, captivating figurative language? Or one with gritty realism? A novel that has had an immense social impact? Or one that has more subtly affected the world? Here ...
Any fan of stories that involve juicy subjects like adultery, gambling, marriage plots, and, well, Russian feudalism, would instantly place Anna Karenina at the peak of their “greatest novels” list. And that’s exactly the ranking that publications like Time magazine have given the novel since it was published in its entirety in 1878. Written by Rus...
Harper Lee, believed to be one of the most influential authors to have ever existed, famously published only a single novel (up until its controversial sequel was published in 2015 just before her death). Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and became an immediate classic of literature. The novel examines racism in the American South ...
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is distinguished as one of the greatest texts for introducing students to the art of reading literature critically (which means you may have read it in school). The novel is told from the perspective of a young man named Nick Carraway who has recently moved to New York City and is befriended by his eccentric n...
The late Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez published his most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in 1967. The novel tells the story of seven generations of the Buendía family and follows the establishment of their town Macondo until its destruction along with the last of the family’s descendents. In fantastical form, the novel explor...
E.M. Forster wrote his novel A Passage to India after multiple trips to the country throughout his early life. The book was published in 1924 and follows a Muslim Indian doctor named Aziz and his relationships with an English professor, Cyril Fielding, and a visiting English schoolteacher named Adela Quested. When Adela believes that Aziz has assau...
Often confused with H.G. Wells’s science-fiction novella of nearly the same name (just subtract a “The”), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a groundbreaking novel in the expression of identity for the African American male. The narrator of the novel, a man who is never named but believes he is “invisible” to others socially, tells the story of his m...
Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, perhaps the most influential and well-known work of Spanish literature, was first published in full in 1615. The novel, which is very regularly regarded as one of the best literary works of all time, tells the story of a man who takes the name “Don Quixote de la Mancha” and sets off in a fit of obsession over roma...
Toni Morrison’s 1987 spiritual and haunting novel Beloved tells the story of an escaped slave named Sethe who has fled to Cincinnati, Ohio, in the year 1873. The novel investigates the trauma of slavery even after freedom has been gained, depicting Sethe’s guilt and emotional pain after having killed her own child, whom she named Beloved, to keep h...
Possibly the most idiosyncratic novel of this list, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway describes exactly one day in the life of a British socialite named Clarissa Dalloway. Using a combination of a third-person narration and the thoughts of various characters, the novel uses a stream-of-consciousness style all the way through. The result of this style ...
Jun 2, 2024 · Who are the best writers of all time? Vote up the authors you think are the best and see how they rank! The famous writers on this list are the best in history, writing books, plays, essays, and poetry that has stood the test of time and make up the world's canon of literature and written work.
Aug 10, 2009 · A list of the most “important” writers of all time might lend itself to fewer problems.
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The "The 50 Most Influential Books of All Time," as compiled by the Open Education Database, celebrates literature's unparalleled power to inspire, educate, and transform individuals and societies at large.
