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This is a list of best-selling fiction authors to date, in any language. While finding precise sales numbers for any given author is nearly impossible, the list is based on approximate numbers provided or repeated by reliable sources.
AuthorMin. Estimated SalesMax. Estimated SalesOriginal Language2 billion [1]4 billion [2]2 billion [3]4 billion [2]English500 million [4]1 billion [5]English500 million [6]800 million [7]English3 days ago · 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.
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. This classic novel tells the story of Tom Jones, a charming and good-hearted but impulsive young man, who is expelled from his adoptive family home due to his wild behavior and love for the beautiful Sophia Western.
- 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.
- 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 ...
The list below is from the book The Novel 100: A Ranking of Greatest Novels All Time (Checkmark Books/Facts On File, Inc.: New York, 2004), written by Daniel S. Burt. Added over 10 years ago.
Aug 10, 2009 · If we had access to certain works—some ancient Greek poet whose works have been lost, or some unpublished Moldovan novelist who died in the nineteen-seventies—the list might look very different.
