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Who, apart from Shakespeare, are the most famous authors of all time? Without further ado, here is a list of thirty of the greatest and most famous writers, listed in order of their birth dates:
- Dante Overview
Dante (Durante degli Alighieri) (1265-1321) Dante was an...
- John Milton Overview
Paradise Lost has all the elements of Greek epic poetry,...
- Dante Overview
- Mark Twain. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, this particular writer is far more recognisable by his pen name of Mark Twain. Once lauded as ‘The greatest humorist the United States has ever produced by fellow penman William Faulkner, his works include classics like Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that have truly stood the test of time.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Whilst British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote many other novels, it’s perhaps easiest to justify his place on our list by saying one name – Sherlock Holmes.
- H.G. Wells. Novelist, satirist and social prophet, H.G. Wells was an Englishman who was best known for being a prolific science fiction writer. So prolific was he that he went on to be dubbed as the father of the genre, rubbing shoulders with greats like Jules Verne.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A true great now from Russian Literature – Fyodor Dostoyevsky created an impressive body of work that explored the human condition, psychology and contentious issues like religion.
- 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 ...
William Shakespeare. Voltaire. Cicero. Thomas Hobbes. Miguel de Cervantes. Karl Marx. J.K.R Tolkien. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Mark Twain. Jane Austen. George Orwell. Gabriel Garcia Marques. Edgar Allen Poe. Charles Dickens. Friedrich Nietzsche. Plato. Seneca.
Apr 16, 2024 · Simply put, they're easily some of the most famous authors of all time. This list of authors features the best writers ever, including, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Geoffrey Chaucer, Homer, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Herman Melleville, William Faulkner, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Jan 25, 2021 · As we celebrate 125 years of the Book Review, we’ll spend time not just in the distant past but in the vibrant present. Few writers this century are as acclaimed as Colson Whitehead, the author ...
Aug 10, 2009 · Short stories and poems, plus author interviews, profiles, and tales from the world of literature. Only one thing is inarguable about this list of the hundred greatest writers of all time, on the...
