A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time
2. Dante Alighieri
3. Homer
4. Leo Tolstoy
6. Charles Dickens
8. John Milton
9. Virgil
10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
11. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
12. Murasaki Shikibu
13. Sophocles
14. Feodor Dostoevsky
15. William Faulkner
16. Marcel Proust
18. Alexander Pushkin
19. T. S. Eliot
20. Jane Austen
21. George Eliot
22. Euripides
23. William Wordsworth
24. Herman Melville
25. John Keats
26. Ovid
27. Aeschylus
28. Du Fu
29. William Blake
30. Gustave Flaubert
31. Franz Kafka
32. Molière
33. John Donne
34. Aristophanes
35. Thomas Mann
36. Henrik Ibsen
37. Anton Chekhov
38. Henry James
39. Walt Whitman
40. Honoré de Balzac
41. Jonathan Swift
42. Stendhal
43. Thomas Hardy
44. George Bernard Shaw
45. Mark Twain
46. Charles Baudelaire
47. Samuel Beckett
48. Virginia Woolf
49. Alexander Pope
50. François Rabelais
52. Emily Dickinson
53. Edgar Allan Poe
54. Henry Fielding
55. Joseph Conrad
56. August Strindberg
57. D. H. Lawrence
58. Robert Browning
59. Eugene O’Neill
60. Charlotte Brontë
61. Emily Brontë
62. Jean Racine
63. Ernest Hemingway
64. Vladimir Nabokov
65. Émile Zola
66. Ben Jonson
67. Cao Xueqin
68. Giovanni Boccaccio
69. Voltaire
70. Samuel Richardson
71. Edmund Spenser
72. Nathaniel Hawthorne
73. Bertolt Brecht
74. Wallace Stevens
76. Gabriel García Márquez
77. Percy Bysshe Shelley
78. Rainer Maria Rilke
79. Robert Musil
80. Horace
81. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
82. Catullus
83. George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron
85. Daniel Defoe
86. Robert Frost
87. Walter Scott
88. Sappho
89. Ka¯lida¯sa
90. Laurence Sterne
91. Federico García Lorca
92. Oscar Wilde
93. Nikolai Gogol
94. William Makepeace Thackeray
95. Chinua Achebe
96. Chikamatsu Monzaemon
97. Ralph Ellison
98. Jorge Luis Borges
99. Albert Camus
100. Luigi Pirandello
101. Zeami Motokiyo
102. Pablo Neruda
103. W. H. Auden
104. Rabindranath Tagore
105. Victor Hugo
106. Tanizaki Jun’ichiro¯
107. Anthony Trollope
108. Flannery O’Connor
109. Kawabata Yasunari
110. Theodore Dreiser
111. Richard Wright
112. Günther Grass
113. Tennessee Williams
114. Li Bo
115. Harold Pinter
116. Toni Morrison
117. Seamus Heaney
118. George Orwell
119. Arthur Miller
120. Doris Lessing
121. E. M. Forster
122. Isaac Bashevis Singer
123. Heinrich Heine
124. Lu Xun
125. Gertrude Stein