The 100 Most Influential Writers Of All Time (the Britannica Guide To The World's Most Influential People)

Published in 2010 by Britannica Educational Publishing (a trademark of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.) in association with Rosen Educational Services, LLC 29 East 21st Street, New York, NY 10010. Copyright © 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, and the Thistle logo are registered trademarks of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Rosen Educational Services materials copyright © 2010 Rosen Educational Services, LLC. All rights reserved. Distributed exclusively by Rosen Educational Services. For a listing of additional Britannica Educational Publishing titles, call toll free (800) 237-9932. First Edition Britannica Educational Publishing Michael I. Levy: Executive Editor Marilyn L. Barton: Senior Coordinator, Production Control Steven Bosco: Director, Editorial Technologies Lisa S. Braucher: Senior Producer and Data Editor Yvette Charboneau: Senior Copy Editor Kathy Nakamura: Manager, Media Acquisition J. E. Luebering: Manager and Senior Editor, Literature Rosen Educational Services Jeanne Nagle: Senior Editor Nelson Sá: Art Director Matthew Cauli: Designer Introduction by Chris Hayhurst Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The 100 most influential writers of all time / edited by J. E. Luebering.—1st ed. p. cm.—(The Britannica guide to the world’s most influential people) ISBN 978-1-61530-096-9 (eBook) 1. Authors—Biography. 2. Literature—Bio-bibliography. I. Luebering, J. E. II. Title: One hundred most influential writers of all time. PN451.A15 2010 809—dc22 [B] 2009029207 On the cover: The influence of William Shakespeare, considered the greatest dramatist of all time, has spread far and wide and transcends the ages. Getty Images Photo credits: p. 8 © www.istockphoto.com/Nick Schlax; p. 16 © www.istockphoto.com/Vetta Collection. CONTENTS Introduction Homer Aeschylus Sophocles Aristophanes Gaius Valerius Catullus Virgil Imru’ al-Qays Du Fu al-Mutanabbī Ferdowsī Murasaki Shikibu Rūmī Dante Petrarch Geoffrey Chaucer Luís de Camões Michel de Montaigne Miguel de Cervantes Edmund Spenser Lope de Vega Christopher Marlowe William Shakespeare John Donne John Milton Jean Racine Aphra Behn Bashō Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Daniel Defoe Jonathan Swift Voltaire Henry Fielding Samuel Johnson 8 17 22 26 29 31 33 38 39 41 42 45 46 51 55 58 62 64 67 73 76 78 80 89 93 96 99 100 103 105 108 111 114 116 37 83 112 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Robert Burns William Wordsworth Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet Samuel Taylor Coleridge Jane Austen George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron Percy Bysshe Shelley John Keats Aleksandr Pushkin Victor Hugo Nathaniel Hawthorne Edgar Allan Poe Charles Dickens Robert Browning Charlotte Brontë Henry David Thoreau Emily Brontë Walt Whitman Herman Melville George Eliot Charles Baudelaire Fyodor Dostoyevsky Gustave Flaubert Henrik Ibsen Leo Tolstoy Emily Dickinson Lewis Carroll Mark Twain Émile Zola Henry James August Strindberg Oscar Wilde Arthur Rimbaud 119 125 129 132 135 138 142 145 148 151 154 158 160 164 168 171 175 177 179 183 188 192 196 199 200 203 206 212 215 222 224 226 229 233 180 193 George Bernard Shaw Anton Chekhov Rabindranath Tagore William Butler Yeats Luigi Pirandello Marcel Proust Robert Frost Thomas Mann Lu Xun Virginia Woolf James Joyce Franz Kafka T. S. Eliot Eugene O’Neill Anna Akhmatova William Faulkner Vladimir Nabokov Ernest Hemingway John Steinbeck George Orwell Pablo Neruda Samuel Beckett Richard Wright Eudora Welty Naguib Mahfouz Albert Camus Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Jack Kerouac Flannery O’Connor Toni Morrison Wole Soyinka Sir Salman Rushdie J. K. Rowling Glossary For Further Reading Index 235 238 240 243 246 249 251 253 256 260 267 271 275 278 280 283 286 289 293 295 297 300 303 306 308 310 312 316 319 321 323 325 327 330 332 334 290 307