Busse Library provides this website as a resource for students and faculty researching literature's major authors. Based upon the book, The Literary 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time by Daniel S. Burt (New York: Facts on File, 2001), the project offers full listings by ranking and through a name index.
Specialized pages offer women writers, American authors, United Kingdom authors, and world authors grouped by continent. Developed solely for this website, additional project resources include significant authors in children's literature and a compilation of other "top 100" literature projects.
Each author's entry includes online biographical research and landmarks, scholarly resources, major works online, and Busse Library offerings for the novelist, dramatist, or poet.
This project, and its inspiration, develop from a tradition to select the world's most important authors who made a lasting contribution to literature and to compile a selection of history's most significant published texts in fiction and nonfiction.
This index offers access to all author entries in ranked order. Direct access to the author's full record in the project is provided via the author's name. To see a grouping page (i.e., "Top 10 Authors"), select the group's boldface title.
The Authors, By Ranking:
The Top Ten Authors
- William Shakespeare (1564-1616) [1]
- Alighieri Dante (1265-1321) [2]
- Homer (fl.c.750? B.C.) [3]
- Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) [4]
- Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) [5]
- Charles Dickens (1812-1870) [6]
- James Joyce (1882-1941) [7]
- John Milton (1608-1674) [8]
- Virgil (70-19 B.C.) [9]
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832) [10]
Authors 11-20
- Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra(1547-1616) [11]
- Murasaki Shikibu (c.978-1030) [12]
- Sophocles (496-406 B.C.) [13]
- William Faulkner (1897-1962) [14]
- Feodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) [15]
- T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) [16]
- Marcel Proust (1871-1922) [17]
- Jane Austen (1775-1817) [18]
- George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] (1819-1880) [19]
- William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) [20]
Authors 21-30
- Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) [21]
- Euripides (c.480-406 B.C.) [22]
- John Donne (1572-1631) [23]
- Herman Melville (1819-1891) [24]
- John Keats (1795-1821) [25]
- Ovid (43 B.C.-17 A.D.) [26]
- Tu Fu (712-770) [27]
- William Blake (1757-1827) [28]
- Aeschylus (c.525-456 B.C.) [29]
- Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) [30]
Authors 31-40
- Franz Kafka (1883-1924) [31]
- Moliere (1622-1673) [32]
- William Wordsworth (1770-1850) [33]
- Aristophanes (c.450-c.385 B.C.) [34]
- Thomas Mann (1875-1955) [35]
- Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) [36]
- Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) [37]
- Henry James (1843-1916) [38]
- Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) [39]
- Walt Whitman (1819-1892) [40]
Authors 41-50
- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) [41]
- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) [42]
- Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783-1842) [43]
- Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) [44]
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) [45]
- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) [46]
- D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) [47]
- Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) [48]
- Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) [49]
- Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) [50]
Authors 51-60
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) [51]
- Francois Rabelais (c.1494-1553) [52]
- Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) [53]
- Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) [54]
- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) [55]
- Henry Fielding (1707-1754) [56]
- Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) [57]
- Robert Browning (1812-1889) [58]
- Albert Camus (1913-1960) [59]
- Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) [60]
Authors 61-70
- Emily Bronte (1818-1848) [61]
- Jean Racine (1639-1699) [62]
- Mark Twain (1835-1910) [63]
- August Strindberg (1849-1912) [64]
- Emile Zola (1840-1902) [65]
- Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) [66]
- Cao Xueqin (1715-1763) [67]
- Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) [68]
- Voltaire (1694-1778) [69]
- Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) [70]
Authors 71-80
- William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) [71]
- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) [72]
- Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) [73]
- Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) [74]
- George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) [75]
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-) [76]
- Walter Scott (1771-1832) [77]
- Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) [78]
- Robert Musil (1880-1942) [79]
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) [80]
Authors 81-90
- Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) [81]
- Catullus (c.84-c.54 B.C.) [82]
- Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) [83]
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) [84]
- Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) [85]
- Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) [86]
- Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) [87]
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) [88]
- Victor Hugo (1802-1885) [89]
- Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) [90]
Authors 91-100
- Daniel Defoe (1660?-1731) [91]
- Gunter Grass (1927-) [92]
- Lu Xun (1881-1936) [93]
- E.M. Forster (1879-1970) [94]
- Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) [95]
- Tanizaki Jun'Ichiro (1886-1965) [96]
- Richard Wright (1908-1960) [97]
- Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) [98]
- Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443) [99]
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) [100]