THE LITERARY 100, Revised Edition Lit100_final.indd 1 11/3/08 10:07:53 AM Lit100_final.indd 2 11/3/08 10:07:54 AM THE LITERARY 100, Revised Edition A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time Daniel S. Burt Lit100_final.indd 3 11/3/08 10:07:55 AM The Literary 100, Revised Edition: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time Copyright © 2009 by Daniel S. Burt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 The poems of W. H. Auden are reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., from Collected Poems. The poems of Robert Frost are reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Co. from The Poetry of Robert Frost. The poems of Wallace Stevens are reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., from Collected Poems, copyright © 1923, renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. The poems of W. B. Yeats are reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Revised Second Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burt, Daniel S. The literary 100 : a ranking of the most influential novelists, playwrights, and poets of all time / Daniel S. Burt. — Rev. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8160-6267-6 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Authors—Biography. 2. Literature—History and criticism. I. Title. 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Lit100_final.indd 4 11/3/08 10:07:55 AM Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce photographs: Chinua Achebe: Brigitte Lacombe Emily Dickinson: Amherst College Library Christopher Marlowe (Putative Portrait): Masters and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Robert Musil: Austrian Cultural Institute Bertolt Brecht (Jörg Kolbe), Ralph Ellison, Seamus Heaney (Christopher Felser), Kawabata Yasunari, Doris Lessing (Christopher Felser), Vladi- mir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, George Orwell, Harold Pinter (Hulton Deutsch), Rainer Maria Rilke, and Wallace Stevens: © Bettman/ CORBIS E. M. Forster, Federico García Lorca, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf: Culver Pictures, Inc. Günter Grass and Franz Kafka: German Information Center Samuel Beckett: Grove Press (Jerry Bauer) Jorge Luis Borges, Du Fu, Zeami Motokiyo, Jun’ichiro¯ Tanizaki, Cao Xueqin: Harvard University Archives, Harvard-Yenching Library W. H. Auden, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Feodor Dostoevsky, Theodore Dreiser, George Eliot, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Flau- bert, Robert Frost, Nikolai Gogol, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Miller, Luigi Pirandello, Edgar Allan Poe, Ger- trude Stein, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright: Library of Congress Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, William Blake, Giovanni Boccaccio, Emily Brontë, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Catullus, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Geoffrey Chaucer, Anton Chekov, Joseph Conrad, Dante Alighieri, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, John Donne, Euripides, Henry Fielding, Du Fu, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Hardy, Homer, Victor Hugo, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, James Joyce, John Keats, D. H. Lawrence, John Milton, Molière, Ovid, Francesco Petrarch, Alexander Pope, Alexander Pushkin, François Rabelais, Jean Racine, Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sophocles, Stendhal, Lau- rence Sterne, August Strindberg, Jonathan Swift, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Wil- liam Makepeace Thackeray, Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope, Virgil, Voltaire, and William Wordsworth: New York Public Library Picture Collection Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas Mann, Toni Mor- rison, Pablo Neruda, Eugene O’Neill, George Bernard Shaw, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Rabindranath Tagore, and William Butler Yeats: Nobel Foundation v Lit100_final.indd 5 11/3/08 10:07:55 AM Lit100_final.indd 6 11/3/08 10:07:55 AM CONTENTS Acknowledgments xi Preface to New Edition xiii Introduction xv 1. William Shakespeare 1 2. Dante Alighieri 5 3. Homer 9 4. Leo Tolstoy 13 5. Geoffrey Chaucer 17 6. Charles Dickens 21 7. James Joyce 25 8. John Milton 29 9. Virgil 33 10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 37 11. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 41 12. Murasaki Shikibu 44 13. Sophocles 47 14. Feodor Dostoevsky 51 15. William Faulkner 55 16. Marcel Proust 59 17. William Butler Yeats 63 18. Alexander Pushkin 67 19. T. S. Eliot 71 20. Jane Austen 75 21. George Eliot 78 22. Euripides 82 23. William Wordsworth 85 24. Herman Melville 89 25. John Keats 93 26. Ovid 97 27. Aeschylus 100 28. Du Fu 104 29. William Blake 107 30. Gustave Flaubert 111 31. Franz Kafka 115 32. Molière 118 33. John Donne 121 34. Aristophanes 126 35. Thomas Mann 129 36. Henrik Ibsen 133 37. Anton Chekhov 137 38. Henry James 140 39. Walt Whitman 144 40. Honoré de Balzac 148 41. Jonathan Swift 152 42. Stendhal 156 43. Thomas Hardy 160 44. George Bernard Shaw 164 45. Mark Twain 168 46. Charles Baudelaire 172 47. Samuel Beckett 176 48. Virginia Woolf 179 49. Alexander Pope 182 50. François Rabelais 186 51. Francesco Petrarch 189 52. Emily Dickinson 193 53. Edgar Allan Poe 196 54. Henry Fielding 200 55. Joseph Conrad 204 56. August Strindberg 207 57. D. H. Lawrence 211 58. Robert Browning 215 59. Eugene O’Neill 218 60. Charlotte Brontë 222 61. Emily Brontë 222 62. Jean Racine 226 63. Ernest Hemingway 230 64. Vladimir Nabokov 234 Lit100_final.indd 8 11/3/08 10:07:55 AM 65. Émile Zola 237 66. Ben Jonson 241 67. Cao Xueqin 246 68. Giovanni Boccaccio 249 69. Voltaire 252 70. Samuel Richardson 255 71. Edmund Spenser 260 72. Nathaniel Hawthorne 265 73. Bertolt Brecht 269 74. Wallace Stevens 274 75. Christopher Marlowe 278 76. Gabriel García Márquez 283 77. Percy Bysshe Shelley 286 78. Rainer Maria Rilke 290 79. Robert Musil 295 80. Horace 298 81. Alfred, Lord Tennyson 303 82. Catullus 307 83. George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron 311 84. F. Scott Fitzgerald 315 85. Daniel Defoe 319 86. Robert Frost 322 87. Walter Scott 326 88. Sappho 329 89. Ka¯lida¯sa 333 90. Laurence Sterne 338 91. Federico García Lorca 341 92. Oscar Wilde 344 93. Nikolai Gogol 348 94. William Makepeace Thackeray 353 95. Chinua Achebe 357 96. Chikamatsu Monzaemon 362 97. Ralph Ellison 367 98. Jorge Luis Borges 371 99. Albert Camus 375 100. Luigi Pirandello 378 101. Zeami Motokiyo 383 102. Pablo Neruda 386 103. W. H. Auden 390 104. Rabindranath Tagore 395 Lit100_final.indd 9 11/3/08 10:07:55 AM