The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time

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Authors: Britannica Educational Publishing

T
HE
100 M
OST
I
NFLUENTIAL
WRITERS
OF
A
LL
T
IME

T
HE
B
RITANNICA
G
UIDE TO THE
W
ORLD'S
M
OST
I
NFLUENTIAL
P
EOPLE

T
HE
100 M
OST
I
NFLUENTIAL
WRITERS
OF
A
LL
T
IME

E
DITED BY
J. E. L
UEBERING
, M
ANAGER AND
S
ENIOR
E
DITOR
, L
ITERATURE

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.

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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-Mutanabb
Ä«

Ferdows
Ä«

Murasaki Shikibu

R
Å«
m
Ä«

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

Bash
ō

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Daniel Defoe

Jonathan Swift

Voltaire

Henry Fielding

Samuel Johnson

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

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

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