Literary 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time

561 Pages·2009·5.54 MB·English

by  Daniel S. Burt

THE LITERARY 100,
Revised Edition
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THE LITERARY 100,
Revised Edition
A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists,
Playwrights, and Poets of All Time
Daniel S. Burt
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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.
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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.
PN451.B87 2008
809—dc22
[B] 2008010066
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Text design by Joan M. Toro
Printed in the United States of America
MP ML 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper and contains 30 percent postconsumer recycled
content.
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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
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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
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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
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