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

352 Pages·2009·4.3 MB·English

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First Edition
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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)
ISBN978-1-61530-096-9 (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
37
Introduction 8
Homer 17
Aeschylus 22
Sophocles 26
Aristophanes 29
Gaius Valerius Catullus 31
Virgil 33
Imru’ al-Qays 38
Du Fu 39
ī
al-Mutanabb 41
ī
Ferdows 42
Murasaki Shikibu 45
ū ī 46 83
R m
Dante 51
Petrarch 55
Geoffrey Chaucer 58
Luís de Camões 62
Michel de Montaigne 64
Miguel de Cervantes 67
Edmund Spenser 73
Lope de Vega 76
Christopher Marlowe 78
112
William Shakespeare 80
John Donne 89
John Milton 93
Jean Racine 96
Aphra Behn 99
ō
Bash 100
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 103
Daniel Defoe 105
Jonathan Swift 108
Voltaire 111
Henry Fielding 114
Samuel Johnson 116
180
Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe 119
Robert Burns 125
William Wordsworth 129
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet 132
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 135
Jane Austen 138
George Gordon Byron,
6th Baron Byron 142
Percy Bysshe Shelley 145
John Keats 148
Aleksandr Pushkin 151
Victor Hugo 154
Nathaniel Hawthorne 158
Edgar Allan Poe 160
Charles Dickens 164
Robert Browning 168
Charlotte Brontë 171
Henry David Thoreau 175
193
Emily Brontë 177
Walt Whitman 179
Herman Melville 183
George Eliot 188
Charles Baudelaire 192
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 196
Gustave Flaubert 199
Henrik Ibsen 200
Leo Tolstoy 203
Emily Dickinson 206
Lewis Carroll 212
Mark Twain 215
Émile Zola 222
Henry James 224
August Strindberg 226
Oscar Wilde 229
Arthur Rimbaud 233
290
George Bernard Shaw 235
Anton Chekhov 238
Rabindranath Tagore 240
William Butler Yeats 243
Luigi Pirandello 246
Marcel Proust 249
Robert Frost 251
Thomas Mann 253
Lu Xun 256
Virginia Woolf 260
James Joyce 267
Franz Kafka 271
T. S. Eliot 275
307
Eugene O’Neill 278
Anna Akhmatova 280
William Faulkner 283
Vladimir Nabokov 286
Ernest Hemingway 289
John Steinbeck 293
George Orwell 295
Pablo Neruda 297
Samuel Beckett 300
Richard Wright 303
Eudora Welty 306 321
Naguib Mahfouz 308
Albert Camus 310
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 312
Jack Kerouac 316
Flannery O’Connor 319
Toni Morrison 321
Wole Soyinka 323
Sir Salman Rushdie 325
J. K. Rowling 327
Glossary 330
For Further Reading 332
Index 334
I
NTRODUCTION
7 Introduction 7
pen a book—any book. In it you’ll find words, of
O
course, but look closely and you’ll also find art,
crafted, in detail, by a writer proud enough to sign his or
her name to the work. In a book, or in any piece of writing,
words are joined together at the whim of the author.
Sentences are created, paragraphs and stanzas formatted,
chapters built, and stories told. In a book or a poem, a play
or a short story, everything is there, on the page, for a rea-
son: To show, to tell, to convey a message. Most works of
writing, quite simply, are meant for reading. The great
ones, however, by the most talented and ingenious authors,
are for study. In such works—The Old Man and the Sea, by
Ernest Hemingway, Moby Dick, by Herman Melville,
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare—it’s the art one finds
within that sets them apart from the rest.
So how is it possible to whittle down a list of influen-
tial writers—artists of the written word—to just 100
people? That’s the challenge—making choices, based on
the evidence, and to ultimately compile a reference that
does its best to envelop world history and disparate cul-
tures, varying values, and regional tastes. Many individuals
included in this compilation, including the three men-
tioned above, are paradigms of English literature. Others,
such as Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes, hail from
ancient Greece. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, a Russian
writer of the early 1800s, is a founder of modern literature
in that country. Leo Tolstoy, also of Russia, was a novelist,
essayist, and dramatist, and is most famous for his novel
War and Peace, considered by many to be one of the great-
est books ever put into print. The 13th-century Sufi poet
ū ī
R m is known today as a musically influenced master on
subjects like mysticism, love, and spirituality.
The sheer panoply of nationalities represented in this
book, as well as variances in style and theme, brings up an
9
7 The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time 7
interesting question. Can Lu Xun, the founder of modern
Chinese literature and a huge influence on Communism in
that country, rightfully be compared to someone like
Emily Brontë, the English novelist who is remembered for
writing one great masterwork, Wuthering Heights? Perhaps,
but their spheres of influence are so different—Brontë’s
in the English-speaking world, Lu Xun’s, for the most part,
in China and the East—that a direct comparison would
certainly be difficult. Writers are influenced by the places
in which they live and the cultures in which they are
steeped. They are all “greats,” and they all have had influ-
ence on their respective readerships.
As the title of this book indicates, all those featured
in this collection are influential. Through their work,
they’ve reached out to the masses, touched the hearts
and souls of millions, and left their mark on the world.
But how exactly is influence defined in this case? Perhaps
it’s the ability of one person, through his or her writing,
to change the way the world thinks. Jack Kerouac is a
prime example. Kerouac, an American writer and the lit-
erary leader of the so-called Beat Generation, achieved
instant fame when his second novel, On the Road, was
published in 1957. Kerouac typed the book on one long
scroll of paper. Written like a jazz piece, it seems spon-
taneous and improvised, a fluid and furious work of
art that could almost be read in one long breath, cover
to cover.
On the Road captures readers’ imaginations, takes them
for a ride, spins them around, and makes them dizzy. It
paints a picture of America like no other novel before it.
What’s more, the book has dared countless readers to
explore the world themselves, to take to “the road,” either
literally or in their imaginations, just like Sal Paradise, the
book’s narrator.
10